On behalf of the Yale Mexican Student Organization, we would like to extend an invitation to our symposium titled Convergencias. The conferences will discuss the main challenges that Mexico currently faces in order to consolidate its democracy and strengthen its leadership in Latin America. Our objective is to gather leaders from different sectors of our society--including government, business, academia, and the media--so that they share with us their perspective on the main obstacles that afflict our country and the necessary measures to overcome them. We intend to identify the main points of agreement and discrepancy so that, once this identification stage is complete, we can begin to work together in our country's best interests. The challenges are numerous: it would be ideal to sit down and discuss the much-needed improvements in the fields of education, international relations, organized crime, democracy, justice, corruption, migration, poverty, and inequality. We acknowledge that it is impossible to address all of these topics thoroughly in only two or three days. That is why we have decided to focus on the topics of immigration, monopolies, crime and justice, and democracy within Mexico and in the Latin American context.

Our invited guest speakers include Sigrid Arzt (Security Advisor to President Felipe Calderón), Fernando Canales Clariond (former Secretary of the Economy, Secretary of Energy, and governor of the State of Nuevo León), Javier Corral Jurado (prominent journalist, former federal congressman and senator for the State of Chihuahua), José Antonio Crespo (Political Analyst and Professor of History at CIDE), and Samuel González Ruiz (Former Head of the Federal Investigation Office v. Organized Crime), and Cecilia Soto (former candidate to the Presidency and Mexican Ambassador to Brazil). We will complement their contributions with discussions with academics from leading universities in the Northeast, such as Gilbert Joseph (Yale), Chappell Lawson (MIT), Tricia Gabany-Guerrero (UConn) and Pablo Piccato (Columbia).

One of the activities that distinguishes this symposium is that we have extended our invitation to Mexican students and the academic community with interests in the region from other universities such as Boston University, Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, MIT, New York University, and the University of Pennsylvania. This will be the first regional inter-university gathering of Mexican students and we are very excited about it! Convergencias is geared towards young leaders, and your participation will contribute immensely to the impact and the success of our conference on our community. We hope to meet you in New Haven!