Andrés Martinez: All Related Content

“The only thing that matters in the world is China, Russia and Europe. Latin America doesn’t matter. Consciously. People don’t give one damn about Latin America now.” That was the assessment President Richard Nixon shared with a young White House aide named Donald Rumsfeld when the latter expressed an interest in bolstering his foreign policy experience. Nixon was speaking a mere decade after the Cuban Missile Crisis, at a time when Communists were taking over in Chile and acting up in South America.

Last Friday morning, the second most powerful man in Mexico’s government, the cabinet member leading the war against the drug cartels, died in a helicopter crash. Mexicans were stunned: Francisco Blake Mora was President Felipe Calderón’s second interior secretary to die in an air crash in three years.

What is it about the moment you arrive at your first college dorm room and meet your roommates while unpacking your stuff? That's a scene seared in most people's memory, the fodder of countless movies and novels to shorthand life's most exciting, but often wrenching, transitions.

So we’re sipping glasses of red wine (Margerum “M5″ Rhone Blend) late on a recent school night at West Hollywood’s Basix, one of those bistro-ish cafes that exude an understated and casual hipness, the type of place where it’s hard to tell if you’re sharing your heat lamp with a table of successful screenwriters or struggling realtors – or struggling screenwriters turned successful realtors.

We began by partnering with foundations and other cultural institutions, who wanted us to convene events and create ancilliary materials.” “We also work closely with the New America Foundation in Washington and Arizona State University,” he continues. ...

The world has been transfixed recently by the struggles of people living under atrophied dictatorships, who, empowered by new forms of communication, have risen up and collectively said "no mas" — or the Arabic equivalent. Individuals such as Wael Ghonim, the 30-year-old Google marketing executive who galvanized the Egyptian opposition on Facebook and spent a couple of weeks in prison for his efforts, have been lionized on American newscasts.

Hugo Chavez is trying to come to the rescue of his friend and fellow "colonel," Moammar Kadafi. The Venezuelan president has offered to mediate Libya's civil war, and warned against any foreign intervention in support of Libya's opposition, which now controls much of the east of the country, including the port of Benghazi, home of the Hugo Chavez soccer stadium. The Venezuelan government even railed against the move to oust Libya from the United Nations Human Rights Council because of Kadafi's violent crackdown on his own people.

It may sound counterintuitive, Mr. President, but all you need to do after the midterm losses is dust off your original game plan and stick to it. Play the role of mediator in chief you sought to play and recommit to transcending petty politics and partisanship.

The American people didn’t hire you for your experience, your ideology, or your ability to connect as a drinking buddy. You were hired because you exuded a calm, lawyerly temperament and a pragmatic competence that American voters craved after eight years of George W. Bush and a spectacular financial meltdown.

When AOL merged with Time Warner a decade ago (in what amounted to a well-timed “coloring in” of casino chips by the dial-up Internet behemoth), AOL’s chairman Steve Case explained that the deal would bring together a tech giant and a media conglomerate for the first time.

Mariachi music and the Potomac River don’t often find themselves in the same sentence, but Mexico turned 200 overnight, so an exception had to be made. Mariachi music did indeed waft over the Potomac, emanating from the Grito celebration on the esplanade of the Kennedy Center. Ozomatli played, fireworks ensued, naturally, and thousands of melancholic Mexicans toasted 200 years of independence from the old empire in the capital of the empire many of them feel replaced it.

Andres Martinez, director, Bernard L. Schwartz Fellows Program, New America Foundation

The Afghan strategy is the president’s ... so a change in command in the theater of operations needn’t amount to a shift in policy. Those are separate matters. ...

POLITICO'S Arena contributors discuss their reactions to the selection of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court. ...