Gloria Alvarez Cross was born in Guatemala City, the capital of the Central American country, on March 9, 1985. His father is from Cienfuegos, Cuba, and his mother is of Hungarian origin.
Is media figure, with characteristics of “influencer”, has a long academic career as a political scientist, broadcaster, television presenter, commentator and writer. She has achieved fame on the American continent for speaking out against what she describes as “populism.”.
The political scientist made herself known in September 2014, through a speech at the Ibero-American Youth Parliament, where she presented her defense of the use of new technologies to stop governments; In it, he criticized the populism propagated by 21st century socialism, especially the regimes of Cuba and Venezuela. That presentation, “Let’s dismantle populism through technology”, turned into video, went viral on YouTube.
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Biography of Gloria Álvarez
His father’s work made the family travel a lot and at 9 they moved to Tegucigalpa, Honduras, two years later he would go to San Salvador, El Salvador. During that period they constantly returned to Guatemala, where he would return at age 16.
The relationship between her parents was tumultuous, and would end in divorce, so her Cuban grandparents welcomed her on weekends. There he would see his grandfather, as a radio amateur, interact with his family and friends from Cuba, and from other countries.
His ideological background is heavily influenced by his grandparents. His paternal grandfather, José Manuel Álvarez Pietro, brought to Guatemala, in 1960, his political ideology of the Cuban right, after the regime of the dictator Fulgencio Batista, in 1959. On the island, he was a representative of the Nestlé company.
On his mother’s side, his grandfather, of Hungarian descent, was anti-communist and married his grandmother, of Latvian origin.
From these roots, Gloria Álvarez’s interest in radio, television and ideological political marketing was born. His ideas are anti-communist, libertarian, and neoliberal.
He has no family left in Cuba. Her scars tell of a great-aunt who committed suicide, the same one who composed a song that is part of the island’s cultural heritage: Celia Torriente and her Paper Boat.
He has lived in his native Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, the United States, Belgium and Italy. Since 2018, he has lived in Mexico City.
In 2005, at the age of 19, he started on the radio, presenting Los 40 Principales Guatemala. Currently, he has a program on Fridays, Glory Friday, which is broadcast on Radio 102.1 FM and from where he presents ideas to improve his country, Guatemala.
It also has a television program, since 2015, called HDP, Hijos de la Política, which airs on Azteca Guatemala on Wednesdays; and she is one of the presenters of the online program “The city of books” that aims to promote the habit of reading, to create critical thinking of citizens.
He’s after the volunteer movement Let’s plant 1000 trees, which to date has planted 150 thousand trees.
Education
He studied Political Science and International Relations, and graduated Cum Laude from the Francisco Marroquín University (UFM), in Guatemala. He has a postgraduate degree in Politics and Economics from Georgetown University in the United States and a master’s degree from KU Leuven University in Belgium in Anthropology, Cultures and International Development.
He completed an internship at the Cato Institute think tank, in Washington DC, and a postgraduate degree in Applied Anthropology from the Sapienza di Roma University, Italy, and also a master’s degree in Leadership and Public Management at the School of Government, in Guatemala .
English, Spanish and Italian are the languages he speaks.
The Guatemalan woman against populism
His position on populism has been his banner before the world. He proclaims that, especially, populist Latin American rulers seek to keep the population in ignorance and misery to perpetuate themselves in power.
They include Fidel Castro, from Cuba; Hugo Chávez, in Venezuela; Evo Morales, in Bolivia; Rafael Correa, in Ecuador; Cristina Kirchner, in Argentina; and Michelle Bachelet, in Chile.
His proposal to eradicate populism, presented in the Zaragoza presentation in 2014, is based on fighting it from technology.
Its three points are:
- Technology allows you to educate yourself, read and train yourself to be better citizens, without the intervention of the State.
- The interconnection of employees and employers, courses and students from different countries; In doing so, we will discover that we have the same problems and we can tackle them together.
- Achieve social mobilization. The conversations on the networks collapse the secessionist and hateful narrative of the State.
Álvarez is a benchmark for libertarian ideas in the hemisphere; He has given more than 250 conferences in Latin America and the United States.
She is not currently affiliated with any political party. Since 2013, she was the director of projects for the National Civic Movement (MCN), an activist organization that seeks “the rescue of the Republic.”
He was there until 2018, when he resigned due to corruption cases against leaders of the MCN, which was financed by 34 Guatemalan businessmen and by the liberal organization National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
In 2019, announced his candidacy for the presidency of Guatemala for the general elections of that same year. Although the laws of that country do not allow her to be a candidate until she is 40 years old, the political scientist took advantage of her influence to advance what would be her government plan.
Among his proposals were some of his own and others that should come from the electorate:
- Each region will manage its tax earnings, independently of the central government.
- Reduce the number of ministries.
- Invest in citizen security.
- He approached the electorate with topics such as the legalization of marijuana and cocaine, abortion, prostitution, same-sex unions, adoptions by homosexual couples, euthanasia and the voluntary sale of organs.
- The populist deception (Deusto, 2016), together with Axel Kaiser: present a general analysis of populism in Latin America, detailing the reasons why this movement occurs, the ways in which it manifests itself and the forms it takes in different countries and circumstances .
- How to Talk to a Progre (Deusto, 2017): from her openly libertarian stance, the author analyzed the premises of the left from a liberal perspective. From there, he concludes that social democracy increases poverty.
- How to Talk to a Conservative (Deusto, 2018): in this essay, it aims to help detect and dismantle the narrative of conservative politicians who try to speak from liberalism to confuse; thus, it tries to separate liberalism from conservatism, a current with which it is usually associated.