Category Archive: Opinion

Latin America’s Crime Tax

Image: Project Syndicate

By Guillermo Ortiz

Even excluding lives lost, communities displaced, and families ravaged, the economic costs of organized crime in the region produce a bleak picture, shaving 0.5–2 percentage points off annual GDP growth in the most affected countries. That, too, represents a hefty human toll.

Latin America almost certainly pays the world’s highest economic price for organized crime. According to the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), crime costs Latin America and the Caribbean an average of 3.44% of GDP annually, equivalent to 78% of all public education spending across the region. But there are significant discrepancies across LAC. Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico stand out both for the scale of the problem and how organized crime operates.

Continue reading →

Guatemala’s Democratic Renewal

Image: Project Syndicate

By Carlos Alvarado Quesada

Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo’s recent selection of an honest successor to a corrupt attorney general represents a decisive victory for the country’s democracy. Arévalo succeeded not because he abandoned institutions to save democracy, but because he trusted institutions enough to work through them.

After two years of fierce political battles, Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo finally managed to appoint a new attorney general in May. In replacing a corrupt prosecutor with an honest one, Arévalo demonstrated that, even after years of erosion, democracy can prevail if political leadership chooses constitutionalism over confrontation.

Continue reading →

Appeasing Trump Only Invites Betrayal – as Europe’s Far Right Just Learned

Image: Project Syndicate

By Stephen Holmes

With Donald Trump laying claim to Greenland, Europeans have finally realized who they are dealing with. The US president is animated less by the prospect of deal-making than by the need for domination, less by the spirit of exchange than by the perverse pleasure of belittling others and exalting himself.

By threatening to seize Greenland by force, US President Donald Trump has exposed the childlike illusions of his European admirers. Having spent years cultivating their bromances with him, the continent’s right-wing populists – the United Kingdom’s Nigel Farage, Jordan Bardella in France, Alice Weidel in Germany, Italy’s Matteo Salvini, Robert Fico in Slovakia, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and Mateusz Morawiecki in Poland – imagined themselves fellow travelers in a revolt against liberal internationalism. Now their idol and patron has been threatening to swallow whole or in part (if the supposed “deal” he has announced comes about) the sovereign territory of a European ally.

Continue reading →

Let’s Build a Responsible & Compassionate Immigration System

Image: NARA and DVIDS Public Domain Archive

By Blake Burdge

Mexico is sending murderers and rapists to the United States.

Tren de Aragua has invaded and seized apartment complexes in Aurora, Colorado with weapons better than the U.S. military’s.

MS-13, a street gang with U.S. origins, has organized itself transnationally with the discrete intention of sowing unrest throughout the United States.

The embellished outrage surrounding transnational crime and organized gang activity grows quiet once it has served its purpose – to criminalize migrants fleeing violence or the grim landscapes in their home countries created and maintained by an oppressive, dominant economic system. 

Continue reading →

The 2023 Montreal Ice Storm: A Stark Reminder of the Urgency of Climate Change

Image: picryl

By Sarah Pachal

People in the Northern Hemisphere may associate April with spring-like weather, but in Southern Quebec and Ontario, April brought an ice storm that shut cities down for days and resulted in one man dead. As we experience record-breaking heatwaves, terrible wildfires, and catastrophic storms like this, it is obvious that climate change is a contemporary reality rather than a distant threat. The evidence is clear: human activity is causing our planet to warm at an alarming rate, with disastrous consequences.

During the rainstorm that began on April 5, between 20 mm and 25 mm of ice collected on trees and buildings and 1.1 million Quebec residents were without electricity, some for days. 

Continue reading →

Rebuild U.S. Leadership in Latin America

Image: Wikimedia Commons

By Saul R. Revatta

There is no doubt that since the end of World War II, the United States has been the dominant force shaping and leading the global economic order. The U.S. has spearheaded a Western-led rules-based capitalistic system that has fueled global economic growth but has also  disproportionately benefited the U.S. and its western European allies. However, as of late, the U.S. has forgotten the tremendous economic gains it has reaped as the primary architect and enforcer of this system. Nowhere is this abdication of leadership more evident than in Latin America (LatAm), where the U.S. is ceding influence to China, which has been funding major infrastructure projects across the region. The incoming Trump administration must know that it is in the U.S.’s best interest to re-engage with LatAm and regain influence. 

Continue reading →

Feminist Economics for All

Image: Project Syndicate

By Mercedes D’Alessandro

It may seem obvious to a layperson that failing to support an economy’s labor force must come at a cost. Yet conventional economic models render nearly invisible – or simply wave aside – a dimension of inequality that pervades economic policymaking and macroeconomic outcomes.

Not everyone has lost out from the “polycrisis” that we are now enduring. Perversely, both extreme wealth and extreme poverty have increased simultaneously for the first time in 25 years. Worse, a host of other problems also now demand our immediate attention – from high and rising debt and increasing job precarity to inflation, climate change, and food insecurity.

To reconfigure our economies for growth and sustainable development, we must go back to the intellectual drawing board to identify elements of economic theory and practice that have been overlooked. For example, even though the pandemic exposed deep flaws in how we think about care, many governments and businesses continue to neglect this dimension of the economy.

Continue reading →