“Miami rice” — that’s what the Haitians called it: cheap, stateside-subsidized grain whose large-scale importation nearly killed the crop’s domestic cultivation. The plan — as established by the Caribbean Basin Initiative in the early 1980s — was to promote diversification of Haiti’s economy, comparable to the“structural adjustments” demanded globally by the World Bank during the next decade.

Stephen Kingsley had a way of coming up with big and implausible plans. An Englishman living in Kansas City, reportedly experienced in the arts of marine salvage and port development, he masterminded a proposal for a massive revival of the Port of Limon on the Atlantic shore of Costa Rica, which had suffered severe damage in a 1991 earthquake. He established a group of on- and offshore companies under the name Owl Securities and Investments. The project’s aim, as pitched to w

The Urabá region of Colombia is a nearly impenetrable thicket of jungle and rainforest. It constitutes part of the Darian Gap, the only break in the Pan-American Highway and a treacherous passage for north-bound migrants. Remote and politically volatile, the region has served as a haven for left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries alike...

Denny Herzberg was still an infant when his parents fled Nazi Germany in 1940. They had managed the difficult task of securing exit visas for themselves, but the Gestapo agent at the ship’s on-ramp wouldn’t let their baby aboard with only a birth certificate.

If you grew up anywhere on the eastern seaboard in the early 1980s, chances are you remember the television jingle, set to the tune...

If you grew up anywhere on the eastern seaboard in the early 1980s, chances are you remember the television jingle, set to the tune...