Tony Wood

Mexico City​, in the words of the critic Carlos Monsiváis, is ‘above all, too many people’. In Los rituales del caos (1995), Monsiváis summed up the ‘multitudes surrounding multitudes’: the swarms of cars, the street pedlars and fire eaters encircling them at traffic lights, the massed congregants at the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the millions...

On​ 16 April Raúl Castro stepped down as first secretary of the Cuban Communist Party. Much of the coverage focused on the fact that, for the first time in more than sixty years, none of the island’s top political posts is occupied by a Castro. This was a generational transition: the current president and first secretary of the party, Miguel Díaz-Canel, to whom Raúl...

Alexei Navalny’s​ arrival in Russia on 17 January was both a homecoming and a high-stakes opening gambit. His decision to return, made after several months convalescing in Germany from near fatal poisoning with a nerve agent in Siberia last August, was a provocation confronting Vladimir Putin with a choice: he could either arrest his most prominent opponent, drawing greater attention...

The​ crisis that led to Evo Morales’s forced removal as president of Bolivia began on the night of Monday, 21 October. Presidential and parliamentary elections had been held on Sunday, and according to a preliminary tally released by Bolivia’s electoral authorities that evening, Morales had a lead of 8 per cent over Carlos Mesa, his nearest rival – not quite enough to...

On 26 December​ 1980, residents of Lima woke to a gruesome, incongruous sight: dead dogs had been strung up from lampposts in the city centre, some bearing pieces of cloth scrawled with the words: ‘Deng Xiaoping, Son of a Bitch.’ It was the work of the Partido Comunista del Perú-Sendero Luminoso. Sendero (or Shining Path, as it’s referred to in English) was an...