Javier Corrales is Dwight W. Morrow 1895 professor and chair of Political Science at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He obtained his Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University in 1996. Corrales's research focuses on democratization, presidential powers, democratic backsliding, political economy of development, ruling parties, the incumbent's advantage, foreign policies, and sexuality. He has published extensively on Latin America and the Caribbean. In addition to ogoing research on Venezuela's politics, Corrales is also working on three separate projects: 

1) Incumbents, Expresidents, and Newcomers;

2) variations in the performance of national oil companies, and
3) the factors helping to expand LGBT rights in Latin America.

Mario Alberto Araya Pérez is a Costa Rican social anthropologist and a visiting researcher at CEDLA. He is affiliated with the Youth Agenda in Rights and Citizenship Centre at the National Distance Education University of Costa Rica (UNED) and is a PhD candidate in the Central American Social Sciences Doctoral Programme at the University of Costa Rica.

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Mario's doctoral research focuses on the logics and dynamics of confinement in urban-marginalised communities in El Salvador and Costa Rica. During his doctoral internship at CEDLA, he is systematising and analysing fieldwork data collected between January 2023 and June 2024. He is also beginning the initial stages of writing his thesis, under the supervision of Dr Julienne Weegels.