More on the Americas
By Eryn Brown, Los Angeles Times
The classic Maya civilization, which flourished in Central America for more than 600 years, has been celebrated for its vast city states...
By Wes Venteicher, Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON — Almost 30 years ago, two young women allegedly obtained fake passports in Europe for a clandestine trip to Cuba. Today,...
By Andrew Blankstein, Kate Mather and Richard Marosi, Los Angeles Times
A man who police allege kidnapped a 10-year-old girl from her Northridge bedroom and sexually assaulted her was captured Wednesday at a drug...
By Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times
MEXICO CITY — Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto on Tuesday faced the most serious political crisis of his young government,...
By Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times
MEXICO CITY — Gen. Tomas Angeles Dauahare, who once held the plum post of military attache to the Mexican Embassy in Washington, was...
By Daniel Hernandez, Los Angeles Times
MEXICO CITY — Contradictory court judgments in the war crimes trial of former Guatemalan dictator Gen. Efrain Rios Montt this week set...
By Daniel Hernandez, Los Angeles Times
MEXICO CITY — On the first day of trial, a witness named Bernardo Bernal recounted how, as a 9-year-old in the spring of 1983, he...
By Tracy Wilkinson and Mery Mogollon, Los Angeles Times
CARACAS, Venezuela — Even before any legal motion was filed, the pro-government head of Venezuela's Supreme Court on Wednesday slapped...
By Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times
MEXICO CITY — Operation Cleanup was a showcase effort to stamp out corruption within Mexico's elite organized-crime bureau. Twenty-...
By Mery Mogollon and Chris Kraul, Los Angeles Times
CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuela's attorney general said Tuesday that seven people had been killed and 61 injured in post-presidential...
By Chris Kraul, Los Angeles Times
CARACAS, Venezuela — Nicolas Maduro's narrow victory in an election to serve out the late Hugo Chavez's presidential term in Venezuela...
By Chris Kraul and Mery Mogollon, Los Angeles Times
CARACAS, Venezuela — Nicolas Maduro, who served as Venezuela's interim president in the weeks after the death of his mentor, President...
By Chris Kraul and Mery Mogollon, Los Angeles Times
CARACAS, Venezuela — When state Gov. Henrique Capriles ran unsuccessfully for president in October against longtime incumbent Hugo...
By Chris Kraul and Mery Mogollon, Los Angeles Times
CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuelan interim President Nicolas Maduro has accused his political rivals of bringing Colombian paramilitaries...
By Richard Fausset and Cecilia Sanchez, Los Angeles Times
MEXICO CITY — Debate is intensifying over armed vigilante patrols that have sprung up in crime-plagued sections of rural Mexico,...
By Tracy Wilkinson and Cecilia Sanchez, Los Angeles Times
MEXICO CITY — The new government of Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto has sought to downplay the deadly violence that has...
By Fabiola Gutierrez and Chris Kraul, Los Angeles Times
SANTIAGO, Chile — Chilean authorities on Monday exhumed the body of Pablo Neruda to check claims by a former chauffeur that the...
By Chris Kraul, Los Angeles Times
CALI, Colombia — To say Luis Abel Delgado of Cali occupies a special niche in the global rag trade is an understatement: He's made...
By Brian Bennett, Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON — A sophisticated airborne radar system developed to track Taliban fighters planting roadside bombs in Afghanistan has...
By Daniel Hernandez, Los Angeles Times
MEXICO CITY — There were fewer riders than normal on driver Octavio Diaz's bus early Wednesday, the first day that a transit fare hike...
By Tracy Wilkinson, Times Staff Writer
MEXICO CITY — In an unusual legal action against the world's richest man, Mexico is suing the telecommunications giant Telmex for...
By Mery Mogollon and Chris Kraul, Los Angeles Times
CARACAS, Venezuela — Interim President Nicolas Maduro on Monday raised the curtain on Venezuela's abbreviated campaign to elect a...
By Vincent Bevins, Los Angeles Times
BRASILIA, Brazil — Francisco Everardo Oliveira Silva never expected to actually be elected to Brazil's Congress. When he ran for a...
By Richard Fausset, Los Angeles Times
MEXICO CITY — Some of the most important civic groups in Mexico are imploring President Enrique Peña Nieto to let Congress...
By Richard Fausset and Andres D'Alessandro
Los Angeles Times
By Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Los Angeles Times
SAN ANTONIO — The Mexican businessmen in Rolexes and Burberry ties meet on the north side of town, at Cielito Lindo Restaurant, or...
By Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times
VATICAN CITY — Few people were more shocked at the choice of a Jesuit as pope than the Jesuits.
By Vincent Bevins, Los Angeles Times
SAO PAULO, Brazil — When she was 19, Neide Cardeal da Silva left her family, who barely scraped by living off the...
By Richard Fausset, Los Angeles Times
BUENOS AIRES — A block away from Pope Francis' childhood home, a modest neighborhood church is wedged between a bakery and a bank of...
By Henry Chu, Los Angeles Times
VATICAN CITY — Instead of the bus, a chauffeur. No longer a tiny apartment, but a penthouse suite. Not just a new name, but his own...
By Andres D'Alessandro and Chris Kraul, Los Angeles Times
BUENOS AIRES — The man who is now Pope Francis was a young Jesuit leader, not long out of seminary, when Argentina's military junta...
By Vincent Bevins, Cecilia Sanchez and Richard Marosi, Los Angeles Times
SAO PAULO, Brazil — In Mexico, President Enrique Peña Nieto tweeted an affectionate greeting for Pope Francis as he prepared...
By Andres D'Alessandro and Chris Kraul, Los Angeles Times
BUENOS AIRES — Argentines reacted with joyous surprise to the news that former Jesuit priest, local archbishop and, most recently,...
By Richard Fausset, Los Angeles Times
MEXICO CITY — Scientists who take the annual measure of Mexican forestland famously occupied by migrating monarch butterflies said...
By Richard Fausset and Cecilia Sanchez, Los Angeles Times
MEXICO CITY — President Enrique Peña Nieto on Monday touted proposed new reforms to boost competition in Mexico's highly...
By Chris Kraul and Mery Mogollon, Los Angeles Times
CARACAS, Venezuela — Opposition leader Henrique Capriles agreed Sunday to run against interim President Nicolas Maduro in an...
By Richard Fausset, Los Angeles Times
MEXICO CITY — They elected a youthful president, a self-styled defender of democratic principles who promised to bring the country...
By Chris Kraul and Mery Mogollon, Los Angeles Times
CARACAS, Venezuela — A special election to decide the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's successor will be held in April, with...
By Chris Kraul and Mery Mogollon, Los Angeles Times
CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was remembered Friday as a leader who cared for the poor and opposed the...
By Chris Kraul and Mery Mogollon
CARACAS, Venezuela — Nicolas Maduro, a stocky former bus driver who never finished high school, takes power with a deep reserve of...
By Richard Fausset, Chris Kraul and Mery Mogollon, Los Angeles Times
CARACAS, Venezuela — Her neighborhood on the outskirts of this capital city is a dangerous, gang-infested barrio where homes are often...
By Chris Kraul and Mery Mogollon, Los Angeles Times
CARACAS, Venezuela —Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, the charismatic socialist whose Bolivarian Revolution reduced poverty and...
By Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times
MEXICO CITY — You might be hard-pressed to find the word "Mexico" in some of the advertising for tourist resorts in Mexico.
By Vincent Bevins, Los Angeles Times
SAO PAULO, Brazil — Between the high-rises in the dark center of this megacity, a swarm of people covers an entire block. They are...
By Richard Marosi, Los Angeles Times
CUATRO MILPAS, MEXICO— In this hardscrabble farming village, an American teenager like Luis Martinez was bound to stand out.
By Richard Marosi, Los Angeles Times
A U.S. pilot program designed to deport illegal immigrants by flying them to Mexico City will operate for only two months this year and...
Times wire services
Cuban activist Oswaldo Paya, who spent decades speaking out against the communist government of Fidel and Raul Castro and became one of...
By Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times
CULIACAN, Mexico — For generations, the extended Hernandez family tended fields of marijuana high in Sinaloa's western Sierra Madre...
By Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times
CULIACAN, Mexico — The cartel henchman nicknamed "El Loco" was reported behind the latest atrocity in Mexico's ever-more-depraved drug...
By Chris Kraul
BOGOTA, Colombia -- A little wild pig named Josefo, abandoned by his mother, helped keep Sgt. Jose Libardo Forero sane.
By Reed Johnson and Ken Ellingwood, Los Angeles Times
If Carlos Fuentes could have invented the perfect character to star in one of his novels, he might have come up with a protagonist named...
By Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times
MEXICO CITY — Tomas Borge, last living founder of Nicaragua's Sandinista movement and one of its most hard-line enforcers as it...
By Ken Ellingwood, Los Angeles Times
MEXICO CITY —Former Mexican President Miguel de la Madrid, who led the country amid economic meltdown and natural disaster in the...
By Christopher Hawthorne, Los Angeles Times
Ricardo Legorreta, the architect who introduced Mexican modernism to a global audience and who brought his crisp, brightly colored aesthetic...
By Richard A. Serrano, Washington Bureau
High-powered assault weapons illegally purchased under the ATF's Fast and Furious program in Phoenix ended up in a home belonging to the...
By Ken Ellingwood, Richard A. Serrano and Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times
Last fall's slaying of Mario Gonzalez, the brother of a Mexican state prosecutor, shocked people on both sides of the border. Sensational...
By Richard Marosi and Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times
Last of four parts
By Richard A. Serrano, Washington Bureau
The claim by senior ATF officials that none of the weapons lost in the botched Fast and Furious sting operation were used in the shooting of...
By Reed Johnson, Los Angeles Times
Gilbert "Magú" Luján — a painter, muralist and sculptor whose whimsical, slyly humorous art works, frequently evoking a...
By Richard A. Serrano, Los Angeles Times
Two days after U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian A. Terry was killed in December, the top ATF supervisors in Phoenix said in internal emails...
By Richard A. Serrano, Washington Bureau
Congressional investigators probing the controversial "Fast and Furious" anti-gun-trafficking operation on the border with Mexico believe at...
By Alex Renderos and Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times
Reporting from San Salvador and Mexico City -- Argentine songwriter and singer Facundo Cabral, an icon of Latin American folk and protest...