Faculty Voices

Laura Alfaro, Warren Alpert Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and former Minister of National Planning and Economic Policy in Costa Rica, reflects on why the current crisis in Nicaragua with its draconian human rights abuses should matter to the region and the world

Paul Farmer, chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, looks at why some countries have lots of vaccines and others don’t...and our responsibility to improve the inequal situation.

Gabriela Soto-Laveaga, Professor of the History of Science and Antonio Madero Professor for the Study of Mexico at Harvard University, discusses how food insecurity and the challenges of food distribution in the pandemic have underscored already existing inequities.

Steve Levitsky, Harvard Professor in the Government Department and director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, discusses the upcoming June 6 Peruvian elections. It’s a hot contest between Keiko Fujimori on the right and Pedro Castillo on the left.

Resources:

Leading Education Through COVID-19: Upholding the Right to Education

Leading Educational Change During a Pandemic: Reflections of Hope and Possibility

Una calamidad educativa Aprendizaje y enseñanza durante la pandemia de COVID-19

Alisha Holland, Associate Professor in the Harvard Government Department, looks at the implications of the April 11 elections in Ecuador.

Eleven million Africans were forcibly sent to the Americas between the 16th and 19th centuries. Two out of every three came to Latin America and the Caribbean. Alejandro de la Fuente, Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics at Harvard, discusses how Afro-descendent mobilization has brought change to the region in the last twenty years. De la Fuente, who is also director of the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at Harvard’s Hutchins Center, points to a transformative wave—particularly in Latin American constitutions—that now recognizes Afro-descendents as integral members of pluricultural nations. That recognition has led to “concrete and measurable opportunities.” But there’s still a long way to go.

Jocelyn Viterna, Harvard Professor of Sociology and director of undergraduate studies in the sociology department, discusses the February 28 Salvadoran elections. The results of these elections for the legislative body and mayoral offices are likely to determine the course of the country for years to come. Viterna, the author of Women in War: The Micro-processes of Mobilization in El Salvador, has worked and researched in El Salvador for 25 years.

Doris Sommer, Ira and Jewell Williams Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of African and African American Studies, discusses the relationship between the humanities and democracies, as well as the dire implications of budget cuts for the humanities both in the United States and Latin America.

Yanilda María González, Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and author of Authoritarian Police in Democracy: Contested Security in Latin America discusses policing, state violence and citizenship in democracy. Looking at issues of race and class, she shows how ordinary democratic politics in unequal societies can perpetuate authoritarian policing.