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.
Why police reforms rarely succeed: Lessons from Latin America
Research from both the U.S. and Latin America has shown that campaigning for “tough on crime” policies, or “penal populism,” is a highly successful strategy for winning elections. As scholars have shown, such policies can generate broad support among a diverse set of voters. So-called “pro-order” coalitions, the collection of civil society organizations, media outlets and politicians that advocate for “law and order” policies, have similarly demonstrated great capacity to mobilize resources and public support. Failing to sustain reform coalitions means there is little counterweight to these pressures.
Can Latin America’s Development Banks Be Fixed?
Finally, governance matters. Development banks should have clear mandates, transparent rules, and open accounts so society can monitor their investment choices. Subsidized lending ought to be brought into the budgetary process: If governments cannot decide on a whim how much to spend on schools, why should they have free rein to allocate scarce resources to corporations? Moreover, the operations of development banks ought to fall within the perimeter of national bank supervisors and be constrained by the best international practice in bank regulation, so as to avoid excessive risk-taking and limit losses. They should also focus on long-term projects and small and medium enterprises, as they tend to have much lower access to credit than large conglomerates. Development does not come from throwing cheap money around to see what sticks. Moreover, these banks can be useful, within a circumscribed role. But it takes good governance to make a development bank work for the people. Are Latin American countries up to the task?
The amount of money that companies like Barrick Gold and ExxonMobil actually give to governments of countries that they extract resources from is now publicly available online thanks to a Canadian bill that was passed back in 2015. This is significant because that information cannot be gleaned directly from the annual reports of publicly-listed companies, making it difficult to determine if resource companies were actually paying their fair share in taxes and royalties to governments.
Border walls are ineffective, costly and fatal — but we keep building them
Lastly, by forcing clandestine border crossing to become even more hidden, by pushing migrants deeper underground, these measures reinforce the power of Mafia and organized crime groups, and increase the violent extortion or coercion of vulnerable migrants (through kidnappings and ransom demands, for example). From the borders of Southeast Asia to the Sahel Region, and from the corridors leading from Central America to the U.S. or from Turkey to continental Greece, it is the most vulnerable migrants who suffer the repercussions of the world’s border walls. Thus, sexual assault has become a common event in women’s migratory journey, with 80 per cent of them being assaulted along their route to the United States; the NGOs they encounter along the way systematically dole out contraceptives.
The Canadian company mining hills of silver – and the people dying to stop it
This is a perennial frontline in a deadly battle fought by land rights activists against corporate interests in Guatemala, a clash of interests that have made the country one of the most perilous places in the world for environmentalists, according to the NGO Global Witness. Since 2010 at least 41 people have been killed – including eight at the Canadian-owned mine, Escobal. Though a handful of hitmen have been prosecuted in connection with the killings, none of the masterminds has been detained. Some argue that the current pattern of oppression has links to Guatemala’s unresolved past. During the civil war, forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings were used to subjugate poor rural communities in order to preserve land rights for the elites.
MACCIH to investigate DESA, government contracts, funding
The Misión de Apoyo Contra la Corrupción y la Impunidad en Honduras (MACCIH) announced Thursday that it would begin investigating, not the murder of indigenous activist Berta Cáceres, but the funding and government contracts of DESA, the company building the Agua Zarca dam for possible corruption and money laundering. Mission spokesperson, Juan Jimenez Mayor announced the OAS mission would look into DESA, how it got its government contracts for the Agua Zarca dam and ENEE electricity purchase, and how it grew from a company with less than $1000 in capital in 2009 to have over $17 million in 2014. In particular, Jimenez Mayor said the Mission wanted to verify the source of the funds, and whether DESA was money laundering.
Politics of Death: Body count mounts in worldwide wars over land
According to global watchdogs, resource-rich Honduras and Nicaragua are the world’s deadliest countries for land deaths per capita, while Brazil tops the list in sheer numbers….Nor is the world’s media much help, according to Ariadna Estevez, professor at the Centre for Research on North America at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. Its “obsession” with framing violence through a lens of organized crime, gangs and drugs means the public and policymakers are misled, she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Analyses of migration patterns from countries such as Honduras reveal a clustering of criminal, misogynistic and political violence which can be directly linked to forced migration and displacement from resource-rich areas.
NICARAGUA THE MOST DEADLY COUNTRY FOR LAND RIGHTS ACTIVISTS
Recently published statistics from watchdog group, Global Witness, have confirmed what Indigenous Nicaraguans have been trying to tell the world for years – the battle to protect Indigenous land rights in Nicaragua is not just one of the most dangerous…it is the most deadly. Faced with such mounting evidence, however, the global human rights community continues to shrug its shoulders. A recent article lauding a new partnership between The Guardian and Global Witness – aimed at increasing surveillance and reporting on land activists’ deaths worldwide – bizarrely blacks out a single mention of Nicaragua, which emerged from recent analysis as the deadliest nation in the world for land rights struggles, per capita.
Publicly, foreign diplomats have said that Haiti is a sovereign country when asked about their position on the re-establishment of the armed forces. Privately, however, they’ve noted that millions have been spent over the years to disarm the old soldiers and strengthen the police, and that they fear an army in a country without any real foreign threats could be used as a political tool against opponents and sow instability. They also question how poverty-stricken Haiti, which already has problems paying its police and other public servants, will pay for such a force. The proposed budget that was sent to parliament late last month allocates just $8.5 million for defense. Denis, who recently met with U.S. lawmakers Rep. Maxime Waters, D-Calif., and Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio to push the idea, acknowledges that financing is an issue. But he said the money can be found in the new force’s fight against contraband.
After Decades of War, Colombian Farmers Face a New Test: Peace
Peace means that soldiers no longer have to shoot their way into rebel-held territory to pull up coca plants or dismantle drug labs. Now the FARC, which formally disarmed last month, is joining forces with the government to wean farmers off coca — one of the first collaborations ever between the old enemies. Outside Mr. Tupaz’s village, Los Ríos, the rebels now appear in civilian clothes alongside government officials, selling farmers on crops like black pepper and heart of palm.
The State of the Left in Latin America: Ecuador and Bolivia After the Pink Tide
The weakening of the social movements in a place like Bolivia, given its political culture of the streets, has been devastating. Social movements still aligned with the government have been coopted, in the process losing the ability to launch any sort of viable progressive challenge. Social movements and intellectuals opposed to the MAS have been targeted for harassment and spurious legal suits, limiting their ability to launch criticism. They find themselves at risk of being lured into alliances with the rightwing. Today, the country is characterized by an overdependence on a charismatic leader controlling a weak party: the classic Latin American caudillo. In such circumstances, preserving the party and its leader becomes a central goal. All in all, opportunity for progressive change the social movements in Bolivia once promised has been compromised. At the same time, though, material conditions for a large percentage of the impoverished population have improved substantially, and as progressives, this key goal is something we should never lose sight of.