Very glad that the Fundación Ideas para la Paz is keeping such a close eye on how the Colombian government is implementing the coca-substitution program foreseen in the FARC peace accord.
The New York Times revealed that Mexico’s government used hacking software to spy on political opponents, journalists, and human rights defenders. And since then, absolutely nothing has happened.
“Nicaragua taught me that hard-fought democratic gains can get rolled back overnight, and that political rights can be erased with a single pen-stroke,” the veteran U.S. journalist notes in a wry piece.
“Si un servidor defrauda la confianza pública es merecedor de mayor reproche penal. La conducta con ocasión del conflicto, es diferente al delito político”
La iniciativa de capacitar a los agentes hondureños en suelo estadounidense, hace parte del programa de cooperación entre los gobiernos de los países centroamericanos y el de Estados Unidos
No hay instancia capaz de integrar una investigación imparcial y creíble que permita sancionar a los responsables y brindar las mínimas garantías a la ciudadanía
The prison carnage was particularly embarrassing to Mexico as it came the same day U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly was visiting Guerrero
In late June, the Mexican government filed a sworn statement with the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, in San Antonio, to argue why the law should not go into effect
Kuczynski had, in the past, repeatedly said he would not pardon Fujimori. Although the president denies it, his apparent change of heart seems to be a reaction to growing pressure from Fujimori supporters
Since April nearly 30 members of the military have been detained for deserting or abandoning their post and almost 40 for rebellion, treason, or insubordination
Si bien la atención se ha concentrado en la liberación del funcionario de la ONU, no es la única vez en la que la población civil ha quedado en medio del conflicto
After Mexico received 3,424 applications for refugee status in 2015, that rose to 8,794 the following year and applications are already outpacing that this year with 5,464 just from January to May
Felix Gonzalez, a spokesman for Chihuahua state prosecutors, told local media the initial confrontation pitted members the La Linea gang, based in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, against a faction of the Sinaloa cartel
A meeting between Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto and U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday at the G20 summit in Germany will last about 30 minutes and probably not lead to any major agreements
Venezuelan lawmakers who oppose President Nicolás Maduro were beaten and bloodied in the halls of congress Wednesday as a pro-government mob stormed the building
Kelly Nicholls had a successful few years as director of the U.S. Office on Colombia, a small organization in Washington on whose board I served. I hadn’t heard much from her after she moved back to her native Australia. Then, in April, she sent me an advance copy of her first novel, set in Colombia.
When I started reading A Reluctant Warrior, I confess my first thought was “uh-oh.” I knew Kelly to be an able researcher and organizer, but not a storyteller. The first pages introduce you to Luzma, a forcibly displaced Afro-Colombian woman on the country’s embattled Pacific coast. I feared I was about to read a relentless tale of injustice, with wooden characters suffering at the hands of greedy elites and sadistic thugs. A story peppered with NGO buzzwords like “civil society,” “rule of law,” and “impunity.” I’d know what’s going to happen next, and the moral would be “if only an unfeeling world wouldn’t stand idly by.”
I was so wrong. Kelly has written an absolute page-turner. Her style is cinematic. The plot is fast-paced and includes some surprising twists. With few exceptions, her characters are complex, believable people. She has deep knowledge of the region where the story takes place, and it comes through on every page. And she did a lot of research, exhibiting a surprisingly detailed knowledge of Soviet-era Russian submarines. (You’ll have to read it to get the reference.)
The novel appears to be set about 10 years ago. Luzma is a strong-willed twenty-something following in the footsteps of her late mother and great-aunt, who are community leaders. Paramilitary violence forces her family to flee to Buenaventura, Colombia’s largest port city. There, she crosses paths with a narcotrafficker with an ambitious plan to move many tons of cocaine, a corrupt army general, U.S. DEA agents, foreign human rights defenders, and brave local leaders.
The characters are not cardboard figures. The drug lord is cruel and ruthless, but terrified of his superiors. The DEA agents are helpful, not just thick-headed cops obsessed with their next big bust. A soldier forced to take part in the corrupt general’s plot is a pawn from a working-class background with a strong sense of right and wrong.
The plot keeps you wondering what will happen next. The dialogue is screenplay-worthy. And the ending is satisfying, neither “happily ever after” nor tragedy. As often seems to be the case in Colombia, victory is incomplete, and the story could go on.
There are some small issues. The American volunteer, from Peace Brigades International, is a bit too dashing and flawless. Readers unfamiliar with Colombia may be confused by the “bad guys” described both as “paramilitaries” and the “Norte de Valle cartel.” The narrative soars when the author takes a few sentences to give readers a vivid sense of what Buenaventura is like: what the streets or people’s homes look like, how people dress, the sounds of motorcycles and blasting music, the smells of food or sewage. Here, Kelly’s eye for detail and her love for Colombia’s Pacific region come through, but some of it seems to get sacrificed to keep the plot moving.
I’ll be hard to reach today, since I’m on vacation. (How to contact me)
I’m still on vacation—the first one in a while—and will be all of next week, too. However, I’m no longer visiting relatives, and if I get my way, I’ll be spending a lot of today at a computer keyboard.
Perhaps nowhere else in the country are the challenges of a post-conflict Colombia more evident, and perhaps no other part of the world is more indicative of how an economy can be fueled by the production and trafficking of cocaine
El fenómeno SÍ es sistemático. Apabullantemente sistemático. Mirando desde tres perspectivas –semántica, jurídica y estadística– llegamos a la conclusión de que simplemente no es verosímil escamotearle su sistematicidad
A partir de ese día, las zonas se convertirán en Espacios Territoriales de Capacitación y Reincorporación, donde los desde ahora exguerrilleros harán todas las actividades necesarias para reincorporase a la vida legal
The DEA took a gamble. It shared the intelligence with a Mexican federal police unit that has long had problems with leaks — even though its members had been trained and vetted by the DEA. Almost immediately, the Treviños learned they’d been betrayed
The software has been used against some of the government’s most outspoken critics and their families, in what many view as an unprecedented effort to thwart the fight against the corruption infecting every limb of Mexican society
Hoy, una vez, más los periodistas saldrán a las calles paran exigir justicia no sólo para el periodista sinaloense sino por todos sus colegas asesinados
Structured Operations doled out some $788 million in bribes in Brazil and 11 other countries, securing more than 100 contracts that generated $3.3 billion of profit
Francisco Goldman, “The Atenco Warning” (The New York Times, June 30, 2017).
Goldman persuasively argues that a 2006 government massacre, under the rule of then-Governor Enrique Peña Nieto, is emblematic of how Mexico is governed right now.
If any of Trump’s wall gets built, it will be in Hidalgo County, Texas, and the Rio Grande Valley near the Gulf of Mexico. It’s not a popular idea there. Del Bosque talks to many local officials and citizens.
“Anybody who has touched the Leahy Law has an opinion about it, but it’s hard to find anybody fully satisfied by the way it is interpreted or implemented,” writes a former State Department official who carried out this important but hard-to-implement set of human rights conditions on foreign military aid.
Phippen disputes the notion that Central American gang members are coming over the border as “unaccompanied children.” Instead, vulnerable kids are ending up in U.S. neighborhoods with serious gang problems.
In the absence of a Senate-confirmed Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, the Florida hardliner with great access to the White House is running much of U.S. policy toward Latin America right now.
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