Latin America

Ricardo Rosselló became Governor of Puerto Rico in January at the age of just 37 – and he inherited a disaster.

Venezuela is in its fourth week of massive anti-government demonstrations – and so far 21 people have been killed in the unrest.

On Thursday, the U.N. Security Council voted unanimously to pull its peacekeeping troops out of Haiti. But it seems few Haitians will be sad to see them go.

The U.N. peacekeepers arrived in Haiti in 2004 to bring order to violent chaos after the overthrow of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. And for a while, the more than 2,000 U.N. soldiers did that.

Farah Larrieux is a Haitian who for the past dozen years has built a tele-life in South Florida. She's hosted the public affairs program "Haiti Journal" on PBS channel WPBT. She has a TV production company.

Last fall Colombia was being called “the Brexit of the Americas.” That’s because, in stunning Brexit fashion, voters there had just rejected a peace agreement to end the country’s half-century-long civil war. Most Colombians felt the accord was too lenient toward the Marxist guerrillas known as the FARC.

Typically, when people are in the court system they want their cases heard as quickly as possible. But asylum requests are different.

Puerto Rico is still mired in one of the worst economic crises in the island’s history. Its new young governor, Ricardo Rosselló, is on a campaign to turn things around - and he's betting an important ally will be South Florida’s booming Puerto Rican diaspora.

Rosselló is only 38 years old. But he’s leveraging his youthful energy in an effort not only to reform the U.S. territory’s disastrous finances but to change the often dysfunctional relationship between the U.S.  government  and Puerto Rico – whose residents are U.S. citizens.

Last summer the first U.S. commercial flights to Cuba in more than half a century took off to jubilant fanfare - and landed to cheers and water cannon salutes. U.S. airlines were giddy about resuming commercial flights to the communist island.

Maybe too giddy.

President Trump’s rough rhetoric toward Mexico suggests his relationship with Latin America could be rocky. But the security challenges there remain daunting. That was the subject of a major Florida International University gathering on Thursday - a conference that made it clear the U.S. will need to summon a more involved hemispheric strategy than just building a wall.