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Mapping a parallel universe
It was a Wednesday afternoon and we were about to discuss a case study on Ronald MacLean Abaroa — the first democratically elected mayor of La Paz in four decades. This was at a time when Bolivia was considered the poorest nation in South America and was suffering from the world’s highest inflation — an annual rate of roughly 24,000 percent in 1985.
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Jamil Mahuad and the Peru-Ecuador peace treaty
It was a Wednesday afternoon and our professor — Nobel Peace Prize nominee Jamil Mahuad asked us to sit as his cabinet members and navigate through the crisis of Ecuador in the year of 1998 – at the time when he was elected president. For eight hours, we learned from the man himself how he navigated the Ecuador-Peru border dispute — a conflict described by former United States President Bill Clinton as “the last and longest running source of armed conflict in the Western Hemisphere.”
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Surpassing the invisible line
Few years back, as my travel to Mindanao became more frequent with the construction of the Mindanao Road Network Development, a 2,567-km road network in Northern Mindanao, Davao, SOCCSKSARGEN, and CARAGA Regions, I have developed a more nuanced view of Islam and oppose the image constructed in binary public discourse.
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Jobs, Jobs, Jobs
For years, Filipinos are reminded of the deteriorating state of Philippine infrastructure — from economic losses causing 3.5 billion a day due to traffic congestion to the increase in road usage every year. Estimates by the Japan International Cooperation Agency predicts that economic losses could rise up to 5.4 billion in 2035 without any infrastructure intervention.
