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Javier E

Colombia Welcomes Millions Of Venezuelans Fleeing Chaos - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • “I thank all the Colombians for having received us Venezuelans so kindly,”
  • Colombia has never tried to stop people like Colón from coming in. Officials knew they couldn’t. The border between the countries, much like the one dividing the United States from Mexico, runs more than 1,000 miles through open country and is punctuated by hundreds of illegal crossings.
  • From the very start, the national migration authority here worked to document the new arrivals, but struggled to keep up. It issued hundreds of thousands of identity cards to Venezuelans, allowing them to come and go freely within a specially designated border zone, though not further inland, and created a new immigration status applicable to Venezuelans already in the country.
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  • More than half a million Venezuelans were given the right to work.
  • his country wants to shift the migrant issue from a humanitarian situation to “a process of development” whereby Venezuelans “can produce and earn income.” The Colombian authorities, he said, “are developing policy to help them earn.”
  • This influx could present an opportunity for economic growth in Colombia. If properly registered and settled, the new arrivals could start small businesses, generating employment and income across the country. “There is vast literature in economics showing how migrants are entrepreneurs at a much higher rate than locals,”
  • Colombia has also made a major effort to get Venezuelan children in school.
  • . In 2017, a decree allowed all foreign children to study in Colombian primary schools.
  • But here, the pressures are beginning to show. Many schools in the border zone have taken in up to 300 students without adding new teacher
  • because Venezuelans have access to only limited emergency care at Colombian hospitals, waiting rooms and wards at clinics across the country have become overcrowded. With local housing stock unable to cope with the numbers of newcomers, many migrants can be found sleeping in town plazas.
  • “It’s impressive that the Colombian government has opened its arms,” Provash Budden, the Americas regional director for the aid organization Mercy Corps, told me. “But there has to be a longer-term plan.”
mimiterranova

A Return to Normal? Not for Countries With Covid Surges and Few Vaccines. - The New Yor... - 0 views

  • BOGOTÁ, Colombia — In Colombia, nearly five hundred people a day have died of the coronavirus over the last three weeks, the nation’s most dramatic daily death rates yet. Argentina is going through the “worst moment since the pandemic began,” according to its president. Scores are dying daily in Paraguay and Uruguay, which now have the highest reported fatality rates per person in the world.
  • “It sounds absolutely contradictory, from an epidemiological point of view, to have 97 percent ICU occupancy and to announce a reopening,” she said, “but from the point of view of the social, economic and political context, with deep institutional mistrust, unacceptable poverty, and unemployment that is especially affecting women and young people, it is necessary to do so.”
  • In Colombia, rising virus cases and deaths have coincided with the largest explosion of social anger in the country’s recent history, bringing thousands of people to the streets to protest poverty exacerbated by the pandemic, among other issues, and prompting concern that the protest movement will spread throughout the region.
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  • Experts say that the only way to stamp out the virus in these regions — and the world — is to rapidly increase vaccinations, which have raced ahead in the United States and Europe while lagging in many other countries around the world.
  • In North America, 60 vaccine doses have been administered for every 100 people, compared with 27 in South America and 21 in Asia, according to data from the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford. In Africa, the rate is two doses per 100 people.
  • About 11 billion shots are needed to vaccinate 70 percent of the world’s population, the rough threshold needed for herd immunity, according to researchers at Duke University, but only a fraction of that number has been manufactured so far.
  • “The ongoing devastation being wreaked by Covid-19 in the global south should be reason enough for the rich countries to want to enable a quick and cheap global vaccine rollout,” Dr. Richmond said. “If it’s not, enlightened self-interest should lead them to the same conclusion.”
aleija

Colombian politicians shouldn't take sides in US election - CNN - 0 views

  • The United States and Colombia are close friends, and close friends speak honestly. That's why, as US elected representatives, we have a very clear message for our Colombian counterparts: Show us the respect of staying out of our elections.
  • Some have even repeated the fabrication that Vice President Joe Biden is a communist or a radical socialist. Earlier, Senator Gustavo Petro also weighed in, expressing a preference for Biden on Twitter.
  • .For the good of both of our countries, this kind of behavior has to end now.
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  • Support for Colombia has never depended on whether a Democrat or Republican was in the White House -- nor, for that matter, on the party affiliation of Colombia's presidents. It should stay that way.
  • At the end of the day, though, this isn't about individual politicians. It's about a partnership built between our two countries over decades -- a partnership that we both need now more than ever.
  • None of us wants to see our partnership suffer. That's because we know how much our countries can achieve when we work side by side. Today, Colombia is far safer and more prosperous than it was twenty years ago -- an accomplishment built on the backs of our brave Colombian partners and facilitated by across-the-aisle support here in the US. Colombia is once again facing a series of unprecedented challenges, including the Covid-19 pandemic, an economic downturn, a spike in insecurity and the Venezuelan refugee and migrant crisis. Regardless of whether Biden wins the White House come November, we want nothing more than to sustain -- in fact, to increase -- our cooperation with Colombia to tackle these challenges together.
criscimagnael

Colombia euthanasia: Man becomes first person with non-terminal illness to die by legal... - 0 views

  • Colombian Victor Escobar became the first person in the Andean country with a non-terminal illness to die by legally regulated euthanasia late on Friday, his lawyer Luis Giraldo confirmed.
  • "We reached the goal for patients like me, who aren't terminal but degenerative, to win this battle, a battle that opens the doors for the other patients who come after me and who right now want a dignified death," Escobar, 60, said in a video message sent to media by Giraldo.
  • On Saturday, a second Colombian -- a woman with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease -- was also euthanized.
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  • Escobar had fought two years for his right to euthanasia in the face of opposition from doctors, clinics and courts, even though the Constitutional Court last year recognized the procedure should not be available just for the terminally ill.
  • Colombia's Constitutional Court removed penalties for euthanasia under certain circumstances in 1997 and ordered the procedure to be regulated in 2014. The first person in Colombia with a terminal illness to die under those rules was in 2015.
  • As of October 15 last year, 178 people with terminal illnesses had been legally euthanized in Colombia since 2015, according to Colombian legal rights advocacy group DescLAB.
criscimagnael

Rodolfo Hernández is Colombia's Trump and He May Be Headed for the Presidenti... - 0 views

  • The Colombian establishment is lining up behind Rodolfo Hernández, a populist businessman with an incendiary streak, to defeat the leftist former rebel Gustavo Petro.
  • For months, pollsters predicted that Gustavo Petro, a former rebel-turned-senator making a bid to be the nation’s first leftist president, would head to a June presidential runoff against Federico Gutiérrez, a conservative establishment candidate who had argued that a vote for Mr. Petro amounted to “a leap into the void.’’
  • Rodolfo Hernández, a former mayor and wealthy businessman with a populist, anti-corruption platform whose outsider status, incendiary statements and single-issue approach to politics have earned him comparisons to Donald Trump.
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  • But it also remade the political calculus for Mr. Petro. Now, it is Mr. Petro who is billing himself as the safe change, and Mr. Hernández as the dangerous leap into the void.
  • “There are changes that are not changes,” Mr. Petro said at a campaign event on Sunday night, “they are suicides.”
  • The story line was: left versus right, change versus continuity, the elite versus the rest of the country.
  • Still, Colombia’s right-wing establishment has begun lining up behind him, bringing many of their votes with them, and making a win for Mr. Petro look like an uphill climb.
  • “The Colombian right has reached such an extremely disastrous stage,” said Mr. Posada, “that they prefer a government that offers them nothing as long as it is not Petro.”
  • At 77, Mr. Hernández built much of his support on TikTok, once slapped a city councilman on camera and recently told The Washington Post that he had a “messianic” effect on his supporters, who he compared to the “brainwashed” hijackers who destroyed the twin towers on 9/11.
  • Until just a few days ago, Colombia’s political narrative seemed simple: For generations, politics had been dominated by a few wealthy families, and more recently, by a hard-line conservatism known as Uribismo, founded by the country’s powerful political kingmaker, former president Álvaro Uribe.
  • But voter frustration with poverty, inequality and insecurity, which was exacerbated by the pandemic, along with a growing acceptance of the left following the country’s 2016 peace process with its largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, seemed to shift the dynamic.
  • Mr. Hernández once called himself a follower of Adolf Hitler,
  • It also reveals that the narrative was never so simple.
  • Mr. Hernández, who won 28 percent of the vote, has attracted a broad swath of voters eager for change who could never get on board with Mr. Petro.
  • Mr. Hernández, with his fuzzy orange hair and businessman’s approach to politics, has also attracted voters who say they want someone with Trumpian ambition, and are not troubled if he is prone to tactlessness. (Years after saying he was a follower of Adolf Hitler, Mr. Hernández clarified that he meant to say he was a follower of Albert Einstein.)
  • Two of the country’s biggest issues are poverty and lack of opportunity, and Mr. Hernández appeals to people who say he can help them escape both.
  • “Political people steal shamelessly,” said Álvaro Mejía, 29, who runs a solar energy company in Cali.
  • He says he prefers Mr. Hernández to Mr. Petro, a longtime senator, precisely because of his lack of political experience.
  • If Mr. Hernández can walk that difficult line — courting the establishment’s votes without tarnishing his image — it could be difficult for Mr. Petro to beat him.
  • As the results became clear, Mr. Hernández’s supporters rushed to his campaign headquarters on one of the main avenues in Bogotá, the capital.
  • Many wore bright yellow campaign T-shirts, hats and ponchos, which they said they’d bought themselves instead of being handed out free by the campaign, in keeping with Mr. Hernández’s cost-cutting principles.
  • “He is a phenomenon,” he said. “We are sure that we are going to win.”
rachelramirez

Colombia Peace Deal Is Defeated, Leaving a Nation in Shock - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Colombia Peace Deal Is Defeated, Leaving a Nation in Shock
  • A Colombian peace deal that the president and the country’s largest rebel group had signed just days before was defeated in a referendum on Sunday, leaving the fate of a 52-year war suddenly uncertain.
  • A narrow margin divided the yes-or-no vote, with 50.2 percent of Colombians rejecting the peace deal and 49.8 percent voting in favor
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  • The surprise surge by the “no” vote — nearly all major polls had indicated resounding approval — left the country in a dazed uncertainty not seen since Britain voted in June to leave the European Union.
  • Both sides vowed they would not go back to fighting.
  • “If ‘no’ wins, we won’t have peace, but at least we won’t give the country away to the guerrillas. We need better negotiations.”
  • The rebels had agreed to immediately abandon their battle camps for 28 “concentration zones” throughout the country, where over the next six months they would hand over their weapons to United Nations teams.
  • rank-and-file fighters were expected to be granted amnesty. Those suspected of being involved in war crimes would be judged in special tribunals with reduced sentences, many of which were expected to involve years of community service work, like removing land mines once planted by the FARC.
  • About 220,000 people were killed in the fighting, and six million were displaced. An untold number of women were raped by fighters, and children were given Kalashnikov rifles and forced into battle.
mimiterranova

Colombia protests: What to know about unrest, deaths, country's COVID economic plan - A... - 0 views

  • Colombians first hit the streets on April 28 to protest a controversial fiscal reform introduced by President Ivan Duque. "The reform is not a whim. It's a necessity to keep the social programs going," he has said.
  • But critics argued the tax hikes -- like a proposed value added tax (VAT) increase on everyday goods -- would disproportionally impact middle and working classes and escalate inequality in the country's pandemic-hit economy.Unemployment in Colombia is currently at 16%. It was 9% before the pandemic began, according to Colombia's National Statistics Department.
  • Human rights nongovernmental organizations say the real death toll could be much higher and have called for the President to restrain police from using any excessive use of force.
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  • Videos of anti-riot policemen using tear gas and batons against protesters have gone viral on social media, spreading beyond big cities and across the country. Far from curbing the protests, alleged police brutality has become a focal point for the demonstrators, who are now calling for an independent, international inquiry into the deaths.
  • "The vandal threat we are facing consists of a criminal organization that is hiding behind legitimate social aspirations to destabilize the society, generate terror and distract the actions of the public force," he said Wednesday.
ethanshilling

As Virus Rages in South America, No End in Sight to Covid-19 Suffering - The New York T... - 0 views

  • In the capital of Colombia, Bogotá, the mayor is warning residents to brace for “the worst two weeks of our lives.”
  • “I have tried to be optimistic,” he also wrote in a recent essay. “I want to think that the worst is over. But that turns out, I believe, to be counter-evident.”
  • Even Venezuela, where the authoritarian government is notorious for hiding health statistics and any suggestion of disarray, says that coronavirus deaths are up 86 percent since January.
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  • As vaccinations mount in some of the world’s wealthiest countries and people cautiously envision life after the pandemic, the crisis in Latin America — and in South America in particular — is taking an alarming turn for the worse, potentially threatening the progress made well beyond its borders.
  • Latin America was already one of the world’s hardest hit regions in 2020, with bodies sometimes abandoned on sidewalks and new burial grounds cut into thick forest.
  • But the region has another thorny challenge, health officials say: living side-by-side with Brazil, a country of more than 200 million whose president has consistently dismissed the threat of the virus and denounced measures to control it, helping fuel a dangerous variant that is now stalking the continent.
  • Inequality, a longstanding scourge that had been easing before the pandemic, is widening once again, and millions have been tossed back into the precarious positions they thought they had escaped during a relative boom.
  • “This is a story that is just beginning to be told,” Alejandro Gaviria, an economist and former health minister of Colombia who leads the nation’s Universidad de los Andes, said in an interview.
  • But with millions of people working in the informal sector, enforcing quarantines became unsustainable. Cases rose quickly and hospitals soon fell into crisis.
  • “The worst-case scenario is the development of a new variant that is not protected by current vaccines,” he said. “It’s not just an ethical and moral imperative, but a health imperative, to control this all over the world.”
  • Uruguay, once lauded as a model for keeping the coronavirus under control, now has one of the highest death rates in the world, while the grim daily tallies of the dead have hit records in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Peru in recent days.
  • Official daily death tolls have exceeded previous records in recent days in most of South America’s biggest countries. Yet scientists say that the worst is yet to come.
  • The region is not prepared. Colombia has been able to issue a first vaccine to just 6 percent of its population, according to Our World in Data, a project at the University of Oxford. Several of its neighbors have achieved half that, or less.
  • By contrast, the United States, which bought up vaccines ahead of other countries, is at 43 percent.
  • The virus arrived in Peru in March last year, like much of Latin America, and the government moved quickly to lock down the country.
  • Across the region, doctors say that the patients coming into hospitals are now far younger and far sicker than before. They’re also more likely to have had the virus already.
  • Last month was the deadliest of the pandemic by far, according to official data, with health experts blaming the increase on holiday gatherings, crippled health systems and the new variants.
  • Vaccines arrived in Peru in February, followed quickly by anger after some politically connected people jumped the line to get vaccinated first.
  • Rafael Córdova, 50, a father of three, sat on a square drawn in the sand that marked his claim to land overlooking the Pan-American Highway and the Pacific Coast.
  • in May, he became sick with Covid and was fired. He believes his bosses let him go because they feared that he would sicken others, or that his family would blame them if he died.
  • “I left the hospital with my daughter in a black plastic bag and got in a taxi and went to the cemetery,” he said. “There was no Mass, no wake. No flowers. Nothing.”
delgadool

'Staggering number' of human rights defenders killed in Colombia, the UN says - CNN - 0 views

shared by delgadool on 15 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Human rights activists and community leaders in Colombia are being killed at an alarming rate
  • There were 107 activists killed in Colombia last year, she said, with 13 other cases under investigation that could bring the total to 120.
  • This terrible trend is showing no let-up in 2020, with at least 10 human rights defenders already reportedly killed during the first 13 days of January
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  • The single most targeted group, Hurtado said, was human rights defenders advocating on behalf of community-based and ethnic groups, such as indigenous peoples and Afro-Colombians.
anniina03

Colombia prison riot: 23 dead in incident prompted by coronavirus fears, Ministry of Ju... - 0 views

  • A prison riots in Colombia prompted by coronavirus fears has left at least 23 inmates dead and 83 injured, the country's Ministry of Justice said on Sunday.
  • There was a "massive and criminal escape attempt" at the Bogota's La Modelo prison, one of the country's largest and most overpopulated prisons
  • Cabello said as of Sunday, no inmates or prison personnel have tested positive for coronavirus nor has anyone been isolated because of it.
saberal

Colombian Official Refuses to Say if Children Were Killed in Attack on Rebels - The New... - 0 views

  • Colombia’s defense minister said Wednesday that several young people were at a rebel camp recently attacked by the military, but would not confirm reports that children were among those killed, an allegation that fueled deep outrage in a nation reeling from decades of war.
  • “young combatants,” who had been recruited and transformed into “machines of war” by criminal actors, were present at a military operation meant to target a violent armed group.
  • On Wednesday morning, the Colombian military announced it had killed 12 people in a military operation that targeted the “criminal structure” of an armed group run by Miguel Botache, known by the alias Gentil Duarte, a former member of Colombia’s largest rebel group, the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
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  • The accusations instantly resonated in a nation scarred by decades of brutal internal war involving the U.S.-backed government, left-wing rebels, right-wing paramilitaries and powerful drug cartels — fighting that frequently included child combatants and claimed many civilian casualties.
  • President Iván Duque has been the subject of growing criticism that he is not doing enough to stop the violence.In late 2019, his former defense minister, Guillermo Botero, left his position after failing to disclose that several children died during a military raid on a criminal group.
  • “We’re not talking about young people who didn’t know what they were doing,” he said of those who join such groups.
  • Those comments drew immediate criticism from several sectors of Colombian society, who said that young people recruited by armed groups should be treated as victims, not perpetrators.
Javier E

China to Be No. 1 Economy Before 2030, Study Says - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • To assess the validity of this study, the research and analysis team graded their past work on global trends, an effort undertaken every four years since 1996. Past studies, they found, had underestimated the speed with which changes arrived on the global scene.
  • The risk of conflict within a state — like a civil war or an insurgency — is expected to decline in Latin America, but will remain high in sub-Saharan Africa, in parts of the Middle East and South Asia, as well as in some Asia-Pacific island hot spots, the study warns.
  • “the health of the global economy increasingly will be linked to how well the developing world does — more so than the traditional West.” In addition to China, the developing nations that “will become especially important to the global economy” include India, Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia, Nigeria, South Africa and Turkey.
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  • A new intelligence assessment of global trends projects that China will outstrip the United States as the leading economic power before 2030, but that America will remain an indispensable world leader
  • “The growth of the global middle class constitutes a tectonic shift,” the study says, adding that billions of people will gain new individual power as they climb out of poverty. “For the first time, a majority of the world’s population will not be impoverished, and the middle classes will be the most important social and economic sector in the vast majority of countries around the world.”
  • half of the world’s population will probably be living in areas that suffer from severe shortages of fresh water, meaning that management of natural resources will be a crucial component of global national security efforts.
  • terrorists could mount a computer-network attack in which the casualties would be measured not by the hundreds or thousands killed but by the millions severely affected by damaged infrastructure, like electrical grids being taken down.
  • At least 15 countries are “at high risk of state failure” by 2030, the report predicts, among them Afghanistan and Pakistan, but also Burundi, Rwanda, Somalia, Uganda and Yemen.
  • The best-case situation for global security until 2030, according to the study, would be a growing political partnership between the United States and China.
  • The worst-case situation envisions a stalling of economic globalization that would preclude advancement of financial well-being around the world. That would be a likely outcome after an outbreak of a health pandemic that, even if short-lived, would result in closed borders and economic isolationism.
  • Mr. Burrows noted that the audiences in China were far more accepting of the American intelligence assessments — both those predicting China’s economic ascendancy and those warning of political dangers if there was no reform of governance in Beijing — than were audiences in Russia.
  • To assess the validity of this study, the research and analysis team graded its past work on global trends, an effort undertaken every four years since 1996. Past studies, it found, underestimated the speed with which changes arrived on the global scene.
  • previous assessments should have paid greater attention to ideology.
  • The risk of conflict within a state — like a civil war or an insurgency — is expected to decline in Latin America, but will remain high in sub-Saharan Africa, in parts of the Middle East and South Asia, and in some Asia-Pacific island hot spots
  • Most worrisome — and already a part of the global security dynamic — is an assessment that future wars in Asia and the Middle East could include nuclear weapons.
  • Other important demographic trends will be aging populations in Europe, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, which could slow their economies further
  • “the health of the global economy increasingly will be linked to how well the developing world does — more so than the traditional West.”
  • In addition to China, the developing nations that “will become especially important to the global economy” include Brazil, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, South Africa and Turkey.
maxwellokolo

Colombia bridge collapse kills 7 - 0 views

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    Colombian risk management authorities said excess weight led to the bridge's collapse Monday. An eyewitness told local media that some 20 people were on the bridge when the ropes holding up the left side of it snapped. The bridge stood at a height of 10 to 15 meters (32 to 49 feet).
knudsenlu

Colombia election: Former Farc rebels face first ballot - BBC News - 0 views

  • Polls have closed in Colombia's congressional elections that saw former members of the Farc guerilla group take part for the first time.The ex-rebels, now known as the Revolutionary Alternative Common Force (also Farc), were given 10 congressional seats as part of a historic peace deal signed in 2016.But opinion polls give the left-wing group little chance of making gains.The vote is being viewed as a test ahead of May's presidential elections.
  • The BBC's Katy Watson, who is in Bogotá, says that many Colombians feel it is too soon to see former rebels in positions of power and say they should have been punished for their crimes.They have faced hostility on the campaign trial, and the group's leader Rodrigo Londoño was pelted with eggs and tomatoes while out campaigning last month.Farc's candidates have acknowledged that they need to convince voters they have changed, but say their involvement in elections represents a fresh start for the country.
  • President Juan Manuel Santos won re-election in June 2014, gaining what he presented as an endorsement of his efforts to end the rebel insurgency.He staked his reputation on securing a peace deal with the Farc and launched peace talks with the group two years after taking office in 2010.
runlai_jiang

An exodus from Venezuela has prompted Latin America's biggest migration crisis in decad... - 0 views

  • Thousands of Venezuelans are pouring out of their crippled nation in one of the biggest migration crises in Latin American history, causing growing alarm in the region and prompting neighboring countries to rush thousands of soldiers to the border.
  • In Venezuela, children are dying. People are starving and being persecuted. What they’re getting from us is a door in the face.
  • Nowhere is the crisis more acute than here in Colombia, where 3,000 troops are fanning out across the 1,400-mile border to contain an influx of Venezuelans fleeing a collapsing economy and an increasingly repressive socialist regime.
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  • In the decades after Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution, about 1.4 million Cubans fled the island, many heading for the United States, where they transformed the social and ethnic fabric of Miami. During the 1980s and 1990s, more than 1 million people — more than a quarter of the population — were displaced during El Salvador’s civil war.
  • y, the growing Venezuelan diaspora is reshaping cities from Miami to Buenos Aires to Madrid. But most Venezuelan migrants are staying in Latin America, where countries are handling a dire situation in different ways.
  • Chávez’s handpicked successor, President Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela has reached a breaking point, with lower oil prices and economic mismanagement leading to the world’s highest inflation rate and spiraling indexes of poverty and malnutrition.
  • Our migration levels are now comparable to Syria or to [the Rohingya going to] Bangladesh,”
  • leftist firebrand Hugo Chávez became president in 1999, thousands of Venezuelans — especially from the upper classes — moved out of the country
  • Facing severe food and medical shortages at home, most have stocked up on supplies, or visited hospitals, before returning across the border.
  • Venezuelans have enjoyed access to special permits good for two years in Colombia’s border region, allowing them to stay up to seven days at a time.
  • bringing a dramatic surge across the border that reached a peak of 90,000 people a day in December. In early February, President Juan Manuel Santos suspended the issuing of new temporary visas and declared a massive militarization of the border.
  • The moves cut the daily flow almost in half — though critics say it has only motivated migrants to cross at dozens of illegal entry points along the border, putting them at risk of harm from guerrillas and criminal bands
  • Locals, meanwhile, are accusing the Venezuelans already here of harming the economy and driving up crime.
  • They come with fruit they buy for nothing in Venezuela and sell for prices here that I can’t compete with. They come here, killing and robbing Colombians. We need take our city back.”
  • The family had recently arrived from Venezuela. The little girl was malnourished and also had developed a life-threatening heart blockage. The hospital was petitioning national authorities for funds before proceeding with the costly operation.
  • Instead, he said, it was carrying out special operations designed to limit the number of Venezuelans without valid visas.
  • “Like any country, we need to have a safe and secure border,” Martinez said. But many Venezuelans weren’t able to get passports in their homeland because of the cost and long wait.
  • The operations are sending as many as 100 migrants a day back to Venezuela.
  • You have to go,” said a female officer. More than a dozen Colombian officers surrounded the thin Venezuelan. “I can’t,” Andie said, her voice breaking. “Please. I’m pregnant, and we won’t survive there.”
yehbru

Copa America Chaos After Brazilian Officials Say Decision To Host Is Not Final : NPR - 0 views

  • South America's greatest soccer contest may be moved to Brazil in a last-minute maneuver to save the troubled tournament less than two weeks before kick-off, but Brazilian officials say there is more to consider.
  • He added that if it goes ahead, teams and their staff will have to follow health guidelines, including being vaccinated. Ramos also said that the competition, which is being called the Cornavirus Cup by critics, would be held in empty stadiums without spectators.
  • The confusion on Monday is just the latest chapter in the chaos leading up to the tournament as much of South America, including Brazil, is in the grips of the global pandemic with some of the world's worst infection and death rates.
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  • Colombia was dropped on May 20 due to anti-government protests sparked by proposed tax raises introduced by President Iván Duque. And on Sunday, the soccer federation, CONMEBOL, removed Argentina as co-host due to the "present circumstances" there.
  • On Sunday, Argentina officials reported more than 39,000 new cases after a week that included a record number of cases in a single day, with more than 77,000 deaths since the start of the pandemic, according to data from the World Health Organization.
  • there have been 16,391,930 confirmed cases with 459,045 deaths — the second highest number of deaths registered, the WHO reported.
  • On Saturday, tens of thousands of protesters across more than 200 towns and cities marched in anger, demanding Bolsonaro be impeached for his catastrophic handling of the health crisis
  • The tournament attracts huge audiences in South America and globally, and it represents a significant financial windfall for CONMEBOL.
Javier E

'It's Russian roulette': migrants describe nightmarish route across Florida Straits | A... - 0 views

  • Those who survive the perilous sea crossing between the Bahamas and the US describe a nightmarish odyssey of vomit, sweat and fear.“It’s suicide – Russian roulette,” one Brazilian migrant recalled in a 2017 interview after at least a dozen fellow countrymen vanished while attempting the same illegal voyage across the Florida Straits.
  • The Florida shipwreck is the latest humanitarian drama to expose the Covid-fuelled migration crisis gripping Latin America and the Caribbean, where the pandemic has killed more than 1.5 million people and wreaked economic havoc.
  • Last year more than 125,000, mostly Haitian migrants – among them elderly women and children - hiked through the Darién Gap, a snake-ridden jungle between Colombia and Panama, to reach the US after abandoning their homes in South America.
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  • “God got us out of there,” said Edner Michel, a 38-year-old Haitian who recently braved the Darién with his wife and newborn child after leaving Brazil because of the crunch. “The feeling I had was that 95% of people who went in there would die.”
  • Meghan López, the International Rescue Committee’s vice-president for Latin America, predicted the exodus would continue in 2022 as families sought to escape pre-existing crises such as poverty, hunger, violence and political turmoil that had often been exacerbated by Covid-19.
  • “These are crazy choices and yet they are not made by crazy people,” López said of their treacherous journeys. “They are made by desperate people making the very best decision that they can make in what are impossible conditions.”
Javier E

More Guns = More Killing - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • I recently visited some Latin American countries that mesh with the N.R.A.’s vision of the promised land, where guards with guns grace every office lobby, storefront, A.T.M., restaurant and gas station. It has not made those countries safer or saner.
  • Despite the ubiquitous presence of “good guys” with guns, countries like Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia and Venezuela have some of the highest homicide rates in the world.
  • Scientific studies have consistently found that places with more guns have more violent deaths, both homicides and suicides. Women and children are more likely to die if there’s a gun in the house. The more guns in an area, the higher the local suicide rates. “Generally, if you live in a civilized society, more guns mean more death,” said David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. “There is no evidence that having more guns reduces crime. None at all.”
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  • All that has spawned a thriving security industry — the good guys with guns that grace every street corner — though experts say it is often unclear if their presence is making crime better or worse. In many countries, the armed guards have only six weeks of training.
  • Indeed, even as some Americans propose expanding our gun culture into elementary schools, some Latin American cities are trying to rein in theirs. Bogotá’s new mayor, Gustavo Petro, has forbidden residents to carry weapons on streets, in cars or in any public space since last February, and the murder rate has dropped 50 percent to a 27-year low. He said, “Guns are not a defense, they are a risk.”
  • United Nations studies in Central America showed that people who used a gun to defend against an armed assault were far more likely to be injured or killed than if they had no weapon.
  • “If you’re living in a ‘Mad Max’ world, where criminals have free rein and there’s no government to stop them, then I’d want to be armed,” said Dr. Hemenway of Harvard. “But we’re not in that circumstance. We’re a developed, stable country.”
maxwellokolo

Jet carrying soccer team may have run out of fuel - 0 views

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    The crash killed at least 71 people during a charter flight to Medellin, including members of the Brazilian Chapecoense soccer squad on its way to the Copa Sudamericana finals. At least three players, two crew members and one journalist survived, Colombian authorities said.
mrflanagan17

What Castro funeral RSVPs say about the world - CNN.com - 0 views

  • Castro's long-estranged sister Juanita Castro said she would not be leaving exile in Miami to attend the funeral
  • earning the island until 2015 a spot on the US State Department's list of countries that support terrorism.
  • President Hugo Chavez began to copy Cuba's socialist and fiercely anti-US government style, Cuba and Venezuela have all but melded into one country.
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  • The arrival of left-leaning presidents of Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela is no surprise and in fact speaks to how much the world has changed since Fidel Castro took power in 1959.
  • Cuba hosted Colombian peace talks that in November led to a deal between Colombia's government and guerrillas
  • Castro was also "a good friend" to revolutions across Africa
  • the two countries that most defined Cuba's international relations, will be conspicuously absent during the memorials
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