Emy Takada is in her fourth year of doctoral study in Hispanic Languages and Literatures while pursuing a certificate in Film Studies. She has taught Brazilian cinema, currently teaching Spanish Grammar and Composition and Conversation.
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.
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.
Dr. Ariel Armony is the director of international programs and director of the University Center for International Studies at the University of Pittsburgh as well as a prominent scholar in Chinese-Latin American relations. I had the pleasure of discussing with him the book Beyond Raw Materials: Who are the Actors in the Latin America and Caribbean-China Relationship, which Dr. Armony co-edited with Enrique Dussel Peters, the director of UNAM’s Centro de Estudios China-México.
On Friday, February 19th, historian, Elliot Young, gave a lecture on his recent book, Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through World War II. Dr.
In our edited book, Reforming Intelligence: Obstacles to Democratic Control and Effectiveness, Steven Boraz and I argue that intelligence should be analyzed as a subset of civil-military relations.
