The Washington Office on Latin America has a seven-step plan for the newest president to implement in his or her first

100 days in office.

Joy Olson, executive director of the WOLA, and Vicki Gass, senior associate of the WOLA, focused on their organization’s plan for development in South America in a speech Wednesday night in the South Ballroom at the Memorial Union.

WOLA recommended the newest president take a trip to Latin America to discuss development plans and have a meeting with Mexico and Canada.

Olson spent some time in the Dominican Republic recently and said nearly 70,000 people had lost their jobs as companies seek to minimize costs.

She also noticed that Iowans were suffering from some of the same problems that South Americans were suffering from.

“Iowans are losing manufacturing jobs, and these jobs are going to neighboring areas and to rural areas, because the costs of production are cheaper,” Olson said.

Part of the problem with U.S.-Latin American relations have been rooted in the fact that Americans have had a very checkered past with their dealings in the region, Olson said.

“We’re here to tell you that U.S. relations with Latin America and the Caribbean are really in a dismal state,” Olson said.

She talked about issues such as extreme inequality between incomes and said that in some countries, the top 10 percent of the population earned as much as 48 percent of the national wealth and the bottom 10 percent earned only 1 percent.

Olson said there were street gangs that shared affiliations with American counterparts and failed U.S. policy on dealing with these gangs led to highly trained groups of corrupt people.

“I’ve talked to officials in Mexico who say that they have to go after these guys who are really well trained,” Olson said.

After wrapping up their proposal for change, both Olson and Gass said there needed to be major changes made to U.S. policies, and they said people should question candidates stances.

“I’m taking a class right now in Latin American politics and I came to check out some information from the class,” said John Brown, senior in political science.

Brown said a lot of the things they were discussing in his classes were very relevant to this speech in regard to situations with low-paying factory jobs, free-trade zones and drug-trafficking problems.

Jose Reyes-Alamo, graduate student in computer science, said there was a recent earthquake in Peru, and he is working with a group of students trying to do a service trip to Peru and networking with WOLA on issues such as funding information.

“I’m Puerto Rican, so I feel interested in Latin America in general,” Reyes-Alamo said.