Voting in Colombia has gone decaf. The big Election Day street party, the fiesta democratica is gone, and with it the t-shirt clad partisans, the colorful political caravans and the boom of amped up campaign songs.

Colombia’s March 14 legislative elections felt more like November 4 in the United States -- cold, quiet and calculating. Colombian law now forbids anything that smacks of proselytizing at voting centers. No music, no electioneering. Now Colombians simply vote – free of pressure and festivity.

To no one’s surprise, Hugo Chavez’s 11-year-old populist revolution in Venezuela has a less than stellar record on democracy and human rights.

Pundits here and abroad obsess over it. U.S. politicians blame one another for it. Heck, even my mother is certain of it – the United States is loosing its luster and facing irreversible decline.

Talk of the United States teetering on the brink, while nothing new, has come back with a vengeance in recent months, spurred by the recession, soaring deficits and high unemployment. But for those who stand above the political fray and look at long-term trends, the cries of impending demise are overwrought.

On January 26, the day before taking office as the newly elected president of Honduras, Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo was counting on the restoration of normal relations with the United States.

“Starting tomorrow,” he told reporters inquiring about his country’s rift with the United States, “everything will be normal.”

You can’t blame Lobo for being confident. That day, the top U.S. diplomat for Latin America, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere affairs, Arturo Valenzuela, had arrived, dispatched by President Obama as head of the delegation attending Lobo’s inauguration.

That the first African American U.S. president is appointing a substantial number of Latinos to his administration should come as no surprise. Now the largest minority in the country, Latinos represent more than 15 percent of the population and voted for President Obama by a margin of two to one.

Many of these appointees have been named to posts responsible for Latin American policy. Some call this pigeonholing and others outsourcing U.S. foreign policy to an ethnic constituency.

Of course, it is neither of those but a little of both.

Tired of contentious, polarizing issues that pit red- and blue-state Americans against each other and make it impossible for them to find common ground? Well, rest easy. It's time for consensus-building, bipartisan, comprehensive immigration reform!

Seriously. It's OK. Starting the debate now won't usher in the apocalypse, despite the fervor of the few and the loud who have so effectively demonized immigrants and distracted the country from the truth about immigration.

`Tis the season for cherished holiday traditions: decorating, caroling, wrapping gifts and, of course, chasing a drunken turkey in the backyard.

Now, I have not personally participated in the latter, but my parents have. As children, they were both tasked with running after turkeys that had been liquored up with a few rounds of potent "aguardiente."

If there were any doubts that these are desperate times for anti-Castro hard-liners, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida has put them to rest.

The ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Ros-Lehtinen would have us believe that lifting the 1961 ban on travel to Cuba would somehow pose a major threat to U.S. national security. How? By making Cuba a haven for criminals and enabling the Castro regime to turn tourists into traitors.

They first met as a group in 2007. Many of them were neoliberal leaders who had instituted the fiscal belt tightening and pro-market reforms known as the Washington Consensus. They witnessed unprecedented increases in wealth, but they also saw the gap between rich and poor grow more pronounced -- and with it, social discontent.

They are Latin America's retired presidents, and two years ago some 20 of them came together to devise a new way forward for the region. Their objectives were simple: to foster long-term economic development and, in turn, strengthen democracy.