Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

Latin America

Latin America

LOW-HANGING FRUIT:

An Opening for Cuban Democracy: Activist Rosa María Payá says the West should recognize change is possible—and make it happen. (Carolyn Kennedy, May 15, 2026, Freedom Frequency)

Rosa María Payá continues her father’s fight against a regime that is enduring its worst economic crisis since the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. The country’s economy began to falter during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the collapse of the tourism industry, and has not recovered since. Blackouts, food shortages, and a crumbling health care system are the new normal. As Rosa María Payá describes, this is not a humanitarian crisis; it is a “humanitarian catastrophe.”


Cuba is part of a larger network of authoritarian regimes working against democratic stability in Latin America and the Caribbean. “When we talk about the Cuban regime, we are talking about the head of the authoritarian octopus in our hemisphere,” said Payá. Most recently, the regime lost a key partner, Venezuela, with the US capture of Nicolás Maduro.

Payá believes this time of vulnerability for the regime presents a window of opportunity.

Latin America

…SO MUCH YET TO DO:

How Venezuela has – and hasn’t – changed since Maduro’s capture (Julia Buxton, May 8, 2026, The Conversation)


On the economic front, Rodríguez has implemented reforms at a greater pace. New laws and regulations reversing Chávez’s nationalisation drive are reopening key sectors of the economy to private investment. This includes hydrocarbons and mining.

A recently unveiled Commission for the Evaluation of Public Assets will audit state ownership in other economic areas such as agriculture, manufacturing and infrastructure. A fire sale to the private sector is expected.

The discipline and political dominance of the PSUV machine have been put to good use here, waving through favourable terms and other confidence-building measures for investors. These include providing legal guarantees in what has long been a notoriously unpredictable economic environment, as well as access to international arbitration. Whether these measures encourage investment will become clear in the months ahead.

Rodríguez has also steered Venezuela back into the International Monetary Fund (IMF), ending a suspension that began in 2019 when the organisation ceased recognising Maduro’s government. Kristalina Georgieva, the IMF’s managing director, reports having “productive” conversations with Rodríguez.


The US president, Donald Trump, has praised Rodríguez for doing a “great job”. He has said she is working well with US representatives. But there are many disruptive challenges on the horizon for Rodríguez. In the short-term, there is a very real risk of protests. Venezuela remains in a political limbo with hopes of justice and democracy currently frustrated.

The absence of demonstrations to date owes much to a lack of leadership on the ground. This is likely to change when opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who the Maduro government barred from competing in the July 2024 presidential election, returns to the country. Machado has said she expects to be back in Venezuela before the end of 2026.

Anglospherics Latin America

THE eND OF hISTORY IS A THREE-LEGGED STOOL:

Chile’s Hard Right Isn’t as Trumpy as It Wants to Seem: How to keep a consensus while pretending to break it. (Quico Toro, Apr 03, 2026, Persuasion)

Foreigners make a lot of lazy assumptions about Chile, but the stereotype of a country set on a hard right-wing path by a brutal dictator who brought prosperity along with repression is a partial truth at best. The truth is much more interesting. Per capita GDP grew only about 40 percent during Pinochet’s entire 17-year rule, and that includes two devastating recessions in 1975 and 1982. Chile’s real push into middle-income status came with democracy: GDP per capita (in constant 2010 dollars) more than doubled from around $6,400 in 1990 to over $14,000 by 2018, and poverty plummeted from 45 percent in 1987 to just 20 percent by 2000.


Chile’s development success story is the story of deepening consensus around institutions built on fundamentally sound liberal principles.

As important as saving Chile from Communism and institution capitalism were, Pinochet’s crowning act was returning to democracy once the threats were gone.

Latin America

hISTORY eNDS EVERYWHERE:

Under Pressure from Trump, Cuban Leader Calls for ‘Urgent’ Economic Change ( Luis Ferré-Sadurní and David C. Adams, March 2, 2026, NY Times)

Mr. Díaz-Canel spoke of the need to give municipalities and the Cuban private sector more autonomy, urged more foreign investment in the energy sector and called for a “resizing of the state apparatus,” according to state media.

“We must focus immediately on implementing the most urgent and necessary transformations to the economic and social model,” Mr. Díaz-Canel said in a speech to the Council of Ministers, the highest body of the government, according to state media.

Mr. Díaz-Canel’s calls for change, which were vague and light in details, appeared to be a direct response to the United States’ increased pressure on the Communist regime and a stark acknowledgment of the toll the U.S. oil blockade has inflicted on Cuba, which is facing one of its most severe economic and humanitarian crisis in decades.

Help them do so.

End of History Latin America

WHEN YOU FINALLY HAVE A FUTURE:

Milei Hunts for Over $250 Billion That Argentines Have Hidden in Secret Stashes (Samantha Pearson and Silvina Frydlewsky, Feb. 3, 2026, WSJ)

Along the leafy boulevards of Buenos Aires, optimism is rising as the government softens financial controls, encouraging Argentines to plow previously undeclared cash into everything from cars to real estate.

“Customers are getting bolder, there is less need to hide things,” said Fabian Luciani, a car salesman in the city for the past 25 years. More than half of his clients pay in cash, he said, sometimes with dollars that families say have been buried in their backyards for years.

The color of the notes is usually a dead giveaway.

“They’ve got yellowish, brownish stains—you know, from humidity,” Luciani said, musing about how many dollars now sitting in the U.S. Treasury bear the stains of Argentine soil.

End of History Latin America

NEVER RETURN TO HISTORY:

Three Lessons from Venezuela’s Economic Collapse: Policy choices turned an oil-rich democracy into a petrostate, then into an authoritarian economy where repression followed redistribution. (Matthew D. Mitchell, January 23, 2026, Daily Economy)

Oil was not the only explanation for Venezuela’s 1970s prosperity. The government spent and taxed modestly. It left most industry in private hands. Inflation was low. And international trade was almost entirely free of tariffs and regulatory barriers to trade.

In 1970, Venezuela scored a little less than 7 on the Fraser Institute’s 10-point Economic Freedom of the World index, making it the 13th most economically free country in the world, just ahead of Japan.

But as the rest of the world liberalized in the 1980s and 1990s, Venezuela went in the opposite direction.

Latin America

AIN’T GONNA WORK MADURO’S FARM NO MORE:

Anatomy of an economic suicide: Venezuela under Maduro (Amirreza Etasi, January 4, 2026, asia Times)


This report is not a political manifesto; it is an economic autopsy. It’s about the arithmetic of ruin. Between 2013 and 2025, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela experienced the single largest economic contraction in modern history for a country not at war. According to data from the World Bank and the IMF, the economy evaporated approximately 80% of its GDP, a figure that dwarfs what happened to the United States in the Great Depression (29%) and to the Soviet Union during its collapse.

For the international observer, particularly in Asia, this collapse offers a critical case study in “fiscal dominance” and the destruction of the price mechanism. It was not merely the result of falling oil prices, or external sanctions, but the mathematical inevitability of specific technical decisions: the monetization of deficits, the expropriation of supply chains and the decapitalization of the state oil company (PDVSA).

End of History Latin America

A FASCIST INTERLUDE CAN SAVE YOU, BUT THEN YOU NEED TO LIBERALIZE FULLY:

Exploring The Chile Project (J.P. Bastos, 12/11/25, EconLib)

The government of Salvador Allende is also the subject of many misconceptions. Edwards recognizes that part of the confusion stems from the fact that Allende was from the Socialist (and not from the Communist) Party, which led authors to mistakenly portray him as a relatively moderate candidate even though, in Chile, the Socialists were much more to the left and had close ties with Cuba and North Korea.2

The book offers a detailed overview of Allende’s economic policies. For instance, Edwards reveals that the government’s grasp over the economy went significantly beyond the well-known nationalization of U.S.-owned copper mines. It also nationalized the banking sector and enforced its right to take control, for an undetermined period, of hundreds of factories producing goods “in short supply.” This short supply was often staged by unions stopping the factory floor and creating artificial shortages. He notes that every import required a license, with some tariffs reaching 250 percent. He also describes how perverse and arbitrary mechanisms were used to set price controls, which led to confiscation of goods, often imposed huge fines, and, sometimes, sent “speculators” to prison. […]

Recurring in Edwards’ narrative in the third and final part of the book is that, despite the breadth of the reforms implemented during the regime, much else was also done after the return to democracy to deepen and extend the reforms. This continuation was often undertaken by center-left politicians. This insight invites reflection on the role Chicago Boys. On the one hand, their ideas undoubtedly charted the path to greater economic freedom, much needed in Chile after Allende’s populist policies.

On the other hand, Chile’s experience highlights the limitations to economic growth and prosperity under a dictatorship. Recent empirical research has analyzed this issue in Pinochet’s Chile from two different sides. Escalante (2022) shows that the Chilean GDP per capita underperformed for at least the first 15 years following the coup. Arenas, Toni, and Paniagua (2024) also question the timing of the “Chilean miracle”, arguing that it only really developed following the return to democracy. Indeed, other Latin American development “miracles” (in Uruguay and Costa Rica) occurred without a similar story of a liberalizing autocrat.

Latin America

THE CRYING ENDS:

Two Years of Milei: The Reform Agenda Moves Forward in Argentina (Marcos Falcone, 12/10/25, Cato at Liberrty)

As of September, the economy is growing at 5 percent on a yearly basis. Poverty, which exceeded 40 percent before Milei took office and peaked at 52.9 percent in the first half of 2024, is now down to 31.6 percent. Monthly inflation, which often surpassed 10 percent in the pre-Milei era and reached 25 percent in December 2023, now hovers around 2 percent. Both exports and imports are rising rapidly.

Latin America

DEFLATION WORKS:

How Milei made austerity popular (Julieta Casas, 11/20/25, Englesberg Ideas)

How has Milei managed to maintain popular support? A comparison with the country’s past austerity administrations suggests two possible reasons. First, while the president’s ‘chainsaw’ economic policies have cut into the real incomes of broad segments of the population and led to a stagnation of economic growth, they did so early on in his administration. After a harsh initial shock, the mid-term elections coincided with a rebound of the economy, potentially aiding the president’s electoral support. What’s more, a drastic reduction of inflation has worked to his advantage.

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