Podcasts about Chileans

This episode marks the end of The Cobain 50 and El Cancionero de Kurt. After going through all 50 albums from Kurt’s list, we celebrated with an event in KEXP’s Gathering Space with a packed house of fans of Nirvana and the podcast to reflect on the series, what it’s meant to us, and what we’ve learned going through all of this music. Below find translations of the Spanish and Portuguese clips aired throughout the episode. Thank you to everyone who has supported our podcasts. We love you so much, it makes us sick. CLIP #1: Luis Carlos Calanca: “Maybe it made him explode, again in Brazil and worldwide it was Kurt Cobain when the band Nirvana came here. Months later, when Kurt Cobain saw them here, he started saying that the band was sensational. And then all the kids wanted to know about Os Mutantes. Lucinha Barbosa: “That’s how, word of mouth, I think, until '98, the big ones started to pay attention because there was no one to stay, no major record company that advertised didn't have that exactly through the fans themselves, word by word.” CLIP #2: José Bellas: Yes, that's right.The next day interviews were scheduled. I had to interview Dave Grohl. and I spent some time before the show at the house of one… one of the two managers of Los Brujos that was Alejandro Almada and he gave me a record for them. I took it there and I gave it to him (Dave). Anyway, another thing that was going around was that, during Los Brujos' soundcheck, Grohl showed up and went to backtages singing the song, people were saying that before Nirvana went on. CLIP #3: Jorge Francisco Soto Flores: Seattle could be any city in Chile. Seattle is a remote place, a rainy place, a place of forests. We (Chileans) are the end of the world, we are the outsiders. We have barriers that could be the Andes Mountains, the desert, the ice, the Pacific Ocean… It happened at a specific time in the 90s. We were returning to a pseudo-democracy. There is also something about representation with the lyrics in every aspect from pessimism now knowing what is going to happen next and also added to to the fact that Chileans love rock music. They are fans of rock and metal. What reason is there for people to be so fanatical about Chris Cornell that here is a god? About Cobain who is a god; that Eddie Vedder, who is a god; Mark Lineman who is a god. I think that’s the only explanation. I don’t see any other, honestly. Hosts: Dusty Henry and Martin DouglasRecorded by: Brandon FitzsimmonsAudio Produced by: Julian Martlew and Dusty Henry Mixed and Mastered by: Matt MartinSpecial thanks to: Isabel Khalili and Larry Mizell Jr.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

"The Shock Doctrine" arrives in America. Now Americans have some idea of how Chileans felt in the 1970s. ALSO: Chris is still mad at Ezra Klein. PLUS: Zoloft VS one's sex drive. A song of the week from Sophia Corinne.Sophia Corinne - "Nursing the Wound": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pWjFwW1kcQCold Brew Patreon: Patreon.com/ChrisCroftonChannel Nonfiction: ChannelNonfiction.com

WWW.ADVENTUREFREAKSSS.COM – GoStraight to the Source!How to work with me: =================================

(Intro) Spoiled Pets (5TYNTK) Delta Payout, U-Haul Chase, Paypal Scam, SoPo Leaf Blowers, Cedar Falls Mobile Home Park (Dirty) LaVar Ball's foot amputated. 50 Cent trolls Joe Budden. A$AP Rocky & Rihanna want to name baby after lawyer. Ye denies being a Nazi. Chileans charged in athlete burglaries. Will Smith wants Zendaya in Hancock 2.  (Topic) Have you ever named a child or a pet after someone who had an impact on you? (Outro) No Politics Day

#1- The Chileans are testy and will protest, block roads and create general chaos at the drop of a hat (like a 4 cent increase in public transportation rates): Not very welcoming or appealing prospect to gringos with a Plan B… #2- How stupid energy subsidy decisions made by Latin American tax authorities to buy votes end up gouging gringo and expat residents: #3- El Salvador's Bitcoin volcano mining progress report: #4- How crazy Latin American labor laws make gringo bosses pull their hair out:   #5- Increasing the chances of a Plan B success:   #6- More painful “cost of living” news from Argentina: President Milei warned there would be pain…      #7- Be sure to pick up my newly updated, "LATIN AMERICAN HEALTHCARE REPORT": the new edition for 2024 (and beyond) is available now, including the latest "Stem Cell Clinic" info and data and my top picks for the best treatment centers for expats and gringos. Just go to www.ExpatPlanB.com      #8  - Our own Expat Captain Mango has developed a unique one-on-one Crypto consulting and training service (he's been deep into crypto since 2013). To get started, email him at: bewarecaptainmango@gmail.com     

Tim gives a traffic update as the 5 Freeway starts to reopen and Tim talks about his superior geographic knowledge of LA. // KFI's Dean Sharp aka The House Whisperer joins the show to provide listeners with tips on fire safety as well as steps you can take to help your home during these high winds and wildfires. // The District Attorney of Orange County, Todd Spitzer joins Tim to discuss the organized crime rings from Chile that are continuing to exploit a dangerous loophole in the U.S. ESTA Visa Waiver program as seen in the recent arrests for the burglary of Bangles QB Joe Burrow's house. // Tim gives the latest updates on the Hughes fire and the corresponding road closures.  

Today's Topics: 1) Catholic Church sex abuse scandals are pushing Chileans to join Temple of Satan? https://www.complicitclergy.com/2024/11/18/catholic-church-sex-abuse-scandals-push-chileans-to-join-temple-of-satan/ 2, 3, 4) In Part 45 of this series, Jesse and Eddie discuss "Authority Isn't Attained," beginning on page 228, in The Liber Christo Method of Healing and Deliverance, by Dr. Dan Schneider  

Summary: Mary Martha shares her experience of moving to Chile and living as an expat. She initially wanted to learn Spanish and chose Chile as her destination. She had a family friend living there, which made the decision easier. Mary Martha entered Chile with a tourist visa and later applied for a temporary work visa. She started teaching English and later transitioned to working at a digital marketing company. Mary Martha found it challenging to learn Spanish as many people wanted to practice their English with her. She also noticed that Chileans tend to hold onto their high school friends, making it difficult to integrate into social groups. In this conversation, Martha shares her experiences of living abroad in Chile for the past eight years. She discusses the challenges she faced, such as language barriers and cultural differences, as well as the rewards of immersing herself in a new culture. Martha emphasizes the importance of self-care and prioritizing personal values while living abroad. She also offers advice for those considering a move abroad, encouraging them to be compassionate with themselves and to focus on their own well-being and growth. Takeaways: Choosing a destination with a personal connection can make the transition easier Learning the local language can be challenging when people want to practice their English with you Integrating into social groups can be difficult in a country where people tend to hold onto their childhood friends Living abroad can be both challenging and rewarding, with language barriers and cultural differences being common obstacles to overcome. Prioritizing self-care and focusing on personal values are essential for a fulfilling experience abroad. It is important to be compassionate with oneself and to give oneself grace when it comes to career growth and personal development. Building a community and making deep friendships takes time, and it is okay to prioritize personal well-being and maintain connections with friends and family back home. Defining and aligning with personal values can guide decision-making and lead to a more fulfilling life abroad. Connect with Us: Website: https://www.tallmantravels.co.uk/the-expat-pod  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100089327439022  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the.expat.pod/  X: https://twitter.com/ExpatPod LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-expat-pod/  Subscribe, Rate, and Review: If you enjoyed this episode of The Expat Pod, please subscribe, rate, and leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform. Your support helps us reach more listeners like you and continue to deliver valuable content on life as an expat. Sound Bites: "I really wanted to learn Spanish" "Teaching English felt like the most flexible option" "It can be hard to enter a group that has their core group of friends" "Being in the, I think also" "This might just be cultural" "We met at a barbecue, which they call a cello" Chapters: 00:00 Introduction and Connection with the Host 01:12 The Inspiration for Moving Abroad and Choosing Chile 05:05 Visa Process and Teaching English in Chile 12:18 First Impressions and Settling into Life in Chile 24:04 Finding Permanent Accommodation and Social Life 28:49 Transitioning to a Chilean Company and Language Learning Challenges 36:52 Navigating Language Barriers and Cultural Differences 38:16 Meeting Chilean Friends and Partners 41:38 Building Relationships and Making Connections 43:08 Professional Life and Language Use 44:05 Exploring South America and Travel Experiences 46:27 Maintaining Connections with Friends and Family 49:49 Balancing Social Life and Personal Well-being 55:05 Career Growth and Personal Development Abroad 58:32 Prioritizing Self-Care and Personal Values 01:08:31 Aligning with Personal Values for a Fulfilling Life Abroad

Ralph has a new book out, The Rebellious CEO: 12 Leaders Who Did It Right and in this episode, we profile three of them, Andy Shallal, owner of the restaurant “Busboys and Poets,” John Bogle, founder of the Vanguard Group, and Robert Townsend, iconoclastic CEO of Avis Rent-a-Car and author of the classic business book “Up The Organization!” Mr. Shallal joins us in person while financial advisor and Boglehead, Rick Ferri, talks to us about the late John Bogle and Robert Townsend Jr. explains the origins of his father's philosophy. Plus, Ralph gives us an update and a call to action on Gaza.Click on the link to order your copy of The Rebellious CEO.Andy Shallal is an activist, artist and social entrepreneur. Mr. Shallal is the founder and proprietor of Busboys and Poets restaurants in the Washington DC area, which feature prominent speakers, poets and authors and provide a venue for social and political activism. He is co-founder of The Peace Cafe, a member of the board of trustees for The Institute for Policy Studies, and a member of the advisory council for the American Museum of Peace.The whole idea of this book The Rebellious CEO is to show that these CEOs reverse the business model. They didn't just have a vision and say, “We're gonna squeeze workers and consumers and environmental indifference to maximize the profits.” No, they started out saying, “We're gonna treat the workers well. We're gonna treat the consumers well. We're gonna confront the environment. We're gonna speak out against injustice.” And they all made money. Every one of them in the book said they always paid attention to profits because without profits they couldn't do all the things they wanted to do.Ralph Nader, author of “The Rebellious CEO”It becomes very personal. And when it's personal, it's hard to separate yourself from the business. So everything that happens in the business, it's not a one -off, it's about me. If the business is treating my employees badly, it means Andy Shallal is treating his people badly. That's a very personal way [of looking at it] and it's a way for I think a lot of these folks that you write about in the book to kind of stay on mission and say, “This is my name. This is my legacy. This is my entire being that is on the line.”Andy ShallalUnderstanding those dynamics and how race plays out in this country and how people interpret and see race is really a very important part of our training— to make sure that people do not fall into the trap of saying, “I don't see race,” because race sees you. And unless you are proactive in how you deal with people as they walk through the door, you're gonna probably make mistakes.Andy ShallalRick Ferri has worked for 35 years as a financial adviser and he is the host of the Bogleheads on Investing podcast. Mr. Ferri was a pioneer in low-fee investment advice and portfolio management using ETFs and index funds, he has authored 7 investment books and hundreds of articles published in Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, and several professional journals, and he is the former president of the John C Bogle Center for Financial Literacy.[John Bogle] was very determined. He believed in giving investors a fair shake on Wall Street. He believed that we should get our fair share of market returns. He believed that there was a conflict of interest in the investment industry between the people who owned the investment companies and the investors in those companies—the people who bought the mutual funds. And he said, "You cannot serve two masters."Rick FerriThat's our mission—to build a world of well-informed, capable, and empowered investors. And that's what the Bogle Center and the Bogleheads are all about.Rick FerriRobert Townsend, Jr. is the son of Robert Townsend, who was president of Avis Rent A Car from 1962 to 1965 and was the author of the best-selling and iconoclastic business manual Up the Organization: How to Stop the Corporation from Stifling People and Strangling Profits.[Robert Townsend, Sr.] was definitely iconically an iconoclast, but I don't think he saw himself that way. He didn't just believe in partnership. He saw that—and teamwork— were the only things to accomplish. So he found, just through serendipity or synchronicity, partners everywhere he looked.Robert Townsend, Jr.[Robert Townsend, Sr.] embarked on a new career of consulting…He would come back from consulting with somebody or other, finding out, “All they wanted was me to tell them they were doing it right. And nothing I said actually made any difference.”Robert Townsend, Jr.In Case You Haven't Heard with Francesco DeSantis1. The tide seems to finally be shifting in favor of a ceasefire in Gaza. Democracy Now! Reports “British Foreign Secretary David Cameron and German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock called for a ‘sustainable ceasefire' in a joint article in The Sunday Times. The pair said efforts should be focused on a two-state solution after the assault comes to an end. The U.K. and Germany had previously declined to call for a ceasefire and abstained from voting last week on the U.N. General Assembly's ceasefire resolution. Also on Sunday, French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna called for an ‘immediate and durable truce' while meeting with her Israeli counterpart Eli Cohen in Tel Aviv, saying ‘too many civilians are being killed' in Gaza. This comes as U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin arrived in Israel earlier today, where he is expected to focus talks on transitioning to a ‘lower intensity' war.'”2. Many wonder why these countries are changing their position so abruptly. One explanation could be the efficacy of the Red Sea blockade enforced by the Yemeni Houthis. Thus far, five of the largest shipping firms in the world, including CMA CGM, Hapag-Lloyd, Maersk and MSC, along with Evergreen and BP, have “paused or suspended their services in the Red Sea,” due to Houthi attacks, per the Economist. Collectively, these firms represent over 60% of global shipping. In response, the United States has announced its intention to form a naval bloc to combat the Houthis, risking further escalation in the region.3. Haaretz reports that Al Jazeera is “preparing a legal file to send to the International Criminal Court (ICC) over what it called the ‘assassination' of one of its cameramen in Gaza.” The ICC complaint focuses on a cameraman, Samer Abu Daqqa, who was “killed by a drone strike on Friday [December 15th] while reporting on the earlier bombing of a school used as a shelter for displaced people in the southern Gaza Strip,” but will “also encompass recurrent attacks on the Network's crews working and operating in the occupied Palestinian territories and instances of incitement against them." The Committee to Protect Journalists reports at least 64 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since October 7th.4. On Sunday, Pope Francis decried the murder of two Palestinian Christian women who had taken refuge in a church complex in Gaza, Reuters reports. The Pope mourned that "Unarmed civilians are the objects of bombings and shootings. And this happened even inside the Holy Family parish complex, where there are no terrorists, but families, children, people who are sick or disabled, nuns…Some would say 'It is war. It is terrorism.' Yes, it is war. It is terrorism."5. According to NBC Bay Area, “At least hundreds of union members rallied at Oakland City Hall Saturday to call for a ceasefire… The ‘Labor for Palestine' rally brought out members from 14 unions across the Bay Area [including longshore workers, teachers, electricians, and nurses]. In addition to the call for the cease-fire, a statement put out by organizers said it also wanted the U.S. to stop providing military aid to Israel and ‘an end to Israel's occupation.' Organizers also said the rally was the first such labor-led rally in the U.S. this year.”6. AP reports Tesla is recalling “nearly all vehicles sold in [the] US,”  following a two-year investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA, regarding “a series of crashes [some deadly] that happened while the Autopilot partially automated driving system was in use.” Dillon Angulo, a driver who suffered brain trauma and broken bones in one such crash, said “This technology is not safe, we have to get it off the road…The government has to do something about it. We can't be experimenting like this.”7. Upon taking office, one of President Biden's stated foreign policy goals was to overturn Trump's designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terror. Yet, according to the Intercept “in a private briefing last week on Capitol Hill, State Department official Eric Jacobstein stunned members of Congress by telling them that the department has not even begun the review process.” As the article notes, “The terror designation makes it difficult for Cubans to do international business, crushing an already fragile economy. The U.S. hard-line approach to Cuba has coincided with a surge in desperate migration, with Cubans now making up a substantial portion of the migrants arriving at the southern border. Nearly 425,000 Cubans have fled for the United States in fiscal years 2022 and 2023, shattering previous records. Instead of moving to stem the flow by focusing on root causes in Cuba, the Biden White House has been signaling support in recent days for Republican-backed border policies.”8. In Chile, voters have rejected a far-right proposed new constitution, per PBS. As the article notes, this vote “came more than a year after Chileans resoundingly rejected a proposed constitution written by a left-leaning convention and one that many characterized as one of the world's most progressive charters.” The new, right-wing draft was characterized as even more conservative than the Pinochet-era constitution it sought to replace as it would have “deepened free-market principles, reduced state intervention and might have limited some women's rights.” As ex-president Michele Bachelet, who campaigned against the new draft constitution said “I prefer something bad to something worse.”9. In Argentina, radical right-wing President Javier Milei has announced a crackdown on civil society, “calling on armed forces to break strikes, arrest protesters, ‘protect' children from families that bring them to demo[nstration]s, and form a new national registry of all agitating organisations,” per Progressive International's David Adler. While unsurprising, this clearly flies in the face of Milei's purported ‘anarcho-capitalist' principles.10. Finally, did Southwest Airlines cancel or significantly delay your flight during the holiday season last year? If so, you could be entitled to a $75 voucher as part of the Department of Transportation's record $140 million settlement with the airline, per the Hill. Under the settlement, which the Department of Transportation claims is the largest ever penalty against an airline for violating consumer protection laws, the airline is required to establish a $90 million compensation system to be used for passengers affected by “controllable cancellations and significant delays,” in addition to paying $35 million to the federal government. Last December's Southwest “meltdown” included “more than 16,900 flights…canceled or delayed…affect[ing] more than 2 million passengers around the holidays.”This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven't Heard. Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

When the gavel came down at the global climate summit in Dubai last week, the deal struck by more than 200 hundred participants was heralded by its supporters as ground-breaking and historic. Critics of the agreement - aimed at limiting global warming to less than 1.5*C - say it's toothless and full of loopholes. U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, John Kerry, has told Newshour that he's focusing on putting the deal into action. But some question whether the transition the deal talks about will happen quickly enough.Also in the programme: As media mogul Jimmy Lai pleads not guilty to security charges in Hong Kong -- another pro-democracy leader now in exile tells us why this trial matters; and why Chileans have rejected a second attempt to reform the country's constitution.(Photo shows John Kerry speaking at a press conference in Dubai, United Arab Emirates on 13 December 2023. Credit: Martin Divisek/EPA)

In 2020, Chileans overwhelmingly supported writing a new constitution. Two years later, Chileans overwhelmingly rejected it. This month, they will vote on a different version, but many say it's worse than what they already have. About: Hosted by Meghna Chakrabarti, On Point is WBUR's award-winning, daily public radio show and podcast. Its unique combination of original reporting, first-person stories, and in-depth analysis creates an experience that makes the world more intelligible and humane. Deep dives. Original stories. Fresh takes. We'd appreciate your help to better understand On Point's podcast listeners and get your feedback — it'll take you about 10 minutes or less! Take our survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/onpointpodcast  

Three news stories summarized & contextualized by analytic journalist Colin Wright.FDA approves first vaccine against mosquito-borne virus chikungunyaSummary: The US Food and Drug Administration has approved the first-ever vaccine for a mosquito-borne illness called chikungunya, which can cause intense joint pain and in some cases lead to death.Context: Illnesses transmitted by mosquitoes have been increasingly worrisome for health experts, as mosquitoes have been moving to new areas as the planet's climate bands have shifted, exposing new populations without any immunity to those diseases; chikungunya has already been tracked in more than 110 countries in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, and more than 2 million cases have been officially reported, globally, since 2005; this vaccine has been approved for people 18-years-old and older, is a single-dose shot, and grants recipients a protective level of antibodies—though the exact statistical level of protection isn't yet known, as the vaccine was approved through the FDA's accelerated approval process which speeds-up the otherwise sluggish treatment-approval pipeline for serious and life-threatening diseases after they've been shown to be safe and efficacious.—The Washington PostOne Sentence News is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Chile's right wing presents draft conservative constitutionSummary: A new constitution, drafted by the furthest-right wing of Chile's government, has been proposed and will be voted upon by the country's citizenry on December 17.Context: This new draft would replace the current constitution, which was produced under former Chilean dictator Pinochet, and would curb the right to collectively strike, threaten access to an abortion, and reduce the number of deputies in congress; it's a stark contrast to the previous constitutional draft that was under consideration, which was sometimes glowingly, sometimes derisively called the most progressive constitution even proposed, and which was overwhelmingly voted down by Chileans late last year.—The GuardianFBI seizes Eric Adams' phones as campaign investigation intensifiesSummary: Following a raid on New York Mayor Eric Adams' chief fundraiser's home, the FBI reportedly seized the mayor's phones and tablet, returning them shortly thereafter, as part of an investigation into whether his 2021 campaign violated campaign finance law.Context: This is an ongoing investigation, but the crux of it, at the moment, seems to be a possible conspiracy to funnel donations from the Turkish government into Adams's campaign, alongside any potential quid-pro-quo granted to Turkey or a Turkish construction company, KSK Construction, which is apparently also under investigation; members of Adams's inner-circle have come under official scrutiny for potential bribe-taking and illegal donation-funneling in the past, and the Mayor says that he's cooperating with the investigation and is not aware of any illegal activity connected to his campaign.—The New York TimesMore than half of US citizens live in a state where marijuana is legal (or will be soon) following the recent success of a piece of legislation in Ohio that will allow for recreational use.—Axios$47 millionNorth American release-weekend box office haul for Marvel's new The Marvels movie, which hit theaters last Friday.That's the worst-ever opening for a film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe—of which there have been 33—and though it brought in about $110 million globally, the film is reported to have cost nearly $275 million to produce.The precursor Captain Marvel film that was released in 2019 debuted to $455 million in ticket sales, so this is being seen as a possible sign that so-called “superhero fatigue” at the box office has landed, in earnest.—The GuardianTrust Click Get full access to One Sentence News at onesentencenews.substack.com/subscribe

José Miguel Vivanco, adjunct senior fellow for human rights at CFR and former executive director of the Americas division at Human Rights Watch, leads the conversation on human rights in Latin America. FASKIANOS: Welcome to today's session of the Fall 2023 CFR Academic Webinar Series. I'm Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. Today's discussion is on the record. The video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org, if you would like to share them with your colleagues or classmates. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We are delighted to have José Miguel Vivanco with us to discuss human rights in Latin America. Mr. Vivanco is an adjunct senior fellow for human rights at CFR and partner at Dentons Global Advisors. He formerly served as the executive director of the Americas Division at Human Rights Watch, where he supervised fact-finding research for numerous reports on gross violations of human rights and advocated strengthening international legal standards and domestic compliance throughout the region. He is the founder of the Center for Justice and International Law, an international civil society organization providing legal and technical assistance with the Inter-American Human Rights System. So, José Miguel, thank you very much for being with us today. I thought you could begin by giving us an overview of what you see as the most important human rights challenges and advances in Latin America today. VIVANCO: Well, thank you very much for this invitation. It is a pleasure to be with you all and to talk for an hour about human rights problems, human rights issues in Latin America. Let me first make a couple of points. First, I think it's very important that, in retrospect, if you look at Latin America in the 1960s, 1970s, and even 1980s, it was a region that was pretty much run by military dictatorships. So if you look at historically, the region is not in such a bad shape. I know that this comment is quite controversial and many experts who follow the region closely might disagree with that statement, but objectively speaking I think we need to recognize that most of the region is run today—with the exception, obviously, of Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua—by democracies, weak democracies, the kind of democracies that we have in Latin America are facing very serious challenges and with endemic problems such as corruption, abuse of power, lack of transparency, lack of proper accountability, and so on and so forth. But in general terms, this is a region that has a chance to conduct some self-correction. In other words, electoral democracy is a very, very important value in the region, and the citizens—most of the people are able to either reward or punish the incumbent government at the times of elections. That is not a minor detail. It is extremely important, especially if you take into account that during the last twenty years in Latin America, if I'm not wrong, the vast majority of the governments elected were from the opposition. The statistics, I think, show that in eighteen of the twenty last presidential elections, the winner has been the party of the opposition; which means that even though our democracies in Latin America are dysfunctional, weak, messy, slow, you know, short-term-oriented, obviously, but at least citizens take their rights seriously and they exercise their powers so that is why you see a regular zigzag or, you know, transfer of power from a left-wing government to a right-wing government or vice versa. And that is, again, something that is, obviously, a very, very important tool of self-correction. And that, obviously, includes or has an impact in terms of the human rights record of those countries. You know, I'm not—I'm not addressing yet—I will leave it for the Q&A section—conditions in those three dictatorships in Latin America. Let me just make some few more remarks about one of the biggest challenges that I see in the region. And that is, obviously, the rise of autocracy or autocratic leaders, populist leaders, leaders who are not interested or as a matter of fact are very hostile to the concept of rule of law and the concept of independence of the judiciary. And they usually are very charismatic. They have high level of popular support. And they run and govern the country in a style that is like a permanent campaign, where they normally go against minorities and against the opposition, against the free media, against judges and prosecutors who dare to investigate them or investigate the government. Anyone who challenges them are subject of this type of reaction. And that is, unfortunately, something that we have seen in Mexico recently and until today, and in Brazil, especially during the administration of President Bolsonaro. The good news about, in the case of Brazil, is that, thanks to electoral democracy, it was possible to defeat him and—democratically. And the second very important piece of information is that even though Brazil is not a model of rule of law and separation of power, we have to acknowledge that, thanks to the checks-and-balance exercise by the Supreme Court of Brazil, it was possible to do some permanent, constant damage control against the most outrageous initiatives promoted by the administration of President Bolsonaro. That, I think, is one of the biggest challenges in the region. Let me conclude my—make crystal clear that there are serious human rights problems in Latin America today regarding, for instance, abuse of power, police brutality, prison problems. Prisons are really, in most of the countries in the region, a disaster. And you know, a big number of prisoners are awaiting trial, in detention and unable to really exercise their rights. And unfortunately, populist leaders use the prison system or essentially criminal law, by expanding the practice and enlarging the numbers of crimes that could be subject of pretrial detention, and—you know, regardless of the time that it will take for that case to be prosecuted in full respect for the rule—due process, and so on and so forth. And that—the reason is very simple. There is a real demand in Latin America for policies that will address insecurity, citizen security. If you look at statistics in terms of crime rate, it is going up in most of the country. Obviously, there are big difference between countries like Mexico, for instance, or Colombia, and if you link—if you look at the power of cartels and big mafias, and gangs in other countries, or petty crime impacting the daily life of the citizens. Regardless of that point, one of the biggest demands in Latin America is for better and more public security. And that's why political leaders, usually the solution for that request and demand is to put people in prison with essentially no real due process and increase the number of prisoners without conviction. There are challenges for free speech occasionally, of those leaders who resent scrutiny of their practice. And normally there is a campaign against free media. And there are some attempts in some countries to constantly look for ways to undermine the independence of the judiciary. Keep in mind, for instance, that now in Argentina the whole Supreme Court is under impeachment, and it's essentially an impeachment promoted by the current government because they disagree with the rulings, positions of the Supreme Court. All the justices on the Supreme Court are subject of this political trial conducted by the Argentine Congress. That is a concrete example of the kinds of risks that are present for judges and the judiciary in general, when they exercise their power and they attempt to protect the integrity of the constitution. So let me stop here and we can move on to the most interesting part of this event. FASKIANOS: Well, that was quite interesting. So, thank you, José Miguel. We appreciate it. We going to go to all of you now for your questions. (Gives queuing instructions.) We already have some hands up. We will go first to Karla Soto Valdes. Q: My name is Karla Soto. I'm from Lewis University. My question is, what specific measures could be implemented to address and/or prevent trafficking within the asylum-seeking community during their journey to the U.S.? VIVANCO: Irina, are we going to take several questions, or? FASKIANOS: I think we should do one at a time. VIVANCO: Well, Karla, there are multiple tools to address that specific issue. But this applies to essentially most of the human rights problems all over the world. The menu is pretty ample, but depends on one important factor—whether the government involved cares about its own reputation. That is a very important premise here, because if you we are dealing with a democratic government, once again, it's not—when I refer to a democratic government, I don't have in mind a sort of Jeffersonian model, I'm referring to the kind of democracies that we have in Latin America. But, if the leaders in charge are—you know, they care about their own reputation, they care about domestic debate, very important, because these types of revelations usually have ramifications at the local level. If they pay close attention to those issues, I think it's possible to apply, essentially, the technique of naming and shaming. In other words, collecting information, documenting what exactly is happening, and revealing that information to the public, locally and internationally. That is going to create naturally a reaction, a process, an awareness, and local pressure is—hopefully, it's not just twenty-four hours news, so splash—big splash, but also will trigger some dynamics. If we are dealing with a country that is run by a dictatorship, it is a very, very different question, because normally you're facing a leader, a government, who couldn't care less about its own reputation. They have taken already and assume the cost of doing business in that type of context. Now, sometimes conditions are kind of mixed, where you have democratic country in general—so there is still free media, there is an opposition, there is Congress, there are elections. But the government in charge is so—is run by an autocratic leader. That makes, you know, quite—a little more challenging to just document and reveal that information. And you need to think about some particular agenda, governmental agenda. Some specific interests of the government in different areas. Let me see—let me give you an example. Let's say that the Bolsonaro administration is seriously interested in an incorporation into the OECD in Paris. That is an important piece of information. Whatever you think that is relevant information regarding the record of that government, you could provide information to an entity that is precisely evaluating the record of the government. And the government will be much more willing to address those issues because they have a genuine interest in achieving some specific goal at the international level. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. We're going to go to Nicole Ambar De Santos, who is an undergraduate student at the Washington University in St. Louis: When we consider weak democracy in a more personal sense, like Peru, the controversy of obligation to help these nations arises. How much third party or other nations, such as the United States, intervene? VIVANCO: Tricky question. Peruvian democracy is quite messy. Part of the problem is that the system, the political system, needs some real reform to avoid the proliferation of small political parties and to create the real link or relationship between leaders, especially in Congress, and their constituencies, and so they are much more accountable to their community, the ones who elected them. I don't think the U.S., or any other government, has a direct role to play in that area. My sense is that when we are looking into a dysfunctional democracy that deserve some probably even constitutional reforms, that is essentially a domestic job. That is the work that needs to be done by Peruvians. Without a local consensus about the reforms that need to be implemented in the political system, my sense is that it's going to be very difficult for the U.S. or any other large democracy, to address those kinds of points. It's very different, that type of conversation, from a conversation or an assessment of universal values, such as human rights. When we are looking into cases of police brutality, for instance, the international community has a role to play. But if I were part of the conversation or evaluation by the U.S. government or the European Union with regard to this dysfunctional democracy in Peru, I would approach very carefully by suggesting creating the right type of incentives, more than questions of punishment, or sanctions. It's incentives for them to create the right conditions to address the domestic problem that is—has become quite endemic, in the case of Peru. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I'm going to take the next question from Matthew. Matthew, you don't have a last name, so can you identify yourself? Q: Hello. Yes, my name is Matthew. I am a junior student from Arizona State University studying business, but working on a thesis that has to do with human rights and the ethics of supply chain management. My question is, you were talking at the very beginning kind of just about history and how understanding history is important. And what I was hoping to get was, why is understanding history and culture important when working to address human rights issues, history of dictatorship, colonialism? In cultures it's socially acceptable things, like child labor, in some countries, that's not acceptable in Western ideology. So, yeah, just how is history and culture important when working to address human rights for the future? VIVANCO: Matthew, I think you're referring to two different issues. History is central. It's really, really relevant. Because that helps you—if you—if you follow your history, especially periods of time when massive and gross violations were committed in Latin America, it's important to put things in context and value what you have today. And the job is to—not only to preserve democracy, but also to look for ways to strengthen democracy. Because part of the problem is that domestic debate is so polarized today, not just in Latin America, all over the world, that sometimes people—different, you know, segments of society—in their positions, they're so dismissive of the other side, that they don't realize that we need to frame our debate in a constructive way. Let me put it—one specific example. If the government of Argentina, who is a government very receptive and very sensitive to vast and gross violations of human rights committed during the military dictatorship, so in other words, I don't need to lecture that government on that subject. They are actually the people who vote for the current government of Argentina—not the new government, the current government of Argentina—is deeply committed to those kinds of issues. I think that one of the biggest lessons that you should learn from the past is the relevance of protecting the independence of the judiciary. If you don't have an independent judiciary, and the judiciary becomes an entity that is an appendix of the ruling party or is intimidated by politics, and they could be subject of impeachment procedures every time that they rule something, that the powerful—the establishment disagree, I think they're playing with fire, and they're not really paying attention to the lessons that you learn from recent history in Latin America. That would be my first comment regarding that type of issue. And the second one, about you mentioned specifically cultural problems, culture, tensions or conflicts. And you mentioned—your example was child labor. And, and you suggested that that—the combination of child labor is something typical of Western ideology. If I'm not wrong, that was the language that you used. I would—I would push back on that point. And because this is not just a Western or European commitment. This is a universal one. And this is reflected on international treaties, and that are supposed to eradicate that kind of practice. If you give up to the concept of local traditions, you know, cultural, you know, issues that you need to pay attention, sure, as long as they are not to be in conflict with fundamental human rights. Otherwise, in half of the planet you're not going to have women rights, and women will be subject of traditional control. And you wouldn't have rights for minorities, and especially—and not only, but especially—the LGBTQ community. And you wouldn't have rights for racial minorities, or different religious beliefs. So, we have to watch and be very careful about what type of concessions we make to cultural traditions. I am happy to understand that different communities in Latin America might have different traditions, but there is some firm, solid, and unquestionable minimum that are the these universal human rights values that are not the property or monopoly of anyone. You know, these are—and this is not an ethical conversation. This is a legal one, because these values are protected under international law. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I'm going to combine or take two questions. The first question is from Lindsay Bert, who is at the department of political science at Muhlenberg College, who asks if you could speak on the efficacy of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in addressing the human rights violations you described. And the second question is from Leonard Onyebuchi Ophoke, a graduate student at Cavendish University in Uganda: Why is it almost impossible to hold the actors that violate human rights accountable? What could be done to make the mechanism more enforceable? VIVANCO: The inter-American system of human rights protection, there is nothing similar to inter-American system of human rights protection in the Global South. You don't have something similar in Asia, or Africa, or the Middle East. In other words, you don't have a mechanism where ultimately a court, a court of law—not just a commission, a court of law—handle individual cases, specific complaints of human rights abuses, and governments participate in public hearings. The parties involved have the obligation to present evidence before the court, and the court finally ruled on the specific matters where its decisions are binding. The number of issues that have been addressed by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in the last thirty years in Latin America are really incredible. And the impact—this is most important point—the impact at a local level is remarkable. In the area, for instance, of torture, disappearances. I'm referring to the elaboration of concepts and the imposing the obligation of local governments to adjust their legislation and practice, and to address specific problems or issues by providing remedies to victims. That is quite unusual. And the court has remarkable rulings on free speech, on discrimination issues, on indigenous populations, on military jurisdiction. One of the typical recourse of governments in the region when security forces were involved in human rights atrocities was to invoke military jurisdiction. So they say, no worries, we are going to investigate our own crimes. And the court has been actually very, very firm, challenging that notion to the point that I don't think there is a single case in Latin America today—once again, with the exception of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, that I hope that somebody will ask me a question about those three countries—and I don't think there is a single case where today security forces try to—or attempt to shield themselves from investigation invoking military jurisdiction. And the credit is to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. I can elaborate, and give you—provide you with a long list of examples of areas where the court has been actually really, really critical in advancing human rights in the region. Let me give you actually one last example that I think is very—is very illustrative, very revealing. In Chile, something like probably twenty years ago or fifteen years ago, full democracy. Full democracy. No Chile under Pinochet. The Supreme Court of Chile ruled that a mother who was openly lesbian did not qualify for the custody of her children because she was lesbian. And she had a couple. So that was sufficient grounds to rule in favor of the father, because the mother didn't have the moral grounds to educate her own kids, children. And this was decided by the Supreme Court of Chile. Not just a small first instance tribunal. And I will point out that the vast majority of the—I mean, the public in Chile was pretty much divided, but I'm pretty sure that the majority of Chileans thought that the Supreme Court was right, you know? The case went to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. And fortunately, after a few years, the court not only challenged that decision of the Supreme Court, forced Chile to change its legislation, and to change the ruling of the Supreme Court of Chile, which is supposed to be the last judgment in the country. And the impact of that one, not only in Chile, in the rest of the region, because it shapes the common wisdom, the assumptions of many people. It helps for them to think carefully about this kind of issues. And the good news is that that mother was able to have the custody of her kids. And not only that, the impact in Chilean society and in the rest of the region was remarkable. Now, the second question that was asked was about how difficult it is to establish accountability for human rights abuses against the perpetrators of those abuses. I mean, it's a real challenge. It depends on whether or not you have locally an independent judiciary. If you do have an independent judiciary, the process is slow, it's messy, it's complicated. But there is a chance that atrocities could be addressed. And that is— especially human rights atrocities or abuses committed during the military dictatorship. There are countries in the region, like for instance, Chile, Peru, Argentina, Uruguay, where there are people in prison for those type of atrocities. In Brazil, thanks to an amnesty law that was passed in 1978, real investigation and prosecution of those atrocities actually never happened. And an important lesson that you could bear in mind is that Brazilian military are very dismissive of these type of issues, of human rights issues. But not only that, my sense is that Brazilian military officers at very high level are not afraid of stepping into politics, and give their opinion, and challenge the government. In other words, they were actually very, very active, and I'm referring to top officials in the Brazilian Army, during the Bolsonaro administration. There were top leaders who actually publicly argued that if they have to organize a coup again in Brazil, they are ready. That kind of language you don't find in Argentina, in Chile, in other countries where there have been some accountability. For one simple reason, the top military officers running the show are very much aware that if they get involved in politics, that they are part tomorrow of a coup d'état or something like that, at the end of the day they will be responsible. And they might be subject of criminal prosecution for atrocities committed during that period. And so there is a price to pay. So their calculation is much more, shall we say, prudent regarding this issue. But again, once again, how difficult it is? It's very difficult to establish accountability, and much more difficult when you're dealing with dictatorship, where you need to rely on the work done by, for instance, the ICC, the International Criminal Court, which is pretty active in the case of Venezuela. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I'm going to take the next question from Fordham. Q: Good afternoon, Mr. Vivanco. My name is Carlos Ortiz de la Pena Gomez Urguiza, and I have a question for you. El Salvador is currently battling crime and gangs with strategies such as mano dura, which have shown a significant decrease in crime at the cost of violating human rights. Do you see a possible effective integration of such policies in high-crime-rate countries, such as Mexico, to stop the growth of narco and crime gang activity? And if so, how? VIVANCO: Well, look, yeah, Carlos, very good question. Bukele in El Salvador is a real, real challenge. It's really, really a complicated case, for several reasons. He's incredibly popular. No question about it. He has managed to—thanks to that popularity—to concentrate power in his own hands. He fully controls Congress. But, much more relevant, he fully controls the judiciary, including the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court today is subordinated to the executive branch. And he is constantly going after the civil society, and free media, and the opposition. Now, in violation of the Salvadorean constitution, he's going to run for reelection. And he will be reelected, because he's also very popular. And his policies to go after gangs are cruel, inhuman, and without—not even a facade of respect for due process. Essentially, the policy which is not sustainable and is—I don't think is something that you could export to other countries—is a policy—unless you have full control, unless you have some sort of dictatorship or quasi dictatorship. Which is based, in essence, in the appearance, in the number of tattoos that people, especially in the marginal communities in the periferia in El Salvador, where shanty towns are located. The police has a, you know, green light to arrest anyone who fit that profile. And then good luck, because it's going to be very, very difficult for that person to avoid something like several months in prison. The whole point of having an independent judiciary and due process is that law enforcement agencies have the—obviously, not only the right, the duty to prevent crimes and to punish criminals. Not physically punish them. You know, it's to arrest them, to detain them, and to use proportional force to produce that attention. But they need to follow certain rules. They cannot just go around and arrest anyone who they have some sort of gut feelings that they are involved in crimes, because then you don't—you're not—the whole system is not able to distinguish and to make a distinction between potential criminals and innocent people. But it is complicated, the case of Bukele, because, for instance, I was referring initially to the technique of naming and shaming as a technique, as a methodology to expose governments with deplorable human rights record. But in the case of Bukele, he couldn't care less about. In other words, actually, I think he used the poor perception that exists, already that is established outside El Salvador as a result of his persecution of gangs in El Salvador—he used that kind of criticism as a way to improve his support domestically. In other words, when the New York Times published a whole report about massive abuses committed by Bukele's criminal system, in the prison system in El Salvador, what Bukele does is to take that one, that criticism, as actually ammunition to project himself as a tough guy who is actually, you know, doing the right thing for El Salvador. It's a question of time. It's a question of time. All of this is very sad for El Salvador, one of the few democracies in Central America with some future, I think, because I think they managed after the war to create institutions that are—that were much more credible than in the neighboring countries, like Guatemala, Honduras, and I'm not going to even mention Nicaragua. But under the control of this strongman, everything is possible today in El Salvador. He will be able to govern El Salvador this way as long as he's popular. Unfortunately, the Biden administration has relaxed its attention and pressure on that government, based on the question of migration. So they are hostage by the cooperation of Bukele government to try or attempt to control illegal immigration into the U.S. So that point trumps or, I mean, supersedes everything else. And that is actually very unfortunate. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I'm going to take the next two questions, written questions. One is on the subject that you wanted, from Brittney Thomas, who is an undergraduate at Arizona State University: How come the governments of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua are socialist or communist while other Latin America countries are predominantly democracies? And then from Roger— VIVANCO: I'm sorry, I couldn't understand the question. Obviously, it's about Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, but? FASKIANOS: Why are they socialist or communist while other Latin American countries are predominantly democracies? VIVANCO: Oh, I see. OK. FASKIANOS: Yeah. And then the next question is from Roger Rose, who is an associate professor of political science at University of Minnesota, Morris: Given the recent decline in the norms of U.S. democracy in the last seven years, does the U.S. have any credibility and influence in the region in promoting democracy? And, again, if you could comment specifically on nations with the least democratic systems—Venezuela, Nicaragua—how could the U.S. play a more constructive role than it is currently? VIVANCO: The U.S. is always a very important player, very, very important. I mean, it's the largest economy in the world and the influence of the U.S. government in Latin America is huge. However, obviously, I have to acknowledge that our domestic problems here and serious challenges to the fundamentals of the rule of law, and just the notion that we respect the system according to which one who wins the election is—you know, has the legitimacy and the mandate to form a new government. If that notion is in question, and there are millions of American citizens who are willing to challenge that premise, obviously undermines the capacity of the U.S. to exercise leadership on this—in this context. And the autocrats and the autocracies in the region—I'm not referring to the dictatorships, but I'm referring to the Andrés Manuel López Obrador, once again, from Mexico, or Bolsonaro in Brazil—they take those kinds of developments in the U.S. as green lights to do whatever they want at local level. So that is a serious—obviously, it's a serious problem. And what is going on here has ramifications not only in the region, but also in the rest of the world. Now, Cuba is a historical problem. It's going to be too long to address the question in terms of why Cuba is a dictatorship and the rest of the region. Part of the problem with Cuba is that you have a government that violates the most fundamental rights and persecutes everyone who challenges the official line. And most of the Cubans today are willing to leave the country and to go into exile. But the problem is that we don't have the right tool, the right instrument in place, to exercise pressure on Cuba. And the right instrument today is the embargo. And that embargo, that policy is a total failure. The Cuban government is the same, exactly the same dictatorship. There has been no progress. And there's going to be no progress, in my view, as long as the U.S. government insist on a policy of isolation. You should be aware that every year 99 percentage of the states in the world condemned the isolation against Cuba, with the exception and the opposition of the U.S. government, Israel, and in the past was the Marshall Islands. Now, I don't think even the Marshall Islands joined the U.S. government defending that policy. So the policy is incredibly unpopular. And the debate at international level is about the U.S. government policy on Cuba and not about the deplorable human rights record of Cuba. That's why I was actually very supportive of the change of policy attempted during the Obama administration. Unfortunately, the isolation policy depends on Congress. And since the times of Clinton, this is a matter of who is the one in control of Congress. And the policy of isolation, it once again makes Cuba a victim of Washington. And Cuba, by the way, is not isolated from the rest of the world. So the U.S. is incredibly, I would say, powerless with regard to the lack of democracy and human rights in Cuba. And at the time, offers a fantastic justification for the Cuban government to present itself as a victim. I think that is the—this is one of the most serious mistakes of the U.S. foreign policy in Latin America that I hope that one day will be—will be addressed effectively. The case of Nicaragua and Venezuela is different, in the sense that we are looking into countries that—Venezuela in particular—have democracy for—a very questionable democracy, very weak, subject of tremendous corruption, and so on and so forth. But they have a system of political parties, free media, and so on, for many, many years. And they end up electing a populist leader whose marching orders and, you know, actually first majors was to establish some effective control of the judiciary. And the Supreme Court became an appendage of the government many, many, many years ago, which means that they managed during the Chavez administration to run the country with some sort of facade of democracy. Today, under Maduro it's no a longer a façade, it's a clear dictatorship responsible for atrocities. Fortunately, it is under investigation by the ICC. And the case of Nicaragua is an extreme case, similar to Venezuela. And it's—it's a dictator who has managed to put in prison everyone who is not in full alliance with the government, including religious leaders, and academics, and opposition leaders, civil society, et cetera. The case of Nicaragua is more complicated because Nicaragua is subject of sanctions by the U.S. government, and the European Union, and Canada, and some governments in the region. But still, we don't see much progress there. FASKIANOS: Great. I'm going to go next to Nassar Nassar, who has a raised hand. You can unmute yourself and state your affiliation. Q: Yes. Hello. FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you. Q: Hi. My name is Nassar Nassar. I'm from Lewis University. So my question is, which are the most significant actors in the global governance of human trafficking? And how effective are they in tackling that? VIVANCO: Well, this is a matter that is usually—the main actors—so this is organized crime. This is organized crime. This is a question regarding—this is a—it's a huge business, and extremely profitable. And if you want to address these kinds of issues, you need regional cooperation, which is very challenging. Keep in mind that at a local level, in many of the most democratic countries in the region, you have tremendous tensions among the local police and different police. For instance, the local FBI—equivalent to an FBI, is usually in tension with other branches of law enforcement. And if you expect to have cooperation from the rest of the countries in the region, it's extremely challenging. So these type of issues require effective cooperation, adjustment on legislation. Require more better intelligence. The reason why you have this type—proliferation of this type of business is because, obviously, corruption and lack of accountability. So this is—my point is that it is a reflection of how weak is our law enforcement system, and how unprofessional, and subject many times of corruption. FASKIANOS: Just to follow up on that, a written question from Patricia Drown, who's at Regent University. How are the cartels and mafia being armed, and by whom? VIVANCO: Well, in the case of, for instance, Mexico, weapons comes from the U.S. Sometimes even legally. You know, the Second Amendment plays a role here. It's so easy to have access to weapons, all kind of weapons, in the U.S. So that helps. And a lack of actually an effective control mechanism to stop that type of traffic. The amount of money that cartels moved in countries like Mexico, but Colombia as well, and this mafia scene in Central America is significant. So they do have capacity to corrupt local enforcement officials that belongs to the police, the army, even the judiciary. And as long as you don't address the root cause of the problem, which is the lack of presence of the state—in other words, there are vast—as you know, there are regions of Colombia that are not under the control of the government, the territories in Colombia. And there are regions of Mexico that, unfortunately, are increasingly under more effective control of cartels than law enforcement and legitimate officials. So that unfortunately, is the—in my view, one of the reasons why it is relatively easy to witness this type of proliferation of illegal business. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. I think we are out of time. We have so many written questions and raised hands. Maybe I'll just try to sneak in one more from Andrea Cuervo Prados. You have your hand raised. I think you also wrote a question. So if you can be brief and tell us who you are. Q: OK. Hello. I'm adjunct faculty at Dickinson State University. And, Mr. Vivanco, I have a question related to Colombia. What do you think about the state of the human rights in Colombia under the new leftist president, Gustavo Petro, compared to the previous president, Ivan Duque? VIVANCO: Andrea, I think it's pretty much the same. When we witness actually an improvement of human rights conditions in Colombia, it was during the negotiations with the FARC. I'm referring to the administration of President Juan Manuel Santos. And with the signature of the peace agreement, when they signed the peace agreement, the numbers shows a serious decline in the cases of, for instance, internally displaced people, torture cases, executions, abductions, and many other of those typical abuses that are committed in Colombia in rural areas where this organized crime and irregular armed groups are historically present. But then the policies implemented during the Duque administration were actually not very effective. There was a sort of relaxation during that period, and not effective implementation of those commitments negotiated with the FARC. That had an implication in terms of abuses. And today I don't see a major shift. My sense is that the local communities are subject of similar abuses, including human rights activists as well as social leaders, in areas where there is a very weak presence of the state. FASKIANOS: Thank you very much. José Miguel Vivanco. We really appreciate your being with us today. And I apologize. Great questions. I'm sorry, we couldn't get to all of the written ones or raised hands. It's clear we will have to do this—focus in on this again and have you back. You can follow José Miguel on X at @VivancoJM. And the next Academic Webinar will be on Wednesday, November 29, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Shibley Telhami, who's a professor at the University of Maryland, will lead a conversation on public opinion on Israel and Palestine. And in the meantime, I encourage you to learn about CFR paid internships for students and fellowships for professors at CFR.org/careers. You can follow us at @CFR_Academic. And visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues. Again, José Miguel, thank you very much for today, and to all of you for joining us. VIVANCO: Thanks a lot. FASKIANOS: Take care. (END)

José Miguel Vivanco, adjunct senior fellow for human rights at CFR and former executive director of the Americas division at Human Rights Watch, leads the conversation on human rights in Latin America. FASKIANOS: Welcome to today's session of the Fall 2023 CFR Academic Webinar Series. I'm Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. Today's discussion is on the record. The video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org, if you would like to share them with your colleagues or classmates. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We are delighted to have José Miguel Vivanco with us to discuss human rights in Latin America. Mr. Vivanco is an adjunct senior fellow for human rights at CFR and partner at Dentons Global Advisors. He formerly served as the executive director of the Americas Division at Human Rights Watch, where he supervised fact-finding research for numerous reports on gross violations of human rights and advocated strengthening international legal standards and domestic compliance throughout the region. He is the founder of the Center for Justice and International Law, an international civil society organization providing legal and technical assistance with the Inter-American Human Rights System. So, José Miguel, thank you very much for being with us today. I thought you could begin by giving us an overview of what you see as the most important human rights challenges and advances in Latin America today. VIVANCO: Well, thank you very much for this invitation. It is a pleasure to be with you all and to talk for an hour about human rights problems, human rights issues in Latin America. Let me first make a couple of points. First, I think it's very important that, in retrospect, if you look at Latin America in the 1960s, 1970s, and even 1980s, it was a region that was pretty much run by military dictatorships. So if you look at historically, the region is not in such a bad shape. I know that this comment is quite controversial and many experts who follow the region closely might disagree with that statement, but objectively speaking I think we need to recognize that most of the region is run today—with the exception, obviously, of Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua—by democracies, weak democracies, the kind of democracies that we have in Latin America are facing very serious challenges and with endemic problems such as corruption, abuse of power, lack of transparency, lack of proper accountability, and so on and so forth. But in general terms, this is a region that has a chance to conduct some self-correction. In other words, electoral democracy is a very, very important value in the region, and the citizens—most of the people are able to either reward or punish the incumbent government at the times of elections. That is not a minor detail. It is extremely important, especially if you take into account that during the last twenty years in Latin America, if I'm not wrong, the vast majority of the governments elected were from the opposition. The statistics, I think, show that in eighteen of the twenty last presidential elections, the winner has been the party of the opposition; which means that even though our democracies in Latin America are dysfunctional, weak, messy, slow, you know, short-term-oriented, obviously, but at least citizens take their rights seriously and they exercise their powers so that is why you see a regular zigzag or, you know, transfer of power from a left-wing government to a right-wing government or vice versa. And that is, again, something that is, obviously, a very, very important tool of self-correction. And that, obviously, includes or has an impact in terms of the human rights record of those countries. You know, I'm not—I'm not addressing yet—I will leave it for the Q&A section—conditions in those three dictatorships in Latin America. Let me just make some few more remarks about one of the biggest challenges that I see in the region. And that is, obviously, the rise of autocracy or autocratic leaders, populist leaders, leaders who are not interested or as a matter of fact are very hostile to the concept of rule of law and the concept of independence of the judiciary. And they usually are very charismatic. They have high level of popular support. And they run and govern the country in a style that is like a permanent campaign, where they normally go against minorities and against the opposition, against the free media, against judges and prosecutors who dare to investigate them or investigate the government. Anyone who challenges them are subject of this type of reaction. And that is, unfortunately, something that we have seen in Mexico recently and until today, and in Brazil, especially during the administration of President Bolsonaro. The good news about, in the case of Brazil, is that, thanks to electoral democracy, it was possible to defeat him and—democratically. And the second very important piece of information is that even though Brazil is not a model of rule of law and separation of power, we have to acknowledge that, thanks to the checks-and-balance exercise by the Supreme Court of Brazil, it was possible to do some permanent, constant damage control against the most outrageous initiatives promoted by the administration of President Bolsonaro. That, I think, is one of the biggest challenges in the region. Let me conclude my—make crystal clear that there are serious human rights problems in Latin America today regarding, for instance, abuse of power, police brutality, prison problems. Prisons are really, in most of the countries in the region, a disaster. And you know, a big number of prisoners are awaiting trial, in detention and unable to really exercise their rights. And unfortunately, populist leaders use the prison system or essentially criminal law, by expanding the practice and enlarging the numbers of crimes that could be subject of pretrial detention, and—you know, regardless of the time that it will take for that case to be prosecuted in full respect for the rule—due process, and so on and so forth. And that—the reason is very simple. There is a real demand in Latin America for policies that will address insecurity, citizen security. If you look at statistics in terms of crime rate, it is going up in most of the country. Obviously, there are big difference between countries like Mexico, for instance, or Colombia, and if you link—if you look at the power of cartels and big mafias, and gangs in other countries, or petty crime impacting the daily life of the citizens. Regardless of that point, one of the biggest demands in Latin America is for better and more public security. And that's why political leaders, usually the solution for that request and demand is to put people in prison with essentially no real due process and increase the number of prisoners without conviction. There are challenges for free speech occasionally, of those leaders who resent scrutiny of their practice. And normally there is a campaign against free media. And there are some attempts in some countries to constantly look for ways to undermine the independence of the judiciary. Keep in mind, for instance, that now in Argentina the whole Supreme Court is under impeachment, and it's essentially an impeachment promoted by the current government because they disagree with the rulings, positions of the Supreme Court. All the justices on the Supreme Court are subject of this political trial conducted by the Argentine Congress. That is a concrete example of the kinds of risks that are present for judges and the judiciary in general, when they exercise their power and they attempt to protect the integrity of the constitution. So let me stop here and we can move on to the most interesting part of this event. FASKIANOS: Well, that was quite interesting. So, thank you, José Miguel. We appreciate it. We going to go to all of you now for your questions. (Gives queuing instructions.) We already have some hands up. We will go first to Karla Soto Valdes. Q: My name is Karla Soto. I'm from Lewis University. My question is, what specific measures could be implemented to address and/or prevent trafficking within the asylum-seeking community during their journey to the U.S.? VIVANCO: Irina, are we going to take several questions, or? FASKIANOS: I think we should do one at a time. VIVANCO: Well, Karla, there are multiple tools to address that specific issue. But this applies to essentially most of the human rights problems all over the world. The menu is pretty ample, but depends on one important factor—whether the government involved cares about its own reputation. That is a very important premise here, because if you we are dealing with a democratic government, once again, it's not—when I refer to a democratic government, I don't have in mind a sort of Jeffersonian model, I'm referring to the kind of democracies that we have in Latin America. But, if the leaders in charge are—you know, they care about their own reputation, they care about domestic debate, very important, because these types of revelations usually have ramifications at the local level. If they pay close attention to those issues, I think it's possible to apply, essentially, the technique of naming and shaming. In other words, collecting information, documenting what exactly is happening, and revealing that information to the public, locally and internationally. That is going to create naturally a reaction, a process, an awareness, and local pressure is—hopefully, it's not just twenty-four hours news, so splash—big splash, but also will trigger some dynamics. If we are dealing with a country that is run by a dictatorship, it is a very, very different question, because normally you're facing a leader, a government, who couldn't care less about its own reputation. They have taken already and assume the cost of doing business in that type of context. Now, sometimes conditions are kind of mixed, where you have democratic country in general—so there is still free media, there is an opposition, there is Congress, there are elections. But the government in charge is so—is run by an autocratic leader. That makes, you know, quite—a little more challenging to just document and reveal that information. And you need to think about some particular agenda, governmental agenda. Some specific interests of the government in different areas. Let me see—let me give you an example. Let's say that the Bolsonaro administration is seriously interested in an incorporation into the OECD in Paris. That is an important piece of information. Whatever you think that is relevant information regarding the record of that government, you could provide information to an entity that is precisely evaluating the record of the government. And the government will be much more willing to address those issues because they have a genuine interest in achieving some specific goal at the international level. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. We're going to go to Nicole Ambar De Santos, who is an undergraduate student at the Washington University in St. Louis: When we consider weak democracy in a more personal sense, like Peru, the controversy of obligation to help these nations arises. How much third party or other nations, such as the United States, intervene? VIVANCO: Tricky question. Peruvian democracy is quite messy. Part of the problem is that the system, the political system, needs some real reform to avoid the proliferation of small political parties and to create the real link or relationship between leaders, especially in Congress, and their constituencies, and so they are much more accountable to their community, the ones who elected them. I don't think the U.S., or any other government, has a direct role to play in that area. My sense is that when we are looking into a dysfunctional democracy that deserve some probably even constitutional reforms, that is essentially a domestic job. That is the work that needs to be done by Peruvians. Without a local consensus about the reforms that need to be implemented in the political system, my sense is that it's going to be very difficult for the U.S. or any other large democracy, to address those kinds of points. It's very different, that type of conversation, from a conversation or an assessment of universal values, such as human rights. When we are looking into cases of police brutality, for instance, the international community has a role to play. But if I were part of the conversation or evaluation by the U.S. government or the European Union with regard to this dysfunctional democracy in Peru, I would approach very carefully by suggesting creating the right type of incentives, more than questions of punishment, or sanctions. It's incentives for them to create the right conditions to address the domestic problem that is—has become quite endemic, in the case of Peru. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I'm going to take the next question from Matthew. Matthew, you don't have a last name, so can you identify yourself? Q: Hello. Yes, my name is Matthew. I am a junior student from Arizona State University studying business, but working on a thesis that has to do with human rights and the ethics of supply chain management. My question is, you were talking at the very beginning kind of just about history and how understanding history is important. And what I was hoping to get was, why is understanding history and culture important when working to address human rights issues, history of dictatorship, colonialism? In cultures it's socially acceptable things, like child labor, in some countries, that's not acceptable in Western ideology. So, yeah, just how is history and culture important when working to address human rights for the future? VIVANCO: Matthew, I think you're referring to two different issues. History is central. It's really, really relevant. Because that helps you—if you—if you follow your history, especially periods of time when massive and gross violations were committed in Latin America, it's important to put things in context and value what you have today. And the job is to—not only to preserve democracy, but also to look for ways to strengthen democracy. Because part of the problem is that domestic debate is so polarized today, not just in Latin America, all over the world, that sometimes people—different, you know, segments of society—in their positions, they're so dismissive of the other side, that they don't realize that we need to frame our debate in a constructive way. Let me put it—one specific example. If the government of Argentina, who is a government very receptive and very sensitive to vast and gross violations of human rights committed during the military dictatorship, so in other words, I don't need to lecture that government on that subject. They are actually the people who vote for the current government of Argentina—not the new government, the current government of Argentina—is deeply committed to those kinds of issues. I think that one of the biggest lessons that you should learn from the past is the relevance of protecting the independence of the judiciary. If you don't have an independent judiciary, and the judiciary becomes an entity that is an appendix of the ruling party or is intimidated by politics, and they could be subject of impeachment procedures every time that they rule something, that the powerful—the establishment disagree, I think they're playing with fire, and they're not really paying attention to the lessons that you learn from recent history in Latin America. That would be my first comment regarding that type of issue. And the second one, about you mentioned specifically cultural problems, culture, tensions or conflicts. And you mentioned—your example was child labor. And, and you suggested that that—the combination of child labor is something typical of Western ideology. If I'm not wrong, that was the language that you used. I would—I would push back on that point. And because this is not just a Western or European commitment. This is a universal one. And this is reflected on international treaties, and that are supposed to eradicate that kind of practice. If you give up to the concept of local traditions, you know, cultural, you know, issues that you need to pay attention, sure, as long as they are not to be in conflict with fundamental human rights. Otherwise, in half of the planet you're not going to have women rights, and women will be subject of traditional control. And you wouldn't have rights for minorities, and especially—and not only, but especially—the LGBTQ community. And you wouldn't have rights for racial minorities, or different religious beliefs. So, we have to watch and be very careful about what type of concessions we make to cultural traditions. I am happy to understand that different communities in Latin America might have different traditions, but there is some firm, solid, and unquestionable minimum that are the these universal human rights values that are not the property or monopoly of anyone. You know, these are—and this is not an ethical conversation. This is a legal one, because these values are protected under international law. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I'm going to combine or take two questions. The first question is from Lindsay Bert, who is at the department of political science at Muhlenberg College, who asks if you could speak on the efficacy of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in addressing the human rights violations you described. And the second question is from Leonard Onyebuchi Ophoke, a graduate student at Cavendish University in Uganda: Why is it almost impossible to hold the actors that violate human rights accountable? What could be done to make the mechanism more enforceable? VIVANCO: The inter-American system of human rights protection, there is nothing similar to inter-American system of human rights protection in the Global South. You don't have something similar in Asia, or Africa, or the Middle East. In other words, you don't have a mechanism where ultimately a court, a court of law—not just a commission, a court of law—handle individual cases, specific complaints of human rights abuses, and governments participate in public hearings. The parties involved have the obligation to present evidence before the court, and the court finally ruled on the specific matters where its decisions are binding. The number of issues that have been addressed by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in the last thirty years in Latin America are really incredible. And the impact—this is most important point—the impact at a local level is remarkable. In the area, for instance, of torture, disappearances. I'm referring to the elaboration of concepts and the imposing the obligation of local governments to adjust their legislation and practice, and to address specific problems or issues by providing remedies to victims. That is quite unusual. And the court has remarkable rulings on free speech, on discrimination issues, on indigenous populations, on military jurisdiction. One of the typical recourse of governments in the region when security forces were involved in human rights atrocities was to invoke military jurisdiction. So they say, no worries, we are going to investigate our own crimes. And the court has been actually very, very firm, challenging that notion to the point that I don't think there is a single case in Latin America today—once again, with the exception of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, that I hope that somebody will ask me a question about those three countries—and I don't think there is a single case where today security forces try to—or attempt to shield themselves from investigation invoking military jurisdiction. And the credit is to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. I can elaborate, and give you—provide you with a long list of examples of areas where the court has been actually really, really critical in advancing human rights in the region. Let me give you actually one last example that I think is very—is very illustrative, very revealing. In Chile, something like probably twenty years ago or fifteen years ago, full democracy. Full democracy. No Chile under Pinochet. The Supreme Court of Chile ruled that a mother who was openly lesbian did not qualify for the custody of her children because she was lesbian. And she had a couple. So that was sufficient grounds to rule in favor of the father, because the mother didn't have the moral grounds to educate her own kids, children. And this was decided by the Supreme Court of Chile. Not just a small first instance tribunal. And I will point out that the vast majority of the—I mean, the public in Chile was pretty much divided, but I'm pretty sure that the majority of Chileans thought that the Supreme Court was right, you know? The case went to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. And fortunately, after a few years, the court not only challenged that decision of the Supreme Court, forced Chile to change its legislation, and to change the ruling of the Supreme Court of Chile, which is supposed to be the last judgment in the country. And the impact of that one, not only in Chile, in the rest of the region, because it shapes the common wisdom, the assumptions of many people. It helps for them to think carefully about this kind of issues. And the good news is that that mother was able to have the custody of her kids. And not only that, the impact in Chilean society and in the rest of the region was remarkable. Now, the second question that was asked was about how difficult it is to establish accountability for human rights abuses against the perpetrators of those abuses. I mean, it's a real challenge. It depends on whether or not you have locally an independent judiciary. If you do have an independent judiciary, the process is slow, it's messy, it's complicated. But there is a chance that atrocities could be addressed. And that is— especially human rights atrocities or abuses committed during the military dictatorship. There are countries in the region, like for instance, Chile, Peru, Argentina, Uruguay, where there are people in prison for those type of atrocities. In Brazil, thanks to an amnesty law that was passed in 1978, real investigation and prosecution of those atrocities actually never happened. And an important lesson that you could bear in mind is that Brazilian military are very dismissive of these type of issues, of human rights issues. But not only that, my sense is that Brazilian military officers at very high level are not afraid of stepping into politics, and give their opinion, and challenge the government. In other words, they were actually very, very active, and I'm referring to top officials in the Brazilian Army, during the Bolsonaro administration. There were top leaders who actually publicly argued that if they have to organize a coup again in Brazil, they are ready. That kind of language you don't find in Argentina, in Chile, in other countries where there have been some accountability. For one simple reason, the top military officers running the show are very much aware that if they get involved in politics, that they are part tomorrow of a coup d'état or something like that, at the end of the day they will be responsible. And they might be subject of criminal prosecution for atrocities committed during that period. And so there is a price to pay. So their calculation is much more, shall we say, prudent regarding this issue. But again, once again, how difficult it is? It's very difficult to establish accountability, and much more difficult when you're dealing with dictatorship, where you need to rely on the work done by, for instance, the ICC, the International Criminal Court, which is pretty active in the case of Venezuela. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I'm going to take the next question from Fordham. Q: Good afternoon, Mr. Vivanco. My name is Carlos Ortiz de la Pena Gomez Urguiza, and I have a question for you. El Salvador is currently battling crime and gangs with strategies such as mano dura, which have shown a significant decrease in crime at the cost of violating human rights. Do you see a possible effective integration of such policies in high-crime-rate countries, such as Mexico, to stop the growth of narco and crime gang activity? And if so, how? VIVANCO: Well, look, yeah, Carlos, very good question. Bukele in El Salvador is a real, real challenge. It's really, really a complicated case, for several reasons. He's incredibly popular. No question about it. He has managed to—thanks to that popularity—to concentrate power in his own hands. He fully controls Congress. But, much more relevant, he fully controls the judiciary, including the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court today is subordinated to the executive branch. And he is constantly going after the civil society, and free media, and the opposition. Now, in violation of the Salvadorean constitution, he's going to run for reelection. And he will be reelected, because he's also very popular. And his policies to go after gangs are cruel, inhuman, and without—not even a facade of respect for due process. Essentially, the policy which is not sustainable and is—I don't think is something that you could export to other countries—is a policy—unless you have full control, unless you have some sort of dictatorship or quasi dictatorship. Which is based, in essence, in the appearance, in the number of tattoos that people, especially in the marginal communities in the periferia in El Salvador, where shanty towns are located. The police has a, you know, green light to arrest anyone who fit that profile. And then good luck, because it's going to be very, very difficult for that person to avoid something like several months in prison. The whole point of having an independent judiciary and due process is that law enforcement agencies have the—obviously, not only the right, the duty to prevent crimes and to punish criminals. Not physically punish them. You know, it's to arrest them, to detain them, and to use proportional force to produce that attention. But they need to follow certain rules. They cannot just go around and arrest anyone who they have some sort of gut feelings that they are involved in crimes, because then you don't—you're not—the whole system is not able to distinguish and to make a distinction between potential criminals and innocent people. But it is complicated, the case of Bukele, because, for instance, I was referring initially to the technique of naming and shaming as a technique, as a methodology to expose governments with deplorable human rights record. But in the case of Bukele, he couldn't care less about. In other words, actually, I think he used the poor perception that exists, already that is established outside El Salvador as a result of his persecution of gangs in El Salvador—he used that kind of criticism as a way to improve his support domestically. In other words, when the New York Times published a whole report about massive abuses committed by Bukele's criminal system, in the prison system in El Salvador, what Bukele does is to take that one, that criticism, as actually ammunition to project himself as a tough guy who is actually, you know, doing the right thing for El Salvador. It's a question of time. It's a question of time. All of this is very sad for El Salvador, one of the few democracies in Central America with some future, I think, because I think they managed after the war to create institutions that are—that were much more credible than in the neighboring countries, like Guatemala, Honduras, and I'm not going to even mention Nicaragua. But under the control of this strongman, everything is possible today in El Salvador. He will be able to govern El Salvador this way as long as he's popular. Unfortunately, the Biden administration has relaxed its attention and pressure on that government, based on the question of migration. So they are hostage by the cooperation of Bukele government to try or attempt to control illegal immigration into the U.S. So that point trumps or, I mean, supersedes everything else. And that is actually very unfortunate. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I'm going to take the next two questions, written questions. One is on the subject that you wanted, from Brittney Thomas, who is an undergraduate at Arizona State University: How come the governments of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua are socialist or communist while other Latin America countries are predominantly democracies? And then from Roger— VIVANCO: I'm sorry, I couldn't understand the question. Obviously, it's about Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, but? FASKIANOS: Why are they socialist or communist while other Latin American countries are predominantly democracies? VIVANCO: Oh, I see. OK. FASKIANOS: Yeah. And then the next question is from Roger Rose, who is an associate professor of political science at University of Minnesota, Morris: Given the recent decline in the norms of U.S. democracy in the last seven years, does the U.S. have any credibility and influence in the region in promoting democracy? And, again, if you could comment specifically on nations with the least democratic systems—Venezuela, Nicaragua—how could the U.S. play a more constructive role than it is currently? VIVANCO: The U.S. is always a very important player, very, very important. I mean, it's the largest economy in the world and the influence of the U.S. government in Latin America is huge. However, obviously, I have to acknowledge that our domestic problems here and serious challenges to the fundamentals of the rule of law, and just the notion that we respect the system according to which one who wins the election is—you know, has the legitimacy and the mandate to form a new government. If that notion is in question, and there are millions of American citizens who are willing to challenge that premise, obviously undermines the capacity of the U.S. to exercise leadership on this—in this context. And the autocrats and the autocracies in the region—I'm not referring to the dictatorships, but I'm referring to the Andrés Manuel López Obrador, once again, from Mexico, or Bolsonaro in Brazil—they take those kinds of developments in the U.S. as green lights to do whatever they want at local level. So that is a serious—obviously, it's a serious problem. And what is going on here has ramifications not only in the region, but also in the rest of the world. Now, Cuba is a historical problem. It's going to be too long to address the question in terms of why Cuba is a dictatorship and the rest of the region. Part of the problem with Cuba is that you have a government that violates the most fundamental rights and persecutes everyone who challenges the official line. And most of the Cubans today are willing to leave the country and to go into exile. But the problem is that we don't have the right tool, the right instrument in place, to exercise pressure on Cuba. And the right instrument today is the embargo. And that embargo, that policy is a total failure. The Cuban government is the same, exactly the same dictatorship. There has been no progress. And there's going to be no progress, in my view, as long as the U.S. government insist on a policy of isolation. You should be aware that every year 99 percentage of the states in the world condemned the isolation against Cuba, with the exception and the opposition of the U.S. government, Israel, and in the past was the Marshall Islands. Now, I don't think even the Marshall Islands joined the U.S. government defending that policy. So the policy is incredibly unpopular. And the debate at international level is about the U.S. government policy on Cuba and not about the deplorable human rights record of Cuba. That's why I was actually very supportive of the change of policy attempted during the Obama administration. Unfortunately, the isolation policy depends on Congress. And since the times of Clinton, this is a matter of who is the one in control of Congress. And the policy of isolation, it once again makes Cuba a victim of Washington. And Cuba, by the way, is not isolated from the rest of the world. So the U.S. is incredibly, I would say, powerless with regard to the lack of democracy and human rights in Cuba. And at the time, offers a fantastic justification for the Cuban government to present itself as a victim. I think that is the—this is one of the most serious mistakes of the U.S. foreign policy in Latin America that I hope that one day will be—will be addressed effectively. The case of Nicaragua and Venezuela is different, in the sense that we are looking into countries that—Venezuela in particular—have democracy for—a very questionable democracy, very weak, subject of tremendous corruption, and so on and so forth. But they have a system of political parties, free media, and so on, for many, many years. And they end up electing a populist leader whose marching orders and, you know, actually first majors was to establish some effective control of the judiciary. And the Supreme Court became an appendage of the government many, many, many years ago, which means that they managed during the Chavez administration to run the country with some sort of facade of democracy. Today, under Maduro it's no a longer a façade, it's a clear dictatorship responsible for atrocities. Fortunately, it is under investigation by the ICC. And the case of Nicaragua is an extreme case, similar to Venezuela. And it's—it's a dictator who has managed to put in prison everyone who is not in full alliance with the government, including religious leaders, and academics, and opposition leaders, civil society, et cetera. The case of Nicaragua is more complicated because Nicaragua is subject of sanctions by the U.S. government, and the European Union, and Canada, and some governments in the region. But still, we don't see much progress there. FASKIANOS: Great. I'm going to go next to Nassar Nassar, who has a raised hand. You can unmute yourself and state your affiliation. Q: Yes. Hello. FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you. Q: Hi. My name is Nassar Nassar. I'm from Lewis University. So my question is, which are the most significant actors in the global governance of human trafficking? And how effective are they in tackling that? VIVANCO: Well, this is a matter that is usually—the main actors—so this is organized crime. This is organized crime. This is a question regarding—this is a—it's a huge business, and extremely profitable. And if you want to address these kinds of issues, you need regional cooperation, which is very challenging. Keep in mind that at a local level, in many of the most democratic countries in the region, you have tremendous tensions among the local police and different police. For instance, the local FBI—equivalent to an FBI, is usually in tension with other branches of law enforcement. And if you expect to have cooperation from the rest of the countries in the region, it's extremely challenging. So these type of issues require effective cooperation, adjustment on legislation. Require more better intelligence. The reason why you have this type—proliferation of this type of business is because, obviously, corruption and lack of accountability. So this is—my point is that it is a reflection of how weak is our law enforcement system, and how unprofessional, and subject many times of corruption. FASKIANOS: Just to follow up on that, a written question from Patricia Drown, who's at Regent University. How are the cartels and mafia being armed, and by whom? VIVANCO: Well, in the case of, for instance, Mexico, weapons comes from the U.S. Sometimes even legally. You know, the Second Amendment plays a role here. It's so easy to have access to weapons, all kind of weapons, in the U.S. So that helps. And a lack of actually an effective control mechanism to stop that type of traffic. The amount of money that cartels moved in countries like Mexico, but Colombia as well, and this mafia scene in Central America is significant. So they do have capacity to corrupt local enforcement officials that belongs to the police, the army, even the judiciary. And as long as you don't address the root cause of the problem, which is the lack of presence of the state—in other words, there are vast—as you know, there are regions of Colombia that are not under the control of the government, the territories in Colombia. And there are regions of Mexico that, unfortunately, are increasingly under more effective control of cartels than law enforcement and legitimate officials. So that unfortunately, is the—in my view, one of the reasons why it is relatively easy to witness this type of proliferation of illegal business. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. I think we are out of time. We have so many written questions and raised hands. Maybe I'll just try to sneak in one more from Andrea Cuervo Prados. You have your hand raised. I think you also wrote a question. So if you can be brief and tell us who you are. Q: OK. Hello. I'm adjunct faculty at Dickinson State University. And, Mr. Vivanco, I have a question related to Colombia. What do you think about the state of the human rights in Colombia under the new leftist president, Gustavo Petro, compared to the previous president, Ivan Duque? VIVANCO: Andrea, I think it's pretty much the same. When we witness actually an improvement of human rights conditions in Colombia, it was during the negotiations with the FARC. I'm referring to the administration of President Juan Manuel Santos. And with the signature of the peace agreement, when they signed the peace agreement, the numbers shows a serious decline in the cases of, for instance, internally displaced people, torture cases, executions, abductions, and many other of those typical abuses that are committed in Colombia in rural areas where this organized crime and irregular armed groups are historically present. But then the policies implemented during the Duque administration were actually not very effective. There was a sort of relaxation during that period, and not effective implementation of those commitments negotiated with the FARC. That had an implication in terms of abuses. And today I don't see a major shift. My sense is that the local communities are subject of similar abuses, including human rights activists as well as social leaders, in areas where there is a very weak presence of the state. FASKIANOS: Thank you very much. José Miguel Vivanco. We really appreciate your being with us today. And I apologize. Great questions. I'm sorry, we couldn't get to all of the written ones or raised hands. It's clear we will have to do this—focus in on this again and have you back. You can follow José Miguel on X at @VivancoJM. And the next Academic Webinar will be on Wednesday, November 29, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Shibley Telhami, who's a professor at the University of Maryland, will lead a conversation on public opinion on Israel and Palestine. And in the meantime, I encourage you to learn about CFR paid internships for students and fellowships for professors at CFR.org/careers. You can follow us at @CFR_Academic. And visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues. Again, José Miguel, thank you very much for today, and to all of you for joining us. VIVANCO: Thanks a lot. FASKIANOS: Take care. (END)

September 11 is now engraved on the consciousness of Americans. Yet for the South American country of Chile, the date has a different and much more tragic significance. It was on that day in 1973 that the democratically-elected government of Salvador Allende was overthrown in a CIA-backed military coup. Augusto Pinochet seized power. In the ensuing years, tens of thousands of Chileans were killed, jailed, tortured and driven into exile. The U.S. role, under Nixon and his National Security Advisor Kissinger, in first destabilizing and then overthrowing the Allende government was decisive. It will rank among the most grotesque interventions ever undertaken by the U.S. A few years after the coup, Nobel Peace Prize winner Kissinger visited Chile. He told General Pinochet, “In the United States, as you know, we are sympathetic with what you are trying to do here.” Recorded at the Wellfleet Public Library as part of Ethel & Robert Levy's speakers series Talking Together.

In the midst of a constitutional crisis, Chileans are also at odds over the legacy of one of the darkest days in their past. Fifty years ago, in September 1973, a military coup, welcomed but not directly instigated by the CIA, toppled the democratically-elected, socialist president Salvadore Allende. Army Gen. Augusto Pinochet took power and ruled Chile with an iron fist for nearly 17 years. Pinochet's regime was notorious for murdering, torturing, and imprisoning thousands of its opponents, canceling elections, and destroying labor unions. Yet, according to polls, significant numbers of Chileans today believe the military coup was justified because of the economic chaos and Marxist drift brought on by Allende's management of the country. Today's conflict over drafting a new constitution (to replace the Pinochet-era constitution) is a reflection of Chile's complicated history of political strife between left and right. In this episode, historians James Lockhart and Kristian Gustafson dissect the CIA's role in opposing Allende's rule after 1970. President Nixon hoped U.S. operatives could somehow block Allende's inauguration by covertly working with his domestic opponents in the Chilean military, Congress, and media. These efforts failed, but the country was embroiled in such chaos by 1973 that the military may have needed no such U.S. encouragement to ultimately dispatch Allende's government.

Senior Latino Correspondent Al Madrigal tackles an array of issues, including: Tucson's Mexican-American studies ban, a general lack of opportunity for Latinos in show business, the cultural differences among Chileans, and which unexpected conservative presidential candidate garners Al Madrigal's nod for the Latino vote.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today on a special edition of the show: National Book Award Winning poet, Martin Espada, helps us remember and recall the events of 9/11/That's 9-11-73, when the US overthrow of the duly elected socialist government of Salvador Allende sent tens of thousand of Chileans into exile. At least, the ones who were able and lucky enough to escape the brutal reign of General Augusto Pinnochet. And Camilo Perez Bustillo brings us up to speed on the battle for self determination that goes on right now in Chile and across the hemisphere. The post Award Winning Poet Martin Espada on 9/11…1973 appeared first on KPFA.

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the military coup in Chile, SBS Spanish spoke to anaylsts who claim the country has still not come to terms with this section of its history. - En la conmemoración de los 50 años del golpe de Estado en Chile, SBS Audio Australia en Español conversa con analistas sobre el presente de esta nación. Algunos consideran que el país no se ha reconciliado con su historia. Otros van más allá y afirman que “nunca” se conseguirá una verdad común. Lo cierto es que después de cinco décadas las grietas del pasado parecen todavía socavar el futuro.

Kate Adie introduces stories from The Gambia, Iran, the USA, Chile and Hungary. Dozens of bereaved families in the Gambia are taking legal action against an Indian drug manufacturer and Gambian health authorities, after more than 70 infants died after taking apparently toxic cough remedies. Sam Bradpiece heard their stories and traces how these medicines came to market. As Iran approaches the first anniversary of the death of Mahsa Amini, the authorities are already cracking down on signs of public dissent. She was a young woman arrested for "incorrect hijab", whose fate triggered a wave of protest across Iran. Lois Pryce speaks to some of the generation of young women who took to the streets a year ago, and now say they're ready to do so again. The Capitol riot on the 6th of January 2021 is still roiling American politics - as some high-profile Republican politicians say the people who were involved were patriots who shouldn't be punished. But the courts have issued verdict after verdict against the architects of the disorder. Mike Wendling reports from Washington DC on the sentencing of a leading figure in the chaos - Enrique Tarrio, former leader of activist group the Proud Boys. In Chile there's been heated debate over how best to mark the fifty years since General Pinochet's military takeover. These days few people deny the killings, torture and disappearances were committed during his dictatorship - but up to a third of Chileans are willing to say the coup was necessary. Jane Chambers considers the nuances of a country torn between left and right. It's been a terrible year for fruit in Hungary - so Nick Thorpe was prepared to go without his usual annual ritual of making his pear crop into homemade brandy. But as it turned out, an unexpected windfall of 200kilos of sour cherries would fuel an even more potent brew... Producer: Polly Hope Editor: Bridget Harney Production Co-Ordinator: Gemma Ashman

Suzi talks to Oscar Mendoza about the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende that came to an abrupt and bloody end 50 years ago on September 11, 1973. Pinochet's coup inaugurated a wave of violence, death and repression that shocked the world—and sparked an enormous international solidarity movement as many thousands of Chileans were forced to leave their country, their families, and their dreams of a democratic, egalitarian future. Oscar Mendoza's life was upended on that day nearly 50 years ago, when, in his words, his carefree days of youth came to an abrupt halt, followed by detention, torture and imprisonment. Two years later, in May 1975, Oscar was expelled from Chile and exiled to Scotland as a political refugee, where I greeted him along with other members of the Chile Solidarity movement in Glasgow. We get Oscar's overview of the Chilean revolutionary process from 1970-1973, one that posited a peaceful transition to socialism with vino tinto (red wine) and empanadas, using the ballot box and constitutional means to achieve the profound economic, social, and political transformations working people demanded. Oscar asks himself two questions, and we take them up too: What are we commemorating 50 years later, and does Allende's dream of a fairer and better Chile live on today?We'll continue this two-part series next week with Marc Cooper, looking at the legacy of Pinochet's dictatorship and the impediments it poses for the leftist government of Gabriel Boric today.Jacobin Radio with Suzi Weissman features conversations with leading thinkers and activists, with a focus on labor, the economy, and protest movements. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chile is about to mark the 50th anniversary of the military coup that started the dictatorial rule of General Augusto Pinochet. Chileans are now asking for the government to completely open up about the human rights violation of his regime and in particular the fate of those who were forcibly disappeared.

Happy couples from across the globe share their best advice for richer relationships. From the relational to the emotional to the sexual, the happiest couples - of all ages weigh in on what makes their relationships thrive. This episode is brought to you by Desire Cruises - a unique experience for adventurous couples! Join us as we cruise to the Greek Isles in August and the South of France next Spring 2024. If you have podcast questions, please submit them here. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podbean, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music & Stitcher! Rough Transcript: This is a computer-generated rough transcript, so please excuse any typos. This podcast is an informational conversation and is not a substitute for medical, health, or other professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the services of an appropriate professional should you have individual questions or concerns. Top Relationship Tips From Happier Couples: 8 Secrets To Success Episode 332 [00:00:00] You're listening to the sex with Dr. Jess podcast, sex and relationship advice. You can use tonight. [00:00:13] Brandon Ware: Welcome to the sex with Dr. Jess podcast. And today we are about to head out on the desire cruise. [00:00:21] Jess O'Reilly: That's right. We're hitting the Greek isles. We're hitting Turkey. You're going to make a cruise sound. [00:00:26] Brandon Ware: No, I'm, I'm so much more mature than that. [00:00:28] Brandon Ware: Don't you know me better? [00:00:29] Jess O'Reilly: I can see you. Yeah. Yeah. Why does your boat sound like a donkey? [00:00:34] Brandon Ware: I don't know. It just does. [00:00:35] Jess O'Reilly: If I heard that sound, I'm not getting on the boat. [00:00:37] Brandon Ware: Yeah. Okay. [00:00:37] Jess O'Reilly: So, pretty excited. This is, I don't know. Is this our sixth Desire Cruise? [00:00:41] Brandon Ware: I believe that it is. [00:00:42] Jess O'Reilly: We've been on pretty much all of them except the ones over New Year's because that's our week off. [00:00:47] Jess O'Reilly: And every time we're on board, I'm collecting information. Not necessarily... data, but people's insights and experiences because it's just such a broad range of guests here. So there are around 700 people on board. There are 44 countries represented. I don't have the breakdown of this specific cruise, but from the last one, a few months ago, from that, I know that there were of the 700, around 300 Americans, 50 Canadians, 57 Mexicans. [00:01:16] Jess O'Reilly: Handful from India, 16 Brazilians, another handful of Colombians, around a hundred from Europe. When I kind of look, okay, that's the UK. They've exited. I did. [00:01:29] Brandon Ware: I also did the German though, or maybe it was Austrian. [00:01:31] Jess O'Reilly: Actually UK is a big contingent. I don't know why I didn't write them down, but there's a good number from the UK. [00:01:36] Jess O'Reilly: Folks from New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, Taiwan, a nice contingent from. Central and South America. So I met Chileans, Costa Ricans, Ecuadorians, Venezuelans, a handful from Lebanon. I met a couple from Korea. And so, and there's, there's kind of a broad age range, right there. I think there might be a couple who are quite young in their twenties, but just like a handful of, let's be [00:02:00] honest, women. [00:02:00] Jess O'Reilly: Yeah. I don't think there's any guys in their twenties, then a handful in their thirties, many in their forties. And then a bunch in their fifties and beyond. And so for me, there's just so much learning here because people hail from all over the world. They come on this cruise for so many different reasons. [00:02:16] Jess O'Reilly: You know, I've spoken about this before that yes, it's clothing optional in certain areas. Yes, it's erotic themed. Yes, there are very interactive workshops and there's even a playroom should you deci...

On 2 May 1973, the Chilean national football team took on Peru in a crucial world cup qualifier at the Estadio Nacional in Santiago. The victory coupled with success in a subsequent playoff meant that only the Soviet Union stood between Chile and a place at the world cup finals. That game, against a nation whose government had friendly ties with Chilean President Allende would take place in November at the same venue. But Chileans would come to remember 1973 for more important reasons than football. Powerful figures had been plotting against the democratically elected Allende for two years, both at home and in Washington DC at the White House. The Chilean football team did qualify for the world cup but only because their opponents from the USSR forfeited the match in protest at the CIA-backed military coup that saw President Allende killed, and thousands imprisoned, tortured, or killed in the very stadium that was due to hold the match. In this episode, I speak with Professor Kristin Sorensen an expert on global studies whose specialties include Chile about the notorious regime of General Augusto Pinochet and the devastating and lasting impact it has had on the lives of ordinary Chileans.  Audio: Nixon tapes public domain Chile v Peru 1972 world cup qualifying Music: Pixabay

Jack and Stephen return to London to attend the meetings which may determine the future of Jack's naval career. There's time at home, a Surprise make over, vacation with the family courtesy of the Chileans, and an even bigger surprise! Ch. 10

A conversation with Elisa Loncón Antileo, the first president of the Chilean constitutional convention, about the potential of a plurinational constitution. Future Histories International Find all English episodes of Future Histories here: https://futurehistories-international.com/ and subscribe to the Future Histories International RSS-Feed (English episodes only)   Shownotes Elisa Loncón Antileo (University of Santiago de Chile): https://fahu.usach.cl/academico/elisa-loncon/ Loncon Antileo, Elisa. 2020. Coexistence between Chileans and The Mapuche. Chile, Plurinational and Intercultural State. ARQ (Santiago), (106), 150-152. [PDF available]: https://www.scielo.cl/pdf/arq/n106/en_0717-6996-arq-106-150.pdf Loncon Antileo, Elisa. 2023. El sueño inacabado de los pueblos de Chile. Una constitución paritaria, plurinacional, con derechos sociales y descentralizada. In: Zerán, Faride (Ed.) De triunfos y derrotas: narrativas críticas para el Chile actual. [Only available in Spanish]: https://lom.cl/products/de-triunfos-y-derrotas-narrativas-criticas-para-el-chile-actual Conference - The Great Transition 2023: https://thegreattransition.net/    Further Shownotes Chile's Constitution Draft from September 2022 (constituteproject.org): https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Chile_2022D?lang=en Constitutional Convention in Chile: https://www.chileconvencion.cl/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_Convention_(Chile) Student protests in Chile 2006 (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_student_protests_in_Chile Protests in Chile 2019 – 2022 (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932022_Chilean_protests Augusto Pinochet (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto_Pinochet Indigenous Nations in Chile: https://www.iwgia.org/en/chile.html Bolivia's Constitution (constituteproject.org): https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Bolivia_2009.pdf United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/2018/11/UNDRIP_E_web.pdf International Labour Organization - Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, 1989: https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_ILO_CODE:C169 Ñuke Mapu - Mapuche Documentation Center: https://mapuche-info.translate.goog/?nos&_x_tr_sl=es&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=es&_x_tr_sch=http Mapuche Flag: https://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/xu.html Organization “Consejo de Todas las Tierras”: https://www.mapuche.info/mapuint/jmar2.htm   Further Future Histories Episodes on related topics S02E47 | Matt Huber on Building Socialism, Climate Change & Class War: https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s02/e47-matt-huber-on-building-socialism-climate-change-class-war/ S02E39 | Daniel Loick zu Freiheit, Souveränität und Recht ohne Gewalt: https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s02/e39-daniel-loick-zu-freiheit-souveraenitaet-und-recht-ohne-gewalt/ S02E36 | Thomas Lemke zum Regieren der Dinge: https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s02/e36-thomas-lemke-zum-regieren-der-dinge/ S02E31 | Thomas Swann on Anarchist Cybernetics: https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s02/e31-thomas-swann-on-anarchist-cybernetics/   If you like Future Histories, you can help with your support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/FutureHistories? Write me at office@futurehistories.today and join the discussion on Twitter (#FutureHistories): https://twitter.com/FutureHpodcast or on Mastodon: @FutureHistories@mstdn.social or on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/FutureHistories/ or on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfRFz38oh9RH73-pWcME6yw www.futurehistories.today   Episode Keywords: #ElisaLoncon, #Interview, #JanGroos, #FutureHistories, #FutureHistoriesInternational, #Constitution, #Plurinationalism, #Nation, #State, #CollectiveRights, #Individualism, #MotherNature, #Mapuche, #IndigenousKnowledge, #Epistemology, #Eurocentrism, #Plurality, #Colonialism, #Coloniality, #DecolonialTheories, #Plurilingualism, #RightForNature, #WomensRights,    

After the capsize of a migrant boat off the Greek coast BBC Arabic's Murad Shishani went to the Greek port of Kalamata to meet relatives hoping to find their loved ones. One man was waiting for news of 30 relatives and acquaintances from the Egyptian district of Sharkia. So why are so many trying to leave this place? Pakistanis were one of the largest groups of migrants on the boat, including many from Pakistan Administered Kashmir. BBC Urdu's Umer Draz Nangiana visited the village of Bundli, home to 28 men on that boat, only 2 of whom survived, to find out what drove them to risk the journey. The Settlers "The Settlers" film shows how Patagonia, in Southern Chile and Argentina, was colonised by Chilean and European settlers, including brutal raids against the indigenous Selk'nam people. BBC Mundo's Paula Molina explains modern Chileans' interest in the Selk'nam, and in this part of their own history. Saving lives after the dam-burst in Russian occupied areas BBC Russian's Olga Ivshina explains how volunteers working in the Russian occupied areas of Ukraine helped save civilians trapped by the floods using local boats. South Korea's reclusive youth A growing number of young people in South Korea are choosing to withdraw from society. Hyunjung Kim of BBC Korean finds out why, and what the government and former recluses are doing to try and help them. (Photo: Framed photo of missing son believed drowned on migrant ship. Credit: BBC)

Turning 100, the accolades for Henry Kissinger are pouring in. He is a legend. Over decades, he has assiduously cultivated and constructed the image of the sagacious elder statesman. Corporate journalists hang on his every word. Politicians seek his advice. But what is his record to deserve such respect and reverence? He is one of the most notorious characters of this or any other period in history. Just ask the Kurds, the East Timorese, the Bangladeshis, the Laotians, and the Chileans what they think of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate. But since they are “unpeople,” their opinions don't count. When he was Nixon's national security advisor, Kissinger displayed his kowtowing to power when he kept silent as his boss made anti-Semitic remarks. When Nixon demanded that Cambodia be bombed, he conveyed the order like a good errand boy. It was Kissinger who once boasted, “The illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little longer.” Recorded at the University of Montana.

Augusto Pinochet's military coup in 1973 was followed by 17 years of systematic human rights violations and the disappearance of some 1,500 Chileans who have never been found.Relatives say they must find their remains to end their long mourning period. Many of them have died waiting.As in many countries where the armed forces have committed atrocities against civilians, those who know where the remains of their victims were buried or destroyed have been reluctant to cooperate.But the Chilean government is heading an ambitious plan to achieve justice.Luis Cordero Vega, Chile's minister of justice and human rights, talks to Al Jazeera.Subscribe to our channel http://bit.ly/AJSubscribeFollow us on Twitter https://twitter.com/AJEnglishFind us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/aljazeeraCheck our website: http://www.aljazeera.com/Check out our Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/aljazeeraenglish/@AljazeeraEnglish#Aljazeeraenglish#News

In today's episode, why Chileans are stocking up on armored vehicles and guns. The latest on the cat-and-mouse game between Disney and Florida's Governor DeSantis. And journey to the banks of India's Ganges River, where the elderly are choosing to break the cycle of death and rebirth rather than head into a nursing home. Visit the Thomson Reuters Privacy Statement for information on our privacy and data protection practices. You may also visit megaphone.fm/adchoices to opt-out of targeted advertising

For the first time since the days of hyperinflation in the 90s, Argentina's inflation rate has risen above 100%. That means that since 2022, prices of consumer goods have more than doubled. Former Brazil President, Jair Bolsonaro who is still in self-exile in the US, has been ordered to turn over more than 3 million dollars worth of jewellery that he reportedly received from Saudi Arabia as a gift while president. And in Chile, there's a second attempt at drafting a new constitution. The current constitution dates back to the Pinochet dictatorship and changing it was one of the major demands from Chileans who took to the streets in 2019 in mass protests. Katy Watson is a BBC correspondent based in Sao Paulo.

Hello everyone, and welcome to Ideas Untrapped podcast. My guest for this episode is Decision Scientist, Oliver Beige - who is returning to the podcast for the third time. Oliver is not just a multidisciplinary expert, he is one of my favourite people in the world. In this episode, we talk about scientific expertise, the norms of academia, peer review, and how it all relates to academic claims about finding the truth. Oliver emphasized the importance of understanding the imperfections in academia, and how moral panics can be used to silence skeptics. I began the conversation with a confession about my arrogance about the belief in science - and closed with my gripe about ‘‘lockdown triumphalism''. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation, and I am grateful to Oliver for doing it with me. I hope you all find it useful as well. Thank you for always listening. The full transcript is available below.TranscriptTobi;I mean, it's good to talk to you again, Oliver. Oliver; Tobi, again.Tobi;This conversation is going to be a little bit different from our previous… well, not so much different, but I guess this time around I have a few things I want to get off my chest as well. And where I would start is with a brief story. So about, I dunno, I've forgotten precisely when the book came out, that was Thinking Fast and Slow by the Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman. So I had this brief exchange with my partner. She was quite sceptical in her reading of some of the studies that were cited in that book. And I recall that the attitude was, “I mean, how can a lot of this be possibly true?” And I recall, not like I ever tell her this anyway…but I recall the sort of assured arrogance with which I dismissed some of her arguments and concerns at the time by saying that, oh yeah, these are peer-reviewed academic studies and they are most likely right than you are. So before you question them, you need to come up with something more than this doesn't feel right or it doesn't sound right. And, what do you know? A few years, like two or three years after that particular experience, almost that entire subfield imploded in what is now the reproducibility or the replication crisis, where a lot of these studies didn't replicate, a lot of them were done with very shoddy analysis and methodologies, and Daniel Kahneman himself had to come out to retract parts of the book based on that particular crisis. So I'm sort of using this to set the background of how I have approached knowledge over my adult life. So as someone who has put a lot of faith naively, I would say, in science, in academia and its norms as something that is optimized for finding the truth. So to my surprise and even sometimes shock - over different stages of my life and recently in my interrogation of the field of development economics, people who work in global development - [at] the amount of politics, partisanship, bias, and even sometimes sheer status games that academics play and how it affects the production of knowledge, it's something that gave me a kind of deep personal crisis. So that's the background to which I'm approaching this conversation with you. So where I'll start is, from the perspective of simply truth finding, and I know that a lot of people, not just me, think of academia in this way. They are people who are paid to think and research and tell us the truth about the world and about how things work, right? And they are properly incentivized to do that either by the norms in the institutional arrangements that birthed their workflows and, you know, so many other things we have known academia and educational institutions to be. What is wrong with that view - simply academia as a discipline dedicated to truth finding? What is wrong with that view? Oliver;There's many things. Starting point is that it was not only Daniel Kahneman, behavioral economics has multiple crises also with Falsified work. Not only with wrong predictions, wrong predictions are bad but acceptable. This is part of doing science, part of knowledge production. But Falsification is, of course, a bigger problem now and they had quite a few scandals in that. The way I approach it always is sort of like a metaphor from baseball. Basically there's something called the Mendoza Line in baseball which is a hitter that has a 200 hitting average. This is like the lowest end of baseball. If you go below 200, then you're usually dropped off the baseball teams. And on the upper end you have really good hitters that hit an average of like 300 or something. If you have a constant 300 average you usually get like million dollar contracts, right? We can translate this to science in a lot of ways. Of course, there is a lot of effort involved in going from a 200 average to a 300 average to a 20% average of being right to 30% a average of being right. But still if you're at a 300 level, you're still wrong 70% of the time. And so the conversations I observe, they're people that are not specialists in a field [and] we're trying to figure out who is right in a certain conversation. Talking about conversations in a scientific field we basically try to use simple pointers, right? One of the pointers is of course a paper that has gone through peer review. You see these conversations of like, okay, this paper has not been peer reviewed, this paper has been peer reviewed. But peer review does not create truth. It sort of reduces the likely likelihood of being wrong somewhat but it doesn't give us any indicator of this is true. The underlying mechanism of peer review usually cannot find outright fraud. Cannot detect outright fraud. This happened quite a few times. And also peer review is usually how close is the submitted paper to what the reviewers want to read. There is a quality aspect to it, but ultimately it changes the direction of the paper much more than it changes quality. So academia overall is a very imperfect truth finding mechanism. The goal has to be [that] the money we spend on academic research has to allow us to get a better grasp of so far undiscovered things, undiscovered related relationships, correlations, causal mechanisms, and ultimately, it has to give us a better grasp of future and it has to give us a better grasp of what we should do in order to create better futures. And this all basically comes down to, like, predicting the future or things that were in the past but yet are to be discovered. Evolution tends to be a science that is focused on the past, looking at things in the past. But there's still things we have to discover, connections we still have to discover. And this is what academia is about. And the money, the social investment we put into academia has to create a social return in the way that we are better off doing the things we need to do to create a better future for everyone. And its [academia] track record in that regard has been quite mixed. That's true.Tobi;So let's talk a little bit about incentives here. Someone who has also written quite a lot, who talked so much about some of the issues - I think he's more focused on methods. He's andrew Gelman, the statistician. I read his blog quite a lot, and there's something he consistently allude to and I just want to check with you how much you think that influenced a lot of the things that we see in academia that are not so good, which is the popularity contest - the number of Twitter followers you have; whether you are blue checked or not; bestselling books; Ted Talks that then lead to people making simplistic claims. There's the issue of scientific fraud, right, some of which you alluded to also in behavioral economics, behavioral science generally. There was recently the case of Dan Ariely, who also wrote a very popular book, Predictably Irrational, but who was recently found to have used falsified data. And I recall that you also persistently criticized a lot of people during the pandemic, even till date - a lot of people who made outright wrong predictions with terrible real life consequences because policymakers and politicians were acting under the influence of the “expert” advice of some of these people who will never come out to admit they are wrong and are less likely to even correct their mistakes. So how is the incentive misaligned? Oliver; Okay, many questions at once. How does academia work? And like I always like to say that academic truth finding or whatever you want to call it is not too far away from how gossip networks work. The underlying thing is, of course, any kind of communication network is basically sending signals. In this case, snippets of information, claims, hypotheses and the receiver has to make a decision on how credible this information is. You have the two extreme versions, which is basically saying, yeah, I just read this paper and I think this paper makes a good claim and is methodologically sound or I just read this paper and this paper is crap as everything about it is wrong. So you basically start with a factual claim and an evaluation. This happens in science Twitter in the same way a gossip network communicates typically good or bad news about the community. Also, a gossip network communicate hazards within the community, sending warnings, which is what academics have been doing quite a bit over the last two and a half years. And they also have this tendency to, a) exaggerate claims, reduce claims, and [they] also have this tendency to create opposing camps. Because very few middling signals are being retransmitted. I've been watching the funeral of the Queen, I have no strong opinion about British royalty in either direction so if I post something on Twitter about it, nobody will retweet. And, of course, the two extreme ends will be retweeted. This is how Twitter works, but it's also how science usually works. You'll see that strong claims in either direction are being transmitted much more frequently than middling moderate claims. So the bifurcation of opinions is inherent in both of them. This element of credibility, that you build credibility, based on how someone else reflects your own beliefs. Your own prior beliefs, really. This is the core mechanism [that if] I read something that confirms my prior beliefs, I'm much more likely to retransmit it with a positive note that "I really like this and I think it's methodologically sound." And if it's something that contradicts my prior beliefs, I'm very much more inclined to question its methodology. And I think we've seen this to an extreme over the two and a half years because we had situations where the discussion was very polarized. And the really bad thing to observe in a scientific discourse in general, but also the amplified scientific discourse on Twitter, is like the absolute lack of quality control when something confirms one's own prior beliefs. So this is usually what a scientist has to do. Like, if I get something that confirms my beliefs, I still have to do a minimum quality control [to check] if it's actually methodologically sound. And this clearly did not happen. People were just passing on anything that confirmed their beliefs and basically expected someone else to do the quality control. The first job any academic has is basically to subject everything, even that confirms your beliefs, and this is also [what] you think is true, you still have to subject it to quality control. And clearly this rarely ever happens. This is why academia is supposed to run on confrontation that, basically, the other camp does it. But if you bring academia together with Twitter, which is [an] amplification network that runs on social engagements, likes and retweets, then you have a very toxic mix. And this is the situation we had over the last two and a half years, how scientific communities can coalesce around things that are just not empirically sustainable.Tobi;Now pardon my language, there's a way that academics, whether they are scientists or social scientists (I know economists are particularly notorious in this arena), they completely f**k with your mind when you're a skeptic. So I'll give you an example. Two days ago…I opened with the replication crisis in psychology, so two days ago, I read a SubStack by someone who is presumably a psychologist, who was then basically complaining that, “oh, yeah, after the replication crisis, a lot of them in academia who were doing PhDs, were also having their own crisis of confidence, because then you have to confront a public who thinks they know everything.” So, like, you describe your study or you say you found something and someone says, "oh, but the field didn't replicate." The whole thing just sounded like some weak apologia that just didn't make any sense. I recall that sometimes a little bit after the financial crisis [of] '07-'08, if I recall correctly, Paul Krugman was dismissing something Talib, Nicholas Nassim Talib, wrote by saying that, oh, if you think you found something that a whole community of academic experts… I'm not quoting him verbatim, I'm paraphrasing… If you think you found anything that a whole academic community of experts missed, then you are most likely to be wrong.So, it brings me to the question of skepticism and how to approach it, because at the other extreme end of this is to say… and certainly there are people like that in the world today who think that no scientific knowledge is true, who question even proven medicine, and there are also conspiracy theorists who say outrightly false things for their own motives, no doubt. So, like, how does one deal with skepticism? Especially if you have conspiracy theorists and outrightly ignorant people on one side, and on the other side you have academic confusion or experts who out of their own biases or some of these institutional and social problems that you have described can also not really come out and admit that, oh, we botched this and this and this is what we are doing to correct our errors. How do you handle skepticism in such a milieu?Oliver; The first thing is and it's also the reason why I like the baseball metaphor is if you are [an] academic, you're an expert in a field, you spend far more time studying this field than others, you're communicating with other experts in the field, so you can get this feeling, and probably justified feeling that because you put more effort into it you should get more reward in the form of more recognition and more credibility. But you should also come up with a realization or understanding that any field you're in and that includes economics and all other fields, there are so many things that are still undiscovered, so many things that are undiscoverable that we have to build axiomatic constructs around in order to actually help us move forward. And if you're able as an academic to move from 20% right over many years to 30% right, you're still 70% wrong. So these are not empirical numbers, but I think they get the point across. And if you don't get that, then you're doing something wrong in academics in general, right? And we've seen this arrogance that was not supported by imperial superiority, like, quite a bit over the last years. Especially Paul Cook when he got some of the things very wrong just recently when he came out, when he admitted that most macroeconomists have been dead wrong about inflation for over a year. And then he claimed that nobody could have foreseen that. This is doubly wrong. You can be arrogant or you can be incompetent, but you cannot be both at the same time. Basically, academia is also a competition for attention. This is an attention industry and exaggerated claims get more attention than moderate claims. So this is not a problem. The problem is, and I see in the discussion is the complete absence of understanding of what the scientific method entails. And that clearly, a lot of academics become specialists in a particular subsection of the scientific method but don't have an understanding of how the whole thing works. Which is interesting, especially in economics, because economics has this very strong claim that it underwent An Empirical Revolution over the last 20 years, which is certainly true. Econometrics have got a much bigger role over the last 20 years, but they also claimed that because they underwent an empirical revolution, they also underwent a credibility revolution, that their results are much more credible and this is a much bigger claim. And this is not a claim that recent events have validated or recent economic performance has not been up to par to support it. But the key thing [is that] the scientific method is basically starting out from a theory which does not have to be a formal way of expressing, but you have to have an overarching idea of how things are connected, how some things cause other things. And from this, you have to be able to create predictions. Basically, foresee future discoveries. And you do this in a number of steps. The first step is usually formalization. You try to come up with a formal model. There are lots of discussions about like, okay, how formal does a model have to be? Usually, formalization is a self-discipline device. It means that you don't come up with ad hoc predictions, but the predictions are based on a clear mechanism that should be working under a variety of conditions. And then once you have a formal model, which we've seen a lot of people trying to build formal models over the last few years, and a lot of them have gotten more attention than they deserved or that they expected, and then you come up with a hypothesis. Hypothesis usually means are you comparing your own view of the world to competing views of the world. You try to find the positions where they diverge the most or where it becomes visible. And then you do empirical test experiments. Or in economics, you try to do a natural experiment or control trials in order to show that your overarching theory, your model, is closer to the truth than the competition. But the key is also and this is remarkably what a lot of people have just simply missed out on, this is the replicability and the role of moving away from a subjective view of the world to an objective view of the world so this can be refuted or replicated by others.And this also means that people who are opposed to your viewpoint have to admit that your view of the world was better than others. And this has almost completely broken down. Because in the two scenarios, economics (macroeconomics) in particular has been dead wrong, especially about inflation which is really one of the core predictive elements of macroeconomics and they have been dead wrong for an extended period of time for the very simple reason because they did not want to acknowledge it. And this is a problem, right? So then we start obfuscating about where you went wrong and you're trying to play political games that being wrong was not just unexpected change in economic environment or social environments or something but being dead wrong was basically caused by your model being fundamentally wrong. Very clearly economics should be in a crisis. The crisis should be clear within the field and the less the field itself owns up to this crisis, the more the outside world [should] pressure the field itself to come clear with its wrong predictions because the cost of getting these things wrong are staggering Tobi;True. So I have three questions but I'll ask them differently. You mentioned towards the end of your answer you talked about political games which is something that also gets me really angry and sometimes confused. And a related issue about that I found also is in development economics. But that will take us into the second question. So let's talk about the politics here. For example, take a field like economics which is highly partisan. You have some people that are called neoliberal economists. Some people are socialists, some people are heterodox, some people are capitalists. I know within the field of macroeconomics itself, they have all these other labels - new Keynesian monetarist, you know, whatever. But what I'm getting at is the role of partisanship, because you always have rival camps accusing themselves of partisanship. One story I related to, which I'm sure you also must have come across is - I saw a story on Twitter a couple of weeks ago before the Chilean constitutional referendum that Mariana Mazukato, Gabriel Zukman and Thomas Piketty, who are all economists, who are all leftists, who mix their research with political preferences and policy advocacy, plan to travel to Chile to celebrate the new draft constitution because it's a win for justice, it's a win for this or that. It's the final rejection of the Pinochet dictatorship and the neoliberal imposition that is. I did not encounter in that particular discourse chain anybody asking what is good for Chile, and Chileans, and even more relevantly how Chileans feel about this. And, I mean, what do you know? The referendum happened and 60% of the voters rejected the new draft. And I know that partisanship and political games, like you said, play not just in economics, it happens in other fields as well. So I'm curious - is this okay? And how exactly did should I say, scholars, particularly in social science, people that have been able to make extraordinary contributions to our body of knowledge and what we know, how have they managed to keep their politics, their personal politics away from their work? Or is it just that everything just used to be easier before we had Twitter? Oliver;Politics and economics have been intermixed long before Twitter. So this is not particularly new, and the mechanism itself is also not new. But your starting point is basically, as I said, like, very simplified that the role of academia is to predict the future and to design strategies to reach good futures. So in that situation, it's not surprising that academics take political positions. The problem comes in, of course, that if the ideological mix in academia and the ideological mix in the overall population and the ideological mix in sort of the ruling elites don't line up. This is a tricky situation, but being close enough to the highest echelons of power for long enough to observe what happens. If you have a change in the administration in Washington DC, then usually the new administration brings in economic experts from favourite schools. And then if the administration loses to the other party, then the other party brings in their favourite economists. So in that regard, if you have this semiconstant exchange of viewpoint, an economic viewpoint gets discredited, it gets replaced via the political process with other people, this is usually how you get closer to the view - I used to call it the drunk unicyclist. You're not really moving forward in a straight path, but you're moving around left and right, and you just try to avoid falling into a ditch. And this is what we observe. No political process is perfect. And as long as the political interests of the academics and the political interests of the elite are aligned with population ones, this is as good as we can get it. I generally have a problem with ideology in economics, but it's inevitable. And my quality is that I be able to read and appreciate writers from the left end of the spectrum, on the right end of the spectrum. I usually deduct points over ideological bent. But good thinkers can make good points even if they are driven by ideology. The problem also comes in when there is essentially no penalty for being wrong in academia. So basically being wrong and being catastrophically wrong externalizes the damage to others. So the worst scenario you do if you're tenured faculty, sort of what I call the endowed chair blue check, like a tenured faculty with a wide reach in social media, you can be dead wrong,you can be persistently wrong, completely unwilling to own up being wrong, and there's no real penalty to it. This is the major problem we're facing right now.Tobi;So that then brings me to the question of niches or what I'll call cottage industries in academic research generally. I know recently I did ask you about what you think about the EA movement. I'm not talking about them, but for descriptive purposes we see the behavior of that group, the adherents, the critics and how much commitment, particularly adherents display to their tribe. I see a lot of that too in academic research. One group I am very familiar with is in economic development (development economics) where everything now is about field experiments and randomized control trials. And one of the fundamental ways it biases research in my opinion and also have negative real life consequences is, if you do a field experiment, a randomized control trial on cash transfer, say in a Kenyan village over a period of time and you measure your results and they are positive and say oh yeah, well, cash transfer works. But the real question that policymakers, whether local governments or central governments or regional governments really deal with every day are sometimes bigger than that. So, like, for example, if you want to choose between building a power station for that particular village at $1 million versus scaling up your cash transfer program, what you'll find is that development economists in the current paradigm would most likely go for the cash transfer plan. Let's scale it up. We have tested this. It works. Essentially they are biased to what they can measure - like, we don't know the spillover benefits of electrification, it would be difficult to design a study, there are so many externalities. So basically they reduce real-life situations into the parameters of their methods and its limitations. And such behaviour is very, very similar to what you see with other social groups. Whether it is the Effective Altruism movement… I was briefly involved also with the Charter City people where for every problem that they can see, the solution is to build a charter city.That movement was actually inspired by your dear friend, Paul Romer. So there is this almost blind commitment and loyalty to their method, to their cottage industry. And sometimes I see it as just drumming up support for their tribe, as opposed to a commitment to the truth and finding what works. So, again, pardon my big question, what's going on here?Oliver; Okay, two things on the starting point about tribes within academia is…like, one of my favourite sayings is that tribalism is the shared belief in counterfactuals, counterfactual being everything that is unknown. And the less we know, the more unknowns there are, the more we tend to flock with our own tribes. So this is something you see everywhere in academia. That's what we call thought collectives. Ludwig Fleck, one of the guys who influenced Thomas Kuhn, came up with this term, thought collectives, to describe this idea that people that share the same idea of causal mechanisms tend to come together and confirm each other and create this thought collective. And this is, of course, what we see here, especially in academia. Economics has additional problem. I think it's not nearly as strong in development economics as other fields, but it's also visible there. This is very much the way economists are recruited. Economics, especially US and UK-centric economics, is extremely mathematicized. So, like, mathematical skills are basically number one, two, and three and the priority. And so you have basically a situation where real-world understanding has almost no role in getting accepted into PhD programs or getting promoted within the system. It used to be theory knowledge, formal theory knowledge. Now it's econometrics knowledge that gets you promoted. And this is very far away from qualification to solve real-world problems. And of course, people are impressed by mathematical skills. So this is something that you can play as a trump card. And this is what happens in the field. And the field is closing itself off from all kinds of outside knowledge because of that, especially in the social sciences. And in my world, I use people with mathematical skills, but only for very, very clearly defined tasks. I have my own mathematical skill set, but I also understand what the limitations are, and I think that's a major problem. And basically, if everyone around you came up in this system that promotes mathematical skills over real-world skills, then you believe that this is the only thing you need. And it's been very clear that basically every ten years, economics has a major crisis about being completely wrong in their predictions. And this intellectual monopoly is a major problem with that.Tobi;My third question in that line then pertains to the philosophy of science. Oliver;Yes. Tobi;So there are people who argue that a lot of these problems are also because modern science or the methodology of science today is divorced from some kind of philosophical foundation. I'm familiar relatively mildly with three philosophical approaches to science and let's just say truth finding. Thomas Kuhn basically puts everything down to competing paradigms. Like my last question, you know, competing tribes. And it's the tribe that wins at the moment that sort of has the monopoly of truth, not strictly, but socially. Then there's Karl Popper, which is also quite popular, that for anything to be valid as truth, it has to be falsifiable. And we've seen this play out so much in particle physics with things like string theory and things like many-worlds interpretation and so many things where their critics are saying, you guys are basically making claims that are not falsifiable, that cannot be tested and what you are doing is not science. And that has been going on now more or less for about three decades, right? And, of course, there's the Lakatos approach, which sort of fits into your own view, correct me if I'm wrong, which is that science has to make novel claims and it has to be predictive, it has to make predictions about the world. So my question then is academia, science, the truth-finding industry, so to speak, or the knowledge production industry, is it having a philosophical crisis?Oliver;I think it has more of a structural crisis. I'm not that deep in the philosophy of science I'm much more interested in the process itself. But one of the things that I think matters to me is Milton Friedman's claim that there are no wrong assumptions but whatever assumptions you make about the world has to generate correct predictions. A theory is being evaluated by its ability to produce non-falsifiable predictions, right? Predictions that turn out to be true even if others don't believe them. This is something you see in the arts as well, you see actually in religion as well, this mechanism of belief propagation that starts with one person believing and over time and over time, can be many decades, of something being accepted as true by everyone. So everyone starts believing in it. Basically, social contagion mechanism. I've always been interested in this. One scenario where this happens or should be happening is science. Right. This is, of course, a process. A process happens via this academic mechanism of peer-reviewed publications, getting tenure based on publication records and so on. And these are all very very imperfect mechanisms. The two extreme versions of that [are] the American system, which is extremely stratified, and the German version is the opposite, it's non-stratified, [and] we produce a massive amount of mediocrity. So, like, neither of them are optimal mechanisms to create truth. And we've seen that over the last two and a half years that political posturing took precedence over truth finding. Is it in a crisis? I think, yes, very clearly. We have two and a half years where very wrong, easily debunkable claims were propagated and were not retracted, even after they've been proven to be wrong. And ultimately, we're in a situation where an economic crisis is very clearly caused by misjudgment from people which we support and pay for being less wrong than the overall population. And that just simply did not work.Tobi;One last thing I'll like to get off my chest and then I'll pass them out to you is, I mean, specifically, if we follow from our last two podcast episodes, I'm a bit frustrated that there is a bit of lockdown triumphalism that the people who vigorously and vehemently used their academic or expert pedigree…Oliver;Credentials. Tobi;Yeah…to advocate for lockdowns are also taking a sort of victory lap. So the pandemic is over. Everything is back to normal. We did the right thing, even though the whole world was against us. That frustrates me a little. I was still watching a clip on YouTube recently because you get even more sensible take from everyday people, people who are experiencing these things than people who are building models and tweeting. One person somewhere here in southwest Nigeria complaining during the pandemic that the government has decided that it is better for us to die at home of hunger than not die from the pandemic. Because this pandemic, we don't know what it is, we don't know how it spreads, but without giving us any information, you basically confined us to our homes with no means of livelihood and nothing to depend on. That makes me sad because in Nigeria here and in many parts of Africa today, a lot of what we are seeing as, and are calling the food crisis, cost of living crisis, whatever it is you want to call it, did not necessarily start, but were aggravated or exacerbated by that approach to the pandemic. And it makes me sad that the people that are culpable, we can have a situation where they can take a victory lap. So that's me. Over to you. What would you like to get off your chest about everything that we have disclosed today?Oliver; Number one is epidemiological modelling was clearly an empirical debacle. The predicted epidemic wave that would take five to six months, that would wipe all large parts of the population never happened. And we have, I don't know, how many thousand waves in our database now, they all go for eight weeks. They start declining, acceleration starts declining very early on. And now we had enough scenarios where simple no measures were taken at any time during the wave. The key moment in that case was, I think, Paul Krugman complained that Denmark was removing all restrictions at the height of the epidemic wave and basically the very next day, the Danish wave dropped. Not a lot of people saw it, but it was extremely embarrassing for him. I've been in very much the same situation because I was living in the United States in the early 2000s and I was very clear from the very beginning of the Iraq war that Saddam Hussein did not have bioweapons. And so the whole invasion was built on Untruth. And the United States and the UK back then also knew that. Back then there was a strong moral panic, especially in the United States, against anyone who was basically speaking against the rationale for going to war. Now, 20 years later, almost nobody is willing to admit that they were speaking up in favour of the invasion back then. This is like a one-generation thing. And we'll see the same thing about the epidemic. This is very clear. The young people who had to carry most of the restrictions…up till now in Germany they're still forced to wear masks at school. They will have a very different view about what happened than the politicians in power. These are the things that'll evolve over many, many years. So I expect the same thing to happen. The interesting thing is really sort of back then it was more on the right end of the spectrum that drove this moral panic. Now it's moved over to the left end of the political spectrum. This is something that we're still to be investigated, why these moral panics unfolded onto the ideological spectrum as we know it. But it might be an interesting topic for the next call.Tobi;True. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ideasuntrapped.com/subscribe

After the Pinochet years, Chile evolved into one of the most successful countries in the Americas in terms of the health of its democracy. All of that came to a screeching halt in 2019 when protests escalated into widespread violence. Chile was suddenly at a revolutionary moment. However, instead of a civil war, the Chileans launched an inclusive political process to write a new constitution. Fast forward to September of this year, the new constitution was overwhelmingly rejected in a national referendum. What happened and what happens next? What lessons can others learn from Chile's efforts to reimagine its democracy? Isabel Aninat, Dean of the Law School of the Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, in Chile has been a keen observer of the constitution-writing process and of Chilean politics. She is fundamentally optimistic that Chilean democracy is headed in a good direction. This episode was originally published on October 27, 2022

Two years ago, on the heels of mass protests, Chileans overwhelmingly agreed: they needed to draft a new constitution. This September, faced with an up-or-down referendum on one of the most progressive governing charters in world history, they balked. What went wrong? Political theorist Camila Vergara breaks down the breakdown in her country's efforts to scrap a political framework dating back to the ruthless dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, who took power in 1973 in a U.S.-backed coup.

In the salty waters beneath the world's driest desert, lie vast reserves of a valuable mineral: lithium.  This metal is crucial for the planet's energy transition. It is used to power electric vehicles and store solar and wind energy, which bring some hope to a world faced with a rapidly changing climate.The lithium mines, which occupy more than 30 square miles of Chile's Atacama Desert, are operated by two private companies, Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile (SQM) and Albemarle. They both have rental contracts with the Chilean government.In these facilities, salty ground water rich in minerals gets pumped to the surface. The liquid, called brine, is then stored in huge evaporation ponds that are exposed to the desert heat.“During [a span of] 18 months, the water in the brine evaporates, and [the] lithium becomes more concentrated,” said Oswaldo Yáñez, SQM's manager of innovation and development. This region has some of the highest solar radiation levels on Earth, and it almost never rains. “The water evaporates incredibly fast here,” Yáñez added.The process ends at a closed plant, where lithium is turned into carbonate and shipped abroad, to places like China or the US.In the past 10 years, the global demand for lithium has skyrocketed. And the increase in production of electric vehicles is expected to raise this demand by at least 300% in the next 10 years.This is good news for Chile's economy. The South American country meets about a third of the globe's lithium demands, and plans to boost lithium production in the next few years.Close to 60% of the world's 86 million tons of identified lithium resources are in Bolivia, Chile and Argentina, according to the US Geological Survey, in an area known as the “Lithium Triangle.” Indigenous people in Chile are concerned that the amount of water used in lithium operations is threatening desert irrigation and farming methods they have relied on for centuries. Credit: Tibisay Zea/The World While Chile has successfully transformed the majority of its available resources into reserves available for commercial production, Argentina and Bolivia have not yet done so. This is largely because of unfavorable investment climates and more challenging geographic conditions, according to Juan Carlos Zuleta, a Bolivian researcher who has been following the lithium business for decades.“This metal will soon be a game changer for this region's economy,” Zuleta said.But for him, the real opportunity is not in extracting and selling lithium. He is researching a possible association between six countries in South America to fabricate and sell lithium batteries and electric vehicles, which the country now imports from abroad.“My idea is basically to create a hub of electric vehicles in South America for the regional market,” Zuleta said. “If we are able to produce the next generation of EVs [electric vehicles] in South America, then we could become a superpower.”Lithium will be crucial in the transition to clean energy, but the extraction method used in the Lithium Triangle presents several environmental problems, according to James Blair, an anthropologist at Cal Poly Pomona, who has done research on lithium mining's impact on Atacama's Indigenous communities.“The main concern is its impact on water use and water availability,” Blair said.“When a large percentage of the water from the brine evaporates, yes, this is exacerbating what is already a major problem of depleted water in one of the driest areas of the world.” Indigenous peoples also worry that the amount of water used in lithium operations threatens desert irrigation and farming methods they have relied on for centuries.Rudencindo Espíndola, an Indigenous topographer in this area, and an activist with the National Observatory of Salt Flats in Chile, said there is a conflict over the way that the industry has presented impacts as benign versus what the Indigenous communities experience.“Brine should be treated as water. ... It's part of our hydrogeological ecosystem and it has a lot of ancestral value for us, so it's worth preserving.”Rudencindo Espíndola, Indigenous topographer“Brine should be treated as water,” Espíndola said. “It's part of our hydrogeological ecosystem and it has a lot of ancestral value for us, so it's worth preserving.”He acknowledged that green energies that demand lithium are good for humanity, “but the price to produce them will be paid by Chile's environment.”Lithium mining is not the only industry that uses groundwater from the Atacama salt flat. Two other companies also mine copper in the region.“Any mining has an impact,” Espíndola said. “The question is, how much impact is acceptable?”Blair said there needs to be more independent research on local biodiversity, water flows and local communities' concerns to find out how to reduce damage. Chile's Atacama desert is one of the driest areas in the world. Credit: Tibisay Zea/The World A recent study linked lithium operations with a decrease in the number of flamingos in the Atacama salt flat.Oswaldo Yáñez, a manager at the SQM mine, said the company is already working on improvements regarding water utilization. “The idea is to extract lithium directly from the brine, without having to evaporate groundwater,” Yáñez said. He added that it will take at least five years to research, develop and implement this method.In the meantime, he said, the tradeoff is worth it, in the name of a greener future.As global demand for lithium keeps rising, anthropologist Blair points out that governments and consumers should do their part, too, “by encouraging battery recycling, and really just reducing car dependency, which is especially a problem in the United States.”There are about 16 million electric cars on the roads around the world now, which is three times more than in 2018. And by 2030, that number is estimated to reach around 350 million.Related: Chileans have long struggled with a water crisis. Management practices are partly to blame, study says.

Before the CIA-supported 1973 coup that placed Pinochet in power, Chile enjoyed democracy for several decades. Remarkably, after less than a decade of Pinochet's brutal repression of his people, Chileans were able to slowly introduce changes that lay the foundation for the eventual return of democracy. This is a huge national accomplishment. In this episode, Dr. Claudio Fuentes takes us through the history of Chile's polarized politics from prior to 1973 to 2022. Despite this polarization, Chile's democracy has survived. Perhaps the reason is that Chileans have experienced the alternative to democracy: Pinochet's years. As our politics become more polarized here in the U.S., we can learn quite a lot from Chile, in how fragile democracy is, in how polarization can destroy democracy. Dr. Fuentes is a professor at the School of Political Science at Diego Portales University in Chile. His academic interests focus on the study of political processes in Chile and Latin America, and in recent years on the study of the dynamics of institutional change. Among his many other recognitions, Dr. Fuentes won the award for the best doctoral thesis awarded by the American Political Science Association (APSA) and is a Luksic Fellow at Harvard University (2011). In Chile, was a member of the Presidential Anti-Corruption Advisory Council (2015). He is an associate researcher at the Center for Intercultural and Indigenous Studies (CIIR) and coordinates the Constitutional Laboratory at Diego Portales University. To learn more about Dr. Fuentes, you can visit his academic homepage. In addition, below are links to other episodes about U.S. interests, interference and even occupation of countries and nations in the Americas: S2E35: Puerto Rico, Dr. Jorge Duany S1E24: Cuba's History, Dr. Lillian Guerra S1E23: Haiti's History, Dr. Robert Fatton I hope you enjoy these episodes. Adel Host of the History Behind News podcast HIGHLIGHTS: get future episode highlights in your inbox. SUPPORT: please click here and join our other supporters in the news peeler community. Thank you.

When Chileans were asked in a referendum in 2020 whether they wanted a new constitution, the response was overwhelming. The current one dated back to the rule of Augusto Pinochet, the military dictator who had stepped down more than three decades earlier. Nearly eighty percent of the population voted in favor of a negotiation that would lead to a new charter for the country.But the negotiation process—which included representatives from the left and right side of the political map, along with dozens of independents—was rocky from the start. Delegates introduced many lofty ideas but the actual give-and-take required to produce a consensus was missing. Voters rejected a draft of the new constitution in September—by a large margin.This week on our podcast, The Negotiators, we examine what went wrong, with the help of John Bartlett, a reporter based in Santiago, Chile. Bartlett covered the constitutional convention and interviewed many of the key players.The Negotiations is a collaboration between Doha Debates and Foreign Policy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Suzi talks to Pablo Abufom and Oscar Mendoza to get their analysis of the monumental defeat in Chile on Sunday, September 4, when Chileans went to the polls to approve or reject a new progressive Constitution, born in response to the massive social protest movement and revolt in October 2019. The demand that grew out of that movement was for a new Constitution to replace the reactionary Pinochet constitution imposed in a fraudulent plebiscite in 1980. A Constituent Assembly was elected, representing the most diverse sectors of the population, specifically excluding the traditional political class. Sadly it was rejected, in fact trounced. Pablo Abufom and Oscar Mendoza each analyze the scope and meaning of the ‘rechazo' or rejection, and look at what happens next.Jacobin Radio with Suzi Weissman features conversations with leading thinkers and activists, with a focus on labor, the economy, protest movements. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Earlier this month, the people of Chile voted to reject the new draft constitution that promised to be the most progressive constitution of any country on the planet, and which was the fruit of the popular uprisings in the country that in December also swept the left wing approved dignity coalition into government. Earlier this year I spoke with Camila Vergara, who argued that for all the potential benefits of the new constitution, it also risked canalising popular ferment in the country in ways that were more acceptable to the chiles economic and political elite, and she also expressed serious reservations about Gabriel Boric's new government, which even before the electoral victory had tacked to the centre in order to win business confidence and support within Chile's divided congress. In today's conversation we talked about why Chileans voted to reject the draft constitution, the failure of the government to popularise understanding of what the new document actually contained, and we also discussed the scale and effectiveness of the right's campaign of misinformation.

This week, Ben and Tommy talk about the new British Prime Minister Liz Truss, Israel's bizarre rules for visitors to the West Bank, Chileans vote down a new constitution, an assassination attempt in Argentina, updates on Ukraine, Politico's new owner, China's covid lockdowns, Kenya's election, Nigel Farage gets a new product line and a BBQ row roils France.

NASA was forced to scrub the test launch for its Artemis I moon mission for the second time on Saturday. Miriam Kramer, a space reporter for Axios, joins us to explain why Artemis has yet to take off. And in headlines: Liz Truss was appointed to replace Boris Johnson as the U.K. 's prime minister, Chileans rejected a new progressive constitution, and e-cigarette maker Juul agreed to a nearly $440 million settlement for false advertising.Show Notes:Vote Save America: Fuck Bans Action Plan – https://votesaveamerica.com/roe/Crooked Coffee is officially here. Our first blend, What A Morning, is available in medium and dark roasts. Wake up with your own bag at crooked.com/coffeeFollow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/whataday/For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday

Sam and Emma host journalist John Bartlett to discuss the recent constitutional referendum in Chile. Then, they are joined by Nsombi Lambright, executive director of OneVoiceMS, to discuss the recent water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi's capital city. They begin by diving into updates on the Mar-a-Lago raid, the Seattle teacher strike, Texas and South Carolina abortion bans, a Texas judge deciding requiring HIV medical care is unconstitutional, and the state of climate catastrophe that we find ourselves in, before watching Jackson Hinkle and Tucker Carlson explore the Jews behind the Nazis behind Joe Biden's fascist lighting. John Bartlett joins, diving right into the results of Chile's constitutional referendum, with the constitution – a rewrite of the binding legislation of Pinochet's dictatorial regime – failing by a wide margin, before jumping back to Pinochet's coup that supplied the first failing constitution, walking through the hyper-privatization and rejection of indigenous communities that framed this quintessential neoliberal shock doctrine document. Next, he, Emma, and Sam walk through the recent social uprising that lead to the rewriting of the document, starting in 2019 after protests saw overwhelming support among Chileans for a new constitutional convention, and slowly developing over the last three years. Bartlett then dives into what elements led this new, rather progressive constitution to fail, parsing through the social welfare policies and emphasis on gender parity and indigenous rights, before exploring the greater systemic changes in their legislative and judicial wings. Wrapping up, they cover the overarching theme of mis- and disinformation around the constitutional campaign and explore the role of industry (particularly the already privatized variety) in the pushback. Then, Nsombi Lambright joins in the wake of a meeting with the federal EPA, jumping right into where the federal government is at with intervening in the Jackson, Mississippi water crisis, before situating where the city is at, having recently gotten running water back but still lacking potability. Lambright, Sam, and Emma then explore the lasting impact of the austerity measures of the Reagan era on Jackson, looking at the mass disinvestment from public infrastructure combined with white-flight seeing business and recreation vanishing from the city, leaving it to slowly disintegrate over the last three decades, with the city only able to slap the occasional bandage on it. They conclude the interview by exploring what Jackson is trying to do right now, as the Mississippi governor attempts to set up his own shock-doctrine implementation of privatized infrastructure, and what those outside of Mississippi can do to help. And in the Fun Half: Ronald Raygun has a quick check-in with a certain commenter in defense of John from San Antonio before Anarcho-Capitalist Mike from Liberty 412 calls in as he debates with Sam and Emma on all things libertarian, walking through the absurdity of private courts, presuming a constant non-aggression principle, and much more. They also touch on Donald Trump's (former) lawyer Alina Habba and Trump's “invisible” documents, and reflect on the industry-shifting debut of the  E-S-V-N podcast. Check out OneVoiceMS here: http://onevoicems.org/ Find ways to help out Jackson Mississippi here: https://formississippi.org/ways-to-help-jackson-water-crisis/ Check out John's work here: https://www.bartlettj.com/ Check out John's podcast here: https://www.miradaspodcast.com/ Become a member at JoinTheMajorityReport.com: https://fans.fm/majority/join Check out ESVN's YouTube channel here! https://www.youtube.com/c/ESVNShow Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! http://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: http://majority.fm/app Check out today's sponsors: Aura: Protect yourself from America's fastest-growing crime. Try Aura for 14 days for free: https://aura.com/majority Immi Ramen: Go to https://thld.co/immi_majorityreport_0922 and use code majorityreport at checkout to save $5 on your order. Thanks to Immi for sponsoring this video! Sunset Lake CBD: Sunset Lake CBD is excited to announce the release of Good Vibe Gummies, a full-spectrum gummy crafted with a blend of CBD and hemp-derived THC! Starting Wednesday September 7th all CBD gummies will be 30% OFF with Coupon Code GOODVIBE. Visit https://sunsetlakecbd.com/ to try these amazing new products and take advantage of this sale while it lasts. Sale ends September 12th. Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattBinder @MattLech @BF1nn @BradKAlsop Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on Youtube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Subscribe to Discourse Blog, a newsletter and website for progressive essays and related fun partly run by AM Quickie writer Jack Crosbie. https://discourseblog.com/ Check out Ava Raiza's music here! https://avaraiza.bandcamp.com/ The Majority Report with Sam Seder - https://majorityreportradio.com/

In this episode of the Essential Geopolitics podcast from RANE, the conversation turns to Chile. In early September, Chilean voters overwhelmingly rejected the constitutional rewrite carried out over the course of the previous year. Although the constitutional rewrite process was formed originally after a majority of Chileans voted in favor of it, RANE Latin America analyst, Carmen Colosi, says that some surprises in the draft caused the defeat, but the process of drafting a constitution is far from over. You can read RANE's analysis of Chile's constitutional referendum in Worldview, RANE's geopolitical intelligence solution. With interactive graphics, RANE's exclusive global risk monitor, key forecast questions, and global threat monitoring, security professionals rely on RANE Worldview. Sign up for a trial at ranenetwork.com.

In this episode of the Essential Geopolitics podcast from RANE, the conversation turns to Chile. In early September, Chilean voters overwhelmingly rejected the constitutional rewrite carried out over the course of the previous year. Although the constitutional rewrite process was formed originally after a majority of Chileans voted in favor of it, RANE Latin America analyst, Carmen Colosi, says that some surprises in the draft caused the defeat, but the process of drafting a constitution is far from over. You can read RANE's analysis of Chile's constitutional referendum in Worldview, RANE's geopolitical intelligence solution. With interactive graphics, RANE's exclusive global risk monitor, key forecast questions, and global threat monitoring, security professionals rely on RANE Worldview. Sign up for a trial at ranenetwork.com.

Britain's new Prime Minister Liz Truss met with the queen in Balmoral on Tuesday where she was officially appointed to office. In a speech at 10 Downing Street on Tuesday afternoon, Truss promised to tackle the energy crisis and the ailing economy. The risk of a nuclear accident at Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia power plant is growing, according to a new report by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The report describes damage to the special building that houses fresh nuclear fuel and the solid radioactive waste storage facility. Also, on Sunday, roughly 62% of Chileans rejected a new constitution, written from scratch, to replace an old one imposed by the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet 41 years ago. Plus, we hear about the legacy of the late Australian Aboriginal singer-songwriter Archie Roach.

Chileans go to the polls on Sunday in a referendum that could lead to the country adopting a constitution enshrining gender equality, action on climate change and Indigenous rights, says reporter John Bartlett in Santiago. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/infocus

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) visits the recently shelled Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Russia-occupied Ukraine; the United Kingdom's Conservative Party chooses the country's next prime minister; and Chileans vote on a more progressive constitution.    Mentioned on the Podcast   Lillian Posner, “Russian Roulette at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant,” Think Global Health

País, known as Criolla Chica in Argentina, and Mission in the US,  was brought by the Spanish conquistadores and was South America's most planted grape for centuries until an economic boom in Chile and waves of migration in Argentina brought new and interesting grapes to these nations. Argentina has plantings of the grape, California now barely any, so Chile is the epicenter of the grape, where it is thought of as the locals' grape – something low quality and common that has been around forever but has never made more than cheap, bulk wine or wine for local consumption.  País (a.k.a., Criolla Chica or Mission), "Mission Grapes" by Hey Fritters is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.   But in 2007, the 200+ year old vines caught the attention of Europeans who were making wine in Chile and they began experimenting. The grape was made into sparkling wine and then into funky natural wines, which gained a following in France and in the capital city of Chile, Santiago. Today, there is revived interest in this grape, and it is making everything from Beaujolais Nouveau-like styles to some more complex, spicy, herbal yet fruit wines with great tannins and acidity. In this episode we explore the origins of this grape and what makes it so fascinating.    Here are the show notes: We discuss the overview of the grape – it's called Criolla Chica in Argentina, Mission in California, and it is grown in Peru where it is distilled into Pisco and makes some natural wine, as well as Bolivia where it is called Missionera. We will refer to the grape only as País because Chile is the epicenter of growing!   We discuss the styles of wine that País makes: rosé, sparkling, lighter and easy drinking wine, and a fortified wine called Angelica, that can last for decades     The Grape Origins: País was probably the first vitis vinifera grape to come from the Old World, we tell the alleged story of Hernán Cortes hating the native grapes and demanding that better grapes be brought. He mandated that sacramental wine be made using grapes grown from cuttings from the Old World, so the high yielding Listán Preto was brought from Castilla-La Mancha and the Canary Islands where it had been growing to make wine to restock ships for the journey across the sea.   In the vineyard País is a big cropper with big, irregular berries. It has a lot of water in the grapes which can result in a low concentration of flavor The grape is easy to cultivate, is drought resistant, and has very deep roots, especially when grown on well-drained, granite rich slopes. It likes hot, dry climates. For these reasons it deserves our attention – it could have a bright future with climate change, although it needs careful management to be good. There are many 200+ year old vines in Chile, trained in bushes. Many of them have potential to be great.      Winemaking:  Winemakers must grapple with the fact that the wine lacks concentration of fruit flavor, and that it has a rustic, rough mouthfeel due to the types of tannins in the grape. It can also have low acidity or, if picked too early, too much acidity.  Techniques to manage the grape include carbonic maceration to increase fruitiness, saignee to increase intensity, and gentle pressing and traditional winemaking to keep the balance in the wines.  Terms we discuss: Zaranda – a bamboo mat that sits over the fermentation vat. Winemakers apply gentle pressure for less tannic, more acidic wines. Grapes are then crushed by foot and left to ferment in the traditional winemaking method Pipas — large pipe-shaped vats made from native beechwood. Used for short-term aging   País Wine/Flavors País is very light in color, and light in body. Depending on how the tannins are managed, the wine can be balanced or have really rough tannins The aromas and flavors range. The wines can be spicy and complex, with earthy, herbal, black pepper, and red fruit notes. It can also be simple with red fruit notes like pomegranate, and floral notes. It's often compared to Beaujolais     Food Pairings:  Mediterranean origin food. Think about Spanish tapas or Greek meze. Lentils, black beans burgers, beans, tacos, Spanish rice     Regions Chile Today, about ~7,250 ha/17,915 acres of País grow all over Chile -- from the Atacama Desert in the north to the southern regions of Maule, Bio Bio, and Itata, where the majority of plantings lie Was a much larger part of Chile's plantings until the mid 1800s when the mining boom made some Chileans very wealthy, and they used that money to set up vineyards and winemaking operations to make French varietal wine – Cabernet usurped País.  The grape was relegated to poor regions,  especially Maule, Bío Bío, and Itata where it was kept alive by the traditional local wine, Pipeño – fizzy, light, often sweet red made of País. The grape was so cheap and undervalued that growers and winemakers have no incentive to work with it  In 2006-2007, producers like Miguel Torres of Spain and young winemaker, Louis-Antoine Luyt who was trained in Beaujolais and is a natural wine advocate began making impressive sparkling and red of País. As the wine improved in quality, others became interested in making País and blends using the grape – Bouchon, Roberto Henriquez, and Concha y Toro are some examples One of Luyt's wine labels   Argentina  According to Amanda Barnes, author of the “Wines of South America”,  “Criolla” means a person or thing of Spanish-descent, born or developed in the Americas. Music, food, people, and grapes can be Criolla. Criolla grapes are a family of grape varieties that include the first vines, and part of that is Criolla Chica.  Producers that are experimenting: Cara Sur in Barreal, San Juan  Rocamadre in Paraje Altamira (Mendoza) from old vines Vallisto in Salta     California Called Mission grape  -- Established in 1769 with the Franciscan missions, Junipero Serra Died with Prohibition, today about 400 acres left, some producers in Amador, Calaveras, Santa Barbara, and Lodi still grow the grapes and some make early drinking, natural wine of it A traditional wine and the one that was esteemed at the time was Angelica, a sticky sweet wine that apparently tastes like molasses, dried figs, caramel, and nuts. The Mission Grape, growing in Lodi, CA. Photo: Lodi Growers Assoc It's an interesting time for País. I think this is the beginning of a journey with this grape and we'll keep you posted on new developments!  Maule, Itata and Bío Bío are in southern Chile. Map (C) WFNP   Sources to learn more: SouthAmericaWineGuide.com, Criolla Grape Varieties, Amanda Barnes País - Decanter China – great article by MW Julien Boulard Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pais Quench: The epic tale of País, the people's grape Wines of Chile: País  ____________________________________________________ Thanks to our sponsors this week:   Wine Spies uncovers incredible wines at unreal prices - on Zinfandel, Barolo, Champagne...you name it - up to 75% off! It's not a club and there's no obligation to buy. They have a build-a-case option, so you can mix and match wines while enjoying free shipping on every purchase. Visit www.winespies.com/normal you'll get $10 credit to use on your first order! Check them out today!   If you think our podcast is worth the price of a bottle or two of wine a year, please become a member of Patreon... you'll get even more great content, live interactions and classes!  www.patreon.com/winefornormalpeople   To register for an AWESOME, LIVE WFNP class with Elizabeth go to: www.winefornormalpeople.com/classes

Nina Khrushcheva on Russia’s war in Ukraine; Gun control advocates say stricter rules may have prevented the Buffalo shooter’s killing spree; Chileans rewrite their country’s Pinochet-era constitution. Get Democracy Now! delivered right to your inbox. Sign up for the Daily Digest: democracynow.org/subscribe

Nina Khrushcheva on Russia’s war in Ukraine; Gun control advocates say stricter rules may have prevented the Buffalo shooter’s killing spree; Chileans rewrite their country’s Pinochet-era constitution. Get Democracy Now! delivered right to your inbox. Sign up for the Daily Digest: democracynow.org/subscribe