General

“It was like out of a movie. Planes, helicopters, flying in over our houses. No one knew they were coming.” Irma Yolanda told us. “The women were in our houses with our children. I was cooking the little bit of beans I had to give to my children and making tortillas… Then the [armed] men came in. They ate all the food they found in every home. After they ate, they threw gasoline over all the houses and set them on fire. We tried to find refuge in the mountains. But it was raining. My children shivering with cold. So there was nothing we could do but return.” Two weeks later, these private security, police, and national armed forces came back to evict Irma Yolanda’s poor, Maya Q’eqchi community once and for all to make way for the nickel mining company that wanted their lands. Finding that the men were out in the fields, they gang raped Irma Yolanda and ten other women, a brutal tactic used to convince the community to abandon their homes.

Last week, the Latin America Working Group partnered with the Center for International Policy to host a conference examining Cuba’s placement on the State Department’s list of State Sponsors of Terrorism. Along with Mavis Anderson from LAWG, speakers included renowned Cuba experts Wayne Smith (Center for International Policy), Robert Muse (Muse and Associates), Carlos Alzugaray (University of Havana), Sarah Stephens (Center for Democracy in the Americas), and Arturo Lopez-Levy (University of Denver). Each panelist spoke critically of this designation, which has served to hurt Cubans rather than affect political changes in Cuba, or combat real terrorist threats.

Last night on "Strategy Session with Antonio Gonzalez" on 90.7 KPFK, LAWG's Senior Associate, Mavis Anderson, discussed the current political reality of U.S. policy towards Cuba. While there are some who will criticize President Obama's slow movement in changing our outdated Cuba policy, "kudos should be given where kudos are due," says Anderson. Obama has made some of the changes available to him under executive authority in permitting Cuban Americans to travel freely back and forth to the island, liberalizing the travel licensing process, and also issuing a veto threat if any legislation is proposed in Congress that aims at repealing his positive changes.

After ten years of making a life for himself in the beach-front city of Santa Monica, California, Jorge Romero* was deported to Mexico, joining the ranks of nearly 400,000 other undocumented migrants removed from the United States this past fiscal year. Behind the record high number of deportations by the Obama Administration are stark, human stories of broken families and untold abuse suffered by those who attempt to return to their homes in the United States. Jorge, who left behind his cousin and father in Santa Monica, was one of those to brave the dangerous journey back. On the way, he was apprehended and grossly abused by the U.S. Border Patrol. This is his story, as recorded by humanitarian organization No More Deaths: