About the Blog and the Contributors

This blog is a space for young professionals researching and analyzing current events in Latin America to share news and their own analysis about the region. It is a venue for thoughtful exchange and innovative ideas.

The opinions expressed by the contributors are theirs alone and do not represent the views of any institution with which any contributor may be affiliated.

Articles originally published on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. Please refer to this document for conditions and limitations.

Many of our contributors are available for interviews and consultant and research projects, and some of the articles contained in this website are available for publication or syndication upon request. Inquiries are welcome.

To contact us please e-mail Sebastian.Chaskel at gmail.

The Contributors

Eliot Brockner is a Latin America Analyst at iJET Intelligent Risk Systems. Based in Washington DC, he covers security, politics, and diplomacy in the Americas. His work has appeared in a number of digital and print outlets, including The International Relations and Security Network, Americas Quarterly Blog, World Politics Review, and Económico (Portugal). He is the Managing Editor of Southern Pulse | Networked Intelligence, an open-source intelligence network providing information related to security and politics in the Americas that is often not published in English. More of his work can be found at www.eliotbrockner.com.

Michael Bustamante is a Ph.D. student in Latin American and Caribbean history at Yale University, where his research focuses on Cuba’s enduring cultural, political, and social links with Spain after 1898. Previously, he served as Research Associate for Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C. Michael graduated from Yale University in 2006 with a B.A. in History and International Studies. During the summer of 2005, he was visiting researcher at the Instituto de Historia de Cuba in Havana. Michael has written for Current History, the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Milken Institute Review, and the Havana-based publication Espacio Laical. In his scholarship as well as his personal life, Michael is committed to the importance of bridging divides between Cuba and its diaspora.

Sebastián Chaskel is originally from Bogotá, Colombia and graduated from Tufts University in 2007 with a B.A. in International Relations and Anthropology. During his time at Tufts, Sebastian was a member of the EPIIC Colloquium with the Institute for Global Leadership and interned with the Project on Justice in Times of Transition and the German Foreign Ministry. He founded LatAmThought while working as Research Associate for Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City and has written for Foreign Policy, Current History, the Spanish think-tank FRIDE, The Washington Times, and ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America. He now lives in Bogotá and is a researcher at Fundación Ideas para la Paz. The views he expresses in this blog are his own and do not necessarily reflect the Fundación’s point of view.

Rachel Glickhouse is a freelance writer and translator based in New York, currently seeking a full-time job. She spent the past two years living in Brazil and has also lived in Spain, the Dominican Republic, and Argentina. She graduated from the George Washington University in May 2007, where she majored in Latin American Studies and Spanish. She writes riogringa.com, her personal blog about current events, politics, and culture in Brazil and the US, as well as Portuguese Blog, Transparent Language’s Brazil culture and language blog. She is also a human rights activist, and speaks fluent Spanish and Portuguese.

Elizabeth Jordan writes from New York City, where she works for a human rights advocacy organization. Her human rights work focuses on research and advocacy in conjunction with activists in the field in Latin America as well as the gender-specific risks that women activists face. Liz graduated from Yale University in 2006 with dual degrees in Political Science and Latin American Studies and wrote theses on the role of Latinos in American presidential elections and the relationship between church and state in Fidel Castro’s Cuba. She has traveled to Cuba, Peru, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and the Dominican Republic.

Andrea Samuelson writes from Medellin , Colombia where she has lived and worked since 2007. After graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy in 2003, she earned a B.A. in Political Science and French from Amherst College, and in 2005, she attended the Universite de Sciences Politiques in France. While attending Amherst, Andrea interned with the Partners of the Americas in Washington , D.C. and traveled to Haiti several times to help bolster relief efforts. Her series of articles in the Times Record News document her observations of the extreme poverty, suffering and political unrest in Port au Prince. Her articles have been featured in publications such as the Amherst Humanitarian and the website for Educate!, a nonprofit organization to support refugee students in Uganda.

Eliza Sweren-Becker is a Research Associate for the Latin America Studies program at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, DC. She graduated with BA in International Relations from Brown University in 2009. Eliza is interested in international human rights law and wrote her honors thesis on the 1979 visit of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to Argentina.

Guest Contributors

Aleszu Bajak is currently living in Santiago, Chile. He is a 2006 graduate of Amherst College with B.A.s in Spanish and Biology. After working for nearly three years in Cornell Medical School’s Gene Therapy department, he has put science on hold to pursue writing and photography. More of his work can be found at his webpage, www.aleszu.com.

Casey Beck is currently in Buenos Aires, Argentina where she is working as a documentary filmmaker and Fulbright Scholar. She graduated from Tufts University in 2007 with a degree in Peace and Justice Studies. Casey was a contributing writer and photographer for “Argentina: From the Ruins of the Dirty War” and the Cultural Survival Quarterly. She has made documentary films for NGOs, the 100 Projects for Peace, and FRONTLINE/World.

Michael Marx McCarthy is a PhD candidate in political science at the Johns Hopkins University, where he also took an MA. A recipient of Fulbright and Inter-American Foundation grants, he spent 2008-2009 in Caracas as a visiting scholar with La Universidad Central de Venezuela and IESA carrying out field work on the various grassroots organizations created during the Chavez period. He is interested in understanding how grassroots organizations work with bureaucracy and vice-versa, and views the interactive arena in which civil society participates with the state as crucial for democratizing democracy. Before graduate school, he worked as a research associate for the rebellious Council on Hemispheric Affairs (viva COHA) and the staid Council on Foreign Relations (viva CFR), where he published Op-Eds in the LA Times, Baltimore Sun and Miami Herald, and examined U.S. policy toward the Andean region.

María Cecilia Rodríguez Alcalá was born in Asunción, Paraguay and graduated magna cum laude from Tufts University in 2007 with a B.A. in International Relations and History and a minor in Political Science. Cecilia is now a project and internship coordinator and communications officer at Fundación Paraguaya, an NGO based in Paraguay that promotes entrepreneurship, self sufficient schools and microfinance programs. She also writers and is an editor of the economic magazine called FOCO, Economía y Negocios, distributed with the newspaper La Nación.

W. Alejandro “Alex” Sánchez Nieto is a Research Fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA) where he focuses on geopolitics, military and security issues. He previously worked at the Center for International Policy. His analyses have appeared in numerous refereed journals including Small Wars and Insurgencies, Defence Studies, the Journal of Slavic Military Studies, European Security, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism and Cuban Affairs. He has also appeared in different media outlets like New Internationalist, BBC, Le Figaro, Venezuela’s El Nacional, Jamaica’s Breakfast Club, among others. The views he expresses in this blog are his own and do not necessarily reflect the point of view of any organizations he is affiliated with. More of his work can be found at: http://wasanchez.blogspot.com/

Manuela Zoninsein is a journalist based in Beijing, China, where she reports for the Newsweek bureau, corresponds for the Engineering News-Record, and freelances for publications that include ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, the Huffington Post and Slate.com. She graduated from Harvard University in 2005 with a B.A. in the honors-only Social Studies department and a Certificate in Latin America Studies, and she co-founded the still-popular cultural show Presencia Latina. After a summer internship in the Latin America Studies department at the Council on Foreign Relations, Manuela accepted a Princeton-in-Asia Fellowship to teach and study at the China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing and to focus on Sino-Latin American relations. A Brazilian-American, she is fluent in Spanish and Portuguese and increasingly conversant in Mandarin. For more information, check out manuelasweb.com.

Web Development

Zachary Lipton lives in New York City and is a composer, jazz saxophonist, essayist and web developer.  He graduated with honors in Mathematics and Economics from Columbia University and runs both Point14 Records LLC, a 21st century record label, and Pannonica, a web development outfit.  His personal website is www.zacharylipton.com.  He provides hosting and maintenance for latamthought.