Politicians on both sides of the partisan divide in the U.S. rarely miss a chance to beat the drums over the perils of the immigrant tide and the imperative to "secure our borders." That might be a good idea. With the world's largest economy on a slide, the dream of making America is looking less lustrous every day, and now the U.S. risks seeing one of its most dynamic and creative sources of human capital blow away with the prairie dust. 

There are already troubling signs. A recent study by the Inter-American Development Bank reports that the flow of dollars Latin American and Caribbean immigrants send back home is slackening. In 2007, Latins living in the U.S. remitted $66 billion to their native countries. That's not half bad (a record amount, in fact) but what drew the Bank's attention was the modest 7 percent increase over the previous year. Until then the flow of dollars back home had been expanding at double digit rates every year. Last year the nominal sum of incoming migrant dollars actually fell in Brazil, from $7.4 billion to $7.1 billion.

Call It the cough heard round the world. The World Health Organization's Feb. 26 report on how super strains of tuberculosis are on the loose has shaken physicians and policy makers everywhere to the marrow. And rightly so. The study, based on a massive survey of 90,000 patients worldwide, is eloquent testimony to the ravages of a modern killer: multi drug resistant tuberculosis, known as MDR TB in the chilly shorthand of public health, and its even deadlier next of kin, extensively drug resistant tuberculosis, or XTR-TB, which is practically untreatable.  

It's no surprise that poor countries, rife with malnutrition, claustrophobic slums, and especially AIDS are super TB's closest ally. Precisely because HIV strafes the human immune system, patients are sitting ducks for infection. That's why almost everywhere that AIDS is prevalent,  tuberculosis is soaring. Worst hit are the fragments of the old Soviet Union (led by Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, where one in four new tb patients have the super variety) and Africa, with the highest rate of TB in the world and the worst public health statistics (only six nations on the continent managed to report to Geneva).  At this rate the Economic Forum at Davos might have to be scrapped in favor of the sanatorium that once crowned that Magic Mountain.

There is one bright spot in the developing world's deathlock with TB: Brazil. That may sound odd. Nearly a quarter of the 185 million Brazilians live below the poverty line, where contagions rage, and some 620,000 have AIDS, a third of all cases in Latin America. But unlike almost every other developing nation, Brazil has not seen the overall TB infection rate spike - much less a runaway outbreak of MDR-TB - among the most vulnerable population. The reason is as simple as it is controversial: free meds for HIV and AIDS patients. In 1996, the Brazilian congress passed a law requiring the government to hand out antiretrovirals to anyone with HIV free of charge. Drug companies were disgruntled, not least because Brazil browbeat them into slashing prices for the three-way cocktail of antiretrovirals, the state of the art medicine used to combat the virus. The same policy encouraged nearly two dozen other developing countries to take on the biggest pharmaceutical corporations as well.

No one ever claimed Brazil was a health spa, of course. After a brief lull, mosquito-borne dengue fever has come raging back, including the killer hemorrhagic variety. An outbreak of micobacteriosis, which causes a nasty hospital infection, leaves lasting surgery scars and can withstand all but the most drastic disinfectants, is on the loose. And while in theory anyone may be treated at the country's public hospitals, chronic underfunding has apparently forced brain surgeons in Rio de Janeiro to resort to common power tools, like home drills, in the operating rooms.

Still, it's hard to argue with success. A team of international scientists recently crunched the numbers and found that Brazilians living with AIDS who reguarly took the three-way cocktail of antiretrovirals had 80 percent lower TB infection rates than did patients who were not treated. (The study reviewed data from 1995 to 2001, but researchers say that the trend holds to this day.) The bottom line is that systematic use of  cutting edge HIV/AIDS medicine may be one of the best ways to keep this millennial scourge at bay. That may not be the best news for Big Pharma's shareholders. But it ought to give public health authorites a shot in the arm.

In Brazil these days, armor is the new normal. From bullet-proof luxury rides to the caveirão, a police assault wagon built like a tank, Brazilians have fortified themselves against the hazards of modern living. In Rio, one evangelical Christian church in a crime-ridden favela is raising a steel-plated, 30-meter containing wall to keep the flock from harm's way when the shooting starts. So fashionable is the concept these days that Brazilians have even come to believe that their charmed economy is innured to world economic downturn.

No doubt there is some ground for optimism. Inflation is under control. Hard currency reserves are topping $160 billion, a continental record. Foreign debt is history. And while the largest economy on earth skates on the edge of recession, Brazilian officials confidently project growth of 5 percent or more this year, or, if the international markets tank, "maybe a little less," shrugs Finance Minister Guido Mantega. Give us your best shot, the bulls in Brazil seem to be saying, for Latin America's drowsy  giant has not only stirred but "decoupled" - or broken free - from the vagaries of the globe's overlord economy. 

Photo: Associated Press

"Ego," the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa once memorably observed, "is the little Argentine in all of us." The truth of this pithy maxim never ceased to impress me during the 27 months when I was stationed in Buenos Aires in the late 1980s as Newsweek's South America correspondent. The Argentines' capacity for self-absorption seemed endless and would express itself in a number of ways, from the collective obsession with a storied past, when Argentina ranked among the world's ten richest countries in the early decades of the early 20th century, to the need to highlight their more European society and culture vis-a-vis those of their Latin American neighbors. To this day, the international news sections of Buenos Aires' leading dailies regularly feature stories analyzing how Argentina is factoring into the calculations of top policymakers in Washington, as if the editors at those newspapers can't quite bring themselves to tell readers that their country barely flickers on the radar screens of the Bush White House or Condoleezza Rice's State Department.

Latin America's rainmakers are not in the habit of eating humble pie. Until just the other day, after all, hyper-popular leaders like Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Evo Morales of Bolivia and Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva could do just about what they pleased, leaving their political foes little choice but to stand by and stew in frustration. But if recent events are any indication, the Latin charismacrats may have to get used to an unsavory set of new rules.

Across the region, democracy is biting back. On Dec. 1, Venezuelans handed Chávez a stinging defeat by turning down a 69-point referendum proposing everything from curbing private property to unlimited reelection. It was El Comandante's first loss at the ballot box, and a sign that the ballyhooed Bolivarian revolution will not be implemented by steamroller. Nor are things looking so rosy for Chávez's closest disciple, Morales, the coca-leaf grower-turned-messianic leader, who vowed to recreate Bolivia by recasting the constitution to redeem the country's teeming poor and forgotten. Now he presides over a nation riven ethnically, between the destitute indigenous majority and the relatively well-heeled light skinned heirs of the Spanish colonialists; geographically, between the hardscrabble Altiplano and the fertile, oil-and-gas-rich lowlands; and ideologically, between the left-wing nationalists who blame foreigners for Bolivia's woes and the globalists who want desperately to connect to world markets. So volatile is the political climate, the constituent assembly had to finish drafting the new constitution under military guard.

Those of us who've had the misfortune of sitting through one of Hugo Chavez' interminable diatribes quietly savored the moment during last week's Ibero-American summit when Spain's King Juan Carlos bluntly asked the Venezuelan president "Why don't you shut up?"

The royal outburst occurred on the final day of the international parley in the Chilean capital of Santiago, at a point when Spanish prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero was politely asking his South American counterpart to cease referring to Zapatero's right-wing predecessor Jose Maria Aznar as a "fascist." True to form, Chavez kept talking through Zapatero's comments even though the Venezuelan leader's microphone was turned off--at which point the usually courtly monarch could no longer contain himself and uttered the words so many of us in Latin America's foreign press corps have been longing to hear.

Stock markets in the developing world are not for sissies. Who can forget the scenes of late last decade, when financial contagion swept bourses from Bangkok to Buenos Aires, bringing traders to their knees? It was no different in Brazil, where in 1999 the overvalued real collapsed practically overnight, taking the São Paulo Stock Exchange (Bovespa) with it. It wasn't long before the sages started dissing Latin America's biggest economy, calling for financial rainmakers to take the B out of BRICs, the acronym for the world's trendiest emerging markets - Brazil, Russia, India and China.

What a difference a decade makes. On October 26, the traders will be frantic again, this time clawing each other for a chance to get a piece of one of the world's hottest properties. Yes, Bovespa is going public. And if the market buzz is to be believed, by the closing bell on Friday, Brazil will have shepherded one of the largest IPOs of the year.

  Brazilian politics has never been for prudes, but the fortunes of Senate president Renan Calheiros and his onetime lover continue to arch eyebrows. Calheiros, as this blog last reported (Aug. 13), has been under fire since May, when he was caught sending wads of cash to Mônica Veloso,

 with whom he had an extramarital affair and a child. Calheiros, who is not much to look at (below), has battled an irate public and fierce political foes ever since to save his own - how might the Brazilians put it? - "bum bum." Not so the fair Ms. Veloso, who has seen hers glorified from the printed page to cyberspace. A former journalist, she not only became one fo the country's biggest stories by revealing her ex's funny finances but now graces the cover of the anxiously awaited October edition of Brazilian Playboy, due to hit the stands on Oct. 9. Call it David and Goliath meets Beauty and the Beast. The whole imbroglio has kept a thousand gossips and eggheads busy parsing the peculiarities of politics and propriety in Latin America's biggest nation.