Unpacking Latin America Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia University

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.