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Category Archive: Latin America
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State or Market Led? Brazil’s Struggle to Improve Infrastructure and IT
Yesterday I attended the annual Brazil Summit in New York, organized by the Brazilian-American Chamber of Commerce. What struck me in the presentations (reinforcing what I heard during my last two visits to Brazil), was the quite disparate views of Brazil today and the levers for growth tomorrow. The first panel focused on information technology [...]
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Colombia’s Displaced
This is a guest post by Stephanie Leutert, a research associate here at the Council on Foreign Relations who works with me in the Latin America program. The best known Colombian security story is that of declining violence. Indeed its homicide rate dropped from near 80 homicides per 100,000 in 1990 to 32 per 100,000 [...]
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Can 80 Percent of Mexicans Be Poor? The Debate Over Poverty
A recent study highlighted in La Jornada, a Mexican newspaper, claims that some ninety million Mexicans are poor, roughly 80 percent of the total population. This contrasts drastically with calculations by the OECD (which put the poor closer to twenty-three million) or those by Mexican researchers Luis de la Calle and Luis Rubio (who estimate [...]
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Argentina Is Not the Model
There have been a lot of people talking about Argentina as if it were the model for other governments in sovereign difficulty to follow. Yes, Argentina’s decision to default was realistically the right call given the crushing debt load. And that is the path the euro zone periphery is on. But, beyond this, I fail [...]
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On to the Summit
The air hung thick this weekend in the fortress city of Cartagena, as regional leaders met to discuss political and economic issues at the Summit of the Americas. Thirty-three of the thirty-five leaders were present, even ailing President Hugo Chavez was in attendance. The sole exceptions were Cuba’s President Raul Castro and Ecuador’s President Rafael [...]
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Central America’s Moment
While Brazil and Mexico (in good and bad ways) tend to fill U.S. headlines regarding Latin America, other nations matter as well for the United States. Among them are the Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Though combined their populations total less than thirty million people, these small nations arguably have an [...]
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Latin America’s Expanding Definition of National Security
Two reports came out recently from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the Council of the Americas (COA), both looking at Latin America and framing their substance as “national security” concerns. The first from CSIS, “Police Reform in Latin America: Implications for U.S. Policy,” describes how police reform has become a mainstay [...]
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Organized Crime Beyond Drug Trafficking
Harvard’s winter 2012 ReVista magazine focuses on crime and violence primarily in Mexico and Central America. Many of the authors were participants in a Harvard-sponsored working group, bringing together scholars and researchers from the university, as well as from other institutions in the United States and throughout the region to delve into the many complicated [...]
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Investing in Latin America
I just came back from speaking on a panel, on Brazil and Latin America more broadly, at a conference for institutional investors. We five panelists came from research, investing, and on-the-ground business backgrounds, providing a variety of perspectives and interesting conversation. Overall three big themes emerged in our discussion: Brazil still holds the top spot [...]
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Currency Wars and the Brazil Cost
The success of the “currency war” and “monetary tsunami” metaphors is unparalleled in strategies to confront the crisis. Guido Mantega, Brazil’s finance minister, achieved world fame in 2010 when he coined the “currency war” metaphor to characterize the problems that the expansionist monetary policies of the central countries were causing for various emerging countries, notably [...]
