El Salvador in Crisis: Politics, Corruption and Migration

El Salvador is at a crossroads. The country looks to become the world’s first country to adopt bitcoin as legal tender. El Salvador's young President Nayib Bukele is increasingly seen as an authoritarian leader. This is all in the midst of a migration crisis in Central America and at the U.S. border.

Please join PCFR and the Consular Corps of Arizona for a program with former El Salvador Ambassador to the U.S., Rubén Zamora and Claudia Umaña Araujo, President of FUSADES for a timely discussion on El Salvador.

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Registration

FREE for PCFR Members

$10 for Non-Members

Schedule

Monday, June 21, 2021

10:00 am-11:00 am MST

1:00 pm-2:00 pm EDT

Venue

Zoom Meeting

The link for this webinar will be included in your registration confirmation email.

Speakers

Claudia Umaña Araujo

President of FUSADES

Claudia Umaña Araujo is a lawyer, activist and legal researcher born in San Salvador, El Salvador. While studying for her law degree from the University Dr. Jose Matías Delgado, the country went through one of its most convulsive times. These circumstances had a great impact on her life and is what has led her to devote most of her career to the pursuit of modernization of the State, search of opportunities through trade and the promotion of the importance of transparency and rule of law as the path to prosperity and peace.

She is the first woman President of FUSADES, which has been ranked among the top 12 in Latin America according the “Think Tank Initiative.” She was the founder and former President for 10 years of the NGO: Democracy - Transparency - Justice (DTJ), which promotes transparency, women’s rights and rule of law. Claudia was also a public servant for almost a decade working as the Director of Trade/Commercial Policy of the Ministry of Economy of El Salvador, with the rank of Special Ambassador for Trade Negotiations. During the years that she held office she coordinated the team that negotiated the WTO agreements, CAFTA-DR, Central America and Chile FTA, among other trade treaties. She was also the head of the Central American Economic Integration process. In 2014, she was awarded the "Order of Bernardo O'Higgins" in rank of Officer, by the Government of Chile and in June 2018. Claudia is one of the 12 Salvadoran leaders that are members of the Central American Prosperity Project which is a program to develop action-oriented strategies for achieving inclusive growth in the Northern Triangle, launched in 2018 by the George W. Bush Institute. In 2020, in honor of International Women’s Day, the Bush Institute experts recognized her as a trailblazing woman in their leadership programs. Claudia is a Fellow of the sixth class of the Central America Leadership Initiative (CALI) and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network.

Amb. Rubén Zamora

Former El Salvador Ambassador to the U.S.

Rubén Zamora presented his credentials as El Salvador’s ambassador to the United States to President Barack Obama on April 15, 2013. For Zamora, the moment may have seemed ironic; 30 years earlier, he was prohibited from even entering the country.

Zamora was born November 9, 1942, in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador. He was in seminary for a while, but studied law at the University of El Salvador and later received a Master’s degree in political science from the University of Essex in England.

In the early 1970s, he was a member of the San Salvador council, working the mayor’s office. In 1979, after a coup toppled a right-wing president, Zamora, as a member of a center-left group, was briefly part of the group that assumed power. However, right-wing factions took control of the government in early 1980, forcing out Zamora and assassinating his brother Mario, who was also in the government. Rubén Zamora then fled El Salvador, staying in exile for seven years.

During his time out of the country, spent in Nicaragua and Mexico, Zamora was often a spokesman for the rebels fighting for control of El Salvador, whose government was backed by U.S. President Ronald Reagan. Zamora was blocked by the Reagan State Department from entering the United States during this period.

When finally peace talks resulted in an amnesty in 1987, Zamora returned to El Salvador, wearing a bulletproof vest. In 1989, his house was bombed, but no one was hurt.

In 1991, peace talks resumed and a truce was declared. Zamora won a seat in the national assembly and was named one of its vice presidents, posts he held until 1994. He was also a member of the Salvadoran peace commission. Zamora ran for president in 1994, the first election since the peace accords were signed. He was backed by the center-left CD-FMLN coalition. He lost to Armando Calderon Sol of the right-leaning ARENA party. Zamora ran unsuccessfully for president again in 1999.

For the next 10 years, Zamora worked in the opposition to the government, getting local candidates elected and taking his case to lecture audiences abroad. In 2009, FMLN candidate Mauricio Funes was elected president. Zamora was named ambassador to India, where he remained until being named to the Washington post in 2013.

Zamora and his wife Ester have five children.

Book for Discussion

The Inevitability of Tragedy:

Henry Kissinger and His World

by Barry Gewen

Friday, June 25, 2021

7:30 - 9:00 am MST

Venue

Online Zoom Meeting

About the Book

Few public officials have provoked such intense controversy as Henry Kissinger. During his time in the Nixon and Ford administrations, he came to be admired and hated in equal measure. Notoriously, he believed that foreign affairs ought to be based primarily on the power relationships of a situation, not simply on ethics. He went so far as to argue that under certain circumstances America had to protect its national interests even if that meant repressing other countries’ attempts at democracy. For this reason, many today on both the right and left dismiss him as a latter-day Machiavelli, ignoring the breadth and complexity of his thought.

With The Inevitability of Tragedy, Barry Gewen corrects this shallow view, presenting the fascinating story of Kissinger’s development as both a strategist and an intellectual and examining his unique role in government through his ideas. This book analyzes his contentious policies in Vietnam and Chile, guided by a fresh understanding of his definition of Realism, the belief that world politics is based on an inevitable, tragic competition for power.

Crucially, Gewen places Kissinger’s pessimistic thought in a European context. He considers how Kissinger was deeply impacted by his experience as a refugee from Nazi Germany, and explores the links between his notions of power and those of his mentor, Hans Morgenthau―the father of Realism―as well as those of two other German-Jewish émigrés who shared his concerns about the weaknesses of democracy: Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt.

The Inevitability of Tragedy offers a thoughtful perspective on the origins of Kissinger’s sober worldview and argues that a reconsideration of his career is essential at a time when American foreign policy lacks direction.

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Illicit Finance, Sanctions, and the New Digital Economy

The New Era of National Economic Security

The geo-economic landscape is changing dramatically with the rise of China, advent of the crypto-economy, and growing complexity of the international financial system. Illicit actors profit and take advantage of gaps in the system and new technologies, while the United States and allies grapple with new domains of conflict and strategies of national economic security. Sanctions, anti-money laundering, and investment security like CFIUS have now taken center stage internationally – presenting fundamental questions that have yet to be answered: How broadly and aggressively should such tools be used? How do we understand the risks to the financial and commercial system from state and non-state actors? What parts of the economy should now be considered part of our national security? Can our current systems, regulations, and models address the growing, complicated risks in the system?

Juan Zarate, chairman and co-founder of the Financial Integrity Network (FIN) and the Global Co-Managing Partner & Chief Strategy Officer of K2 Integrity will join PCFR to address this changing landscape and domain of conflict and present a framework for answering these questions.

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Registration

FREE for PCFR Members

$10 for Non-Members

Schedule

Thursday, September 9, 2021

12:00 pm-1:00 pm MST

3:00 pm-4:00 pm EDT

Venue

Zoom Meeting

The link for this webinar will be included in your registration confirmation email.

Presenter

The Honorable Juan C. Zarate

Chairman & Co-founder, Financial Integrity Network

Global Co-Managing Partner & Chief Strategy Officer, K2 Integrity

Juan Zarate is chairman and co-founder of the Financial Integrity Network (FIN) and the Global Co-Managing Partner & Chief Strategy Officer of K2 Integrity.

He is the chairman of the Center on Economic and Financial Power, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and a senior fellow at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center.

He is the senior national security analyst for NBC News/MSNBC. He was a visiting lecturer in law at the Harvard Law School for eight years and is a published author, including his books “Treasury’s War” (2013) and “Forging Democracy” (1994).

Mr. Zarate sits on the boards of various organizations, including Northwestern Mutual, Boston Dynamics, Cambridge Quantum Computing North America Holdings, and the Director’s Advisory Board for the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). Mr. Zarate has served for several years as an independent advisor to Coinbase. For over five years, Mr. Zarate sat on the board of the Vatican’s Financial Information Authority, and for seven years, he was the U.S. advisor on HSBC’s Financial System Vulnerabilities Committee.

Mr. Zarate served as the Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser for combating terrorism from 2005 to 2009, where he was responsible for developing and implementing the U.S. counterterrorism strategy and policies related to transnational security threats. He was the first-ever Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for terrorist financing and financial crimes, where he led the expansion of the anti-money laundering and sanctions regimes, the innovative use of the Treasury’s national security–related powers, and the establishment of the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (TFI).

Mr. Zarate is a former federal terrorism prosecutor prior to 9/11, and a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College and a cum laude graduate of the Harvard Law School.

Book for Discussion

Plunder: Napoleon's Theft of Veronese's Feast

by Cythnia Saltzman

Friday, September 24, 2021

7:30 - 9:00 am MST

Venue

Online Zoom Meeting

About the Book

"A highly original work of history . . . [Saltzman] has written a distinctive study that transcends both art and history and forces us to explore the connections between the two.” ―Roger Lowenstein, The Wall Street Journal

Cynthia Saltzman’s Plunder recounts the fate of Paolo Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana, a vast, sublime canvas that the French, under the command of the young Napoleon Bonaparte, tore from a wall of the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, on an island in Venice, in 1797. Painted in 1563 during the Renaissance, the picture was immediately hailed as a masterpiece. Veronese had filled the scene with some 130 figures, lavishing color on the canvas to build the illusion that the viewers’ space opened onto a biblical banquet taking place on a terrace in sixteenth-century Venice. Once pulled from the wall, the Venetian canvas crossed the Mediterranean rolled on a cylinder; soon after, artworks commandeered from Venice and Rome were triumphantly brought into Paris. In 1801, the Veronese went on exhibition at the Louvre, the new public art museum founded during the Revolution in the former palace of the French kings.

As Saltzman tells the larger story of Napoleon’s looting of Italian art and its role in the creation of the Louvre, she reveals the contradictions of his character: his thirst for greatness―to carry forward the finest aspects of civilization―and his ruthlessness in getting whatever he sought. After Napoleon’s 1815 defeat at Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington and the Allies forced the French to return many of the Louvre’s plundered paintings and sculptures. Nevertheless, The Wedding Feast at Cana remains in Paris to this day, hanging directly across from the Mona Lisa.

Expertly researched and deftly told, Plunder chronicles one of the most spectacular art appropriation campaigns in history, one that sheds light on a seminal historical figure and the complex origins of one of the great museums of the world.

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Struggle for the Future of Myanmar

By the time that this program will go live, the situation in Myanmar could look a lot worse. Experts former Amb. Scot Marciel and Lynn Salinger join PCFR to speak about Myanmar’s history and what’s at stake in a country in decline (crisis). Myanmar is unique in that the entire country is united against a military coup, likening it to a foreign occupying force. The combination of economic decline between high unemployment in urban areas and worsening conditions for farmers, coupled with a cash shortage makes for a humanitarian crisis in the making. Myanmar’s geostrategic direction is important for the Indo-Pacific region.

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Registration

FREE for PCFR Members

$10 for Non-Members

Schedule

Thursday, October 14, 2021

12:00 pm-1:00 pm MST

3:00 pm-4:00 pm EDT

Venue

Zoom Meeting

The link for this webinar will be included in your registration confirmation email.

Speakers

Amb. Scot Marciel

Former U.S. Ambassador to Myanmar

Scot Marciel is a Visiting Scholar and Practitioner Fellow on Southeast Asia at Stanford University’s Walter Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center. A career Foreign Service Officer, he most recently served as the U.S. Ambassador to Myanmar from March 2016 through May 2020. He also has served as U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia, U.S. Ambassador for ASEAN Affairs, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Southeast Asia.

Mr. Marciel has more than 36 years of experience as a diplomat in Asia and around the world, including in Vietnam, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Turkey and Brazil. Mr. Marciel earned an MA from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and a BA in International Relations from the University of California at Davis.

Lynn Salinger

Nathan Associates

Lynn Salinger is a development economist and Principal Associate with Nathan Associates, an economic advisory services firm in Arlington, Virginia. Her work has focused on helping governments, private sector associations, companies, and individuals in middle- and low-income countries acquire the skills needed to allow them to reap the benefits of increased global integration. Ms. Salinger’s areas of expertise include labor markets and workforce development, agriculture and food policy analysis, trade integration and facilitation, competitiveness and private sector development, gender and social inclusion, and productive uses of energy in development.

Lynn’s career began in Northern Cameroon, where she conducted farming systems research, then pivoted to Morocco in North Africa to explore agricultural prices, tariffs, and market incentives as the country underwent structural adjustment. Over nearly forty years, she has since worked across sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, and Southeast Asia. Since 2015 Ms. Salinger has supported two economic growth programs for the United States Agency for International Development in Myanmar, and currently tracks the economic impacts of the February 2021 military coup on Myanmar’s macroeconomy, trade and investment flows, and households. Lynn received her B.A. in political science and German from Tufts University and her M.A.L.D. from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, at Tufts. Lynn is the mother of two grown sons; she and her husband live in Concord, Massachusetts.