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Libba Farrar

HIV/AIDS and Human Rights in Mexico - 0 views

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    Mexican government made attempts to guarantee the General Health Law that mandated that the government was to enforce the right to health protection, making the law applicable in court cases. When entering into negotiations with neighboring countries in an attempt to enter the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Mexican government could retained their reputation for its human rights violations; therefore, initiating a domino effect in Mexican government policies. In an attempt to address this issue developed human rights commissions and committees to enforce and tackle the barriers human rights violations presented to the government's involvement in foreign affairs. Although it can be argued that the enforcement of HIV/AIDS screenings at jobs, educational facilities, and the matrimonial sphere presented some violation of basic inalienable rights.
Elizabeth Hughes

INSTRAW - 0 views

    • Elizabeth Hughes
       
      This article discusses the inclusion of women in the local government in Guatemala. However, women are participating in government in Huehuetenango, Chiquimula, Solala, and San Marcos. Women are acting against political violence. One way that they are doing this is by eliminating corrupted activities within the government. In order to end political violence against women, federal laws must be established against the violence. Having women in the governmental systems, help in governmental response towards the rights and needs of women.
Libba Farrar

Center for Immigration Studies - 0 views

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    Illegal immigration into the United States from Mexico has increasing become a topic for debate. The Mexican government seeks Illegal-Alien Amnesty; however, the United States, under the Bush Administration, believed in building a 'guestworker' program, which in theory would address the educational deficits amongst the incoming immigrant workers. Immigrant workers who enter the United States are coming from areas of poverty which lack adequate educational facilities and due to the lack of financial prosperity young adults are frequently withdrawing from school to try and turn a profit for the family. The cheap labor that comes into the United States comes at a high cost to the natives as it increases the poor population and the amount of people relying on welfare programs. Analysis of the statistics show that the amount of households headed by immigrants make up the majority of the poor population on welfare and without health care insurance; therefore, the United States is seeking to establish policies that address both issues in the welfare system as well as the policies regarding hiring unskilled immigrant workers.
Elcey Williams

AIDS in Mexico - The Body - 0 views

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    This source shows recent patterns of AIDS infection in Mexico, as well as recent government policies to deal with the disease.
Iraimi Mercado

Violence and crime in Mexico at the crossroads of misgovernance, poverty and inequality... - 0 views

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    This source talks about the policys thaa are being made to combat the crime in Mexico. It focuses on what the government is working on to deal with the issue.
Maria DiGioia

Foreign Policy: Gays in Latin America: Is the Closet Half Empty? - 0 views

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    This article talks about how homosexuality is coming out more and more in Latin America, and people are becoming less afraid of the idea through the support of the government movements. It talks about how the term "macho," though still existing, is starting to give way to a more "gay-friendly" region. This article also gives a bit of history on the gay, lesbian, and bi communities and their efforts in Latin America, and how it is rapidly moving to a more accepting environment despite the religious upheaval with it.
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    An article published in February 2009 discusses the change in attitude of towards homosexual people in Latin America. Ten years ago the area still promoted "macho" attitude and took on a "don't ask, don't tell" attitude, however, today groups are fighting for gay rights and making improvements. In 2003 Mexico even passed an anti-discrimination law that included sexual orientation. This new toleration is mainly due to the region no longer being authoritarian as well as gay and lesbian activists groups making a different in government and their local areas.
claude adjil

Brazil Takes Off - 0 views

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    In 2003 when Goldman Sachs economists linked Brazil with Russia, India and China as the economies that would come to dominate the world, much contest aroused over the inclusion of Brazil. Many economists questioned how Brazil could participate amongst the ensemble since the country features a declining growth rate, victim to any outside financial crisis, and constant political instability does not make Brazil an appealing candidate as an arising force. China leads the world economy out of recession while Brazil was not far from behind. Brazil was unable to avoid the downturn, but was among the last to fall and among the first to recover with a growing economy again at an annual rate of 5%. With the development of new deep-sea oilfields over the next few years, Brazil's growth will rapidly escalate also a result of Asian countries heightened appetite for food and minerals from Brazil's ample land. Forecasts alternate but in the decades proceeding 2014 Brazil will emerge as the world's fifth largest-economy, excelling Britain and France, and in 2025 it is also speculated that Sao Paulo will be the fifth-wealthiest city. Brazil perhaps surpasses its competing members because unlike China, it is a democracy, unlike India; the country is not plagued with insurgents, or ethnic and religious conflicts, or hostile relationships with its neighbors like India has with Pakistan and Kashmir. In contrast to Russia, Brazil exports more than oil and arms, and has established more cordial relationships with foreign investors. Brazil's emergence has not been hasty but instead steady. Initiatives began in the 1990s when they established a coherent set of economic policies, and the Central Bank was granted autonomy, which stimulated development of new multinationals that may have previously been state-owned companies that are now prospering as a result of operating from a distance from the government. Weaknesses, however, still permeate throughout Brazil, so it is necessary to
Kat Dunn

Latin America Weighs Less Punitive Path to Curb Drug Use - 0 views

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    This article talks about the changes in policies for certain Latin American countries towards drug consumption. Countries such as Argentina and Mexico are looking to decriminalize drugs as step towards a solution. Many Latin American governments see the United State's way of dealing with drug use as having major negative effects and causing more problems then it is fixing.
Morgan Somer

Preventing HIV through education in Latin America and Caribbean - 0 views

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    Latin American leaders are trying to prevent HIV in Latin America and the Carribean through sexual education and health promotion programs in schools. Childhood and adolescent years are the most important years of developing, therefore it is imperative to provide education on sexuality. The Costa Rican Government signed an agreement allowing leaders to educate 15-25 year olds on HIV and how to use a condom.
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    Latin America Ministers pledged to provide broad sex education in schools. Having sexual education can give the children an accurate idea of how bad the issue of HIV/AIDS is, and how they could prevent it. The education will cover a broad range of issues such as how HIV is transmitted and how to use a condom. The governments in Latin America and Caribbean are showing huge leadership in this field to provide the children and adolescents will information that will help this growing epidemic.
Arabica Robusta

Adrienne Pine and David Vivar: Saving Honduras? - 0 views

  • They say that following the coup, Cáceres, working with the pro-coup Marrder family that controlled the HTW website, deceitfully wrested control from the Gutierrez family which had founded the paper and until then had maintained editorial control.
  • The Marrders eventually decided to found Honduras weekly as a competing newspaper, with Cáceres as editor. Stanley Marrder, listed on its website as "Owner and publisher of Honduras Weekly," is a Texan businessman and large Republican donor who grew up in Honduras. As they watched their own paper go under, the staff and owners of HTW darkly joked that they too had been victims of a coup.
  • HTW had been a printed and online English-language newspaper aimed at tourists and investors, employing journalists. Honduras Weekly, by contrast, is a blog that does not employ any trained journalists or paid staff, although you would not know that from its "about" page. In a tally last week, of forty-one "guest contributors," fourteen were evangelical missionaries who had each written one travelogue in classic "Heart of Darkness" style. Here is an example: After months of prayerful, "Jonah and the whale" thoughts, I booked my ticket to La Ceiba, Honduras this past weekend and no longer retain a wussy status. This gives my 'I don't leave home well' feelings a whole new slant. I'm flying out with the Vision Honduras team from Dassel, Minnesota on March 3 for a volunteer eye care mission that will last 19 days, carrying only what I can fit into a backpack.
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  • Cáceres uses deceptive tactics like these specifically to prop up an illusion of balance in a blog masquerading as a newspaper, but which is really Cáceres' personal soapbox. In a similar vein, Cáceres recently quoted me out of context in a way that made the quote appear to support his work in a press release promoting his book, written for the 700 club.
  • One of the articles recently republished to appear to look like it was written for HW was titled "US, Honduran Soldiers Partner on Medical Mission to Colón," describing a "humanitarian" mission to the community Guadalupe Carney, written by Alex Licea .Two important facts are left out in the article: first, that SOUTHCOM specifically targets communities like Guadalupe Carney, named for the revolutionary priest and martyr, that are united in their resistance to the coup and U.S. imperialist policy for its "aid" efforts, and secondly, the full attribution of the article, reprinted from SOUTHCOM's website and written by Sgt. 1st Class Alex Licea, SOCSOUTH PAO [Public Affairs Officer].
  • Cáceres has been an enthusiastic supporter of SOUTHCOM's operations in Honduras, and Joint Task Force Bravo, and Bravo has returned that enthusiasm, even sponsoring his annual conference in 2008, themed "Building Global Partnerships: Implementing MDG 8 in Honduras." According to a participant at the conference, Cáceres proudly described to his audience the process that led up to the partnership, explaining that a director at DARPA who had been on a mission trip to Honduras with his church and "fell in love" with the country arranged for SOUTHCOM to allocate a substantial sum of money for the conference.
  • a woman from Task Force Bravo spoke. She proceeded to describe what they did as well as how they help humanitarian efforts. But she also gave a short history of the base. She stated that the base was there in the 1980s to combat aggression. That deeply affected me because I know the role of the US government at that time and have seen the effects of US support of Central American regimes like Honduras and El Salvador in that time.
  • As described on an earlier version of its website, the goal of Cáceres's conference is "to inform, inspire and to generate creative thinking about ways to help Honduras through grassroots projects aimed at providing the Honduran people with some basic abilities to live, learn, and grow... so that eventually they are in a better position to solve the problems of their society." The Social Darwinist assumption implicit in this description (as in the missionary travelogues posted on Honduras Weekly) is that Hondurans have not been able to solve the positions of their society for cultural and developmental reasons-rather than military and economic imperialism. Cáceres insists in his writings and in official conference propaganda that the work is apolitical, but this is of course an impossibility in today's Honduras.
  • While these and other individuals representing the U.S. State will be presenting, the vast majority of individuals attending come from reactionary evangelical groups, promoting charity work based on a premise of "apolitical" salvation that stand in direct opposition to the vibrant Honduran resistant movement's goals of justice and self-determination.
  • Why is USAID ("From the American People") officially sponsoring the Conference on Honduras this year? It's not because the NGOs involved are doing any good; they aren't. In their acceptance of a Social Darwinist model that identifies poverty as the result of a lack of "empowerment" and human capital, they can't.
  • In ignoring those voices, they refuse to address the roots of the problem. Instead, they provide ideological cover for a neoliberal agenda, promoting a Protestant ethic of individual responsibility that eschews notions of social justice, participatory democracy and the public good.
  • why, then, does the U.S. State support Cáceres? It is because he, like the NGOs he promotes, has been a truly effective tool in whitewashing the neoliberal undermining of democracy in Honduras, and the role of U.S. policy and military in it. Cáceres' advocacy is Clinton's Smart Power, combining institutions of military force and media and Non-Profit Industrial Complex coercion to undermine democratic processes in the interest of supporting the corporations that funded and have benefited from the coup. And indeed, as long as we don't focus on the pro-corporate, anti-democratic golpista praxis in our own government, as the State Department employee I met on the train said, our fingerprints are all over that.
Sophie Bergelson

Mexico City Struggles With Law on Abortion - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    This article is from 2008, one year after Mexico City legalized abortions. It talks about the continuing difficulties for poor women to receive safe abortions, even though they had been legalized. Women complained about long lines at understaffed public clinics, hostile treatment from hospital workers who opposed abortion, and unfair bureaucratic hurdles which made it difficult or impossible for them to get the procedure done. At the time this article was written, the abortion law was being challenged in the Supreme Court by the conservative government.
Sam Obstfeld

LATIN AMERICA: "Sexuality Is an Essential Part of Humanity" | IPS - Communicating MDG3 ... - 0 views

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    This news story is about a "declaration of sexual rights" given by the International Planned Parenthood Federation in Argentina, in which the group asked governments to commit to protecting their citizen's sexual rights, which translates into sexual education and ease of access to contraceptive methods.
Courtney Connors

Foreign Policy: Gays in Latin America: Is the Closet Half Empty? - 0 views

  • The region is becoming gayer. It's not that there are more gays and lesbians living in Latin America (we would never know)
  • he region is becoming more gay-friendly
  • Latin America was the land of the closet and the home of the macho
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  • In 1998, Ecuador's new constitution introduced protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation. In 1999, Chile decriminalized same-sex intercourse. Rio de Janeiro's state legislature banned sexual-orientation discrimination in public and private establishments in 2000. In 2002, Buenos Aires guaranteed all couples, regardless of gender, the right to register civil unions. The policy changes just kept coming. In 2003, Mexico passed a federal antidiscrimination law that included sexual orientation. A year later, the government of Brazil initiated "Brasil sem homofobia" (Brazil without homophobia), a program with nongovernmental organizations to change social attitudes toward sexuality. In 2006, Mexico City approved the Societal Cohabitation Law, granting same-sex couples marital rights identical to those for common-law relationships between a man and a woman. Uruguay passed a 2007 law granting access to health benefits, inheritance, parenting, and pension rights to all couples who have cohabited for at least five years. In 2008, Nicaragua reformed its penal code to decriminalize same-sex relations. Even Cuba's authoritarian new president, Raúl Castro, has allowed free sex-change operations for qualifying citizen
  • regime change
  • homophobia
  • A recent survey in Brazil, the country with the largest gay-pride parades in the world, showed that 58 percent of respondents still agree with the statement, "Homosexuality is a sin against the laws of God," and 41 percent with "Homosexuality is an illness that should be treated."
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    This article proposes the idea that an increasing number of Latin American countries have become more acceptive of gay and lesbian ideals. Due to regime changes, the once "closeted macho" countries now welcome such legislation as protections against sexual discrimination; the decriminalization of same-sex intercourse; grants to health benefits, parenting, and so on in countries like Ecuador, Mexico, Brazil, Uruguay, and NIcaragua.
Libba Farrar

Guatemala 1981 - Chapter IX - 0 views

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    On October 13, 1981 the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights published a report that outlined the political conditions within the republic of Guatemala. Chapter IX of this report focuses on political rights and as such designates five sections that address various aspects of domestic political rights. Within the text the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights devotes one section to the history of politics since the 1940s up until the regime in power during the early 1980s. Along with Guatemala's political history, Chapter IX incorporates political rights as defined under the 1965 Guatemalan Constitution and governmental adherence to such policies as outlined by the Constitution.
Arabica Robusta

Ecuador's Digital Agenda: Bridging the Digital Divide and Laying the Foundations for a ... - 0 views

  • Since becoming elected president, Rafael Correa has made higher education (particularly in the field of technology) a key aspect of domestic policy. In 2013, 1.83 percent of public spending as a percentage of total GDP went toward higher education (one of the highest in all of South America).
  • It is worth noting that the Information Communication Technology (ICT) sector has become an increasingly important source of growth for many Latin American countries.
  • Another important goal in Ecuador's digital agenda is to achieve digital sovereignty to overcome technological dependence on developed countries. In its effort to achieve this goal, in 2010, the Ecuadorian government passed a higher education reform bill, which requires universities to use open-source software as a way to protect intellectual sovereignty.
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  • Finally, late in March, the government inaugurated Yachay, the country's first planned city of nearly 17 square miles designed to become a hub for technological research and scientific infrastructure. Located inside the city is Yachay University, which is now Ecuador's first research technology institute. The university will offer degrees in the following areas: life sciences, information and communications technology, nanoscience, renewable energy and petro chemistry.  The university hopes to attract professionals and researchers, both foreign and domestic, to ensure technological innovation.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - WikiLeaks Haiti: The Aristide files - 0 views

  • Such positions are major reasons Washington fought to get and keep Aristide out of Haiti, the cables make clear. “A premature departure of MINUSTAH would leave the [Haitian] government...vulnerable to...resurgent populist and anti-market economy political forces—reversing gains of the last two years,” wrote US Ambassador Janet Sanderson in an October 1, 2008, cable. MINUSTAH “is an indispensable tool in realizing core USG [US government] policy interests in Haiti.”
Laura Donovan

U.S. Tries to Salvage Honduras Accord - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    This article discusses the recent change in support of the Obama administration in terms of the current governmental situation in Honduras. It has been four months since the president of Honduras was ousted. Formerly an agreement was reached between the former and current leaders to form a government to control the country until an election to reinstate the former president could be planned, however the congress has planned an election for office before this time and going against what had originally been agreed on the United States has broken many allies and agreed to recognize the leader of this election
Jennifer Salazar

BBC NEWS | Americas | Could war erupt in arms-spree LatAm? - 0 views

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    After a weapons-buying splurge, is South America gearing up for conflict? Robert Munks, Americas analyst for IHS Jane's, investigates.
Jennifer Salazar

BBC NEWS | Americas | Mexico's transvestite ban draws gay protest - 0 views

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    Gay rights protesters plan to hold a Gay Pride parade in a Mexican border town that recently outlawed cross-dressing.
janegelb

Mexican Court Says Sex Attack by a Husband Is Still a Rape - New York Times - 0 views

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    In 2005, Mexico declared that a sexual attack by a husband is still defined as rape. In 1994, the country ruled that it was simply "an undue exercise of conjugal rights". Under this ruling, women could not report rape by their husband. The article states that 47 percent of women report being the victims of violence, and 84 percent of domestic violence victims are silent.
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