But what you won’t see are women.

El Mirador, a relic from the country’s machista past, politely refuses to serve them. The bathroom has only a urinal and a sink.

So it may have come as a surprise to some when Mexico's PAN party decided to nominate Josefina Vazquez Mota, a woman, for president – the first time a woman has ever been nominated by a major Mexican party.

Accepting her nomination, Vazquez Mota, a longtime government official, said, "I will be the first woman president of Mexico in history.”

Even if they are not yet welcome in the cantina at El Mirador, women are making noticeable inroads into other areas of Mexican political life.

With the real possibility that Mexico may join Latin American countries like Argentina, Brazil and Chile in electing a female to the highest office, her nomination marks a slow but steady erosion of Mexico’s macho culture, a way of life that lives on in the upper echelon of Mexican business world.

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Clad in blue T-shirts and waving tiny red, yellow and blue flags, the lively crowd sang and danced, waiting for the arrival of the man who is the first serious threat to President Hugo Chávez in his 13-year tenure.

Henrique Capriles Radonski is the frontrunner for primaries due to take place on Sunday, in preparation for October’s presidential election.

For the first time in its disjointed history, the opposition he is about to command has finally united to take on the socialist president.

When he arrives, el pueblo — "the people," as Chávez affectionately calls them — crowds around him.

The 39-year-old Capriles has risen up the political ladder in Venezuela over the last decade, once a mayor and now governor of the country’s second-most populous state, Miranda.

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Bain, the source of Romney's fabulous personal wealth, has been the subject of recent attacks in the Republican primary over allegations that Romney and the firm behaved like, in Rick Perry's words, "vulture capitalists."One TV spot denounced Romney for relying on "foreign seed money from Latin America" but did not say where the money came from. In fact, Romney recruited as investors wealthy Central Americans who were seeking a safe haven for their capital during a tumultuous and violent period in the region.

Like so much about Bain, which is known for secrecy and has been dubbed a "black box," all the names of the investors who put up the money for the initial fund in 1984 are not known. Much of what we do know was first reported by the Boston Globe in 1994 when Romney ran for U.S. Senate against Ted Kennedy.

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Chavez was noticeably thinner and paler as he appeared on television Thursday night, reading from a prepared speech with a serious and at times sad expression. He said he is resolved to "be victorious in this new battle that life has placed before us."

Chavez's admission shook the political landscape of a country he has dominated for his more than 12 years in power, and who had vowed to win re-election next year and govern for another decade or more.

There is no obvious successor to the charismatic Chavez within his Bolivarian movement, and his illness may also affect his leadership within the ALBA alliance of leftist Latin American nations.

Chavez said he had two operations in Cuba, including one that removed a tumor in which there were "cancerous cells." The 56-year-old president said the surgery was performed after an initial operation nearly three weeks ago to remove a pelvic abscess.

A military chief, Gen. Henry Rangel Silva, assured the country on Friday that Venezuela's stability "is guaranteed."

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The White House says Obama will leave El Salvador, the final stop on his five-day trip, after holding a conference call with his national security team to discuss the situation in Libya.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

President Barack Obama opened the final leg of his Latin American tour Tuesday in El Salvador, a critical partner on immigration and narcotics wars, issues of increasing concern to the United States.

Obama, along with wife Michelle Obama and their two daughters, arrived in the capital San Salvador Tuesday afternoon under a blistering sun following stops in Brazil and Chile. After being greeted at the airport by children in traditional dress bearing candy, the president and first lady were welcomed at the national palace by El Salvador's President Mauricio Funes and his wife Vanda Pignato. The two couples stood at attention in front of the flags of both their countries as the national anthems of El Salvador and the United States were played. Obama and Funes then headed into a private meeting at the palace, to be followed by a joint news conference.

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Guatemala's constitution prohibits members of a president's extended family from running for the presidency.

Judiciary spokesman Edwin Escobar says divorce proceedings began Monday between Sandra Torres de Colom and President Alvaro Colom, who cannot run for re-election.

If both parties agree, the divorce could be final in about a month.

Torres announced March 8 that she will be the presidential candidate of the governing National Unity for Hope party in the September election.

Torres' spokesman could not be reached for comment.

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It was the first time the 84-year-old revolutionary icon has said he no longer heads the Communist Party, which he has led since its creation in 1965. The Communist Party website still lists him as first secretary, with his brother President Raul Castro listed as second secretary.

The declaration raised questions about just how much power Fidel Castro has been wielding behind the scenes -- with or without a formal post -- and to what extent Raul Castro has had true freedom to make his own decisions.

Castro wrote in an opinion piece that when he got sick in 2006, "I resigned without hesitation from my state and political positions, including first secretary of the party ... and I never tried to exercise those roles again."

He said that even when his health began to improve, he stayed out of state and party affairs "even though everyone, affectionately, continued to refer to me by the same titles."

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From Rio's glamorous beaches to a notorious slum to an elegant theater, Obama glimpsed the city's cultural extremes and offered the kind of personal engagement that can pay political dividends for years. Less than one day after announcing U.S. military strikes against Libya's government, Obama made time to kick a soccer ball around with kids in a shantytown.

The competing stories of Obama's itinerary -- a war front in Africa, an economic commitment to South America -- divided his time in incongruous ways. By morning, he spoke with his security team about the international assault against Moammar Gadhafi's defenses; by night, he was to stand atop a mountain and admire Rio's world famous statue of Jesus.

Meanwhile, U.S. warplanes pounded faraway Libya.

It was all summed up by one image: Obama, adeptly juggling a soccer ball, as his aides helped him juggle his agenda.

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U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in Paris to meet with U.S. allies on Libya, said Carlos Pascual's decision to step down was "based upon his personal desire to ensure the strong relationship between our two countries and to avert issues" raised by President Felipe Calderon.

Clinton didn't say specifically what she was referring to, but a furious Calderon has publicly criticized Pascual's cable, which was divulged by the WikiLeaks website.

Pascual's resignation -- less than two weeks since President Barack Obama met with Calderon at the White House -- appeared to be the biggest fallout yet from thousands of sensitive U.S. diplomatic cables from around the world released by WikiLeaks. It was the first such public departure by a U.S. ambassador during the Obama administration.

Mexico's government offered a polite and muted response, offering "its best wishes to Ambassador Carlos Pascual in the duties he will undertake after concluding his post in our country."

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After an early morning arrival in Brazil's capital, Obama held meetings with newly elected President Dilma Rousseff, then addressed a joint meeting of U.S. and Brazilian business leaders. He praised Brazil's economic ascent, and said American workers stood to benefit from increased ties with the world's seventh-largest economy

"As the United States looks to Brazil, we see the chance to sell more goods and services to a rapidly-growing market of around 200 million consumers," Obama said. "For us, this is a jobs strategy."

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In particular, Newt Gingrich and Sean Hannity hammered the president over the trip, while New York Daily News columnist Andrea Tantaros said Obama has "priority issues" during an appearance on "The O'Reilly Factor." 

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A veteran Chilean leftist who spent many years in exile after the 1973 military coup that overthrew the democratic socialist government of Salvador Allende, Guzmán became famous throughout the film world for his three-part documentary "The Battle of Chile," which captured all the drama and tragedy of his country's revolution and counterrevolution. It's one of the greatest living-history pictures ever made, as well as a work of ardent political advocacy that influenced a generation of young radical filmmakers all over the world. (I'm confident that Michael Moore, Oliver Stone and Ken Loach, for instance, would agree.)

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Three mummies were recently found in an underground temple in Luxor, Egypt. Translated hieroglyphs identified them as the Clash of Civilizations, the End of History, and Islamophobia. They ruled in Western domains into the second decade of the twenty-first century before dying and being embalmed.

That much is settled. Without them, the Middle East is already a new world that must be understood in a new way. For one thing, Egypt, that previously moribund land of "stability" and bosom buddy of whoever was in power in Washington, has been hurled into the Middle East's New Great Game. The question is: What will be its fate -- and that of the millions of Egyptians who took to the streets in a staggering show of aggressive nonviolence in January and February?

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Marisol Valles Garcia was granted a leave of absence from March 2-7 to travel to the United States for personal matters but failed to return to Praxedis G. Guerrero as agreed, city officials said in a statement.

"In the absence of (Valles Garcia's) presence on the agreed-upon day, and since there was no notification of a need to extend the period of her absence, the mayor has decided to remove her from office," the statement read.

A local official accompanied Valles Garcia last week to the international bridge connecting El Porvenir to Fort Hancock, Texas, said Human Rights Commission official Gustavo de la Rosa Hickerson.

Local news media have since reported that she was seeking asylum in the United States, but there has been no confirmation of that and her precise whereabouts were not clear.

Over the weekend, as speculation increased that she was seeking refuge, officials tried to contact Valles Garcia by cell phone but were unable to reach her.

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But who is Carlos Slim and how did he get here? Here's a dossier.

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The previously redacted State Department memo, dated Dec. 28, 1961, was released by Judicial Watch, a Washington-based organization that said it obtained it through a Freedom of Information lawsuit.

According to the memo, the Massachusetts Democrat made arrangements to rent the brothel "for an entire night" in Santiago earlier in 1961. "Kennedy allegedly invited one of the Embassy chauffeurs to participate in the night's activities," according to the memo.

One State Department official described Kennedy as "pompous and a spoiled brat," according to the memo. Kennedy was making a fact-finding trip to several Latin American countries. "Kennedy met with a number of individuals known to have communist sympathies," the memo said.

Kennedy was a 29-year-old assistant district attorney in Boston at the time of the trip. He was elected to the Senate in 1962 and served more than four decades until his death in 2009.

Kennedy's family members had no immediate reaction to the release of the memo.

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And there was controversy. In the 1998 World Cup final against host France, Ronaldo looked slow and disoriented and played poorly as Brazil lost. It later came out that Ronaldo had suffered a seizure the night before and should never have been on the field.

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Electricity and phone service were disrupted and thousands of people fled to higher ground following Friday's quake, but the government quickly announced that there was no risk of a tsunami, and there were no reports of damage or injuries.

President Sebastian Pinera appealed for calm and praised his government and Chileans in general for responding quickly.

"Today we're better prepared," Pinera said. "I think we've learned the lesson of Feb. 27, 2010."

Rodrigo Ubilla, the vice interior minister, said the navy had "totally discounted any risk of a tsunami."

Still, the strong earthquake frightened many Chileans, especially along the coast, where people quickly moved to higher ground.

"There was a preventive self-evacuation," said Vicente Nunez, who directs the National Emergency Office, ONEMI. But he said Chileans could safely return home.

Residents fled their homes in Talcahuano, a port city whose center was ravaged last year by huge walls of water that sent shipping containers and fishing boats into downtown buildings and streets, municipal spokesman Javier Gonzalez told The Associated Press.

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