Gregory Weeks

Like the episode in May, this one is a panel discussion. This time Christine Wade invited Adam Isacson, Adriana Beltrán, Ana Patricia Rodríguez, and me to Washington College to discuss “Immigration, Security, and Human Rights in the Trump Era.” It was a great discussion, ranging from U.S. policy to the experiences of the migrants themselves.

Greg talks with Fred Batista, Assistant Professor of Political Science at UNC Charlotte. His research focuses on comparative politics, political psychology, and methods, and he has done a lot of work on Brazilian politics, especially with regard to female candidates for office. They talk about the Brazilian presidential election, coming up on October 7. Just the usual stuff about stabbing, unpredictable voters, and overall dissatisfaction.

Greg talks with Christine Wade, who is Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Washington College. She studies Central America and recently published Captured Peace: Elites and Peacebuilding in El Salvador and also the ninth edition of Latin American Politics and Development. We discuss the state of the crisis in Nicaragua, which was still unfolding literally as we talked. We don’t have lots of answers but hey, we’ve got good questions.

Link to the NACLA article that Dr. Wade mentions:

https://nacla.org/news/2018/06/15/deciphering-nicaraguan-student-uprising

Greg talks with his good friend and colleague Jurgen Buchenau, who is Professor and Chair of the Department of History at UNC Charlotte. He is an expert on the Mexican Revolution and has published numerous books on the topic. We talk about Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO, who is the frontrunner in the Mexican presidential race. We look at him from a historical perspective to see how he fits into Mexican political history.

This is a different sort of episode. Greg recorded a round table on security in Latin America that he organized and chaired for the Latin American Studies Association meeting in Barcelona. The speakers are Brian Fonseca (FIU), Orlando Pérez (Millersville), Jonathan Rosen (Holy Family), and Kristina Mani (Oberlin). It was a great, though sobering, conversation.

Greg talks with Jana Morgan, who is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Tennessee and a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. She works on inequality, exclusion and representation. She explores how economic, social and political inequalities affect marginalized groups and undermine democratic processes and outcomes. She recently published an article in Latin American Research Review on political decentralization and party decay in Latin America, and that’s what we talked about. I couldn’t help bringing the United States into the conversation as well.

Greg talks with Adam Isacson, who is Director of the Defense Oversight Program for the Washington Office on Latin America. He has been studying Colombia and its conflicts for many years, and recently traveled there to evaluate a USAID project to bring government services to post-conflict areas of the country. We talked first back in Episode 3 in September 2016 about the then upcoming plebiscite and uncertainty, so we discuss what’s been accomplished (or not) from a firsthand perspective, what the outlook is, and what the Colombia-Venezuela border looks like.

Greg talks about his project on autonomy in U.S.-Latin American relations, which he presented at the 2018 meeting of the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies a little more than a week ago in Nashville. One part of that project is to give the Latin American literature more attention, which happens too little.

Ana Valdez Curiel is an undergraduate (majoring in Political Science and Latin American Studies) here at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is an activist and involved in a lot of different things but for the purposes of this conversation I have to note that she was brought to the United States as a young child and is currently a recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.

This is a personal look at DACA and we talk about the stress involved, the uncertainty about life, the misperceptions people have, and the debate over the “good” vs. “bad” immigrant. Congress is dealing with the issue right now and the stakes are high.

Thanks to Alex Frizzell for doing the recording, which for the first time I did at a studio here on the UNC Charlotte campus.

Greg talks with Geoff Ramsey, Assistant Director of the Venezuela Program at the Washington Office on Latin America. As part of that position, he contributes to the Venezuelan Politics and Human Rights blog. They discuss what possibilities there are for political change in Venezuela, including dialogue, international pressure, elections, and military actions. Not exactly an uplifting conversation but we try to end on a positive note.