Daily Headlines: October 10, 2016

* Haiti: Doctors warned that Haiti could face its second cholera outbreak in recent years following the more than 1000 fatalities and towns still isolated by Hurricane Matthew.

* Argentina: An estimated 70,000 people marched in the Argentine city of Rosario for women’s rights and against all forms of gender violence including femicides.

* Mexico: The Mexican peso has strengthened by 2.3 percent in a reported indication that the market is confident over a Hillary Clinton victory in the United States presidential election.

* Uruguay: Rodolfo Nin Novoa, Uruguay’s Foreign Minister, called on ex-Guantanamo detainee Jihad Diyab to end his two-month-old hunger strike and “continue looking for a better future for him and his family.”

YouTube Source – Al Jazeera English (“The death toll has reached 1,000, but rescue teams are still combing through wreckage in the remote southwest of the country. A number of cholera cases have been reported, raising fears of a renewed outbreak of the disease.”)

Online Sources – NBC News, Financial Times, teleSUR English, Reuters

Daily Headlines: May 24, 2016

* Guatemala: Guatemalan prosecutors are considering a inaugurating a new office specializing in dealing with femicides in response to the 222 gender-based murders of women in the first four months of 2016.

* Puerto Rico: Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders railed against a bipartisan congressional plan backed by the White House to help restructure Puerto Rico’s $70 billion public debt.

* Peru: Polls indicate that Keiko Fujimori has widened her lead ahead of the June 5th presidential runoff despite corruption allegations within her campaign and concerns over the relation to her imprisoned father, ex-president Alberto Fujimori.

* Venezuela: Brazil’s acting foreign minister said his country and Argentina reportedly agreed to help mediate in Venezuela’s worsening political crisis.

YouTube Source – DW (English)
 
Online Sources – teleSUR English, Politico, Reuters, ABC News

Daily Headlines: May 18, 2016

* Dominican Republic: Luis Abinader conceded Sunday’s president election to Danilo Medina but not before blasting the policies of the incumbent and denouncing problems at voting stations.

* South America: The Paraguayan Congress is considering a bill to help combat a recent surge in femicides, while lawyers for the Bogota, Colombia government have come under fire for blaming the female victim of having been raped and killed in a 2012 murder.

* Argentina: Monsanto will reportedly “suspend future soybean technologies” as part of a dispute with the Argentine government and framers of genetically modified soybeans.

* Mexico: President Enrique Peña Nieto proposed expanding the legalization of same-sex marriages from a few locations like Mexico City to the entire Mexican nation.

YouTube Source – euronews

Online Sources – ABC News, teleSUR English, Colombia Reports, Reuters, The Huffington Post

Daily Headlines: April 28, 2016

* Venezuela: A study released this week found that Venezuela, which is undergoing an energy crisis, is the country most vulnerable to the low price of crude oil.

* Cuba: The recent increase in the number of Cuban migrants entering the U.S. could lead to a reform of the Cuban Adjustment Act even though White House officials have denied the possibility of enacting changes.

* Mexico: “We want to stay alive” was the theme of a protests held days ago in the State of Mexico to repudiate femicides and violence against women.

* Latin America: The economy for Latin America and the Caribbean is expected to contract for a second straight year in 2016, according to the International Monetary Fund.

YouTube Source – PBS NewsHour (Video uploaded in March 2016).
 
Online Sources – GlobalPost, CNBC, Politico, The Guardian, Vox

Daily Headlines: January 19, 2016

* Latin America: Colombia enacted a law imposing harsher punishments against those convicted of attacking women with acid, while the Dominican opposition accused the government of doing little to combat femicides.

* U.S.: The Supreme Court accepted listening to arguments later this year over the legality of the DACA and DAPA immigration relief programs.

* Chile: Chilean prosecutors will reportedly reopen an investigation into the origins of the late dictator Augusto Pinochet's multimillion dollar fortune.

* Brazil: Another negative sign for Brazil’s economy as economists believe that inflation will rise by 7% this year.

YouTube Source – Thomson Reuters Foundation (Video uploaded on April 2015).
 
Online Sources – BBC News, Dominican Today, Fox News Latino, Bloomberg, NBC News

Daily Headlines: August 20, 2015

* Argentina: Attorneys representing the family of Alberto Nisman, a top Argentine prosecutor killed under mysterious circumstances last January, claimed that “someone” erased data from his cell phone shortly before he died.

* Venezuela: PDVSA chief Eulogio Del Pino was named as Venezuela’s new oil and mining minister amid a domestic economic crisis caused in part by the low prices of crude.

* Colombia: Colombia recently became the sixteenth Latin American country to define femicides as a specific crime but will the new law help decrease levels of violence against women?

* Brazil: Brazil’s unemployment rate rose for the seventh straight month in July and jumped from 6.9 percent in June to 7.5%.

YouTube Source – BBC News

Online Sources – Reuters, Financial Times, The Latin Americanist, Buenos Aires Herald

Daily Headlines: May 25, 2015

* Peru: Authorities declared a 60-day state of emergency in two Peruvian provinces over an escalation of violence between police and protesters against construction of the $1.4 billion Tia Maria copper mine project.

* Mexico: Family members of some of the forty-two alleged criminals killed in a shootout on Friday alleged that the victims were massacred by Mexican troops.

* Argentina: The recent death of a 14-year-old girl reportedly murdered by her boyfriend has shined a light on femicides in Argentina.

* U.S.: Juan Pablo Montoya overcame being in last place and pit stop problems to win his second Indianapolis 500 title fifteen years after his initial victory.

YouTube Source – euronews (At least four people have died in clashes over the proposed Tia Maria project in southern Peru).
 
Online Sources – GlobalPost, The Daily Beast, CNN, CBS Sports

Daily Headlines: March 17, 2015

* Colombia: A new U.N. report named the “bandas criminales” groups of demobilized right-wing paramilitary members and criminal gangs as the primary security threat in Colombia.  

* Argentina: Citigroup will pull out of the custodial business in Argentina after a U.S. judge opted not to remove an injunction that prevented the bank from processing $2.3 billion in Argentine bond payments.

* Mexico: Was the recent firing of acclaimed investigative journalist Carmen Aristegui from Mexico’s MVS radio network justifiable or censorship?   

* Brazil: A new femicide law was enacted last week in Brazil that includes increased prison time for those convicted of the gender-based killing of women.

Video Source – YouTube via Al Jazeera English

Online Sources –Reuters; euronews; CNN; Voice of America

Peru: Fifty-Six Femicides in 2014

Peru officially added femicides to the country's penal code in 2011.

Ciudad Juarez in Mexico is usually associated with the gender-based murders of women yet femicides are a problem throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.  Such is the case of Peru where the government revealed alarming data on violence against women.

According to Peru’s Minister of Women and Vulnerable Populations, Carmen Omonte, at least fifty-six confirmed femicides took place during the first six months of this year.  At his pace, the number of confirmed femicides would be less than the 131 detected in 2013.  Nevertheless, the eighty-eight suspected femicides cases between January and June of this year could outpace the 151 possible instances believed to have occurred last year.

In light of theses statistics, Omonte said that her ministry was working on a protocol “across multiple sectors” to better address the “serious problem” of violence against women and femicides.  Yet the minister, who admitted last month to have been the target of sexual harassment, urged female victims of violence to speak up and not live in fear.

“It’s still an uphill battle in getting women to report that they’ve been assaulted, and to stop [women] from assuming it’s a natural thing to just suffer in silence… However, I believe that little by little, society and the government, working together, are helping more women to take heart and go to the authorities,” Omonte said.

Earlier this month, Omonte joined former Olympian and revered figure Natalia Malaga in launching a public campaign aimed at encouraging women to stand up for their rights.  The program could help combat feelings of machismo still prevalent in Peru:

Report: Femicides on the Rise in Honduras

Millions of Hondurans turned out on Sunday to participate in the Central American country’s presidential election. The two frontrunners, conservative Juan Orlando Hernandez and ex-First Lady Xiomara Castro, have each declared themselves as the victors though the official vote tally has yet to indicate a clear winner.

The next president will have to face several major problems hurting Honduras including deep political divisions, crushing poverty and high levels of violence.  In a country with the world's highest murder rate, women are especially vulnerable and this was shown in a report released earlier this month.

A woman is killed in Honduras an average of once every fourteen and a half hours according to the Violence Observatory of the National Autonomous University of Honduras. The group concluded that 2851 women were killed in Honduras between 2005 and 2012 and there has been a steady increase in femicides over the past eight years.  (175 women were killed in 2005 while 606 died last year).

The report did not provide figures for 2013 though the Observatory estimated that some 323 women died in the first six months of this year.

“Nationwide, violence against women and especially femicides make up a very alarming problem,” declared Violence Observatory director Migdonia Ayestas.  She added, “As proof of this, 14.2 of every ten thousand Honduran women last year were murdered” compared to a 12.3 per ten thousand in 2011.

Violence has steadily worsened in Honduras, as the country has become an increasingly favored route for illegal drugs transported from South America to the U.S. and Canada. Hence, it’s unsurprising that the report noted that organized crime is indirectly behind some of the violence against women with roughly three in five killings attributed to “revenge and paid killings.”
 
“It isn’t the case that these women were directly involved in illicit activities but more relevantly is that the people they live with were linked to organized crime,” said Ayestas.

Further adding to this “alarming” problem is that a majority of the women targeted last year were aged between 15 and 31 while more than 1600 femicides between 2005 and 2012 involved firearms.  Hence, the Observatory the group recommended reforming gun control laws including changing the current statute permitting adults to legally own up to five firearms.