 Marty earned his BA in political science from DePaul University in Green Castle, Indiana and his MA and PhD from the University of Chicago in international relations and political science. He recently retired after 44 years of college and university teaching, the last 40 at Griffin College. The author of over 50 peer-reviewed works, he has led student and alumni study abroad experiences eight times and has personally studied and done research in 48 countries on six continents. That's pretty amazing. He has served as a fellow of the East West Center at the University of Hawaii, president of the North Central Council of Latin Americanis, and executive director of the Wisconsin Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, which named him peace educator of the year in 2015. Another honor. We are honored to have you here this evening. Dr. Farrell will speak for approximately 45 minutes, after which we'll have a 15 minute Q&A. We need to leave the room by 8 p.m. because the library closes and we don't want anyone locked in here overnight. During the Q&A, please raise your hand if you have a question and wait for one of our people to bring the microphone to you because we have quite a few people here this evening and we know you all have great questions and comments, so please wait until you have the microphone so that we can hear you. So now let's welcome Dr. Farrell. Thank you very much, Christine. I really appreciate that very nice introduction. Really couldn't have been much better unless I wrote it myself. Oh, I guess I did. Okay, well, if I made it a little bit longer, pat it a little bit more, we could have gone directly to the questions. But no, seriously, I always enjoy coming over to Sheboygan here. It's a beautiful community. So much to do here. You've done such great things with your lakefront. Your museums are fantastic. Great restaurants. I'm probably missing a few things, but I really enjoy it. And thanks to Christine and the AUW celebrating 100 years, you said. I remember that founding very well. That was a great time. No, I'm not quite there yet, but close. Okay. The theme set out by the Foreign Policy Association in the Great Decision series, I guess it was basically, and there is a booklet, which I'm sure the library has here, but you also can purchase it or view it online, of course. Is there a new wave? That was kind of the question that was posed. Is there a new pink wave in Latin America? And it would be a new pink wave because there was a previous pink wave of left of center governments back in the first decade of the 21st century. So roughly 1998 through 2010 or 2012, there were a number of left-leaning governments that were in power, mainly elected. And that's the ones I'm going to deal with are the elected ones, for the most part. Some, as in Cuba, are not really elected, but I will say a few things about that as well. But now, once, and some of those governments did fairly well, such as in Brazil with Lula de Silva, but then in 2009, the financial collapse, both in the United States and Europe, also affected Latin America. So there was a big decline in their economies at that time. And so then we saw a blue wave. And again, the colors are kind of reversed in dealing with Latin America. They use pink or red for left of center, whereas in our country, we do it the other way around. Republicans are red, Democrats are blue. But down there, then there was a blue wave, a series of conservative governments that came in. But then we had the COVID crisis. And since that time, we really have seen a new pink wave in Latin America. Now, again, what does that mean? These governments and the parties that they represent by no means not all the same. Some would be barely center left, others would be further to the left. And then, of course, we have the, frankly, dictatorships of Nicaragua and Cuba and Venezuela that are, you know, quite far to the left. And so there's a great deal of shading and nuance in between. But as of right now, you could say there are pink or pinkish regimes in at least 15 countries, including Argentina, although that is probably not going to last for very long because we have new presidential elections coming up later this year, in fact. And I will talk about those. Also, I was fortunate enough to be able to spend time in Argentina just this past December. So we had about a week in Buenos Aires and then later, about a week in Patagonia, divided between Argentine and Chilean Patagonia and then ended up with a few days in Santiago, Chile. So I will make some comments based on the personal experience there. But Bolivia has had left-wing governments for over 15 years now, and that is continuing. Brazil, Lula de Silva was re-elected in a very close election recently. Costa Rica, we could say, is slightly left of center today. Chile definitely, Gabriel Boric, won the election as a protest leader from a leftist perspective. Colombia has its first leftist president, probably ever in its history, in Gustavo Petro. Ecuador, the elections are in the midst of happening right now. So they've had the first round and the runoff will be October 15th. But that is looking. We'll take a look at some of these elections. Honduras, that's a big surprise. But Chamara Castro, not related to the Cuban castros, but the wife of the previous president, Zalea, who was overthrown in one of the last military coups that we've seen in Latin America. But she's elected in her own right as an anti-military candidate. And equally surprising, Guatemala has its first left of center progressive candidate since 1954. President, I should say, since 1954. Bernardo Arrivalo. And he is the son of the first democratically elected president in Guatemala's history back in 1950, or actually 1948. His successor is the second democratically elected president of Guatemala. He was overthrown in a CIA organized in 1954. And they have not had a left of center president since then. But now with Arrivalo's son being elected, that has changed. And Peru had a sort of left-wing president elected two years ago. But he was impeached and removed from office, Pedro Castillo. We'll talk a little bit about that. And then finally, Venezuela as we know. So that's kind of an overview. That's at least 15. And how many countries are we considering? We used to speak of the 20 Latin American republics, but actually there's several more. Some of the countries like Guyana have become independent. That was formerly British Honduras, or excuse me, Belize. Guyana was also formerly a British colony in South America. And then, of course, we usually refer now to Latin America and the Caribbean. And I will touch on some of the Caribbean nations, but not a lot of the small ones. So I think Haiti, we can look at Dominican Republic, Jamaica. Those would be the main Caribbean countries that I would like to touch on here at some point. At least briefly. So there's a lot of countries. We can't cover them all in detail. Some of my former students are in the audience tonight, and I really appreciate their coming. But, you know, we have 16 weeks to cover a topic like this when we're giving a credit course. And obviously we can't cover anywhere near that much, but I want to at least give you a taste and try to leave time for questions at the end as well. One thing I would like to comment on now, this is kind of deep background, but there's been a lot of new research given the human genome analysis that is able to be done and testing genetic codes and people, as well as archaeological evidence, you know, things, physical objects you find from digging, and language. Language evolves in ways that can be analyzed. And what we now know is, looking at this, how were the Americas people in the first place? And I think it is important to know who the original inhabitants were. Now, here in Africa, we have OOA, that's out of Africa migration, about 60 to 50 KYA as thousand years ago. Of course, went into Europe, summed down to Oceania. Human beings made it to Australia as early as 40,000 years ago. The Aborigines have been there that long. Now, again, in that time period, there was heavy glaciation, so that it was more exposed, there was more exposed land. So in a way, it was easier to get places. There weren't as long sea voyages from some of these islands doing the island hopping here. But people then went up to Eastern, North Eastern Asia, about 50,000 years ago. And what we now have learned, this is pretty new, and I find this interesting, it looks as if the population we're dealing with came into what is called Beringia. So this is land that was exposed because the sea levels were so low. This is Alaska, if you can recognize it. So it's sort of in between present-day Russia and Alaska, there was land, and people settled there for, it looks like, at least 15,000 years. And here's where they were. Now, they couldn't go this way because the glacier was still there. And this was inhospitable tundra, so they were kind of isolated here, but they did survive. And then when the ice began to melt around 15,000 years ago, they moved on out and came down into the Americas, some by land, some by sea. And began to move out around 17,000 years ago. Their numbers increased rapidly. As you can see, when they got to the new world, the Western Hemisphere, they found a lot of big animals with lots of meat to eat, and easy pickings, because they had never seen people before they weren't afraid. So the hunters had a field day and increased their population by 60-fold in just 300 years. Then split into about three branches as they moved down through the Americas. And Jennifer Raff is the scholar who has led a lot of this new research. The Native Americans over the centuries then built numerous great civilizations, both in North America, the Mississippi Valley, obviously Southern Mexico and Central America, and also present-day Andean areas of Peru, Colombia, and so forth. And this is Teotihuacan on the site, Aztec City on the site of Mexico City. What's this one? Machu Picchu. Any of you been there? Oh, quite a few. And it doesn't surprise me. Great. We couldn't go right now, could we? We had to close that down because of the protests over the removal of the president-elected Castillo and some of the artifacts there. So the numbers at the time of the conquest by Spaniards, Portuguese, between 60 and 100 million Native Americans were in the Western Hemisphere. However, the number dropped by about 90% in just the first 100 years. Partially disease, of course, or mainly disease, but exacerbated by war, massacres, enslavement, overwork, deportation, malnutrition, and so forth. So just in Mexico alone, this is what happened to the Native population back in the 16th and early 17th century. Today, they obviously have rebounded. And again, where we find the most distribution, highest distribution, are in the darker-colored portions here again in this region of South America, Central America, Southern Mexico. Abel Morales, former president of Bolivia from 2006-2019, represents Native Americans, one of the first to ascend to such a high position, certainly the first in the history of Bolivia, which has the highest percentage of Native American peoples. Okay, again, just generalizing about Latin America in general, overall, you know, not Central America so much, but South America in particular, these are actually big countries. So as you can see, South America alone is roughly three times the geographic size of Europe. There's three Europe's fit inside there. Now, Europe does have more population, so it's much more densely populated. But again, population-wise, Mexico is equal to Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, all together. Venezuela is as big as all these Nordic countries, plus the Baltic states. Brazil is as big as Central America, plus Italy. Argentina about the same as Ukraine. So these are big countries, and they're important countries, especially to us, since they're in our hemisphere. Okay, now this I'm going to have to go over pretty quickly, but trying to give you a historical summary here in just a few minutes. We've already talked about peopling the Americas. Conquest in the colonial regime roughly 1492 to 1811. So this is one of the Spanish and Portuguese, for the most part with a few British and French outposts. Mainly Spanish and Portuguese ruled these countries. They did a lot of pillaging, just taking out gold, silver, things of that nature. But they did build cities, and they did establish an agricultural system. By 1811, though, Portugal and Spain were distracted and weakened by the Napoleonic Wars. There was the example of Haiti had won its independence from France. The United States had won its independence from Great Britain. And in the other American countries, they led independence movements, and most of them were able to win their independence by about 1825. We then had a real period of instability before they could establish regimes with good institutions. Mexico had 80 presidents before 1855, or heads of state, 80. We've only had 46 presidents. So it was very unstable, a lot of fighting. Then we have a period of unifying dictatorships, such as led by Porfirio Diaz in Mexico, that at least establishes order and consolidates the boundaries. But then the dictatorships give way to a more democratic system when legislatures become more important, have bigger say, but it's still an oligarchic democracy in that the landed elites are still the ones largely in control. And this has been a persistent issue throughout Latin American history, and in Central America, for example, even up to the present day. This is why Guatemala has had so few progressive or even small-D Democrats in office, is because the landed oligarchy is so strong there. In places like El Salvador, it's still said that only maybe 14 families control the vast majority of the property and the wealth of the country. So oligarchy was established in the early periods, but remains a problem today. But this is also why populism is very popular, because this allows potential leaders to appeal to the common masses of people against the oligarchy. And so, for instance, Juan Perón, who ruled in Argentina for several years and then even came back in the 1970s, and his party today remains the most powerful political party in Argentina, but he put himself as representing the common poods and against the oligarchy, and he accomplished some very good things. But then some other things which are part of his heritage are not so positive today, as we'll see. Then the Depression came, brought down the oligarchic democracies. We have popular dictators, including Perón, including a number of others in other countries. But then, following that, by about mid-1950s, Revolution of Rising Expectations. We have revolutions in Bolivia and Cuba. John Kennedy starts the Alliance for Progress. The Catholic Church holds the Medellin Conference. But then that democratic period is overwhelmed by a series of military dictatorships. So starting with Brazil in 1964, followed by Chile in 1973, Argentina a few years later, these are the big countries ruled by military dictatorships for the next at least couple of decades. But finally in 1985, roughly, we begin to come out of the military dictatorships. Pinochet loses a referendum in Chile in 1988. And so we brings us into the present era, which that's a pretty long time period. I could probably divide it up a little bit better, but at least that gives you a historical overview. A few statistics on economics. What we see here is, again, the darker blue means higher GDP per capita, higher income on average. The lowest would be the dark red, as we see in Sub-Saharan Africa, Afghanistan, a few other places. Yellow is more middle of the scale here. And we see most of Latin America is kind of in the middle. They're not among the poorest countries, not among the richest countries, kind of in a middle position for the most part. Here at least Venezuela used to be one of the richest in South America, but again with dictatorship and bad economic policies has really seen a huge increase in poverty. Paraguas considered poor, Cuba not enough data, Haiti, many of the countries though are considered at least middle level in terms of average income. But this too is kind of a problem because they haven't been improving in recent years. There was improvement in the first decade of this century, but not really since then. So this is where some analysts are asking if much of Latin America is caught in a kind of a middle of the road trap, middle income trap where they've developed enough to get out of abject poverty that we see in a number of other world areas but by being too dependent on the export of commodities and not improving their total factor productivity enough to really progress and get dynamic economic growth going. So for example, and I know some of you have studied economics so I won't pretend to be an economist but fundamentally what are the factors that are involved in creating wealth? I'll give you a hint there's three. Okay, I think the first thing in Econ 101 it should be land, labor and capital. So land is if you're in agriculture obviously you need land or even if you have a factory or even a hotel you need land. You don't need land for everything especially in our cybernetic age but land is still a fundamental thing, a component of value or wealth. And you need labor so you need somebody to work and you need capital. You need money to invest in order to have tools for that person who's going to be doing the work. Now one way you can grow is just by increasing those inputs. Now you may say well there's only so much land, well not quite. For instance in Brazil Bolsonaro the president up until just last year he wanted to increase the amount of land by burning down the rainforest. And he did, he put more land into production so that's one way to do it. Also if you have a growing population you can have more labor, right, more people. And Latin America had that for quite some time. They had pretty high birth rates, they've gone down now. But for a while they were supplying more labor. And more capital, well that can be a little bit harder to come up with. But if you give my point you can develop up to a certain point just by increasing those inputs. But there becomes a limit to that. Because you know I can't, you know at some point just adding more workers in the factory is not going to increase my output. What I'm missing is productivity or efficiency. That is what you really have to improve to have dynamic growth. And this is what's been lacking in Latin America. You've not seen the total factor productivity increasing because they haven't innovated. And some of the reasons for that are weaknesses in the human capital, low education levels, lack of first class universities, lack of scientific research. You can go back to some cultural factors. Traditionally science, engineering, technology, these kinds of things were actually somewhat looked down upon in the Latin American culture. Things like philosophy, literature, poetry, art, these were more highly valued. These were more sublime. These weren't gritty, you know, kind of tawdry ordinary things. They're loftier things. And this was somewhat in the culture that was obviously inherited from Spain and Portugal in many cases. But this is something that has held them back. And this could be contributing to this middle income trap that many of the Latin American countries find themselves in. But I would point to other things like policies. So for instance, a big mistake that was made by Latin America was called, in the 1970s, industrialization by import substitution. Now what is that? Well, that means at that time in the 1970s some of their economists looked at their situation and said, we're exporting a lot of raw materials and importing a lot of manufactured goods. And there's a lot more profit in manufactured goods than there is in agricultural or iron ore or basic commodities like that. So what we'll do is we'll erect high tariff walls against those manufactured goods. We'll put a huge tax on any of that that comes in and we'll foster our own manufacturing industrialization behind those tariff walls. And once we get the ball rolling, then we can compete. And that's what they did. But unfortunately, it didn't work because behind those tariff walls, you really don't have the pressure to increase your productivity. You don't really have to be efficient because you're protected and you can get by with second rate technology and second rate quality and second rate a lot of things. And I'm not saying there weren't any successes in some of those efforts. 1969, Brazil, and this was actually started by the military government, found an aircraft company called Embraer. Now, how many of you have flown on an Embraer aircraft? I'll bet most of you have. These are the regional jets. You know, if you fly from a smaller airport to a bigger hub, you'd probably be on one of those or a Canadian regional jet. But Embraer is pretty big. So that's been a success. But overall, it wasn't successful. And what's even worse, some countries in order to punish the landed oligarchy, Argentina is the prime example of this. They even put a tax on exports. And it's still there today. Now, why in the world would you do that? Well, you might do it to punish the rich landed oligarchs or try to get money from them to finance social programs. But at the same time, obviously you're hurting your own economy. Because here's goods that they're selling to customers who are willing to pay what we're asking and gives us money we wouldn't otherwise have. So taxing exports, I think you'd have trouble finding a single economist who would say that taxing exports is a good idea. There might be some disagreement over tariffs on imports given certain situations. But taxing exports is really not a good idea. But Argentina and some other countries have done that. Okay, so that's kind of a little overview of the economic situation. I know there's probably a lot of questions could be asked or holes punched in my argument. But we'll come back to that when we turn to the questions. Okay, I apologize about this graph. I didn't realize it came so out of focus. But basically what it's showing is, here's the downturn. This is rates of growth. And there were, see here, this is the first pink wave. Hi, see it's three, four, even 5% growth per year. But then the economic crisis comes of 2009 and a big decline. They did bounce back from that but then fell back again and now are mired down here and COVID didn't help. Obviously. So pre pandemic estimate of growth is on this curve, but actual is on this. And many of the Latin American countries did not handle COVID well. Peru has the worst record in the world had the highest death rate. Why it's not the poorest country. Again, we could spend our entire hour on that I'm sure but in part it was lack of public health investment. But it also was a lot of misinformation spread about Ivermectin and some of these other quack cures that got people were buying it out of the pharmacies. They bought all of it and all these other quack treatments. And so it was in part a failure of leadership. But that's also when Peru was going through some difficult times politically. So that probably contributed. This just shows you that the blue line is the former communist countries of Eastern and Central Europe. And you can see they struggled in the 90s going back. But since 2000, they have really done quite well overall. And emerging and developing Asia has been steadily up. This is all as a percentage of US GDP per capita, whereas Latin America has actually declined somewhat over the same period. So they're falling behind. So this is again fertile ground for opposition political parties. But do they have the answers? Do they really have the correct answers? That's a really huge question. Now, income inequality. This is another huge issue in Latin America. Because again, the darker the color, the greater the inequality. And yes, again, Sub-Saharan Africa is most unequal, but Latin America is very unequal. The United States, we're more unequal than we were in the early 1980s or after World War II. And again, we could talk about why that is. But a lot of inequality and that is what gives fertile ground for populace who can say, you know, the rich elite is taking all the benefits in the country and you're getting nothing and elect me and I'll change that. And in some cases, they've had some success. But just redistributing existing wealth is not really the answer, in my opinion. It needs to again go back to increasing your leverage, your actual productivity. And that requires investment in education, in training, in infrastructure. Those are the things that will increase your productivity. Inflation. Well, Argentina stands out as the worst. But the others, again, it's increased since 2000. But again, that's happened everywhere due to COVID. It probably will be coming down, but it's still an issue. And Argentina, I can tell you, the people are very upset about this. And we're going to look at their elections in a moment. But having just been there, I don't know if any of you are planning to go there. I do recommend it. Buenos Aires is a fantastic city. And you easily see that Argentina between 1890 and 1920 was one of the richest countries in the world. They have monumental buildings and architecture in that time period way more than Chicago. I was way bigger metropolitan than. It's even almost on a level of Paris, France. It's unbelievable. So that was the amount of wealth that they had at that time. But then they ran into problems. They've been chronically one of the most indebted nations. They've had currency collapses on several occasions. Right now, I can tell you from personal experience, the people really do not want their own money. So if you're planning to go there, here's my advice. Take plenty of American currency with you. I'm not suggesting you do anything illegal. This is being recorded. But just for everyday usage, if you go into stores, they will offer you a 30% to 40% discount if you pay in American dollars. So I'm not talking about going to the black market dealer, Heaven forbid. I was told what they really want are those nice new $100 bills. You know, the Ben Franklin with the blue line through it. Why do they want that? Because that has the best security and least likely to be counterfeit. But that is what the currency dealers prefer. I was told. No, we did not bring anywhere near enough American money. It was a huge mistake. It's also important for tipping because it means so much more to them than their own currency, which is losing value 60% a year. So that's on a daily basis. You're seeing it disappear. So why is this? Well, again, it's mismanagement, fiscal irresponsibility. But it's also things, some of which are still left over from the one Perone period. And, you know, he did a lot of good in the late 40s and early 50s, brought in the eight hour day for the Argentine workers, holiday, which they'd never had before. A number of other, you know, strengthened the unions and increased their bargaining power. So he did a lot for the working people of Argentina. But some of the other things are not so good. Things that seem good initially like subsidies, subsidizing food, subsidizing utilities. I'm told that the average heating bill or utility bill in Argentina is about $5 a month. It's not anywhere near that cheap for electricity and natural gas if they're using that or oil, whatever they might be using in the areas that need heating. But where is the rest of that coming from? It's coming from the government. They're subsidizing it by 75, 80%. Well, where is that money coming from? Well, it has to come from somewhere else. Also, what does a subsidy like that always encourage? Overuse, right? If it doesn't cost me anything, I don't have to pay any attention to try and save it. So I'll just make no effort to economize. So it's very wasteful. The ultimate example of that, it's not from Latin America. But in Russia, and this was true even after the end of communism, but for a while the government was still subsidizing bread. And you could get a nice huge loaf of bread. And believe me, this is heavy solid bread for five cents, the equivalent of five cents. Why? Because the government wanted everybody to have bread and be able to afford it. That's a good aim. That's a good goal. But what does it result in? The farmers from the countryside were coming into town buying up the bread and taking it out to feed their livestock. Because it was so heavily subsidized, it was cheaper than grain. You think the pigs cared that they got bread rather than grain? Oh yeah, this is a nice brioche. This is really, really tasty. Complete waste of all that time and effort and yeast and all those other good stuff. So subsidies sound good. Populists will talk about it as a promise, but it's wasteful. Finally, the Human Development Index is above world average. So that takes not just income, but health statistics, education levels, quality of life. It is above the world average. But still, big disparities. So here the darker color is higher, Human Development Index. More pale color is lower. So there's big disparities just over the border here between Chile and Argentina, Uruguay versus Bolivia. Again, Venezuela and Nicaragua not doing well. The World Values Survey, they just completed a new one that's published this year. But it's basically asking people questions about their basic values. And down in the bottom, this is traditional or more religious values. Up top, more secular values. And here's survival. In other words, people that really are looking to get enough to eat. Whereas here, I have plenty to eat. I can worry about things like the environment, human rights, more abstract things. So you're able to rank all these different countries just on these two scales. Now for present purposes, I'll just say, what's of interest, we could spend over a week on this easily. But Latin America does kind of hang together here. So there is a cultural commonwealth here. There are some cultural affinities and similarities. And in terms of the world, they're more religious, more traditional. Obviously, Catholic Church was dominant for centuries. Nowadays, more evangelical religions are growing in many Latin American countries. Some are less traditional in their values or religious. Brazil and Argentina and Uruguay, they're right up toward the midpoint. But others are more here. And then in terms of the survival versus self-expression, they're closer to the middle, maybe a bit too still to the survival as compared with Sweden, Norway, Denmark, other European countries up here. United States is here, so not as far along on this. If there is a path from here to there, which at least in general there does appear to be, you know, we're still here. So we're not that far from some of the Latin American countries. Well, again, you could teach a whole course on this, but it's worth looking into if you find it interesting. Corruption. This has been a huge problem. Again, the darker the color and the more corrupt according to Transparency International and except for Uruguayan Chile, maybe some of these small countries, it's kind of a big problem. Contributing factors to violence, poverty and drugs, homicide rate, the darker the color, the more poverty in the country, and the larger the size, the more homicides. So we see these way outsized ones, Honduras, Guatemala especially, but also Guiana, Suriname, Bolivia to an extent. Again, the smaller ones less violent, the lighter ones less poverty. So there is a correlation. But again, we hear a lot about the crisis on our border, and obviously you combine this chart with several other things we've looked at, you see white people are trying to escape. They're trying to escape poverty, they're trying to escape violence, they're trying to escape a life that isn't too promising. In terms of democracies, again, Latin America is doing better, except in the last 10 years, according to the Economist magazine, it has gone down. Actually, less support for democracy as measured by their index. And it's true of other regions, there's been backsliding in every single region, but more in Latin America than elsewhere. So that's kind of disturbing. Again, these are just rankings. So countries like Uruguay, Chile, Costa Rica, Trinidad, Tobago and Jamaica, these are considered the most solid democracies. Then you have more transitional or defective democracies. Mexico is considered highly defective. Then we start to get into moderate autocracy, although again, I think Honduras and Guatemala have both elected oppositional leaders in very recent times, so they might deserve a higher rating here. And this is Freedom House. It's just a little bit more generous in how they categorize things, but again, it's the same ones at the top and the same ones at the bottom. The most not free, the biggest dictatorships, Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba. Haiti may not even have a government. It's more of a failed state. Now these show you the pink wave of the early 2000s, then the blue wave that came in the 2010s now back to, and even now I would say both Ecuador and Peru should be red. Not these two, Paraguay and Uruguay are still, but Uruguay has been progressive consistently, just has a conservative government now. Would Mexico definitely progressive? But you should also add Guatemala as well as Honduras as it is there. Now these belong to the San Paolo Forum. Again, these are very broad ranging from left of center in some cases to far left. And this is basically saying the same thing. So let's take, we have about a few more minutes before we go to questions, but let's look at a few individual countries. Mexico, very important to us, our neighbor to the south. Again, you see how many changes of head of state they had. This is their independence, 1811. By the way, what is Mexican Independence Day, their 4th of July? We have the 4th of July. What is their 4th of July? September 21st, you're very close. I want somebody to say Cinco de Mayo so I could say you're wrong. Okay, I don't want to underestimate this audience. That would be a huge mistake. So I got very close to the right answer, right off the bat. We have to go all the way down to Benito Juarez in the 1850s. See, the length of the line is how long they served. He's considered the Abraham Lincoln of Mexico. He died in office, was not assassinated. Then Maximilian, that's when the French were trying to take over. That's what Cinco de Mayo celebrates was a victory over Maximilian's forces representing a French attempt to take over. Then we have the dictator Diaz. Then we have the Mexican Revolution of 1911 that lasted for 20 years on and off. Finally though, in 1934, the PRI or Institutional Revolutionary Party is established. Now you see a regular succession and a peaceful succession from 1934 right up to the present day with AMLO. Now, all the green bars are that same party. So it was kind of a one-party monopoly, but at least they were having elections. Then in 2000, Vicente Fox of the PAN party defeated the PRI party candidate and then his successor Calderon also. So he had, and that's a six-year term, so he had 12 years of opposition control of the presidency. Then you had the PRI was brought back in for another term, Pena Nieto. He was very unpopular and then finally our current president Lopez Obrador. Now, if we go back to 2012, this is when Nieto defeated AMLO. But again, what I want to point out here is Mexico is one of the few countries in Latin America that does not have a runoff. So you have parties that qualify to be on the ballot and frankly, it's just like a jungle ballot. You can vote for anybody and the one who gets the most votes wins, even if it's not a majority. Almost all the other countries have runoff and if we have time, we'll see that. Now, I think the runoff is better, much better, because you can imagine trying to govern with only 39% support. It could be very difficult. This is what happened in Chile. Chile had no runoff. In 1970, Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile as a socialist with only about 35% of the vote. And then he tried to carry out some far-reaching reforms and upset a lot of people both in Chile and obviously in the United States and I'm not justifying what we did at that time, but we helped the military later under Pinochet, you know, overthrow and murder him. And when we were in Santiago, we saw that square and that place in the presidential palace at that time that was bombed and where he was killed and he did not deserve that, but the problem was trying to govern with such a slim majority, not even a majority. But this is the way Mexico does it, they're still doing it. But then six years later, 2018 M.O. won not just a plurality, but a majority. Outright, 53.2%. And to make a long story short, whether he's been totally effective or not, and he certainly hasn't been, but his popularity has not waned. He maintains very steadily over 60% approval ratings. Can you imagine that? And he's almost at the end of his term. When's the last time we had a president that maintained popularity ratings or approval ratings like that? It's been a long time. Well, how is he doing it? He's a man of the people. He relates to people very well. They like his social programs. He's increased old age pensions. And similarly for school children, they get subsidies just for going to school. So he is trying to improve educational levels and he also has made food distribution in poor neighborhoods. Very important. So these are some of the things that made Lula de Silva very popular in Brazil in the 2010s and also helped him get re-elected, you know, just very recently. So, AMLO is very popular and that's why we feel when they have their next election, which will be next year, June, again, just one ballot, that Claudia Scheinbaum is probably going to be elected Mexico's first president. But even if she isn't, the PON candidate, Xochitl Galvez, her first name does indicate that she comes from an indigenous family. Her father is Native American. Her mother is Hispanic. But you can see she also is kind of a populist as she's riding a bike around Mexico City. But this is Claudia Scheinbaum. These are the two leading candidates by far. Unless something totally unforeseen happens, one of them will be the next president of Mexico. Now how many of you would have thought 10, 20 years ago if I told you, Mexico will have a woman president before the United States? You may have believed me, but I think we had certain stereotypes about machismo and how women were treated in Mexico and so forth. But now it's virtually certain that they will have a woman president before the United States. And they may also have their first Jewish president. Claudia Scheinbaum is Jewish as well. Okay, Bolivia, just a word on this. Abel Morales, I mentioned the indigenous heritage, served as president for already 13 years and tried to get reelected in 2019 even though the voters had rejected a constitutional amendment allowing him to run for yet another term. He still tried to run anyway, claimed victory, but there was rebellion and the courts and institutions forced him to resign. He went to Mexico, new elections then were held in October of 2020. His party won with the candidate, Luis Arce. But, and again, easily. So the same party movement for socialism, again, that's a leftist regime. But he's a trained economist, but right now apparently Abel Morales has come out of exile. He's back in Bolivia and he's starting to quarrel with his successor. And it's threatening to split that movement, which has obviously been very successful. So that one will have to keep tuned to see what happens there. Chile produced surprising results. Chile had been very stable since Pinochet lost the referendum in 88 and stepped down. Very stable, four years, alternating between different parties. But I guess it got a little boring. And so in 2018 there were major protests. Gabriel Boric was one of the leaders of the protests. Some cartoonists thought that the police were a little bit heavy-handed in dealing with the protests. So he has a bloody baton here. But Augusto Pinochet is saying from his grave, very good, very good, you did a good work. Well, that's obviously a sarcastic cartoon. But if you look at the election results, now this shows you what you can have with a runoff. So in the first round the arch-conservative cost actually got a higher percentage, 27.91 to 25.82. But in the runoff, obviously Boric did better picking up some other votes from these other parties because he won actually rather easily, even though he came in second in the first round, he won the runoff. So he's an activist, led a lot of these protests. He's definitely a left of center, so he's part of the new pink wave. Oh, just quickly on this, they also are trying to write a new constitution in Chile. So they elected a constitutional constituent assembly to draw up a new constitution. They did that, but when it was brought to the voters for a vote in 2023, or 2022 rather, toward the end, it was rejected. The voters thought it was too radical. It had 188 articles. The U.S. Constitution has seven, not that we're the be-all and end-all of everything, but also there were something like 150 individual rights enumerated for people, for animals, for nature, and frankly it was just considered too much. And the majority, so now they're back at the drawing board trying to draw up another new constitution, but it will be presumably more moderate, more acceptable. Peru, this is a very sad story. This was an upset victory for somebody Pedro Castillo from the countryside, a school teacher, humble origins, but struck a chord with people. And again, you see the proliferation of candidates in that first round. He got only about 19%, although it was more than the others, but in the second round he won, but very, very close. But the Congress of Peru was against him. He tried to shuffle his cabinet. They impeached him once. He wasn't removed. They impeached him a second time. And then they were trying to impeach him a third time, and he said, you're dissolved. It was called an auto coup and tried to dissolve the national legislature. But they rebelled against that, and they then impeached him and removed him. And that succeeded. He is now in jail. He hasn't been put on trial. He's being held in pretrial detention, but he is in a jail or prison. You know, I thought it was interesting. There's three other Peruvian presidents also currently under detention. So he's the fourth one. We're kind of thinking about the possibility we might have one. They have four at the same time. Jimori from the 90s for human rights abuses when he was president and Alejandro Toledo for corruption. And Kuczynski, he hasn't been convicted yet. He's like Castillo. He's being held in pretrial detention. But this is, you know, this is not good, obviously. This is not healthy. I need to interrupt you. I know we all would love to stay for another hour or so, but we're going to have to, at this point, call it so that some of you may have an opportunity to ask questions. Okay? So if you'd raise your hand, please, and we'll run a microphone to you. Yeah. Either about anything I touched on, or if there's a country you're curious about I didn't get to, I may be able to help out on that too. From time to time you hear about an industry that moves its plant to a Latin American country. How has that impacted, you said, laborers and things of that in that particular country where I'm thinking of auto industries building cars in Latin America? Yes. Well, I think Mexico is the best example of that, and the answer to that is it definitely has helped them. But it's not enough to really charge the entire economy. It certainly helps especially in those northern states of Mexico, and it helps the entire Mexican economy. But it's just not enough. And then we have the disruption when NAFTA was suspended for a while, and then we've had COVID. Those are two things that have both set that back, but Mexico is a very natural place for that to happen. And frankly, again, not everybody's going to agree with this, I would imagine, but I think it's good for everybody. Why? If you don't mind, I talk too much. We have the biggest manufacturer of commercial laundry equipment in the world right in Rippon, and you have an outlet store right here in Sheboygan, Speed Queen or Alliance Energy. As county board chair, I used to go through their tour quite often, and they make their machines, they're making up to 400 a day right in Rippon, and they're made from scratch basically, but I saw a few parts, a little motor for like a dryer drum. Echo on Mexico. Okay, did I get all offended? Did I get all angry? No. That was there because Speed Queen management knew that this was a good product at a good price, and it was better than anything being made in this country at that time, and that's why they went with that. And it helped them make a cheaper but very good washing machine. It reduced their cost. If they were required to buy that from some higher priced producer, who's going to pay for that? You and I, the consumer. And then I have less money to spend on haircuts or going to a nice restaurant here in Sheboygan. So that's why I say trade, if it's handled correctly, is beneficial. And also, I think it is much better to have prosperous people as neighbors than desperately poor starving people as neighbors for all kinds of reasons. So frankly, it's not in our interest to be an island of prosperity in a sea of misery, but there just hasn't been enough of that to really hit the takeoff point in most of these countries. Or whoever. I'll let Christine handle the prioritization. Is this working? Oh, yeah. So speaking of prosperity in the middle of misery, I'm especially concerned with Central America because they're really heavily poor there. And has there been much talk about having a unified Central America, like a unified Europe, and to create more prosperity and drive human rights and just the whole shebang? Okay. I'm going to be a little bit vague on that. Now, in terms of actually unifying the countries, that's not on the table right now. That was the case, though. There was something called the Central American Republic, and an American named Walker actually tried to go down there and take it over. This was in the long time ago in the 1850s. But no, as President Reagan said when he visited some of these countries, they're all individual countries there now. But trade deals, yes, they have some preferential trade deals with Central America, as well as the Caribbean Basin. There was something called the Caribbean Basin Initiative that included those countries. And again, the idea was to foster trade and investment, but there just hasn't been enough of it. I would have to dig a little bit deeper to tell you exactly why it hasn't worked better. But people understand that this needs to happen. But I totally agree with you. We've known this for decades. We've known it since even, I don't know, maybe we didn't recognize it, but I think even the Alliance for Progress under John Kennedy was a recognition that it was in our national interests in the United States to foster economic and political development, to have more stable governments, have less corrupt governments, have more prosperous businesses and industries and people, and try to foster that to the extent that we could. But it really has not worked that well, and the proof of that is at the border, unfortunately. But that's, again, if I had a magic wand to wave, I would wave it and make that have worked so much better because the people are hardworking and they want to succeed, but they're in an environment where it's almost impossible. And so that is why many of them are voting with their feet and leaving. But look into that Caribbean Basin initiative. That is something that we haven't acted, that was supposed to accomplish some of these goals, but has fallen short of the mark, for sure. I have a question. The biggest problem in South America right now, would it be the drug trade? Would it be lack of indigenous infrastructure and industry? What would you say is the biggest problem? I would say the latter. I think economic development is a bigger problem. And I'm not saying the other will go away if you have that, and of course they're intertwined. If the local cartel, if I have to pay them off just to even have a factory, that doesn't encourage investment. And if foreigners have to come in and deal with criminals like that, they don't want to deal with that either for obvious reasons. But I think frankly, and I don't enjoy saying this, but the number one way to stop drug trafficking from Latin America is to reduce the demand for the drugs in this country. So if the demand is there and the money is there, somebody's going to provide it. But yeah, we just had a presidential candidate. I didn't have time to get to it. In Ecuador was gunned down the streets just last month. And he was a anti-corruption candidate. And he was going to see Ecuador used to be peaceful. Ecuador used to be low crime. But of course where is it located? This is another sad story that sometimes your fate is determined by your neighborhood. And they're right in between Peru and Bolivia. Two biggest cocaine producers in the world. And naturally it infiltrates. And what they've arrested, also Colombia. So they've arrested six Colombians for that assassination. And it appears to be tied into drug gangs competing for things. So it is a huge problem. You know, again, I would say in Mexico, and it's recognized a huge problem. Again, I looked at some public opinion surveys in preparing this. You know, why is AMLO so popular? And is party and Ms. Scheinbaum likely to win next year? Well, the number one problem that most Mexicans will cite as the biggest problem facing their country is public security. And how many approved of AMLO's handling of public security? About 25%. His overall popularity is 60%. So that's their biggest problem. He hasn't really dealt with it. But he's still popular. Why? Because he has a good common touch with people. They relate to him. But also he has done things for poor people and poor neighborhoods. So that's enough. But they agree with us that that's the number one problem in their country and that not enough is being done. But here's the other thing. Again, I try to maybe not talk as much. But you know what it means when a disease becomes endemic, right? It's just like everywhere. You just can't avoid it. It's just everywhere. That's the way it is with corruption. Because if it's strong enough, all they have to do it, let's say I want to take a stand against it. What they commonly say is, you know, they'll come to me and they'll say, okay, we've got a deal for you. The deal is called silver or lead. Take our money and leave us alone or we'll kill you. How do you deal with a proposition like that? It's very hard. And so it is a huge problem. It's the number one problem in many of these countries. I thank you so very much for sharing with us. I think we have time for one more question. And then we'll go here too. Oh, okay. My question is this is that it seems like a lot of countries in the Latin American, those countries in themselves, it's almost like they lack an identity. And what I mean by that is like, when you think of Costa Rico, you think of eco, economy, positivity. What is the problem there? Why can't these other countries find that identity and then move forward? Well, I guess if I had an answer to that, I'd run for president myself. Of any country am I choosing? So how many Costa Rican kind of campus? I've been in Costa Rica several times. It's called Switzerland of Central America. They've had a democratic government ever since the 1940s. They abolished their army. That was one way they got rid of military coups. They just disbanded the army. Now they've had to build it up a little bit now, self-defense forces. But that's one thing. They just took that use of force out of the equation. Good leadership. They've had strong liberal, and I mean that with a small L. I mean what I mean is people that respect institutions and respect laws and following the rules. And of course those are conservative values too. But they serve to maintain a state where people can have predictability in their behavior and their expectations and therefore they have an incentive to do things for the long run, not just immediate self-gratification. But they've had strong leaders that emphasized respecting the institutions. And that is what the other countries haven't had in many cases. Look at how tempting it is. And we see Aval Morales in Bolivia, somebody I personally probably sympathize with quite a bit. He's already been in power for 15 years. And it clearly states, that's it, your term limited out. Instead of respecting the institution, he first tries to get an amendment passed and the voters themselves turn it down. The same people that put him in office turn down the constitutional amendment. He goes ahead and stages an election with himself as a candidate anyway. That's not respecting an institution. And he's not the only one. And I'm going to be 100% frank with you. We've got a huge problem with that in our country right now. And if we have politicians that put their own personal power over any respect for institutions, that's what's caused this chaos in many of these countries. And it's very frightening to see it raring its head right here in the oldest functioning representative democracy that we have. And where the institutions have been respected over and over and over again, win or lose. And that's now being threatened. Yes. Well, is that it? I think we need to call it to make sure that we all are able to leave here this evening. Once again, thank you very, very much for being part of this.