Hi everyone and thank you for coming and this event is also co-sponsored by

Nackler who just relaunched. Look at their site you should pick up their

their issues. They really do this work very well.

I'm here, my friend Renee Rojas, our new issue,

which we're here to kind of celebrate the launch of,

centers on Latin America, and it centers particularly on the pink tide and we called it by taking

power partially because we thought that what happened in Latin America was kind of in the last

10-20 years or 10, 15 years was kind of a

counter to the idea that we changed things by

stepping questions of power.

And the Pink Tide experiments, of course,

have had a mixed record.

But on the whole, there's massive reductions in inequality and massive reductions in poverty,

increases in access of health and literacy.

I mean, these are real gains and in terms of the shifts that we've seen it's comparable

only to maybe the immediate construction of the welfare states in Europe in the post-war periods.

So I think there's a lot to kind of learn, and I hope the issue is kind of a tentative attempt

to get some lessons about why the pink tide, I shouldn't say, fell short,

but why it encountered certain kind of structural constraints

that it limited what it was able to accomplish.

So I think it's a good issue.

It's really beautifully designed.

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