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The police tried to impede Trinidad Ruiz from looking for the bodies of her husband and son. They were disappeared by paramilitary forces on March 23, 2012.  Manuel Ruiz, age 56, and Samir Ruiz, age 15, were executed. Their bodies were dumped in a river and discovered more than four days later by the surviving members of the Ruiz family who were accompanied by Colombian and international human rights organizations. More than eight months later, Mrs. Ruiz and her family are still searching for justice in the highest profile murder of 2012 in Colombia.....

Three years after the most devastating natural disaster in Haitian history, the earthquake that killed over 300,000 people on January 12th, 2010, Haitians are still struggling to rebuild a semblance of normalcy in their daily lives. Despite the $6.34 billion in humanitarian and recovery funding from the international community that supposedly has already been disbursed in Haiti, reconstruction efforts still appear painfully slow in the eyes of many Haitians. President of the Catholic NGO Caritas Haiti, Pierre André Dumas, called upon all sectors of the country to unite in this time of disillusionment with shortcomings of reconstruction efforts:

"The momentum that followed the earthquake has faded. Much of the promises have not been kept. There is a sense of disappointment among the people: a large part of the population still lives in tents ... We need greater political will, national dialogue and love for this country. We must put aside individual interests."

Cuba policy faces a new era with a second Obama Administration and a State Department soon to be led by Senator John Kerry (D-MA). We could well have have some friends in high places, and that’s not at all wrong. President Obama has made some serious changes to U.S.-Cuba policy in allowing for Cuban Americans to travel freely to Cuba without restriction and liberalizing purposeful (people-to-people), religious, academic and cultural travel. Senator Kerry has been a strong congressional ally in advocating for a rational policy towards Cuba. In 2011 he placed a freeze on $20 million in USAID funding that was designated for “democracy promotion” in Cuba, until a report on the ineffectiveness of these programs was produced by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). While there has been progress made in the last four years in pursuing a more sane Cuba policy, there is still a cloud hanging over a real change in our relations with Cuba. That cloud is Alan Gross, a USAID subcontractor who has been detained in Cuba since December 3, 2009. Why? Well, Arturo Lopez-Levy shares some important facts in his piece on The Havana Note, “Is Obama Acting Pragmatically in the Alan Gross Case?”...

Last year I visited Bajo Aguán, a land torn by a terrible land conflict.  You can see in this video many of the vivid realities I saw on that trip: the immense, silent, hundreds of miles of African palm plantations, used for biofuel, which wealthy landowners are seeking to expand, setting the stage for the struggle over land; the brutal and overwhelming presence of police and soldiers, with anti-riot gear and guns, up against poor peasants; the testimony of a young man who was doused with gasoline by security forces and threatened with being burned alive; the heartless and violent evictions of communities; the determination and bravery of campesino women and men who take over farms they claim as agrarian reform land, and the cooperative ways in which they eke out a living—until the next eviction or assassination.