During the Bush years, Guantanamo was the core symbol of right-wing radicalism and what was back then referred to as the “assault on American values and the shredding of our Constitution”: so much so then when Barack Obama ran for President, he featured these issues not as a secondary but as a central plank in [...]
Guatemalan prosecutors announced January 26 that 85-year old Efraín Ríos Montt, military dictator in 1982-1983, was going to trial in March. He’s accused of responsibility for killing and disappearing thousands of mostly poor and indigenous Guatemalans. Gratified, blogger Juan José Guerrero wrote: “I was surgeon in the Coban Regional Hospital when you (Ríos Montt) were [...]
As a member of the M-19 guerrilla group in the 1980s, Gustavo Petro, who was known as Comandante Aureliano, served 18 months in prison for illegally carrying a firearm. Now mayor of the Colombian capital, Bogotá, Petro is leading an experiment in banning guns from the streets of this city of eight million people, where [...]
IT’S time to acknowledge the foreign policy disaster that American support for the Porfirio Lobo administration in Honduras has become. Ever since the June 28, 2009, coup that deposed Honduras’s democratically elected president, José Manuel Zelaya, the country has been descending deeper into a human rights and security abyss. That abyss is in good part [...]
The recent upsurge in violence in Central America undoubtedly has links to the illegal drug trade. According to Washington, 84 per cent of the known cocaine trafficked from South America to the US now passes along the Central American corridor, up from just 23 per cent in 2006. Last May, the massacre and beheading of [...]
GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — The defense lawyer for former dictator Efrain Rios Montt said Friday that a judge violated due process when she issued unprecedented genocide charges against Rios Montt for conduct during Guatemala’s bloody civil war. Danilo Rodriguez Galvez said Judge Carol Patricia Flores was supposed to issue her decision only after hearing testimony [...]
As Noam Chomsky has often cautioned, when considering foreign relations, and especially military intervention, states should always heed the primary Hippocratic oath – “First, do no harm.” The U.S. has certainly disregarded this admonition with reckless abandon in Latin America, and Colombia is the foremost example of this, at least at the present time. Human [...]
Latin America is confronting past civil wars and dictatorships this week with a series of prosecutions and apologies that are shining a light on decades-old atrocities. Governments and courts in Guatemala, Argentina, Colombia and El Salvador moved to acknowledge and possibly punish state-sanctioned violence during cold war-era campaigns against leftwing insurgents. Human rights campaigners welcomed [...]
Rising military spending has minimal impact on health and education budgets (Stockholm, 24 January 2012) Off-budget spending and secrecy are limiting the democratic accountability of the military sector in Latin America and the Caribbean. This comes at a time when military spending is rising rapidly in the region. Nevertheless, transparency is improving and the increased [...]
This analysis was prepared by Delphine Mechoulan, Guest Scholar for the Council on Hemispheric Affairs Expected to begin operating in 2014, the El Quimbo Hydroelectric Project Plant is located in Huila, a southwestern region of Colombia. It is one of the largest development projects in the country. The facility provides a prime example of how [...]
