Category: Spotlight: Perspectives in Times of Change

It was snowing the day in early August when I arrived at Lof Pillan Mahuiza, a Mapuche-Tehuelche community around 60 miles from Esquel, the provincial capital of Chubut, Argentina.

In Latin America, the chair occupies a central and often overlooked place in everyday life. It is present in rural homes and public plazas, inside crowded city schools and at the edges of municipal offices.

Blackness has reshaped the fabric of the Americas. From the Middle Passage to contemporary diasporas, Blackness has constituted a transhemispheric demographic, cultural and historical reality.

On a sweltering, overcast Florida afternoon on July 4th, 2025, about fifty people congregated at a multigenerational Miccosukee Seminole camp, a site rooted in history and cultural significance. Just a quarter of a mile away looms the Dade-Collier Transition and Training Airport, now hauntingly renamed “Alligator Alcatraz.”

“If you can count on waves, time will give you everything,” explains Aitor Francesena Uría, AKA ‘Gallo’ (rooster), when asked about Surf City and El Salvador.

Our modern days mark the end of an era that began in the 15th century. King Henry the Navigator and his Portuguese caravels, joined by the Crown of Castile’s three ships under Christopher Columbus launched the exploration of Africa and America that ultimately led to globalization.

Upstream from Chepe Aleta, following the winding road alongside the river that ends at El Palmarcito, after crossing what Yovani Hernández Ramírez calls the “Puentes de Plata y de Oro” (Silver and Gold Bridges), you arrive at the hamlet of Acahuaspán

Today, El Salvador’s passage from chaos to order relies on a modernization process that weaves a social and productive straw tapestry among Salvadorans as never before—such a tapestry is called “petate” in Central America

Drawing your line on a wave while surfing, your board goes where your eyes go. The Surf City campaign communicated a clear and unequivocal message to the world: El Salvador is now safe.

“El Boyita”—little buoy—is only a couple of years away from coming of age, but his eyes have already seen four murders. They were perpetrated by mareros—gang members—years ago, at a hillside of the Bálsamo—Balm—Coast, near the slum of El Chumpe, in El Salvador.

In May 2025, INCAE, a prominent Latin American business school, hosted the first Anticipatory Leadership Week of the Global Curriculum for Anticipatory Leadership (GCAL). Leaders gathered in Costa Rica to explore how anticipating future trends—from AI to sustainability—can shape decisions today.

Listen to the song Soldadito Marinero—little soldier sailor—by the Spanish Basque Country rock band Fito y los Fitipaldis. It says that he wanted to be a child, but the war caught him too soon. Something like this happened to Carmelo.

Every morning, you decide what clothes to wear. Whether plain or elaborate, your choice of apparel reflects a quiet act of self-definition. Through her exhibit, Addressing the Dress, Mexican artist Angeles Salinas reclaims the dress as a site of transformation, threading together themes of personal struggle, cultural inheritance and feminine agency to assert control over her evolving identity.

As a little girl, I was always afraid to cross bridges over turbulent waters. This irrational fear complicated things for my parents since I grew up in Valladolid, a small city in northeastern Spain with a river passing through it. Every time we crossed the Pisuerga River with its abundant current, I asked them to grip my hand and not let go.

As I prepared my speech for the graduation ceremony —my first as President of INCAE, an institution that, from Latin America, has cultivated leadership with purpose in more than 20,000 graduates over six decades—I found myself reflecting in silence on a few uncomfortable questions: Do we truly lead for the longstanding future or merely for today— perhaps for tomorrow at best?

Lurigancho Prison in Lima, Peru, is the largest and most overcrowded prison in the country. With a prison overpopulation and overcrowding of 9,735 inmates (August 2024 Statistical Report from the National Penitentiary Institute, INPE), despite having an actual capacity for only 3,204, and with a ratio of more than 100 inmates per security officer (compared to six inmates per officer in the United States, it stands as a grim giant.

Growing up in Latin America can be quite tough, especially when it comes to mental health

Students at the Chan Santa Cruz program in Mexico are getting their degrees in Bilingual Education (Maya/Spanish) and Historical and Cultural Heritage in Mexico.

  The world has lost one of the most charismatic pontiffs of the last century with the passing of Pope Francis, the first Latin American prelate of the church’s 1.3 billion Catholics. Francis was a reformer who made himself available to the faithful, and traveled to 66 countries, including eleven in Latin America.

In May 2024, Argentine Security Minister Patricia Bullrich wrote on X, “We are going to lock them all up” after criminals in Rosario threatened to kill her. She issued the statement in response to random attacks by criminal organizations causing the deaths of civilians in the Argentine city of Rosario where two taxi drivers, a gas station employee and a bus driver with no apparent ties to organized crime had been murdered by hitmen.