Latin America & Caribbean Archives

Data Sovereignty vs. Digital Prospecting

AI’s reckoning in the Amazon

October 23, 2025 • by Annie K. Lamar and Sarah B. McClure

“Now, for the first time in history, anyone can conduct archaeological research,” or so promised artificial intelligence giant OpenAI in a recent promotion-via-public competition. Marketed as an Indiana Jones–style adventure, the “OpenAI to Z Challenge” invited users to digitally scour the Amazon rainforest for archaeological treasure. More than 2,500 teams ...

Data Sovereignty vs. Digital Prospecting

Economy

Panama Against Trump

A country’s fate hangs in the balance as protestors take to the streets

October 13, 2025 • by Nolan Young

As Donald Trump prepared to take office in late 2024, the American president-elect issued a stunning threat: to “take back” the Panama Canal, almost a quarter century after the United States had returned control of the canal and the zone around it to the sovereign state of Panama. Once in office, ...

Latin America & Caribbean

Lula 3.0 and the Austerity Trap

The Left in power, the Right in control

July 17, 2025 • by Nara Roberta Silva

Campaigning for his third term as president in 2022, Lula da Silva ran on a straightforward message: making Brazil “happy again.” Now, halfway through his third term, macroeconomic indicators paint a fairly rosy picture of the country’s trajectory under his administration: GDP growth exceeded expectations, and the unemployment rate fell ...

Activism

“The Amazon Is Not a Warehouse”

A conversation with Dionéia Ferreira on the Amazonian Transdisciplinary Network

May 8, 2025 • by Dionéia Ferreira, Eduardo Staszowski and Renata Zampronio

Dionéia Ferreira is a scholar, environmental activist, and community leader in southern Amazonas, Brazil, where she plays a key role in weaving together RETA, the Amazonian Transdisciplinary Network. RETA connects local communities, women leaders, researchers, and legal actors across the territory surrounding the BR-319 highway—a controversial infrastructure project at the ...

Latin America & Caribbean

The Working-Class Venezuelans at the Center of Trump’s “Crisis”

Xenophobic rhetoric divides immigrant communities

May 2, 2025 • by Erick Moreno Superlano

Alex was trembling when he entered the café. He had agreed to participate in my research on Venezuelan immigration in New York and we had decided to discuss his story over coffee. But as he walked down the street to meet me, an ICE van had pulled over and parked ...

The Working-Class Venezuelans at the Center of Trump’s “Crisis”

Activism

How Venezuelans Reclaimed Their Communes

Chris Gilbert’s Commune or Nothing! places Venezuela’s communal movement as a key moment of working-class self-emancipation

March 6, 2025 • by Gant Roberson

In the central western region of Venezuela, a vast scenery of fertile land blends with the llanero (herdsman) culture of the people of Simón Planas township. Adults make use of children's bicycles (received as Christmas gifts from the government) to meet the exigencies of day-to-day life, evoking “a forgotten episode ...

How Venezuelans Reclaimed Their Communes

Latin America & Caribbean

The Foggy Future of Brazilian Democracy

The recent coup in Brazil challenged the country’s democracy even more than January 6 did in the United States

February 15, 2023 • by Theo Almeida

The consequences of January 8 for Brazilian politics may be much more severe and have not yet fully unfolded. ...

Latin America & Caribbean

Bolsonaro Shocks the Left in Brazil

Polarization deepens as a populist movement makes unexpected political gains

October 12, 2022 • by Theo Almeida

When Brazilians went to the polls on Sunday, October 2, most observers—and most pollsters—expected that Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the leftist former president, and his Workers’ Party (PT) would decisively defeat his chief opponent, Jair Bolsanaro, the current President from Brazil’s Liberal Party (PL)....

Activism

Turning Art into a Political Weapon

Scholars Terri Gordon-Zolov and Eric Zolov discuss the aesthetics and significance of the Chilean estallido

September 21, 2022 • by Terri Gordon-Zolov, Eric Zolov and Jordi Mariné Jubany

Wearing protest iconography was also a way to support the movement. And it was potentially risky. You could wear a handkerchief to cover your eyes from tear gas or to make yourself more anonymous or you could wear a green scarf to support reproductive rights. ...

Activism

The Walls of Santiago

How the Joker and Pikachu become symbols of the Chilean social uprising, in an excerpt from Terri Gordon-Zolov and Eric Zolov’s new book

September 21, 2022 • by Terri Gordon-Zolov and Eric Zolov

Humor provided a powerful weapon in the ﬁght to topple the civic-military dictatorship. The radical deprivation of human rights during the Pinochet regime had secondary costs, among which were the loss of a sense of freedom, spontaneity, and overall well-being. ...

Democracy

Brazil

Land of despair

April 8, 2021 • by Daniel Peres

Brazil faces two threats, both lethal. On top of COVID-19, the country faces another virus, lethal to democracy: the virus of autocracy. The pandemic is brutally sweeping Brazil. Almost 4000 deaths per day, according to official data. There is no reason to doubt that we will reach more than 500,000 ...

Democracy

Bolsonaro’s Regime of Chaos and Fear

The pandemic and the collapse of democracy in Brazil

May 14, 2020 • by Daniel Peres

In the third week of April, when asked about the rising death toll, Jair Bolsonaro answered that he didn’t know: “I’m not a gravedigger,” the president of Brazil snapped. When it was called to his attention the following week that the number of Covid-19 deaths in Brazil had exceeded the ...