Clara Wood, survivor of the DEA-Honduran Drug War Massacre in Ahuas that took the life of her 14-year old son, declared that she has been pressured to alter her account of events by members of the U.S. government.
President Obama has nothing to gain, and much to lose, by propping up Mexico’s corrupt President, Peña Nieto. Peña Nieto will be in Washington on Tuesday, seeking to bolster his support in the United States as it rapidly unravels in his own country.
While Peña Nieto and Obama will discuss plans to fortify the bilateral security agenda, which to this date has caused over 100,000 deaths and 24,000 disappearances in Mexico in the last 8 years, citizens of both countries are demonstrating that a transnational organized effort to push for and achieve justice is not only possible, but well under way.
Honduras has been rated by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) as the country with the highest homicide rate in the world from 2010 until 2012, when the most recent report was issued.1 From 2005 to 2013, the number of violent deaths of women rose by 263.4%. This violence is the result of multiple factors, including high levels of economic inequity and inequality, poverty, corruption, militarization, and an ever increasing presence of organized crime and drug trafficking, all of which has a strong negative impact on the human rights of the population, and on the lives of women in particular.
When violence is attacked with violence, women become both victims and defenders. They are disproportionately and differently affected by violence, violation of human rights and the erosion of community. Yet Mesoamerican and the U.S. governments continue to fund militarist enforcement policies framed as counternarcotics or anti-terrorism that arm and train men to patrol and control the population that put women at great risk.
With homicides on the rise again, truce facilitators say support and funding is needed to reduce violence in the Central American nation.
The capture of Mexico’s most-wanted drug lord, Joaquín Guzman Loera “El Chapo” is a major victory for the U.S.-Mexican drug war. But will it reduce or increase the violence that plagues the country?
Women’s organizations are raising a red flag on Nicaragua. In a hearing of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on March 12, they reported rising violence against women, corruption and abuse of power in government when dealing with the crimes, and the increasing vulnerability of girls and young women.
In 2013, Mexican drug war victims joined US victims on the Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity in New York’s Riverside Church. The testimonies they presented, in the same place where in 1967 Martin Luther King called for an end to the Viet Nam war, revealed the similarities between the two unjust wars and why we should oppose them.
A secret operation to run guns across the border to Mexican drug cartels — overseen by U.S. government agents — threatens to become a major scandal for the Obama administration. The operation, called “Fast and Furious,” was run out of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) office in Phoenix, Arizona. ATF sanctioned the purchase of weapons in U.S. gun shops and tracked the smuggling route to the Mexican border. Reportedly, more than 2,500 firearms were sold to straw buyers who then handed off the weapons to gunrunners under the nose of ATF.
