Unpacking Latin America

Political Scientist Sarah Daly discusses the legacies of Latin American civil wars tracing them to the current levels of high criminality and voters’ preference for security even at the expenses of civil liberties. She discusses the impact of violence in Colombia, including this year presidential election, and the power concentration by President Bukele in El Salvador as examples of these processes.

Lawyer and philosopher Silvio Almeida discusses structural racism in Brazil in comparison with the US emphasizing the role of social movements in mobilization and production of knowledge within racialized state institutions, such as the judiciary, the legislature, and the police.

Historian Caterina Pizzigoni discusses the story of the Conquest for the indigenous people of Latin America. The demographic catastrophe it unleashed was followed by the continuity of everyday life in villages of sedentary populations. This contrasts with great disruption for those who were not peasants or lived in areas with gold and silver. She explains the rights and duties assigned by the Crown to indigenous peoples, as well as their resistance to the imposition of new gender roles and their adaptation of religion. She ends with the new challenges created by Independence on the indigenous populations of the region.

In this episode Marcelo Medeiros discusses conditional cash transfer programs addressing the role of conditionality on their political support and their positive effects on reducing poverty. He also elaborates on the limits of their technocratic design around 3 areas: First, he emphasizes how their fiscal conservatism made them shrink in the face of negative shocks that increased their need. Second, he points on the insufficiency of technocratic support and technical evaluations to avoid the dismantling of the largest regional conditional cash transfer programs by presidents Bolsonaro in Brazil and Lopez Obrador in Mexico. Finally, he discusses how the bureaucratic infrastructure created to target chronic poverty was inadequate to address the impact of shocks on a population that moved temporarily into poverty.

In this episode, Mauricio Cardenas discusses the impact of climate change and policies to reduce emissions in Latin America, based on his recent book on Climate Policies in Latin America and the Caribbean. He discussed the costs of climate change to countries in the region as well as the lessons on areas where different countries have move forward. He points to different opportunities, such as the electricity sector, as well as challenges, such as weak state capacity to monitor regulatory goals, especially in the agricultural frontier, and the need to compensate consumers who would pay higher costs for the energy transition. He concludes with a discussion of US incentives to collaborate with the region regarding climate change.

Nicholas Limerick discusses in this episode the dramatic effects of lack of schooling in Latin America during the pandemic as well as the role of indigenous organizations, especially CONAIE, in providing information in indigenous languages to fight Covid-19. He emphasizes how indigenous organization was crucial for the establishment of bilingual education and the teaching of Kitchwa in Ecuador. He further discusses how the teaching of Kitchwa in Ecuador has involved its standardization in a way that is not necessarily recognized by those speaking the language at home. Finally, he discusses the role of the Ecuadorian indigenous movement in the presidential election of this year and his perspectives on the runoff election of April 11th.

Graciela Montaldo discusses the strength of the feminist movement in Argentina and its political impact on the legalization of abortion, emphasizing its cultural dimensions and the strength of its diversity and intersectionality. She reflects on gender domination as a crucial political construction and its cultural interpretations from a domestic understanding of gender violence, questioned by the feminist social movement #NiUnaMenos, as well as the constraints on female voice in the public space in the early 20th century.

Julissa Reynoso, chief of staff of the future First Lady Jill Biden, discusses here the impact of the Latino vote on the election and new directions for the new administration in Latin America. She emphasizes the diversity of the Latino vote and, on foreign policy, points to changes on immigration policies, the need to foster economic options for the population in the region, to tackle climate change, and to foster hemispheric cooperation.

Claudio Lomnitz discusses in this episode the plight of the more than 70,000 disappeared or missing people in Mexico and their search by family members. This search does not confront a strategic plan but a complicit and weak state, which contributes both willingly and unwillingly. He further talks about Mexico’s violence as a symptom of government incapacity and its links to the militarization of security, which has continued under the presidency of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

In this episode, Frances will draw connections between Puerto Rico and Latin America based on a common history of hierarchies and coloniality and will discuss how the Puerto Rican society both in the island and in the Diaspora learned to self-organize in response to catastrophes seeking to replace the absence of by the federal state. She will also discuss how the current discussion on race and ethnicity highlights the hierarchies embedded in the Latinx and Latin American population and will tell us how her search for answering the question of Puerto Rican coloniality brought her to a career that transcends disciplinary boundaries.