Opinion and Interviews

University of Pittsburgh Hillman Library houses Thomas Walker Collection: A lifetime of scholarly work in Latin America

By Rosa De Ferrari
November 8, 2017

Caridad was a woman of great endurance. Rising at 4am and retiring at midnight, she spent her long days cooking and selling mondongo, or tripe soup, to the men returning from the brothels in a small town in Colombia. With her sparse earnings, she supported her six children and was able to send her eldest, a son, to school. He went on to become a university professor and in turn provided education for his younger siblings. Not unlike mothers around the world, Caridad fought for her children’s survival with resilience and strength.

Michael Shifter: Latin America in a Time of Uncertainty

By Rosa De Ferrari
October 9, 2017

Last Wednesday, the Center for Latin American Studies here at the University of Pittsburgh hosted a talk by Dr. Michael Shifter on US-Latin American relations. Dr. Shifter is president of the Inter-American Dialogue and has played a key role in shaping the group’s agenda and commissioning policy-relevant articles and reports. In addition to being an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, Dr.

Carlos' Story

By Rachel Rozak
December 16, 2016

This past summer I had the incredible opportunity to spend half of my summer working in Sololá, Guatemala.  The municipality is located in the Western highlands of the country, and I was specifically staying around the beautiful Lake Atítlan in the town of San Juan La Laguna.  When my intern team’s boat landed in San Juan’s dock, I remember being a bit apprehensive – I had been forewarned that the town was more in tune to its Maya roots and that it would be a much more traditional experience than the other parts of Guatemala we had visited.

The Politics of Sentencing Reform in Brazil

By Rodrigo Nunes
May 9, 2016

Much like the United States, Brazil has a mass incarceration problem. The country’s prison population is the fourth largest in the world, its incarceration rate is the highest in South America, the occupancy level in its prison system is at 154 percent, and almost forty percent of all prisoners are still awaiting trial. These numbers have consistently worsened since the country’s transition to electoral democracy in 1989, and represent one of the biggest barriers for the establishment of a liberal political order in the country.

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