Tag Archives: central america

Costa Rica

Upstart leftist challenges Araya dominance in Costa Rican vote

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Villalta

Not so long ago, the Costa Rican presidency was Johnny Araya’s to lose.costa_rica_flag

But as Costa Rica holds a general election on February 2 to pick a new president and all 57 members of its Asamblea Legislativa (Legislative Assembly), Araya is on the defensive and may find himself in a runoff against an upstart progressive candidate, José María Villalta (pictured above).

araya

Araya (pictured above), the mayor of San José since 1998, the candidate of the relatively dominant center-left Partido Liberación Nacional (PLN, National Liberation Party) and the nephew of former president Luis Alberto Monge, led polls throughout 2013.

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There were always reasons to believe that lead was soft, in light of the massive unpopularity of outgoing president Laura Chinchilla (pictured above), who late last year has a 12% approval rating, making Chinchilla, according to pollster Mitofsky, the least popular leader in Latin America.  Elected in 2006 to great fanfare and high expectations as the country’s first female president, Chinchilla has struggled to contain Costa Rica’s exploding public debt, which grew from 30.7% of GDP in 2011 to 35.3% in 2012.  Fifteen ministers have resigned during her administration following corruption and other scandals, and Chinchilla last May hit rock-bottom when she accepted jet rides from a Colombian businessman with suspected drug trafficking links.  Furthermore, Araya’s two-decade record as mayor of Costa Rica’s capital, including ongoing investigations for corruption, provided his opponents with ample ammunition.  Araya has also struggled at times to respond to critics about how he could lead a government that commands the trust of the electorate.

Despite those headwinds, Araya had hope to believe that he would win the PLN’s third consecutive presidential term, given the near-complete collapse of Costa Rica’s traditional center-right party of the past three decades, the Partido de Unidad Socialcristiana (PUSC, Social Christian Unity Party).  Though it held the presidency three times between 1990 and 2006, its parliamentary caucus shrunk from 27 in 1998 to just six today, and its presidential candidates in 2006 and 2010 failed win more than 4% of the national vote.  When former presidents Rafael Ángel Calderón Fournier and Miguel Ángel Rodríguez were convicted and imprisoned on corruption charges stemming from PUSC’s time in power, it massively discredited the party.

But the PUSC’s troubles have only worsened in the campaign leading up to Sunday’s vote.  PUSC’s presidential candidate Rodolfo Hernández dropped out of the race, blasting his own party’s record on corruption along the way.  That Hernández dropped out on October 3, changed his mind two days later, and left the race again on October 9 only made the PUSC’s chances worse.  The PUSC hastily named Rodolfo Piza, the former head of Costa Rica’s social security system, who previously contested the PUSC primary for the presidential nomination in May 2013, as its nominee instead.

Support for three other candidates now threaten to deny Araya the 40% support he needs to win the election outright on Sunday, leading to a runoff between the top two candidates, likely on April 6.  It would be just the second time in Costa Rican history that the presidential race requires a runoff (the first was in 2002).

The strongest challenger is the 36-year-old Villalta, whose popularity surged dramatically last autumn.  He’s the candidate (and currently the sole parliamentary member) for the Frente Amplio (Broad Front), a relatively new social democratic party that has figured minutely in Costa Rican politics — until now.

A brash, confident leftist, Villalta has embraced a campaign heavy on human rights for an agenda to  boost environmental regulations, enact same-sex marriage, and enact more progressive economic policies at odds with the broadly free-market policies that have dominated both PUSC and PLN administrations over the past three decades.  But his youth and his rapid rise in Costa Rican politics have kept some voters from fully embracing his candidacy.  Though he’s not a communist as his opponents have charged, words of solidarity with the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez have not helped convince voters that Villalta is moderate enough to govern Costa Rica effectively.  He received some ridicule in the final presidential debate for suggesting a tax on sodas and other junk food, including chifrijo, a Costa Rican bar food that combines rice, beans, chicharrón (pork) and chimichurri.

guevara

The strongest candidate on the right is Otto Guevara (pictured above), who’s making his fourth consecutive presidential bid.  Guevara, an attorney, founded the conservative Movimiento Libertario (ML, Libertarian Movement), in 1994 as an anti-corruption party championing free-market liberalism and greater individual rights.  First elected as a legislator in 1998, Guevara has won increasing amounts of support in each election — 1.7% in 2002, 8.4% in 2006 and 20% in 2010.  Guevara has taken a strong social conservative stand in the current campaign, especially against abortion and same-sex marriage.  He’s benefitted from the collapse of the PUSC and, though he seems unlikely to make it into the second round, polls show that he could win the presidency in a runoff against either Araya or Villalta.

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If Villalta had the momentum through the end of 2013, yet another center-left candidate seems to have captured that momentum as the campaign ends — Luis Guillermo Solís, an academic, diplomat and one-time adviser to former president Óscar Arias on the Esquipulas Peace Agreement that helped bring an end to the ideology-based civil wars that plagued much of Central America in the 1980s.  Ariás, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987 for his efforts, has served twice as Costa Rica’s president, from 1986 to 1990 and again from 2006 to 2010, and he remains one of the region’s most respected statesmen.  Solís (pictured above) left the PLN in 2005, however, and he’s running on a solidly center-left platform to improve the country’s health care and pension system and reduce corruption.  Solís has sharply criticized both Chinchilla and Araya throughout the campaign and, as a more moderate center-left alternative to Araya, Solís may be winning voters who are having second thoughts about catapulting the more radical (and younger) Villalta to the presidency.

Solís represents the Partido Acción Ciudadana (PAC, Citizen’s Action Party), another social democratic party founded in 2000 by Ottón Solís (no relation) that emerged as an anti-corruption alternative to the PLN that, like the Broad Front, is more skeptical of the PLN/PUSC adherence to neoliberal policies.  The PAC, for example, opposed Costa Rica’s membership in the US-Central American Free Trade Agreement. Ottón Solís ran for president in the previous three elections, and he nearly defeated the seemingly unstoppable Arias in the 2006 election.

The final CID-Gallup poll released January 28 showed Araya holding onto a 35.6% lead, followed by Villalta with 21.0%, Guevara with 17.6%, Solís with 15.6% and Piza at just 6.5%, with other candidates winning just 3.6%.  Those numbers represent a narrow drop for both Araya and Guevara, but it’s a bit of a sharper drop for Villalta, who was pollign in the mid-20s and high-20s earlier this month and in December.  Villalta’s loss has been Solís’s gain.   Continue reading Upstart leftist challenges Araya dominance in Costa Rican vote →

El Salvador

Three-way Salvadoran presidential election focuses on security

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CentralAmerica
Map credit to cartographer Daniel Feher. You can find more of his work here: http://www.freeworldmaps.net/centralamerica/political.html.

In the same week that conservative Juan Orlando Hernández was inaugurated as Honduras’s new president, both neighboring El Salvador and Costa Rica will vote for new presidents on Sunday, February 2, capping a whirlwind of electoral action that will continue with expected runoffs in both countries throughout the spring and the May Panamanian presidential election.el salvador

El Salvador, which lies chiefly along the Pacific coast of Central America, has less than 20% of the area of its neighbor Honduras, but it has 6.3 million residents, nearly 80% of Honduras’s population.  That makes El Salvador the densest country, population-wise, on the Latin American mainland, and that’s not counting between 1.65 million and 2 million Salvadoran Americans, many of whom emigrated north during the Salvadoran civil war and whose remittances back to El Salvador account for 28.2% of El Salvador’s gross domestic product.  Salvadorans abroad, for the first time in Salvadoran political history, will be able to vote in Sunday’s election and the widely expected runoff between the top two finishers on March 9.

Like Honduras (and Costa Rica and Panamá), the Salvadoran president is constitutionally limited to one term in office, which means that the center-left incumbent, Mauricio Funes, is ineligible to run for reelection.

It’s fairly difficult to understand Salvadoran politics without understanding that it’s still in many ways recovering from the brutal civil war from 1979 to 1992  between the US-backed Salvadoran government and the left-wing guerrilla group, the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN, Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) that killed between 70,000 and 80,000 people.

The conservative Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA, Nationalist Republican Alliance) formed in 1981 in direct opposition to the FMLN, and it held power in El Salvador in the early 1980s and again from 1989 until 2009.  Under the administration of Alfredo Cristiani, El Salvador finalized the 1992 Chapultepec Peace Accords ending the civil war.  His successor Armando Calderón Sol worked to restore a sense of normalcy to the country through the end of the 1990s and to spearhead a series of reforms to privatize and liberalize the Salvadoran economy.  Francisco Flores, who led El Salvador from 1999 to 2004, continued ARENA’s broad center-right agenda, strongly pushed for the US-Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) in alliance with US president George W. Bush and oversaw the dollarization of El Salvador’s economy, a policy that remains controversial even today among Salvadoran economists.  Flores, however, is under investigation for misuse of public funds and, earlier this week, skipped a congressional hearing on the investigation and is accused of trying to flee the country on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, the FMLN strived throughout the 1990s and 2000s to shed its radical leftist past and is now El Salvador’s chief center-left political party with an orientation that’s more social democratic today than Marxist.  Funes’s narrow election victory (with 51.3% of the vote) in March 2009 represented the first non-ARENA government in El Salvador’s post-civil war history.  Funes, a former journalist, campaigned on a moderate agenda that largely accepted much of the neoliberal architecture of the Salvadoran economy, including dollarization.  But as president, Funes has expanded social welfare benefits — abolishing public health care fees, combatting illiteracy, providing food and clothing to schoolchildren, granting title to disputed land claims, introducing monthly stipends and job training for the poorest Salvadorans, and signing legislation to protect women, sexual minorities and indigenous communities.  He’s also oriented El Salvador closer to the Venezuela-led Alianza Bolivariana (ALBA, Bolivarian Alliance) while retaining strong ties with the United States.

Funes, however, has not been so successful in reducing the violent gang-driven crime and drug trafficking that has also afflicted Honduras, Guatemala and México in recent years.  Since a truce between the two top Salvadoran gangs, the Mara Salvatrucha (M13) and Barrio 18, fell through in 2013, Salvador homicides have been on the rise.

The 2014 election pits three candidates against each other, and it’s expected that none will win the absolute majority required to avoid a March runoff.  Though polls vary, a January 13 Mitofsky poll shows the ARENA’s candidate, former San Salvador mayor Norman Quijano leads with 35.5%, FMLN’s candidate, vice president Salvador Sánchez Cerén trails narrowly with 31.8% and former president  Elías Antonio ‘Tony’ Saca in third place with 16.0%.  Other polls in the past two months have shown Sánchez Cerén with as much as a 14% lead, and other polls have shown Saca with up to 27% support, though the trend seems to indicate that Saca’s supporters are partly flocking to Quijano, thereby making the race between Quijano and Sánchez Cerén much tighter. 

So how would each of the three candidates govern El Salvador?  Continue reading Three-way Salvadoran presidential election focuses on security →

Honduras, Nicaragua

Photo of the day: A photo op that Xiomara Castro couldn’t have pulled off

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ortegojuanorlando

Today, Honduras’s president-elect Juan Orlando Hernández met with the presidents of three Central American neighbors — Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panamá (two of whom will be replaced in elections that are scheduled to be held within the next five months).honduras flag iconNicaragua

But the photo that most stands out is the one above, with Hernández, the conservative leader of Honduras’s Partido Nacional (National Party) gripping and grinning with Nicaragua’s president Daniel Ortega.

Trade between the two countries is increasingly important, and the two counties still have strained relations over a border dispute in 2000-01. Honduras shares nearly all of its southern border with Nicaragua and, as drug trafficking becomes an increasingly insoluble problem for Honduran security, there are fears that Nicaragua (with a homicide rate that’s equal to just one-fourth of Honduras’s) could destabilize as well.  So it’s obviously important for Ortega and Hernández to have a strong working relationship.

But Ortega, as the leader of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN, Sandinista Front of National Liberation) is a stridently left-wing president with little respect for democratic institutions.  Though he’s transformed from guerrilla-style revolution in the 1980s into more run-of-the-mill corruption today, he remains the most anti-American (pro-Venezuelan) socialist leader in Central America.

It’s been just a few days since Hernández was determined to be the winner of Honduras’s November 24 election.  That result continues to be challenged, but it seems increasingly likely that Hernández will indeed be Honduras’s next president.

But consider a parallel universe where Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, leading the campaign of the firmly leftist Partido Libertad y Refundación (LIBRE, Party of Liberty and Refoundation), had posed with Ortega days after winning the election.  You’d have half of Honduras and much of the US policymaking apparatus up in arms about Honduras’s sudden left turn, and it may well have obscured Castro de Zelaya’s first week as president-elect by causing a domestic or international brouhaha.

It’s not a particular commentary on either Castro de Zelaya or on Hernández, but just a point about how critically perception matters in international affairs.  What for one candidate is a run-of-the-mill meeting with the leader of a neighboring country would have taken on a much more ominous tone for another candidate.

Honduras

Why gun control legislation is a non-starter in Honduras

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traficodearmas

I write today in The New Republic about the role that firearms play in Honduras’s security issue — the country has the world’s highest homicide rate, and nearly 80% of those homicides are committed by means of small arms, such as pistols, revolvers, shotguns, and rifles.honduras flag icon

Despite some changes to Honduran gun laws in the early and mid-2000s, however, gun laws remain relative lax in Honduras.  Each person is permitted to own up to five firearms and while open and concealed carry, and the ownership of assault weapons, are both technically illegal, enforcement of gun laws is sporadic at best.  Even more troubling is a corrupt police force that’s been reported to prey on some of the weakest groups in — labor activists, LGBT activists, indigenous activists and just the downright impoverished.

You might expect each of Honduras’s top presidential candidates — perhaps, most especially, leftist Xiomara Castro de Zelaya — would be in support of a strong push to restrict gun ownership, but it’s just not the case — even though security is the top issue, by far, in the Honduran election.  In many ways, the chances for significant gun control laws in Honduras are even more pessimistic than in the United States, where even a bipartisan push earlier this year failed to enact even mild background checks in the aftermath of the December 2012 Newtown elementary school shooting.

Rasel Tomé, an activist who joined with the Zelayas to found Honduras’s new leftist party, Libre (the Party of Liberty and Refoundation), has high hopes for a wide array of progressive legislation if Zelaya wins Sunday’s election. But even Tomé doesn’t dare to list gun-control legislation on his wish list of potential policy highlights for the next four years—he argues that in a country where the government has so thoroughly and historically failed to respect human rights, the state can hardly be trusted to ask its citizens to disarm. “If the people were disarmed, they would feel vulnerable to abuses and infringements,” Tomé said. “Right now, when there’s such a culture of suspicion, what has [outgoing president Porfirio] Lobo Sosa’s government done so that people feel their human rights can be respected? Can you go to the public forces and feel that they will protect you? They won’t because there’s so much impunity. So it’s not the right moment to bring that topic to the forefront of the debate.”

The Honduran constitution doesn’t enshrine a “right to bear arms” like the 2nd Amendment does, but gun laws have been historically lax in Honduras. The chief restriction is a law that limits an individual to owning just five firearms, but that’s lightly enforced at best. Successive governments in the 2000s theoretically tightened Honduran gun laws—a national registry was created in 2002, assault weapons were banned in 2003, and it’s been technically illegal to carry guns (openly or concealed) in public since 2007. But in a country where officials lack the power even to investigate every murder, and where many citizens carry weapons for personal protection, those restrictions aren’t rigorously enforced. Moreover, those laws don’t apply to the police, who have been accused of perpetrating a troubling amount of the violence directed at Hondurans, especially the most vulnerable groups. But many Hondurans today believe that the U.S. is partially responsible for Honduras’s gun problem. They attribute the high rate of firearm ownership to the glut of weapons that flooded the country in the 1980s when the Reagan administration armed the Contras from within Honduras in an attempt to push the Soviet-backed Sandinistas out of power in Nicaragua to the south. Just as the United States gave its blessing to the transfer of weapons from Qatar to anti-regime Libyans in 2011 that may have subsequently found their way into the hands of Tuareg separatists (or worse) in northern Mali in 2012, U.S.-sourced firearms in the 1980s intended for the Contras have now found their way into the hands of the gangs that control the most dangerous parts of Honduras’s capital, Tegucigalpa, its industrial center of San Pedro Sula, and its Caribbean coast. But in recent years, a swarm of illicit arms have also entered Honduras from Mexico and other parts of Central America as part of the illegal drug trade.

El Salvador

El Salvador’s experience in dollarization

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CIMG1235

On the way back home from Honduras, my plane landed briefly in El Salvador at San Salvador’s airport.el salvador

Not wanting to pass up a brief opportunity to try my first Salvadoran pupusa in El Salvador*, I started looking for a cash machine to withdraw some local currency.  Within seconds, however, I remembered that El Salvador switched from the colón to the US dollar 12 years ago, so of course there was no need, and I began thinking a little more about why El Salvador adopted the US dollar and whether it has seen any benefits from doing so in the past decade or so.

That decision was among the most important of the administration of Francisco Flores, El Salvador’s president between 1999 and 2004, and a member of the conservative Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA, National Republican Alliance).  Flores became one of the top US allies in the region at a time when Hugo Chávez was cementing his control on power in Venezuela.  Not only did he stand firmly with US president George W. Bush over regional affairs, he even deployed Salvadoran troops to Iraq in support of the US invasion.

Dollarization was controversial even at the time, but the policy goal was that it would reduce El Salvador’s interest rates and facilitate trade — this was in the era before the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), which came into effect in 2009 among the United States, the Dominican Republic and four Central American countries.**

But the broader economic benefits haven’t materialized as fully as Flores might have hoped a decade ago — El Salvador’s GDP growth rates have lagged behind even some of its poorer Central American peers in the past 12 years:

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The entire Central American economy is tied heavily to the US economy due to massive trade and remittances from family members living and working in the United State.  That’s especially true for El Salvador, because many Salvadorans migrated during the brutal civil war during the 1980s (in the Washington, DC metro region, for example, Salvadorans represent the largest Latino nationality group, outpacing even Mexicans).  With around 6.3 million people, El Salvador has over three-fourths of the population of Honduras, but less than one-fifth of the area of Honduras.***

But it’s been essentially the sick man of Central America for some time, routinely underperforming Honduras, which is struggling under the weight of political polarization, trafficking-related violence and massive corruption.  El Salvador faces those problems as well, but it’s generally believed that those problems are at least slightly less drastic in El Salvador.

What’s clear is that while dollarization may (or may not) have worked for Panamá and Ecuador, the benefits have either been too small for El Salvador to realize or, worse — and more likely, dollarization has actively hampered the Salvadoran economy.

Salvadoran central bank president Carlos Acevedo earlier this year admitted that dollarization was ‘a sack of unfulfilled promises’:

Bank President Acevedo made his most recent statements (reported by Active Transparency) following the release of a government study on dollarization, which reached some rather negative conclusions. The report found that many key economic indicators, including exports and GDP fell, while inflation and interest rates rose. Dollarization has failed to shield the economy from downturns and instead made El Salvador more susceptible to instabilities in the U.S. economy, as witnessed during the 2009 recession. The Economista published an article yesterday reaching very much the same conclusions.

In his statements this month, Acevedo said dollarization was “badly designed, improvised and lacking consultation,” and that El Salvador’s fiscal performance with dollarization was the worst in sixty years. He also said the performance was so poor that even proponents of dollarization could not ignore its negative impacts.

Prices in San Salvador’s airport do seem to be higher than prices in Tegucigalpa’s airport, though perhaps the better comparison is to the swankier airport in San Pedro Sula.  But there’s definitely a sense among Salvadorans that consumer prices rose after 2001, though the reasons for that phenomenon remain an open question, even among economists.

Another IMF report from 2011, however, indicated that dollarization had reduced interest rates between 4% and 5%, thereby contributing to savings and boosting GDP by 0.25% to 0.5% annually.

It’s tempting to argue that El Salvador is suffering from the same fate as the eurozone — i.e., that El Salvador and the United States do not comprise an optimal currency zone), Salvadorans are ‘stuck’ with US monetary policy, which may not be appropriate for the Salvadoran economy, and there’s obviously no mechanism for fiscal transfers from the US federal government to the Salvadoran government.   Continue reading El Salvador’s experience in dollarization →

Guatemala

Ríos Montt found guilty of genocide, crimes against humanity, sentenced to 80 years

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GUATEMALA-HUMAN RIGTHS-RIOS MONTT-TRIAL

It’s hard to know exactly what to think, but I certainly didn’t expect former Guatemalan president Efraín Ríos Montt to be treated so harshly by a tribunal in his own country.guatemala flag icon

Tonight brings word that Ríos Montt, at age 86, has been convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity, with a sentence of 80 years in total — it’s the first time a country has ever tried or convicted a former leader for genocide.

It’s a breathtaking victory for human rights — even by the grueling standards of the Cold War, the terror that Ríos Montt wreaked on the indigenous inhabitants of Guatemala’s highlands was inexcusable.  The death of up to 10,000 Guatemalans during a reign of 17 months is really quite something and, though justice has come 30 years after Ríos Montt left office, the fact of the matter is that justice has now come to a country that spend far too much of the Cold War impoverished and embattled in civil war.

It’s also a somber verdict for the United States and the administration of former U.S. president Ronald Reagan, which horrifically supported Ríos Montt with vigor, in part because of his ties to evangelical Christians, and his ties to the Republican establishment in the United States continue to this day — his daughter, Zury Ríos Montt, is married to former Illinois Republican congressman Jerry Weller.  There are, of course, poor marks for every U.S. presidential administration, but the wanton disregard for human rights during the early 1980s sets the Reagan administration’s support for Ríos Montt aside as a particularly egregious oversight in an era of bipartisan disregard for sovereignty throughout Latin America.

Though I doubt it will make top headlines in the United States, any U.S. citizen on the left or the right should be horrified by what Ríos Montt and his administration perpetrated, and even more horrified that the United States so breezily facilitated it.

I don’t mean to be unduly partisan — you can lay any number of tragedies in foreign lands at the feet of many U.S. presidents, Democrat and Republican.  For Guatemala, though, the involvement of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in overthrowing the leftist, though duly elected, Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz in 1954 was a catalyst for the civil war and turmoil that the country would face for the next four decades.  Though it happened on the watch of U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower and U.S. secretary of state John Foster Dulles, the uprooting of developing nations during the Cold War, especially in Latin America, was a bipartisan venture.

But as I wrote in February, the Ríos Montt administration escalated what had already been by that point three decades of civil war: Continue reading Ríos Montt found guilty of genocide, crimes against humanity, sentenced to 80 years →

Venezuela

A diatribe against arepas — and food policy in the Caribbean basin

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CARACAS, Venezuela — I’ve basically had one meal since I’ve arrived in Venezuela, and in the spirit that the local cuisine is going to be the tastiest cuisine, I made my first meal arepas (pictured above), a ubiquitous cornmeal disk (some are more pancake-esque, others biscuit-esque) filled in this case with beef.Venezuela Flag Icon

It’s not that I want to throw shade on Venezuela in particular, but it’s stunning to me just how unhealthy food is in Central America and in the Caribbean — when you think about the tropical climate that the region features, you’d think it could be one of the world’s most amazing food traditions — think fresh fishes complimented by fruit-based salsas and the kind of salads that put health-conscious Californians to shame.

But the reality is a lot of fried food, heavy fare that seems somehow out-of-place in such a hot and humid climate, and I find that to be true throughout the region.

In Nicaragua, they’ve turned fried pork rinds (chicharrón) into a main dish. El Salvador’s contribution is the pupusa, a kind of cheese-filled corn disk. In Puerto Rico, the most well-known dish is mofongo, fried plantains that are mashed together (see below). Ubiquitous starchy fried plantain chips (patacones or tostones) are never hard to find.

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Throughout the Caribbean islands, fresh fish is routinely fried up (though sometimes mercifully grilled), and served with any number of heavy, starchy sides — in Barbados, ‘pie’ — what Americans know as macaroni and cheese — and french fries are a standard side dish. It’s not uncommon on the Colombian coast for a typical meal to include fried fish, rice or some other starchy dish, and some sort of fried plantain.

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Here in Venezuela, I also have to look forward to tequeños, a tight coil of fried white bread filled with white cheese, and I passed a stand earlier for cachapas, a kind of corn pancake.

Moreover, this region in particular has taken a liking to norteamericano-style fast food. Guatemalans are so taken with fried chicken that a flight from Guatemala City to the States isn’t a flight without the smell wafting through the boxes of furtively (and not-so-furtively) obtained chicken from the home-grown chain, Pollo Campero (see below).

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But why did the food culture of the Caribbean basin develop in this fashion, and what does it mean for the region’s future? Continue reading A diatribe against arepas — and food policy in the Caribbean basin →

Guatemala

Former Guatemalan dictator Ríos Montt to be tried for genocide

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huehuetenango

Central America was a rough neighborhood during the Cold War.guatemala flag icon

And Guatemala, with a civil war that essentially began with the overthrow of elected president Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán (with U.S. support) in 1954, and ended only with a peace treaty in 1996, was particularly rough.

Even in that context, however, the reign of Efraín Ríos Montt in the early 1980s, again backed by the United States, was a particularly brutal one.

Ríos Montt, however, this week became the first ever head of state to be tried for genocide in the Western Hemisphere, when a Guatemalan judge ruled that the trial will go forward — authorities charged Ríos Montt in early 2012 with genocide and crimes against humanity for, particularly, 1,771 deaths of indigenous Ixil Mayans during his 17-month reign, but really over 10,000 deaths in 1982 attributed to Ríos Montt’s regime — it’s a trial that could bring about a greater awareness of the atrocities committed not only in Guatemala, but throughout Central America during the Cold War, as well as the complicity of the United States in some of the most brutal events in Latin American history in the 20th century.

Ríos Montt, now aged 86, continues to argue for amnesty under the basis of a 1996 amnesty, but his lawyers have been accused of using legal tactics to bring about additional delays in the case.

Under international law, crimes against humanity and genocide have been considered to be exempt from national amnesty statutes, and indeed, even under Guatemala’s 1996 national conciliation law, genocide, torture and forced disappearances are expressly exempt from amnesty.

Today, the misty mountain air of Lake Atitlán in the Guatemalan highlands is best known for tourism rather than terror (pictured above).  Towns like Huehuetenango and Santiago Atitlán, in 2013, are better known as a source of fair-trade coffee than as a site of genocide.

But 30 years ago, the Guatemalan highlands saw some of the worst atrocities of the Guatemalan civil war.  Continue reading Former Guatemalan dictator Ríos Montt to be tried for genocide →