Free Republic

They bite during the day and find humans tastier than the rest of the animal kingdom -- and that's exactly what makes the Aedes mosquito so dangerous. Well, that and the fact that it carries the Zika virus, which has terrified the globe. "There is the enemy," Dr. Tom Frieden, chief of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told Congress as he projected an image of the bug on screen last week, calling for a massive effort -- with a staggering $1.8 billion price tag -- to combat the danger. The Zika virus is an obscure agent that festered...

Thanks to Obama’s open border policies there are now hundreds of thousands of cases of Chagas Disease in the United States today. Chagas disease also known as American trypanosomiasis, is a potentially life-threatening illness caused by the protozoan parasite Trypanosoma cruzi (T. cruzi). It is found mainly in endemic areas of 21 Latin American countries. The disease is transmitted to humans by contact with feces of triatomine bugs, known as ‘kissing bugs.’ Chagas disease is spread by the Kissing Bug in Latin American countries. Chagas often leads to a fatal condition known as Chagasic cardiomyopathy. The National School for Tropical...

Montevideo (AFP) - Latin America will demand that the richest and most polluting countries foot the bill for reducing harmful emissions at the world climate summit starting Monday. Countries in one of the world's poorest and most environmentally diverse regions have failed to agree on many things and do not have a common negotiating position overall going into the talks

The director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, the storied home of the agency’s most secretive intelligence operations, has announced that he plans to retire, The Daily Beast has learned. CIA spokesman Dean Boyd confirmed that the director announced his retirement “after a long and distinguished career at CIA. We thank him for this profound and lasting contributions to both CIA and to our nation’s security.” As a practice, the CIA doesn’t identify the head of the clandestine service by name. But Frank Archibald was outed in a Twitter post in 2013, and details of his biography were known to...

Is Catholicism responsible for the fact that Mexico is a third world hell hole? The GDP per capita in Argentina is only one-third of the GDP per capita of America and Canada, despite the fact that Argentina has a larger percentage of Whites than America and Canada. Portugal and Spain are among the poorest West European nations in terms of GDP per capita. Is this caused by Catholicism, or is it caused by other problems?

HyperinflationOver the years, we have repeatedly poked fun at the transformation of Venezuela into a "socialist utopia" - an economy in a state of terminal collapse, where the destruction of the currency (one black market Bolivar is now worth 107 times less than the official currency's exchange rate) and the resulting hyperinflation is only matched be barren wasteland that local stores have transformed into now that conventional supply chains are irreparably broken. Just this past Wednesday we showed a clip of what is currently taking place inside Venezuela supermarkets, noting that "the hyperinflationary collapse in Venezuela is reaching its terminal...

Bad ideas take a long time to die Since the start of the 21st Century, the leftward lurch in Latin America has been unmistakable. By early 2008, the nations of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela, and, to a certain extent, Mexico and Peru, have all embraced center-left political parties or movements. The reason for the tilt is a familiar one: the siren song of government-mandated wealth redistribution and increased levels of social spending have resonated with people with a long history of economic and development troubles. “I think it’s difficult for conservative candidates to...

Pope Francis arrived in Bolivia on Wednesday on the second leg of his South American tour and immediately insisted that the Catholic Church continue to play an important role in society amid efforts by the government of President Evo Morales to curb its influence.... Morales came to power championing Bolivia's 36 indigenous groups and enshrined their rights in the constitution, and under his leadership Bolivia's economy has boomed thanks to high prices for its natural gas and minerals. But Morales has roiled the local church by taking a series of anti-clerical initiatives, including a new constitution that made the overwhelmingly...

[The following are just excerpts from the first 5 sections of an extensive very revealing multifaceted 2014 Pew Research survey. My focus is mainly on the Protestant and Catholic views. Complete Report PDF] Religion in Latin AmericaWidespread Change in a Historically Catholic RegionLatin America is home to more than 425 million Catholics – nearly 40% of the world’s total Catholic population – and the Roman Catholic Church now has a Latin American pope for the first time in its history. Yet identification with Catholicism has declined throughout the region, according to a major new Pew Research Center survey that...

​Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has announced new plans to create a subsidized food program for school teachers and other workers in the education sector. Maduro explained that the new program would benefit as many as 700,000 families of education workers, including the children of teachers and professors. The president added that his government is committed to ensuring all teachers are provided with a living wage. Earlier this week, Maduro approved a 50 percent increase in teacher salaries.

Venezuela’s socialist government is struggling to put food on the shelves amid runaway inflation. Brazil’s president is facing calls for impeachment. And even Cuba’s communist government, an iconic touchstone for generations of leftists, is embracing closer ties with the U.S. Whether it’s because of corruption scandals or stagnant growth, the popularity of the crop of leftist Latin American governments that have been running the region since the start of the millennium appears to be waning. Voters that embraced what became known as the pink tide that swept away the pro-Washington, free-market policies dominant in the 1990s are increasingly tuning hostile...

President Obama officially closed a chapter in U.S. history that has guided presidents since nearly beginning, indicating the United States will no longer act to resist overseas influence in the Hemisphere. Obama, who spoke Friday during a “civil society” forum in Panama City, Panama, disparaged past efforts by the United States to forestall the spread of Communism in Latin America and suggested similar missions would no longer be undertaken. “The days in which our agenda in this hemisphere so often presumed that the United States could meddle with impunity, those days are past,” Obama said.Let’s think about what Obama means...

Those interested in reviving Catholicism’s saliency in everyday life in Latin America should consider how they can make Christ front-and-center of their social outreach People hold crosses while standing behind a statue of Christ during a re-enactment of the Crucifixion April 18 near Monterrey, Mexico. (CNS photo/Daniel Becerril, Reuters) It’s hardly surprising that the election of Latin America’s Pope Francis has focused more attention on Latin American Catholicism since the debates about liberation theology which shook global Christianity in the 1970s and 1980s. The sad irony, however, is that this renewed attention is highlighting something long known to many Catholics...

Paulina Abramovich, AFP December 2, 2014Santiago (AFP) - Latin America's economies, hit by falling investment, will grow just 1.1 percent in 2014 -- their lowest level in five years, a UN commission on the region said Tuesday. The poor performance of several of Latin America's biggest economies dragged down growth across the region, found the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). Argentina's economy will contract by 0.2 percent this year and Venezuela's by 3.0 percent, it said. Regional giant Brazil's will grow just 0.2 percent. The figures are the latest confirmation of the end of...

(Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor/Getty Images) Tens of millions of Latin Americans have left the Roman Catholic Church in recent decades and embraced Pentecostal Christianity, according to a new Pew Research Center survey on religion in 18 Latin American countries and Puerto Rico. Indeed, nearly one-in-five Latin Americans now describe themselves as Protestant, and across the countries surveyed majorities of them self-identify as Pentecostal or belong to a Pentecostal denomination. Pentecostals share many beliefs with other evangelical Protestants, but they put more emphasis on the “gifts of the Holy Spirit,” such as speaking in tongues, faith healing and prophesying.With...

(CNSNews.com) - The Obama administration announced on Friday a plan to create a new refugee/parole program for children in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras whose parents are legal residents of the United States. “This program will allow certain parents who are lawfully present in the United States to request access to the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program for their children still in one of these three countries,” the State Department said in a news release. The department added that “[c]hildren who are found ineligible for refugee admission but still at risk of harm may be considered for parole on a case-by-case...

A new Pew survey found that Latin American Catholics are increasingly leaving the Catholic Church, either to join evangelical Protestant churches or are abandoning religion altogether. The survey participants cited a search for a personal connection with God as the biggest reason for their shift. The wide-ranging survey, released on Thursday, reported that although 69 percent of adults across the region identify as Catholic, in almost every country surveyed there was a reported net loss of Catholics in terms of people raised Catholic and currently Catholic. Overall for Latin America as a whole, 84 percent of the population was raised...

In light of the recent "Child" immigration show brought on by Obama, it is interesting to look at what has been happening in Latin America under Obama's watch. El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras are over their heads with gangs and cartels in the drug trafficking trade that Obama helped install --------------------------------- 2010-Resurgent Communism in Latin America Many Cuban refugees risked everything to escape the murderous regime of Fidel Castro. Oftentimes they made treacherous voyages aboard rickety rafts, hoping only to reach the free shores of Florida with their lives. Many died along the way. But communist rule was vicious and...

What does the triumph of FMLN candidate Salvador Sanchez Ceren, in the March 9 presidential elections in El Salvador represent for Latin America? I see his victory as very significant because it not only further strengthens the progressive current expanding through Latin America since the 1998 triumph of Chavez in Venezuela, but because he is the first president since Chile's Salvador Allende to reach the presidency by putting forward a project that he had no qualms in calling socialist. At the same time, he has explained socialism as a democratic, participatory project that is not decreed from above. This idea...

Officially this money is supposed to discourage illegal immigration, in reality it sends the message that if a lot of illegal aliens from your country come and create a crisis, the United States will send you huge piles of money.It encourages the very behavior that it claims to be discouraging. The White House announced $254.6 million in new aid for Central American countries today.The money will go toward returning unaccompanied minors who travel to the U.S. illegally to their families and fostering youth centered programs in their home countries, the White House said this afternoon.The assistance to the governments of...