Daily Headlines: April 30, 2015

* Puerto Rico: Puerto Rican legislators rejected a $2.9 billion tax plan that supporters claimed would have helped ease the commonwealth’s debt crises.

* Brazil: “No, I'm not going to be executed, I'm going to Brazil in a year's time,” was allegedly said by death row convict and possible schizophrenic Rodrigo Gularte shortly before he was killed by a firing squad in Indonesia on Tuesday.
 
* Argentina: Families of the 85 victims of the controversial AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires twenty-one years ago could soon receive a “one-time” financial compensation.

* Guatemala: An estimated 15,000 protesters recently called on the resignations of Guatemala’s president and vice president amid a growing corruption scandal potentially involving senior members of government.

YouTube Source – TIME (Video uploaded in March 2014).
 
Online Sources – Bloomberg, BBC News, The Guardian, The Latin Americanist, Global Voices Online

Daily Headlines: April 9, 2014

* Argentina: An Argentine court sentenced ten people to up to twenty-two years in prison regarding the 2002 kidnapping and “sexual exploitation” of a missing young woman named Marita Veron.

* Mexico: Death row inmate Ramiro Hernandez is running out of legal options and today he will likely become the second Mexican national to be executed in Texas this year.
 
* Cuba: Sen. Patrick Leahy, the head of the Senate subcommittee that oversees USAID, blasted the administrator of that agency for a “cockamamie” failed social network project launched in Cuba.

* Haiti: A new report found that the percentage of Haitian earthquake survivors living in refugee camps has plummeted by 91% though the study notes the “phenomenon of new families moving into camps and families splitting and occupying more tents constitutes a worrying trend.”

Video Source– The Daily Beast via YouTube (Susana Trimarco, the mother of missing Argentine woman Marita Veron, has become an activist against human trafficking as she continues the search for her “disappeared” daughter.) 

Online Sources – BBC News; The Latin Americanist; ABC News; CBS News; Miami Herald

Honduran executed in Texas

A convicted Honduran murderer was killed by lethal injection in Texas roughly 48 hours after a Mexican national met the same fate. “God forgive them, receive my spirit” 29-year-old Heliberto Chi reportedly muttered before he died in front of a small audience including his relatives and the sons of the man he was convicted of robbing and killing in 2001.

Chi was scheduled to be executed last year though that was delayed while the U.S. Supreme Court (USSC) decided on the constitutionality of death via lethal injection. (Their verdict allowing lethal injection was announced in April.)

Much like the defense behind Jose Medellin- who was executed on Wednesday- Chi’s lawyers tried to argue that international law was broken. They argued that local authorities neglected Chi's rights; that notion was ultimately nixed by the USSC:

Chi's lawyers argued in a final appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court that he should be granted a stay because he had not been notified of his right to consular services.

The court denied the appeal, paving the way for Chi's execution by lethal injection in the state's death chamber in Huntsville…

In Chi's case, separate from the World Court proceedings, the state argued that upon his arrest, Chi had not immediately identified himself to police as a foreign national.

Chi thus becomes the second foreign national to be executed by Texas this week despite interventions by the International Court of Justice and President George W. Bush.

Image- BBC News (“Chi was the 411th Texas inmate to die by lethal injection.”)

Sources- New York Times, Reuters, The Latin Americanist, JURIST, MSNBC,