non-US news

Last month, all anyone could talk about in the marketplace was the rising cost of food. Now that a violent transportation strike has paralyzed the country for two weeks and prevented deliveries from getting to market, the conversation has shifted to food shortages.

”Things are going from worse to more worst,” said veteran market vendor Manuel Ramírez, inventing a superlative to describe his frustration with the unraveling situation in Nicaragua. ”Even the [produce] baskets look like they are on strike,” he said, nodding to the large market bins that are empty except for a few rotting tomatoes and what appears to have been lettuce.

In the streets, several protests continued Wednesday while a tense calm prevailed throughout most of the country. Striking bus and truck drivers have clashed with riot police in recent days and the U.S. Embassy in Managua warned U.S. citizens to take precautions in the face of the strike, which began May 5.”*

A look at recent Mexican drug war-related violence:

May 10 — The No. 2 on the Juarez police force was shot more than 50 times and killed near his home. The Juarez police chief resigned that same day.

May 9 — Four gunmen in a truck shot and killed a former commander of Mexico City’s anti-kidnapping unit. The former commander was shot seven times in the head in front of his apartment. At the time he was working for the Honor and Justice Council of Mexico City’s police, which is similar to the internal affairs units in U.S. police forces.”* And 5 more events in May - go to the source below to see them all -striking list

The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the murder of Jorge Mérida Pérez, a correspondent in Quetzatenango province for the national Guatemalan daily Prensa Libre. Mérida was shot to death in his home on Saturday afternoon. CPJ calls on the Guatemalan authorities to begin an immediate, thorough investigation into this brutal killing.

While a motive has yet to be confirmed, early indications are that the killing may have been linked to Mérida’s journalism.

At 4 p.m. on Saturday, at least one unidentified individual stormed into the journalist’s home in Coatepeque, 130 miles (210 kilometers) southwest of Guatemala City, according to press reports and CPJ interviews. Mérida, 40, who was working at his computer at the time of the attack, was shot four times in the head, Prensa Libre reported. His 14-year-old son was in the house but was not injured.”*

In Peru, however, some people depend on resources they can find near where they live– and sometimes this means in or near parks. Without the support of these people countless opportunities to protect ecosystems, animals, plants, and cultures might be lost. Legal protections for parks generally go ignored by people who are in need and often such laws are challenging if not impossible to enforce in remote areas anyway. The key for conservation in Peru and elsewhere seems to rest upon finding a middle ground upon where communities choose to help protect natural resources, while also benefiting from the use of these resources in a sustainable manner.

So how have Peru and countless other countries tried to address this challenge? By inviting people who have a stake in national parks and other protected areas to participate in the creation of plans that will guide how these places are protected and utilized for economic gain. While sometimes extraordinarily successful, it’s not surprising that many of these management plans often fall short, and do not end up accomplishing their goals. The public participation processes used to make management plans are sometimes utilized by park managers as a manipulative means to have communities accept already decided upon objectives, or the goals agreed upon during the processes are not easily achieved or are poorly funded. But these failures might be a thing of the past, as researchers in Peru’s Cordillera Azul National Park have perhaps revolutionized conservation through an innovative strategy. It seems to have empowered communities in the buffer zones of the park and won their confidence and support.”*

Honduran farmers like Alvarez can’t compete in a global marketplace where the costs of fuel and fertilizer soared and rice prices doubled in the past year. The former breadbasket of Central America now imports 83 percent of the rice it consumes — a dependency triggered almost two decades ago when it adopted free-market policies pushed by the World Bank and other lenders.

The country was $3.6 billion in debt in 1990. In return for loans from the World Bank, Honduras became one of dozens of developing nations that abandoned policies designed to protect farmers and citizens from volatile food prices. The U.S. House Financial Services Committee convenes today in Washington to explore the causes of the global food crisis and possible solutions.”*

A hacker who identified himself as “Anonymous Coward” stole personal data of 6 million Chileans — reportedly including a daughter of the president — and posted it briefly on the Internet, authorities said Sunday.

“This is a serious and delicate issue,” said presidential spokesman Francisco Vidal.

Police Chief Jaime Jara confirmed that authorities were investigating the theft of the leaked data, which he said included identity card numbers, addresses, telephone numbers, e-mails and academic background.”*

Argentina’s Mar del Plata Intl. Film Festival, the only FIAPF Category One festival in Latin America, has rescheduled to Nov. 6-16, a move aimed at improving attendance and programming.

The National Film Institute, Incaa, had previously moved the event to December from March, where it was inconveniently sandwiched between Berlin in February and Cannes in May.”*

The opposing banks of the River Plate are contrasts in style. They were always that way. Buenos Aires was usually metropolitan and bright, while Montevideo was provincial and sullen. However, now the two sides reversed position, with the northern bank showing an air of vitality and modernity, while the southern bank sinking into a morass of pessimism.

Uruguay is booming. After growing 7.2 percent y/y in 2007, the Uruguayan economy is poised to grow more than 6 percent y/y in 2008. Foreign investment is pouring into the country, taking advantage of its vast natural resources and tourism potential. Despite the tantrums demonstrated by Argentines against Botnia’s new paper mill at Fray Bentos, other multinationals are rushing to develop similar projects on the River Plate. “*

Televisa Publishing is expanding its Partnership with BIG Research to produce research about consumer behavior and media consumption in Latin American countries.”*

Thousands of Mexicans dressed in white marched silently Sunday through the streets of Juarez, Mexico, just across the border from El Paso, Texas to protest drug-related violence. that killed more than 100 people, including about 20 police officers, during the past week in Mexico. VOA’s Greg Flakus has been following the situation from our Houston bureau.

Ordinary citizens in Mexico are reacting with alarm as the war between rival drug smuggling groups erupts in city centers and residential neighborhoods. Law enforcement experts say drug gangs are reacting violently to efforts by police and the army to break up their operations.”*

Satellite imagery obtained from NASA will help archeologist Bill Middleton peer into the ancient Mexican past. In a novel archeological application, multi- and hyperspectral data will help build the most accurate and most detailed landscape map that exists of the southern state of Oaxaca, where the Zapotec people formed the first state-level and urban society in Mexico.

If you ask someone off the street about Mexican archeology, they’ll say Aztec, Maya. Sometimes they’ll also say Inca, which is the wrong continent, but you’ll almost never hear anyone talk about the Zapotecs,” says Middleton, acting chair of the Department of Material Culture Sciences and professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Rochester Institute of Technology. “They had the first writing system, the first state society, the first cities. And they controlled a fairly large territory at their Zenith—250 B.C. to 750 A.D.””*

Thousands of white-clad people marched silently Sunday to protest a surge of drug-related violence in a Mexican city across from Texas where the No. 2 police officer was shot dead.

The crowd of several thousand students, church leaders, businessmen and politicians walked for about four miles (six kilometers) across Ciudad Juarez to a park near a border crossing, breaking the silence in a burst of speeches, dancing and singing.

More than 200 people have been killed so far this year in Ciudad Juarez. The city of 1.3 million across the border from El Paso, Texas, is home base for the powerful Juarez drug cartel.”*

May 5th marked the beginning of an intended thirty day strike, with more than 1.5 million public transport workers and truckers in Nicaragua protesting rising fuel costs and the lack of government impetus to do anything about it. (1) With road blockades in several places in Managua and almost no public intercity transport allowed whatsoever, Nicaragua is at an effective standstill. Containers full of goods sit stalled on the sides of highways, and even sports teams have cancelled weekend matches. When baseball is put on hold in Nicaragua, you know it is serious.

The focus of the strike centers on three unions’ demands for government subsidization at the fuel pump. The Federation of Taxi Drivers, National Transportation Coordinator and the Interurban Transportation Directorate demand that gas prices, currently at about US$4.70 per gallon, be reduced by more than US$2.00 per gallon and frozen. However, the government remains firm that such a policy would bankrupt them, and the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure has offered to reduce the price of gasoline by only US$0.30 cents a gallon. (2)

“*

Under conventional economic logic, Mr. León is uncompetitive. His yields are just a fraction of what mechanized agriculture churns out from the vast expanses of the Great Plains.

But to him, that is beside the point.

The Mixteca highlands here in the state of Oaxaca are burdened with some of the most barren earth in Mexico, the work of more than five centuries of erosion that began even before the arrival of the Spanish colonizers, their goats and their cattle. The scuffed hillsides look as though some ancient giant had hacked at them, opening gashes in the white and yellow rock.

Over the past two decades, Mr. León and other farmers have worked to reforest and reclaim this parched land, hoping to find a way for people to stay and work their farms instead of leaving for jobs in cities and in the United States.”*

Fiction: In the film No Country for Old Men (Cohen Brothers, 2007), evil, as represented by Javier Bardem’s excellently portrayed drug trafficker-paid hitman, moves implacably through the Chihuahua desert’s dusty Texan towns, injuring, killing, destroying, getting what he wants. Good, personified by Tommy Lee Jones’ also excellent tired old Sheriff, is impotent against the triumphant march of evil, which he watches, resigned, on the verge of his retirement.

The reality: Holy Week, 2008. Paloma de Villa, with less than 2,000 inhabitants, set in the Chihuahua desert on the border with Columbus, New Mexico. The police commandant and six officers, between them making up the entire municipal police force, resign. They hand in their notice because of the wave of drug-related killings and kidnappings and they exile themselves on the U.S. side of the border. In just 81 days, from Jan. 1 to March 21, organized crime has beaten all records for killings in the state of Chihuahua: 175 people murdered plus 40 corpses found in a Ciudad Juarez mass grave ups the macabre homicide figure to 215 for the year. In March alone, 107 people have been killed in this border town.

The law is impotent against the advance of evil.”*

After a bloody week here in Mexico, the weekend held little reprieve for the nation’s police force.

The second-highest-ranking police officer in the border city of Juarez, across the frontier from El Paso, Texas, was shot dead on Saturday, adding to the string of killings that took place last week.”*

Seaweed found at an inland settlement in Chile confirms that the village is one of the oldest inhabited sites in the Americas and demonstrates that residents had extensive contact with the coastline, 50 miles away, researchers said Friday.

Radiocarbon dating of the seaweed shows that the samples are 14,100 years old, give or take 120 years. That means the site, called Monte Verde, is at least a millennium older than the so-called Clovis sites in the American Southwest, long believed to be the most ancient in the New World.”*

Phantoms come, phantoms go. They swirl around Leonora Carrington, a tiny woman of 91 with a tart intellect and a posh British accent, as she sips Earl Grey tea at her kitchen table. They rise like black vapors from the pavement of Avenue Reforma, where a menagerie of Carrington’s enigmatic bronzes startle pedestrians and spook passing cars.

“Nobody ever takes this chair,” says Carrington in her genteel, impish voice, indicating one of four matching seats for her tea-time guests. “I think it’s haunted by my husband.”

After more than six decades of living in Mexico, where she has raised two sons and outlived two husbands, Carrington is being showered with accolades, exhibitions (including the outdoor sculpture show on Reforma) and essay tributes as one of her adopted country’s greatest living artists and its last remaining link to a key chapter of Modern art history. She appreciates the attention. “They’ve been very receptive and very kind here in Mexico.”"*

President Evo Morales agreed Thursday to stand for election in a nationwide recall vote, gambling that Bolivians will reelect him after just two years in office and shore up support for his pending reforms.

Morales first proposed a nationwide recall referendum in December amid a battle over his draft constitution.”*

The national coordinator of Mexico’s battle against organized crime was slain Thursday by an assassin hiding in his home in what appeared to be the latest revenge killing by one of the country’s most notorious drug cartels.

Edgar Millan Gomez, 41, was the third leading federal security official to be killed in Mexico City in a week.”*

The problems faced by Rosa and others like her, complicated by factors such as the country’s loss of Soviet aid years ago, appear to be getting worse. Cuba’s system of two currencies may be at least partly to blame.

Cuba uses the dominant convertible peso known as the CUC — introduced four years ago to replace the U.S. dollar, which had been circulating for more than a decade — and the Cuban peso known as moneda nacional.

Those with jobs in hotels, airlines and shops and on the thriving black market earn CUCs, referred to as “the dollar” and worth about 25 times the peso. The peso is the currency given to all state workers and pensioners, which must be converted to CUCs to purchase most goods. The Cuban government retains the peso because it lacks sufficient foreign reserves to back and circulate only CUCs.”*

A group of men shot dead a high-ranking Mexican federal police officer involved in the government’s war on drugs on Thursday, the fourth senior policemen killed in recent days.

Regional commissioner Edgar Millan was gunned down in the capital in the early hours of the morning, a spokesman for the Security Ministry told Reuters. He was shot nine times, the spokesman said.

“They were hunting him,” he said. The spokesman said it was too early to say if the murder was drug-related.”*

ALAS (”wings” in Spanish) has finalized the artist line-up for “El Concierto Por Los Niños” (“The Concert For The Children”), which will see many of the  world’s leading Latin music superstars join in a call-to-action to aid impoverished children in Latin America. Set to take place on May 17^th with concerts in Mexico and Argentina, this historic event will see the participation of the following artists:

Mexico City - La Plaza de la Constitución, (El Zócalo) - Starting at 5:00PM (Local Time)

Aleks Syntek, Ana Torroja, Babasonicos, Chayanne, David Bisbal, Diego Torres, Emmanuel, Juan Luis Guerra, Juanes, Los Tigres del Norte, Maná, Miguel Bose,

Ricardo Montaner, Ricky Martin, Timbiriche and Tania Libertad

Buenos Aires - Costanera Sur - Starting at 2PM (Local Time)

Alejandro Sanz, Calle 13, Fito Paez, Gustavo Cerati, Jorge Drexler,  La Portuaria, Paulina Rubio, Pedro Aznar And  Shakira

With venue sizes able to accommodate up to 200,000 people in Mexico City and another 120,000 in Buenos Aires, “El Concierto Por Los Niños” is expected to bring together well over 300,000 music fans. In fact, fans in Buenos Aires have already grabbed the large majority of available tickets as over 90,000 free passes were distributed in just over a week.   In Mexico City, where the free concert is open to fans on a first arrival basis, the city’s famed El Zócalo is expected to fill to capacity.

Mexico’s drug underworld has become ever more violent in recent years, with gunmen beheading victims and carving threats into their bodies. But almost like a code of honor, hit men targeting ranchers, businessmen, journalists and rival drug smugglers have largely left the victims’ families alone.

The attack on Alba broke all the rules.

On Saturday, seven ranchers were killed as they returned from a union meeting led by Alba. The following day, gunmen disguised as police showed up at Alba’s ranch. When they didn’t find him, they lined up 10 of his relatives and friends in front of his sturdy, two-story brick house and mowed them down.”*

Mexican wireless carrier America Movil SAB (AMX) said in a statement Wednesday that it has signed an agreement with Apple Inc. ( AAPL) to sell the iPhone in Latin American later this year.

America Movil is the largest mobile operator in Latin America with 159.2 million wireless subscribers at the end of March.”*