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Justice Beyond Borders
The Plan Condor trial that began on March 5, 2013 in Buenos Aires is an unprecedented opportunity for many victims of the human rights violations committed by South American military regimes in the 1970s and 1980s to finally see justice. The regional coordination of repression resulted in hundreds of disappearances and murders of Uruguayans, Chileans, ...
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Uruguay’s Culture of Impunity Continues to Rear its Head
The decision by Uruguay’s Supreme Court of Justice to transfer Judge Mariana Mota is evidence that the country’s culture of impunity for the crimes of the 1973-85 dictatorship still endures. Co-authored with Dr. Francesca Lessa, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Latin American Centre, St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. The judge was in charge of over ...
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Desaparecidos
To mark the International Day of the Disappeared, I would like to share this poem by Mario Benedetti ‘Desaparecidos’, to which I was introduced very recently by a friend and colleague. Below, I have included a translation, albeit a rather crude one, for those who would like. Here’s to the disappeared, and to those who ...
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The Coffee Complex, Part III
In my last two posts (Part I and Part II) I began discussing the impact of quality on coffee farmers. Since coffee is grown on such tight margins, and since the price really has little to do with the actual costs of production, most farmers and exporters go to great lengths to ensure that their ...
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The Coffee Complex, Part II
In my last post I asked whether the quality demands of the specialty coffee industry are, in fact, necessary. This demand for quality is the backbone of a $16 million dollar industry – specialty coffee’s estimated share of the roughly $80 billion per year coffee trade (statistics vary widely; these numbers are from the 2010 ...
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A Significant Confession by the Argentine Church
One of the most controversial aspects of Argentina’s last military dictatorship was the role of the Catholic Church, who for over three decades has remained largely silent over the issue. Official statements regarding the clergy’s involvement in the military’s Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (known simply as el Proceso), which killed up to 30,000 people between ...
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The Coffee Complex
The complexity and difficulty involved in turning a small red cherry into a liquid beverage has always surprised me. It seems simple enough: when ripe, the cherries are harvested, weighed, depulped, washed, dried, sorted, stored, exported, roasted, ground, and finally served as espresso or drip coffee. Yet each of these steps involves hundreds of smaller ...
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A Spanish Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The Nordics get most of the attention as of late for their crime thrillers. But across the ocean, Latin America is beginning to boil with a detective boom of its own. In fact, the region has long been at a simmer. Jorge Luis Borges himself is considered a father of the intellectual’s policial, as such ...
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The Happiest Place on Earth
Once again, the New Economics Foundation has named Costa Rica the happiest country on the planet. The announcement has been met with skepticism and confusion, as well as what might be called pity for the rest of the world. “If Costa Rica is the happiest place on earth,” one man told me, “how bad must ...