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Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies will close its office in Santiago, Chile at the end of this year and allow its office lease in Mexico City to expire this month because of a strained budget.

The changes were announced in July 22 emails to center affiliates. Staff in the Mexico City office will work remotely, but summer internships, courses, and other student programming will still take place in person. DRCLAS’s third international office, located in São Paulo, will remain open.

Government professor Steven R. Levitsky, the faculty director of DRCLAS, said that the center decided to close the office in Santiago because a funding source that had supported it for roughly two decades ran out several years ago.

The bulk of the funding came from a 1999 donation by Andrónico Luksic, a Chilean businessman. Unlike the Brazil office, the Chile office does not have an endowment — and, according to Levitsky, DRCLAS’s budget is too tight to spend its unrestricted funds on the Chile office.

“In order to keep it open, we either had to find a big donor, like in Brazil, to sustain it, or to use unrestricted funds from Cambridge to finance it, and given the broader fiscal crisis in the University, we just didn’t have the money,” Levitsky said.

Levitsky said DRCLAS faced a million-dollar deficit last year, and the cuts were made after faculty associated with the center identified funding priorities.

“We had to make horrendous, horrendous choices this year — really, really painful choices, choices that felt like we were cutting off limbs,” he said.

DRCLAS had already made cuts to its internship programs. By the end of last year, the center no longer offered their Puerto Rico Winter Institute, a study abroad program that ran in January, or winter internships in Mexico.

Levitsky said the recent changes were also an attempt to accommodate declining student interest in travel to Chile while broadening DRCLAS’s work in other South American countries. Decades ago, Chile was seen as a relatively stable and safe country for students to travel to, unlike many of its neighbors.

Now, Levitsky said, “Harvard kids are going everywhere in South America. They’re going to Peru, they’re going to Colombia, they’re going to Ecuador, Bolivia.”

“Chile is just a smaller place, and there’s less traffic by our faculty and students to Chile,” he said.

Students who participated in DRCLAS’s programs in Chile said they were disappointed to see the office closing.

Minerva C. Garcia ’26, who participated in Chile’s Summer Internship Program this past summer, said she and her peers “were all in shock” when they found out on the last day of programming that the office would close.

Garcia, who worked in a regional government in Chile, said the program was her first time traveling outside the United States and a valuable opportunity to learn how Chile’s government works. The office closure felt like “a slap in the face,” she said.

Paola Y. Lee-Vega ’26, who completed a summer 2023 internship in Mexico through DRCLAS, said she worried that students, many of whom already work remotely, would lose out if they could no longer convene in the program’s central office.

“The physical space was really important for us,” she said. “That’s where we did all of our activities. That’s where we would meet before going on a trip. Or that’s where we would meet to just bond and talk and create community and reflect on our experience.”

Anouska I. Ortiz ’26, who participated in both winter and summer internships in Mexico, said the experience helped her connect to her own Mexican background — and added that she hoped DRCLAS would find a way to reopen its closed Latin American offices.

“Interest is still there,” she said. “I’m hopeful that the DRCLAS office will find more funding, more donors, so that they can keep their offices open.”

But DRCLAS is unlikely to reopen the Chile office — even if it regains financial stability.

DRCLAS spokesperson Vanessa Salas Fuentes wrote in an email that the center “is moving toward a more flexible and sustainable model of engagement with Latin America — one that allows us to support research, teaching, and student experiences without requiring a permanent physical presence.”

Levitsky said that if Harvard and DRCLAS move beyond the University’s current crisis, the center would still pursue a different vision for its work in Chile.

DRCLAS “won’t go back and build and open up a brick and mortar office in Santiago, Chile,” he said, but plans to develop a more flexible footprint with multiple Spanish speaking countries to uphold its presence in places including Chile, Argentina, Colombia, and Peru.

The center is still looking for funding to support new initiatives and hoping to invest in its Mexico programs.

“Thus far, we just have not secured the funding to do it,” Levitsky said.

—Staff writer Mia F. Lupica can be reached at mia.lupica@thecrimson.com.
—Staff writer Jordanos S. Sisay can be reached at jordanos.sisay@thecrimson.com.