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.
Covering Violence Against Women: How We Miss the Bigger Story
The media does not like structural violence. We like things that conform to our preconceived notions. As one friend who lived in Juárez and wrote a book about it told me, “Most people write the story before they even get on the airplane.” Finally, the international media’s near singular focus on violence against women in Juárez means that we miss the macro story. As Molly Malloy, a librarian and professor at the University of New Mexico State has pointed out, the proportions of homicides against women in Juárez (about 10 percent of the murders) is actually lower than that of the United States (about 20 to 25 percent of the murders).
Targeting “Hot Spots” Could Drastically Reduce Latin America’s Murder Rate
Perhaps more than any other part of the world, homicide in Latin America is concentrated by time and place – for policymakers hoping to reduce the region’s staggering levels of violent crime, this represents a major opportunity. Home to just 8 percent of the world’s population, Latin America experiences 33 percent of the world’s homicides, and is disproportionately affected by other forms of victimization, including assault, robbery and property crime. Most of this occurs in just a handful of urban settings. In response, crime prevention measures that explicitly target places, people and times where criminal activity recur have generated remarkable successes in the region.
Mexico: Over 250 skulls found in Veracruz mass graves
The victims’ advocacy groups have criticised authorities for doing little to try to find or identify the state’s missing people, many of whom were kidnapped and never heard from again. Al Jazeera’s John Holman, reporting from Mexico City, said that one mother of a missing person told him that her family received “very little help” from state authorities in finding her son. “Veracruz is a real epicentre in the violence that is being felt through various areas of Mexico,” he said.
MAYA WEAVERS PROPOSE A COLLECTIVE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAW
The modern state was built not only through land dispossession, but also knowledge dispossession. Aspuac associates the cultural appropriation of textiles with broader patterns of Maya dispossession. “Textiles are part of the territories. To protect water and land is to protect our textile art … they are our knowledge. Maya dispossession does not happen only through territory, it happens also through the dispossession of our ancestral knowledge.” Indeed, the appropriation of Indigenous territories for extractive industries has been accompanied by the systematic expropriation of Indigenous labor and the dismantlement of ancestral knowledge. Not only are Maya women exploited, underpaid and continuously confronted with high levels of violence and discrimination. Export companies are in effect extracting the production of Maya weavers in order to exploit their knowledge and work.
Children Who Survived Fire in Guatemala Are Still Not Safe, Report Says
The rest of the residents who were housed at Virgen de la Asunción have been moved to other facilities across the country. Health Ministry officials told Disability Rights International that seven of the girls were pregnant. Many of the children at the home were abandoned; others had been placed there by their families. Last year, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities called on Guatemala to end the institutionalization of children. But without any support from the government, families often have no choice. “It’s absolutely a question of political will,” Mr. Rosenthal said. “It never occurs to them that kids should be with their families.”
Farmers sue World Bank lending arm over alleged violence in Honduras
The suit’s plaintiffs include more than 15 individuals. There are two class action claims: one regarding roughly 200 members of the Panamá community, the second representing roughly 1,000 people and focused on allegedly “unjust” profit-making from contested land acquisitions in the past. The 132-page legal complaint says the plaintiffs are seeking compensation for “murders, torture, assault, battery, trespass, unjust enrichment and other acts of aggression”. Ultimately, it says, the case is about World Bank entities “knowingly profiting from the financing of murder”. The document describes decades of violence but focuses on the period since 2010, seeking damages for several specific deaths and what ERI attorneys described as a “pattern of attacks that is ongoing”.
After lengthy mission, UN peacekeeper pullout looms in Haiti
With a steady downsizing of Haiti peacekeeping operations in recent years and the U.S. administration of President Donald Trump pushing for cutbacks, the U.N. is looking at sending home 2,358 soldiers from 19 contributing countries, perhaps within months. U.N. peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous said during a recent trip to Haiti that the military component “is likely to disappear in the relatively near future,” though officials have not spoken publicly about the roughly 2,200 foreign police who accompany them. Washington, the Haiti mission’s main check-writer, is also applying pressure as it reviews all 16 U.N. peacekeeping missions. A diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity because the conversations were private, has told the AP that the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, has spoken about winding up the Haiti peacekeeping operation, which is known by its French acronym, MINUSTAH.
How US Crop Dumping Keeps Haiti Poor and Dependent
The intention of feeding people is not immoral, but the policies carrying out the good intention are deeply flawed. The mutually beneficial exchange that would otherwise occur has been replaced by waste and suffering. The U.S. must eliminate the agricultural and foreign aid policies that have propagated Haiti’s economic stagnation. The unseen consequences of U.S. policy may get even worse for the Haitian economy. The intentions of providing Haitians with free food threatens the Haitian agricultural industry and has been detrimental to their growth. U.S. policy clouds the foresight of entrepreneurs and prevents sustainable growth investments from which both Americans and Haitians could benefit. The fault does not fall on the Haitian people; rather it is their institutions and our institutions that need reform. The world has failed Haiti through enacting bad policies. The U.S. should learn from our past mistakes and feed people through the most efficient way possible–the private market.
Colombia has a peace deal, but can it be implemented?
“Colombia is in a hole and doesn’t have a way of getting out of that hole,” Isacson said. “Colombia’s rural conflict zones need a Marshall Plan right now, but at least for the next couple of years, they’ll be lucky to avoid an austerity plan.” Colombia was counting on financial help from the United States, which has given the country more than $10 billion in mainly military and anti-drug aid since 2000 under the so-called Plan Colombia. The aid is largely credited with saving Colombia from an armed FARC takeover. After the peace deal was signed last year, President Obama promised Santos $450 million in aid for next fiscal year, up from $320 million this year. But that amount is now in doubt. President Trump has said he may cut foreign aid across the board and so far has not said publicly whether Colombian peace will be a priority.
Bolivia sees coca as a way to perk up its economy – but all everyone else sees is cocaine
Since Evo Morales became president in 2006, 20,000 hectares of leaf has been permitted informally, a policy adopted to ensure a subsistence income for all registered growers. As Bolivia uses 14,700 hectares for chewing and teas, according to a 2014 European Union study, this leaves 7,300 hectares of “excess” coca. “If we could export legally, coca farmers’ incomes would improve,” explained Ricardo Hegedus. “It wouldn’t eliminate drug trafficking but it would make it harder and more expensive for traffickers to get coca.”