Category: Latin America

Will Argentina and Chile’s Rightward Shift Lead to More Births?

SAMI J. KARAM

I mentioned last month in TWL #299 that the pink tide is receding in Latin America and that the continent’s political leadership was shifting to the right. On Sunday, the right-wing candidate (“far-right” according to people who only read The Guardian) José Antonio Kast won the presidency of Chile, ending the rule of socialist Gabriel Boric. When he was elected, Boric was hailed as a new page for Chile and for the continent, but his actions in office were less impactful than anticipated.

A conservative on social issues, Kast is a staunch opponent of abortion with no exceptions allowed for rape, incest, risks to the mother or viability of the fetus. Kast also opposes same-sex marriage, adoption by same-sex couples and “gender identity ideology”. Unlike his Argentinian counterpart Javier Milei who is single and childless, Kast has nine children from the same mother, lawyer María Pía Adriasola, to whom he has been married for 34 years.

A good question from my perspective is whether this rightward shift is merely the result of frustration about the economy or whether it signals a deep change of attitude toward social issues. When it comes to annual births for example, they have been declining in Chile since 1991, but they declined even faster starting in the mid 2010s.

As to Argentina, annual births have fallen off a cliff by a full third since 2015 (chart), mainly due to 1) a program initiated in 2017 to combat teenage pregnancy, and 2) the legalization of abortion in 2020.

The total fertility rate (TFR) has been falling for several decades in Argentina, Chile, and Latin America/the Caribbean, much as it has in the rest of the world. The ultimate social test of the rightward shift in politics is in the TFR and in annual births. If they stabilize or start to edge upward, we will know that the continent has turned a page, not only in politics and economics, but also in social attitudes. But because social notions are slow-moving and difficult to change, my guess is that we will not see meaningful reversals in annual births.

The majority of Latin American and Caribbean countries forbid or restrict abortions. Abortion was legalized or decriminalized in Cuba (1965), Uruguay (2012), Argentina (2020), Colombia (2022) and Mexico (2023). Other countries such as Chile, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia etc. allow abortions under very limited circumstances. But El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Jamaica have total or near-total bans.

Florida in the Election

Editors

A French version of this article appears in L’Express.

Former mayor Mike Bloomberg has announced that he would spend as much as $100 million of his own money to help Vice-President Biden prevail in Florida on Election Day. This underscores once again the importance of Florida in this and every presidential contest.

Florida has a good track record of picking the winner in a presidential election. With the messy 2000 contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore, the state gained prominence as the ultimate prize and must-win battleground. To be sure, it is not a perfect track record, given that Florida favored George H. W. Bush in 1992 and Richard Nixon in 1960 over winners Bill Clinton and John Kennedy. If you go to earlier times, you also find that Floridians misfired with John Davis and James Cox in 1924 and 1920, two unknowns today except among aficionados of electoral history. But in sum, four misses out of 25 elections over a century can indeed be called a strong track record.

The stakes are high in 2020 given the state’s 29 Electoral College votes and the tightness of the race according to the polls. Vice President Biden is now nominally ahead by 1 to 3%, an insignificant gap that can easily close or widen in the remaining days of the campaign, depending on a slew of factors, not least the performance of each candidate in the upcoming debates.

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Soccer for Americans

Editors

Three rule changes to turn American soccer into a big money maker.

The experience of watching a soccer game rarely lives up to the anticipation. You go in hoping for a 4-3 cliff-hanger (as with Argentina vs. France recently) but too often you end up with 1-0 or worse, a draw, or much worse, a draw that is resolved through a penalty shootout. This chronic letdown explains why Americans prefer watching other sports.

soccer
Photo by Torsten Bolten.

Except for anxiety-ridden upper middle-class moms trying to steer their teenage sons away from (American) football practice, most Americans don’t really care about watching soccer. If this is changing, at about the pace of a glacier inching down an Alaskan ravine, it is mainly because the percentage of immigrants in the US population has been on the rise in recent decades. These immigrants or their parents often come from countries where soccer is the leading spectator sport. It follows then that with the current crackdown on immigration, the future of American soccer is looking as frail as ever. NFL bosses need not lose much sleep.
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Learning from Medellín with Alejandro Echeverri

Editors

“I think, if you want to write a new narrative at some specific moment in the story of a city, it is important that you have to feel the transformation and see the transformation. So the physical transformation is important but always there is more a spiritual thing, as happens with emotional connections and inspirational things.” ______Architect Alejandro Echeverri.

EcheverriPhotoIf you have an interest in Latin America or in urban matters, you will have read by now that the city of Medellín, Colombia has undergone a startling transformation in the past fifteen years. In the 1980s and 1990s, the name of Medellín evoked fearsome drug cartels, violence and terrorism.

But in the 2000s, Medellín took a dramatic turn for the better. In 2012, it was selected from 200 contenders as Innovative City of the Year in a survey organized by the Wall Street Journal and the Urban Land Institute. Today, it features regularly among lists of forward-looking cities and must-see destinations. Read more →

NIC: Global Trends 2030

Editors

The US NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE COUNCIL released a study GLOBAL TRENDS 2030: ALTERNATIVE WORLDS.  The talking points about demographics are as follows:

Rapid extensions of life expectancy likely: global deaths from communicable diseases projected to drop by more than 40 percent.

Some countries, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, will still have youthful populations, but demographic arc of instability will narrow on both east and west flanks.

“Aging” countries face the possibility of decline in economic growth. Increased migration will spread to emerging powers.

Urbanization set to grow to almost 60 percent.

Starting at page 20 of the FULL REPORT is Megatrend 3: Demographic Patterns.

On page 24 is a table on the ‘Demographic Window of Opportunity’ for various countries.

Nine Out of 10 Latin Americans Will Live in Cities by 2050

Editors

Region is already the world’s most urbanized, with 80 percent of the population living in cities. 

FROM FOX NEWS LATINO:

RIO DE JANEIRO –  Almost nine out of every 10 people in Latin America will live in a city by the year 2050, and the region should use this moment of economic stability and slower population growth to make those cities more equitable, said a UN report issued Tuesday.

The report by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme said the region is already the world’s most urbanized, with 80 percent of the population living in cities. This growth came at a cost: it was “traumatic and at times violent because of its speed, marked by the deterioration of the environment and above all, by a deep social inequality,” the report said.

“The main challenge is how to develop in a way that curbs the enormous inequalities that exist within cities,” said Erik Vittrup, the head of human settlements of UN-Habitat’s regional office for Latin America and the Caribbean. “There are other cities that have been through these urban transformations and don’t have this level of inequality. It goes against the economic model in Latin America. Cities didn’t grow more inclusive; the prosperity wasn’t for everyone.” READ MORE.