Luis Robayo / AFP via Getty Images photo at Foreign Policy. Caption: “A Colombian soldier stands guard during a curfew imposed due to high numbers of coronavirus cases in Cali on July 17. In some of the country’s rural areas, illegal armed groups have taken the law into their own hands, implementing the curfews by force and threatening residents of harsh punishments if they fail to obey the lockdown rules.”

(Even more here)

August 6, 2020

Western Hemisphere Regional

The Biden campaign told me in an email that the presumptive Democratic nominee for president considers Mauricio Claver-Carone, Trump’s candidate to head the Washington D.C.-based Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), to be “overly ideological” and “under-qualified”

Since the end of March through the beginning of July, guards at detention centers across the country deployed force — pepper spray, pepper balls, pepper spray grenades — in incidents involving more than 10 immigrants at a time on a dozen occasions

To continue detaining nonviolent detainees as the virus tightens its grip on ICE facilities is pointless and dangerous — for detainees and for employees

Brazil

  • Monica Gugliano, Vou Intervir! (Piaui (Brazil), August 6, 2020).

O dia em que Bolsonaro decidiu mandar tropas para o Supremo

One of the State Department’s top Brazil experts, who has lived 11 years in the country, the Texas native grabbed headlines cozying up to Bolsonaro with an assertive style

Central America Regional

Acaso el principal cambio puede ser que la migración deje de ser la moneda de cambio en la política exterior hacia la región

Colombia

Aunque la implementación de los PDET ha avanzado, el gobierno Duque solo ha entregado 27 mil hectáreas de tierras a campesinos

Los exparamilitares claves en el proceso han denunciado amenazas contra ellos y sus familias. Juan Guillermo Monsalve incluso fue víctima de un ataque con cuchillo hace ocho años

Rights groups warn that armed groups including the ELN are using the pandemic to expand their control, threatening those who break the curfew with punishments and even death

El trámite se basó en una orden de captura contra el exparamilitar que estaba vencida. Y si bien esta fue prorrogada, la defensa de Mancuso alegó que el juez no era competente para tal prórroga

Guatemala

South Florida federal prosecutors have charged a former Economics Minister of Guatemala, Asisclo Valladares Urruela, 44, with helping to launder close to $10 million of illegal drug proceeds and other ill-gotten money

Honduras

El término de su prisión preventiva vence el próximo 2 de septiembre, luego de 2 años y medio

“There’s so much hate,” she said. “So much rejection of what it means to be indigenous. So much contempt”

Mexico

Unidentified assailants shot a journalist dead outside his home in the western Mexican state of Michoacan

El ataque contra el recinto policial estuvo liderado por Omar Mora Rojas, un presunto jefe de sicarios del cártel de La Nueva Familia Michoacana en la zona de La Ruana

U.S.-Mexico Border

“It’s a way we can identify what our biggest needs and the right mix in terms of personnel, technology and infrastructure along our border,” said U.S. Rep. Xochitl Torres Small, D-New Mexico

The migrant shelters where we provide care remain crowded tinderboxes for infectious diseases such as varicella, mumps, and norovirus, and now Covid-19. The situation on the border is a public health crisis of our country’s own manufacturing

Biden committed to fully ending land confiscations, a more aggressive stance than President Barack Obama took when he came into office after President George W. Bush had approved border fencing

Congressional investigators say the agency is blocking them and revealing little about its internal investigation

Venezuela

The Nicolás Maduro regime promoted Interior Minister Néstor Reverol to General in Chief — the highest military rank in Venezuela —even though the officer is charged by federal prosecutors in New York with accepting large bribes in exchange for protecting drug shipments

La debilidad más importante que existe en Venezuela «es que no hay un mecanismo especial para las personas defensoras de DDHH, como lo tiene Colombia y la mayoría de los países centroamericanos

En el texto, hecho a puerta cerrada, se pondrá a la milicia como un nuevo componente especial de la Fuerza Armada Nacional