The News Roundup is a regular section of the blog, featuring news articles from various sources around the web, with the goal of providing an overview of the weekly conversation about the countries where MCC works in the region. Quotes in italics are drawn directly from sources and do not necessarily reflect the position of MCC.
Forced Displacement in Mexico: The Hidden Toll of the War
Official statistics also show that, during the first four years of the war between authorities and criminal groups, population rates began to drop in 246 municipalities. The pattern increased during the last two years of Calderon’s administration and Peña Nieto’s first three. INEGI statistics indicate that between 2010 and 2015 the number of municipalities that experienced a decrease in their population rates rose to 691. In October 2015, a delegation of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights visited Mexico to study the phenomenon. The team concluded that “one of the serious human rights violations that gave way to the different forms of violence from which Mexico is currently suffering has to do with forced internal displacement.” According to the preliminary observations that the agency formulated during its visit, the violence is perpetrated by “organized crime groups, which, in some cases, work together with state authorities.”
Frederico is now 91 years old. Sitting on a chair outside his son Benjamin’s small home, the frail veteran tells me how in October 2010, he heard from friends about recent news reports in which the government announced that several members of the Guatemalan military had been secretly and intentionally infected with gonorrhea by American researchers in the 1940s. Other groups—mental patients and prisoners—had additionally been exposed to syphilis and chancroid. The experiments were in the news because then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had issued a public apology to the government of Guatemala for violating its citizens’ human rights. Álvaro Colom, president of Guatemala when Clinton made reconciliation efforts, announced an investigation into the matter. Then-President Barack Obama asked the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues to commence a report investigating how these horrifying experiments came to be. The report has been completed, the apology long since issued. But for families like Frederico’s, compensation and treatment has still not come.
‘Drug Charges Against Ex-Guatemala Officials are Tip of the Iceberg’
Many political and economic elites made a poor assessment of the arrival of Donald Trump. The designation of John Kelly as Secretary of Homeland Security, a man who knows the Northern Triangle very well, and his influence has been decisive in keeping the policy that was drawn up in 2014. The message is: We will continue to support the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (Comisión Internacional contra la Impunidad en Guatemala – CICIG), and the fight against corruption and crime will continue even stronger than before. I do not know if there was coordination between Kelly’s visit and the news surrounding the extradition, but the message was clear. They are going to force the elites to obey the rule of law, for better or worse.
How Trump’s Deportation Crackdown Could Sink El Salvador
President Donald Trump’s ongoing crackdown on undocumented migrants in the U.S. threatens this income. On Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security issued memos that anybody without the correct papers could be sent home, enacting an executive order Trump signed on Jan. 25. The directive signaled that Trump could be gearing up to fulfil his onetime campaign promise to deport all 11 million undocumented migrants in the United States rather than just dangerous criminals. The consequences for Salvador’s economy would be potentially devastating. Remittances not only lift many out of extreme poverty but also mean people buy more, which keeps local companies afloat. “It’s a cycle,” says economist Cesar Villalona. “If remittances went down it would plunge people into poverty and reduce spending, which would hurt companies, causing unemployment, and hitting government finances.”
An Idealist’s Martyrdom Fails to Move Honduras
But our taxpayer dollars continue to flow to Honduras to support the government of Juan Orlando Hernández, thus enabling the climate of terror that is fed by his party’s corruption. Today, we mourn not just the loss of Berta Cáceres. We mourn the loss of all the other Bertas in Honduras, like Tomás García, María Enfirquesta Matte, Francisco Martínez Márquez and many more. Wherever unprotected activists stand up to governments and corporations that encroach on indigenous land rights and other human rights, we must do all we can to stop our governments, corporations and lending institutions from playing the role of enabler.
Lush heartlands of Nicaragua’s Miskito people spark deadly land disputes
Both Miskitos and mestizos claim there has been no investigation into the crimes, and police often refuse to register their complaints. “The government told the court that it has received no complaints regarding the land conflict. That all the 2,000-and-something complaints registered in 2015 on the Caribbean coast were common crimes,” says Cunningham. “This means that they do not want to classify these murders, disappearances and kidnappings as a land conflict.”
Haiti gov’t creates commission to probe prison conditions
The presidential announcement came a few days after The Associated Press published an exclusive report on an upsurge of inmate deaths, including 21 last month at the country’s biggest prison, due in large part to malnutrition-related illnesses and other preventable diseases. An AP team saw a corpse and emaciated men with sunken cheeks and protruding ribs at the infirmary at Haiti’s severely overcrowded National Penitentiary, which houses some 40 percent of the country’s inmates in squalid conditions. Prisoners were crammed shoulder-to-shoulder in cellblocks so overcrowded they are forced to sleep in makeshift hammocks suspended from the ceiling or squeeze four to a bunk. New arrivals jostle for space on filthy floors where inmates on lockdown 22 hours a day must defecate into plastic bags in the absence of latrines.
Demobilising with the FARC’s 18th Front (photo essay)
The 18th Front is considered to be one of the left-wing group’s more militarily successful fronts, exerting strategic influence in the northern part of Antioquia, a state that has been heavily affected by the country’s 52-year civil war. It is a conflict that has involved government forces, drug cartels, right-wing paramilitaries and leftist guerrillas, and which has left hundreds of thousands dead, tens of thousands kidnapped and millions displaced. Although the initial peace accord between the Colombian government and the FARC was rejected in a plebiscite on October 2, both parties reached a new accord that was ratified by congress on November 30. As part of the demobilisation, disarmament, and reintegration process outlined in the peace accords, the FARC moved to pre-concentration sites in late 2016, before a move to UN Transitory Zones on January 31, 2017. On that day, 6,300 guerrillas moved to the UN-organised camps.
Colombia’s FARC rebels begin disarming under peace deal
Colombia’s leftist FARC rebels are due to to begin surrendering their weapons under a landmark peace deal, marking the delicate transition from an armed group to a political party following more than half a century at war. After weeks of mustering its troops at designated disarmament zones, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), was set on Wednesday to start an inventory of its weapons and destroying munitions under UN supervision.
Amazon Deforestation, Once Tamed, Comes Roaring Back
Bolivia’s greenhouse gas emissions levels per capita exceed that of many European countries, despite having a far lower per capita income. Deforestation is responsible for more than 80 percent of Bolivia’s total carbon dioxide emissions, according to a recent study by researchers at Insead, a graduate school based in Fontainebleau, France. A major culprit is the cultivation of soy, which has jumped more than 500 percent in Bolivia since 1991, to 3.8 million hectares in 2013, according to the most recent agricultural censuses. Little of that soy is consumed domestically. The vast majority is processed and exported as animal feed in a commodities trade that serves a global appetite for hamburgers, chicken and pork.
Burger King animal feed sourced from deforested lands in Brazil and Bolivia
Local farmers carried out the forest-burning to grow soybeans for Burger King’s suppliers Cargill and Bunge, the only two agricultural traders known to be operating in the area. Glenn Hurowitz, Mighty Earth’s CEO, said: “The connections are quite clear. Bunge and Cargill supply Burger King and other big meat sellers with grain. McDonald’s, Subway and KFC are not perfect but they’re doing a hell of a lot more to protect the forests. If Burger King does not respond immediately to people who want to know where their food comes from, then people should shop elsewhere.”