Guidelines for NACLA assignment

For this assignment, you are to read current news articles about Latin America from the website for the North American Congress of Latin America (NACLA) and submit two short reviews during the semester. Please submit one review per due date. Each review is to be at least 3-4 pages and each due date corresponds to a regional topic in Latin America. I'll explain further later in these instructions.

To select the articles, go to the website and choose an article from any of the sections listed at the top of the banner, such as "Magazine," "Columns" and "Opinion and Analysis." However, to gain complete access to all the resources in the website, I strongly encourage you to sign up for a free account. The registration is easy, just create a username (or use your e-mail) and password, and you're ready to go!

October 5: Mexico, Central America or the Caribbean (Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, etc.)

November 2: South America (Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Uruguay, Ecuador, Venezuela, etc.)

Please submit your reports through Canvas in either of the following formats: doc, docx or PDF (if you are using Apple Pages to compose your review, please be sure to convert your paper to docx or PDF before submitting it).

Late papers will be accepted for each submission, but only for one week after the assigned due dates and will be assessed a full grade deduction. Please use both a title page and a works cited page (neither of these pages count toward your 3-4 pages of text).

These two reports will count as a combined 20% toward your final grade. In your works cited page, compose your article entry in a format like this:

Nidia Bautista, "Justice for Lesvy: Indifference and Outrage in Response to Gender Violence in Mexico City," NACLA Report on the Americas website (July 31, 2017).

In terms of the content of each report, I am looking for two main points of discussion. First, you should devote the first half of the report to a summary of the main points in the article that you selected.

To help you to address this issue, consider some of these questions: What is the main issue being discussed? (i.e. immigration, elections, education, environment, women's issues, crime, etc.) Who are the main personalities mentioned in the article? (i.e. Enrique Peña Nieto, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, President Trump, etc.) How does the issue affect the people of the country mentioned in the article?

Does the issue have any connection with United States interests? In other words, please try to be as objective as possible during this portion of the assignment.

And for the second point of discussion, please analyze the article that you selected and present your point of view on the story.

For example, how do you feel about the story? How did this article contribute to your understanding about modern Latin America?

And what do you think about the author's perspective on the article? (i.e. did he or she exhibit any conservative or progressive opinions?) Whether you are liberal or more conservative in your political views, I encourage you to present your views as you discuss this portion of the assignment.