Mexico & Central America News and Discussions

[Member]

I wonder how LATAM will fare in the future with all this tech and stuff.

Higher authoritarianism?

[caltrek]

Mexico’s Proposed Energy Reform Could Have Broader Consequences for Democracy at Large
by Cody Copeland
April 5, 2022

https://www.courthousenews.com/mexicos- ... -at-large/

Introduction:

MEXICO CITY (Courthouse News) — A case in Mexico’s Supreme Court concerning the president’s proposed electricity reform could have implications reaching much farther than the country’s energy sector: democracy at large.

While the case concerns President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s attempt to undo energy reforms from previous decades, the ruling could reveal how much influence Mexico’s executive branch now wields over the judiciary.

Initially proposed as two separate administrative regulatory policies in 2020 that the court deemed unconstitutional in February 2021, the reform is a combination of the two policies created by López Obrador, who said he did so without changing “even a comma” of the previous proposals.

Among other changes, the reform aims to give the country’s Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) first rights to all energy purchases, a move experts say will stifle competition and put billions of dollars of foreign investment at risk.
...
One of the issues up for debate was whether or not access to electricity is a human right that the state is obligated to provide. Six of the ministers said they did not agree that the issue is before the court and moved on to debate other aspects of the reform.

[caltrek]

Economist Rodrigo Chaves to Become Costa Rica’s New President
April 4, 2022

https://www.latinorebels.com/2022/04/04/chaves/

Introduction:

(Latino Rebels) COSTA RICA: Economist Rodrigo Chaves won Sunday’s presidential election ahead of ex-President José María Figueres (1994-1998). Chaves, from the Social Democratic Progress Party (PPSD), was projected to secure victory with about 52.9 percent of the vote according to the official preliminary partial tally of the run-off ballot.

The anti-establishment candidate and former World Bank official is popular among voters who reject traditional politics and grew concerned over the country’s national debt. Figueres’ National Liberation Party has dominated the country’s politics at the local and national levels over the past half-century.

Chaves promised to use referendums to bypass congress to bring change in Costa Rica. as a large number of voters grew discontent with the political establishment. The 60-year-old had already positioned himself as the favorite candidate coming in second in an initial vote on February 6.

During Chaves’ tenure at the World Bank, he was accused of sexual harassment; he denied the accusations

[weatheriscool]

Cuba and US take tentative step with talks on migration
Source: AP

WASHINGTON (AP) — Cuba and the United States took a tentative step toward unthawing relations and resuming joint efforts to address irregular migration, a senior Cuban official said Friday following the highest-level talks between the two countries in four years.

There were no major breakthroughs, but the mere fact that the U.S. was holding substantive talks was a sign relations might be looking better under President Joe Biden after going into deep freeze under his predecessor, Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio said.

“They seem committed. They ratified that they are committed to the agreements in place," Fernandez de Cossio said. "So we have no reason to mistrust what they’re saying, but time will tell.”

The talks did not focus on broader U.S.-Cuba relations but more narrowly on restoring adherence to previous agreements that were intended to curtail the often-dangerous irregular migration from the island to the United States.

Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics ... ar-AAWv9rI

[caltrek]

Mexico President Proposes Dramatic Electoral Reforms
by Maria Verza
April 29, 2022

https://www.latinorebels.com/2022/04/29 ... alreforms/

Introduction:

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico’s government on Thursday proposed a dramatic overhaul of the nation’s electoral system and the agency that oversees it—one of the country’s most trusted institutions. It would reduce the size of Congress and state legislatures while having the federal elections board chosen by voters, potentially adding a higher degree of politics to what has been an independent body.

The proposal also would reduce federal funding of political parties and spending on elections in general—a repeated target of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has often feuded with the National Electoral Institute.

The proposals presented by López Obrador and several members of his Cabinet would create a new federal elections authority to replace the institute, as well as eliminate similar state-level bodies.

“There is no intention of imposing a single party,” López Obrador said. “What we want is that there is a true democracy in the country and that electoral frauds end … to leave a true democratic state established.”

But the path for what will surely be a controversial reform package would be difficult. López Obrador’s party and its allies do not have the two-thirds majority in Congress required to make constitutional changes. The main opposition parties have already said they oppose such changes.

[weatheriscool]

At least four dead as explosion rocks historic hotel in Havana
Source: Washington Post

An unexplained explosion at a historic hotel in Old Havana killed at least four people and destroyed much of the building on Friday morning, Cuban officials said.

Thirteen people were missing. Firefighters and a rescue team searched the rubble of the Hotel Saratoga, where people could still be trapped, according to a tweet from the official account of the Cuban presidency. The causes of the explosion were unclear, the tweet said, but preliminary investigation pointed to a gas leak.

Videos and images on social media showed smoke filling the air and crowds gathering in the street outside the hotel. A photo published by the news agency Reuters showed at least one body in the street outside the hotel covered with a sheet.

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel and other officials were at the scene.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/20 ... ga-havana/

[caltrek]

Mexico’s 100,000 ‘Disappeared’ A Tragedy, Says UN Rights Chief Bachelet
May 18, 2022

Introduction:

(UN News via Eurasia Review) The news that more than 100,000 people in Mexico are now officially registered as “disappeared” is a tragedy, UN rights chief Michelle Bachelet said on Tuesday, in a call for action to tackle the country’s longstanding problem.

A national database has listed all those who’ve been reported missing in the country since 1964, and the tally continues to climb, amid ongoing drug gang violence and a lack of effective investigations.

To date, only 35 of the disappearances recorded since then have led to the conviction of the perpetrators, a “staggering rate of impunity”, said the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Justice for families

In a statement, the UN human rights chief urged the authorities to continue to implement reforms and ensure justice for the victims and their families.

“The crime of enforced disappearances is one of the worst things, for the families, precisely because they never get closure and rarely sadly are bodies found,” said UN rights office spokesperson Liz Throssell.

Read more here: https://www.eurasiareview.com/18052022- ... -bachelet/

[weatheriscool]

The cartels control a large part of Mexico and central America and has literally zero value on human rights. They will kill people as they see people as trash. It is a disease on humanity. 300,000 killed in the past 30 years. https://www.washingtonpost.com/es/post- ... parecidos/

[weatheriscool]

The truce between gangs and the government in El Salvador has been broken
« on: April 24, 2022, 01:26:57 PM »
https://apnews.com/article/nayib-bukele ... 37c6ff3c1a

President Nayib Bukele asked El Salvador’s congress Sunday to extend an anti-gang emergency decree for another 30 days.

Bukele has used the emergency powers to round up about 16,000 suspected gang members, following a spate of murders in March.

Rights groups have criticized the measures, saying arrests are often arbitrary, based on a person’s

[caltrek]

Nicaraguan Bishop Fasts to Protest Police Harassment
May 20, 2022

Introduction:

MEXICO CITY (AP) — A Roman Catholic bishop in Nicaragua began an “indefinite fast” Friday inside a church to protest increasing harassment from national police, who he said followed him throughout the entire previous day.

Rolando Álvarez, the bishop of Matagalpa and a fierce critic of President Daniel Ortega’s government, said in a video published by his diocese that police had even breached his “circle of family privacy” while he visited a niece.

Ortega’s government arrested dozens of political opposition leaders, including most of the potential candidates, in the months before his reelection to a fourth consecutive term last year. His government has shut down dozens of nongovernmental organizations that he accuses of working on behalf of foreign interests to destabilize his government. Tens of thousands of Nicaraguans have been chased into exile.

The Catholic church remains influential but has not escaped Ortega’s wrath. He has accused its priests of being “terrorists and coup plotters” and blamed them for participating in his “failed overthrow.”

Álvarez was one of the bishops who supported demonstrators in massive street protests that broke out in April 2018 and became a call for Ortega to step down. Since then, Álvarez’s sermons often criticize the government and demand the release of political prisoners.

Read more here: https://www.courthousenews.com/nicaragu ... arassment/

[weatheriscool]

Children as young as 6 are taking up arms in Mexico
Child soldiers
Nineteen children were conscripted into a vigilante group that for years has been battling drug gangs in Mexico’s Guerrero state. The recruits are as young as 6.
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/st ... d-to-fight

In a lawless stretch of western Mexico, children as young as 6 are taking up arms against organized crime.

This week, 19 children were conscripted into a vigilante group that for years has been battling drug gangs in restive Guerrero state. Images published by local journalists of the initiation ceremony — in which uniformed, rifle-wielding boys performed military-style maneuvers — drew outrage across Mexico, with human rights officials condemning the exercise as child abuse.

A leader of the vigilante group said in a phone interview Thursday that an increase in violence in the region and the absence of government intervention have left the community with no choice but to arm even its children.

“They must be prepared,” said Bernardino Sanchez Luna, who founded the self-defense group known as the CRAC-PF. “If they are afraid, the criminals will kill them like little chickens.”

[caltrek]

An Interview With Prime Ralph Gonsalves of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
by Laura Capote and Leticia Garziglia
June 19, 2022

Introduction:

(Janata Weekly) [The small island countries of CARICOM have given a demonstration of dignity and sovereignty, maintaining firm positions on the U.S. interference policy against Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Here is an Exclusive interview with Ralph Gonsalves, Prime Minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. “Comrade Ralph”, as he is known to his supporters and countrymen, is the main leader of the Labor Unity Party, and is serving his fifth consecutive term in office, after winning the 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2020 elections.

In addition to being an active campaigner for the republic and full sovereignty, Gonsalves is a renowned intellectual figure. An economist and Master in Public Administration from the University of the West Indies, and Doctor in Administration from the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, he has written on trade unionism, Marxism, neocolonialism, political economy, Africa, the Caribbean and the problems of integration and development, among other topics. Some of his most outstanding books are “The Specter of Imperialism: The Case of the Caribbean” (1976); “History and the Future: A Caribbean Perspective” (1994) and “The Non-Capitalist Path to Development: Africa and the Caribbean” (1981).

Currently, Gonsalves is one of the main promoters of the policy of reparations to Afro-descendant populations for the crimes of slavery and trafficking, as well as an active promoter of the integrationist policies of CARICOM and ALBA-TCP.]

❈ ❈ ❈
Question: How do you analyze the global and continental geopolitical situation? What projects and forces are in conflict? What are the main trends?

Ralph Gonsalves: We are in an extremely complex period of the global political economy, flooded with multiple contradictions. One of the constants is the advance of monopoly capitalism, which has spread across the globe. The asymmetrical link between global monopoly capitalism, the governments of North America, Europe, Australia, Japan and what are known as “emerging markets” is visible. Of course, within the major monopoly capitalist countries there are national factions, so there are contradictions within the European Union itself and between them and the United States, even though they all share capital’s historic mission.

Read more here: https://janataweekly.org/ralph-gonsalv ... -succeed/


Saint Vincent and the Grenadines

[caltrek]

How Cuba Is Eradicating Child Mortality and Banishing the Diseases of the Poor
by Vijay Prashad and Manolo De Los Santos
July 6, 2022

Extract:

(Eurasia Review) The region of the Zapata Swamp, where the Bay of Pigs is located, before the Revolution, had an infant mortality rate of 59 per 1,000 live births. The population of the area, mostly engaged in subsistence fishing and in the charcoal trade, lived in great poverty. Fidel spent the first Christmas Eve after the Revolution of 1959 with the newly formed cooperative of charcoal producers, listening to them talk about their problems and working with them to find a way to exit the condition of hunger, illiteracy, and ill-health. A large-scale project of transformation had been set into motion a few months before, which drew in hundreds of very poor people into a process to lift themselves up from the wretched conditions that afflicted them. This is the reason why these people rose in large numbers to defend the Revolution against the attack by the United States and its mercenaries in 1961.

To move from 59 infant deaths out of every 1,000 live births to no infant deaths in the matter of a few decades is an extraordinary feat. It was done, Dr. Dayamis says, because the Cuban Revolution pays an enormous attention to the health of the population. Pregnant mothers are given regular care from primary care doctors and gynecologists and their infants are tended by pediatricians—all of it paid from the social wealth of the country. Small towns such as Palpite do not have specialists such as gynecologists and pediatricians, but within a short ride a few miles away, they can access these doctors in Playa Larga.

Read more here: https://www.eurasiareview.com/06072022 ... oor-oped/

caltrek’s comment: Given Cuba’s advances in such fields as this, the United States ought to be ashamed of any continued sanctions against that country.

[wjfox]

'Narcos' drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero captured in Mexico - as 14 killed in Black Hawk helicopter crash during operation

Saturday 16 July 2022 12:24, UK

Mexican military forces have captured notorious drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero, who was behind the torture and murder of a US drug enforcement agent in 1985.

Caro Quintero, 69, was arrested after a search dog named Max, a bloodhound, flushed him out of hiding in shrubland in the town of San Simon in Sinaloa state during a joint operation by the navy and the attorney general's office, according to a statement from the Mexican navy.

[...]

Caro Quintero was on the FBI's most wanted list, with a $20m (£16.9m) reward offered for his capture.

The US government hailed the arrest, and said it would waste no time in requesting his extradition.

"This is huge," White House senior Latin America adviser Juan Gonzalez wrote on Twitter.

https://news.sky.com/story/mexico-captu ... h-12652871

[caltrek]

^^^Of course, now I suppose we will be hearing from the libertarians about the excessive use of force in capturing this scumbag...errr...I mean suspect.

[weatheriscool]

Haiti gang violence: UN votes to ban small arms sales
Source: BBC

The UN Security Council has voted unanimously to ban some weapon sales to Haiti, rocked by deadly gang violence.

The resolution calls on UN member states to prohibit the sale of small arms, light weapons and ammunition to what it calls "non-state actors".

But a proposal by China for a full embargo on weapon sales was rejected.

Since last week, 89 people have been killed in the Port-au-Prince capital region alone. Aid agencies say many areas are now dangerous to access.

Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-62187717

[caltrek]

Mexican President Lopez Obrador Showed Leadership in Meeting With President Biden
by Rodrigo Guillot
July 27, 2022

Introduction:

(Alternet) Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) visited the United States on July 12 and offered five proposals to U.S. President Joe Biden. These proposals are based on AMLO’s in-depth knowledge of Mexican history and his reading of the economic crisis in the United States, which seems to be losing its edge as a global leader.

See article linked below for a description of the five proposals

Conclusion:

López Obrador has not only established himself as the political reference point for the Latin American left but has also been leading the process of integration in the south of the region through the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) summit and his diplomacy in Central America. He has managed to undermine the interventionist capacity of the United States without losing the friendly relationship with Mexico’s northern neighbor, as this official visit to the United States demonstrates. Besides this, Mexico has proposed solutions to inflation and the global ailments caused by the pandemic and the Ukraine war, encouraging its U.S. counterpart to follow Mexico’s political economy.

Latin America and the Caribbean are increasingly being seen as equals to the United States; are putting themselves on the front line in the battle for the sovereignty of countries such as Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela; and are backing progressive processes such as those in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, and Honduras. Likewise, López Obrador has put on the table a political subject that will be of paramount importance in U.S. domestic life: the rights of the Mexican and Latino migrant workers. AMLO has asked them to use their votes to monitor and shape the immigration legislative reforms in the United States and to ensure that the interests of the Global South are no longer ignored during policymaking in the West.

Read more here: https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/mexic ... -history/

[caltrek]

Mexico President to Bypass Congress to Keep Army in Streets
by Maria Verza
August 15, 2022

Introduction:

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico’s president has begun exploring plans to sidestep congress to hand formal control of the National Guard to the army, a move that could extend the military’s control over policing in a country with high levels of violence.

That has raised concerns because President Andrés Manuel López Obrador won approval for creating the force in 2019 by pledging in the constitution that it would be under nominal civilian control and that the army would be off the streets by 2024.

Neither the National Guard nor the military has been able to lower the insecurity in the country, however. This past week, drug cartels staged widespread arson and shooting attacks, terrifying civilians in three main northwest cities in a bold challenge to the state. On Saturday, authorities sent 300 army special forces and 50 National Guard members to the border city of Tijuana.

Still, López Obrador wants to keep soldiers involved in policing and remove civilian control over the National Guard, whose officers and commanders are mostly soldiers, with military training and pay grades.

But the president no longer has the votes in congress to amend the constitution and has suggested he may try to do it as a regulatory change with a simple majority in congress or by executive order and see if the courts will uphold that.

Read more here: https://www.latinorebels.com/2022/08/1 ... streets/

[caltrek]

In Mexico Resort Town, Squatters Make a Stand Against Developers
by Mark Stevenson
August 18, 2022

TULUM, Mexico (AP) — Unchecked development has hit this once laid-back beach town on Mexico’s Caribbean coast so hard that developers are now eager —even desperate— to build condominiums and hotels in a shantytown.

While police are trying to evict squatters so towering condos can be built next to wood and tarpaper shacks, residents are fighting back, saying they are tired of foreign investors excluding local people from their own coast.

In the latest clash on July 27, police accompanying a backhoe fired tear gas and tried to knock down some squatters’ homes in the shadow of a new, balconied condo building. The attempt ended when wind shifted the gas back onto officers, who retreated under a hail of rocks.

The contrast between rich and poor is stark. Gleaming white four-story condos with vaguely Mayan-sounding names and English slogans like “Live in the Luscious Jungle” and “An immersive spiritual experience” stand next to shacks made of poles, packing crates, tarps, and tin roofing.

On a coast where unchecked resort development has already closed most public access to beaches —there are only a few public access points on the 80-mile stretch known as the Riviera Maya— residents of the squatters’ camp may have reason to ask whether poorer Mexicans will be allowed here at all.

https://www.latinorebels.com/2022/08/18 ... squatters/

[weatheriscool]

Nicaraguan government takes over opposition newspaper headquarters
Source: Reuters

The Nicaraguan government took over the facilities of a long-standing newspaper critical of President Daniel Ortega to turn the space into a "cultural center," the newspaper said on Tuesday.

The paper "La Prensa," one of the oldest in the Western hemisphere, was occupied by Nicaraguan police forces last year and several of its executives detained. Since then, a team of reporters in exile have kept the site online from abroad.

"For several days, (the regime) has been carrying out construction and moving some of (La Prensa's) machinery and equipment," the paper said on its website.

"With these actions, the Ortega-Murillo regime completes the de facto confiscation of the assets of the industrial plant of Editorial La Prensa," it said.

Read more: https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/ ... 022-08-23/