Rural Community in Colombia Photo: Anna Vogt
Paramilitary killing spree was Colombia ‘state policy’: Judge
A Bogota court ruled on Friday that a series of massacres, homicides and forced displacement operations carried out by paramilitaries in the north and northeast of Colombia in the late 1990s was “state policy.”
Will the International Criminal Court Investigate Mexico’s ‘Drug War’?
The violence of Mexico‘s so-called “war on drugs” has caught the attention of the international community, with calls for the International Criminal Court (ICC) to turn its attention to the country. If they’re successful, high-level government officials — or even leaders of drug trafficking organizations — may be prosecuted in the Hague. But it’s a difficult road ahead.
El Salvador’s Barrio 18, MS13 Learn to Farm
The vocational training program for incarcerated gang members is an encouraging sign for a country that has been overrun by gang violence. The inauguration of the prison farm is the latest in a series of initiatives taken by the Salvadoran government to find alternatives to the Mano Dura (Iron Fist) security strategies, which have only served to worsen the country’s gang problem. In September, President Salvador Sanchez Ceren announced the creation of a National Council for Citizen Security that will include members of the public and private sectors in creating an action plan to reduce crime and violence.
On Talk to Al Jazeera, President Evo Morales gives an insight into his personal life and discusses his controversial decision to legalise child labour, his expulsion of the US ambassador, the issue of drug trafficking – and whether he plans to step down when this term is over.
The Guatemalan children who sued the state
“That the judges stated that there were violations is of course a result, but the goal right now is that these teachings reach more Guatemalans,” said José Castillo, Program Coordinator at Nuevo Día, which took the cases to court. “We are facing a government whose public policies don’t respond to Guatemala’s reality. This process, what it wants to do is tell the State to modify its policies. This is the only way to stop poverty and malnutrition.”
Facing deadly conditions, there’s no Hollywood ending for Latin America’s miners
In the end, awareness among global consumers of the source and side effects of metal extraction may be key in prompting diversification of economies and improvements in the sector. As audiences worldwide witness Chile’s “Los 33” immortalized on the big screen, they might spare a thought for those, picking the insides of the earth clean for the copper in their smartphones, who never make it out alive.
Crisis in Mexico: The Disappearance of the Forty-Three
Mexico’s struggle against political corruption and rampant organized-crime violence it breeds can’t be co-opted by any one ideology or party or movement. The popular hashtag slogan “We are all Ayotzinapa” really does have to mean all of us, both in Mexico and outside it. The civic movement that has begun must be sustained. Perhaps when the Mexican congress has finally been cleansed as legislatures were in Colombia and Italy, where sustained civic pressure led to sweeping dismissals and criminal prosecutions of corrupt legislators—why should it possible for those countries and not for Mexico?—Mexico, with a fresh start, can renew its passionate and necessary ideological arguments with the possibility of translating those discussions into honestly administered policies and reforms.
Canada Accused of Failing to Prevent Overseas Mining Abuses
The Canadian government is failing either to investigate or to hold the country’s massive extractives sector accountable for rights abuses committed in Latin American countries, according to petitioners who testified here Tuesday before an international tribunal. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) also heard concerns that the Canadian government is not making the country’s legal system available to victims of these abuses.