The Caribbean’s Fiscal and Economic Challenges
Pack your bags. The vacation is over. This was the panorama of the Caribbean in 2008 and 2009, when the Great Recession emptied the islands’ beaches of tourists and dried up foreign direct investment for hotels, condos and restaurants. Current account and fiscal deficits widened in many of the Caribbean nations, and belt-tightening was the … Read more
Will the widespread use of body cameras improve police accountability? Yes
As a trial judge, I have heard hundreds of cases involving charges of false arrest and excessive force by the police. All of these cases turn on credibility. The victim (assuming he or she is alive) tells the story from his or her perspective, and the police officers (often more than two) tell their story. … Read more
Latin America’s High-Tech Warriors
Interstate conflict is rare in Latin America. Yet some nations in the region are emerging as world leaders in advanced military technology. From drones to complex border surveillance systems, their research and development (R&D) laboratories have come up with sophisticated tools to counter this century’s unconventional threats to national security. That’s reflected in part by … Read more
Internet in the Americas: Who’s Connected?
Across the Americas, Internet usage is on the rise. Access to the Internet—fundamental to the full realization of human rights, according to the United Nations—can significantly improve quality of life by increasing knowledge and understanding, by broadening expression, and by deepening engagement with civil society.1 Especially since the widespread use of the Internet by activists … Read more
Partido de la Red and DemocracyOS
Even as technology has radically transformed how we relate in the twenty-first century, democracy has been slow to catch up. Political corruption and ineffective bureaucracies have contributed to a declining faith in government, as demonstrated by widespread protests from Mexico and the United States to Argentina. But a group of activists, entrepreneurs, hackers, and students … Read more
The Battle for High-Speed Internet
Chattanooga, Tennessee, may be best known for the Glenn Miller Orchestra’s 1941 hit, “Chattanooga Choo Choo.” But today, the city of about 173,000 people can also boast the first, most cost-effective and fastest high-speed municipal Internet in the United States. Chattanooga’s fiber-optic Internet costs $70 a month1 and connects users at one gigabit per second … Read more
Is Bitcoin Latin America’s Next Big Thing?
The new technology for financial transactions is a boon for people who lack access to traditional banks and financial systems. The historic surge of global Internet access and usage underlines the tremendous potential of the technology known as Bitcoin.* In two decades, the number of Internet users worldwide grew from approximately 25 million in 1994 … Read more
Civic Innovator: Rosmery Mollo Mamani
Rosmery Mollo Mamani’s great-grandmother died in childbirth. It is an all-too-common tragedy in the Bolivian altiplano (plateau), where Indigenous women experience the country’s highest rates of maternal mortality. But Mollo refused to accept that fact as inevitable. At the age of 19, she left her Indigenous community in the province of Ingavi to pursue a … Read more
Medellín, The Smart City
Expectant mothers in the poorest areas of Medellín, Colombia, once had to travel far from their neighborhoods for doctor appointments—often spending more money than they earned in a day on transportation. But thanks to the Buen Comienzo (Good Start) program provided by the city government’s Medellín Ciudad Inteligente (Medellín Smart City) initiative, mothers-to-be in the … Read more
Politics Innovator: Aída Fabiola Valencia Ramírez
Aída Fabiola Valencia Ramírez learned the hard way what can happen when you fight for public accountability in rural Mexico. On March 10, 2013, the Mexican federal deputy attended a meeting in her hometown of San Agustín Loxicha in Oaxaca to question then-Municipal President Flavio Pérez about what she considered under-funded public works projects. An … Read more
Silicon Valley 2.0
Not too long ago, in a city known for its sunshine and surrounding mountains, a team of young developers submitted their newest creation to Apple’s app store. It was called Typic. Beautiful in its simplicity, it offered a means of artistically embedding text in a photo, along with various filters and other options. After the … Read more
Protestify
When Christina Hawatmeh was a graduate student at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs in 2012, she searched Twitter for breaking news on protests in the Middle East. She soon realized that much of the material uploaded to Twitter ended up “lost” for a variety of reasons: imperfect social media algorithms limit search … Read more
Business Innovator: Jose Kont
Every entrepreneur aims to reinvent the world, but José Contreras went one step further by reinventing his identity. The 28-year-old Guatemalan, who has brought a social media marketing technique called “neuromarketing” to companies in Central America, not only established a new firm called iLifebelt to promote it; he gave himself a new name. Under the … Read more
Colombia’s Internet Advantage
We are at the center of a revolution. The social, cultural and political changes triggered by the development of information and communications technologies (ICTs) that were unforeseeable just a couple of decades ago are now an undeniable reality. As our children and grandchildren are keen to remind us, once-transformative technologies such as fax machines and … Read more
Arts Innovator: Andrés Levin
Andrés Levin built his first multitrack recording device at the age of eight in his parents’ home in Caracas. It was an appropriate start for an artist who has gone on to weave musical skill and technological precociousness into a career that has made him one of the most striking experimental artists of his generation. … Read more
