Message from the Interim Director
Welcome to the Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center (LACC) at Florida International University, one of the preeminent centers on Latin America and the Caribbean in the United States. Since its foundation in 1979, LACC has played a crucial role in stimulating top-notch scholarship to understand and address the pressing issues affecting the Western Hemisphere. This commitment has resulted in LACC being a Preeminent Emerging Program at FIU, a federally-designated National Resource Center on Latin America, and one of the most important area studies centers in the United States due to the impact of our faculty in the region.
LACC benefits from being one of the academic centers with the highest concentration of Latin American and Caribbean Studies scholars in the United States. Furthermore, our first-class scholarly expertise is enhanced by the deep family and cultural ties that many of our faculty maintain with the region. Our Center is an institution rooted in South Florida and shaped by the vibrant population exchange and hemispheric trade. This attribute makes FIU’s LACC unique. It embodies the international scope of FIU and signals the imminent opportunities created by open academic communities.
The Center is a resource on all things in the Caribbean and Latin America, from technology to public health to human security and more. The FIU faculty and students who conduct research, teach, and promote policy discussion on Latin America and the Caribbean are the most important assets of LACC. Through the outstanding scholarship of its faculty and students, it seeks to impact public policy in its various dimensions and transform our societies for the benefit of its peoples.
As the newly appointed director of LACC, I invite you to be part of this endeavor. As interim director, I will strive to keep and enhance this mission in partnership with you and our community.
José Miguel Cruz is an associate professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice and director of the Center form the Administration of Justice. Before becoming Director of CAJ, Jose Miguel served as Director of Research in LACC, where he secured research grants from the State Department, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, the Tinker Foundation, USAID, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), UNICEF, and Open Society Foundations (OSF), among others.
Dr. Cruz earned his PhD in political science at Vanderbilt University after completing his master’s degree in public policy at St. Antony's College, Oxford University. Before joining FIU, and for more than ten years, he served as the director of the Institute for Public Opinion (IUDOP) at the Jesuit-run University of Central America (UCA) in San Salvador. IUDOP has been one of the premier public opinion research centers in Central America since the 1980s.
He is considered one of the pioneers in the study of criminal violence in Central America and Latin America, and the first to study Central American transnational gangs comparatively.