Mexico’s Secretaries of Government and Foreign Relations and Defense and Marine Secretariats will stand beside their U.S. co-hosts June 15 and 16 to launch the new Plan Pentagon for Central America. They won’t call it that, of course. Vice President Mike Pence will open the event “Conference on Prosperity and Security in Central America”, before the presidents, the generals and representatives from observer countries.
Zihuatanejo and the case of Luis Quintana and Ilse Ramirez stand as another important test of the rule of the law, respect for human rights and the prospects for democratic change in Mexico.
On Oct. 9, 200 activists marched along a dusty highway between Nogales and Tucson toward a Border Patrol checkpoint just north of Tubac, Arizona. At the front, activists prepared to risk arrest clutched painted crosses in their hands, each bearing the name of someone killed by US-trained assassins or the militarized US-Mexico border.
It’s anybody’s guess how many victims of violence are still buried somewhere in the Juarez Valley on the Mexico-U.S. border. For starters, there is the still largely unexcavated Navajo Arroyo, where the remains of 18 young women who went missing from nearby Ciudad Juarez have been recovered and identified since late 2011, according to the local daily Norte.
The Colombian people voted NO to peace. Or to be exact, 50.2% of 37% of the eligible population voted no. In the referendum held Oct. 2, the majority of voters decided to scuttle four years of peace talks dedicated to ending 52 years of bloodshed.
Silent traumas grip a growing number of families in Mexico. Not knowing where a loved one is, relatives comb jails, hospitals, morgues and common graves. Digging into the earth, their shovels probe for bodies or remains–fragments of a human being who once warmed their lives.
Since last spring, an estimated 13,000 Haitians and other foreign nationals have arrived in Baja California, with varying estimates of anywhere from 10,000 to 40,000 more on the way.
Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales and Attorney General Thelma Aldana arrived in Washington to convince aid and lending agencies of Guatemala’s commitment to rule of law just a day after their government arrested its most prominent human rights prosecutor.
Some fifty major Honduran human rights organizations wrote a letter to the New York Times expressing their conviction that US aid is perpetuating violations of human rights in their country.
On June 21, 2015 the London-based Guardian newspaper published an article describing the testimony of a soldier who says he deserted the army after his unit was given an order to kill activists whose names appeared on two lists. The second list contained the name of Lenca indigenous leader Berta Caceres, murdered last March.
