Everybody loves infrastructure

Latin America invests about 2% of GDP on infrastructure. Between 1992 and 2011 China invested an average of 8.5% of GDP in infrastructure per year. Given the demonstrated effects of infrastructure on development and poverty reduction, it’s time for the region to make a concerted effort to attract foreign investors.

Read More »

What’s left? Venezuela and Ecuador

President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and Rafael Correa exhibit none of the characteristics of the modern, progressive left—such as, support for indigenous communities’ land rights or LGBT rights—so why are they still called leftists? Because they say so.

Read More »

Letter to President Maduro from former presidents

Several months ago, former presidents Óscar Arias, Felipe Calderón, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Alejandro Toledo, and Ernesto Zedillo signed an open letter to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro expressing their concern over the deteriorating human rights conditions in the country and political prisoners such as former Mayor of Chacao Leopoldo López. Here is their letter—though little has changed since they signed it.

Read More »

The new and not-so-new foreign policies in the Americas

When we started this website, the idea was to begin a broad discussion of Latin America’s emerging foreign policy and its implications for inter-American relations, economic development and democracy and human rights. Here is the outline for a book chapter I’m working on on the topic of Latin America foreign policy—part of a larger book project by New York University and, later, my own book. Here I post the precis for comments. Any and all are welcome—in the spirit of the website and public debate. (Please forgive any typos.) The goal is to provoke discussion. Your comments will help.

Read More »

What India is learning from Brazil

India is looking to adopt Latin America’s famous and popular conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs. But are they transferable to a country of 1.2 billion people, in which 363 million of them live below the poverty line, 260 million live in rural areas?

Read More »

John Oliver rips on Brazil World Cup stadiums

In a long rant about FIFA corruption, John Oliver uses as an example the white elephants created by the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. As he says—referring to the classic Joni Mitchell song, Brazil has literally “paved paradise to put up a parking lot.

Read More »
Scroll to Top