Photo of Luis Lacalle Pou during his inauguration ceremony on 1st March 2020. Photo by Alan Santos/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
Uruguay, a country known throughout Latin America for its left-wing leadership, took a swerve to the right in 2020. After 15 years of coalition governments comprised of left-wing political parties united under the Frente Amplio (Broad Front), the conservative Luis Lacalle Pou took office as the country’s new president in March 2020. In July, with a centre-right and right-wing coalition in power, Pou s new government introduced the controversial ‘Law for Urgent Consideration’.
This legislation intends to set the pace of an agenda focused on public security, fiscal austerity and investment gains. However, critics believe that this could be at the expense of basic freedoms and rights. The law aims to reform a wide range of issues, including broadening the power given to the police force during public demonstrations.
In a hut with almost no furniture, a group of Tzotzil people gather around a long wooden table and on the dirt floor, eating their breakfast: a bowl of beans, corn tortilla, habanero chili, and a big cup of coffee. The old wooden table and chairs are blackened with the smoke rising from a ground stove, where a pot of beans and a pot of coffee sit atop the fire.
Early in the morning of the 22nd of every month, young and old Tzotzil people pack this hut in Acteal, a small village in the highlands of Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas. Hailing from different communities of Chiapas’s Chenalhó municipality, they are all members of La Organización Sociedad Civil Las Abejas de Acteal, also known as Las Abejas. First, they eat their collective breakfast. Then they change out of their jeans and hoodies and into their traditional Tzotzil clothes to hold their monthly memorial of the 1997 Acteal massacre.
By SIR RONALD SANDERS
EVENTS at the Organization of American States (OAS) continue to reveal that, notwithstanding the efforts by some of its 33 member states, the Organization is the handmaiden of powerful governments which control it through various methods, including coercion.
Nothing symbolises this more glaringly than a presumptuous assault on the Government of Trinidad and Tobago by the agent of one small political party, purported to be the Government of Venezuela. The sordid event occurred in the OAS Permanent Council on December 16.
Some background is necessary. For various reasons, linked to the ambitions of political and business elites in certain countries, Juan Guaidó was selected as “Interim President” of Venezuela. The people of Venezuela had no say in Guaidó’s selection or in his adornment with the title of “Interim President”. Guaidó and his party cannot deliver any basic function of a government. They do not have the capacity to sell a one cent stamp
Nicaragua essentially bans opposition from 2021 elections
by The Associated Press
Last Updated Dec 21, 2020 at 3:14 pm EDT
MANAGUA, Nicaragua Nicaragua’s ruling party-dominated Congress passed a law Monday that would essentially ban opposition candidates from running in the 2021 presidential elections.
The law gives the government of President Daniel Ortega the power to unilaterally declare citizens “terrorists” or coup-mongers, classify them as “traitors to the homeland” and ban them from running as candidates.
Given that Ortega has already applied those terms to virtually the entire opposition and the leaders of massive 2018 protests against his regime, the law approved Monday appears aimed at sweeping aside the last roadblock to Ortega’s continuing his near-perpetual rule over the Central American nation.
Human Rights Advocate
@ Focus Barbados| Protect the Children
JUSTICE DELAYED is justice denied. Barbados is becoming notorious for pushing matters under the rug for years, backlogged court cases, people remanded to jail and cases that don’t get called before the court until several years later, witnesses to cases being asked to remember evidence from 10 years ago, and people walking around the same streets as perpetrators while awaiting their day in court.
In my case, Barbados failed to respond to a petition I submitted in June 2015 to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights by the deadline. This failure triggered the advancement of my petition to a formal case as stated in a letter mailed from the Commission to Jerome Walcott and myself on November 23, 2020: