The problem with Belize?

From Belize

A report called “Doing Business 2014” sponsored by the World Bank says that Belize ranks 106 out of 189 countries in terms of “how easy or difficult it is for a local entrepreneur to open and run a small to medium-size business when complying with relevant regulations.” This is two notches down from last year, below the regional average for Latin America and the Caribbean which is 100, and far below Mexico which ranks 53rd and Guatemala which ranks 79th.  

The problem with Belize?  Well, the study says that doing business in Belize is just plain difficult, from dealing with construction permits to registering property, to paying taxes, to getting electricity, it’s all just plain difficult in Belize.  In terms of ease of starting a business Belize is ranked 167th – which is way below the regional average; in terms of getting credit, Belize is ranked 130th, and in terms of protecting investors, Belize is ranked 138. 

Belize continues to make international headlines for all the wrong reasons as the country is losing ground to organized crime, drug trafficking and corruption. Authorities have recently uncovered criminal networks involved in the trafficking of illegal narcotics, counterfeit merchandise, timber, exotic animals, humans, and weapons. Corruption is on the rise with a number of scandals across different government ministries, several involving the illegal sale and distribution of Belizean nationality documents and passports to people from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, as well as the alleged misappropriation of government funds.

I didn't want to just pick on Guatemala.

Holocaust Memory and the Tests of Time: Sustainable Remembering of a Relentless Past (Video)

The University of Scranton posted the video of last week's lecture by Robert Kraft on Holocaust Memory and the Tests of Time: Sustainable Remembering of a Relentless Past. I helped sponsor the talk through the Education for Justice program that I oversee.

It was a terrific talk and well attended by students. Dr. Kraft is a cognitive psychologist and focused his talk on how trauma, namely suffering through and surviving the Holocaust, affects memory. While Kraft spoke about the holocaust, his insights are generalizeable, to a certain extent, to other traumatic episodes.

In what world are these businessmen living?

Some news stories apparently ripped from The Onion:

Guatemala among top global reformers in World Bank's Doing Business report

Leader Of The Year: Otto Perez Molina, President Of Guatemala “Committed to development”

Please tell me that I am wrong but I am under the impression that 2013 has been a major step back in Guatemala.

Freedom of the press has declined with cyberthreats and physical threats against El Periodico and its employees. At least four journalists have been murdered so far this year.

The criminalization of social protest has worsened with government officials and businessmen characterizing civil society leaders as terrorists and their struggle against injustice as terrorism. The Human Rights Defenders Protection Unit in Guatemala (UDEFEGUA) recorded 568 attacks against human rights defenders during the first eight months of 2013 compared to 305 in 2012. Twenty-two human rights defenders and four journalists have been killed so far this year. (See here, here, here, and here)

Freedom of expression and belief have come under attack. The offices of the Association for the Advancement of Social Sciences (AVANSCO) were burglarized in January shortly before it was scheduled to publish a report related to its work on the history of the police. The Central American Institute for Social Democracy Studies and the private office of the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression, Frank La Rue, were burglarized in July during which documents and computers were stolen.

The public prosecutor's office and the courts have shown improvement although much of that improvement has been overshadowed by the questionable decision by the Constitutional Court to overturn the Rios Montt verdict. Lawyers from abroad voiced concerns that the court's ruling had made more uncertain the role of the judiciary in the country which was not good for investors. The deaths of labor leaders have also caused concern for Guatemala's trade relations with Europe and the United States.

President Otto Perez Molina announced a two-year moratorium on mining concessions which ticked off the business community and didn't satisfy grassroots activists. The president has just sent in the army to secure five of the country's customs houses because of corruption and fraud.

And to top it all off, the president of the Bank of Guatemala (Banguat), Edgar Barquín, recently made a presentation to Congress on how the "Confidence Index of Guatemala fell from 80 to 36 percent in the last six months due to insecurity, social unrest and lack of legal certainty for investors."

In what world are these businessmen living?

For Guatemala's Rigoberta Menchú, votes aren’t everything

Rigoberta Menchu recently spoke with the Tico Times about her role in postwar Guatemala.

With two unsuccessful presidential campaigns under her belt, where she failed on both occasions to garner more than 3 percent of the national vote, it may seem like her work has fallen short of bettering the lives of Guatemala’s indigenous people. But her success may be larger than the polls suggest.

“I’ve really enjoyed the last two elections,” Menchú told The Tico Times in a recent conversation. “I haven’t reached 30 percent of the vote, but I’ve reached 95 percent of the country.”

In 2007, the Mayan activist became the first indigenous person to run for Guatemala’s top political post, and four years later she founded the country’s first Mayan political party, WINAQ.

“We were never interested in winning the elections. You can’t win without money, and no multimillionaire would support us,” she said.

Recounting an anecdote from her last campaign, she described addressing a rural town when an opposition party’s bus drove by announcing it was handing out packets of rice. Her audience disappeared.

“Elections here are a carnival, they’re not democratic. Parties use poverty, giving the poor hope by handing them food.”

Despite the irony that the majority of the people she campaigns for do not vote for her, Menchú said her political career has been a success.

“I’ve opened a door to Mayans and to women. Not only do we now have a party, but we also have one person in Congress,” she said, referring to Mayan lawyer Amílcar Pop.

But it’s not all politics.

I've been anti-candidate Menchu for awhile and remain so. While her name and personal story are sure to garner domestic and international media coverage, she's done little to build long-term support for a viable political project of the left or of the indigenous in Guatemala.

As long as the political left supports her for the presidency, they don't have much of a chance. The right aren't going to support her anyway but having her name in the news gives them the opportunity to send me photos of what they say is a photo of Menchu in guerrilla fatigues.

Some on the left tell of meeting her at cocktail parties in DC during the 1980s prior to her winning the Nobel Prize and give a different picture of her. Many on the Guatemalan left do not trust her because of her VP in the 2007 election, Luis Fernando Montenegro, a former president of Guatemala’s national coffee association (ANACAFE). He was neither indigenous nor a man of the people.

Then in 2011, the Frente Amplio de la Izquierda had more or less agreed on Yuri Melini as its presidential candidate and perhaps Walda Barrios as vice president. A few months before the election, however, in April, Menchu and Winaq said that they wanted to be part of the Frente Amplio but only if Rigoberta was its presidential candidate. And not only that, but Amilcar Pop of Winaq would have to head the national list for congress.

While there was hope that Menchu and Winaq would help the left in 2011, it looks like they set back the cause of the left. What they required to join the Frente Amplio caused all sorts of problems at the local level, all of them anticipated. They didn't seem to put the political project of the left ahead of their own personal ambitions.

Justin Bieber volunteers in Guatemala

Justin Bieber took some time off after a concert in Guatemala City to help Pencils of Promise - an organization dedicated to building schools for communities in need.

I know who he is but I couldn't name a single one of his songs. He sounds pretty sincere. It'll be great if the experience changes the young man and the people with whom he has recently come into contact with.

Agriculture, drugs and impunity in Guatemala

Green agriculture in Guatemala is excited about some of the conservation efforts in the Peten - it just seems so out of whack compared to the national story.

In The Globe and Mail, Campbell Clark writes that Guatemala ties drug policy to investment, security – and pragmatism. It might be the right policy but I'm still skeptical about President Perez Molina's support for decriminalization given that he (1) never mentioned drug reform during his mano dura campaign, (2) shocked those around him when he announced that Guatemala should consider decriminalization and only then sent his advisers to different think tanks to figure out what that meant, and (3) is relying on people, like Gustavo Herrera, that he once tied to drug trafficking to represent his administration on the selection of judges.

NISGUA says "No Impunity! No Amnesty!": Organizations react to news of CC ruling.Maybe it's just me, but I don't think that the law has anything to do with whether the Constitutional Court encourages a lower court to apply amnesty to Efrain Rios Montt or whether he actually returns to trial next year.The Court will find some reason, outlandish or not, to accomplish what they want politically. Obviously not the same but I keep thinking about John Roberts' opinion on the health care law that was found constitutional because levying penalties on those who don't purchase insurance could be considered a tax and thus was proper under the taxing clause.

Now this is the foreign meddling that the Guatemalan government supports - Peter Teffer looks at Unexpected love for the European Union... in Central America.

Finally, Mark Tran has Guatemala remembers conflict victims as new battles ignite over resources. In this article, he takes a look at earlier massacres in Rabinal northeast of the capital and recent conflict in Santa Cruz Barillas, Huehuetenango, northwest of the capital.

Stop human trafficking. Push for "safe harbor" laws.

The following is a post reproduced from Twitter friend and photographer John Sevigny. See more of his work at www.gonecity.blogspot.com.

Friends.

Imagine being kidnapped and forced into prostitution or drug sales.

For years.

Then imagine being "rescued" by law enforcement only to be prosecuted for prostitution and drug sales and possibly sent to prison.

For years. Imagine having that happen to your child, sister, nephew or grandchild.

It's something perhaps hundreds of thousands of victims of human trafficking face in states where there are no "safe harbor" laws to protect those who should be treated as victims, not criminals.

My personal experience with this problem is isolated to Central America, where I have known many young men and women who have gone to prison for refusing to testify against gang members and other people against whom they were justifiably afraid to testify. In fact, a 24-year-old friend in San Salvador has recently -- under pressure from a gang as well as prosecutors -- pleaded guilty to drug possession charges. The catch? She was forced to sell drugs. She is awaiting a sentence of up to eight years, a sentence which will make her young daughter an orphan.

There's nothing I can do for my friend in Central America. But we can do better in the States than they do in El Salvador. Once upon a time we enacted tough laws against domestic violence. They have helped. This time around, we need to protect a different kind of victim.

Today I'm using this blog, as well as social media accounts, to ask you to sign this petition by the Polaris Project to push state lawmakers to enact safe harbor laws.

I want to ask you for three favors.

First, sign this petition.

Second, post the petition to Facebook or on Twitter.

Third, consider giving a donation to Polaris Project, a straight-up organization tackling what is becoming an all-too-frequent 21st Century form of injustice all over the world.

Let's start in the States and hope that the example we set spreads to other countries.

Keep watching this blog. I'll be spreading to word about human trafficking issues all week.

Thanks for your hope, faith, and most importantly, your action.

JS

41,000 Guatemalans deported so far in 2013

The US recently surpassed last year's record number of deportations to Guatemalans when three planes landed at Aurora airport in Guatemala City. As of mid-October, the US had deported 40,938 undocumented individuals to Guatemala. In all of 2012, they had "only" deported 40,647.

Here's the story of one dangerous dairy farmer who is helping the US race towards 50k deportations of Guatemalans.

Lopez-Juarez only reached the third grade of school in Guatemala and had few opportunities to find work, Randi Bianco said. His parents and five siblings work as field hands.

In Cayuga County, Lopez-Juarez worked at his cousin's dairy farm in Auburn, documents say. That gave him enough money to send $500 a month to his family in Guatemala and $150 a month in child support for his two teenage daughters in California.

Now one would have to know about his misdemeanor battery charge from 1998, but this doesn't look like an example of immigration authorities focusing on keeping America safe.

The good news appears to be that the US won't increase the number of Guatemalans deported in 2014. According to a Guatemalan immigration officials, the US just doesn't have enough resources to increase deportations any faster than it is doing today.

Media myths about the Sandinistas and Reagan

Tom Ricker has a good post on 5 Ongoing Media Myths about Nicaragua and Reagan that is worth reading in its entirety. Here are his five myths:

The FSLN and the revolution are one and the same

Nicaragua was governed by a Marxist totalitarian regime during the 1980s

The context of the Contra War is irrelevant to discussing alleged violations of civil liberties

He said/they said

Activists may have been well meaning, but were naïve

I'm not sure that the FSLN had any intention of sharing power with any other actor following the July revolution. Following the October 1979 coup in El Salvador, the moderates resigned from the junta believing that either the government was not in charge of the military or that it was ordering the military to continue its repressive policies. In Nicaragua, the moderate (non-Sandinista) members of the junta resigned when it was clear that the new government was to pursue the interests of the FSLN and not necessarily all those who supported Somoza's overthrow. The FSLN alienated progressive, but non-Sandinistas, early on. They alienated some of their international supporters, like Costa Rica, for criticizing their system of governance and dependence on the US while minimizing the role that they played in the revolution.

The Soviets provided some sophisticated weapons to the FSLN to defend the revolution and I'm pretty sure that it was earlier than the mid-1980s. I did find it interesting though that the post omitted any mention of Cuba. Yes, the US was concerned that Nicaragua would give the Soviets a foothold in Central America. Cuba was already in the Soviet camp. The Sandinistas' non-aligned foreign policy was clearly more aligned with the Soviets than with the US or the non-aligned movement of the time. Between 1979 and 1981, maybe even 1982 in the case of El Salvador, it was unclear whether the Salvadoran and Guatemalan governments would collapse to revolutionary pressure.

US-Sandinista relations probably would have deteriorated anyway but the proximate cause was Nicaragua's funneling of weapons to the FMLN in El Salvador. The US told the Sandinista leadership that it would not try to destabilize its revolution as long as it did not try to export it to other countries. It warned the Sandinistas that they would not look kindly upon arms transfer to the Sandinista. The Sandinista leadership did not believe the US. Why should they have?  They also felt that they needed to support the FMLN because of all the assistance that it had provided to them during late 1970s. The FMLN sent millions of dollars to the Sandinistas and hundreds of guerrillas to fight in the revolution.

But overall I pretty much agree with Ricker's main points.

Peace accords on the verge of collapse?

Government and rebel representatives signed a United Nations supported peace accord ending over a decade of civil war in 1992. The conflict was fueled primarily by local injustices but it also had all the flavors of a Cold War conflict with the US, Soviets and others providing political, economic, and military support to the war's participants.

Unfortunately, after well over a decade of relative peace and economic growth, the rebels and the government have engaged in a series of back and forth moves that threaten one of the most successful examples of negotiated settlements to civil wars of the twentieth century.

Here's the story:

Mozambique has been a country on the rise in recent years. In 1992, it concluded 17 years of civil war with the Rome General Peace Accords. And after a period of dependence on international aid, its economy has begun to come into its own, as the country has attracted energy companies from around the world to develop untapped oil and coal resources. The Mozambican economy was projected to grow 7 percent this year, but progress may be derailed if the country lapses back into violence.

That seems more likely today than at any other point since the Rome Accords were signed 15 years ago. On Monday, Mozambican government forces raided the headquarters of the opposition movement, Renamo, forcing the organization's leader, Afonso Dhlakama, to flee. The organization then announced its withdrawal from the 1992 accords, and on Tuesday staged an attack on a police station in the town of Maringue (no casualties were reported). It's not the first time Renamo has clashed with the government, which since 1992 has been headed by its civil war rival, the Frelimo party -- Renamo skirmished with government forces earlier this year in April and June. But the withdrawal from the Rome Accords is a significant move, marking the end of one of Africa's most successful peace treaties and the culmination of a five-year drift towards violence.

The accord's success can largely be attributed to the country's aid dependency and a working relationship between the leaders of Frelimo and Renamo, Carrie Manning, a professor at Georgia State University who has written extensively on Mozambican politics, explained to FP by email. Initially, she writes, "both Renamo and Frelimo needed the ongoing support of international donors, who had a large part in overseeing the peace process and worked effectively to provide good offices and financial contributions to help overcome stumbling blocks in the process." In the event of tension, Renamo could turn to stakeholders abroad. "it was a kind of second court of public opinion to which Renamo especially could appeal," says Manning.

And Barbara Walter has a nice short post on The Four Things We Know About How Civil Wars End (and What This Tells Us About Syria).

Amnesty to cover Guatemala's Rios Montt?

There are still a lot of unknowns at this point, but it looks like the Constitutional Court in Guatemala has opened the door to a ruling that would prevent the re-prosecution of former dictator and one-time convicted génocidaire, Efrain Rios Montt, under the country's 1986 amnesty law.

The decision suggests the case against the retired general be dropped on the basis of a amnesty proclaimed in 1986 by Guatemala's then-military regime, La Prensa Libre daily said Wednesday on its Web site.

The CC, according to the newspaper, ordered trial Judge Carol Patricia Flores to rule on defense lawyers' motion for a dismissal of the charges against the 87-year-old defendant, who presided over one of the bloodiest phases of the nation's 1960-1996 civil war.

In January 2012, a pre-trial judge rejected amnesty claims. In June 2013, the Supreme Court rejected a motion to stop a retrial on the basis that the amnesty law should apply to Rios Montt. Almost an eternity ago as well, August 2013, the Constitutional Court ruled that the amnesty did not extend to charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.

However, the new ruling, which has not yet been made public, leans towards accepting that the amnesty covers army and guerrilla forces for any and all crimes committed - a blanket amnesty. It looks like Judge Carol Patricia Flores now has to decide whether the amnesty applies to charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. Prior to the Constitutional Court's overturning of the May guilty verdict and the sending of the trial back to April 19th, Judge Flores had tried to send the trial all the way back to the beginning.

This doesn't look promising. It doesn't matter how tortured its legal reasoning is going to look. The Constitutional Court seems intent on ensuring that Rios Montt and other human rights violators are never held accountable.

One month before elections in Honduras

Several good posts on the upcoming elections in Honduras.

Hermano Juancito writes about the breakdown of the two-party system

RAJ talks about the newest poll that has the Partido Nacional's Juan Orlando Hernández ahead of Xiomara Castro de Zelaya for the first time. I'm not sure that we can say anything more than the race is a toss up right now and that Hernández has all the advantages of an incumbent and more.

Seth Robbins takes a look at Honduras vote: More parties, new politics? with the Christian Science Monitor. Seth looks at some of the challenges facing the new Libre party.

Finally, Alex Main looks at the political violence leading up to this year's elections. People affiliated with a number of the political parties have been killed since mid-2012. However, the majority of those killed were linked to the Libre party.

Holocaust Memory and the Tests of Time: Sustainable Remembering of a Relentless Past

Education for Justice is hosting Dr. Robert Kraft of Otterbein University for a talk on Wednesday, October 23rd, on “Holocaust Memory and the Tests of Time: Sustainable Remembering of a Relentless Past.” Dr. Kraft is a cognitive psychology professor Robert N. Kraft, Ph.D. The lecture is 6:30 p.m. in Brennan 228.

Beginning in the late 1970s, Holocaust archives began videotaping the oral testimony of Holocaust survivors. Housed in these archives are uniquely authored accounts of traumatic memory: thousands of hours of unconstrained recall from individuals who lived through extended atrocity. These archives then document the recall of personal experiences in the context of larger historical events.

As a psychologist, Dr. Kraft studies oral testimony of Holocaust survivors to understand memory for atrocity and its aftermath and to characterize the persistent influence of such memory on the lives of the survivors. Unlike the topographic summaries of trauma in large correlational studies or the distant approximations in the laboratory, qualitative study of Holocaust testimony discloses what resides within each person: the phenomenology of the tormented.

One goal of this research is to generalize the findings on the psychology of Holocaust survivors to other groups of people, including the survivors of widespread atrocities in Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, and Guatemala. Drawing on close observation of more than 130 Holocaust testimonies at the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale University, this presentation outlines how atrocity is remembered, how it shapes the lives of the survivors, and how it is communicated to others.  

Dr. Kraft's talk is part of our year-long theme tacking "Sustainable Memory." The Education for Justice Office promotes justice throughout the University community through various programs, lectures and activities. The office intends to educate students on the importance of justice, so they may act ethically when faced with justice themes in the future. For additional information, visit our website.

Please join us if you can.

How about some recent news from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Colombia?

The Pan-American Post has some really interesting updates on developments in the Americas today.

In the first one, Salvadoran Catholic Church Refuses to Turn Over Archives to Officials. It's a really troubling situation in El Salvador. However, I love the idea of creating a new organization to oversee the records and have it named after deceased Tutela Legal director Maria Julia Hernandez. I'd also say that this is another example that it is not just the perpetrators of human rights violations who are afraid of opening up the wounds of the civil war. Obviously, these are wounds that have never closed for many people.

There's also another post on Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos recognizing that his original timeline for negotiations with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) was too optimistic. The URNG and the Guatemalan Government met on and off for nearly a decade before negotiations picked up in 1994. It took the Serranazo and tremendous pressure by local and international actors to bring the negotiations to fruition.

And in El Salvador, the FMLN and Duarte administration negotiated in the mid-1980s under the guidance of the Catholic Church. Those negotiations didn't get too far. They picked up once again following Alfredo Cristiani's 1989 election. However, the FMLN's disappointment with the pace of negotiations contributed to its November 1989 offensive which led the military high command to go after and kill pro-democracy and pro-negotiation civilians, including the Jesuits at the UCA.

A military stalemate, the discrediting of the government and military, tremendous pressure by the Catholic Church in the US, President Bush's 1988 victory and the end of the Cold War still didn't bring about a quick end to the Salvadoran civil war. The UN was brought in the help mediate the peace and it was only then, after eighteen more months, that all sides were able to hash out the Chapultepec Accords.

And I thought that I had seen a recent poll related to next year's presidential elections in El Salvador but now I can't find it. It was probably another close call. At this point, I'm wondering if the FMLN is wondering whether they should have put Oscar Ortiz at the front of the ticket. Probably not the leadership whose private internal polls that will never be shared probably have them winning in the first round. The FMLN has no one else to blame but themselves if they lose next year and allow ARENA to return to the presidency.

One step forward and two steps back for Guatemalan media

Two employees of Exploraciones Mineras de Guatemala, S.A. (EXMINGUA), the Guatemalan subsidiary of Nevada-based mining company Kappes, Casssiday & Associates (KCA), were convicted and sentenced to two years in prison for “threats and coercion” against independent journalists reporting on local resistance to a U.S.-owned gold mine during a November 2012 protest. The men can buy their way out of prison by paying $3 per day of their sentence.

Last week's sentencing follows an early October sentence of six months handed down against the ex-minister of Culture and Sports, Jerónimo Lancerio, for threatening journalist Sofía Menchú last March 7th.

These two sentences are important steps by the Guatemalan justice system to protect the growth of a free and independent media. However, Guatemala remains a dangerous place to practice journalism.

On Saturday night, Karina Rottman's bodyguard was shot and killed by two unknown gunmen. Rottman is the head of Guatemala's VEA Canal cable TV channel.

VEA Canal is noted for its analysis and criticism programs generally oriented against the administration of Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina.

The channel allocates TV time to opposition, mainly leftist, leaders, who issue their commentary and critiques of the government.

Apparently, this was the second attacks against Rottman's security detail in the last few weeks.

Two weeks ago, after meeting with Treasury officials in a capital restaurant, two of her bodyguards were beaten up by unknown attackers, she said, demanding that the authorities investigate and clear up the attacks.

There have been more than 80 attacks and threats against journalists in Guatemala so far this year. As I wrote in March, President Otto Perez Molina must do more to protect journalists and a free and independent media in Guatemala if he wants to improve the country's international reputation and gain access to greater international funding like a compact from the Millennium Challenge Corporation. Obviously, it is not all the president but one has to start somewhere.

"Identifying Nelson"

An estimated 800 children were disappeared during the civil war in El Salvador, mostly by the country's military. Often after making their way into an orphanage in the capital, some children appear to have been raised in El Salvador while others were sold into shady international adoption networks and ended up in the US and Europe.

Identifying Nelson tells the story of one two-year old who was taken from his parents after they were killed in a government operation in Tegucigalpa, Honduras in 1982. 

Titled "Identifying Nelson," the film follows de Witt on his 15-year journey toward understanding his past and his birth-country's history. He builds relationships with members of his biological family, meets the El Salvadoran president Mauricio Funes, and interviews other “disappeared” children.

In one of the opening sequences, a grainy newspaper photo appears on the screen, taken after Honduran authorities conducted the raid that killed de Witt's mother. In the arms of a woman wearing military fatigues, a two-year-old de Witt stares down the lens. "I am Nelson de Witt. I am Roberto Coto," de Witt narrates. "I am one of the disappeared children of El Salvador."

You can buy the book or learn more about the film and its fundraising campaign at Identifying Nelson.

Academic failure of 3.6 million students in Central America

Lorena Baires talks about some of the ways that the various Central American states are working to turn around their failing educational systems.

In Honduras

Students, teachers, administrative personnel and community leaders are learning strategies focused on prevention, protection and assistance in cases of violence.

In the area of prevention, educational materials have been developed on humanitarian principles and values. To ensure protection, risks are evaluated and security measures are implemented at each school. In terms of providing assistance, training is provided in first aid and urgent emotional care.

And in El Salvador

To support the threatened students, the PNC in 2010 introduced the School Police Program, which assigns pairs of officers to schools to provide psychological care, give preventive talks to students in problematic situations and offer sports classes.

Last year, the National Sports Institute (INDES) provided training to 400 police officers to help them give guidance to students in 300 public schools through sports, according to Inspector Blanca Lidia Figueroa, the head of the PNC’s Youth and Family Services Division.

The officers work with schools and provide a one-hour class to about 40 students. Through sports, officers seek to strengthen values such as solidarity, companionship, honesty, respect and tolerance. At the end of the activity, students are asked to provide a summary of what they learned.

Say it ain't so - Corruption in the Saca administration?

I haven't been following the corruption scandal that closely but I wonder if Senator Leahy's threats are starting to pay off. The investigation in wrongdoing during the Saca administration, the recent arrests of members of the Texis cartel, and the possible investigation into former President Francisco Flores might have bought El Salvador some good will.

It was no secret to most Salvadorans while construction was under way on the Diego de Holguín that large sums of money were disappearing into politicians’ and businessmen’s pockets given the constant and numerous irregularities in the project: inexplicable changes in the highway’s route; sudden, lengthy pauses in construction; illegal tree-cutting; and multiple lawsuits. However, it was not until 2010 that the parameters of this elaborate corruption scheme began to be outlined in a suit submitted to the attorney general’s office by the new Minister of Public Works, Gerson Martínez. Martínez, a founder of the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) party, came to office under President Mauricio Funes’ administration in 2009, becoming the first non- right wing government in El Salvador’s history. .

In large part, Funes’ electoral victory can be attributed to earnest campaign promises to increase governmental transparency and on his tough-on-corruption stance. Martínez took this message to heart and ran with it upon entering office, initiating the most well documented corruption investigation in recent Salvadoran history involving some of the country’s biggest players. To date,18 people, among them former ministers, vice-ministers, government functionaries, and high-profile businessmen, have been charged in a move that illuminates just whose interests the various political parties running for office in the February 2014 elections have at heart.

Go read the whole thing. I can honestly say that many of us were expecting more investigations / arrests like these over the last four plus years.

Review of Elana Zilberg's Spaces of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis...

I recently had a review of Elana Zilberg's Spaces of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis Between Los Angeles and San Salvador published in The Latin Americanist. In her book, Zilberg explains how the MS-13 and the 18th Street gangs became the objects of local, national, and international concern, eventually coming to symbolize the “gang crime-terrorism continuum” following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States.

Zilberg argues that gang abatement strategies adopted in the United States during the 1990s that emphasized mass incarceration and increased deportation contributed to escalating gang violence in both the United States and El Salvador. These policies have actively promoted transnational linkages between gangs that had not existed prior to the strong fist approach. Following the 1992 Los Angeles riots, thousands of young men and women who had been raised in the United States were forcibly repatriated to El Salvador, a country with which they were barely familiar. They were sent back to a government which saw most, if not all of them, as criminal deportees who were a threat to society.

El Salvador was just emerging from a bloody civil war where their return would “combine with the flourishing of organized crime, the incomplete disarmament of a highly militarized society, the reemergence of the extralegal social cleansing practices of the death squads of the 1980s, the uneven progress of police and of judicial reforms, and finally, the adaptation of the zero-tolerance abatement strategies used in the United States. Together these elements would provide fertile ground for the reproduction and articulation of the patterns of violence of both El Salvador and the United States” (152).

It's a good book and I recommend it.

Celebrate "Day of the Student" by giving students the day off

Marco Caceres has a post on Honduras: My Country Tis of Thee at The Huffington Post that looks at his country's failures. I won't post them all but here is a sampling:

Honduras: The country where nearly 60 percent of its people are poor but there is still enough money to produce 215 millionaires.

Honduras: The country that allows foreign mining companies to poison its rivers, streams and creeks with arsenic, cyanide and mercury in exchange for a few jobs and a little tax revenue.

Honduras: The country that celebrates the "Day of the Student" by giving students the day off.

Honduras: The country that accounts for about 17 percent of the people in Central America, but about 60 percent of all the AIDS cases in the region.

Honduras: The country where presidents of companies have their photos taken for the newspapers for paying their taxes.

Honduras: The country where more than 90 percent of the street children resist hunger by inhaling shoe glue.

Honduras: The country that threatens its doctors for striking because they have not been paid for months, but then proceeds to declare a work holiday for winning a soccer match.

To be fair, I'm pretty sure that we could do this for most countries. However, it does remind me of a conversation that I had with former guerrilla Cesar Montes in Guatemala this summer. He said that Guatemala is a country contradictions.

It has a Nobel Laureate for Literature, Miguel Angel Asturias, but a population that cannot read.

It has a Nobel Laureate for Peace, Rigoberta Menchu, and a former president on trial for genocide, Efrain Rios Montt.

There were a few more but I honestly can't remember them and, unfortunately, this was before our interview actually started so I don't have the transcripts.

Debt and El Salvador

The Jubilee Debt Campaign recently released a report on nine countries currently suffering debt crises. El Salvador is one of the nine included in their study..

The global financial crisis hit El Salvador hard. Exports dropped, food and energy prices rose and remittances fell – from 20% to 17% of GDP – as El Salvadoran workers in the US were laid off. As a result of higher unemployment and increased food and medicine costs, poverty levels increased too. More than 40% of the population live below the poverty line. Yet the government spent $970 million in 2011 (24% of government revenue) on paying foreign debts, most of which were inherited from the vicious junta of the 1980s.

According to the report, government external debt stands at $6.5 billion (28% of GDP) and private external debt at $4 billion (17% of GDP). As a result, the government is responsible for external annual debt payments of $970 million (24% of revenue, 15% of exports).

The report looks a little partisan to me but I prefer reports that slant in favor of the poor and justice rather than those that slant against the poor and for injustice.

Foreign NGO's in Guatemala

Some environmental-related news from around the region:

Voices from El Salvador writes on Popular Struggle for Food Security in El Salvador, specifically the Bajo Lempa region.

National Geographic has a special on Protecting El Salvador’s Largest Wetland From the Bottom Up which looks at turtles.

Kelsey Alford-Jones of the Guatemala Human Rights Commission/USA (GHRC) brings us up-to-date in Conflict Over Proposed Dam Flares Up in Guatemala.

After a trip outside Coban, Alta Verapaz, Mark Tran writes Trouble brewing in Guatemala's coffee and cardamom fields for The Guardian.Those small-scale farmers involved in the export of coffee and cardamon are suffering due to the effects of the international market, rust, and perhaps climate change while those farming for their own consumption are getting by. I hadn't come across the food security / food sovereignty distinction before so I though that I would highlight it here.

Unlike food security – defined as ensuring people have enough to eat – food sovereignty focuses on power and control of land, water and seeds. Ojom has not heard of food sovereignty, but that is what she is practising. 

The first article from Voices from El Salvador also speaks of food sovereignty.

Here's another article on Locals help protect Guatemala's rare forests.

Finally, Anna-Claire Bevan put together an article on Seres: Reshaping Guatemala’s development paradigm. I noted on Twitter that, according to the story, Guatemala hosts more foreign NGOs than any other country in Central America (this does contribute to why the government wants to kick out some foreigners).

Seres: Reshaping Guatemala’s development paradigm; Guatemala hosts more foreign NGOs than any other country in CentAm http://t.co/PMUo72Vyfu
— Mike Allison (@CentAmPolMike) October 14, 2013

A friend asked whether that was a good thing and whether the boom in international NGOs was brought on by the end of the war. It's not necessarily my area but here are some thoughts. Guatemala has more international NGOs than other countries in Central America for several reasons.

First, its population. Guatemala has a larger population than the other countries of Central America so it is not surprising that a larger number of international NGOs have been set up. Guatemala is also closer to the US than other Central American countries, but I can't say that's an important driver.

Second, its needs are great. I wouldn't say that its peoples' needs are greater than those of Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador, but they're up there. Human rights and women's rights come to mind. Chronic malnutrition, poverty, and inequality. The effects of climate change. You name it, there's a need. One thing that is missing, I think, are organizations committed to promoted reconciliation across the different parties involved in the civil war. I get the feeling that these types of organizations are much more numerous in other countries emerging from civil wars.

Third, history. The US aborted-democratic revolution ending in 1954 provides a powerful allure for people to recognize Guatemala. The thirty-six year war contributes as well. Fourth, keeping with the allure angle, are its people. Guatemala has one of the largest indigenous populations in the Americas and that is a powerful attraction. I'll add in as well that, it is a beautiful country. Nothing against the other Central American countries, but Guatemala comes out ahead here except if you are looking for nice, white sandy beaches. Panajachel and Antigua are two great places to set up international NGOs and to recruit people.

Fifth, the state. Here it comes from several angles. There is the historically repressive nature of the Guatemalan state that has led people from around the world to travel to there to help. The repression is still there and it does drive people to come and help. Simultaneously, there is the absence of the state. The state just isn't present in many communities, which might be a good thing at times. That also leads to international NGO's to step in and fill the void. There's also the state's role in promoting indigenous tourism. For the last 100 years or so, the Guatemalan government has showcased its indigenous people in order to drive tourism.

There are several other reasons but I'll stop here. What would you add?

Nicaraguans pray that US avoids default

Since Daniel Ortega's election to the Nicaraguan presidency in 2006, the country and he personally, perhaps, have become increasingly dependent upon their relationship with Venezuela. However, they are starting to feel the pinch that many feared might follow Hugo Chavez's death.

During the first half of 2013, Nicaragua received $314 million from Venezuela through a variety of programs, including loans, direct transfers, and foreign direct investment. The intake was over 4 percent less than during the same period of 2012. Venezuela's foreign direct investment in Nicaragua also fell 40 percent. The Nicaraguan government has als decided to pick up a $65 million tab to continue to deliver $30 "bonuses" each month to 150,000 public employees that will no longer be coming from Venezuela..

And it's not just money flowing from Venezuela to Nicaragua that has taken a hit. Venezuelan imports from Nicaragua also decreased 6 percent. The Nicaraguan government, businesses, and citizens are going to take a hit.

Even with increasingly relations between Nicaragua and Venezuela, the US remains Nicaragua's main trading partner. A slowdown in trade with Venezuela would probably hurt but could be overcome. However, a slowdown in the US economy coupled with reduced economic cooperation with Venezuela is going to be tough to overcome.

In a report issued in April last year, non-governmental Nicaraguan Foundation for Economic and Social Development (Funides) projected that the country's economy would grow by 4.5% in 2013.

However, that body also made calculations based on a less optimistic "alternative scenario," taking into account the crisis in the United States, the main destination of Nicaraguan exports, and uncertainties regarding Venezuelan aid.

Such "alternative scenario" estimates that if the US grows 0.5% less than last year, then Nicaraguan exports to the US would drop between 10% and 20%; and if Venezuela stops allocating USD 300 million to Nicaragua, then the growth rate would drop by 2.5% in 2013-2015.

Not catastrophic, but not good. And the consequences will not just be felt economically. Germany's Konrad-Adenauer Foundation recently released it annual Democratic Development Index in which Nicaragua, among others, marked democratic gains "largely for improving the economic welfare of their citizens."

In addition to the economic effects of a slowdown in the US and decreasing support from Venezuela, Ortega is likely to confront growing criticism for his weakening of democratic institutions and processes in Nicaragua.

The Constitutional Chamber strikes again

The Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice in El Salvador continues to demonstrate its independence as it just declared unconstitutional the Legislative Assembly's 2012 selection of Salomón Padilla as president of the Supreme Court.

Padilla had been chosen president as part of the political solution to the 2012 crisis when El Salvador had two courts claiming to be supreme. However, the Constitutional Chamber today ruled that Padilla should not have been elected because of his previous FMLN political affiliation.

I imagine this is going to cause some complications because some of what the FMLN agreed to in August 2012 was with the knowledge that Padilla would be the CSJ's president. Now the Constitutional Chamber has ruled that that cannot be the case.

Padilla had said that he would accept the Court's ruling prior to it being known. We'll see what happens now.

The myth of the squeaky-clean US

I have a new post up at Al Jazeera on the US media's recent coverage of the immigration trial of Jorge Vinicio Sosa Orantes in California. Sosa was only facing immigration violations, but the violations stem from his lying about his role in the Guatemalan military and the massacre at Dos Erres. Unfortunately, nearly all the domestic coverage left out the context and/or the role of the US in the Guatemalan civil war. Given the 1998 and 1999 truth commission reports, Bill Clinton's apology, several other immigration and extradition trials, and this year's Efrain Rios Montt trial in Guatemala, it's inexcusable that the media has done such a poor job linking this trial to historical and contemporary events.

I fully support the efforts of the US' Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Unit and other agencies pursuing human rights violators living in the US. But the US comes out looking way too clean in these articles - portrayed as vigorously pursuing a bad guy who committed dastardly deeds and then dared to seek refuge in the US. This is not entirely accurate.

By its omissions and lack of context, the US media is failing to tell the story of the Guatemalan civil war in a responsible, just way. That's not just unfair to the victims and survivors of the war: it's also dangerous.

Not everyone will agree about US support for the Guatemala military and its government during the war, or US support for prosecuting human rights violators in the postwar period, but you just can't omit those issues from the coverage.

Human rights stories out of El Salvador

Two El Salvador-related pieces to keep you busy this beautiful Sunday morning.

In the first, Nina Lakhani looks at the closing of Tutela Legal in El Salvador shutters historic rights clinic for Al Jazeera.

Since then, the Archbishop's Human Rights and Legal Aid Office, known as Tutela Legal since 1982, has documented more than 50,000 cases of human rights abuses - before, during and after the civil war which ended in 1992. It holds the most comprehensive archive of El Salvador's bloody history and its lawyers continue to represent survivors of notorious massacres including El Mozote and Rio Sumpul.

End of an era

On September 30 the staff arrived at work to find the locks changed and armed guards on the doors. They were allowed 10 minutes to clear their desks chaperoned by the security guards.

The current Archbishop, José Luis Escobar Alas, had closed Tutela Legal and issued a statement saying its work was "no longer relevant". Two days later Escobar Alas said it was a normal part of restructuring and modernisation and a more relevant organisation would open in due course.

The closure triggered national and international condemnation from faith, human rights and solidarity groups, with large protests outside the Archdiocese. The biggest concern is about the safety and preservation of the huge paper archive without which any future legal action against perpetrators, who have enjoyed full impunity until now, could prove impossible.

Should change libertarian theology to liberation theology although Romero's liberation theology appears to be somewhat distinct from the region's liberation theologians.

The second story is by Sarah WhitesKoditschek on Catching Up With The Past: Justice For The Jesuit Murders In El Salvador and is up at The Huffington Post.

Montano is one of an estimated 1,000 human rights violators living in the United States. Most enter the country with tourist visas and, like Montano, take advantage of benefits intended for refugees. Porous vetting processes -- at the State Department, Immigration and Naturalization Services, and later the Department of Homeland Security -- have facilitated their entry.

“I think if you look over time, there's clearly a pattern of military and police personnel from countries that we have long been strong allies with, especially during the Cold War, seeking refuge or simply a home in the United States,” said Kate Doyle of the National Security Archives in Washington D.C.

I'd just add that Spain seeks the extradition of the military officers responsible for the murders of the Jesuits because five of them were born in Spain. Temporary Protected Status also was extended to Salvadoran nationals because of earthquakes, not the civil war.  

US is still fighting the Cold War with Nicaragua

Writing at The Huffington Post, Nikolas Kozloff takes on the New York Times' coverage of Bill de Blasio, the Democratic candidate in New York's mayoral race, and his ties with the Sandinistas.

Perversely, New York's media is again debating the Sandinista Revolution and the tumultuous Contra War in Nicaragua. Just why has the media suddenly taken such a keen interest in Central America, a region it has for the most part ignored over the past 30 years? For local media to break away from its normally parochial coverage and actually run stories about foreign policy, let alone Nicaragua, is unusual. What makes the recent flurry over the Sandinistas surprising is that debate has centered upon the political activism of Bill de Blasio, the Democratic candidate in New York's mayoral race.

If it were not for the New York Times, which ran a long investigative piece on de Blasio's political organizing in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it is perhaps unlikely that the media establishment would have latched onto Nicaragua, and few would have revisited the Sandinista Revolution at all. Yet the Times piece, which treats de Blasio's activism in a rather unflattering and condescending light, has led to a media firestorm and added an unusual foreign policy dimension to the New York City mayoral race.

As I mentioned before, I thought that the coverage was pretty good. However, it was lacking a bit because de Blasio hadn't really spoken in detail about his time in Nicaragua or how his thinking has changed or remained the same since. I also read a number of terrible right-wing delusional attacks against the NYT piece that probably made me think that it was actually better than it was.

I don't mean to take a middle ground but the Sandinistas were probably worse than what many of their supporters remember (look at their treatment of Miskito Indians) but not as bad as what some critics have and continue to allege (Totalitarian? Seriously?). The Contras committed numerous atrocities but the motivations of many of them were sincere (land taken by the Sandinistas, increasingly hostile relationship towards the Church).

I don't support what the US did in Nicaragua during the 1980s or maybe it's just better to say that it wasn't my preferred policy. Reagan could have done more to support human rights and democracy while still supporting pro-democratic and anti-communist forces in the region. It was an either/or policy choice.

However, I am always torn by the fact that I am happy that the US, democracy and capitalism won the Cold War over the Soviet Union and Marxism-Leninism. But was the defeat of the Sandinistas really necessary to accomplish that outcome?

Arrests in high-profile crimes in Guatemala

On September 7th-8th, gunmen opened fire on the people of San Jose Nacahuil outside Guatemala City. Eleven people died in the attack. At first, authorities suspected that youth who were denied alcohol or young gang members were involved in the massacre. Community representatives said that the police might have been involved as a patrol car had passed through approximately one hour prior to the shootings. Days later, other Guatemalans and internationalistas said that the shootings might have been related to the community's opposition to mining and that we should not swallow the authorities' version of the events hook, line, and sinker.

Well, on Tuesday, Guatemalan authorities arrested eight suspected gang members, perhaps nine, thought to be members of the "Crazy Rich" cell of the 18th Street Gang for the murders. They are still searching for four more suspects. Apparently the Crazy Rich cell operates in the area and authorities still suspect that the shootings took place because the bar's owner refused to pay protection money. According to investigators, the gang's leaders housed in a Zone 18 prison ordered the gang to kill those who were behind on or outright refused to pay extortion money. They sprayed the area with bullets to send a message to the entire population.

It's still possible that political motivations were behind the killings, gangs have been known to carry out contract killings, but for now it appears that the motivation was financial. The police car that had passed through San Jose Nacahuil was not involved in the killings as the car was in Zone 6 at the time of the shooting according to its GPS.

Tuesday's arrests follow last Friday's arrest of Eduardo Villatoro Cano by Mexican authorities. "Guayo Cano" is the alleged head of a drug trafficking ring accused of massacring eight policemen in Salcaja, Quetzaltenango this summer.

On Thursday morning, Guatemalan authorities rescued forty-two victims of trafficking, including thirty-seven minors. Two men were arrested for enticing the victims, mostly women, to travel to the capital for work and then forcing them to work from 6 am until 11 pm in tortilla and grocery stores.

Guatemala remains a country with too much crime and too many violent deaths. After three straight years of decreases in the homicide rate, the rate might increase slightly in 2013. Much depends on the last three months of the year.

However, the work of CIGIG, Claudia Paz y Paz, Yasmin Barrios, and countless other people, Guatemalan and foreign, have done a very good job of turning around public security institutions in the last six years or so. Their record is not perfect but there is no doubt that there are more police, prosecutors, and judges who are capable of pursuing and exacting justice in 2013 Guatemala. These high-profile arrests are evidence of their success.

Should Paz y Paz win the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, she surely deserves it. So do most others who are nominated. However, it would also be a recognition of the hard, dangerous work carried out by thousands of Guatemalans in some of the worst conditions in the Western Hemisphere.

A changing of the miners in El Salvador

Doesn't seem like a good trade if Pacific Rim were actually a real company with the potential to make millions in El Salvador.

OceanaGold Corp has agreed to acquire all the shares in Canadian gold miner Pacific Rim Mining Corp that it doesn't already own in a deal valued at $C10.2 million ($A10.43 million).

...

For OceanaGold, the proposed acquisition would give it control of Pacific Rim's El Dorado Gold Project in El Salvador, a high grade gold-silver resource yet to be developed.

"This transaction will provide OceanaGold shareholders with potential exposure to a high grade gold-silver resource located in a very prospective region," OceanaGold managing director Mick Wilkes said in a statement.

OceanaGold currently owns just under 20 per cent of Pacific Rim. As part of the agreement, OceanaGold will advance Pacific Rim as much as $US1 million ($A1.06 million) for working capital at a 10 per cent interest rate.

The agreement has been unanimously approved by the directors of OceanaGold and Pacific Rim, excluding one common director who abstained from voting.

The proposal is fair to Pacific Rim shareholders from a financial point of view, according to advice provided to Pacific Rim from Evans & Evans Inc.

The board recommends shareholders vote in favour of the arrangement, the company said.

Pacific Rim is currently in dispute with the government of El Salvador over what it says is a passive refusal to issue a decision on Pacific Rim's application for environmental and mining permits for the El Dorado project.

The proposed acquisition is expected to close next month pending shareholder and regulatory approvals. 

The Revolutionary Wave of the New Left in Latin America and Europe (1960-1990).

Two friends, Eduardo Rey Tristan (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela) and Alberto Martin Alvarez (Instituto Mora, México), are putting the final touches on a November 18-19 conference at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela in Spain on The Revolutionary Wave of the New Left in Latin America and Europe (1960-1990).

The workshop seeks to open an academic dialogue about the origins, development and decline of the wave of revolutionary violence of the New Left in Latin America and Europe. The workshop favors the adoption of transnational perspectives that explore influences and links -ideological, material and personal- between organizations and revolutionary groups within and between the two continents. We are especially interested in such issues as the spread of ideas and repertoires of action, the collaboration, support or solidarity between organizations, and comparative perspectives that would allow us to find possible common patterns of emergence, development and disappearance of armed groups within the wave of the “New Left”.

The workshop will have two parts. During the first day, senior scholars will lead a seminar on Transnational Perspectives on Political Violence Research that will explore the state of contemporary scholarship on the New Left. The second day will be dedicated to the presentation of lines of research - of individual researchers or research teams- in order to build an international network among scholars in Latin America, Europe and the United States engaged in the comparative study of political violence and revolutionary mobilization between 1960 and 1990. 

If you are interested in attending and/or participating in the workshop, please contact Alberto (amartin@institutomora.edu.mx) or Eduardo (eduardo.rey@usc.es). It looks like a terrific conference with presentations by

Peter Waldman of the Universität Augsburg on European Terrorism and Latin American Guerrilla: Comparability and Paths to Explore.

Eduardo Gonzalez Calleja of the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid on The Conceptual Debate between European Terrorism and the Latin American Guerrilla.Shared or Different Waves of Mobilization?

Timothy Wickham-Crowley of Georgetown University (Washington D.C.) on Two Waves of Guerrilla-Movement Organizing in Latin America. 

Ybon Le Bot of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Paris on From Third World revolution to the social movement in globalization. Paradigm shift in Latin America.

There's also time built in for debates and the sharing of current and future research by all those attending. See here and here for more information. Hopefully, this will be the first of many fruitful gatherings.

Will Paz y Paz join Rigoberta Menchu as a Nobel Peace Prize winner?

Guatemala's Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz continues to get some great international press. I imagine that this just infuriates President Otto Perez Molina, CACIF, and other members of the economic and political elite. They still believe that she is a leftist out to win in the courts what she and others failed to win on the battlefield.

In addition to the Journeyman Pictures video above (well worth fifteen minutes of your day), Paz y Paz also received some good press in The Guardian in an article by Mark Tran on Guatemala: one woman's campaign against violent crime and corruption. Don't make fun of his math - 5,632 is not down from 5,618 murders but he is right. Homicides have been decreasing over the last few years even though the murder rate might increase a bit this year. I'm also not sure that evidence implicating President Otto Perez Molina in civil war atrocities led to the annulment of the trial. That is more Allan Nairn pumping the importance of his testimony rather than anything verifiable. A finding of genocide led various actors to mobilize and reverse the outcome.

It's always nice to hear a positive story about the humble Paz y Paz but her courage is old news. What we really want/need to hear more about is whether the office will/can continue its good work when she leave her post at the end of next year. Have there been institutional changes that will continue once she moves on? If not, what needs to be done between today and next December, other than select an excellent AG, to ensure that the office continues and improves upon Paz y Paz's tremendous work? It is going to be tough to improve upon the work of someone who is a contender for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Heads are going to explode, figuratively speaking, if Paz y Paz joins Rigoberta Menchu as a Nobel Peace Prize winner from Guatemala.

Will El Salvador squander gang truce opportunity?

Oscar Martinez has an essay in Sunday's New York Times on Making a Deal With Murderers that looks at President Mauricio Funes' handling of the gang truce in El Salvador.

Salvadorans have grown used to murder, rape, extortion and humiliation at the hands of the gangs. And they have no more faith in the government’s ability to fight back with violence. The truce, however, had the advantage of being something new. It was an attempt to do things differently, to enter gang-controlled territory without resorting to gunfire and then, from the inside, attempt to change things. It was a chance to implement public policies — like aid for gang neighborhoods and programs to help kids and teenagers discover that they had options other than joining gangs — that could reduce the power of the gangs in the long run. The problem is that we need time and peace to do these things, and for that we need the truce.

Basically, Oscar and I are on the same page. You can look back at what I've written in the past, but El Salvador was at a really bad point with a murder rate over seventy per 100,000. The country did not have the resources to make a significant dent in the country's murder rate and negotiating a truce between the MS-13 and 18th Street gangs gave the Salvadoran government a fighting chance.

No one is saying that the truce would solve the problems that contributed to the gang violence. However, what some of us have said is that the truce would give the Salvadoran people and government an opportunity to put in place short-, medium-, and long-term social,economic, political, and security policies to tackle the root causes of gang violence and other societal ills.

Now, the truce was going to be difficult to sustain under the best of circumstances and intentions. However, the truce has been undermined by the lack of support from civil society, the media, the business sector and the US government. Some of those might have criticized the truce anyway on political or ideological grounds, but Mauricio Funes's attacks against those who uncovered the secret truce (El Faro) and their insistence that they played no role in facilitating it have been counterproductive. Why should anyone support a government-facilitated truce if the government itself doesn't support it publicly?

Not wanting to admit to playing a role in facilitating a truce with violent individuals who did so much harm to the country is understandable. The truce is still unpopular according to public opinion polls. However, the truce has held for over a year, close to eighteen months now, and reduced the murder rate from approximately 70 per 100,000 to around 40 per 100,000 today. That is an important success and not one that a government should run away from.

Oscar seems to believe that President Funes won't publicly support the truce because he fears that it will damage his public approval ratings.

Everything seems to suggest that President Funes will leave office without ever admitting that he has saved an astounding number of lives, probably because the numbers that really matter to him are those of a different sort — the kind that reflect his popularity in the polls.

That's hard for me to accept but it is possible, I really don't know. Once the president dug in his heals denying his administration's involvement, he might have though that his credibility would have been more seriously affected by doing a 180 and saying that he was behind the truce all the time. I also wonder whether his relationship with the US would have become more much difficult had he said that it was his decision to put the resources of his office behind the truce. We know that the US thinks that the truce stinks and Funes' public position in support of the truce might have eroded his relationship with the ambassador and Washington.

If that's the case, it hasn't worked. I'd say that Funes and Washington are both looking to turn the page with next year's elections. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that relations are going to get that much better following February's elections.

Sandinista runs for mayor of New York

The New York Times had a really interesting and well-written story on New York mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio about two weeks ago that has been causing quite the stir. During the Cold War of the 1980s, the US was supporting right-wing governments and militaries in El Salvador and Guatemala while at the same time funding a right-wing counterinsurgency in Nicaragua against the left-wing Sandinista government. Many US citizens sided with those groups (FMLN and URNG) and governments (Sandinistas) against which the US government and President Reagan were fighting.

Some citizens raised awareness of the atrocities being committed by the troops that the US was training (School of the Americas). The Catholic Church opened many basements to house refugees from Central America who fled to the US (sanctuary movement). A number of Americans traveled to the region to stand in solidarity with the poor and oppressed (Maryknoll missionaries, Fr. James Carney, CRISPAZ). Others raised funds and purchased weapons for the FSLN, URNG, and FMLN and drove them south from Texas and elsewhere in the country.

Bill de Blasio appears to have been one of those Sandalistas (sandal wearing foreigners) who traveled from the US to Nicaragua at the age of 26 to participate in the creation of a more just society under the Sandinistas. He moved there in 1988 to help distribute food and medicine. He also participated in raising money for the Sandinistas while working in New York.

As he seeks to become the next mayor of New York City, Mr. de Blasio, the city’s public advocate, has spoken only occasionally about his time as a fresh-faced idealist who opposed foreign wars, missile defense systems and apartheid in the late 1980s and early 1990s. References to his early activism have been omitted from his campaign Web site.

But a review of hundreds of pages of records and more than two dozen interviews suggest his time as a young activist was more influential in shaping his ideology than previously known, and far more political than typical humanitarian work.

I haven't read all the coverage but de Blasio seems to be defending his support for the Sandinistas during the 1980s and distancing himself from the group following la pinata, the pact with Aleman, and the consolidation of the party around Daniel Ortega. From my perspective, that seems to be a reasonable perspective. De Blasio supported the Sandinistas when they stood for the creation of a more just future even if how they went about creating such a future wasn't the most ideal way of doing so. They've made mistakes in the postwar and the Sandinista government of today isn't the party of the 1980s, let alone the 1990s.

As you can imagine, he has been attacked for traveling to Nicaragua during the 1980s and distributing food and medicine to the poor. He has been criticized for not being aware of some of the crimes that the FSLN committed during the 1980s and not being critical enough of the FSLN in the post-war period. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the coverage has been unfair totally omitting the terrorism of the Contras, the illegal operations of President Reagan and his merry men, and the regional and international context of the 1980s.  
It's not just Latin America that hasn't come to grips with its Cold War history.

[You can read some positive/negative responses from Stephen Kinzer, Adam Martin, Juli Weiner, Paul Berman, and Ronald Radosh.]

Shake-up in Costa Rican presidential campaign

According to Zach Dyer writing for Reuters, Rodolfo Hernandez of the center-right Social Christian Unity Party (PUSC) is leaving the race to be the next president of Costa Rica. He made the unexpected announcement on Thursday.

Hernandez blamed "backstabbing" by his own party and alleged that some dissatisfied PUSC members passed information to the centrist PLN's candidate, Johnny Araya. The PLN has held power since 2006.

Here's more from Zach this time with the Tico Times

The former-PUSC candidate said he never imaged that he would face so much “intrigue, envy, egoism, betrayal and disloyalty.”

“This is not the democracy I dreamed of, this is not the party I always defended. This is not what I wanted for Costa Rica,” Hernández wrote in his jeremiad.

Not much to say except those seem like weak excuses to back out of a presidential race. On the other hand, it just reinforces my impression that Costa Rican democracy has severely weakened over the last decade. It is still one of the shining stars in Central and South America with a very good quality of life, but it seems to have been heading in the wrong direction for some time now.

The ruling National Liberation Party's (PLN) and its candidate, Johnny Araya, are now in an even better position to hold on to the presidency. It looks like the PUSC has two weeks to name a replacement candidate for February 2nd's elections.

Update: Hernandez jumped back into the race Saturday afternoon, twenty-four hours after quitting it. Not quite the story of Brazil's Jânio Quadros but we'll have to see what happens.

Baby-snatching in Guatemala

Anastasia Moloney has a depressing story on Baby-snatching for illegal adoption hits the headlines in Guatemala. Some babies are purchased. Others are stolen from hospitals after mothers have been drugged and/or hospital staff paid off. Finally, many other babies are stolen from rural families who are believed do not have the financial resources to pursue kidnappings of children.

Some of the children are sold into adoption. Others might be used for organ trafficking. And more are sold into a life of pornography and prostitution. Verifiable numbers are hard to come by but it looks like trafficking in babies and children has been reduced since CICIG was put into place in 2007, international adoptions were banned in 2008, and the Alba-Keneth Alert System was established in 2010. The practice hasn't stopped and is still a pressing concern as Guatemala remains a prime country for organized crime in everything imaginable including the trafficking of humans, exotic animals, drugs, and weapons.

Child trafficking in Guatemala is also fuelled by weak governance, high levels of impunity and widespread corruption, rights groups say.

“It’s not only the failure of the police but the immigration authorities too. Police are poorly paid in Guatemala, not much more than the minimum wage, which makes them easy targets to be corrupted by criminals,” Baten said.

Guatemala’s lax and porous borders – the country shares borders with Honduras, Belize, El Salvador and Mexico – also provide a fertile breeding ground for child trafficking.

My impression is that Guatemala has undertaken a number of significant reforms to tackle corruption and impunity and to strengthen government institutions over the last few years. Authorities can investigate, solve and prosecute illegal activity much better today than they could a few years ago. The number of homicides has decreased significantly but it's harder to measure a significant decrease in other crimes or an increase in citizen security.

While I wasn't the biggest fan of Alvaro Colom, I thought that he had righted the ship and provided his successor with the opportunity to build on some of his administration's successes (See here and here). Otto Perez Molina's first year in office was a mixed bag and his second full year looks, unfortunately, to have been a step back.

Prisons to peace centers following civil wars

What does one do with sites (prisons, military barracks, etc.) that are well-known for having been home to the evil that men have done to each other? Does one demolish prisons where political prisoners were tortured so as to erase the horrors of what happened inside those walls? Does one transform the site into a home to promote peace and understanding? Or does one use to historical site to teach current and future generations about their country's history?

Opposition lawmakers in Nicaragua have introduced a bill to turn a notorious torture center into a museum. The first priority is to ensure that torture is no longer being committed there. Then there is the question of what to do next. Tim Rogers at the Nicaragua Dispatch writes

A bill presented to the National Assembly this week by opposition lawmakers seeks to convert Nicaragua’s most infamous jail cells into a torture museum.

Legislators from the Nicaraguan Democratic Bloc (BDN) have presented an initiative that would permanently close the El Chipote prison, the site of the most heinous acts of torture under the Somoza dictatorship and Sandinista government, and convert the rat-infested cells into a national museum—one that most Nicaraguans over the age of 20 would probably be too afraid to visit.

Liberal lawmaker Alberto Lacayo, who is sponsoring the bill, says the jail should be closed due to its “long, painful, shameful and humiliating history related to military-political power, authoritarianism and repression.”

Northern Ireland is moving ahead to turn the Maze Prison into a peace center. Ten IRA prisoners, including Bobby Sands, died there following a hunger strike in 1981. Earlier proposals looked to turn the prison into a multi-sports stadium for soccer, gaelic football and rugby.

In Santa Tecla, El Salvador, a civil war era prison has been turned into a museum. The prison was the first one to hold political prisoners beginning in 1983. It closed with the signing of the peace accords. In he post war, the former prison was used to help train members of the new civilian police before it was abandoned following the 2001 earthquakes. It is well worth the short trip out to Santa Tecla to visit museum and to enjoy a night out on Paseo El Carmen.

Guatemalan kailbil guilty of lying to US officials

On Tuesday, a California federal jury found Jorge Sosa guilty of making false statements and obtaining citizenship unlawfully. Sosa was one of the commanders on the ground during the December 1982 massacre at Dos Erres. He had been accused of lying when he sought residency and citizenship in the United States. Sosa's sentencing date is December 9th. At the point, the former second lieutenant in the Guatemalan army will learn his punishment - up to fifteen years in prison and/or the loss of his U.S. citizenship.

Totally not the most important part of the story, but according to this AP article, "Sosa listened to the verdict through a Spanish interpreter and appeared to take notes, as he did for much of the trial, without visible reaction." Sosa worked as a martial arts teacher and has lived in the US and Canada for the last thirty years. Did he really need a Spanish interpreter or was his use of the interpreter somehow designed to make him more sympathetic to the jury?

I wrote something longer for Al Jazeera prior to the verdict. Hopefully, it'll be up soon. I'm still not happy with the press coverage.

And I've had these links to interviews with various Guatemalan officials sitting around as a draft post. Now might as be as good a time as any to get them up.The first is an interview with Juan Francisco Soto. He is the director of the Center for Human Rights Legal Action (CALDH) and was one of the parties that joined the genocide case against Efrain Rios Montt. The second interview is one that La Jornada carried out with Judge Iris Yassmín Barrios. Judge Barrios presided over the Rios Montt trial. Here's the English translation.

Someone should write a book on the recent history of Guatemala using Judge Barrios as its focus. She has been involved not only in the Rios Montt trial, but those of Bishop Gerardi, Myrna Mack, Salvadoran PARLACEN representatives, the Sacatepéquez girls, the Dos Erres massacre in Petén, and several drug trafficking cases including the Zetas.

Imagine a country where private sector campaign donations were prohibited

Imagine a country where private sector campaign donations were prohibited...

In Costa Rica, unlike in other political systems, the private sector is not allowed to provide campaign contributions. The democratically elected legislative representatives and the Executive Branch set the amount of GDP that will be used for campaign finance as well as for the administration of the elections. Monetary contributions by the private sector are not allowed in Costa Rica, although a legislative proposal to allow such donations was introduced by the ruling National Liberation political party (Spanish initials: PLN).

Recent surveys among voters in Costa Rica indicate that the citizenry is not ready to accept the concept of political campaign contributions being made by the private sector. The voters feel that such a system would bring a tinge of unfairness to some of the leftist political parties that are usually not very friendly to the private sector. They also feel that political donations by the private sector may also invite corruption in the electoral system.

In the coming elections to succeed President Laura Chinchilla, Costa Rica will spend $50 million dollars in election costs and campaign finance. Several new political parties will participate, and voter turnout is expected to improve. Although voting in Costa Rica is made compulsory by law, there is no enforcement thereof and no penalties for those who abstain. Voter turnout in Costa Rica used to be among the highest in the Americas, but it has sharply declined in the wake of two high-profile cases of corruption involving two former presidents who actually received prison sentences.

Campaign season in Costa Rica begins on Wednesday with elections scheduled for February 2, 2014.Clear your calendars. El Salvador's presidential elections are scheduled for February 2 as well.