On October 18, the Bolivian public went to the polls and elected Luis Arce Catacora as the country’s 67th president in a surprise result that returned the socialist party of former President Evo Morales to power. Morales had previously ruled Bolivia as the leader of the Movement Toward...
Cartagena’s city center is a vibrant and colorful area full of international visitors. However, the outskirts paint a different story. Here, the invasiones, the shanty towns that surround the main city, are ridden with poverty. The effects of inequality stem beyond economic concerns as...
The Bolsonaro family suffered a severe blow in the first week of November. It was not Donald Trump’s loss in the US election, given that the businessman is the benchmark by which Jair Bolsonaro tries to model his presidency in Brazil. On November 3, the public prosecutor of Rio de Janeiro has...
The country with the highest per capita infection rate of COVID-19 is in South America — but it isn’t Brazil. Chile, despite its high incomes and access to resources, has struggled to keep the pandemic under control and suffers from infection rates higher than the United States, which...
On Tuesday, August 4, via a short and unassuming tweet, the former president of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe Velez, informed the world that he was placed under house arrest. The news sent shockwaves throughout South America’s political circles and sparked protests across Colombia. Uribe’s house...
When Luis Fonsi launched his ninth album, “Vida,” in January 2017, he probably didn’t imagine that its main song, “Despacito,” featuring Daddy Yankee, would become an international sensation. The track broke seven Guinness records, among which were the most weeks at the top of...
Paraguay’s current president, Mario Abdo Benitez, was elected in April 2018. When he was sworn into office in August that year, it represented a second consecutive five-year term in power for the conservative Colorado Party, following the right-wing presidency of Horacio Cartes. At 48, Abdo...
The late Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1921-1997) was a prominent figure in the 20th-century critical pedagogy movement and the celebrated author of the ground-breaking 1968 text, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” Freire’s seminal work proposes a dialogical method of teaching literacy that...
Brazil’s President Jair Messias Bolsonaro seems to be trying to go down a different route than the rest of the world when it comes to the COVID-19 crisis. While the “Trump of the Tropics” has been following US policy on many fronts, Donald Trump has stepped back from his earlier claims that...
April has been a hard month for the largest and most populous Latin American country. While the whole world is engulfed in the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed over 200,000 globally to date and unleashed an unprecedented economic crisis, Brazil has also been going through political upheaval....
In November 2019, Luis Lacalle Pou was elected president of Uruguay after defeating the ruling party candidate and former Montevideo mayor, Daniel Martinez, in the second round. President Lacalle Pou’s inauguration in March marked the end of a decade and a half of executive leadership by members...