Around Latin America

 

-Though the higher-profile case, the conviction of Guatemala’s Efraín Ríos Montt was not the only triumph for human rights and justice last week. In Uruguay, General Miguel Dalmao was sentenced to 28 years in prison for his role in the murder of a professor during Uruguay’s military dictatorship (1973-1985).

-Brazilian indigenous peoples have once again occupied the site of the Belo Monte Dam to protest the impact it would have on their lands and on the environment, even while government officials accused the indigenous people of being tied to illegal gold-mining. Though failing to provide any actual evidence of mining among indigenous peoples, the government’s charge is discursively not-insignificant; illegal gold mining takes a significant toll on the environment, while arguments against the dam are often predicated upon the negative impact it will have on the environment. By leveling such accusations, the government seems to be trying to delegitimize indigenous claims by portraying them (again, without offering any actual evidence) as hypocrites who protest environmental damage even while enriching themselves through other forms of environmental degradation.

-In another reminder of the detrimental impacts of liberalization of markets and free trade agreements on local economies, over one hundred thousand Colombian farmers have gone on strike in protest over the weakening of the Colombian agricultural sector, as cheaper products from North America and elsewhere flood the Colombian market, destroying the livelihoods and jobs of Colombian farmers.

-In a powerful reminder that in military dictatorships, members of the military can and do also suffer repression, sixteen Brazilian soldiers spoke before the Brazilian Truth Commission, testifying about the persecution and torture they suffered when they remained loyal to the government of João Goulart, whom the military overthrew in a coup in 1964.

-Pope Francis proclaimed sainthood status for hundreds this past weekend. Included on the list were Mexican María Guadalupe García Zavala and Colombian Laura Montoya, the first saint from Colombia. However, not all popular saints (those whom people praise as saints but who lack official canonization from the Church) received the Pope’s endorsement, as the Vatican recently declared Mexico’s Santa Muerte, or “Holy Death,” to be “blasphemous.”

-Hundreds of Cubans, led by Mariela Castro, marched against homophobia in Cuba, seeking to further equal rights and treatment for members of the LGBT who have faced cultural, social, and political repression over the years.

-Speaking of homophobia and hatred, homophobic Brazilian congressman Marco Feliciano (who is currently the head of Congress’s human rights commission, offering a sad commentary on the nature of Brazilian congressional politics), cancelled a hearing on a homophobic project to find a “cure” for homosexuality after having earlier taken to Twitter to defend his project.

-After months of relative silence, former Haitian leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide has recently begun speaking out about the challenges facing Haiti and offering some criticisms of the current government of Michel Martelly.

-Finally, Brazil has announced a plan to bring thousands of Cuban doctors to Brazil to help in Brazil’s underserved areas.  Greg Weeks does a great job unpacking the various aspects of the story, including how the plan reflects ongoing inequalities in Brazil (a sample take-away point: “When asked if any doctor was better than no doctor, CFM President Carlos Vital responded in the negative. “Pseudo treatment is worse than no treatment,” he said. “If you don’t have a doctor in your city, you can go to the next city and have a quality doctor.” Sure, just go 100 miles to the next city if you don’t have a doctor. Nothing to see here!”)

Colombian Smugglers Caught [Insert Bad Pun about "Habits" Here]

It seems probable that, as a security agent at an airport, you’re used to seeing all kinds of outfits, including some that you see regularly – businessmen, troops deploying, religious figures, to the point where you could spot a fake outfit from a real one. Which is probably why this news is not terribly surprising:

Three women dressed like nuns have been arrested at a Colombian airport allegedly smuggling drugs.

Police said the women, aged 20, 32 and 37 had two kilos (4.4lb) of cocaine each strapped to their bodies.

Officers said they became suspicious because the women “didn’t look like nuns” and their habits “didn’t look right”.

Though the story comes off as a rather light tale for something revolving around drug trade (and the very serious impact on the women arrested), it masks the tragic realities behind the drug trade. All three women said they’d turned to smuggling due to “financial hardship,” and now face probable prison sentences. Of course, the fact that they were traveling to a popular island resort is a reminder that the demand among the wealthy for drugs contributes to the drug trade even while it ensnares those who face financial hardship. And though these three women were caught, it probably has barely put a dint in the availability of drugs on the island itself, so that the tourists will be able to turn to recreational drug use while these women go to jail. Behind the seemingly-mildly amusing story is yet another tragic reminder on the ways in which the drug trade both reflects and reinforces broader socioeconomic inequalities in Latin America.

Around Latin America

-Still dealing with the loss to Chile of its only route to the Pacific 140 years ago, Bolivia is set to take its case to the International Court of Justice, a move that Chilean President Sebastián Piñera has said would open a “Pandora’s Box” of territorial issues in the Americas (including the territory the US took from Mexico in the wake of the Mexican-American War).

-US President Barack Obama is set this week to make his first trip to Latin America since winning re-election last November, with stops in Mexico and Costa Rica planned. Prior to the trip, he met with Latino leaders in the US, with whom he discussed socioeconomic issues.

-Peruvian President Ollanata Humala may be preparing to pardon former president Alberto Fujimori, who is serving jail time after his conviction for human rights violations that Fujimori oversaw during his 1990-2000 presidency.

-Evo Morales is set to run for a third term as president after Bolivia’s constitutional court ruled in favor of presidents serving three consecutive terms.

-Chilean Laurence Golborne, seen as the frontrunner among conservative candidates to challenge former president Michelle Bachelet in next year’s election, has removed himself from the race amidst allegations of shady business practices.

-Cuban gay rights activist Mariela Castro will travel to the US to receive an award in Philadelphia next week. Castro had initially been denied a visa to the US, due primarily to the fact that she is the daughter of Raul Castro.

-Colombia is set to resume peace talks with the FARC after a month-long break in the peace process.

-The Catholic Church has excommunicated Brazilian priest Roberto Francisco Daniel (known colloquially as Padre Beto) for his defense of open marriages and his defense of same-sex love. More than a symbolic move, the excommunication marks a split between official church hierarchy and a growing strain of moderate and even progressive Catholicism among some parishioners in Brazil.

-A new scientific study suggests that Latin America is facing a “cancer epidemic” due to challenges in diagnosing and treating cancer, as well as to increasingly unhealthy diets, higher levels of tobacco-smoking and alcohol consumption, and an increasingly inactive lifestyle.

-In what is an important step in addressing impunity (albeit a significant issue in its own right), sixty officers in Rio de Janeiro have been arrested on charges of corruption, even while another five officers were arrested for the murders of a journalist and a photographer who were working on a story on militias in Brazil’s interior state of Minas Gerais.

-The next president of the World Trade Organization will be from Latin America, as the remaining to candidates for the position are Mexico’s Herminio Blanco and Brazil’s Roberto Azevedo.

-Finally, when I studied in Costa Rica about a decade ago, the “best” beer one could find was Heineken, so this is excellent news for Costa Rica.

Around Latin America

-Marking the first major protest of the year, over 100,000 Chilean students took to the streets to continue to push for educational reform, an issue that has garnered much support and been a consistent problem for conservative president Sebastian Pinera. (And for those wondering, this is what (part of) over 100,000 people in the streets looks like.)

-With the recent conviction of some of his former top aides for corruption, Brazilian federal prosecutors have opened an investigation into former president Luis Inacio Lula da Silva to examine what, if any, role in or knowledge of payoffs Lula might have had during his first term.

-Uruguay became the third country in the Americas to legalize gay marriage nationwide (joining Canada and Argentina) after the Chamber of Deputies approved the Senate’s changes to the bill (the Chamber of Deputies originally passed an earlier draft of the bill last December). Meanwhile, in Chile, Congress has begun debating the legal recognition of same-sex couples; though the recognition would fall short of allowing gay marriage, it would grant gay couples the same rights as married couples.

-Although the frontrunner in Paraguay’s upcoming elections, conservative candidate Horacio Cartes apparently has quite the history of shady dealings and possible corrupt practices, including international smuggling, practices that, if true, could further strain Paraguay’s relations with its neighbors, relations that were already damaged when Congress rapidly removed former president Fernando Lugo through a dubious “impeachment.”

-A study finds that an overwhelming amount of the money donated to aid Haiti after the devastating 2010 earthquake ultimately ended up in the hands of US companies, with only one percent aiding Haitian companies themselves.

-Speaking of Haitians, they are among the thousands of immigrants who have recently entered into Brazil, leaving the small state of Acre to ask for federal aid in supporting the influx. I don’t quite agree with Boz that their desire to move Brazil automatically means that the economy there is doing well, but it at least suggests that people in other countries perceive the Brazilian economy to be preferable to their own.

-In spite of his family’s claims late last year, Alberto Fujimori does not actually have cancer, which was the reason his family initially called for his release from prison, where he is currently serving a 25-year sentence for human rights violations during his 1990-2000 presidency. Although the former president is not actually ailing, that has not stopped Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani from calling for a pardon for Fujimori.

-As a hunger strike among prisoners at US facilities in Guantanamo continues, the US has begun force-feeding some of the striking prisoners.

-In the wake of the rape of a tourist from the US, Rio de Janeiro has banned the use of vans for public transit (rather than the larger buses) in the southern part of the city. Of course, that the ban is in effect only in the wealthier southern zone where tourism dominates provides yet another reminder of the social stratification evident throughout Rio, including in public transportation options.

-Hundreds of thousands of Colombians, including President Juan Manuel Santos, marched in support of ongoing peace negotiations between the Colombian government and the FARC.

-Are Brazil and Russia close to a missile deal?

-Although scholarship and human rights activism have already torn much “the veil” off Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s regime, the recent exhumation of Nobel-laureate Pablo Neruda could further shed light on the poet’s death and end years of speculation over whether he really died of cancer, as had long been maintained, or if the regime had him killed, a theory that has been bandied about as well.

-Outrage continues over the appointment of evangelical politician Marco Feliciano as the head of the Brazilian Congress’s Human Rights Committee in spite of a history of public homophobic and racist statements. As a result, in a blow against transparency or accountability in government, the Committee recently decided to close all hearings to outsiders  in hopes of preventing protests from erupting in committee hearings.

-Speaking of human rights in Brazil, police are finally facing trial for their role in the executions of prisoners during the Carandiru massacre of 1992. The massacre, which occurred 21 years ago this October, left 102 prisoners dead from gunshots after police entered the prison to break up gang fighting between prisoners.

-A Guatemalan court upheld the not-guilty verdict of former president Alfonso Portillo on charges of theft of state funds. However, his legal problems are far from over, as the ruling now opens the path for his extradition to the United States, where he faces indictment for embezzlement and money laundering.

-A Chilean court has suspended development on the Pascua Lama mine, originally set to be one of the world’s largest gold mines, ruling that the pollution and environmental destruction already caused by the Canadian mining company Barrick violates the original terms of the agreement. The shutdown marks a victory for indigenous groups, who had argued that the mine threatened their daily lives and resources, and is part of broader challenges to Barrick’s environmental toll and presence throughout Latin America.

-Finally, scientists have recently encountered a new species of porcupine in Brazil, but the future of the species is already uncertain, as the tree-dwelling Coendou speratus lives in an endangered forest.

Around Latin America [Human Rights Edition]

There has been a recent wave of stories regarding human rights in Latin America in both the past and present worth covering.

Mexico

-With the ongoing issue of the disappeared in Mexico in the 21st century, and, after a tortuous path that saw initial rejection before Enrique Peña Nieto signed it into law, there is now a Victims’ Law that seeks to provide compensation and closure for families whose loved ones have gone missing. While the law has some issues to work out, and while it’s not clear how it will be institutionalized, it’s an important step in dealing with the issue of violence and memory in Mexico.

Uruguay

-In Uruguay, hundreds gathered to protest a Supreme Court ruling that effectively restores an amnesty that exempts military members who committed human rights violations during the Uruguayan dictatorship of 1973-1985. Congress had initially overturned the amnesty in 2011.

-The recent death of former New York mayor and congressman Ed Koch brought a reminder of his human rights efforts. In the 1970s, Koch sponsored legislation to cut off funding to Uruguay after reports of human rights violations under its dictatorship. The legislation was ultimately successful, and, as detailed in John Dinges’ excellent The Condor Years,  two Uruguayan officials threatened to assassinate Koch. Although the CIA discovered the death threat in July 1976, it was only in October that CIA Director George H.W. Bush told Koch of the threat.

Paraguay

-Families of victims of the Stroessner dictatorship (1954-1989) used the 24th anniversary of his downfall to demand justice for the more than 400 people murdered and disappeared and the 20,000 detained and often tortured during his regime.

Colombia

-In a disturbing trend, the number of attacks on and murders of human rights defenders and activists has increased, with a murder every five days on average, and an attack once every 20 hours on average. Suffice to say, the attacks undermine efforts to ensure human rights in Colombia are respected.

Guatemala

-Mike Allison recently put the degree of human rights violations during Guatemala’s Civil War in succinct but devastating terms that shows the common flaw of the “both sides committed atrocities” arguments in Guatemala: “Of the 1,112 massacres (more than four people but usually much more than four), government forces were responsible for 1,046 (94.06%). Government forces include the army, military commissions, PACs, death squads, and police. [...] The guerrillas were responsible for 46 (4.14%).” It’s hard to imagine a more disproportionate use of state force and terror than that.

Argentina

-While former human rights violators in Argentina have been sentenced to house arrest, it turns out that the “punishment” is in many ways nominal, as rights violators continue to move freely about in public, pointing to real loopholes and problems in enforcing more lenient “punishments” for older rights violators.

-Authorities in Brazil arrested 61-year-old Gonzalo Sánchez, a fugitive Argentine officer charged with participating in the torture, murder, and disappearance of dozens during the military dictatorship.

-With Dutch monarch Queen Beatrix recently stepping down, her son Prince Willem-Alexander is set to assume the (symbolic) throne, creating the first ever “Argentine Princess.” For Prince Willem-Alexander’s wife is Argentine Máxima Zorreguieta. However, while Argentina has celebrated at the rise of one of its own citizens, it turns out her past is not without its own dark roots, as her father was Minister of Justice under General Jorge Videla, when the government tortured, murdered, and disappeared tens of thousands, during the military dictatorship of 1976-1983.

-A couple of years ago, I posted a series of photos (here, here, here, here, here, and here) on ways in which the Argentine dictatorship continued to be criticized and memorialized in public spaces. Lillie Langtry points us to this article (in Spanish) with more examples of how Argentines continue to remember the regime and its victims, thirty years after it finally collapsed.

Brazil

-Speaking of public space and memory, many of the prisons and sites where torture took place during Brazil’s dictatorship are disappearing from public space in São Paulo. The destruction of these buildings is significant, as they served as physical memory-sites that served to remind people of the deeds and impact of the military dictatorship; as scholarship on memory, human rights, and space has repeatedly demonstrated, the removal of such buildings can and does accelerate the receding of memorialization of human rights violations in public memory itself.

-It’s not just the physical landscapes of cities where the dictatorship is disappearing. Brazil’s military schools sadly, if unsurprisingly, are using textbooks that gloss over or ignore the military dictatorship and its deeds (original in Portuguese here), prompting scholars and members of the Truth Commission to suggest the need to overhaul military educational materials so as to better address Brazil’s past for future soldiers and officers.

-Even while markers of the dictatorship disappear both from public spaces and textbooks, however, the deeds of the dictatorship are being recorded in other ways. Brazil’s Truth Commission, which has been drawing on interviews, documentary evidence, testimony, and other materials to investigate the regime’s deeds, recently reopened an investigation into the death of former president Juscelino Kubitschek. Kubitschek, who was one of the regime’s highest-profile critics after 1965, died in a car crash in 1976, and rumors swirled around his death, including the possibility that the regime forced the crash (rumors aided by the fact that another high profile critic, fashion designer Zuzu Angel, whose son the regime “disappeared,” died in similar circumstances that the state ultimately acknowledged responsibility for).

-Not all are happy with the Truth Commission, however. Marcelo Rubens Paiva, the son of a politician who the regime arrested and disappeared, criticized the commission for being “timid” and needed to be firmer and stronger in its investigations.

-While the Truth Commission investigates the deaths of people the regime killed, the Organization of American States has announced it will launch its own investigation into the death of Vladimir Herzog, a journalist who died under torture during the administration of Ernesto Geisel.

-Meanwhile, a former torturer was recently discovered as having worked as a teacher for 24 years before his death in 2009. Under a false name, Cleber de Souza Rocha taught geography classes in São Paulo, often showing up to class drunk.

-The recent execution-style killing of Cícero Guedes, a leader for land reform and peasants’ rights in Brazil, provided another tragic reminder of the dictatorship, as his murder took place in a region where the  dictatorship killed and disappeared land activists during its most repressive years.

Chile

-While Chile has had several official investigations into the Pinochet regime’s rights violations, some mysteries remain unsolved. One of those mysteries is how Pablo Neruda died. Officials are exhuming the Nobel laureate’s body to see if he may have been poisoned when he died just twelve days after the Pinochet regime overthrew democratically-elected president Salvador Allende.

-Neruda isn’t the only high-profile cultural figure who died in the Pinochet era. The regime infamously arrested and cut off the hands of folk singer Victor Jara before ultimately murdering him. In the wake of the arrest of several officers connected to his death, J. Patrice McSherry has this great report on the case, its history, where it stands, and the impact of his widow Joan’s efforts to keep the case and his memory alive.

Drones in Latin America

While drones a topic of discussion and debate among military analysts, civil libertarians, and scholars in the US, the unmanned aircraft are certainly not strictly the domain of the US alone. Many Latin American countries are developing their own “drone” technology for a variety of purposes, from monitoring favelas in Brazil to monitor drug cartels in the Dominican Republic, from protecting pipelines in Colombia to patrolling borders in Chile. Anna Kroos at Just the Facts has an excellent rundown on drones, their uses, and their development in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela, a rundown that is required reading for anybody interested in Latin American military technology, politics, and society.

Around Latin America

-In Mexico, families of some of the more than 20,000 people missing due to drug violence or other causes asked the federal government to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the issue.

-As the FARC announced that its ceasefire will end on January 20, Colombian negotiators have called on the FARC to speed up the process towards peace.

-Three years after the catastrophic Haitian earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people and devastated the national capital of Port-Au-Prince, Haitian President Michel Martelly said only one-third of the international aid pledged to the country in the wake of the quake had actually arrived.

-A few stories of note on indigenous peoples throughout the hemisphere:

• In Argentina, a 12-year-old indigenous boy was beaten to death, apparently with a bat, and another teenager succumbed to injuries from a “heavy beating” and died, both in the northeastern part of the country, causing outrage in an area where a military police officer also killed an indigenous woman grandmother and a baby last month.
• Meanwhile, in Brazil, urban indigenous settlers in Rio are attempting to protect their homes and livelihoods from forced eviction from the former home of the Museum of the Indian near Maracanã stadium, which will host the World Cup final in 2014. And a  construction company working on the renovation of the stadium fired two workers who expressed support for the natives.
• And in Canada, the country’s “First Nations” have been protesting government legislation that could threaten both the environment and indigenous sovereignty, launching Idle No More, a movement that is drawing comparisons to the Occupy movements of the last few years.

-New relaxed travel rules went into effect in Cuba yesterday. Among other things, the new regulations increase from 11 months to 24 months the time people are allowed to live outside of Cuba before losing their citizenship, allowing people to travel from Cuba longer and perhaps creating new networks of emigres with ties to their home country.

-Nearly one year into his term, Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina shook up his cabinet, including closing down the National Peace Fund, saying the department, designed to aid the poor, had become inefficient and corrupt and announcing vague plans to create a new organization under the Ministry of Social Development.

-Nearly 700 Afro-Colombians caught in the middle of violence between paramilitary groups and alleged “gangs” in the Chocó region have been forced to relocate in order to avoid violence, joining the nearly 3.9 million other displaced persons, one of the highest rates in the world (ahead of places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Nigeria, Sudan, and Syria).

-The United Nations has awarded the International José Martí Prize to Brazilian activist Frei Betto. Frei Betto, born Carlos Alberto Libânio Christo, has spent decades fighting for human rights, equality, and justice in Brazil, and who was an important figure in resisting military rule in Brazil during the regime of 1964-1985.

-Women in Costa Rica staged a breastfeeding sit-in protest in a mall after a woman shopping there had been asked to stop nursing her child earlier in the week.

Coca Leaves No Longer An Illegal Drug, Says UN

Well, this is something:

Traditional uses of the coca leaf in Bolivia will no longer be considered illegal under a United Nations antidrug convention, the organization said Friday. Coca is the plant used to make cocaine, but many people in Bolivia, which has a majority indigenous population, chew it as a mild stimulant, a use that has continued since pre-Colombian times. Bolivians also use the plant as a tea, in medicines and in religious or social rituals.

Of course, the move was not without opposition:

The country’s condition for rejoining the convention met resistance from 15 countries, including the United States and the rest of the G8 group of industrial nations, according to UN spokeswoman Arancha Hinojal. But the objections received by the United Nations ahead of Thursday’s midnight deadline fell far short. In order to block Bolivia’s return to the convention a full third of its signatories – or 63 – needed to object.

This isn’t surprising, but is yet one more reminder of the myriad ways that the US’s (and other so-called “developed” countries’) attitudes towards the drug trade are absurdly simplistic and flawed, putting all the blame on the growth of a plant without considering the industrial processes needed to create a drug, the issues of demand in the US, the ties of drug lords to governments and presidents that received the US’s support, or the importance of treating addiction within its own borders, to say nothing of allowing large western banks make so much money laundering illegal drug money and face only small penalties for clearly aiding the drug trade just because they are allegedly “too big to jail.”

Quite simply, blaming the coca leaf for all the ills of the drug trade is counterproductive, and the UN’s decision to revoke its illegal status within the borders of Bolivia is an important, if small, step in dealing with the issue of coca and drugs in a more nuanced fashion. In its natural state, the coca leaf is about as dangerous as the coffee bean, and has very real historical, cultural, and religious significance to many people in the Andean highlands in Bolivia, Peru, and Argentina. It’s really hard to see how legalizing it in Bolivia is going to lead to some explosion in cocaine production – after all, Bolivia is far behind either Peru or Colombia in terms of cocaine production, and the coca leaf is illegal in those countries still. This is not to say legalizing the leaf (and the subsequent market in the leaf) in Bolivia will lead to a reduction in cocaine use in the world – there is the whole demand side of the equation in the US and Europe, after all – but given that declaring it is illegal in one country has done nothing to stop the cocaine trade or cocaine use even while it has impinged upon indigenous cultural and ceremonial practices in South America, it’s hard to see the UN’s move as some disaster.

Investigating Presidents in Brazil and Colombia?

Authorities in Brazil and Colombia have announced they will investigate former presidents for very different actions during their administrations. In Brazil, former president Luis Inácio “Lula” da Silva (2003-2011) may face investigations into how much he knew about the Mensalão scandal that recently led to the conviction of several politicians, including his former chief of staff José Dirceu, for corruption. The Mensalão, or “big monthly [payment]” scandal, involved politicians and the PT using public spending to pay politicians to vote for legislation between 2003 and 2005, based on the coalition-style politics that define Brazil’s legislature. [Social scientists debate whether or not Brazil's system of "presidential parliamentarism" can exist in theory or in practice, and the Mensalão became one of the focal points in debating the merits or demerits of presidential parliamentarism.] Though Lula was never implicated in the scandal, given that it reached the upper levels of his administration, it appears investigators are ready to open an investigation. Complicating the picture, many of the programs that were passed in the first years of his administration (at the height of the Mensalao) have had a very positive impact on reducing social and economic inequalities in Brazil and strengthening the economy.

Meanwhile, on an even more serious note, former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010) is finally facing an investigation into his ties to paramilitary groups that committed human rights violations and were tied to drug trafficking while serving as governor of Antioquia in the mid-1990s. Though Uribe alleged that the investigations are “criminal vengeance” from drug-traffickers in jail, it’s not clear how prisoners would have direct ties to investigators. This is not the first time Uribe has been tied to right-wing paramilitary groups; several high-ranking politicians and officials were arrested and convicted for their connections to groups like the AUC [United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia], including Uribe’s own cousin, even while Uribe insisted he never had contact with or connections to paramilitaries. The fact that some of his top officials had such ties, combined with the fact there is enough evidence to his own connections to at least prompt an investigation, provides yet another indicator of his government’s ties to human rights violations in Colombia.

And as an addendum, both of these investigations have the potential to strengthen transparency, democracy, and human rights. To what degree democratic institutions are strengthened in the wake of these investigations will depend largely on their outcomes; even so, the fact that presidents cannot act with impunity in politics or human rights without facing the potential of public investigations down the road is part of a notable transformation in the last thirty years or so, and provides an encouraging sign for Latin American politics in the 21st century.

Around Latin America

-With Hugo Chávez in Cuba convalescing from further cancer treatment even while his inauguration looms, there is growing tension over whether Chávez will assume power constitutionally or not. Proponents say he does not have to be in the country to assume, while opponents say if he cannot be inaugurated on Thursday, then a new leader must be appointed. A new plan that could be implemented would delay the inauguration until Chávez is able to take office. Now, the Catholic Church in Venezuela has weighed in, proclaiming it to be “morally unacceptable” should Chávez remain in power without officially being present for his inauguration. While the Church’s stance is unlikely to turn the tide one way or another, it adds a powerful voice to a situation that’s already uncertain, and could add to the political tensions in the country.

-Students in Guatemala continue to take to the streets to protest the government’s planned educational reforms. The reforms include a plan to make teachers’ certification take five years instead of three (as it currently requires), a move that students say will cost them more, an issue that was at the heart of similar protests last year.

-Chilean authorities arrested eight military officials for the murder of folk singer Victor Jara in 1973. Jara, one of the best and most popular of the Nueva Canción movement that highlighted social inequalities and was often associated with leftist politics, was arrested, tortured, had his hands cut off, and was ultimately shot shortly after the military coup that overthrew democratically-elected president Salvador Allende and led to Augusto Pinochet’s regime. And while Chile has finally arrested eight officials tied to the murder, his widow, Joan, has asked the US to extradite Pedro Barrientos Nuñez,  another official tied to the murder who currently lives in Florida.

-Haiti renewed ex-dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s passport after a judge ordered Duvalier not face charges for human rights violations during his regime.

-In another example of the deep social impacts that migration and xenophobia filter into everyday life, rights activists in northern Mexico are increasingly facing threats from unnamed groups over their role in helping migrants.

-Argentina sentenced another sixteen former military officials and seven police officers and civilians for their roles in human rights violations during the military regime of 1976-1983, capping off a relatively successful year that saw a number of successes as human rights violators faced justice (and victims and their families saw some sense of closure) for their actions during the dictatorship.

-Speaking of human rights in Argentina, the use of torture, while widespread under the military rule, has never gone away. Fortunately, officials and rights activists are set to start using surprise visits to prisons, juvenile detention centers, and psychiatric hospitals in an attempt to discourage and prevent the torture of inmates.

-Honduras has fired its ambassador to Colombia after two computers were stolen during a party in which at least two suspected prostitutes were in attendance. Of course, this is not the first time that Colombian prostitutes have been connected to high-level security controversies for foreign powers.

-In an attempt to reduce the number of real crimes committed with fake weapons, Mexico City destroyed thousands of toy guns this week. While the effort to reduce crimes like robberies through the measure, one can only hope the move leads to a reduction in crime and not criminals using real guns that actually kill people in order to commit robberies.

-Preparing for re-election, Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa announced he is taking a one-month leave in order to campaign for a third term.

-Last week, Salvadoran bus drivers and microbus operators launched a work stoppage to protest an end to government fuel subsidies. As Tim points out, although the work stoppage came to an end over the weekend, there’s the chance it could resume, as the issue of the subsidy has not yet been resolved.

-Finally, though it’s a few weeks old, Chilean Justice Minister and former rector of the Autonomous University of Chile, Teodoro Ribera, resigned his position as minister after he was tied to allegations of bribery and corruption, as well as to questionable accreditation practices, allegations that further hurt the already-unpopular president, Sebastián Piñera, who has faced mounting criticism and protests over the issue of the cost of higher education and demands for reforms.