Today’s Video: Immigration explanation

We will hopefully be back over the weekend to discuss several stories we missed from the past week. (Possible topics may include the right to life debate in Argentina and the health of Chilean students on a hunger strike).

Yesterday the Department of Homeland Security issued a directive calling for a case-by-case review of the deportation proceedings of undocumented immigrants that have had no prior criminal record. Several news reports claimed that the measure could affect as many as 300,000 potential deportees but what sort of impact does the move have on immigration policy? Katherine Vargas of the National Immigration Forum explains in this video via Univision:

Video Source - Univision via YouTube
Online Source - CNN

Daily Headlines: August 19, 2011

* Peru: A statement from the U.S. State Department said that the agency doesn’t feel that “the temporary suspension of (Peruvian coca) eradication this week represents a permanent shift in the government's counternarcotics policy.”

* Brazil: Spanish fashion chain Zara was accused by Brazilian authorities of the mistreatment and exploitation of workers in a Sao Paulo facility.

* U.S.: An ex-Salvadoran army colonel accused of being involved in the 1989 murders of six Jesuit priests was found living in impunity in Massachusetts.

* Venezuela: After months of legal wrangling the family members of the late President Carlos Andres Perez reportedly reached a deal that would permit him to be buried in Venezuela.

Image – Mariana Bazo/Reuters via The Guardian (“A coca farmer in Tingo María, Peru.” According to The Guardian, Peru’s prime minister claimed, “the government was committed to reducing the illegal crop and would convene a special panel next month to chart a strategy that would stress alternative development, ‘social inclusion and fighting poverty’.”)
Online Sources- AFP, The Guardian, UPI, Reuters

Daily Headlines: August 18, 2011

* Latin America: Numerous top Israeli diplomats have allegedly traveled to several Latin American countries in order to discourage support for the creation of a Palestinian state.

* Central America: Diplomatic tensions between neighbors Costa Rica and Nicaragua over Calero Island could be reignited due to rumors of a recent incursion into the disputed territory.

* Venezuela: President Hugo Chavez announced that he would pull $11 billion in Venezuelan gold reserves from foreign banks.

* Brazil: According to a “preliminary analysis of satellite photos” deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon increased by 15% between July 2010 and July of this year.

Image – Reuters (“Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman speaks to the media before the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem July 17, 2011.” Lieberman was one of numerous top Israeli diplomats that have reportedly traveled recently to Latin America in order to drum up opposition to Palestinian statehood).
Online Sources- insidecostarica.com, The Latin Americanist, AFP, CNN

Daily Headlines: August 17, 2011

* U.S.: A few hundred demonstrators including Latino activists protested in several cities throughout the country against the Obama administration’s immigration policy.

* Brazil: President Dilma Rousseff may not be as keen as her predecessor was on arms purchases but that hasn’t stopped international firms like Boeing and Saab from attempting to land a multibillion-dollar fighter jet contract.

* Puerto Rico: Could Puerto Rican residents soon be allowed the right to vote in federal elections?

* Honduras: Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper capped his official visit to Latin America by announcing that his country and Honduras reached a free trade agreement.

Image – New York Times (“In Chicago on Tuesday, a protest against policies leading to deportations.” Demonstrators criticized the current immigration policy including the increased number of deportations as well as problems with the Secure Communities program).
Online Sources- Reuters, AHN, UPI, Bloomberg

Today’s Video: Violence in El Salvador

It has been roughly twenty years since civil war tore El Salvador apart. Nowadays another threat is hurting the Central American country: violent street gangs that have reportedly been the target of recruitment by some of Mexico's powerful drug groups. The following Not Safe for Work video via Al Jazeera English delves into the topic:

Video Source - Al Jazeera English

Daily Headlines: August 16, 2011

* Bolivia: Over 500 mostly indigenous demonstrators protesting the construction of a highway through the rainforest are marching over 300 miles to La Paz.

* Venezuela: The Venezuelan economy may have its problems but it seems like that hasn’t affected the considerable growth in the country’s stock market this year.

* Cuba: Newly declassified documents showed that several U.S. planes were downed by friendly fire during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961.

* U.S.: According to a impreMedia and Latino Decisions poll nearly half of Latino respondents believed that raising taxes on the wealthy is the “only way” to solve the budget crisis.

Image – AP via BBC News (“The marchers say the road threatens their ancestral territory.”)
Online Sources- Al Jazeera English, Reuters, LAHT, Voice of America, New American Media

World Watch: Hunger pangs

* Africa: Oxfam called on African leaders to do more to alleviate a growing famine while Human Rights Watch accused numerous political actors for exacerbating Somalia’s humanitarian crisis.

* Germany: On the fiftieth anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall a minute of silence was observed to pay respect to those who died while trying to cross the barrier.

* Iraq: At least 74 people died as the result of a series of bombings in thirteen Iraqi cities.

* China: A Buddhist monk called for the return of the Dalai Lama to Tibet by setting himself on fire.

Image – John Moore/Getty Images via The Guardian (“People await food aid distribution in Mogadishu. Human Rights Watch say Somalia's warring factions have exacerbated the crisis.”)
Online Sources- Voice of America, Bloomberg, BBC News, The Guardian, MSNBC

Today’s Video: Jaime Garzon – humor and impunity

Imagine the public reaction in the U.S. if Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert were to be gunned down in cold blood. Now picture that in the subsequent years impunity surrounds the murder and investigations into the crime have yielded few results. Such is the case of Jaime Garzon, Colombia’s top political humorist who was assassinated just over twelve years ago.

Garzon was best known for his sharp satire against the Colombian political establishment in TV programs such as “Zoociedad” and "Quac, El Noticiero". (In this clip, for instance, Garzon pokes fun at then-Governor and eventual president Alvaro Uribe as “the dictator Colombia needs!”) His most famous character was Heriberto de la Calle (roughly translated as “Heriberto of the streets”), a shoeshine man who grilled celebrities and political leaders. (In this clip, Heriberto asks ex-U.S. Ambassador to Colombia Myles Frechette if it’s true that the U.S. “doesn’t pursue guerillas since the rebels send cocaine to the U.S. and they receive arms in return?”)

Aside from his humor, Garzon was also a lawyer and peace activist who involved himself in the liberating of hostages from the FARC as well as the failed peace negotiations with the rebels. Paramilitary leaders allegedly viewed him not as an intermediary but instead as a guerilla collaborator and he reportedly received death threats from them. It’s believed that paramilitary chief Carlos Castaño ordered Garzon to be killed, a tragedy that would occur in Bogota on August 13, 1999.

In 2000, Castaño was convicted in absentia of the murder of Garzon and sentenced to 38 years in prison. The purported mastermind behind the assassination never spent a day behind bars for his crime and he himself would be killed under mysterious circumstances in 2004.

After years of weak investigations in Colombia, Garzon’s family last week sought the intervention of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. In the meantime, one cannot help but wonder how Garzon would’ve skewered the Colombian political landscape of the past few years and if the country is still without a “national identity” as he jokingly refers to in this 1993 interview:

(Hat tip for the video: Colombia Reports).

Online Sources- El Heraldo, Colombia Reports
Video Source - YouTube

Daily Headlines: August 15, 2011

* Brazil: Gunmen assassinated Patricia Lourival Acioli, a local judge best known for pursuing violent gangs and corrupt cops.

* Argentina: Exit polls indicated that President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner easily won yesterday’s primary election; thus, indicating that she could win outright in October’s presidential election.

* Venezuela: President Hugo Chavez returned from Cuba on Saturday after undergoing second round of radiation treatment and chemotherapy.

* U.S.: According to the California attorney general’s office the number of official hate crimes against Latinos in that state jumped by nearly 50% last year in comparison to 2009.

Image – AP via BBC News (“Patricia Acioli was buried on Friday in her home town of Niceroi.”)
Online Sources- Reuters, BBC News, latimes.com, MSNBC

Daily Headlines: August 12, 2011

* Guatemala: Police detained two men suspected of taking part in a 1982 civil war massacre of 268 mostly indigenous villagers.

* Mexico: Authorities captured Oscar Garcia, a former Marine who allegedly carried out or ordered over 600 murders on behalf of drug gangs.

* Peru: The Supreme Court rejected a legal challenge by disgraced ex-president Alberto Fujimori to overturn his 25-year prison sentence for human rights violations.

* Venezuela: President Hugo Chavez claimed that his chemotherapy in Cuba was going well and added that he “will be back in Venezuela soon.”

Image – AP via Boston.com (“A woman celebrates outside the court at the end of a trial in Guatemala City” last week.)
Online Sources- BBC News, Reuters, MSNBC, Bloomberg

Daily Headlines: August 11, 2011

* Latin America: Most stock markets throughout Latin America made modest gains yesterday though a senior Economic Committee for Latin America and the Caribbean official warned that global market volatility could have an adverse effect on the region.

* Guatemala: The Constitutional Court unanimously upheld a Supreme Court ruling barring the presidential candidacy of ex-First Lady Sandra Torres.

* Chile: Tens of thousands of protesters continue to demonstrate in cities like Santiago and Valparaiso in favor of public education reforms.

* Brazil: The country’s indigenous rights agency claimed that drug traffickers from Peru “invaded and looted” a remote Amerindian village in the Amazon.

Image – Reuters (“An electronic display board is seen at Brazil's BM&FBovespa stock exchange in Sao Paulo February 18, 2011.”)
Online Sources- Reuters, Mercopress, The Telegraph, CNN, Sky News

Women in Mexico: Recognition, femicides and protest

A Mexican court refused to extradite to the U.S. an alleged drug trafficker nicknamed the “Queen of the Pacific” while Colombian authorities captured a supposed female figurehead in the Sinaloa gang. Despite the criminal connections of these two ladies there has been several pieces of positive news for women in Mexico over the past few weeks.

In Mexico City, the metropolis’ government passed a law that codifies the crime of femicides. The reform to the local criminal code was enacted two weeks ago and includes sentences of up to sixty years in prison.

Under the new categorization femicides are defined as gender-based murders that may include sexual abuse or discrimination against woman. This was the criterion being applied to the arrest of a man arrested and charged with femicide only three days after the law was enacted. According to local police the suspect “got annoyed because the (daughter of his girlfriend) was biting her fingernails and hit her several times causing her death.”

Other Latin American countries are ether considering or have already made femicides a stand-alone crime. In Peru, for instance, Minister for Social Development Aída García Naranjo said last week that she would introduce a proposal to try to combat an increased number of murders against women.

Meanwhile, Mexican women’s rights activist Consuelo Morales was one of the seven winners of this year’s Alison Des Forges Award for Extraordinary Activism from Human Rights Watch (HRW). The human rights group recognized Morales for her “courageous efforts in finding and end to impunity and to help the victims of the ‘war on drugs’ in Mexico.” HRW praised her work for the Monterrey-based Citizens Supporting Human Rights group that “documents these abuses, litigates key cases, and provides critical support for victims of both security forces and violent drug cartels.”

Lastly, a group of women in Mexico City have organized protests against cantinas that illegally discriminate against them. The Women to the Cantinas group claimed that several establishments have refused to serve prospective female clientele while male customers harassed others.

The manager of one of the bars in question denied that his employees discriminated against women. One customer made it be clear that he was certainly not pleased with the protests:

There are places for everyone; for women, for gays,” a resident Archie Bunker who declined to give his name told Reforma. “Can’t there be a single place just for men? I come here because of the tradition that we run women out.”

Then, declaring himself “a misogynist,” he fled into the night with the rest of the regular male customers.

Online Sources- seattlepi.com, RCN Radio, Human Rights Watch, elmundo.es, Milenio, LAHT, La Republica, Fox News Latino
Image – Azteca Noticias

Daily Headlines: August 10, 2011

* El Salvador: Nine former Salvadoran soldiers detained for their supposed role in the infamous murder of six Jesuit priests in 1989 could be extradited to Spain.

* Latin America: Stock markets throughout the region rebounded yesterday after suffering heavy losses on Monday.

* Venezuela: Three people including two former prison governors were charged with corruption in connection to deadly rioting weeks ago at the El Rodeo prison.

* Mexico: An alleged “anti-technology group” took responsibility for setting off a bomb that injured two university professors at a college campus near Mexico City.

Image – Reuters via The Guardian (“A stone engraved with the names of the six Jesuit priests killed during El Salvador's 1980-92 civil war.”)
Online Sources- The Latin Americanist, Reuters, The Guardian, Voice of America, BBC News

Daily Headlines: August 9, 2011

* Guatemala: A judge ordered that a U.S. couple return their adopted daughter after the court found that the girl was kidnapped from her Guatemalan birth mother.

* Mexico: According to newly released data fewer migrants are entering Mexico but there has been a sharper decline in migrants leaving the country.

* Cuba: A U.S. travel firm that secured a license for “people-to-people exchanges” in Cuba abruptly suspended its planned trips to the island.

* Colombia: President Juan Manuel Santos pledged to modify the military in order to better combat a weakened but still combative FARC rebel army.

Image – AP via Time (“Seven Guatemalan children sit in bouncing chairs at the Casa Quivira children's home in Antigua, 50 kilometers (30 miles) west of Guatemala City Tuesday Aug. 14, 2007.”)
Online Sources- CNN, Sun-Sentinel.com, Fox News Latino, Reuters AlertNet

LatAm stock markets not immune from "black Monday"

The aftermath of last week’s U.S. debt ceiling debacle and the downgrade on Friday of the country’s credit rating by Standard & Poor’s has caused a massive selloff in the global stock markets. Latin American markets have not been immune to the apparent crisis in the international financial sector.

Argentina’s stock market may be the region’s hardest-hit before the end of trading today. The Merval index nosedived by at least 9.17% with sixty-nine of the index’s seventy-three stocks in the red. Among those companies suffering the greatest losses are Mirgor (- 14.17%), Petrobras Argentina (- 12.09%) and Edenor (- 10.00%).

In Brazil, meanwhile, the Bovespa index plummeted this afternoon by a least 8% after plunging by 5.6% by mid-day. The early afternoon loss thus represented the lowest intraday level in over two years and the nadir of a two-week long market decline.

Earlier today President Dilma Rousseff admitted that her administration would be willing to “take any measures necessary” in order to stem Brazil’s financial troubles. Yet in a press conference with visiting Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Rousseff also promoted the importance of stronger trade relations and observed that Brazil “can't mess around right now and go out spending what we don't have.”

Rousseff’s remarks about avoiding overspending were coincidentally echoed by Uruguayan president Jose Mujica. “There’s no other reasonable solution than to follow the criteria of a good housewife,” noted Mujica in an interview with a local newspaper. He further observed that in terms of the regional economy South America has done “very well” but “from Colombia towards the north the dependency on the U.S. market is complicating matters.”

For other countries in the region the financial news wasn’t positive at all:

• Chile: With roughly one hour left until closing the blue-chip Ipsa index plunged by 7.2% and fell below the 4000-point mark for the first time since Lehman Brothers collapsed in June 2008.
• Mexico: The IPC index fell by 6.05% with stocks in the financial and mining sectors being hit the hardest.
• South America: The general index in the Lima, Peru stock market fell by over 5% at noon while Colombia’s Igbc declined by 3.2%.
  

The region’s currencies also suffered losses today as uncertainty looms over the future of the global economy:

In an effort to limit potential losses, investors are selling stocks, bonds and currencies to hold more liquid assets. For many, that means the U.S. dollar, the most liquid asset of all, said Diego Donadio, Latin America currency and debt strategist for BNP Paribas in Sao Paulo.

"The important thing to remember is that the downgrade has increased the level of uncertainty in the world and raised doubt about exactly what is a risk-free asset," he said in an interview.

"In a moment like this, you buy the most liquid asset, the main asset that your debts and trade is valued in, and in Latin America, that's the dollar."

Image- AP via ABC News (“In this Aug. 4, 2011 photo, a trader works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, in New York.”)
Online Sources- MSNBC, Reuters, La Republica, Potafolio.co, La Tercera, El Universal, BBC News, El Cronista, clarin.com, Folha.com, Bloomberg, EFE

Daily Headlines: August 8, 2011

* Venezuela: Leaders of Venezuela’s main political opposition group are reportedly against a U.S. Congressional bill backed by several legislators critical of President Hugo Chavez to cut off funding to the Organization of American States.

* Haiti: Rest in peace Jean-Claude Bajeux; the Haitian human rights activist and scholar passed away Friday at the age of 79.

* U.S.: Los Angeles businessman Alex Meruelo will reportedly become the new owner of the Atlanta Hawks and, thus, the first Latino to own a major stake of an NBA team.

* Mexico: An accused “top Mexican drug trafficker” from the Sinaloa gang claimed that he has legal immunity based on his supposed work as an informant.

Image – Getty Images via The Telegraph (According to The Washington Post, a letter was sent by Venezuela’s United Democratic Coalition to U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen voicing their concern over a proposal to eliminate U.S. funding of the OAS).
Online Sources- Washington Post, CBS News, AHN, Reuters