Obama, Rousseff and the crucible of human rights

When Presidents Obama and Rousseff gather next week in Washington, DC, one topic, unfortunately, is unlikely to get much attention: the roiling global rights crisis. But there is a common agenda on which both democratic leaders could establish a much-needed, progressive consensus, involving digital freedom and promoting dialogue and human and democratic rights in Cuba and Venezuela. Will they?

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South American exports to China

Using ECLAC data, we constructed a graph tracing the past 20 years of exports from South America to China as a percentage of their total exports. In this light, it’s not surprising that those are the same four countries the Chinese premier visited last month.

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A continent in silence

Since October, eleven journalists across six countries—two in Colombia, two in Honduras, three in Mexico, two in Brazil, one in Paraguay, and one in Peru—have been murdered, according to the Inter-American Press Association.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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