AS/COA Online | Interview: Mexican Undersecretary for Foreign Relations Lourdes Aranda

Mexican Undersecretary for Foreign Relations Lourdes Aranda discusses her country’s role as this year’s G20 host. Aranda, who serves as a G20 representative, explained why Mexico's role in guiding the G20 agenda toward achieving goals in the areas of green growth, food security, and economic stability.

Video edited by David Gacs.

Americas Quarterly - Free Trade and Congress

AQ's analysis of congressional support for free-trade agreements and states' export benefits, and what that means for the Panama and Colombia FTAs. 

Served as multimedia editor.

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Americas Quarterly - Making a Difference

A special series in the print edition of the Fall 2010 AQ highlights eight outstanding teachers from the region. Meet one—Peruvian teacher Leoncio Tamay—and learn about the school where he works.

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Access the interactive at AmericasQuarterly.org.

CFR.org | Park: Private Sector Solution Could Resolve North Korean ‘Radioactive Funds’ Issue

John S. Park, head of the Korea working group at the United States Institute of Peace, discusses the controversy over $25 million in North Korean funds holding up a February 2007 denuclearization deal. Although the U.S. State Department pledged to release the money from Banco Delta Asia (BDA) in Macao, banks around the world consider the funds tainted by a U.S. Treasury Department ruling that connects the $25 million with illicit activities.

“The $25 million is the financial equivalent of radioactive funds,” explains Park, who says the time has come “to start thinking out of the box of having governments approach third party banks.” He suggests a private sector solution to the current stalemate and that Asia’s experience with troubled banks during the 1997 financial crisis provides a model for resolving the issue. Monetary authorities in Macao could declare BDA a distressed bank and put it up for sale, explains Park. He says the BDA banking license in a recapitalized format could result in a “lucrative sale” in which the proceeds “can be used for the clean transfer of $25 million to a bank designated by North Korea.”

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CFR.org | Timeline: Venezuela's Chavez Era

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez took office in 1999 on a populist platform. But as he moves to enact his “socialist revolution,” critics say the country increasingly resembles an authoritarian state. This interactive timeline offers a visual account of modern Venezuelan politics and Chavez’s rise to power.

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CFR.org | Abbas: Musharraf’s Sinking Credibility

Hassan Abbas, a research fellow at Harvard University and author of Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism, served as an official in the administrations of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. He discusses escalating violence over Musharraf’s decision to suspend Pakistan’s Supreme Court chief justice and says it signifies “the beginning of the end” for the president, who seized power in a 1999 coup. Abbas says deadly clashes over the judicial crisis could not have occurred “without instruction from the top,” and that the government wished to show it would not tolerate dissent. The possibility of an agreement between Musharraf and the exiled Bhutto appears increasingly remote given the Supreme Court controversy, says Abbas.

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CFR.org | Interactive Map: Pakistan's Troubled Tribal Belt

This interactive map explores the turbulent tribal region along Pakistan's Afghan border, including the North West Frontier Province, Balochistan, and the semiautonomous tribal areas.

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CFR.org | Southerland: Chinese Bloggers Bypass Censors to Break Stories

Dan Southerland, executive editor at Radio Free Asia, discusses whether Chinese bloggers can push for more open media in China by getting around censors to break news. He cites a recent story, which made international headlines and was initially covered by bloggers, about a woman in southern China who resisted government siezure of her property. Southerland concedes that most of China's roughly 60 million bloggers write about personal matters and, when covering news, often fail to include essential details about where or when an event took place. However, he says, “If everybody suddenly decided that they would stop censoring themselves I think they could easily overwhelm the government” and could “get a little beyond the superficiality” of state-run media. Southerland also discusses “online muckrakers” who uncover stories about local government corruption and push news past monitors by praising the central government.

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CFR.org | Crisis Guide | Darfur

CFR.org's Emmy Award-winning multimedia exploration of the crisis in Darfur and its policy implications.

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CFR.org | U.S. Relations with China (1949 - Present)

Since the 1949 Communist victory in China, U.S.-Sino relations have wavered between tense standoffs and attempts to bridge strategic and ideological differences. This CFR.org Timeline offers a visual account of U.S. Relations with Communist China.

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CFR.org | Kripalani: Pakistani Protests May Leave Musharraf's Political Future "Extremely Uncertain"

Manjeet Kripalani, CFR press fellow and India bureau chief for BusinessWeek, discusses the increasing social unrest in Pakistan caused by President Pervez Musharraf's decision to suspend Chief Justice Iftikar Chaudhry. She says the crisis could leave the president's political future "extremely uncertain.

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CFR.org | Minzner: "Institutional Failure" Leads to Social Unrest in China

CFR International Affairs Fellow Carl Minzner, an expert on Chinese domestic issues and former senior counsel at the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, discusses the increase in social unrest in China. He says that in China, a country under one party rule lacking institutional means to address grievances at the local level, "central leaders don't necessarily know what's going on until ten thousand local farmers make it out of a particular area and mount a collective protest."

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CFR.org | Esarey: China's New Media Laws An “Experiment”

Ashley W. Esarey, a China media expert and author of a Freedom House report on Chinese press censorship, discusses the new regulations giving foreign journalists press freedoms through the end of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. He calls the new laws an “experiment” by the Communist Party and says the press freedoms may become permanent unless they “lead Chinese journalists to call for more freedom themselves.”

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CFR.org | Crisis Guide: The Korean Peninsula

Over half a century since Korean War's end, conflict persists on the peninsula. Explore the military, economic, and nuclear dimensions of this frozen conflict.

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This interactive helped CFR.org win a 2007 Knight-Batten for Innovations in Journalism for its for its Crisis Guide Series.

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CFR.org | Kux: Musharraf Has Little Control of Border with Afghanistan

Ambassador Dennis Kux, a senior policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Asia program and former Foreign Service South Asia specialist, discusses the porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Under international pressure to control the Taliban and other extremists from making cross-border raids into Afghanistan, the government of President Pervez Musharraf recently proposed mining and fencing the border. Kux says the idea is not a viable solution and that the Pakistanis cannot stop “individuals going across what has long been an open border.” He also says that the Pakistani intelligence agency’s longtime links to militant groups as well as sympathy for the Taliban in tribal areas near the border serve as obstacles to stopping incursions into Afghanistan.

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CFR.org | Garrett: Progress and Problems With Bird Flu Policy

Laurie Garrett, CFR senior fellow for global health, says global commitments to end bird flu mean the world is in a better position to handle a potential avian flu pandemic than it was two years ago. But she warns that we still don't have "a toolkit that can stop this virus from circulating" if the virus evolves to allow easier human-to-human transmission. "Flu is by far the most contagious probability in our near horizon, and there are no fools left who think you can confine it to one country," says Garrett.

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CFR.org - Sweig: Castro’s Temporary Power Handover A “Significant Moment for Cuba”

The staunchly anti-American Cuban leader Fidel Castro temporarily ceded power to his brother Raul this week while he recovers from gastrointestinal surgery. Julia E. Sweig, senior fellow for Latin America studies and author of Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground discusses the first break in Castro's forty-seven years in power. The event marks a historic moment for the region and a vulnerable time for U.S.-Cuba relations, says Sweig.

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