This October, the international community saw a new development in an ongoing territorial dispute between the South American nations of Bolivia and Chile.
Even before the health studies were released about the incredible benefits of quinoa, Bolivia and Peru found themselves as the main producers and consumers of this crop. However, more recently studies have been released portraying quinoa to be the ultimate superfood.
Bolivia is a landlocked country in Latin America, whose economic and cultural centers are located in remote, mountainous regions. This geography has posed challenges for economic exchanges for hundreds of years, and Bolivia is one of the poorest, least developed countries in South America. Bolivia’s stagnation in industrialization can in part be explained by the geography hypothesis delineated by Armendáriz and Larraín (2017), which postulates that forces of nature are a root cause of national poverty.
Last week, a long awaited trial against the former president of Bolivia and his minister of defense commenced on Monday with its jury selection. Defendants did not take to the stand in their home country, though; rather, the eight families who have charged Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada and José Carlos Sánchez Berzaín traveled to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to make their case to a U.S. court.
What is your first impression when you see the brand billboards adorning this urban landscape? You might normally associate such precarious infrastructure with marketplaces exclusively selling low budget or fake products, yet in this Open Air Fair in La Paz, Bolivia, the banner ads were sponsored by electronics multinationals. They are in search of Bolivian clients of all social strata and ethnic affiliation who routinely come to buy original electronic equipment from these tiny stalls and improvised shops.
A key indicator of ethnoracial income inequality is the difference in the probability of being poor between whites and non-whites. This probability is expressed as the percentage of individuals living below the poverty line. In Brazil, 5.2 percent of whites live below the extreme poverty line, while, for non-whites, that figure is 14.6 percent. In Bolivia, where 14.7 percent of whites live below the poverty line, the rate for non-whites is 31.5. In Guatemala, the rate for whites is 20.6, and the rate for non-whites is 46.6. To what extent does fiscal policy reduce this gap?
The following contribution presents key arguments and findings from the paper ‘Business Power and the Politics of Postneoliberalism: Relations Between Governments and Economic Elites in Bolivia and Ecuador’, published by the author in the journal Latin American Politics and Society (vol. 58, no. 2, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-2456.2016.00313.x).
Coca is a leaf that is integrated in the Bolivian culture through rituals, medicine, food, religion, social interactions, and much more. The primary use for the coca leaf is consumption; it is chewed or brewed for tea. Coca leaves are not exclusive to Bolivia, rather many Andean countries such as Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, Peru, Paraguay, and Brazil use coca for similar cultural practices as well.
A lorry carries the local harvest through a pea field in the Bolivian Altiplano. Photo credit: Rachel Godfrey-Wood.
As the United States draws nearer to the possible election of its first female president, Panoramas decided to take a look at the female presidents Latin America has had in the past. Below are the profiles of each of these eleven women, whose successes and trials reflect the history of women in politics around the world.
