The Economist Latin America January 25, 2020

Politics The opening arguments were heard in the Senate trial that will decide whether to remove Donald Trump from power following his impeachment by the House of Representatives. The president faces two charges: abuse of power, for pressing the Ukrainian government to investigate a political rival, and obstruction of Congress, for directing officials to ignore subpoenas. Mr Trump’s defence team includes Ken Starr, whose investigations led to Bill Clinton’s impeachment, and Alan Dershowitz, who helped defend O.J. Simpson. They argue the charges “do not remotely approach the constitutional threshold for removing a president from office”. Investigating the investigator Brazilian prosecutors asked a judge to indict Glenn Greenwald, an American journalist, for helping a group that had hacked the phones of judges and lawyers. Mr Greenwald used messages between judicial officials, including Sergio Moro,…

LAST MONTH India changed the law to make it easier for adherents of all the subcontinent’s religions, except Islam, to acquire citizenship. At the same time, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) wants to compile a register of all India’s 1.3bn citizens, as a means to hunt down illegal immigrants (see Briefing). Those sound like technicalities, but many of the country’s 200m Muslims do not have the papers to prove they are Indian, so they risk being made stateless. Ominously, the government has ordered the building of camps to detain those caught in the net. You might think that the BJP’s scheme was a miscalculation. It has sparked widespread and lasting protests. Students, secularists, even the largely fawning media have begun to speak out against Narendra Modi, the prime minister, for…

Politics The opening arguments were heard in the Senate trial that will decide whether to remove Donald Trump from power following his impeachment by the House of Representatives. The president faces two charges: abuse of power, for pressing the Ukrainian government to investigate a political rival, and obstruction of Congress, for directing officials to ignore subpoenas. Mr Trump’s defence team includes Ken Starr, whose investigations led to Bill Clinton’s impeachment, and Alan Dershowitz, who helped defend O.J. Simpson. They argue the charges “do not remotely approach the constitutional threshold for removing a president from office”. Investigating the investigator Brazilian prosecutors asked a judge to indict Glenn Greenwald, an American journalist, for helping a group that had hacked the phones of judges and lawyers. Mr Greenwald used messages between judicial officials,…

IT IS THE oldest problem in politics: what should you do when a ruler who legitimately holds office betrays the people he rules? The impeachment clause in America’s constitution is a 200-year-old remedy to that problem, but it was informed by a tussle on the other side of the Atlantic that goes back much further—to the impeachment of Michael de la Pole, the king of England’s finance minister, in 1386. When the authors of America’s constitution were designing a system of self-government, they borrowed from that ancient tradition. If Americans picked a president who then committed “Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanours”, then the legislature could remove him. Impeachment has always been hard to use. No president has ever been impeached in the House and convicted in the Senate,…

LAST MONTH India changed the law to make it easier for adherents of all the subcontinent’s religions, except Islam, to acquire citizenship. At the same time, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) wants to compile a register of all India’s 1.3bn citizens, as a means to hunt down illegal immigrants (see Briefing). Those sound like technicalities, but many of the country’s 200m Muslims do not have the papers to prove they are Indian, so they risk being made stateless. Ominously, the government has ordered the building of camps to detain those caught in the net. You might think that the BJP’s scheme was a miscalculation. It has sparked widespread and lasting protests. Students, secularists, even the largely fawning media have begun to speak out against Narendra Modi, the prime minister,…

NO FIRM EXEMPLIFIES the arguments around technology better than Huawei. The Chinese firm has risen from an obscure importer of foreign telecoms gear to one of the world’s biggest makers of equipment for fifth-generation (5G) mobile networks. Its prowess has caused jitters in other countries, which worry that Huawei’s kit might come with “back doors”— deliberate security holes that could act as conduits for Chinese spies or cyber-saboteurs. America, in particular, has the firm in its sights. It orchestrated the arrest in Canada of Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s chief financial officer (and daughter of its founder), who was in court this week on charges of sanctions-busting (see Business section). It has been lobbying allies to freeze the firm out of their domestic 5G systems. Australia and Japan have already done so. A…