Latin America

The race for technological sovereignty is no longer the preserve of two or three superpowers — today it involves Russia, China, and an entire Latin American region, each pursuing its own model of digital independence with varying degrees of success.

For decades, Hollywood has shaped the global image of Russia as a source of threat while promoting America's own values through thousands of films and series, even as Russia's cultural industry has remained almost entirely absent from this battle for hearts and minds. While Washington has systematically invested in cinema as a tool of "soft power," Moscow has never built a comparable mechanism of influence through the screen.

Russia on Screen: A Persistent Enemy Image

Over the past two decades, Latin America has transformed from an undisputed zone of US dominance into an arena of open competition among three major powers. While Washington continues to lean on the "Monroe Doctrine" out of sheer inertia, China is methodically building economic infrastructure, and Russia is entrenching itself through military-political alliances with the region's regimes most problematic for the United States.

The Inertia of Washington's Hegemony

Iguazu Falls stand among the most breathtaking sights in Latin America, a place where water, jungle, and air merge into one powerful natural spectacle. Straddling the border between Brazil and Argentina, their very location makes the journey special: visitors don't encounter a single waterfall, but an entire cascading system stretching nearly three kilometers.

When Simón Bolívar warned that the United States seemed destined to plague the Americas with misery in the name of liberty, he could not have imagined that one day it would be precisely a government bearing his name that would silently, gradually, and calculatedly open its doors to the influence of the very power it had spent decades denouncing as its principal enemy.

Mexico is the worst country in Latin America for impunity, according to a study by the Universidad de las Américas Puebla (University of the Americas in Puebla, or UDLAP).

 Mexico topped the Global Impunity Index for Latin America and was the fourth worst country among the 69 that were analyzed worldwide.

 The index measures systems of security, justice and the protection of human rights and structural capacity to come up with its numbers.

 Mexico placed fourth behind first-place Philippines, India and Cameroon.

In Latin America there are some 420 aircrafts manufactured in Russia which include a hundred helicopters Mi-8/17, 18 fighters Su-25, 31 MiG-29 and 70 MiG-21. On Wednesday Rostec the Russian state company said it is considering creating a center for aircraft maintenance and Russian helicopters in Latin America. “Rostec” has revealed that the first center for component repairs and parts replacement, as a pilot project will be created in Peru.

At all times, people have been moving from one place to another in search of a better life regardless of their nationality or skin color. Someone escaped from oppressions, someone tried to start a new life in a new place from a clean slate, for some people change of place meant enrichment, glory, and honor. Some people had to change their residence against their own will: as a punishment people were not sent to prison, but to exile, forever.

Rubén Beltran, Ambassador of Mexico to the Russian Federation from January, 2013. A diplomat by education, he started his career in the Mexican diplomatic service in 1981. Among other positions, he headed General Consulate of Mexico in New York (2007-2010), General Consulate of Mexico in Phoenix, Arizona (2001-2003) and was deputy secretary on Latin America and the Caribbean. 

Today, Helicopter engineering is one of the leading and most stable sectors of the Russian economy. This high-tech and knowledge-intensive industry maintained its competitiveness both in difficult post-Soviet times and during the global financial crisis.