Welcome to Latin American Lowdown

 I'm trying to learn more about Latin America. Summarizing news stories about the region is one way to do it. Follow along if you are interested. This is no more than a retirement hobby. This blog is free.  Looking south beyond our borders stirs no end of  useful thoughts. We can see how a big part of the world sees us. It's sobering to realize they don't see us the way we see us. We can learn from that. We can learn about the unending struggle between autocracy and democracy in many countries. That way, we'll know more about the challenges our political system faces. Democracy is under attack here.  

We can see the challenges to our economic power that many of us just don't know about. China, not the United States, increasingly looms large in Latin America's future. When my language teacher in Costa Rica said he bought a new car, I was startled to learn that it's Chinese. Maybe that's a silly example. Here's another one: did you know that Brazil's biggest trading partner is China, not the U.S.?  

We see the massive toll taken by political instability -- the waves of migration it generates, and the difficulties generated for the United States when it chooses to ignore what is happening in other countries and to ignore the opportunity to influence in broadly helpful ways the development of their economies and their resources and the potential of their people. When our neighbors are in trouble, we are in trouble.

"Latin American Lowdown" is kind of a joke. Getting the lowdown on something implies you know it inside and  out -- but how much can you really know about a country from the occasional story in a big American paper? Money, power, corruption, violence -- it's news but how much do you really learn about the life of a people and its culture? About  the natural grandeur  of a country and its economic resources? About where to go and what to eat? To that end, this may have some travel and culture notes, and some country profiles. It may have some original stories eventually, depending on how this goes, but I don't know enough to do that yet. On the other hand, I don't want to run afoul of copyright law. 

What's meant by "Latin America?" Here's how Britannica defines the term: "Latin America is generally understood to consist of the entire continent of South America in addition to Mexico,  Central America, and the islands of the Caribbean whose inhabitants speak a Romance language. The peoples of this large area shared the experience of conquest and colonization by the Spaniards and Portuguese from the late 15th through the 18th century as well as movements of independence from Spain and Portugal  in the early 19th century." 

I'm fascinated by the how the relatively small nations of Spain and Portugal had an impact on so many countries around the world. It's interesting to note that there are more native Spanish speakers in the world than native English speakers -- 463 million versus 370 million, according to one estimate (but if you add in non-native speakers, the figures are 1.3 billion versus 537 million, with English the most spoken language in the world). So I plan to include stories about Spain and Portugal too.  And of  course about how immigration from Latin America is affecting the United States.