non-US news

Now, most of these women don’t even have that: Babies whose adoptions have been annulled will likely spend years in government-run orphanages before they can be adopted under the new rules.

Of the 2,286 pending cases, authorities have reviewed about 750, annulled 26 adoptions and are pressing criminal charges in nine against birth mothers, lawyers and civil registrars who allegedly forged documents, Attorney General’s spokesman Jorge Meng said Monday.”*

Angel Caballero’s experience in business administration may have helped get him a job with Venezuela’s Banesco bank, but it was his knowledge of Caracas’ poor barrios that the bank was really after.

The former steel industry worker manages $1.5 million of loans spread over 250 clients in some of the most impoverished areas of Caracas’ west side, helping Banesco tap into one of Venezuela’s fastest-growing lending markets.

“At first people were a little wary,” said Caballero, who was raised in the Caracas barrio of Magallanes de Catia. “But once the loan is approved, people feel they are being taken into account and they are very responsible about paying.”"*

Cubans got their first glimpse of their former president Fidel Castro for more than five months in a report on official state television yesterday.

A silent video of the Communist revolutionary chatting in a garden with the visiting Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez, was shown on the main evening news bulletin.”*

But instead of carrying news or fresh seafood delicacies from the coast, they haul propane tanks, camping equipment and four days of food for wealthy tourists from worlds away — all for as little as $8 a day.

Peruvian law permits only 500 people to set out each day on the Inca Trail to Peru’s top tourist destination, Machu Picchu — and nearly 300 of them are porters. Many complain that they are underpaid for their backbreaking labor.”*

The U.S. State Department yesterday alerted tourists who visit Dominican Republic on the risks of being victims of common hoodlums in cities, beaches and resorts, as well as by Police agents who demand bribes. “Crime continues being a serious problem in all of the Dominican Republic.”

The warning, in the State Department Consular Topics Section’s Web site (‘travel.state.gov’), corresponding to Dominican Republic, is similar to notices the entity has posted in previous years”*

For as far as the eye can see, stalks of sugar cane march across the hillsides here like giant praying mantises. This is ground zero for ethanol production in Brazil — “the Saudi Arabia of biofuels,” as some have already labeled this vast South American country.

But even as Brazil’s booming economy is powered by fuel processed from the cane, labor officials are confronting what some call the country’s dirty little ethanol secret: the mostly primitive conditions endured by the multitudes of workers who cut the cane.”*

The explosions that shatter the early morning quiet here are perfect metaphors for another kind of boom, the economic one transforming Panama’s capital.

The blasts a few miles north of the city are part of the first phase of the $5.25-billion Panama Canal expansion project. They are clearing a path for new locks that will modernize the historic waterway and, in 2014, enable bigger ships to traverse the isthmus.

This country’s economy grew 11% last year, in large part because of expectations of continued prosperity resulting from a bigger and busier canal. But there is more going on in Panama than just a massive public works project.”*

A famous Nicaraguan revolutionary singer-songwriter has asked the government to stop using his music.

Carlos Mejia Godoy, who penned the hymn of the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front, said in a letter published Saturday that President Daniel Ortega and his staff are not authorized to use his songs at government events.

He did not dispute the use of the party hymn he wrote, but he gave government-supported television and radio outlets a week to stop using a version that he recorded.”*

In Latin America, in the absence of a social revolution at the moment of national independence there were plenty of rebellions and political revolts. Less frequently these were popular rebellions and almost never were they ideological revolutions that shook the traditional structures, as was the case with the North American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Cuban Revolution. Instead, internal struggles abounded, before and after the birth of the new Republics.

A half century later, in 1866, the Ecuadorian Juan Montalvo would make a dramatic diagnosis: “freedom and fatherland in Latin America are the sheep’s clothing with which the wolf disguises himself.” When the republics were not at war they enjoyed the peace of the oppressors. Even though slavery had been abolished in the new republics, it existed de facto and was almost as brutal as in the giant to the north. Class violence was also racial violence: the indigenous continued to be marginalized and exploited. “This has been the peace of the jail cell,” conclued Montalvo. The indian, deformed by this physical and moral violence, would receive the most brutal physical punishments but “when they give him the whip, trembling on the ground, he gets up thanking his tormenter: May God reward you, sir.” Meanwhile, the Puerto Rican Eligenio M. Hostos in 1870 would already lament that “there is still no South American Confederation.” On the contrary, he only saw disunion and new empires oppressing and threatening: “An empire [Germany] can still move deliberately against Mexico! Another empire [Great Britain/Brazil] can still wreck Paraguay with impunity!” “*

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez met with former Cuban President Fidel Castro to discuss the world’s food, energy and financial crises during a private three-hour meeting, state media reported Tuesday.

No details about the health of the ailing 81-year-old Castro were released by the online edition of the Communist Party daily Granma in its report on Monday’s meeting. The newspaper released no new images of Castro, who has not been seen in public since he fell ill nearly two years ago. Castro’s last official photograph was released in January.”*

Elian Gonzalez said he will never let down ex-President Fidel Castro and his brother Raul Castro, according to the Communist youth newspaper Juventud Rebelde.

Raul Castro succeeded Fidel as president earlier this year.

Now 14, Elian was 6 when his relatives in Miami, Florida, lost their fight to keep him in the United States and he was returned to Cuba in mid-2000 with his father.”*

After three years of bureaucratic suspension and six months of hearings, five ex-civil patrollers were sentenced to 780 years in prison by the Sentencing Tribunal in the highland county of Salamá on May 28.

The tribunal found insufficient evidence to convict a sixth accused. The six have been on trial for their participation in the massacre of 177 Maya-Achí women and children from the village of Río Negro in the county of Rabinal, Baja Verapaz on March 13, 1982.

The massacre of Río Negro women and children is one of 626 documented massacres perpetrated during the bloodiest of Latin America’s civil wars in which 250,000 people were killed or disappeared. “*

The Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) and the Latin American Working Group (LAWG) have sent a letter to the governor of the Mexican state of Guerrero expressing serious concern about reports of human rights violations and criminalization of social protest in the state, particularly against indigenous communities.

The letter specifically voices concern about the arrests of five leaders of the Me Phaa Indigenous People Organization on April 18 and asks for better due process guarantees in these and other cases involving indigenous people in the state. “*

No one has been brought to justice for the murders of two young indigenous reporters in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca in April, a case that has mobilised social activists and drawn condemnation from UNESCO.

Local indigenous authorities told IPS that two months after the murders, their communities have returned to “normality,” which for them means the presence of paramilitary groups, clashes between rival clans, and the absence of state security forces.

On Apr. 7, 22-year-old Felicitas Martínez and 24-year-old Teresa Bautista were ambushed and shot to death on a rural road in their municipality. The two young women were reporters for Radio Copala, “The Voice that Breaks the Silence”, a low power, small range community radio station that has been on the air since January.”*

In what some experts call Raúl Castro’s boldest break yet from socialism, Cuban state companies have until August to overhaul their salary structures to one that pays hard-workers more than slackers, the government newspaper reported Wednesday.

No more will all Cuban workers doing the same job receive the same pay. Now people who do more will get more — and those who offer quality service will be rewarded, the vice minister of labor, Carlos Mateu, told Granma, the country’s Communist Party newspaper”*

“We seek recognition for colonel Castellanos so he can receive the ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ title,” from Israel, Foreign Ministry Historical Investigation Committee coordinator Ricardo Moran told reporters after presenting a documentary on his life.

Castellanos, who served in Geneva as consul for El Salvador from 1942 to 1945, and his first secretary, George Mandel Mantello, issued Salvadoran citizenship papers to thousands of Jews, mostly from Hungary, so they could avoid being sent to Nazi death camps.”*

69 percent of all government workers got their job through connections and/or political recommendations, a situation that still reflects the presence of cronyism when government agencies recruit personnel.

The figure, disclosed in the “Survey on civil service and public servants” presented yesterday by the National Public Administration Institute (INAP) in the El Embajador hotel, reveals that only 16, 6 and 4 percent enter via job applications, professional contest or training and merits, respectivel”*

Alejandro Che Paau’s home is slated to be under water by 2013.

Paau was born in this Maya-Q’eqchi jungle village of 300 people perched above the verdant banks of the Chixoy and Copón rivers in northern Guatemala. Fields of cardamom and corn surround several dozen palm-thatched homes, which are accessible only by boat or foot.

But the junction of these two jade-colored rivers, a 20-minute descent from Paau’s home, is also the proposed site for the nation’s second-largest hydroelectric project - the Xalalá Dam. His village is one of 18 communities that would become a 3-square-mile reservoir.”*

Marchers Say Education Officials Are Changing LGE “Behind Teachers and Students’ Backs”

A sea of umbrellas flooded Santiago’s central Plaza de Armas around midday last Wednesday as teachers, high schoolers, university students, and parents took over the rainy Santiago streets in a national protests called by the Teacher’s Association. The protest was against the General Education Law (LGE), an education reform package being put forward to replace the existing Organic Constitutional Education Law (LOCE).”*

Manuel Uribe, who once weighed a half ton but has slimmed down to about 700 pounds, celebrates his 43rd birthday on Wednesday with a simple wish for the coming year: to be able to stand on his own two feet to get married.

Interviewed at his home in northern Mexico, where he can still do little more than sit up on a bed, Uribe said more than two years of steady dieting have helped him drop about 550 pounds from his Guinness record weight of 1,235 pounds.”*

Last week, Wal-Mart de Mexico announced it is the company with the best corporate governance in Mexico and the fourth best in Latin America according to Spanish consulting company Management and Excellence (M&E) which rates 50 non-banking sector companies in the region. In the group, there are 25 Brazilian companies and 14 Mexican companies.

The study uses metrics from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) to evaluate several corporate governance subjects such as board of director’s responsibility, shareholders’ rights, audit committees’ guidelines, transparency practices and the use of good governance policies.

“Integrity is above anything else in Wal-Mart de Mexico. We understand that the only way to pass on our value proposition to our customers, meet shareholders’ expectations, foster associate growth, and contribute towards improving the quality of life for Mexican families is having good corporate governance, one that is ethical, disciplined, transparent and efficient. Being considered the company with the best corporate governance in Mexico is a huge responsibility, and a challenge to continue generating value for Mexico,” said Raul Arguelles, Sr. VP for Corporate Affairs and People Division for Wal-Mart de Mexico.

This is the second time Wal-Mart de Mexico has been recognized by M&E as a leading company in Mexico. In May 2007, WMM was named the company with the highest sustainability, governance and corporate social responsibility in Mexico. Also, WMM is the only Mexican company among the first ten companies in this field in Latin America

With these initiatives Wal-Mart de Mexico reaffirms its commitment to improve the quality of life for Mexican families.

Committed to a better Mexico

Wal-Mart de Mexico S. A. de C.V. (BMV: WALMEX) is a retail company whose vision is to contribute towards improving the quality of life for Mexican families. It has several business formats, including self-service stores (Bodega Aurrera, Wal-Mart Supercenter and Superama), membership warehouse clubs (Sam’s Club), apparel stores (Suburbia) and restaurants (Vips, El Porton and Ragazzi), amounting to 1,045 units. In 2008, Wal-Mart de Mexico received the Socially Responsible Company award for the eighth consecutive year.

A major Mexican tomato-growers’ association says shipments to the United States have stopped as U.S. authorities investigate the origin of a salmonella outbreak.”*

Mexico’s central bank says annual inflation rose to 4.95 percent in May, the fastest pace in more than three years, amid rising food prices.

The bank said Monday that annualized inflation rose more rapidly than in any month since December 2004, led by the swelling costs of food oils, rice, wheat products and corn tortillas.

Housing costs also climbed, likely due to the increased cost of building materials. Annual inflation was 4.55 percent in April.”*

A note threatening a Mexican journalist was found outside the office of a newspaper in southern Mexico on Monday, two days after someone left a severed head there.

Tabasco state Attorney General Gustavo Rosario said the letter was directed at Juan Padilla, editor of El Correo de Tabasco, which recently carried reports about migrant smuggling and kidnapping in the area.”*

Mexican archaeologists said Monday they have unearthed the remains of an Aztec palace once inhabited by the emperor Montezuma in the heart of what is now downtown Mexico City.

During a routine renovation project on a Colonial-era building, experts uncovered pieces of a wall as well as a basalt floor believed to have been part of a dark room where Montezuma meditated, archaeology team leader Elsa Hernandez said.

Montezuma’s palace complex — known as the Casas Nuevas, or New Houses to distinguish them from his predecessors’ palaces — is thought to have comprised five interconnected buildings containing the emperor’s office, chambers for children and several wives and even a zoo, according to Hernandez.”*