LAWG Blog - Latin America Working Group

"The Country is Different Now"

by Vanessa Kritzer on May 03, 2010

“It's important to talk about the terrible things that are happening, but the media always covers the negative. It’s more important to talk about what is rarely discussed—that the people are organizing themselves. Not much has been said about how the country is different now, or at least that there are new ideas now about what policies should be like and how we can change things. I wanted to bring that sense of hope and possibility here. The belief that a new America is possible, a different order is possible.”

:2010, Publications

Call for Action Following Violent Attacks against International Human Rights Caravan in Oaxaca

by Jennifer Johnson on April 30, 2010

Human rights organizations are joining together to condemn and call for urgent action following the horrific attacks against an international human rights caravan in Oaxaca earlier this week.

On Tuesday, April 27th a caravan of 25 human rights observers, reporters and teachers was ambushed by an armed group of paramilitaries in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. Two members of the delegation were killed in this attack, Betty Alberta Cariño, the director of Center for Community Support Working Together (CACTUS) along with Tyri Antero Jaakkola, a human rights observer from Finland, with 15 more reported injured.

:2010, Blog Posts, Jennifer Johnson, Mexico

Justice Is Hard to Find for Mothers in Ciudad Juárez

by Brian Erickson on April 29, 2010

“How many years has this been going on? Why didn't they change the way they investigate everything?” These are the questions that linger on the mind of Irma Monreal after nearly nine years of struggling to find a semblance of justice after her daughter, Esmeralda, was raped, tortured and murdered in Ciudad Juárez in 2001.

:2010, Blog Posts, Brian Erickson, Mexico, U.S.-Mexico Border

Haiti: Of Donors and Disasters

by Salvador Sarmiento, RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights on April 28, 2010

Take a look at a quality analysis by Salvador Sarmiento of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights of the road to travel between an apparently successful donors conference and the actual delivery of well-targeted aid, published on the Center for International Policy’s Americas Program blog.

:2010, Blog Posts, Guest, Haiti

Improving Relations with Havana: Is the U.S. Up to the Challenge?

by Travis Wheeler and Emily Chow on April 26, 2010

Speaking recently before a university audience in Kentucky, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shared her thoughts about the future of U.S.-Cuban relations. She touched on many headline-grabbing issues, but her comment that it's her “personal belief that the Castros do not want to see an end to the embargo and do not want to see normalization with the United States, because they would then lose all of their excuses for what hasn’t happened in Cuba in the last 50 years" is what got Cuba's, and the international media's, attention.