Semana Santa in Antigua, Guatemala. Anna Vogt
The News Roundup is a regular feature of the blog where we select a number of 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.
How people power is tackling corruption in Mexico (video)
In 2015, Mexico’s Congress approved the creation of an anti-corruption system – to try and improve Mexico’s reputation for graft. But despite these efforts to clean up its act, Transparency International still rates Mexico as the most corrupt OECD nation. And so a group of Mexicans has come up with a proposal that politicians should share much more information about their assets and personal connections and provide proof that they pay their taxes. So can they get Congress to debate and pass the law?
Gustavo Castro Soto and the Rigged Investigation into Berta Cáceres’ Assassination
Both the Mexican Ambassador, Dolores Jiménez, and Castro himself are worried that he will be charged by the government for the killing, they told the National Commission of Human Rights of Honduras on March 16. A writer and organizer for environmental and economic justice, Castro has been forbidden by local authorities from leaving the country to return to his native Mexico until April 6, at least. Since being released from several days in Honduran government custody, he has been forced to take refuge in the Mexican Embassy in Tegucigalpa. The protection of the Mexican Embassy “does not mean that my life is no longer in danger,” Castro wrote to some friends and colleagues on March 4. As long as he is on Honduran soil, he remains in peril. Ambassador Jiménez called the risk he is running “an objective fact.” Castro – who is able to identify Cáceres’ killer – is an impediment to the plan that the Honduran government is clearly advancing, which is to pin the murder on members of the group which Cáceres founded and ran, the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations (COPINH). It could help the strategy of the fraudulently elected regime to dispense with Castro by charging and arresting him.
China’s Fantasy Canal Doing Real Damage in Nicaragua
The canal will not happen because it does not make sense. The primary reason is that there is no demand for a second Central American canal, making the project financially unfeasible. In an interview with CNBC, Bruce Carlton, president and CEO of the National Industrial Transportation League, a shipping industry advocacy group, speaking for the vast majority of industry experts said, “I sincerely believe we don’t need another canal. I don’t think there’s enough ship traffic to warrant the construction of another canal.” In addition, at a cost of$40 billion, even if the Nicaraguan canal received all of the Panama Canal’s current traffic (an impossible assumption) it would take 40 years for the project to break even. Add on that the Panama Canal offers faster transit times, that no current American ports can handle ships the size that the Nicaraguans are talking about, and that global warming could possibly open a faster and free route north of Canada, and the whole project seems like a fool’s errand.
Ex-dictator faces genocide retrial in Guatemala
A Guatemalan court on Wednesday began a closed-door retrial of former dictator Efrain Rios Montt on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity committed during his 1982-1983 rule. Rios Montt, now 89, was being tried in absentia with only the family members of victims on hand. Rios Montt’s attorney says his client has been diagnosed with dementia. Prosecutors hope to reassert a conviction against the ex-general delivered in a May 2013 trial but which was overturned within days by Guatemala’s constitutional court, which ordered the new trial. In the discarded verdict he was sentenced to 80 years in prison. Rios Montt is accused of being responsible for the murders of 1,771 indigenous Ixil-Maya people during his rule at the height of Guatemala’s 36-year civil war, which ended in 1996.
“Designed to whitewash the company’s image and undermine opposition to a proposed gold mine in Cabañas, the activities of the El Dorado Foundation contradict the country’s decision not to permit metal mining and risk reawakening a conflict that has already cost several people their lives,” remarks Professor Stuart Kirsch, one of the authors and an anthropologist at the University of Michigan with two decades of experience studying mining conflicts. Canadian-Australian mining company OceanaGold is suing El Salvador for US$250 million at a World Bank tribunal when the company failed to obtain a mining permit for which it never met regulatory requirements. Three successive Salvadoran presidents have committed not to issue new mining permits, while a 2015 opinion poll found that opposition to metal mining is nearly 79.5% nationwide and 83.9% in municipalities affected by the proposed project. Between 2009 and 2011, four local environmental activists were murdered in Cabañas. Since then, several local organizations have also received threats These crimes have never been fully investigated.
Why The U.N. Is Being Sued Over Haiti’s Cholera Epidemic
And there’s new evidence that the toll from Haiti’s ongoing cholera epidemic is significantly higher than official tallies suggest. Meanwhile, survivors appear to be making headway in a legal and public relations campaign to gain compensation from the agency they blame for introducing cholera to the island nation: the United Nations. A study, which appears this month in Emerging Infectious Diseases, indicates Haiti’s official count of cholera cases and deaths are a big understatement. A house-to-house survey in four communities — two urban and two rural — has uncovered nearly three times more cholera deaths in the first six months of the epidemic than officially recorded. In some hard-to-reach villages, researchers found, cholera killed 1 in every 20 residents in the early months of the outbreak.
John Kerry holds unprecedented peace talks with Colombian Farc rebels
US secretary of state John Kerry held an unprecedented meeting on Monday with leaders of a Colombian leftist rebel group on Washington’s list of international terrorist organisations. The rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Farc, have been engaged in peace talks with the Colombian government in Havana to end the South American country’s half-century of war. In closed-door meetings, Kerry first spoke with the members of the Colombian government team seeking a peace deal with Farc, Latin America’s oldest guerrilla group. He then met separately with rebel negotiators in the Laguito neighbourhood, where peace talks have been held since 2012.
Why free love in the FARC isn’t so free. (You wouldn’t know it from reading the New York Times.)
Stories reporting on the anthropology of everyday life during conflict and within armed groups can illuminate the full range of members’ experience — or can erase their realities. For instance, while it’s important to recognize that women and girls have been part of the FARC, those who tell their stories and who craft the peace must understand their complex and diverse motives and experiences. Similarly, research has shown us that the twin categories of “perpetrator” and “victim” of violence aren’t neatly separated: The same person may have been simultaneously committing violence and a victim of it. Initiatives during what Carolyn Nordstrom calls “the time of not-war-not-peace” need to draw on the full range of these complex stories if they want to ensure the peace and prevent women and girls from being recruited into the guerrillas next time.
Story of cities #6: how silver turned Potosí into ‘the first city of capitalism’
Modern Potosí is a shell of its former self. The mountain still towers over the city but it is crumbling inside, made unstable by the hundreds of miles of mine shafts constructed over the 500 years it has been exploited. In 2011, the upper cone of the mountain collapsed. It is now predominantly mined for zinc and tin, although children still look through the piles of ore for the silver that once made their city so wealthy. Many of the Bolivians who still work in the mines suffer from the same illnesses as those who died at the hands of the Spanish – their lungs turned black by the dust. “For many miners, their fathers also died of silicosis, and they entered the mine at an early age. There’s a culture of death here,” one miner told Al Jazeera in 2014. The poverty and dilapidation of modern Potosí mask the story of a once-imperial city whose grand villas are now restaurants, hairdressers and dental surgeries. But high in the Andes above the treeline, the rich mountain remains – its contents now in Armada shipwrecks, the jewellery of Arab rulers, and the remaining treasures of the Ming dynasty. Few places in the world were left untouched by its riches.