From the Americas Society/Council of the Americas. AS/COA Online's news brief examines the major—as well as some of the overlooked—events and stories occurring across the Americas. Check back every Wednesday for the weekly roundup.

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Mediated Talks on Honduras to Resume; Zelaya Calls for Insurrection

Talks between the deposed Honduran President Manuel Zelaya and the interim government ended in Costa Rica with little progress on July 10. Since then, Costa Rican President Óscar Arias announced talks would resume later this week and Zelaya said that, should he not gain reinstatement this weekend, he would consider the dialogue a failure. He also called on Hondurans to engage in an insurrection.

The Christian Science Monitor interviewed COA's Eric Farnsworth, who described the call for an uprising as "a colossal mistake." Moreover, in a debate on a National Jounal Experts blog, Farnsworth writes: “The real story is not the overthrow of Zelaya in Honduras…[but] where the hemisphere itself has been as nation after nation has elected leaders who then use the institutions of democracy to attempt to perpetuate themselves in power.”

The Wall Street Journal puts the Honduran crisis in context in a multimedia look at the history of caudillos. Considering both sides of the coup, the main article states: “In the eyes of the international community Roberto Micheletti took charge through an old-fashioned coup,” but “In Mr. Micheletti’s take on the events, it was his government who avoided another, slow-motion coup by Mr. Zelaya himself.”

Mexico’s recent swine flu scare (H1N1) made evident the country’s lack of an efficient system for health information. Although the government acted promptly once it understood the potential danger of having the new virus being spread from human to human, the problem had actually begun weeks before. Some experts now believe that the series of events that led to the pandemic may have even started months before the government took notice of rare and strong pneumonias within an otherwise largely immune demographic group.

The scare made evident other aspects of Mexico. The country’s lack of investment in research and development, as well as innovation policies in the past decades became the talk of the town. Not only did Mexico not have the technology available to identify the new virus, but it lacked the human capital and infrastructure necessary to assist in the development of a vaccine.

Sure, it may not make economic sense for Mexico to install or develop its own virus diagnostic laboratories. But the fact that Mexico not only doesn't have them but hasn't even begun to develop similar technology can be seen as another symptom of a country that forgot about the importance of innovation and technological development for progress. While Chile and Brazil, to mention two of Latin America’s top performers, increased their spending in research and development (R&D) in the last decades, Mexico’s has been nearly stagnant.