Tony Wood

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...

On​ 23 January – the anniversary of a revolt that toppled the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez in 1958 – the head of Venezuela’s National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, declared himself interim president. But the crisis has been long in the making. Most of the Venezuelan opposition boycotted the presidential election held last May, in which Nicolás...