CIP Americas

Fifteen brave Guatemalan women from the indigenous qeqchí people testified before the High Risk Court in Guatemala City on Sept. 24-28, as part of the first criminal trial for sexual slavery and rape during the armed conflict. This legal action is historically transcendent, not only for being the first time that sexual violence during the armed conflict in Guatemala has come to trial, but also because it is the first trial for sexual slavery that has been brought to a national court. Previous cases have been presented in international courts.

It potentially affects half the U.S. population, men and women whose lives could be disrupted forever from one day to the next. It costs billions of dollars, at a time when schools are closing down and essential public services disappearing. It deepens the nation’s racial divide and tears families apart. It kills tens of thousands of people, in the U.S. and abroad.

  Yesterday I lost my son. My son will be turning two and has a beautiful name that means message or word. Born into a period of violence because of the coup in Honduras, he was for many of us a symbol of life and hope amidst a reality informed by pain and death. Panic [...]

The earthquake has struck. What we are seeing now is the way in which the pieces are being arranged for the reconstruction of hemispheric order, how the countries are organizing, and the new role that the ex-hegemonic power will play. What is certain is that the global crisis put an end to the United States’ “backyard.”

Over the 27 years since IRCA, a general division has marked the U.S. immigrant rights movement. On one side are well-financed advocacy organizations in Washington DC, with links to the Democratic Party and large corporations. They formulate and negotiate over immigration reform proposals that combine labor supply programs and increased enforcement against the undocumented. On the other side are organizations based in immigrant communities, and among labor and political activists, who defend undocumented migrants, and who resist proposals for greater enforcement and labor programs with diminished rights.

Over the last 25 years, guest worker programs have increasingly become a vehicle for channeling the migration that has stemmed from free market reforms. Increasing numbers of guest workers are recruited each year for labor in the U.S. from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean under the H1-B, H2-A and H2-B programs. Recruiters promise high wages and charge thousands of dollars for visas, fees and transportation. By the time they leave home, the debts of guest workers are crushing.

One of the last century’s most notorious despots, Jean-Claude Duvalier, has returned to Haiti after 25 years in exile. The most effective way for the United States and the MINUSTAH-contributing countries of Latin America to help Haiti would be to provide the support it needs to hold accountable those who flagrantly and violently abuse power at the great expense of the Haitian population.