BATAN, Brazil — Priscila da Silva once asked her grandmother why she had 12 children, and the answer was simple: “Because I wanted to.” These days, Silva, like many women in Brazil and the rest of Latin America, has other plans. At 24, she thinks about having one child, if that. “The situation today is different, and raising a child is difficult,” said Silva, slicing tomatoes at a restaurant that she founded with four other women, only one of whom has planned a family of any size. “This is another time, and it’s not the same.” Read full article > >

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Birth rate plummets in Brazil

The US rejects as “horrific” Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s musings about whether the US might be giving Latin American leaders cancer.

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US rejects Chavez cancer comments

Alleges CIA responsible for Latin American leaders’ health issues.

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Chávez: U.S. Using Cancer as Weapon

Leaders from 33 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean approve the creation of a new regional bloc that excludes the United States and Canada.

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New LatAm bloc ends first meeting

SAO PAULO, Brazil — In years past, the International Monetary Fund would bail out Latin American nations on the brink of economic disaster, including Brazil, which was often hammered by international crises and its own fiscal mismanagement. But this past week, the new director of the Washington-based multilateral lender, Christine Lagarde, visited Brazil, fast-growing Peru and economically solid Mexico to praise the region’s macroeconomic management and take steps to ensure that Latin America is not infected by Europe’s debt crisis. Brazilian and Mexican financial officials also told reporters their countries are leaning toward contributing to the IMF’s war chest, as Lagarde, who is French, determines how the lender will assist Europe. Read full article > >

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IMF comes, hat in hand, to Latin America

One by one, the aging Cold War operatives ambled into St. ­Alban’s Parish late last week. In walked a former CIA director. Sitting on the right, the agency’s ex-operations chief in Afghanistan. Somewhere else, an ex-Latin America division chief. As the organ began playing, the 300-plus attendees read their programs. The words on the cover laid out the ritual at hand, but they also symbolized an era’s completion: “In Thanksgiving and in Celebration of the Life of Clair E. George.” Read full article > >

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At memorial for Iran-contra figure Clair George, CIA colleagues’ loyalty endures

One by one, the aging Cold War operatives ambled into St. ­Alban’s Parish late last week. In walked a former CIA director. Sitting on the right, the agency’s ex-operations chief in Afghanistan. Somewhere else, an ex-Latin America division chief. As the organ began playing, the 300-plus attendees read their programs. The words on the cover laid out the ritual at hand, but they also symbolized an era’s completion: “In Thanksgiving and in Celebration of the Life of Clair E. George.” Read full article > >

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At memorial for Iran-contra figure Clair George, CIA colleagues’ loyalty endures

Service problems in Europe, Middle East, Africa, India, and Latin America.

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‘Switch Failure’ Behind BlackBerry Outage

LONDON — BlackBerry’s woes spread on Tuesday as the smartphone’s maker reported service disruptions for a second straight day in Europe, the Middle East and Africa and fresh problems in Latin America and India. Research in Motion Ltd., which makes BlackBerry devices, acknowledged there were ongoing problems Tuesday, hours after it said services were operating normally and the cause of delays in subscriber services a day earlier had been resolved. Read full article > >

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BlackBerry service woes spread to Latin America, India on 2nd day of disruptions

A trial could finally prove that top military rulers in Argentina engaged in a systematic plan to steal babies from perceived enemies of the government.

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Daughter of Argentina’s ‘Dirty War,’ Raised by the Man Who Killed Her Parents

SANTIAGO, Chile — In Latin America’s most economically stable country , it was yet another protest. Thousands of students chanted slogans, banged drums and snarled traffic Thursday, as the media and political establishment intensely watched. And the center-right government of President Sebastián Piñera once more looked powerless to curtail the anger in the streets. The country, seen as a model of progress since dictator Augusto Pinochet’s iron grip slipped 21 years ago, continues to be buffeted by the most serious and sustained protests in a generation of democracy. That has raised an uncomfortable question: Why do so many Chileans — tens of thousands in the streets, millions more who say they support the protesters — believe that their country has failed to address widespread needs, beginning with an education system that even the government acknowledges has flaws. Read full article > >

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Education protests shake Chile’s government

Peruvian president-elect Ollanta Humala says he wants to deepen Latin American integration and sees the US as a “strategic partner”.

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Peru’s Humala sets out priorities

When news broke that the United Arab Emirates had hired Xe Services, LLC (formerly Blackwater) founder Erik Prince to set up a secret, private army made up of non-Arab soldiers, it presented a dangerous possibility for rulers in the Middle East and North Africa who aim to reassert control over their increasingly discontented populations. Abu Dhabi’s crown prince Sheik Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan hired Prince (a fundamentalist evangelical Christian nationalist who has been accused of fueling a “holy war” with Islam) to set up a paramilitary force of roughly 800 soldiers, drawn mostly from Latin America and South Africa, and trained by military veterans from the United States, United Kingdom and France.

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Outsourcing Repression: The UAE and the Future of the 2011 Revolutions

“It was a beautiful revolution,” the man in the beret says one night over dinner. “A beautiful revolution.” On other lips, those words might ring campy and downright spoof-goofy a la Woody Allen in “ Bananas .” But the man in the beret pulls it off, as he has for decades. At 86, Ernesto Cardenal can still muster passion for revolutions past and future. It’s the present that confounds Nicaragua’s cosmic poetic stylist, a towering figure in Latin American literature absorbed in the winter of his life with a kind of eco-poetics swirling with the earthly evils of greed, corruption and exploitation. Read full article > >

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Ernesto Cardenal, poet and Catholic priest, still causes controversy at age 86

IPOJUCA, Brazil — Here on Brazil’s northeast coast, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez dreamed of building an oil refinery and naming it after a Brazilian adventurer who had fought for Venezuela’s independence. The joint venture with Brazil, he said in trips here, would help unify Latin America against his adversary, the United States. The $15 billion refinery is now two years away from completion, but with little input from Venezuela or its mercurial president, who for years backed projects regionwide in his drive to make Venezuela the vanguard of a new era in Latin America . Read full article > >

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Chavez’s influence wanes in Latin America