Program Director is quoted in the Tico Times about how the solution to the decrease of extremely high levels of crime and poverty in Central America will take more than a "magic bullet".
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The humanitarian crisis is so high-profile that 250 people crammed into the Wilson Center’s sixth-floor auditorium and two overflow rooms to attend Thursday’s program, which was moderated by Steve Inskeep, host of NPR’s Morning Edition; another 170 watched the conference online.
“I can recall no time since the Central American wars of the 1980s when so much U.S. media attention has been paid to this region,” said Cynthia Arnson, director of the think tank’s Latin American program, in introducing the three foreign ministers.
“These children come from an extremely violent region, where they probably perceive that the risk of traveling to the U.S. is preferable to remaining at home,” she said. “Poverty levels have gone down, but 45 percent of Salvadorans, 55 percent of Guatemalans and 67 percent of Hondurans are still poor. There is no magic bullet to address these problems, which have taken decades, if not centuries, to develop.”
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The Wilson Center’s prestigious Latin America Program provides non-partisan expertise to a broad community of decision makers in the United States and Latin America on critical policy issues facing the Hemisphere. The Program provides insightful and actionable research for policymakers, private sector leaders, journalists, and public intellectuals in the United States and Latin America. To bridge the gap between scholarship and policy action, it fosters new inquiry, sponsors high-level public and private meetings among multiple stakeholders, and explores policy options to improve outcomes for citizens throughout the Americas. Drawing on the Wilson Center’s strength as the nation’s key non-partisan policy forum, the Program serves as a trusted source of analysis and a vital point of contact between the worlds of scholarship and action. Read more
