Category: Spotlight: Perspectives in Times of Change

Haiti is in the news. In recent weeks, gangs have coordinated violent actions, taken to the streets and liberated thousands of inmates to spread chaos and solidify their control of the Port-au-Prince capital.

As 2024 ushered in, newly-elected Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa issued a state of emergency in his country, citing a wave of gang violence spurred by the prison escape of a local criminal leader with ties to Mexico’s ruthless Sinaloa Cartel.

I first arrived in Latin America in 1997, and since then, I’ve been involved in education and the development of leadership and governance issues in the region. During these 27 years—12 of them from Spain—I have had the opportunity to interact with leaders from the region, the private and public sectors, multinationals and small and medium-sized enterprises, and various industries.

Almost exactly 500 years ago Hernán Cortés dispatched his brother-in-arms Pedro de Alvarado from newly subdued Tenochtitlán to conquer Guatemala. Violent and monumentally willful, Alvarado was a key lieutenant in the Spanish Crown’s conquest of Cuba in 1511 and Cortés’ deputy in defeating Moctezuma’s empire in 1521.

On January 3, 2024, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele ordered the destruction of San Salvador’s Monument of Reconciliation, an enormous sculpture on the west side of the capital that had been inaugurated in 2017 under Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) President Salvador Sánchez Cerén. Intended to celebrate 25 years since the signing of the Peace Accords, which brought El Salvador’s civil war to an end, the monument featured two bronze figures—an FMLN fighter and a soldier with arms interlocked and releasing a flock of aluminum pigeons.

This powerful quote drew my attention, echoing what authors have written about the crucial connection between Indigenous bodies and their territories, and how colonialism has disastrous consequences affecting this connection.

Samuel “Koko” Erazo is a Honduran artist who understands that his country’s electric sector is not an abstract thing for the citizens of his country, particularly the poor.

I first explicitly began to explore the theme of Cuban Blackness in 2014 at BE.BOP 14, Spiritual Revolutions & “The Scramble for Africa,” a theoretical and anti-colonial event in Berlin, Germany, organzied by the late Dominican writer and curator Alanna Lockward. I presented my project “Túmbenlo,” which supported the duo rap group Obsesión in their 2010 demands on the Cuban government to demolish the statue that glorifies racism in Cuba: the statue erected in 1936 of José Miguel Gómez, the second president of Cuba, responsible for the 1912 massacre of thousands of Afro-Cubans who were members of the Independent Party of Color (PIC, after its Spanish acronym).

Grendy Isabel Nina Huaycane, who comes from the southern Peruvian Andean region of Puno, grew up in an urban area of Puno, where she heard both Spanish and Aymara, though she remembers that most of her interactions where “only in Spanish.” Her entrance to university was a turning point in her life.

I read in a recent report by the Norwegian Refugee Council that the violence in Honduras is similar to that experienced in war zones.

Mexico, a country of extraordinary cultural richness, is a place where ancestral roots intertwine with the present in a unique way. I remember a childhood where even the names of streets evoked history and tradition.

Beneath the comal, the flames swayed with a gentle warmth, mirroring the graceful cooking style of my late maternal grandmother, Emilia Velazquez, as she artfully crafted her tortillas. The tortillas puffed up, releasing an aroma known only to those who truly appreciate and understand the art.

I remember being in the school patio. My grandfather had been arrested the day before. I didn’t say anything about what had happened. I didn’t understand. I wanted to tell someone something, but I knew no one would understand what I was saying. In my school in 2002, they didn’t teach us anything about the history of contemporary Argentina

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni faced a dilemma: she didn’t want any more immigrants, but she was facing severe population decline in her country. She needed young people who wanted to start families to settle in Italy; however, she didn’t favor those immigrants arriving from Africa.

“The lake was our mother and father. Now, we are orphans,” said Don Rufino Choque, whose words echo through the desolate, windswept salt flat that had once been the thriving shore of Lake Poopó, Bolivia.

Everywhere we went in Guatemala, we saw shops with Hebrew names—Eben Ezra Pharmacy, El Shadday Fertilizer.

As implausible as it may seem, the news is hard and true. We have closed our wonderful campus in Managua with first-class facilities in the world in which we train local leaders with a global mentality to contribute to sustainable development – so needed – in our countries.

We come from a beautiful country, with abundant natural, archaeological and cultural wealth. Despite its splendor and Mayan heritage, our country suffers from its colonial legacies.

Peruvian citizens have been on the streets since December 2022—protests and strikes are calling for the resignation of the current president, Dina Boluarte, and new elections.

In my work at the INCAE business school, I get to interact with presidents and business leaders (CEOs) from our region.