Latin America

With mobile phones spreading like wildfire in developing countries, they are becoming vital tools in the fight to improve health, educational and economic outcomes for aspiring families around the world (as we have pointed out in a variety of contexts). A recent World Economic Forum report, “Big Data, Big Impact: New Possibilities for International Development,” highlights some of the amazing potential and remaining challenges in the field.

By Alejandra Montes, Save the Children

Originally posted on www.youthsave.org

In 2006, Mexico’s newly elected president, Felipe Calderón, declared war on his country’s drug cartels. He militarized and intensified a conflict that had been managed by his predecessors through an opaque strategy of accommodation, payoffs, assigned trafficking routes, and periodic takedowns of uncoöperative capos.

Last Friday morning, the second most powerful man in Mexico’s government, the cabinet member leading the war against the drug cartels, died in a helicopter crash. Mexicans were stunned: Francisco Blake Mora was President Felipe Calderón’s second interior secretary to die in an air crash in three years.

On June 8, 2005, Alejandro Dominguez, the head of the chamber of commerce in Nuevo Laredo—a busy Mexican city on the Texas border—took office as the city’s chief of police. He was an outsider to law enforcement, brought in by the mayor as an honest broker. Six hours later, he was dead, shot 40 times as he walked to his car. Five days later, Mexico’s then-president, Vicente Fox, sent in the army and national investigative police, who arrested the city police force en masse, taking all 700 of them into custody, pending investigation.

When Congress nearly failed to continue funding the government recently, one of the provisions in the spending bill that they couldn't agree on was an obscure bit of legislation related to the almost 50-year-old embargo of Cuba.

The provision -- which was eventually dropped -- would have reinstated a Bush administration policy that restricted Cuban Americans to visiting family in Cuba only once every three years, and then only to immediate family and with no humanitarian exceptions -- even for deathbed and funeral visits.

Whenever someone asked me why we have the same anachronistic policy toward an island nation 90 ninety from our shores that we have had for half a century, I generally tell them that Cuba simply "doesn't matter." In a big-picture sense, our policy hasn't changed (or has only gotten hotter) since the Cold War ended and left two combatants behind on the field.

Yesterday in the Mexican municipality of Batopilas, President Felipe Calderon announced “the largest banking access program in the world that is targeted at the poorest people.” More than 6 million families, all current participants in Mexico’s government public benefit program Oportunidades, would benefit from the Calderon’s efforts, which he explained would help reduce the gap between the rich and the poor.

Late last month, YouthSave’s core Research Advisory Council (RAC) member Carolina Trivelli was sworn in as Peru’s first Minister of Social Inclusion. Trivelli was most recently Director at the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos and has worked with Proyecto Capital and NAF on linking conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs with financial inclusion strategies.

Last week, Ms. Trivelli graciously agreed to answer some questions about her appointment and upcoming plans.

I've just finished reading a new report by Professor Richard Feinberg, a former Clinton administration official and non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution.  "Reaching Out: Cuba's New Economy and the International Response," clocked in at a daunting 101 pages but should nonetheless be required reading for anyone following the island nation's long-awaited economic restructuring.