The projects for 2016 of Latitudes, the Latin American Research Group from Australia, are now available online, including the recordings of events carried out in the first semester, the launch of a new book and a project of digital archives.
The presentations in public events regarding Argentina and Brazil are now available in Latitudes’ website, www.latitudesgroup.info. The first seminar for this year, titled Media Monopolies and political power in Latin America: The Argentine Case, was conducted to analyse the latest developments in this country and the role of mass media conglomerates in them. The event featured an interview with the renowned argentine journalist and sociologist, Pedro Rubén Brieger.
Dr. Fernando López presented his work Media and political power in Brazil: the implementation of a coup at the second event this year, the Public Forum: political crisis in Brazil, organized by Latitudes, the Sydney Latin American Social Forum, and the Socialist Alliance. Pedro Ivo Teixerence, researcher and Ph.D. candidate in Social History at the Universidad Federal de Rio de Janeiro and the Ruhr University, in Bochum, Germany, also contributed to this special event with an online presentation regarding the crisis in his country.
Dr. Fernando López, Editor of Latitudes, has published the book The Feathers of Condor: Transnational State Terrorism, Exiles and Civilian Anticommunism in South America” (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016, Great Britain), already available for sale. One of this book’s main arguments maintains that Operation Condor had a great degree of cooperation between the dictatorships, considering the distrust, animosity and historical rivalries amongst the armed forces from these South American countries, which was distinct, yet intriguing feature of this operation. The book is available for sale at Cambridge Scholars Publishing’s website and Amazon.co.uk. The work will be officially launched in Sydney in October 2016.
Similarly, Latitudes’ first publication, 40 years are nothing: history and memory of the 1973 coups d’etat in Uruguay and Chile (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015, G.B.), edited by Pablo Leighton and Fernando López, is available at Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Amazon US & Amazon UK. Radio SBS (Special Broadcasting Service) in Spanish interviewed Fernando López about the book.
Finally, Latitudes invites the international community to contribute material to the digital archive called The Down/South Archive, a research initiative that investigates links and political-cultural parallels between Australia and Latin America, two (sub)continents that share the same ocean and southern latitudes.
For more information, visit www.latitudesgroup.info and latitudesgroup@gmail.com
