Latin America Quiz 2024 | LatAm Exquisite Trivia

Jewish heads of state currently lead Israel, Ukraine, and Mexico. Isaac Herzog has been the President of Israel since July 7, 2021; Volodymyr Zelensky, who has been Ukraine’s President since May 20, 2019, has become an international symbol of resilience; and Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo was elected Mexico’s President on June 2, 2024. She is the first Jewish person and the first woman to hold this office in the country.

Fun Facts: Javier Milei, the President of Argentina, has also revealed his Jewish heritage. During a speech at a Chabad synagogue in Florida, Milei shared that his grandfather discovered shortly before he died that his mother was Jewish. This revelation means Milei himself is Jewish by heritage. While Milei grew up Catholic, he expressed a deep connection to Jewish values and has shown significant support for Israel; Laurentino “Nito” Cortizo Cohen was elected President of Panama in 2019. While his mother was Jewish, Cortizo defines himself as a devout Roman Catholic. Russia and France have Prime Ministers of Jewish descent, but they’re not considered heads of their states.

Colombia’s Green Wave movement to decriminalize abortion had a winning moment on Feb. 22, 2022, when Colombia’s top Constitutional Court ruled that abortion is no longer a crime under Colombian law. The court’s decision decriminalizes abortions in the first 24 weeks of pregnancy. Mexico’s Supreme Court decriminalized abortion in Sept. 2021, and Argentina’s Congress legalized the procedure in late 2020.

Xiomara Castro is the president-elect of Honduras. She takes office on 27 January 2022. Castro will be Honduras’s first female president and the first president not to be a member of either the Liberal Party or the National Party since Honduran democracy was restored in 1982.

Who’s Honduras’s first First-Husband?

Manuel Zelaya, Xiomara Castro’s husband, was President of Honduras from 2006 to 2009 until exiled in the 2009 Honduran coup d’état. Castro was a leader of the movement resisting the coup.

Chile elected 35 years-old Gabriel Boric as its president at the 2021 presidential election run-off vote on Dec. 19, 2021, making him the youngest head of state in the Americas and the second youngest in the world. Assuming office in March 2022, Boric is the youngest president in Chile’s history and the president elected with the most significant number of votes in the country’s history.

Honduran authorities detained former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández on Feb. 15, 2022, to potentially face extradition and drug charges in the United States. Hernández, who led the country for eight years and stepped down less than a month earlier, was extradited to the US on Apr. 21 for taking part in a “violent drug-trafficking conspiracy” that since 2004 has transported 500 tons of cocaine from Venezuela and Colombia to the United States via Honduras. The former president’s brother, Juan Antonio Hernández, is serving a life sentence in the United States for cocaine trafficking.

The first Latina in the Senate, Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, won her second term on Nov. 13, 2022. Her win determined her party’s control of the chamber for the next two years of Joe Biden’s presidency. The midterm election usually favors the party out of power, but not this year. The Republican party did, however, retake control of the house of representatives.

“Allinllachu” means hello in southern Quechua, the primary language in the Quechua linguistic family spoken mainly in Peru and Bolivia. Approximately 25% (7.7 million) of Peruvians speak a Quechuan language. Quechua variants are still widely spoken today, being the co-official language of many regions and the second most spoken language family in Peru. Quechua was one of 24 languages that Google added to its translation service in May 2022. Many, like Quechua, are spoken by Indigenous or minority groups.

Frida Kahlo’s oil painting, “Diego and I,” completed five years before her death in 1954, sold for $34.9 million at Sotheby’s on Nov. 16, 2021, making it the most expensive artwork by a Latin American artist.

Who is Diego from Frida Kahlo’s “Diego and I”?

Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, who is depicted in “Diego and I” just above Kahlo’s tearful eyes, was the artist’s husband (they married twice) and the previous “most expensive artwork by a Latin American artist” record holder. Kahlo’s “Diego and I” surpassed Rivera’s “The Rivals” 2018 record, when his painting sold at auction for $9.76 million.

The correct answer is “Nada Más Que Decir,” (AKA Nada) meaning “Nothing More to Say.” This Argentine TV series marked Robert De Niro’s small-screen debut. In this series, De Niro plays an American writer who visits his friend Manuel, a food critic, in Buenos Aires. The series premiered on Oct. 11, 2023, on Star+ in Latin America, Hulu in the US, and Disney+ in Europe.

Rita Moreno won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1962 for her role as Anita in “West Side Story,” making her the first Latina ever to win an Oscar. 60 years later, in 2022, Ariana DeBose became the second Latina and first Afro-Latina actor to win the award – for the same role in the Steven Spielberg version of the film.

Sony Pictures has cast Puerto Rican reggaeton star and wrestling aficionado Bad Bunny as El Muerto, the first Latinx superhero to lead a live-action Marvel film. El Muerto is a masked Mexican wrestler who inherits superhuman strength from his powerful ancestors. Bad Bunny’s casting was announced on Apr. 25, 2022, at CinemaCon in Las Vegas.

On Oct. 30, 2022, Brazilian leftist leader Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva won a third non-consecutive presidential term. The 77-year-old former metalworker spent 19 months in jail for corruption convictions before the Supreme Federal Court annulled them in June 2021. On Jan. 1, 2023, Da Silva was sworn in as president and pledged to hold outgoing president Bolsonaro’s administration accountable. He has previously vowed to overturn former President Bolsonaro’s far-right policies, including pro-gun measures and weak protection of the Amazon rainforest.

Known in Brazil as “O Rei” or “The King,” legendary professional footballer Edson Arantes do Nascimento, AKA Pelé, died on Dec. 29, 2022, at 82, following a battle with colon cancer.

Gal Costa, the world-renowned Brazilian singer with a nearly six-decade career, died on Nov. 9, 2022. She was 77. The singer had recently canceled a concert at a local music festival after surgery to remove a nodule from her right nasal cavity. According to tour dates listed on her website, she had been expected to return to the stage in São Paulo in December.

Brazil declared the country’s independence from Portugal on Sept. 7, 1822. Portugal officially recognized Brazilian independence three years later, after a long independence war.

How did Brazil celebrate its bicentennial?

Brazil’s bicentennial was celebrated less than a month before the country’s 2022 presidential elections. Far-right nationalist President Jair Bolsonaro has urged Brazilians to flood the streets of Brasilia, Sao Paulo, and his hometown of Rio de Janeiro in a show of strength.

Thousands of Bolsonaro supporters stormed Congress, the presidential palace, and the Supreme Court in Brazil on Jan. 8, 2023. The rioters caused destruction and chaos, calling for military intervention to get Bolsonaro back to power or to get the newly re-elected Lula da Silva out. Among the damage caused by the rioters was spray paint on Alfredo Ceschiatti’s iconic A Justiça statue outside the Supreme Court, broken windows, toppled furniture, and a punctured huge painting by Emiliano Di Cavalcanti. There have been at least 300 arrests.