Research Topic

1:The inequality in the income in Latin America  

The situation of inequality is pretty much the worst in the world. High-income people don’t want to pay for the tax and are not willing to help with the infrastructure development like the hospitals, universities and cultural life. Also, the drug-related crime and governmental corruptions are the reason for some of the higher income people to lose faith in their country.This is a ferocious cycle. If the government does not try to revolutionize their inner system, the Latin American would go on deteriorating. We have to know that  the latin American countries used to be the fastest growing economy, but now they are they are greatly undermined by the government corruption and drug related issues.

For this topic, I want to focus on the reasons the richest people don’t want to invest in their home country, to help with the economic improvement.

2:Drug Cartel in Latin America.

The reason I am interesting in this is because the drug is the serious problems across the latin America. The countries like Columbia and Peru are the major producer of cocaine and the most of the drug are exported to the North America and Europe. It is said that Mexican and Colombian generate a total of $18 to $39 billion dollars per year. And along with the profits, conflicts between major drug cartel and the crime conducted by drug cartels are always major issues in those areas. For instance, Latin America and the Caribbean has the world’s highest crime rates, with murder reaching 32.6 per 100,000 of population in 2008. And the conflicts increase as the government start to declare war on the drug cartel. For instance violence has surged in Mexico since 2006 when Mexican President Felipe intensified the Mexican Drug War.

A fully operational submarine built for the primary purpose of transporting multi-ton quantities of cocaine located near a tributary close to the Ecuador/Colombia border that was seized by the Ecuador Anti-Narcotics Police Forces and Ecuador Military authorities with the assistance of the DEA.

And especially, I want to focus on the period when Escobar became the major drug cartel in      Columbia and how it affects theColumbia people’s life.

My first topic of interest is the formation and history of FARC, a guerrilla movement in Colombia, that just disarmed this year, becoming a legal political party. They have roots in rural poor areas, forming during the Cold War as a communist group. In Colombia there are mixed views about them, as many urban and upperclass people don’t support the FARC as they often kidnap and ransom people, as well as commit acts of domestic terrorism. However, the government is pretty corrupt in Colombia, begging the question of whether they’re freedom fighters or terrorists. I hope to learn more about the cultural divide on FARC and urban versus rural perspectives in Colombia. Wikipedia’s page is very detailed on FARC, and there are several articles on Credo. Here’s a link to an article I read in May about the disarmament of FARC.

My second topic of interest is the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and the role of the American Red Cross. The Red Cross lied about the extent of their relief efforts, and what they did with the funds that they raised. This incident illustrates the role that America has had in Latin America, often with a savior complex that ends up being damaging to Latin America. So I would like to investigate the relief efforts in Haiti and how they’re recovering. Wikipedia has a good starting point of information, but obviously this topic is pretty narrow and there isn’t a wikipedia page for this specifically. There were a few interesting looking articles on credo, but barely any relevant ones.

1. The rights of Indigenous peoples in Latin America
2. The prevalence of baseball in Latin America, specifically the Dominican Republic

With the first topic, I look to continue researching what I learned from the article I focused on for my Noticias post. Many groups of indigenous people are being discriminated against, or their rights are being infringed upon. I want to learn more about the different groups of indigenous people who live in Latin America and which Latin American countries do the best job of protecting the rights of indigenous peoples (and alternatively, which countries do the worst jobs). Below this paragraph I’ve included a link to the article I read last week for my Noticias post, as I think it provides a good starting point for this topic.

www.nytimes.com/2017/09/10/world/americas/brazil-amazon-tribe-killings.html?rref

With the second topic I’d like to investigate how baseball (often referred to as “America’s pastime”) came to be such an important part of Dominican culture. This is particularly interesting to me because I’m a big fan of the Cleveland Indians, and we have several Dominican players on our team, such as Edwin Encarnacion, Jose Ramirez, Carlos Santana, and Danny Salazar. I’ve begun researching it already and have several sources that can be used for this topic, and I’ll include a link to one below.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Latin-Americans-in-Major-League-Baseball-910675

 Pictured is Edwin Encarnacion. Roll Tribe

For the research project I am interested in studying either;

1. The Latin American film industry or;
2. How the Latin American fashion culture differs from the trends we see here in the United States.

If I choose to study the Latin American film industry, I would like to examine and compare the stages of production, from pre-production to post, to the corresponding stages in the film industry in the U.S. As someone who once considered being a film major with a Spanish/Latin American studies minor,  I am incredibly interested in how the two subjects interact within each other. Throughout my high school, Spanish classes would always use Latin American films to help promote Spanish skills, however, I would love to investigate the common themes in these films and what the commentary of those films have to say about Latin American culture. As I previously mentioned, I am used to seeing these films in intermediate Spanish classes, however, these films, as well as their actors and actresses, are becoming very popular in the United States’ culture and the world of entertainment. I am interested in exploring how these Latin American actors/actresses are becoming so popular in our society, as well as answer the question “why?”. Wikipedia had quite a bit of information on a select list of films. Included in this list was a brief explanation of the general theme of the films. Credo had much more information and even touched on details such as film festivals and how the films display Latin America culture and identity.

The second topic that I am interested in is Latin American fashion and couture. I am mostly interested in this topic because it is a topic I have never studied before. Throughout my years studying Spanish culture I’ve never studied the fashion trends and/or compared them with the trends that are exhibited here in the United States. I think this interest stems from experiences I had in Ecuador. It is very obvious that the fabrics, colors, and styles are very different but beyond that, I think it’s interesting to examine what “provocative” in one society means versus in another when it comes to clothing. When looking at the Wikipedia pages for Latin American culture, I couldn’t help but realize there wasn’t much information on the topic. There was one page that provided links to specific articles of clothing by country. Credo, however, did have a lot more information as well as a book listed as a source that looked particularly helpful on the topic.