Americas Articles

President Cristina Fernández Kirchner has reason to be optimistic. The first female president of Argentina is very likely to be competing for reelection in October and the latest opinion polls show that she is significantly more popular than her political rivals. Although the President’s popularity has taken dips in the past and her political career has seen its share of scandal, the government has been able to quickly recover its levels of popular approval. In 2009, President Kirchner achieved only slightly more than 30 percent approval in opinion polls; however, in a more recent Ipsos-Mora y Araújo poll, 65 percent of those interviewed described the presidential image as “good,” or even “very good.”

In 1888, Brazil became the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery. However, even today, many Brazilians – some say as many as 250,000 – are working under conditions not so dissimilar to those faced by slaves over a century ago.

In the northeastern state of Pará, slaves are commonly the ones who do the backbreaking work of turning wood into charcoal.

During the early months when Occupy Wall Street maintained tent cities in lower Manhattan and other metropolitan areas around the country, the occupations attracted an array of young counter-culturalists and itinerant radicals. To many people seeing the images of the encampments on the news, it looked like a motley assembly, not something out of the American mainstream.

But while some of the images of Zuccotti Park that defined Occupy Wall Street in its infancy may have appeared to depict a fringe, the movement as a whole is far bigger than any of its encampments. In truth, the Occupy movement is a protest against a broken economic compact that reaches into the very middle of America and that is resonating in other parts of the world as well.

Having taught Sarah Emily Shroud and her fiancé Shane Michael Bauer in Damascus, Syria, I was able to learn about their goals and aspirations, one of which was to leave the comfort of their homes in the US to help poor communities living in the Middle East. They strived to use their privileged status, education, and experiences to help those living under a dollar a day. Sarah and Shaun did this in various ways such as teaching refugees in Damascus and helping the people to chart their way. Having gotten to know the couple, I learned that their intentions in the Middle East were not political but rather, humanitarian.