Columns
April 16, 2014
A judge rules seven years later on a case of the Colombian State against trade unionists. In the middle of an election race, President Santos will have to publicly apologize for crimes his main rival committed.
April 10, 2014
Violence in Mexico is the result of a climate of impunity in which violent crime goes largely unpunished.
March 31, 2014
Bolivia's Amazonian region is experiencing the most disastrous flooding of the past 100 years. Two Brazilian mega-dams on the Bolivian border may be contributing significantly to this tragedy.
March 29, 2014
On the anniversary of Argentina's 1976 coup d’état, HIJOS founding member Camilo Juárez describes his organization's continued work to bring justice to the victims of the seven-year military dictatorship.
March 24, 2014
The community of El Tamarindo was formed by internally displaced families on empty, untitled land in Colombia. With the expansion of the Barranquilla Free Trade Zone, the community is being forcefully displaced again.
March 14, 2014
Even as they continue to shape the domestic political agenda, Chile's resurgent social movements are mobilizing to build cross-border solidarity, pressuring newly-elected President Michelle Bachelet to ally with other leftist governments in the region.
March 14, 2014
After ARENA's accusations of fraud in the El Salvador presidential election, Ramiro Fúnez talks with an international election observer who state that "these elections were as clean and transparent as they could possibly be."
March 12, 2014
A scathing report on the U.S. Border Patrol's use of deadly force reveals warzone conditions—the result of more than 25 years of Mexico-U.S. border militarization.
March 10, 2014
There’s nothing new about drones flying over Mexican airspace without congressional approval. But Peña Nieto is challenging the most traditional—and also progressive—practices of sovereignty and national development in Mexico.
March 7, 2014
Upcoming run-off elections in El Salvador and Costa Rice look positive for social democratic candidates. Sánchez Cerén and Solís take their policies to the polls.
February 27, 2014
Bolivia's highest court has rejected a constitutional challenge to the country's restrictive abortion law, while ruling that legal abortions no longer require a judge's consent. Both opponents and advocates of abortion rights have found reasons to celebrate.
February 26, 2014
Blogger Francisco Toro claimed in the New York Times that Venezuelan "government pressure ensured that no broadcast media carried coverage" of a speech made by opposition leader Henrique Capriles. But the two largest private media outlets did in fact cover the event.
February 25, 2014
A shooting by a Border Patrol agent in southern California last week and a recent U.S. drone strike in Yemen that killed members of a weddding party share much: the persistent power of empire and its associated violence along the global "color line."
February 24, 2014
On Colombia's Pacific coast, Buenaventura has been host to the worst violence seen in Colombia for years, as the interests of developers, local people, and paramilitary groups collide.
February 21, 2014
The international media’s escalation of the Venezuelan crisis, and their complete silence regarding Haiti, highlights U.S. inconsistency in upholding the values of human rights and democracy.
February 20, 2014
That groups of armed peasants are more successful in controlling organized crime than the state should be a terrible embarrassment and public relations disaster for the government of Enrique Peña Nieto.
February 17, 2014
A proposed children’s rights law being considered by the Bolivian Congress is facing opposition from an unlikely source: a union representing the child workers themselves.
February 13, 2014
Last month, an article in Peru's penal code was modified to allow police and the military to use lethal force against protestors. Activist Elmer Campos Álvarez lives to tell the story.
February 12, 2014
Peace in Colombia is in a precarious position—says the literature on post-conflict countries. A 2003 report states that on average, 44% of countries emerging from civil war return to conflict within the first five years.
February 11, 2014
While a subsection of Colombian society enjoys access to education, access to jobs, and racial privilege, the teenaged sons of the majority of the population put their lives on the line to protect what they themselves do not enjoy.
February 2, 2014
CONAMAQ, a federation of Bolivian highland indigenous peoples, has split into two parallel organizations after a bitter struggle. Is this the result of internal political conflict, or a government strategy to undermine opposition?
February 2, 2014
Credited with developing BRICs theory, Jim O'Neill is now onto a trendier acronym. According to his MINTs theory, Mexico’s competitive manufacturing edge and cheap and “flexible” labor will place the country among the ten most powerful economies.
January 31, 2014
According to DHS’s numbers, apprehensions of Central American migrants increased by 55 percent in 2013 over the previous year, with data that indicates an exodus coming primarily from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.
January 28, 2014
One of the emblemetic organizations resisting violence in Colombia provides insight into deeper truths about the political economy of conflict in the country.
January 28, 2014
When Argentina’s Supreme Court upheld in October a media law that takes on press monopolies while promoting diversity in media ownership, journalists in the English-speaking North covered it as a blow to press freedom.