Following a week of accolades abroad, President Enrique Peña Nieto returned home to face the worst political crisis of his administration. Protests rage after local police forcibly disappeared 43 students of Ayotzinapa, a rural teaching college in the state of Guerrero. As investigations continue, the crisis has laid bare the violence and corruption that control large parts of the nation.
Every year on October 2 thousands of Mexican students pour into the streets of Mexico City, marching from Tlatelolco through the historic city center downtown, to the main plaza. This year they commemorated the 1968 massacre of students, the attack on Ayotzinapa students last month and the life of Raúl Alvarez Garin, “the hero of Tlatelolco”.
True development in El Salvador will mean looking beyond U.S. money and the strings that always come with it.
Representatives of Mexico’s indigenous peoples have issued a new declaration and announced upcoming mobilizations to further their cause.
The dual plagues of blight and price fixing are causing the scarcity and high prices of the fragrant bean, but the real problem for communities is the need to grow other foods.
La plaga de la roya y el coyotaje influyen en la escasez y el alza de precios del aromático, pero el verdadero problema para las comunidades es la necesidad de cultivar otros alimentos.
Susana (name changed to protect her identity) will have try again to make the journey to the United States with her son Daniel, 16. Both left everything they had in El Salvador to escape because a gang threatened to kill the boy for refusing to be a gang member.
Officials at the Salvadoran Foreign Ministry do not have accurate data on the number of children who are traveling to the United States illegally at the hands of smugglers. The Vice Minister for Salvadorans Abroad, Liduvina Magarín, recently visited 12 sites that function as shelters, detention centers, and migrant processing centers located in the southern U.S. border. In a single day, these places received 310 Salvadoran children. Given the traffic and movement of people in recent months, it is speculated that the daily number of children passing through that border is between 500 and 600 Salvadoran children who have been sent with coyotes to the United States.
The women of the Movement for Justice in El Barrio–a community-based organization led by immigrant women in New York– and the Zapatista women of La Realidad are two examples of how women in struggle all over the world are coming together to inspire and learn from each other, and how, in the process, they are transforming the world.
Selena is a young woman born into Zapatismo and brought up in and with a Zapatista autonomous education. She knows no gender or age restrictions. She was appointed to a post that is indispensable to the survival of the collective–to register facts and occurrences and then share with the community what she has heard, discovered and learned. Nobody doubts her truth or integrity, her strength or the fidelity of the information she communicates. She was trained for this. The Assembly chose her for this role because of these qualities.
