Mac Margolis

Chile's youthful revolutionary leader is rattling a nation—and a continent—as she champions education reform.

Brazil's star preacher is the country's new best-selling author of fuzzy, feel-good spirituality.

A woman is president in booming, macho Brazil. And Dilma Rousseff's calling the shots. By Mac Margolis.

Brazil's hottest new model is tall, dark, and glamorous. She's also a he. Meet high fashion's newest gender-bending muse.

José Mariano Beltrame did what everybody in Rio de Janeiro thought impossible—pacify two of the city's most drug-infested, crime-ridden favelas. Welcome to the shantytown counterinsurgency.

Is this economic powerhouse of the Andes about to prove that the "Lula effect" will win the battle for Latin America?

When Marta Vieira da Silva was 10, a skinny tomboy in Dois Riachos, her hometown in the Brazilian dust bowl in the northeastern state of Alagoas, her team coach gave her a new pair of football boots. They were three sizes too big. "I can take them back," he offered. "No! They're perfect," she shot back. It was her first pair of cleats, and she wasn't about to let them go.

On Dec. 30, in the fading hours of his presidency, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva penned a few last-minute directives for Brazil. Chief among them: increase protection from Hollywood for the country's rising film industry.

Over the years, Iran's theocracy has fearlessly thumbed its nose at Israel, the United States, and the United Nations. But now Tehran has taken its row with the West a disturbing degree further. This week the Iranian government reportedly banned all works by Paulo Coelho, the Brazilian mystic and author of international bestsellers such as "The Alchemist," "Diary of a Magus," and "Veronika Decides to Die."

Leave it to Hugo Chávez to turn natural calamity into political opportunity. As torrential rains left 130,000 Venezuelans homeless, the president leveraged the elements to his advantage.

In the depths of the global financial crisis in 2008–09, China stunned the world with its massive $596 billion stimulus spending program, which helped Asia avoid the worst of the downturn.

As torrential rains swept Venezuela in early December, leaving some 35 dead and 130,000 homeless, the president wasted no time in leveraging the elements to his advantage. On "humanitarian grounds," the man Venezuelans know as El Comandante asked—and on Dec. 17 won—Congress's blessings to rule by decree for the next 18 months.

A long-burning row between the government in Montevideo and cigarette maker Philip Morris is slowly turning into the mother of asymmetric battles.

Small borrowing has big problems. Last month's $221 million rescue loan to a group of troubled Indian microfinance companies—with some $2 billion on the line, nearly eight of 10 borrowers were in default—has stirred a crisis of faith in development circles.

Keeping the peace in Rio de Janeiro has never been a job description for the faint-hearted. But the mayhem that swept the streets of South America's fairest city this week has been extreme even by outsize Brazilian standards.

Brazilian President-elect Dilma Rousseff is starting off bold. Her initial agenda includes eradicating absolute poverty, trimming the budget, and safeguarding freedom of the press. Even the political opposition nodded in agreement.

Brazil being Brazil, a land where the next campaign begins the nanosecond the last one ends, speculation is already rife following the election of Dilma Rousseff. Complicating the picture is the fact that in Brazil there is no such thing as an ex-president.

With the sudden death of Néstor Kirchner, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner not only lost her lifelong companion but also a political accomplice. His death is a blow of seismic proportions to South America's largest nation, and the tragedy has cast a cloud over Fernández's struggling government and, even more, next year's presidential elections.

The contest to succeed Brazil's mega-popular President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has taken a turn toward the irrational. Lula's former chief of staff Dilma Rousseff, and her challenger, former São Paulo governor José Serra, have made the Oct. 31 runoff a campaign against privatization.

Whatever else you can say about Chilean President Sebastián Piñera, aversion to risk-taking is not one of his faults. That fact was made more than clear during the dramatic rescue of the 33 miners, every moment of which Piñera oversaw like a field marshal on the front.

Tall and defiant and cornered by disgruntled cops, Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa stood at the window of a police hospital, clutched a microphone, and yanked his tie loose. "If you want to kill the president, here I am!" In a country that's no stranger to coups, this was no political theater.

The woman set to succeed Brazil's president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is a former guerrilla who has never held elective office. She can hardly hope to evince the political skills Lula spent a lifetime developing.

Hugo Chávez has brought his country lasting recession, constant power outages, rising crime, and rampant inflation. So how does he continue to be successful?

This time eight years ago, Brazilian democracy took a stress test—and passed with distinction. The onetime radical union leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took charge of Latin America's largest nation and impressed the world with his moderate politics and prudent economics. That was then.

Even though Latin America is more democratic than ever, governments across the region have lashed out this summer at unfriendly reporters by imposing restrictive (and sometimes unconstitutional) bans on the free press.

Brazil has a sunken-treasure problem. The discovery three years ago of a huge offshore stash of oil unleashed a gusher of nationalist euphoria. At somewhere between 9 billion and 15 billion barrels, it was the largest find in the Western Hemisphere in more than a quarter century.

Skip the lines, forget about bribes. E-gov gives anyone with a web connection direct access to public services.

With just three months left before they elect a new president, Brazilians are holding their breath. Back in 2002, when a onetime union man with a history of slamming the bourgeoisie was poised to take office, the very idea nearly undid a convalescing Brazilian economy. To save his candidacy, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva wrote an open "Letter to the Brazilian People" eschewing his confrontational past and vowing to abide by the free market. The resulting economic revival has awed the world.

In a time of emerging-market juggernauts, Colombia gets little notice. Its $244 billion economy is only the fifth-largest in Latin America, a trifle next to Brazil, the $2 trillion regional powerhouse. Yet against all odds Colombia has become the country to watch in the hemisphere. In the past eight years the nation of 45 million has gone from a crime- and drug-addled candidate for failed state to a prospering dynamo.

The landslide victory of Juan Manuel Santos as Colombia's president opens a new chapter in the story of a nation that has come to rely less on personalities than on institutions grounded in the rule of law.