The Carrot, the Stick, and the Seeds: U.S. development policy faces resistance in El Salvador
August 15, 2014
True development in El Salvador will mean looking beyond U.S. money and the strings that always come with it.
Tag: CENTRAL AMERICA
Hell in the Icebox
August 6, 2014
Felipe came to Nogales from northeast Guatemala. He doesn’t speak English. He barely speaks Spanish and struggles to tell his story of fleeing violence in his home town in his native mam. U.S. authorities can find no translator.
Violence, Main Motor of Child Migration in El Salvador
July 23, 2014
Susana (name changed to protect her identity) will have try again to make the journey to the United States with her son Daniel, 16. Both left everything they had in El Salvador to escape because a gang threatened to kill the boy for refusing to be a gang member.
Status of violence against women in Honduras
July 15, 2014
Honduras has been rated by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) as the country with the highest homicide rate in the world from 2010 until 2012, when the most recent report was issued.1 From 2005 to 2013, the number of violent deaths of women rose by 263.4%. This violence is the result of multiple factors, including high levels of economic inequity and inequality, poverty, corruption, militarization, and an ever increasing presence of organized crime and drug trafficking, all of which has a strong negative impact on the human rights of the population, and on the lives of women in particular.
El Salvador Lacks Accurate Data on Child Migration
July 15, 2014
Officials at the Salvadoran Foreign Ministry do not have accurate data on the number of children who are traveling to the United States illegally at the hands of smugglers. The Vice Minister for Salvadorans Abroad, Liduvina Magarín, recently visited 12 sites that function as shelters, detention centers, and migrant processing centers located in the southern U.S. border. In a single day, these places received 310 Salvadoran children. Given the traffic and movement of people in recent months, it is speculated that the daily number of children passing through that border is between 500 and 600 Salvadoran children who have been sent with coyotes to the United States.
A Day Like Today, Now.
July 9, 2014
On a day like today five years ago, I woke up with the noise of military planes crisscrossing the skies, and without light, without water, without news. It was June 28, 2009 and the chronicles of the impossible were yet to be written. In the entire world, even in Honduras, our generation thought that coups d’état had passed into history. We were wrong.
Confronting the Central American Refugee Crisis
June 25, 2014
They can’t stay and they have nowhere to go. Forced out by poverty and the threat of imminent death in their countries, extorted by organized crime, kidnapped and executed in the transit countries and deported if they make it to their destination.
“Because we remember, we sow justice”
April 9, 2014
There have been major advances in truth and justice movements in recent years. But of all the goals of the movements for truth and justice, the most important is the least achieved: to guarantee the crimes will not be repeated.
Lessons from the Costa Rican Elections
April 2, 2014
The results of the Feb. 2 elections in Costa Rica surprised the left party, leaving it out of what is now a one-candidate run-off election. We talked to Maria Florez-Estrada of the Broad Front about what happened and what to expect.
Why does more “security” keep leading to more violence against women?
March 10, 2014
It’s common practice to take stock on this day of where we are and how far we’ve come in the movement for full gender equality and respect for the human rights of women. This year in the Americas, the situation is getting worse rather than better.