Tolu, Colombia. Anna Vogt
The News Roundup is a regular feature of the blog where we select a number of 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.
Introducing Latin America’s Top 5 “Corruption Busters”
From Brazil to Guatemala and beyond, a new generation of prosecutors, judges and activists is making extraordinary progress. These brave, highly skilled “corruption busters” are prosecuting offenders and sending them to jail in unprecedented numbers – no matter how powerful they are. If this crackdown continues, it will go down as one of the most important changes to Latin America in the 21st century. It will strengthen democracies. It will make the business world more transparent, and more open to new players. And it will help reduce poverty and inequality, as the billions of dollars lost to graft every year are redirected toward the neediest. Here at Americas Quarterly, we’ve decided to celebrate five distinguished leaders behind this trend. They are: Sérgio Moro, the Brazilian judge overseeing the probe at Petrobras; Iván Velásquez and Thelma Aldana, the Colombian prosecutor and Guatemalan attorney general whose joint investigation led to the imprisonment of a Guatemalan president; José Ugaz, the Peruvian prosecutor and global chair of Transparency International; and Viridiana Rios, a Mexican activist and academic whom we chose as a symbol of the younger generation of Latin Americans agitating for change on social media.
Have January raids deterred migrants from illegally crossing the border?
The raids, which were launched Jan. 2, resulted in 121 people being taken into custody, primarily in Georgia, North Carolina and Texas. Advocates for immigrants, however, challenged the notion that the decline in border apprehensions can be attributed to the raids. “The time it takes a refugee to travel from Central America to the United States precludes making any connection between the raids and the number of people who have arrived since the raids,” said Jonathan Ryan, executive director of the San Antonio-based Raices immigrant legal advocacy group. Illegal crossings on the southern border traditionally decrease during the winter, and apprehensions also dropped between December 2014 and January 2015, though not as dramatically as this time. Overall, recent illegal crossings by children and families are soaring compared with a year ago.
The hidden environmental factors behind the spread of Zika and other devastating diseases
So what can we do? Yale’s Durland Fish argues that we have to pay much more attention to how large projects involving forests, dams, wetlands and more change the ecology of diseases by changing the habitats of their vectors. And that we need to think about diseases from a much more ecological standpoint in general. “You should be able to understand how these simple man-made aquatic habitats, how do they produce mosquitoes, what are the biological processes involved, in turning a mosquito egg into an adult mosquito,” he says of Aedes aegypti. “And we don’t understand that process.” Fish says the medical world tends to pursue cures such as vaccines, rather than ecological understanding that can lead to better prevention. When it comes to Zika virus, says Fish, “You have to do something about the mosquitoes, and that’s strictly an environmental problem, there’s no medical applications to that. And focusing on that as an environmental issue is going to have the greatest impact on protecting people.”
THE SOCIETAL COST OF LOCKING UP WOMEN FOR LOW-LEVEL DRUG OFFENSES
Latin America is facing an epidemic: women across the region are incarcerated at alarming rates for non-violent, low-level drug offenses. This doesn’t have to be a reality. A working group of human rights experts, legal specialists, and government officials throughout Latin America has published a policy roadmap for the region to reduce the unjust levels of women’s incarceration for drug offenses. The report, released by the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), the International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC), Dejusticia and the Inter-American Commission of Women of the Organization of American States, calls for a wide array of reforms to address the human cost of current drug policies in the Americas. “Women, Drug Policies, and Incarceration: A Guide to Policy Reform in Latin America and the Caribbean” recommends that governments pursue the decriminalization of drug consumption and the use of alternatives to incarceration—particularly for pregnant women and women with dependents—as well as education and training programs that can lead to meaningful employment.
Beneath Mexico lies the grim toll of the country’s brutal drug war. In recent years Mexican authorities have uncovered 201 so-called fosas clandestinas or “clandestine graves,” containing 662 decaying bodies and piled bones of mostly unidentified victims of what appears to be violence related to the drug war and human-trafficking networks. The following map, based on a data set provided by the Mexican government under a freedom of information request, attempts to visualize the spread of drug war violence by locating unmarked graves where human remains have been found in recent years. The data, although official, is most likely incomplete. Some media reports and watchdog organizations suggest there are far more unmarked grave sites and corpses than the government is admitting to.
A new Cuban revolution and the stark divide between rich and poor
And who will their priorities be? Ms. Rubeira, the expert on race in Cuba, rubbed knotted fingers at her temples when we talked about the transition. “It worries us, the descendants of Africans, the passing of the historic generation,” she said. “Because, although the problem is not solved, Fidel always tried to find a solution, and Raul followed his steps as president. But Fidel is …” Here she trailed off out of delicacy, for no one here refers directly to the aging Mr. Castro’s eventual passing. “And Raul will step down – so what’s going to happen with the [new] leadership, who don’t have these ideas?” Already, Ms. Nunez, the sociologist, says, her sense is that the commitment to equality is not as strong today as it was a couple of years ago. The state must lead, with policy that recognizes the existing differences. “If you treat everyone equally, you’ll reproduce inequalities,” she said. “Policy must focus on historically disadvantaged groups, and account for geographic differences.” One crucial factor, she added, is credit: The government must act quickly to extend a program of loans to Cubans who do not have relatives abroad sending cash and gifts.
Liberated Haiti: Thirty Years After Duvalier
Correcting Plan Colombia: 5 ways the US can support lasting peace in Colombia
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos will meet with US President Barack Obama to promote the peace process and mark the 15th anniversary of Plan Colombia, a US assistance package that was accompanied by grave human rights abuses on the ground since it started in 2000. Their meeting provides an excellent opportunity for the US government to learn from the mistakes of Plan Colombia, and ensure that future aid and diplomacy truly contributes to a lasting peace. This should start with an honest assessment of Plan Colombia. Rather than holding the aid package up as a complete success story, Presidents Santos and Obama need to recognize the many failures of Plan Colombia, which are illustrated well by WOLA’s new interactive presentation on its legacy and the Latin America Working Group Education Fund (LAWGEF) infographic on the human rights impact of the aid. Fortunately, the coming years will give the United States a chance to improve on these failures. Now that the country is nearing an end to its armed conflict, there are concrete steps the US government can take to resolve the challenges facing Colombia.