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.
U.S., Mexican officials to discuss asylum pact
One skeptic at DHS said the agreement — even if it could be reached — amounts to more of a political move and doesn’t take the best interest of asylum seekers into account. “There are all these ways that in another administration, this could be a positive step,” the official said. “But that’s just not what’s going on here. This is just an effort to send people back with no process.” Eric Olson, deputy director of the Wilson Center’s Latin American Program, echoed that sentiment. “It’s pushing a problem downstream,” he said, “and I don’t know that it solves much of anything.”
Rather than split up families and lock people up, a better strategy would build up the U.S. government’s capacity to handle the causes and effects of a historic humanitarian crisis in Central America, where unchecked criminal violence is expelling tens of thousands each year. It would invest in faster adjudication of asylum claims with due process, and in addressing the root causes of the violence. It would also recognize that, minus Central American children and families, the number of undocumented people trying to cross the border today is the fewest in 48 years. That calls for modest, smart adjustments to border security, not radical proposals like building walls or tearing apart families. Instead, the Trump administration is embarking on a course of action that could cause the federal government’s courts, ports of entry, and prisons to collapse.
There are many ways to lose your life in the one-hundred-mile border zone that extends north of the US-Mexico line. You can freeze in the mountainous area around Big Bend in West Texas. Die of exposure in the Sonoran Desert. Drown in the All American Canal just outside of Calexico. Suffocate in a box truck in San Antonio. Get shot by a Marine sniper while herding goats on your family’s ranch. Be shot by Border Patrol for “throwing rocks” in Ciudad Juarez. Or be tasered and beaten to death by Border Patrol in San Diego. Many choose to present border militarization as a process that is constantly “becoming” but is never quite “here.” The truth is that Trump’s threat to send soldiers to the border is a natural escalation of the last forty years of bipartisan policy. The US-Mexico border already is militarized — and it’s taking hundreds of lives a year.
Corrupt Guatemalan officials find help from an unlikely source: Marco Rubio
Meanwhile in Guatemala, the murder of three campesino leaders – Luis Arturo Marroquín, José Can Xol, and Mateo Chamán Paausince Rubio – within a week has prompted calls to strengthen not weaken crime fighting. Political analyst Luis Solano said losing US support would be a financial and political blow for Cicig, but also counterproductive to America’s own interests. “It would strengthen ultraconservative groups, and encourage the organized crime structures and parallel power groups to which they are linked.”
Honduran Jesuit comes to US to promote reforms in US-Honduras relations
They hope to meet with sympathetic congressional representatives to offer a number of suggestions on how the U.S. government can play a constructive role in promoting human rights in Honduras. Those plans include:
- Withdrawing U.S. backing for the Honduran military forces that are threatening the lives of their people;
- Demilitarizing the public security forces;
- Supporting Honduran calls to establish an independent commission working under the auspices of the United Nations to publish a report to identify those responsible for the post-election crisis murders and bring the perpetrators to justice;
- Freeing political prisoners arrested during the post-election crisis;
- Declaring the 2017 presidential elections as null and void because of the unconstitutional foundations upon which Hernández was re-elected; and
- Supporting a new general election to return the country to a constitutional order.
Church sets dialogue with Nicaragua’s government this week
Nicaragua says it welcomes a visit by the Organization of American States’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and Roman Catholic bishops announced Monday that a dialogue with the government will start this week. The Nicaraguan Council of Bishops said talks between civic groups and the administration of President Daniel Ortega will start Wednesday morning, following weeks of anti-government protests in which an estimated 65 people have been killed. OAS General Secretary Luis Almagro published Nicaragua’s acceptance letter in his Twitter account Monday.
Nicaragua unrest: UN to probe killings of government opponents (video)
Nicaragua‘s government has accepted pressure from the Catholic Church to permit the UN and Inter-American Human Rights Commissions to investigate the killings of government opponents. Civil unrest in Latin America’s poorest nation has entered its fourth week.
Ten Caribbean journalists lead by the Center for Investigative Journalism in Puerto Rico (CPI by its initials in Spanish) spent nearly a year investigating the effects of climate change in their countries. Just when they began to write their stories, Hurricanes Irma and María struck, devastating several of their territories. For years, it had been said that the Caribbean island were among the world’s most vulnerable to climate change, but in 2017, this forecast became a hard reality for millions of residents of the Antillean countries. Concrete effects of climate change, such as rising sea levels and rains, as well as more intense hurricanes, and coastal erosion, are already a reality that is wreaking havoc in the Caribbean, harming the social and economic life of the islands.
THIS UNGOVERNED HAITIAN CITY IS FIGHTING TO STAY ALIVE
But if neither the central nor local governments invest in developing Canaan and it remains informal for too long, it may become impossible to turn this rapidly expanding city into a legal and fully functioning municipality, suggests Belizaire. “If you let the informal invade the area, you won’t have room for the formal. And it will be a very long process to rehabilitate and have a great Canaan,” he says. There’s more at stake than just Canaan’s own future. If the city does become viable, it may offer lessons for other poorly governed cities beyond Haiti’s borders. After all, Canaan may be the world’s newest ungoverned city, but it isn’t the first.
A Precarious Peace in Putumayo
A year into peacetime, daily life in Colombia’s major cities is largely unchanged. But in rural areas where the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) remained strong throughout the 50-year conflict, the shift is palpable. Putumayo—a sliver of fertile land bordering Ecuador and Peru—is one such region. After decades of violence between competing FARC and paramilitary forces that peaked in the early 2000s, newfound peace means the end of roadblocks, curfews, and massacres. Even as the region is opening up to new investment and infrastructure, residents warn that ongoing inequality and environmental destruction are sowing the seeds of new conflicts to come. The FARC’s March 8 announcement that they will suspend their campaign for the May 2018 presidential elections following security threats raises further questions about the future of peace in Colombia.
The U.S. spent billions fighting coca in Colombia. Why hasn’t it made a dent?
While Villalón is wrapping up the book, he says the coca trail is still full of avenues to explore. In particular, he’s curious about why Latin America always stars as the villain in the drug war. How is it possible, he asks, that despite U.S. intelligence and law enforcement efforts, tons of cocaine floods into America every year? “It’s very strange to me that all of this cocaine can still make it through,” he said. “What’s going on? Is there corruption at the border — at the political level? We don’t know. … But we should investigate.” And the coca story in Colombia remains as pressing as ever. During a recent trip to a small village in Meta, Villalón tried to buy beer, but the merchant didn’t have or accept cash — she only took coca paste.
In Colombia, the Center Isn’t Holding
A victory for Petro, Fajardo or De La Calle would help to safeguard the accord but any of them would still face the familiar problem that has so often blocked implementation: congressional gridlock. With a large Democratic Center bloc in Congress, any pro-peace president will face enormous difficulties in carrying out reform. Some of the more progressive parts of the deal might be discarded to appease the far-right. This would undermine any efforts towards a lasting peace, because the same factors that led to the creation of the FARC — massive inequality and rural poverty — would remain. (The idea that drug trafficking is the root cause of the war, common on the Colombian right and abroad, is a myth that ignores the real origins of the conflict, which long predate the war on drugs).
Jesuit Legacy in the Bolivian Jungle: A Love of Baroque Music
Eventually the Moxos leaders revealed something that astounded him. Thousands of pages of manuscripts, including music from baroque operas to concertos for solo instruments, some of which had been copied as late as 2005, had survived. The copyists had even signed some of the scores “maestro capilla,” a Baroque-era title used by composers like Johann Sebastian Bach. “The manuscript was never lost, we just didn’t know about it,” the priest said.
BOLIVIA IS LANDLOCKED. DON’T TELL THAT TO ITS NAVY
Simply by existing, the navy is the physical embodiment of Bolivia’s refusal to give up. The government established the Armada Boliviana in 1963, acquiring four US patrol boats. Today its humble fleet includes speedboats, tankers and other vessels, some cast-offs from China. “The fleet they keep is bruised and battered, and they’d be the first to admit they could probably do with some newer craft,” Ballon says.