Seminars

In the aftermath of President Trump’s military assault on Venezuela to capture President Nicolás Maduro, this talk will look at the dynamics of immigration to the United States from Venezuela and Cuba, from President Biden’s administration to the present. It will consider how immigration from those countries affected the exercise of U.S. power in the region as well as domestic politics in the United States.

In this talk I share research from my current book manuscript on the history of government efforts to identify human remains exhumed from Patio 29, the largest anonymous burial site used by the Pinochet dictatorship to conceal those it executed and disappeared. By 2002, government scientists had identified 96 sets of remains and returned them to families for burial. Yet in 2006 it emerged that at least half of these identifications were incorrect. The talk examines how these settled truths of identification unraveled and connects them to Chile's process of democratic transition.

For many years, Guatemala was in the international spotlight for its successful campaign against impunity. This campaign included cases of grand corruption and organized crime as well as serious human rights violations during the internal armed conflict (1960-1996), which left 200,000 dead and missing and more than one million displaced. Today, that campaign against impunity has been resoundingly defeated, even after the 2023 victory of anti-corruption candidate Bernardo Arévalo, who promised to restore good governance and resume anti-impunity efforts. Academic and journalist writing on Guatemala’s anti-impunity efforts have focused on its anti-corruption work. For the past ten years, I have led a project monitoring war crimes trials in Guatemala. In this presentation, I will examine Guatemala’s efforts to pursue accountability for wartime atrocities and how a coalition of far-right politicians, old guard military officials, and economic elites have worked to obstruct these efforts, and how survivor groups are fighting back.