Monday, October 5, 2026
2:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. EDT
The Georgetown Americas Institute is pleased to host a conversation with Claudia López, former Mayor of Bogotá and recent presidential candidate in Colombia, in dialogue with Michael Shifter, adjunct professor at Georgetown University, and Denisse Yanovich, managing director of the Georgetown Americas Institute.
Drawing on her experience as a former senator, mayor, and presidential candidate, López will share her perspectives on Colombia’s latest presidential elections and what they reveal about the current state and resilience of the nation’s democracy. The discussion will expand to examine broader hemispheric trends, including the key threats facing democratic governance across Latin America, the factors driving increased polarization and the recent political and ideological shifts to the right across the region, and how she views the evolving role of the United States in regional affairs.
Featuring
Claudia Lopez became Bogotá's first female and first lesbian mayor in the city’s history in 2019. She has an emphatic focus on environmental, education, social equity, and anticorruption issues. Lopez was a senator of the Republic of Colombia between 2014 and 2018 and vice-presidential candidate in the 2018 presidential election for the Green Alliance party. Her tenacity and enormous capacity for collective action were reflected in her fight against corruption by leading a citizen consultancy, a participatory instrument, with historic results. Before entering her political career, Lopez was an accomplished researcher and scholar. Lopez is a finance and international relations graduate from Universidad Externado de Colombia, holds a master’s degree in public administration and urban policy from SIPA-Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in political science from Northwestern University. Currently, she is an Advanced Leadership Fellow at Harvard University.
Michael Shifter is an adjunct professor at the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, where he has taught Latin American politics since 1993. He is the former president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a leading policy forum on Western Hemisphere affairs based in Washington, DC. Shifter writes and comments regularly on U.S.-Latin American relations and hemispheric issues. His articles have been published widely, including in the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Financial Times, Current History, Americas Quarterly, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, Journal of Democracy, Politico, and Harvard International Review, as well as in leading newspapers and journals in Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Latin American Studies Association and is a contributing editor of Current History. Shifter graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Summa Cum Laude from Oberlin College and holds a M.A. in sociology from Harvard University, where he taught Latin American development and politics for four years.
Denisse Yanovich is the managing director of the Georgetown Americas Institute. Prior to joining Georgetown she was the deputy to the president at the Inter-American Dialogue, a leading think tank on Latin America. She also worked at the Embassy of Colombia in Washington, managing their Public Diplomacy program, and Fedesarrollo, an economic policy think tank in Colombia, as a research associate. Yanovich holds a B.S. and M.A. in economics from Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá and M.A. in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University College, London.