JOSÉ "Pepe" Mujica, the former president of Uruguay, passed away on May 13, 2025, at the age of 89. He is survived by his wife, Lucía Topolansky, a fellow former guerrilla and senator. Mujica’s life was a remarkable journey – from guerrilla fighter to becoming a president, from years of solitary confinement to earning global recognition as a man of the masses. The Latin America he once led, and the Latin America he leaves behind, are not the same. Mujica was born on May 20, 1935, in Montevideo, Uruguay, into a middle-class family.

A WAR zone is an ugly place. It is a place of noise and dust, the language of blood written on walls, a place of young men mostly who are afraid and allow that fear to produce the adrenaline necessary to kill or be killed; and if they cannot generate sufficient adrenaline, then they turn to captagon (a mixture of amphetamine and theophylline) or some other narcotic to dull their anxiety and their fear. Guns are not fired by the young working-class that is sent to war necessarily out of duty or patriotism; guns are mostly fired out of fear.

TWO years ago, the fragile but hopeful peace in Sudan was broken when the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) both arms of the Sudanese state – went to war against each other. The second-year anniversary of the war was commemorated on April 11, 2025 with a ghastly attack by the RSF on the Zamzam refugee camp in the province of northern Darfur. ‘The bombs were falling on the hospital’, said Hawa, a mother of three who was inside that hospital. ‘Those of us who survived left with only our children on our backs’.

SINCE November 2023, when Israel began its genocidal attack on the Palestinians in Gaza, Ansar Allah – the group that governs Yemen – began a series of attacks on Israeli-affiliated ships in the Red Sea and in the Gulf of Aden as well as at Israel itself. These attacks – more than a hundred at last count – resulted in a dramatic decline in commercial shipping through the Suez Canal and in the closure of Israel’s only Red Sea port of Eliat.

THE military exercise is called Freedom Shield 2025. But the name is misleading. It suggests that the United States military – including its nuclear assets – provide a shield for its allies (mainly South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines). Yet, the biggest impediment to peace and stability in the region, the biggest destabiliser and contributor to regional tensions is the United States. A Korean proverb is apt here: the US gives the disease and then the medicine.