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Rich, Dark Earth

AMAZON RAINFOREST

If the fabled fountain of youth exists, modern society might be destroying it.

In the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, centenarians in indigenous tribes remain spry, hiking barefoot for miles through rough, dangerous terrain after years of active lifestyles and healthy eating.

Varî Vãti Marubo of the Marubo tribe, for example, could be 107 or 120 years old. When she was a little girl, she and her family would run from white explorers in the jungle. Now, her friends and neighbors pursue traditional modern careers and share their experiences on social media. The lifestyle that cultivated her longevity and that of other indigenous folks is disappearing.

“Since our birth, we’ve kept the traditions alive,” she told the New York Times. “But now I see everything changing. Many young people have forgotten the wisdom of our elders.”

Marubo represents the human side of what’s being lost every day in the rainforest.

The Brazilian government recently announced that deforestation in the Amazon in the 12 months through August occurred at around half the rate of the prior year, and marked the lowest rate since 2016.

The success in reducing deforestation stemmed from Brazilian officials using satellites and rigorous inspection programs that focused on areas where deforestation was most rampant, University of Toronto researchers wrote.

Authorities have also cracked down on those who clear land illegally, too. For example, a Brazilian court recently ordered a rancher to pay $50 million for destroying part of the jungle, the Guardian noted. The fee included penalties for emitting carbon into the air.

But loggers and others still cleared 1,700 square miles – the size of Rhode Island – in the year through August, the Associated Press reported. The disappearance of this massive carbon sink has major implications for the world when greenhouse gases are causing climate change, the Council on Foreign Relations explained.

Illegal gold mining is also taking its toll. Greenpeace recently revealed that 5,000 miners were operating in the rural Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, Reuters reported. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has sought to end illegal mining and deforestation by deploying the military, but the territory to cover is enormous and the financial incentive to break the law is very high.

Climate change is also a problem. The Amazon saw more forest fires in August than at any other time since 2020, according to Voice of America. Ranchers often light the fires to clear land. But less rain and drier conditions cause them to spread out of control. Experts estimated that almost 40,000 fires occurred in August.

Meanwhile, these developments come as scientists say the Amazon may actually store more carbon than originally thought.

“Rich soil in the Amazon cultivated over centuries by Indigenous communities may store billions of tons of carbon,” New Scientist wrote. As a result, the “Nutrient-rich ‘dark earth’ soil may store an amount of carbon nearly equivalent to annual CO2 emissions in the US.”

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Weaponizing Migration

NICARAGUA

In Senegal, Haiti, India, China, and Libya, the hot new ticket is Nicaragua.

Famed for its beaches, volcanos and rainforests, citizens of dozens of countries are attracted by a different lure: It’s become a major gateway to the United States.

“In Senegal, it’s all over the streets – everyone’s talking about Nicaragua, Nicaragua, Nicaragua,” Gueva Ba, 40, of the capital Dakar, told the Associated Press.

Ba paid about $10,000 to get to Nicaragua in July 2023, where he then made his way to the US border with Mexico. After crossing it, he was caught, detained and deported a few months later, along with 131 other Senegalese who had also tried their luck.

Ba, like many of the tens of thousands of migrants now trying to use this route, had already tried to make it to Europe 11 times by boat from Morocco across the Mediterranean.

But with Nicaragua, he knew he had a special advantage; not only did he not need a visa to land there, but more importantly, Nicaragua is actively encouraging such migration as a way to punish the US for sanctions against the repressive regime of President Daniel Ortega, in power for 28 of the past 45 years, say US officials.

“The Ortega government knows they have few important policy tools at hand to confront the United States … so they have armed migration as a way to attack,” said Manuel Orozco, director of the migration at the Inter-American Dialogue, in an interview with NPR. “This is definitely a concrete example of weaponizing migration as a foreign policy.”

Beyond a tit-for-tat for sanctions, Nicaragua’s government, led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), is making millions of dollars with its business of human trafficking, imposing arbitrary entry fees on the migrant arrivals that can be as much as $200 per person, as well as thousands of dollars in landing and departure fees imposed on the charters, wrote El País. And those prices are going up – arrivals from Africa now will be charged more than $1,100 to land in Nicaragua.

US Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Brian Nichols said he was “concerned” about the “dramatic” increase in flights to Nicaragua to promote migration. “No one should profit from the desperation of vulnerable migrants – not smugglers, private companies, public officials or governments,” he wrote on X. The US slapped new sanctions on Nicaragua in May over the migration issue.

The numbers tell the story. Between May 2023 and May 2024, more than 1,000 flights with migrants from countries such as Libya, Morocco, Uzbekistan, India, and Tajikistan landed in the Nicaraguan capital Managua, while in a six-month period between June to November 2023, about 500 flights, mostly from Haiti and Cuba, landed there, according to the Inter-American Dialogue.

At the same time, while arrests for illegal crossings on the US-Mexico border topped 6.4 million between January 2021 and January 2024 (before falling steeply later in 2024), Mexicans accounted for only about one-quarter of those arrested, the rest coming from more than 100 countries, wrote the think tank. From July to December 2023 there were more than 20,200 arrests of just Senegalese migrants for crossing the border illegally, 10 times the figure for arrests in the same period in 2022.

“Migration flows to the United States have more than doubled to over eight million people annually from 2020 and 2023,” the organization wrote, adding that Nicaragua is responsible for at least 10 percent of all migration that has arrived at the Mexico-US border.

The charters first began in 2021, when the Nicaraguan government opened the doors of the Augusto C. Sandino International Airport, relaxed visa requirements for African nationals and welcomed the first migrant arrivals from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Curacao, and Haiti. Today, passengers now fly from countries in South America, North Africa and Central Asia, to the country on their way to the US to avoid the dangerous crossing at the Darien Gap at the Colombian-Panamanian border, the World wrote.

The Senegalese and others became part of a surge in migration at the southern border, made up for the first time of people from countries such as Mauritania, Ghana, Tajikistan and Bangladesh, who usually head towards Europe. They were able to coordinate the trip because of travel agents, smugglers and the information that comes from social media and apps like WhatsApp, and pay for the trip with electronic payments.

Meanwhile, Nicaragua itself has been increasingly contributing to the flows headed toward the US border over the past few years, according to the Migration Policy Institute. It has deported hundreds of its own nationals, while the deepening repression in the country has led to thousands more deciding to head north.

“Nicaragua is caught in a spiral of violence marked by the persecution of all forms of political opposition, whether real or perceived, both domestically and abroad,” said Jan Simon, the chair of a United Nations human rights group that accused the Nicaraguan regime led by Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, of “crimes against humanity.”

A former police special forces officer, going only by the name Edwin, was ordered to shoot protesters during mass anti-government demonstrations in 2018. Instead, he fled, before being captured, imprisoned, raped, and severely tortured.

These days, he lives in exile in Costa Rica, making ends meet with odd jobs while waiting for asylum in the US. He worries about Nicaraguan officials finding him.

“There were moments of desperation when I thought: ‘It would have been better if I stayed … killed all those people,” he told the Washington Post. “But I didn’t go into the police to kill people.”

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Tech and Tradition

PARAGUAY

Cryptocurrency miners whose servers generate their digital product have flocked to Paraguay to take advantage of the landlocked South American country’s low taxes and cheap electricity.

But as power shortages continue to plague the capital of Asunción, many of these crypto miners also steal electricity, as the Economist wrote. Now, the government is launching a crackdown that includes 10-year jail sentences for such theft.

For example, Paraguayan authorities have seized 10,000 mining computers this year alone from these so-called “crypto cowboys,” noted the Week.

Companies have lined up to register for business in the crypto mecca rather than fleeing the country, claimed officials who operate the public power company, according to Bitcoin.com. At least one has decamped for Brazil, however, in search of friendlier climates.

These developments highlight how Paraguay is embracing future technologies while still grappling with its past, figuring out how to uphold the law and balance the power of the state with personal freedoms and civil liberties.

The brass feet sitting on a plinth in Asunción illustrate the point. The feet belong to a statue that commemorated Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, until citizens tore it down in 1989. The longest-ruling dictator in Latin America, Stroessner took power 70 years ago, killing hundreds and throwing thousands of others in jail.

As Al Jazeera explained, Stroessner was a classic strongman who deployed the military to aid his political allies in the country’s elite in their oppression of ordinary folks. His security forces would massacre people who dared claim they owned land, for example, over the objections of business leaders and others who would prefer otherwise.

The generalissimo’s legacy, like the brass feet, remains, however, in the form of his conservative Colorado political party, whose leaders continue to rule the country.

Paraguayan President Santiago Peña, for instance, is working hard to attract cryptocurrency miners, other tech companies, and foreign investment to decrease Paraguay’s dependence on agricultural exports. While on a recent trip to Argentina to boost economic development, however, his party expelled a crusading anti-corruption senator from the legislature – undermining the rule of law image Peña was trying to project.

“As Peña seeks to showcase the country’s potential on the global stage, its democratic institutions remain mired in local networks of patronage and corruption,” wrote World Politics Review.

A recent shootout between police and drug smugglers at the home of another Paraguayan lawmaker and Colorado party member also showed how connections between the country’s elite and criminals continue unabated.

Peña will need to tackle his country’s big problems, especially corruption, before he can attract more investment, say analysts. “This is entrenched through all political parties, at all levels,” said Christopher Newton, an investigator at research organization InSight Crime, in an interview with the Associated Press. “When it comes to people who have the power to make changes, a lot of those people are the ones who will likely benefit from not making changes.”

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Ganamos

VENEZUELA

Tens of thousands of Venezuelans took to the streets around the world over the weekend, demanding that authoritarian President Nicolás Maduro recognize the results of last month’s election they say he lost.

In the capital Caracas and other cities across Venezuela, in the United States, Australia, South Korea, Madagascar and elsewhere, Venezuelans carried flags that featured their candidate, Edmundo González, who reportedly won twice as many votes as Maduro, flags that read, “Ganamos” (we win), NBC News reported.

The protests were organized by the opposition, calling on Maduro to step down and the world to recognize its historic election win on July 28. Some like the US have already answered that call, saying González won the election, while the European Union is withholding its recognition of Maduro until he releases the election results in full.

But so far, Maduro, and the election commission he controls, insist that he won the election with 51 percent of the vote, while refusing to release the full results. Instead, he has cracked down on the protests – 24 people have already been killed and more than 2,400 people have been arrested since the election, added National Public Radio. Social media and communication apps such as WhatsApp have been monitored and tampered with.

Doesn’t matter, say protesters. On Saturday in Caracas, demonstrators shouted, “We are not afraid.”

“Today the world knows what we Venezuelans are made of … we awakened a country,” opposition leader María Corina Machado, said in a video message Saturday morning. “They try to scare us, to divide us, to paralyze us, but they cannot.”

Maduro, who deployed police against the demonstrators on Saturday, has held office since 2013 after the death of his mentor, socialist Hugo Chávez. He has undermined the country’s economy while destroying its democracy, explained the Council on Foreign Relations. Chávez, who was enormously popular, leveraged his country’s wealth to help the poor. The bloated state that he created bred corruption and mismanagement, however. Maduro expanded the system rather than used Venezuela’s oil wealth to grow sustainable economic development, while staying in power through repression, his hold on the police and military, and rigged elections.

As a result, almost 8 million people have fled the country, with more saying they are planning to leave if the political and economic situations don’t improve.

Analysts told the Guardian that Venezuela under Maduro now has two paths forward. The country could become like Nicaragua, where President Daniel Ortega has seized total control of society through violence and repression, or Romania, where frustrated citizens started a revolution that ended the harsh and failing communist regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu.

Nicaragua appears to be Maduro’s preferred model. He has called for security forces to use an “iron fist” against protesters who took to the streets to call for fair elections, wrote Agence France-Presse. And the repression after this election has been worse than anything people have seen in decades, according to the New York Times.

Western leaders have condemned Maduro but have offered few changes to sanctions they have already slapped on the South American country, Reuters reported. His allies – China, Iran, and Russia – are key to his survival, but they haven’t been as forthcoming with aid or business opportunities as they were in the past, argued World Politics Review.

Maduro might have nobody else to rely on but the men with guns around him. That’s because, the protesters say, he doesn’t seem to have the people anymore.

“We are here reminding those who have confiscated power that they have to release it – the people have chosen, and we won,” Maria Vallera, a retired 80-year-old in the crowd, told the Washington Post. “It’s a dictatorship, what we have here. He refuses to recognize what the people want. He knows he has lost the people.”

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Getting Rich, Right

GUYANA

Past efforts at reforming the constitution of Guyana have yielded little change.

Now, however, as the small South American nation prepares to dole out the benefits from new oil drilling, advocates say the recently empaneled Constitution Reform Commission must create a new political and economic order.

“A political system that gives the government – with a one-seat majority in the legislature – unrestrained control over natural resources breeds political discontent and instability,” wrote Americas Quarterly.

Dubbed the “New Qatar,” after the oil-rich emirate in the Persian Gulf, Guyana is blessed with offshore oil reserves of more than 11 billion barrels, making it a leading oil producer in terms of per capita growth. Last year, the country’s gross domestic product increased by a third, the Guardian reported. This year, similar growth is expected. Formerly a poor country, people are receiving $5,000 public cash grants, parcels of land to build houses and university scholarships.

Oil companies, knowing how important Guyanese oil is for their bottom lines, are fighting over who benefits the most from the reserves, too, added Reuters.

But, despite the oil boom, many Guyanese folks are still struggling with poverty, noted the World Bank. The influx of cash, meanwhile, sparked inflation that caused prices of sugar, oranges, cooking oil, and peppers to more than double last year alone, while individual workers’ wages have remained stagnant, the Associated Press reported.

A major test of knowing whether or not oil riches have spread throughout the country’s economy will be whether or not emigrants return to the country, argued the St Kitts and Nevis Observer in an editorial. Half of the country’s population lives and works elsewhere in order to make ends meet.

Others also wonder about other repercussions. As National Geographic explained, Guyana’s natural wilderness is one of the continent’s best-kept secrets. Could a growing energy sector imperil this resource, the nascent basis of a tourist economy that could otherwise help balance out the country’s dependence on oil?

In the New York Times, Rutgers University English and journalism professor Gaiutra Bahadur also pointed out how Guyana’s capital Georgetown faces serious challenges due to climate change and rising sea levels – but has little choice, it seems, than to develop carbon-based industries to survive.

Also, how might the new economic climate impact the drug trafficking networks operating throughout Guyana and South America? Authorities recently captured a submarine in a jungle waterway with the capacity to haul up to three tons of cocaine, for instance, CBS News wrote.

Now, analysts say the country has a unique and amazing chance: To get rich in the right way.

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Port of Call

LATIN AMERICA

American Gen. Laura Richardson, who oversees US military operations in Latin America, recently told the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado that the US needs a new approach to counter Russian and Chinese – especially Chinese – influence in the region.

Richardson called on American policymakers to launch an economic aid program for Latin America akin to the Marshall Plan for Europe that was implemented after World War II, reported bne IntelliNews. This program should be designed, Richardson said, to match Russia and China’s closer trade and diplomatic ties in “America’s backyard.”

Richardson’s view was also nuanced. While she said Russia’s operations in Cuba, Venezuela, and elsewhere are important, she believes China especially is a new, major player whose entrance is already driving changes in trade and diplomacy in the region.

In a recent story in the Economist describing China’s expanding influence in Latin America, for example, the writer led with a description of the new 20,000-foot-long breakwater for the new port under construction in Chancay on the Pacific Coast of Peru. The Chinese company Cosco built the port – with $1.3 billion already invested in it – around 40 miles north of the capital of Lima. Chinese President Xi Jinping is scheduled to attend the facility’s inauguration in November.

The US, alarmed by the Peruvian port venture, is now competing with China to develop Punta Arenas, a Chilean port that could serve as a perfect stop for ships sailing in growing trading networks traversing the southern hemisphere, wrote Americas Quarterly. Low water levels in the Panama Canal, Middle Eastern wars and radical militants and also pirates targeting shipping lanes, and more trade in commodities like green hydrogen have increased merchant traffic in the Strait of Magellan by 83 percent compared with 2021, for instance.

Besides political and business concerns, critics like US Army War College political scientist R. Evan Ellis fear China will seek to export its authoritarianism to Latin America as it builds this critical infrastructure. “China is increasingly active in Latin America and other parts of the world in conducting training programs in China for professionals from the region,” Ellis noted in the Diplomat. “Problematically, these trainings are rife with authoritarian content and narratives.”

Chinese officials undoubtedly have tried to strongarm local leaders into adopting pro-China policies, like banning coffee imports from Guatemala due to the country’s recognition of Taiwan’s independence, as Reuters explained. Moves like these have angered Latin American leaders, including Brazilian fashion retailers who resent losing business to cheap Chinese textiles, added Deutsche Welle.

However, Latin Americans keep accepting Chinese cash and investment. Trade between the two sides grew to $315 billion in 2020 compared with $12 billion in 2000. That number is likely to increase to $700 billion through the next decade, according to the Miami Herald.

The business of international relations is business, analysts say, and in this region, that trade is booming.

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The Three-legged Stool

VENEZUELA

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is running for reelection for a third term on July 28. His strategy includes appearing on the ballot 13 times as the endorsed candidate of different political parties. His main rival, Edmundo González Urrutia, meanwhile, appears only three times.

These maneuvers are only the tip of the iceberg regarding Maduro’s election meddling, reported the New York Times. His government has also rejected candidates, arrested opposition organizers, developed confusing ballots to stymie challengers, and barred millions of expatriate Venezuelans critical of Maduro’s regime from voting.

Venezuelan authorities, for example, recently arrested opposition leader María Corina Machado’s security chief on charges of violence against women, the Associated Press wrote. Machado said the allegations were bogus but illustrated the challenges she and her allies face. Machado won an informal primary to face Maduro in the election but officials banned her from running. Now she is campaigning for her hand-picked candidate, the former diplomat González.

Despite his advantages, polls show that Maduro is 20 points behind González, reported Reuters, mostly because the autocratic socialist president’s handling of the economy has been atrocious.

The South American country’s gross domestic product has shrunk by a third under Maduro and his predecessor and mentor, Hugo Chávez, a left-wing hero who lifted millions of Venezuelans out of poverty but set the stage for economic sclerosis and political corruption, explained the Council on Foreign Relations. Today, more than 80 percent of the country’s population lives in poverty. The health system is crumbling. The oil industry, which is vital to its prosperity, is falling apart, too.

Around 7.7 million Venezuelans have fled the country in search of jobs and liberty, noted the United Nations Refugee Agency. These expatriates are often among Maduro’s most outspoken critics. The Christian Science Monitor, for instance, interviewed María de los Ángeles León Núñez, who organized anti-Maduro activities ahead of the forthcoming vote for more than 100,000 of her compatriots who migrated to Mexico in recent years.

Maduro, meanwhile, shows little signs of going down nicely.

He and his ruling party, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, must win the election if voters
do not want Venezuela to fall into “a bloodbath, into a fratricidal civil war,” he said at a campaign rally in the capital of Caracas recently, CNN reported.

Financial markets are betting that González has at least a chance to win in an upset victory, Bloomberg wrote, though nobody doubts that the challenger faces an uphill battle against formidable odds.

The pressure for change is building steadily, the newswire added, even as the world has seen this in Venezuela before.

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When the Waters Come

LATIN AMERICA

Climate change allegedly has claimed many victims.

Temperatures as high as 117 degrees Fahrenheit were recently causing fatal heat strokes in Pakistan. The South Asian country is on track to warm by almost nine degrees Fahrenheit by the 2090s compared with the early 1980s. These deaths occurred after devastating floods in 2022 killed more than 1,730 people and wrecked two million homes, causing $30 billion in damage.

Natural disasters stemming from climate change especially harm so-called fragile states, or developing countries with corrupt and/or inefficient governments, like the Central African Republic, Somalia and Sudan, noted the International Monetary Fund. Women and girls are also among the hardest-hit victims, added UNICEF. Females comprise around 80 percent of those displaced in climactic events, too.

Climate change also impacts flora and fauna – affecting people’s lives. Consider how higher water temperatures threaten the Maine lobster industry. Permafrost in Siberia is thawing, challenging locals who are used to hard ground. Wildfires have ravaged Canada and parts of Europe.

Few examples of the toll that climate change is taking on people are more wrenching than the experience of the 1,200 residents of Carti Sugtupu, a tiny, densely populated island in Panama.

Inhabitants of Carti Sugtupu lived in dirt-floor houses nestled on the island that is as large as five football fields, wrote Agence France-Press. They lived off fishing, with “no drinking water, sanitation or reliable electricity.” A visual story in the Atlantic magazine provided stirring images of the fascinating Latin American island community.

However, more recently, the sea has been frequently flooding their homes, which are around three feet above sea level. As a result, authorities informed them that rising sea levels would make living there impossible by 2050, and that they would be provided with new homes in Nuevo Carti, a town on the Panamanian mainland.

The islanders didn’t want to go.

“We are sad because if this island disappears, a part of our heart, of our culture, disappears with it,” said Alberto Lopez, who was born on the island 72 years ago, in an interview with Business Insider. “My grandmother, my grandfather and my aunt died here … it’s not going to be the same, but I have to move on because life goes on.”

While these Panamanian islanders are the first in the country to be relocated because of the changing climate, they aren’t going to be the last in the region.

In southern Brazil, for example, Silvia and Vitor Titton surveyed the ruins of their neighborhood ravaged by flooding in Porto Alegre, and decided they had enough, it was time to move to another city. “No, I can’t do this,” she told the Washington Post of her decision to leave the area. “I can’t live with this fear of water, fear of rain.”

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The Pot Bubbles Over

WORLD

The recent assassination attempt on former US President Donald Trump, who is running again for the country’s top leadership post, is just the latest example of how the stew of political violence simmering throughout the world for years is now bubbling over.

Following the shooting on Saturday and condemnations for the act that poured in from leaders from across the globe, many politicians vowed to turn down the heat, and punish perpetrators.

One thing is clear – as lone actors and criminal gangs take violent action, political violence is rising across the globe, and it is not just a developed world problem anymore.

Recently, for example, an Ecuadoran court sentenced five people to prison – with two receiving sentences touching 35 years in length – for their involvement in the assassination of Ecuadoran presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio last August, reported the BBC.

Villavicencio, a former journalist, was an anticorruption campaigner who sought to fight drug gangs that have grown to hold tremendous power and influence in the South American country. As Al Jazeera explained, Ecuador sits between Colombia and Peru, two of the largest cocaine exporters in the world. Ecuadoran ports are key segments of their distribution networks to the rest of the world.

In Mexico, where Claudia Sheinbaum recently won the presidential election, violence against politicians increased 150 percent compared with elections in 2021, wrote CNBC, citing political consultancy Integralia. Drug gangs drove much of the killing and harassment, too.

Europe has seen an alarming rise in attacks on politicians over the past year.

During the recent high-stakes election in France, for example, where tensions were running high, there were more than 50 instances of people assaulting political candidates and campaigners, reported CNN. Deploying 30,000 police to deter disorder and violence, the government detained around 30 alleged assailants for questioning. A few candidates needed hospitalization.

In neighboring Germany, ahead of European parliamentary elections in June, saw a rise in attacks, particularly against politicians from the left-leaning Social Democrats and the Greens. German news magazine Der Spiegel commented that hundreds of “brutal” attacks “against politicians are shaking democracy.”

And in Slovakia, Prime Minister Robert Fico was shot and seriously injured in May in a “politically motivated” attack.

Meanwhile, in Asia, physical attacks against political leaders are not uncommon. In one of the most devastating such incidents in the region in recent history, lawmaker and former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe was gunned down in 2022 at a political event in a country where gun violence is exceedingly rare.

In South Korea in January this year, just months before the elections, South Korean Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung, the country’s main opposition leader and former presidential candidate, was stabbed in the neck, the South China Morning Post wrote. That same month, Bae Hyun-jin, a conservative lawmaker was assaulted by a teen with a brick, suffering head injuries.

“Political terrorism is a threat to democracy and cannot be tolerated for any reason,” said Ho Jun Seok, a spokesperson for South Korea’s ruling People Power Party. “Political terrorism is the product of politics based on extremism and hatred, and politicians have a responsibility to unite society.”

After the assassination attempt on Trump, many world leaders said such an attack on a political leader should be unthinkable, Reuters noted. But British government expert on political violence John Woodcock, whose title is Lord Walney, has long warned of the threats posed by radical groups on the right and left in his country. Speaking to the Guardian, he said the assault on Trump was “a vivid reminder of the vulnerability of all politicians.”

Woodcock’s critics at left-wing British news outlet Novara Media, however, argued that Woodcock has advocated for silencing protests and dissent, compromising freedom of speech and assembly, surveilling organizations, communities and other supposed agitators more closely, and other repressive measures.

Some researchers say that political polarization has led to harsher rhetoric from politicians in Europe and a change in the norms of what is acceptable speech and behavior – and opened the door to violence.

“And that’s always been led to some extent by right-wing populist parties popping up (in Europe) and suddenly no longer obeying the rules of the game,” Peter Neumann, a professor of security studies at King’s College London, told NPR. “No longer being polite and pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable in terms of discourse, pushing the boundaries in terms of very militant language that is being employed.”

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Succession

BOLIVIA

Bolivian President Luis Arce recently told the Associated Press that his mountainous South American country is not struggling in an economic crisis. Many Bolivians and most economists would disagree.

Commercial activity in the capital of La Paz ground to a halt recently, for example, after Arce deployed troops into the streets to counter a supposed coup d’état that the president claimed was occurring.

Gen. Juan José Zúñiga Macías, now relieved of his command, brought soldiers to central Plaza Murillo in front of the Bolivian Congress and presidential palace. “A Reuters witness saw an armored vehicle ram a door of the presidential palace and soldiers rush in,” wrote the news agency. Speaking to journalists, Zúñiga said the country’s leaders needed to “stop destroying, stop impoverishing our country, stop humiliating our army,” noted the Economist.

But the plot fizzled. During the ruckus, Arce, 60, clasping a ceremonial baton that symbolized his rank as head of state, and his cabinet ministers confronted the general. “I am your captain … withdraw all of your troops right now, general,” Acre said to Zúñiga, according to the Guardian.

The soldiers left the presidential palace a few hours later. Police then took control of the palace and arrested Zúñiga. He’s one of 21 military officers and others associated with the coup behind bars.

Arce’s political enemy, former President Evo Morales, meanwhile, accused Arce of organizing a “self-coup” with the aim of cementing his control over the government and claiming extraordinary powers in an emergency that only he knows is happening.

As World Politics Review explained, Arce and Morales were once close allies. Arce served as finance minister under Morales, who won an unconstitutional fourth consecutive term, but resigned in 2019 under pressure from the army amid widespread protests against election meddling. Morales supported Arce’s 2020 candidacy. But he now might challenge Arce as the ruling Movement for Socialism party’s candidate in 2025. Arce has made clear his intent to remain president, however.

This tension in the runup to next year’s presidential poll comes as the economy is cratering despite Bolivia’s many natural resources, wrote Agence France-Presse. The country has natural gas fields and mines of lithium, a vital mineral for future technology manufacturing. Yet the country needs more investment in these sectors to truly capitalize on them. Now the country has slipped into a recession that is making it harder to recover, wrote the Wilson Center, adding, “Worryingly, the real crisis has not yet begun.”

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