Latin America and the Caribbean

When Mauricio Claver-Carone was elected as president of the Inter American Development Bank (IADB) last September, a 60-year tradition was broken, deepening the irrelevancy of Latin America in the global stage. This is so because the IADB, a key player when it comes to funding projects for the Latin American countries, has had a non-written […]

On January 30th, 2020, a few moments after Mexico’s Statistical Agency (INEGI) released its advance estimate of the country’s economic growth, Mexico’s President–Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO)–stood in front of reporters for his daily morning press conference. It had become harder for AMLO to dodge the concerns posed by analysts and journalists about the perception of Mexico’s lack of economic growth.

Former Minister Mauricio Cardenas responded to the questions formulated by LAPJ Editor-in-Chief Cesar Pabon on 25 January 2020. What follows is a lightly edited transcript. LAPJ: What are your views on the current state of the emerging protests that have spread across most Latin American countries? The protests exhibit a combination of both shared and […]

How do you think the common challenges of Latin America have changed in the past twenty years? In the early 2000s we were discussing the middle-income trap and how to deal with the dependency of commodities of Latin America. One of the aspects that has changed in the last twenty years has been the perception […]

Latin America has faced significant challenges and has always found ways to get ahead. The potential of Latin American countries is great and has been recognized around the world. However, we are now witnessing a crisis that endangers the democratic progress of Latin America. Nicolás Maduro’s regime has plunged Venezuela into a dire situation where […]

  Ellie,[1] a young trans woman from Central America, sits across a small table from me in blue men’s scrubs, hair cut short and eyes downcast. It’s taken hours to shuffle her from the solitary confinement unit to this cold, windowless room, where I am to help her prepare her pro se asylum case. She’s […]

On August 3rd, yet another crime of gender-based violence made headlines in Mexico: ”Girl Kidnapped and Raped by Police”. Over the following days, feminist protests erupted across the country to demand women’s right to basic dignity—a life free of violence. However, these protests have been mistakenly and unfairly accused of being violent themselves, when in […]

Their symbol: a white headscarf. Their weapon: a list of names spoken aloud. Their mission: to keep the memory of their children, “disappeared” by the Argentine military junta four decades ago, alive in the memory of modern-day Argentina and beyond. The Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of May Plaza), many now in their 70s […]

  Less than half a mile from the U.S. border on a street corner in Tijuana, Mexico sits a small orange kitchen. Like other restaurants on the block, El Comedor typically has a steady stream of people lingering and picking up conversations while music bumps in the background. Yet there is no shortage of things […]

Looking ahead, Latin America faces no shortage of policy challenges, and many (if not most) of these have domestic economic and political roots. The problems confronting individual countries vary markedly in origin, nature, and severity, so it would be misleading to discuss many of these at the regional level. The economic implosion inflicted on Venezuela […]

Abstract The transfer of development rights is an instrument of urban policy originally used in the United States. It allows the owners of landmarks in a city to sell their air rights to developers for them to build over the standard height limits of their properties. The article explains the recent introduction of the mechanism […]

Introduction Gender equality is today at the top of the international agenda, as in the past decades we have seen the emergence of diverse social movements advocating for the expansion of women’s rights in issues such as education, labor, violence, politics, etc. This year, the gender perspective is a cross-priority to the G20 agenda, with […]