Family garden plot in Colombia. Photo: Anna Vogt
Artists in Mexico turn low-income neighborhood into one giant mural
A community project in central Mexico is bringing art to people’s homes. Literally. An artists’ collective known as the German Crew have spent 14 months turning the hillside neighborhood of Las Palmitas into a giant, colorful mural in an effort to bring the working-class “barrio” together and change its gritty image.
Huge Mexico City Rally Over Killing of Journalist
Of the seven journalists killed in 2015, four worked in Veracruz. Since 2010, 13 journalists have been killed there in the tenure of Gov. Javier Duarte, of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, according to Article 19, a media rights group. In all, 41 journalists have been killed since 2010. To those at the rally, the killing was a reminder of the violence journalists face here. “I can’t put responsibility for his death on the government directly, but we can hold this government responsible for the climate of harassment and impunity that prevails in Veracruz,” said Jenaro Villamil, an investigative journalist.
Honduras And Guatemala Anti-Corruption Protests Spur Hope For Change For The First Time In Decades
“This is a really historic time in Central America,” said Arturo Matute, a Guatemala-based analyst for the nonprofit International Crisis Group, headquartered in Belgium. “The question is whether this will really turn into a critical juncture in which society, civil organizations, the private sector and political parties can really come together in making the best out of this opportunity that’s being presented to us to begin really cleaning up our state institutions.”
Guatemala Calling: Lynchings and the Politics of Inequality
The barriers to popular participation are steep, as already noted, but these protests suggest a fundamental shift in citizen voice and activism. They also demonstrate the country’s marked shift away from when organized violence was the default reaction to political disenfranchisement. What is needed now are the systemic changes that redistribute opportunity that protestors are demanding, and provide opportunities to influence policing and daily security fears. Until then, lynchings will continue to exact a toll on victims, perpetrators, and the collective Guatemalan psyche.
The Executioners of El Salvador
“We’re a society that knows nothing about peace,” Oscar told me. “I’ve never lived it.” These days, El Salvador, he argued, is in the grip of something terrible, something frightening and lawless, and it’s natural for people to be outraged. But allowing police to kill with impunity is far too dangerous a proposition in a country with El Salvador’s history of state violence…The night before he left the country, Óscar told me that he understood the anger, and he knew that he and his co-authors would be attacked for his investigation. “I only hope,” he said, “that the readers who applaud the fact that the police are now judge, jury, and executioner don’t suffer one day at the hands of the police they’ve empowered.”
As murders soar, El Salvador gangs want to talk truce
Santiago looks at the gangs in political terms – poor, deprived communities which are ignored by the state and which must be given a better deal. “There are no football teams, but there are gangs. No boy scouts, but gangs. Nothing, just gangs,” Santiago told of the communities during an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera. “They don’t understand our culture. They have never taken the trouble to understand the phenomenon of the gangs,” he said.
Honduras’ Garifuna communities resist eviction and theft of land
Additionally, the communities’ locations make them vulnerable to encroachment by palm oil producers and narco-traffickers. Therefore, defending territory has also come to mean defense against these legal and illegal industries. By recuperating the land, the Garifuna communities will be able to continue to slow down the transportation of narcotics through their territory. Since 2012, the community of Vallecito has through their permanent presence successfully kept the local narco-traffickers from reconstructing a transit point along the coast, which was destroyed by the Honduran military. But the communities have faced intimidation and violence from the traffickers.
Thousands of Haitians fleeing Dominican Republic stuck in camps
Tens of thousands of Haitians and Haitian-Dominicans have fled the Dominican Republic in response to its strict new immigration policy with many settling in squalid camps in Haiti. Haitian officials estimate the population at four camps in the south of Haiti is at least 2,000 and growing.
The United States Once Invaded and Occupied Haiti
The United States ended its occupation in 1934, but its effects still persist today. The U.S. turned Port-au-Prince into a bustling urban center and created an army to squelch opposition in rural areas, explains Tharoor. Future leaders employed the same model to maintain dominance. The U.S. occupation may have failed in its goal of improving American and Haitian relations, but it it left a blueprint for oppressors to come.
Where Are the Bodies Buried in Colombia?
Unmarked graves, mass graves and common graves abound in Colombia. The puzzle is finding those who know their whereabouts and who they contain. This is clearly easier said than done. As the Criminologist said: “These groups are organized, the idea is to leave no evidence and no witnesses.” It is clear that La Escombrera is just a start as thousands of Colombian families yearn for closure in a process which could easily take decades.
Rewriting the History of Plan Colombia
Lost somewhere in the narrative battle is the fact that, during the last 25 years, the FARC has not even been the biggest human rights violator in Colombia. Moreover, the consensus among serious analysts is that Plan Colombia was one of the major factors in the breakdown of the government’s previous negotiations with the rebels. If Kelly understood his mission as “charting the path to peace,” he wouldn’t have published his incendiary op-ed when he did: at a moment when the two-and-a-half-year peace process was faltering and talks were preparing to broach the subject of transitional justice, for FARC rebels who “displaced innocents and destroyed livelihoods across Colombia” and for members of the Colombian military who did the same, only on a larger scale.