GUATEMALA CITY – Guatemalans began casting ballots in a presidential runoff Sunday, choosing between a comedian with no political experience and a former first lady, amid the fallout of a massive corruption scandal.
Vladimir Putin’s Russia, eager to return to superpower status, is increasingly trying to play out its conflict with the United Sates in Latin America while “profiting from weapons sales and challenging and provoking the USA,” Costa Rican social scientist Constantino Urcuyo told a U.S. congressional committee in Washington, D.C. last Thursday.
Today, 62 percent of Hondurans live in poverty and 42 percent live in “extreme poverty.” To make matters worse, violence and organized crime is fueling emigration, while the country’s weakened institutions are encouraging a process of remilitarization.
Costa Rican indigenous leaders hope the long-delayed Indigenous Autonomy Bill might finally get a hearing in the Legislative Assembly as result of April’s Inter-American Commission on Human Rights ruling ordering the government to take precautionary measures to protect indigenous groups in the Salitre Indigenous Reserve in southwestern Costa Rica.
The congressional elections to be held in Venezuela in December offer a flicker of hope to a country facing dark prospects. Provided they are carried out correctly, they offer an institutional channel to manage the country’s deep political polarization and growing popular discontent.
Insisting that "our country is better than this," an emotional Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday that the U.S. must get serious about gun control and be willing to take on the entrenched politics surrounding guns.
GUATEMALA CITY – After being on the run for six months, Juan Carlos Monzón – one of the top leaders of a massive customs fraud scheme that brought down Guatemala’s president, vice president and dozens of others – has finally turned himself in.
When Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro closed the border with Colombia, he did it from the presidential palace hundreds of miles away. On the ground, supervising deportations and local officials, was the country's iron-fisted chief lawmaker, Diosdado Cabello.
On Wednesday and Thursday, 51 countries filed their climate action plans with the United Nations, a key step toward reaching an international accord at the Paris climate summit in December. Altogether, more than 130 nations accounting for about 85 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions have filed plans.
