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.
On Corruption, They Still Don’t Get It
The region’s private and public sectors must have a frank dialogue about how to reform the current rules of engagement, and reduce opportunities for corruption. Civil society should continue to beat the drum for cleaner government, while supporting candidates who will embrace it within the norms of liberal democracy. Finally, there’s still time for some current politicians to adjust – and reap the benefits. It’s no accident that, in the chart above, the lone exception to the region’s low approval ratings is Mauricio Macri of Argentina. While not perfect, he has followed a government plagued by endemic graft with credible attempts at greater transparency and reform – which has bolstered his popularity, even at a moment of economic uncertainty. In that sense, Macri may be Latin America’s first successful post-Car Wash president. May there be many others.
Irma: Gone but never to be forgotten
Irma is perhaps a good illustration of the evidence that suggests that hurricane frequency is unlikely to change in years to come, but that warmer waters and a warmer atmosphere, as a result of global warming, allow for greater potential hurricane intensity. With global temperatures rising towards the limit of 2C agreed upon in the Paris Agreement, it may not be long before Irma’s place in the record books is usurped by another product of our rapidly warming world.
With the third anniversary of the tragedy approaching, a new project by an international team of investigators has taken the most damning of those inquiries and visualized them, offering a means of seeing the night of September 26 for what it truly was: a coordinated, lethal assault on the students involving Mexican security forces at every level, and grave violations of international law. The interactive platform, constructed by the research agency Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, and shared with The Intercept in advance of its public release, pulls from a voluminous body of investigations into the crime.
#BlackWednesday: Guatemala Takes Another Step to Institutionalize Corruption
Guatemala’s congress took another bold step towards institutionalizing corruption on September 13, by reforming a law to protect politicians and their party functionaries from prosecution and penalties in cases of illicit financing of political campaigns….Prominent citizen activists in Guatemala are already challenging the new law in court. And the US congress and the rest of the international community have voiced their concern. But Morales and his cronies are not listening, perhaps in part because they can see through the Trump administration’s hypocrisy. In essence, this is the beginning of the purge, not the end of it. And in effect, it will neuter the efforts of the CICIG, the Attorney General’s Office, and the international community to upend the perennially corrupt and very often criminal Guatemalan political system.
What Guatemala’s political crisis means for anti-corruption efforts everywhere
Now the country is waiting to see how this battle over impunity will be resolved and whether a morally and legally damaged president can survive. The outcome of this contest will shape not only whether Guatemala can emerge from decades in the grip of powerful criminal-political-security networks, but also whether an innovative hybrid international-national experiment will be able to continue to serve as a model for combating corruption and impunity in other countries. It also offers a chance for the Trump administration to take an early visible stance in favor of controlling the crime and corruption in Central America that abet violence, migration, and drug trafficking.
God vs. gang? For some ex-gangsters in El Salvador, rehab happens at church
Here at Eben Ezer, many Barrio 18 members speak about unsuccessful attempts at leaving the gangs, often for a loved one. But they point to the church as the institution that helped them commit. Key to some church groups’ success, they suggest, is their understanding that gangs can fill emotional and social needs – factors that help make gang life appealing to teenagers in the first place. “These young men need an identity. They can find that within the gang or the church,” says Pastor Luis Gonzalez, who has worked with gang members in the notorious San Francisco Gotera prison for several years.
Extortion in Honduras Capital Shutting Stores, Causing Migration
According to authorities from the Honduras Consumers Association (Asociación de Consumidores y Usuarios de Honduras – ACONSUMEH), more than 1,500 corner stores, popularly known as “pulperías,” have closed in the last two years in Tegucigalpa due to extortion. The report says that this accounts for 30 percent of all pulperías in the capital, El Heraldo reported. Moreover, some 600 pulperías have closed in the capital due to extortion between January and June of this year, 30 percent of which are estimated to have not reopened, according to municipal authorities.
How A China-Funded Canal In Nicaragua Sparked A Woman’s Fight For Land And Country
But as a recent Amnesty International report pointed out, Nicaragua’s congress passed the new law without consulting local communities, effectively opening a door for future projects without the need to ask those living in the area for their opinion. In practice, then, the law means nearly 120,000 people are currently at risk of losing their land, homes and livelihoods. The environmental cost of the project would also be devastating, causing irreversible damage to miles of fertile land and to Lake Nicaragua, the largest source of freshwater in Central America.
Irma mostly spared Haiti. But for struggling farmers, the damages are devastating
Long before Matthew left more than 800,000 Haitians in need of emergency food assistance and the El Niño drought phenomenon plunged Haiti into its worst food insecurity crisis in 15 years, the northwest suffered from long dry spells that led to growing food insecurity and deeper poverty despite its potential for fishing and agriculture. As recently as February, the food insecurity unit classified the northwest as being in an economic and food security crisis. As a result, Nabot said, the focus has to be not just on the emergency response but on supporting farmers over the long term, to help strengthen their economic security and ability to cope with shocks.
Trump delivers shock rebuke to Colombia over cocaine surge
Adam Isacson, an analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, described Trump’s threat as a “huge mistake” that would likely reverberate throughout a region that has long resented the U.S. drug certification process as a throwback to the days of gunboat diplomacy. “The message to the rest of the region is that no matter how many years you collaborate with the U.S., if you deviate from our preferred strategy for a moment, we’ll publicly humiliate you,” Isacson said. “They’re taking the bilateral relationship to its worst place in two decades.”
‘They lied’: Bolivia’s untouchable Amazon lands at risk once more
A joint assessment by the International Federation of Human Rights, the Bolivian Permanent Assembly of Human Rights and the Catholic church in 2016 concluded that the consultation had been “neither free nor informed and did not respect the principle of good faith”. Some residents could stomach a road through the park, if it gave them greater access to the outside world, but the proposed route, connecting Villa Tunari and San Ignacio de Moxos runs through the centre of the park, far away from the communities, which are concentrated along its eastern flank. “If there were some benefits, I would support it. But there is not one benefit for us,” says Carmen Leni, a schoolteacher in Gundonovia, swatting mosquitoes from her legs with a tea towel.