Digital Commons Network^™

Legal Protections For Environmental Migrants: Expanding Possibilities And Redefining Success, Jayesh Rathod

Working Papers

This working paper describes international and domestic efforts to enact legal protections for environmental migrants, with attention to Latin America, and examines why efforts to craft a comprehensive international instrument to address this phenomenon have yet to succeed. It details factors contributing to this impasse, including: the lack of an existing framework; the inherent complexity and variability of environmental migration; the trend towards restrictive migration policies; and the lack of a clear institutional leader at the international level. Citing the limits of an exclusive focus on the creation of a new international instrument, the paper also points to the need …

¿Cómo Traducimos "Ni Una Más" Al Inglés?: Latin American Manifestation Of The Phenomenology Of Femicide, And The United States’ Subsequent Internal Neglect, Suemi Mendez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper aims to tackle two components in analyzing the phenomenological concept of femicide, most simply known as the killing of women because they are women through structural violence and oppression. First, it will develop its deployment within the Latin American framework as it has been adapted to function within the regional lexicon, both socially and legislatively. This assessment will serve to address the successes and failures thus far in tackling femicide as the location with the highest statistics globally. Through this foregrounding, it will lead into how this revised deployment of femicide fits into the context of Global North …

Drivers Of Stunting Reduction In Peru: A Country Case Study, Luis Huicho, Elisa Vidal-Cárdenas, Nadia Akseer, Samanpreet Brar, Kaitlin Conway, Muhammad Islam, Elisa Juarez, Aviva Rappaport, Hana Tasic, Tyler Vaivada, Jannah Wigle, Zulfiqar Ahmed Bhutta

Woman and Child Health

Background: Peru reduced its under-5 child stunting prevalence notably from 31.3% in 2000 to 13.1% in 2016.
Objectives: We aimed to study factors and key enablers of child stunting reduction in Peru from 2000-2016.
Methods: Demographic and Health Surveys were used to conduct descriptive analyses [height-for-age z scores (HAZ) means and distributions, equity analysis, predicted child growth curves through polynomial regressions] and advanced regression analyses. An ecological (at department level) multilevel regression analysis was conducted to identify the major predictors of stunting decline from 2000 to 2016, and Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition was conducted to identify the relative contribution of each factor …

Access To Treatment For People With Hiv: Do Latin American Governments Cover Medical Treatment For People With Hiv-Aids Who Cannot Afford It?, Veronica M. Belmonte

International Programs

I will analyze different Latin American Supreme Court rulings in order to demonstrate that governments are obliged to cover universal medical treatments for people with HIV. This is a worldwide issue and UNAIDS is constantly working to protect this vulnerable group of people. We can see this progress in the following statistics.

The Origin Of Usurpation And Tyranny: Nonagentic Anti-Imperialism Of The Twenty-First Century And The Legacy Of Chavismo, Juan Bustillo

International Studies (MA) Theses

As Venezuela’s Chavista regime presides over the country’s descent into Latin America’s worst refugee and humanitarian crisis in modern times, a mass exodus of nearly five million Venezuelans since 2015, the rhetoric of Western anti-imperialists and the regime itself has absolved it of any responsibility for the crisis and the increasing authoritarianism that led to it by abdicating the regime's agency to act according to its own free will. This paper develops the discursive concept of nonagentic anti-imperialism, a rhetoric that effectively absolves self-declared anti-imperialist regimes, from Castro’s Cuba to Rajapaksa’s Sri Lanka, of human rights abuses and democratic erosions …

A Historiography Of Populism And Neopopulism In Latin America, Michael Conniff

Faculty Publications, History

For over a half century, Latin American and other scholars have written reams and held innumerable conferences about the populist style of politics in the region. Historians quickly joined in with their theories, methods, and perspectives. Most literature focused on the classic period from the 1930s-1970s, when populism dominated many nations’ governments. In the 1980s and 1990s, as the region rebounded from military dictatorship, new leaders using populist methods won office and instituted economic policies in line with neoliberalism. This reappearance, called neopopulism, sparked new interest in the subject. Finally, after 2000 numerous left-leaning politicians gave rise to a radical …

Engines Of Autonomy: Regional Organizations Leading Latin America’S Struggle For Emancipation, Dejan Bajic

College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations

This thesis intends to show how South American counter-hegemonic regional political organizations bolster, disseminate, and strengthen regional autonomy, especially concerning the historic control of the United States of America (U.S.). I argue that regional organizations are the “engines” of Latin American people’s movements and elites’ search for regional political integration, “imagined unity,” and solidarity as an alternative to “Washington’s NeoPanAmerican agenda.” To date, the literature on regional organizations and sovereignty has not fully considered the influence of South American regional organizations in continentally bolstering autonomy in the sense of transcending the “subordination of Latin American countries vis-à-vis the major powers …

Tactics For Thriving On Multiplicity: Liliana Porter’S Photo-Drawing-Installations, 1973–Present, Jennifer Bratovich

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines Porter’s hybrid 1973 works during a period of transnational artistic mobility. It argues she employed strategies of reproduction and contingency to circulate the works among multiple contexts, and shows how her 2012 revisiting of these works led to their revitalization within current reassessments of Latin American conceptualism.

How Socialism Failed Venezuela, Ben Abrahamson

Political Science Theses and Capstones

In the 1970s, Venezuela was considered one of the wealthiest nations in the world. They enjoyed high oil prices after the discovery of OPEC, they were a democratized country in a continent where most of it was still undeveloped. Unfortunately, in the 1980s a major cut in oil prices caused economic turmoil, and leading into the 90s there were bloody riots, political disparity, attempted coups and building poverty. In 1998 came Hugo Chavez, a newly elected president to rid their economic issues and end corruption. However, that all turned out to be the opposite of what he did. The country …

A Thumb On The Scale: Chinese Investment And Influence In Ecuador And Colombia, Christina Pendergrast

Honors Theses

Over the past two decades, Chinese involvement in the developing world has increased dramatically, raising concerns over the intentions behind the provision of development packages. Critics have accused China of a practice known as debt-trap diplomacy, a method of ensnaring less developed nations by providing more loans than those nations have the ability to feasibly pay back. While China denies that their loan and investment packages are provided with any ulterior motive, the influence held by an investor like China has the potential to impact these partner countries for decades to come. In light of the scope of China’s role …

Cruces, Carlos Mario Tobon Franco

Theses

Cruces is a multimedia installation depicting immigrant conditions and experiences throughout landscapes, Latinx communities, and borderlands. Made during the last two years, it is constructed as a multivocal ethnography of immigrants with varying legal statuses, countries of origin, and stages in their journey. The imagery, sounds, and narratives are composed of the distributed yet relational geographies of immigrants’ experience and the pieces are structured to highlight the constitutive elements of human mobilities, such as trains, rivers and immigration hubs, as well as the natural obstacles they face in their perilous transit, such as forests and deserts.

The fieldwork was carried …

Does Description Equal Prescription? A Case For Gender Quotas In Latin America, Samuel E. Hobbs

Honors College Theses

Extant research demonstrates that gender quotas do increase women’s descriptive representation in national legislatures, including in Latin America (Smith 2016; Mark et al. 2012). However, there has been an evident lack of research conducted to identify the relationship between gender quotas and outcomes of gendered legislation. I argue that gender quotas implemented on the national legislature in Latin America do increase the outcome of gendered legislation. I test my hypothesis by examining the government of Chile to analyze the effects of the augmentation of women in national legislatures. To do so, I use the government’s national legislative database to search …

Narrating Complexity In Latin America: Jorge Volpi, Roberto Bolaño, Valeria Luiselli, And Daniel Alarcón, Charles R. Lebel

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the centrality of complex thought in examples of Latin American narrative produced since 1999. I am interested in the ways in which Jorge Volpi (Mexico City 1968), Roberto Bolaño (Santiago, Chile 1953), Valeria Luiselli (Mexico City 1983), and Daniel Alarcón (Lima, Peru 1977) address complex dynamics in contemporary human experience. My analysis focuses on thematic and narratological indicators of complex thought primarily in Volpi’s En busca de Klingsor (1999); Bolaño’s 2666 (2004); Luiselli’s Los ingrávidos (2011), La historia de mis dientes (2013), and Los niños perdidos (2016); and Alarcón’s podcast Radio Ambulante. I have chosen these …

The Chasquis Of Liberty: Revolutionary Messengers In The Bolivian Independence Era, 1808-1825, Caleb Garret Wittum

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on a group of South American revolutionaries and the ways they shaped and challenged the precepts of the Age of Revolutions that rocked Latin America, Europe, and the Atlantic World in the early nineteenth century. Specifically, it investigates revolutionaries like Vicente Pazos Kanki, an indigenous journalist and diplomat, who traveled throughout South America, the United States, and Europe in an effort to form republican governments that brought together indigenous, African, and European citizens into multiethnic republics. I call these revolutionaries the chasquis of liberty. A chasqui was the rapid-traveling foot messenger of the Andean preconquest and colonial …

How Hard Can This Be? The Dearth Of U.S. Tax Treaties With Latin America, Patricia A. Brown

University of Miami Law Review

The United States has fewer tax treaties with countries in Latin America and the Caribbean than the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain and even China have with such countries. After first describing ways in which tax treaties reduce barriers to cross-border trade and investment, this Article considers in turn various possible explanations for this situation. It examines, and rejects, the hypothesis that Latin American countries are reluctant to enter into tax treaties in general. It then considers, and rejects, the possibility that Latin American countries are opposed to in-creased trade and investment from the United States in particular. It then …

Introduction, Colin Crawford, Daniel Bonilla Maldonado

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

The papers gathered in this volume analyze access to justice in Latin America, Europe, and North America from a philosophical, legal, and sociological perspective. In these three regions of the world, as in the rest of the globe, liberal democracies face a troubling gap between the normative and the descriptive: the access to justice promises made by the legal and political system are not fully realized in practice. The studies collected here, therefore, share two baseline assumptions. First, the right of access to justice is fundamental in a liberal state. Access to justice ensures that citizens are able to defend …

Cause Lawyering And Compassionate Lawyering In Clinical Legal Education: The Case Of Chile, Fernando Munoz L.

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

In order to contribute from a situated perspective to a global narrative of access to justice, in the next sections I will trace the origins of compassionate and cause lawyering in the history of Chilean legal aid and training. Part II will explain how legal assistance to the poor was codified as a duty of legal professionals during the Middle Ages, in both canon law and in Castilian legislation. Part III will show that practical legal training, both in Spain and in Chile, began much later as the result of the ambition among prominent members of the legal profession to …

The Mandarins Of The Law: Pro Bono Legal Work From A Comparative Perspective, Daniel Bonilla Maldonado

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

In Part I, I present the elements that form the standard global concept of pro bono work. Pro bono work is a global phenomenon defined by, and based on, a transnational discourse. In the first section of Part I, I argue that this transnational discourse conceptualizes pro bono work as a set of institutionalized free legal services that lawyers voluntarily provide to people with few financial resources or to protect the public interest. In the three following sections, I specify and analyze the concepts of subject, time, and space that this understanding of pro bono work creates, to present the …

Pro Bono Work In Colombia: How Can It Help Broaden, Equalize, And Ensure Access To Justice, Ana Bejarano Ricaurte

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

This article does not discuss whether pro bono programs should exist in Colombia, or whether they cause positive transformation in the legal profession. These issues are examined in other types of legal literature, and this author departs from the standpoint of viewing this type of work as a positive practice within the legal culture. The main thesis of this article is that pro bono work is still developing in Colombia, both in its numbers of participating attorneys and clients, as well as in the ways it is affecting the legal culture. As important as it might be, the work of …

Afro-Descendant Representation On Latin American Courts, Daniel Gomez Mazo

SJD Dissertations

By using Colombia as a case study, this dissertation exposes ethno-racial homogeneity on Latin American courts as a problem affecting Afro-descendants and judicial systems in the region, and to uncover its connection to formal and informal rules governing the composition and functioning of Latin American courts. This study differs from previous literature in its approach to the problem of minority underrepresentation in judicial bodies. We analyze this issue based on empirical evidence, collected mostly through the use of qualitative instruments. This analysis diverges from studies that have framed the issue of minority presence in public institutions purely from a normative …

Corruption And Anti-Corruption Agencies: Assessing Peruvian Agencies' Effectiveness, Kia R. Del Solar

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Corruption has gained attention around the world as a prominent issue. This is because corruption has greatly affected several countries. Following the exploration of various definitions and types of corruption, this thesis focuses on two efforts to rein in “grand corruption”, also known as executive corruption. The thesis is informed by existing theories of corruption as well as anti-corruption agencies and then situates Peru’s experience with corruption in its theoretical context and its broader Latin American context. This work conducts a comparative analysis and follows a process-tracing approach to examine and evaluate Peru’s recent anti-corruption agencies and their effectiveness in …

Acoso Visual: Staring Back At The State And Gender Conformity, Juan Luna

Honors Theses

A semi-autoethnographic piece that uses a radical transfeminist lens to interrogate hegemonic systems of gender and race in the Dominican Republic through the violence that Trans and Gender Nonconforming people face. While focusing on trans violence, this thesis explicitly turns its gaze away from Trans/Gender Nonconforming people and interrogates the state, cisnormativity, and gender conformity. This thesis explores how acoso visual (visual accosting) is a historically informed process that works to border trans/gender nonconformity out of the idea of Dominicanidad. Ultimately, this text reminds Trans/Gender Nonconforming individuals that they are not the reason for the transphobia that they experience, and …

Neutrosophic In Latin America, Advances And Perspectives (Neutrosofía En Latinoamérica, Avances Y Perspectivas), Maykel Leyva-Vazquez, Jesus Estupinan, Florentin Smarandache

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

Neutrosophy has given way to its own research method by constituting a unified field of logic for a transdisciplinary study that crosses the borders between the sciences. This paper analyzes the impact of neutrosophic theory in Latin America, its main drivers and the state of the research. The increase in publications since the creation of the Latin American Association of Neutrosophic Sciences is noteworthy. The most approached areas are found in the interrelation of the social sciences and neutrosophy, presenting outstanding results in these areas of research. The most outstanding university and institutions are the Autonomous Regional University of the …

After The Deluge: Central American Historiography At Low Tide, Robert H. Holden

History Faculty Publications

This essay reviews the following works:

Centroamérica: Filibusteros, estados, imperios y memorias. By Víctor Hugo Acuña. San José, Costa Rica: Editorial Costa Rica, 2014. Pp. xv + 151. $5.99 paperback. ISBN: 9789968684408.

I Ask for Justice: Maya Women, Dictators, and Crime in Guatemala, 1898–1944. By David Carey Jr. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013. Pp. xxv + 335. $55.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780292748682.

A Camera in the Garden of Eden: The Self-Forging of a Banana Republic. By Kevin Coleman. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. Pp. 312. $27.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781477308554.

Empire by Invitation: William Walker and Manifest Destiny in …

Redefining Lgbtq And Abortion Rights In Latin America: A Transnational Toolkit, Alyssa Julian

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Throughout Latin America, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Queer (LGBTQ) and abortion rights movements have progressed at divergent strengths and speeds, with significant variation among countries. The region is home to some of the most restrictive and discriminatory laws when it comes to these contentious issues. This Note explores some of the reasons behind the variation in LGBTQ and abortion rights throughout the region.

This Note traces the economic and political history of Latin America to illustrate the climate in which these social movements are operating. Further, this Note offers a brief snapshot of recent global developments in LGBTQ …

Reducing Inequality And Poverty In Latin America: Conditional Cash Transfer Programs In Chile, Colombia, And Mexico, Jorge Humberto Guzman Gonzalez

Dissertations

Latin America is the most unequal region across the globe. Inequality has increased the election of populist leaders and has resulted in massive social movements and protests in the region. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the 2000s, a process of inequality reduction started in the majority of the countries. Since the end of the 1990s, a large number of Latin American countries were the world pioneers developing Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs), to put money in the hands of the poor with the conditions of school attendance and nutritional check-ups for their children. Most of the studies have analyzed the effectiveness …

Reflections On Critical Pedagogy In America Latina: La Lucha Continua, Peter Mclaren

Education Faculty Articles and Research

"When I speak in Mexico, I support efforts there to create a revolutionary critical pedagogy—one that has not been domesticated and depotentiated by neoliberal dogma. This means the inclusion of a decolonial pedagogy which challenges the “coloniality of power” (patron de poder colonial) that still resides at the heart of post-colonial societies. I would advise as a central, overarching goal of critical pedagogy the struggle for a socialist alternative to the “value form of labor” that exists in capitalist societies throughout North and South America, and that such efforts must be transnational in scope since capitalism is now transnational in …

Variations On A Theme: Corporate Law In Latin America, Continental Europe, And The United States, Ángel R. Oquendo

University of Miami Inter-American Law Review

The regulation of incorporated companies in Latin America and Continental Europe appears to distance itself from that in the United States. It differs in how it structures itself and handles incorporation, incorporators, piercing, governance, discipline, and shareholders. In their regulatory exertions, both regimes rely, certainly, on legislation and adjudication yet do so differently, qualitatively in addition to quantitatively.

Apparently, civil and common law continue to specialize respectively though not exclusively in statutes and binding precedents. Still, they ever more frequently intrude into each other’s apparent specialty, while leaving their own imprint on it. The tendency to converge coexists with that …

Special Relationships: Anglo-American Latin America Policy And The Redefining Of National Security, 1969-1982, Benjamin Jared Pack

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

From 1969–82, the United States and Great Britain redefined national security in a distinctive way, separating the notion of national security from its traditional foundations in realist thought. The way the two powers come to define national security was the result of more than a century of historical interaction with Latin America and their own historical experience with ideology, imperialism, and colonialism. As such, the way the United States and Great Britain perceived their respective special relationships influenced the way they chose to intervene in matters of national security, particularly in Latin America’s Southern Cone countries of Chile and Argentina. …

Investment In Latin America Will Limit Migration North, Ryan J. O'Riordan, Stanley P. Kowalski

Law Faculty Scholarship

The refugee crisis at the US Southern Border is due to multiple compounding factors: Latin America’s over-reliance on commodities, failure to economically diversify to innovation, and a lack of coherent US strategic engagement with the region. The situation is hemispheric; imploding states and a serious humanitarian calamity loom ever larger on the southern horizon. Since this represents a long-term problem requiring strategic and sustainable development initiatives, a new Alliance for Progress for the 21st Century is proposed which will build partnerships to advance innovation-driven development across the region.