On October 3, Worker’s Party (PT) candidate Dilma Rousseff won the first round of Brazil’s presidential election with 46.9% of the vote. Paramount to Rousseff’s victory was her ability to convince voters that she represented the continuity of the policies of popular Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. It was initially thought that for many of Brazil’s social movements Rousseff's message of “business as usual” would be received unfavorably, given the lack of structural change during Lula’s two administrations. Yet, this has not been the case, and many of Brazil's social movements see in Rouseff the potential to usher in further social change, including land reform and a shorter work week.

Students are delivering an open letter to Georgetown University president John J. DeGioia today, signed by over 150 scholars, urging the university to reconsider its appointment of former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe as a visiting scholar. The letter objects to Uribe’s ties to paramilitary groups, the scandal in which members of the Colombian military killed civilians but claimed they were guerrillas, corruption and human rights violations in his administration, manipulation of the judiciary, and a notorious wiretapping scandal.

In June 2009, Mauricio Funes took office as El Salvador’s first leftist president. With more than 51% of the popular vote, Funes won the election as the candidate of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), the political party that was once a federation of guerrilla armies that fought the Salvadoran state to a bitter stalemate in the 1980s. María’s Story, a documentary filmed 20 years before Funes’s historic election, records a nationwide military and political offensive undertaken by the FMLN in late 1988 and 1989. The documentary continues to inspire audiences to discuss U.S. foreign policy, the reality of war, gender politics, and shared values of what constitutes justice and basic human rights.

This article originally appeared in the September/October 2010 edition of NACLA Report on the Americas.

The Peruvian economy has been enjoying something of a heyday lately, basking in the glow of the mainstream media. Currently being hailed as something of a Latin American wonder child, the Andean country has received increasing press coverage for its near decade of strong growth, which has continued despite the global economic downturn. But extensive coverage of fawning comments by President Obama have overshadowed the parallel narrative of a country potentially on the brink of disaster, with widespread voter discontent, sharp income disparity, and explosively divergent claims to land and resources.