Latin America

“If you can’t cope with the current hurricane and extreme rainfall now, then you won’t be able to cope with what is to come,” Leslie Walling.

Posters cover almost every conceivable surface, even tombs in graveyards. Trucks mounted with loud speakers blare campaign jingles. Candidates’ faces are everywhere. It’s elections “à la américaine”, complete with polls and whistle-stops.

Bridges, railroads, petrochemicals, steel mills, electricity, aqueducts, agriculture, meat-processing plants, ship building and even cable cars: Brazil’s powerful entrepreneurial arm is reaching towards the Caribbean, via Venezuela, where the Hugo Chavez government is working to build what it calls “21st century socialism.”

In a move seen as a sign that gender will be important in her government, Brazil’s president-elect Dilma Rousseff is preparing a Cabinet that is one-third women.

Two initiatives of the administration of President Mauricio Funes in El Salvador, aimed at increasing competition in the pharmaceutical industry in order to bring down the cost of medicines, are being fought by the opposition in Congress.

For many, Costa Rica embodies the notion of a country committed to taking care of its natural environment. But Costa Rican activists beg to differ, and have a list of the actions that contradict the country’s green “for-export” image.

The White House had virtually taken for granted Senate ratification of a key part of that agenda – a new strategic arms reduction treaty (New START) with Russia, particularly after it ceded chief Republican interlocutor on the accord, Sen. John Kyl, the extra 4.1 billion dollars he sought to add to the 80 billion dollars committed to the administration’s proposed five-year nuclear-weapons modernization program.

The cholera outbreak continues to spread. “We have cases in all departments”, said yesterday Nigel Fisher, coordinator of the humanitarian action for the United Nations in Haiti, “although the Haitian authorities this weekend said that only six of the ten departments have been affected by the disease” stressing that “According to epidemiologists, the number of cases will increase significantly”.

Demonstrators blame foreign peacekeepers for introducing the infectious disease into the country. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the strain of cholera bacteria spreading in Haiti matches the one endemic in South Asia.

Increasing numbers of U.S. Gulf Coast residents attribute ongoing sicknesses to BP’s oil disaster and use of toxic dispersants.