Why Did Governments Compensate Slaveholders for Abolition?

Across the Americas, Emancipation Moved Slowly, and Profited Those Who Had Benefited from Slavery Most

The records are difficult to make out at first—blurred rows listing the names of slaveholders, enslaved individuals, and prices under the dim light of the microfilm reader. But once brought into focus, they reveal a harrowing moment: enslaved men and women being appraised for the last time in their lives, a valuation made with abolition in service of direct payments to their former owners. There’s the record listing the enslaved man Santiago Servacio, possessed by the mistress Tereza Castaño, whose value was set at 9,900 pesos. And there are those …

How Do Pandemics End? | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

How Do Pandemics End?

Argentina’s 19th-Century Cholera Outbreaks Show the Myth of a Single, Definitive Conclusion

The study of epidemics has routinely centered around what medical historian Charles Rosenberg calls a “dramaturgic structure”: a story of infection that builds to a climax of widespread illness and …

How Latin America’s Left Could Lose Their Scapegoat

Will Obama’s Trip to Cuba and Argentina Be the Nail in the Coffin for the Region’s Tired Anti-American Script?

Barack Obama took a deserved victory lap in Latin America last week.

Critics of the president’s opening to Cuba accuse Obama of appeasing the Castro regime, but they missed the historic …

Argentina Inches Closer to Wall Street

Voters Reluctantly Say Farewell to Peronism

Economic crises besiege Argentina with the regularity of earthquakes over a tectonic plate. These crises can be devastating, wiping out family savings, employment, and life plans. It seems we’re always …

Stop Making Argentina Your Morality Tale

After Years of Every Default and Inflation Scenario Imaginable, Arcane Financial Developments Are Now Dinner Table Conversation

I woke up a couple of weeks ago to an Argentina that had, against its will, defaulted on its sovereign debt. For those unversed in international finance terminology, that basically …

Walking Home Alone at Night in Buenos Aires

In Argentina, Like Elsewhere in Latin America, Fear of Crime Is a Way of Life

A debate dominates the end of my dinners at my parents’ house: how to get home? I live a mere seven blocks away, a brief walk across a park. Though …