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[Translation of an article from El Colombiano of Medellín for May 16, 2013. See original here.]

By Daniel Rivera Marín

Sunday, April 19, marks six months since the government and FARC sat down in Havana, Cuba, to negotiate peace and the first item on the agenda has not been exhausted, although both sides expect that by the end of this cycle, which is the ninth, a first agreement can be announced.

And if not, analysts agree, a signal that is not very favorable will shape public opinion, considering that President Juan Manuel Santos has spoken of a short peace process, with negotiations beginning in November, 2012, and ending, supposedly, in November, 2013, while FARC has said repeatedly that no exact period can be set.

On this topic, Sergio Jaramillo, high commissioner of peace [in the Santos administration], said, “The government is not interested in talking with FARC in Havana forever; the government does not want to talk with FARC beyond this year. The government wants to arrive at the signing of a final accord that allows us to begin the phase of a transition to peace.” Read the rest of this entry »

Campesinos claim soldiers and police favor the landowners

[Translation of an Agence France Presse article as published in Diario Tiempo of San Pedro Sula for May 13, 2013. See original here an related articles here, here and here.]

A campesino leader was assassinated by armed men in the troubled valley of Aguán, 600 kilometers northeast of the Honduran capital, bringing to 99 the number killed in the region, the scene of a conflict between farmers and landowners, a leader of the agrarian movement reported on Sunday.

“Three heavily armed men assassinated José Omar Pérez, 37, president of the Los Laureles operation, in the La Concepción settlement, which belongs to the Movimiento Unificado Campesino del Aguán (MUCA), around 9:30pm Saturday night,” the spokesman for the organization, Vitalino Álvarez, told AFP.

The attack occurred 100 meters from Pérez’s home as he and his wife were returning from his mother-in-law’s house in the city of Tocoa.

“The assassination of comrade Pérez makes 99 campesinos killed by the deadly bullets of the landowners’ security guards and the paramilitary groups who operate in the region,” stated a MUCA communiqué.

The conflict began in the Aguán in January, 2010, a month after more than 5,000 campesinos occupied 7,000 hectares of land claimed by the landowners.

The campesinos hold that these lands have belonged to them since they were granted to them as part of an agrarian reform in the 1980s.

In 1992, a law allowed the parcels of land to be sold and some leaders of the farmers, behind the backs of their base, sold them to the landowners at low cost.

In August, the government ordered a military deployment, reinforced by the police, to carry out a “general disarmament” but deaths continue and the campesinos hold that the soldiers and the police are backing the landowners.

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After almost nine years in the country, MINUSTAH prolongs conditions of poverty and repression, securing the political and economic interests of the United States

[Translation of an interview from Brasil de Fato of São Paulo for May 9, 2013.  See original here and related articles here, here, here and here.]

By Márcio Zonta

The United Nations Mission for the Stabilization of Haiti (MINUSTAH) will be nine years old in June.  Created in 2004 by the UN Security Council, it brought the activities of foreign troops into the country after the coup against then President Bertrand Aristide.  He was kidnapped and deposed by United States forces, being forced into exile in Africa. Read the rest of this entry »

Only 207 of the 2,197 recognized communities hold land titles, making access to family agricultural incentives difficult

[Translation of an article from Brasil de Fato of São Paulo for May 8, 2013. See original here. Quilombolas are the residents of Quilombos, settlements established in the Brazilian jungle during the early colonial era by escaped slaves, who also gave refuge to indigenous peoples, Arabs, Jews and others suffering colonial oppression. In the early days, some Quilombos were strong enough to pose a serious threat to Portuguese rule, leading to harsher repression by colonial forces, who drove them deeper into the jungles. The Quilombos were widely thought to have disappeared until the 1970s when a number were found still in existence. For more on the history of Quilombos go here. ]   

By Sarah Fernandes

A report released by the federal government confirms the view that there is still much to be done in assuring the basic rights of the Quilombola communities. Of the 80,000 Quilombola families in the Cadastro Único [Single Registry], the data base for social programs, as of January of this year 74.73 percent still lived in conditions of extreme poverty, according to a study, “Brasil Qilombola,” released on Monday, May 6, by the Secretaria de Políticas de Promoção da Igualdade Racial (SEPPIR – Secretariat for the Promotion of Policies for Racial Equality). Those registered and not registered make up a total 1.17 million persons in 214,000 families. Read the rest of this entry »

[Translation of an opinion piece from La Jornada of Mexico City for May 5, 2013. See original here.]

By Guillermo Almeyra

From the point of view of governments and institutions, the changes in Latin America brought about by the death of Hugo Chávez are important but not fundamental. The Venezuelan revolutionary process is weaker and its adversaries are therefore stronger, but if the leadership of the state and of the PSUV (Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela) are determined, with the support of their bases, to radicalize and deepen transformation of the country, if they reduce waste and improve somewhat the distribution of food and goods, social change could take a new leap forward, since the current moderate recovery in consumption and production in the United States, Venezuela’s principal market, gives certain stability to the price of oil.

This is the basis, on the other hand, of the security offered by the Maduro administration to Cuba, ALBA (Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América — Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America) and the Caribbean against the uproar of the Venezuelan Right about the “giveaway” of oil and financial support to Venezuela’s allies and against the same concessions of this kind that the right-wing Chavistas want to make to the anti-Chavista Right. At the same time, in Brazil, with next year’s elections impending, the Right does not seem to have either a clear candidate or the possibility of winning; the economy is somewhat better and the government enjoys the support of the transnationals, agribusiness and domestic large-scale capital, to which it has made considerable concessions, and it does not face strong social protests. Read the rest of this entry »

[Translation of an article from Carta Maior of Brazil for May 3, 2013.  See original here.]

By Marcel Gomes

Rio de Janeiro – The strengthening of relations between Brazil and Venezuela during the administrations of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Hugo Chávez will allow Brasilia and Caracas to maintain close political and economic ties, even after the death of the Venezuelan.

Those who hold this view are supported by the high degree of institutionalization of the bilateral relations. The new president, Nicolás Maduro, has at his disposal UNASUR (Unión de Naciones Suramericanas – Union of South American Nations) and MERCOSUR (Mercado Común del Sur – Southern Common Market), energy projects, local branches of IPEA (Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada – Institute of Applied Economic Research), EMBRAPA (Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária – Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation) and Caixa (Caixa Econômica Federal – Brazilian publicly owned bank), as well as a commercial exchange that has jumped from 800 million US dollars to six billion reais [about three billion dollars] in a decade – 80 percent of it, keep in mind, to Brazil’s benefit. Read the rest of this entry »

[Translation of an article from Carta Maior of Brazil for April 30, 2013. See original here and related article here.]

By Eric Nepomuceno

Fernando Lugo, removed by force from the Paraguayan presidency last year through an unusual parliamentary coup – he was tried and convicted in 48 hours, with no time for a defense – was as evasive as he was inconsistent. What seemed at the outset to be a hurricane of hope for change turned out in the end to be a breeze. The fragile movements meant to change, even if only a little, the deformed face of an unjust and rotten country, led to nothing.

Now everything is back on track. A candidate for the Partido Colorado, the very same party that for decades smothered the country in violence, corruption and fraud, has been elected president. His name is Horacio Cartes. He is a controversial businessman, a millionaire many times over, completely inexperienced (okay, it is true that he presided over a soccer club, but in politics, nothing) and with an embarrassing list of accusations against him that range from money laundering to the smuggling of cigarettes. At the age of 56 he had never in his life voted. Read the rest of this entry »

[Translation of an article from El Clarín of Santiago, Chile, for April 26, 2013. See original here and related articles here, here and here.]

By Jorge Saenz

The life of Horacio Manuel Cartes Jara (born in Asunción on July 5, 1956) could be used as the script of any successful Latin American soap opera. As an adolescent he had the good fortune to enroll in the best educational institutions of the city: Goethe, Internacional and Cristo Rey; then he traveled to the United States where, by a stroke of luck, he made friendly ties with the Cessna aviation company, which gave him economic security. Read the rest of this entry »

[Translation of an article from AlterPresse of Port-au-Prince for April 12, 2013. See original here. The writer is communications coordinator for the Jesuit Refugee Service for Latin America and the Caribbean.]

By Wooldy Edson Louidor

Bogota, Colombia, April 12 – Several South American governments are showing a clear tendency toward a hardening of their migration policies in regard to Haitian migrants who reach their border or are already in their territory.

From Ecuador to French Guiana (an overseas territory of France), Haitian migrants face an ever more complex series of difficult situations like the closing of borders, threats of deportation, increases in requirements for entering their territories and humanitarian crises. Read the rest of this entry »

((A worker walks past opposition graffiti.))

[Translation of an article from Opera Mundi of São Paulo, Brazil, for April 19, 2013. See original here.]

by Breno Altman

The script being followed by Henrique Capriles, the defeated candidate in Sunday’s elections, should be watched closely. Beyond revealing the nature of the local Right, the events taking place help to understand the package of efforts already being made against leftist governments in Latin America.

Taking advantage of the narrow margins by which Nicolás Maduro won the contest, the conservative camp yells “Fraud.” So far, no serious evidence of any kind that this actually took place has been offered. On the contrary, the overwhelming majority of international observers attest to the integrity of the electoral process. But the relative weakening of the Chavista base is taken as an opportunity to escalate the confrontation. Read the rest of this entry »

[Translation of an article from Espacinsular of Santo Domingo for April 10, 2013. See original here.]

by Griselda Liberato

Santo Domingo, April 10 – Although it is not state policy, events suggest that government agencies are supporting violations of the migration laws. Taking into account the legal mechanisms the country has for the control and registration of immigration and reviewing the repeated occasions in which Haitians have charged that authorities do not process applications for documents or for renewal of them, it can be confirmed that the state carries out policies that increase the percentage of persons living in Dominican territory indefinitely under irregular conditions. Read the rest of this entry »

Environmental contamination and sickness are the result of years of mining in La Unión

[Translation of an article from ContraPunto of El Salvador for April 13, 2013. See original here.]

By Gerardo Arbaiza

San Salvador – In the extreme east of the country, in the canton of San Sebastián in the Santa Rosa de Lima municipality of La Unión, is a good example of extreme neglect by government authorities, despite its being beside the most profitable gold mine in the country, a mine worked from 1968 to the beginning of the ‘80s by the United States company Commerce Group, from which a total of seven billion dollars is said to have been extracted, from which no benefit for the community is to be seen.

The list of tribulations in San Sebastián is long: the sulphurous color of the water in the San Sebastián River extends a depressing welcome to a community that, its inhabitants say, is visited by officials only when legislative and mayoral candidates are looking for votes. The acidity of this water (pH between four and five) makes it impossible to drink, comments Cidia Cortez, a researcher with the Centro de Investigación sobre Inversión y Comercio (CEICOM – Center for Research into Investment and Commerce). Read the rest of this entry »