By Cordelia Rizzo In 2007, Mexico City’s legislature affirmed a woman’s right to choose to terminate her pregnancy during the first trimester. Today, this remains the only pro-choice law in the whole country. In response, conservative congresses in other parts of Mexico have toughened their own anti-abortion laws. But ordinary Mexicans are just beginning to […]
As newspapers continue their steady financial decline and the press is criticized for everything from false news reports to jeopardizing national security, those of us who live in the comfort of a democracy may start to say, Who needs them? There are plenty of blogs to fill the gap, and as tech-savvy critical thinkers trained […]
How much more of the $378 billion transmitted via the casa de cambios and inserted into Wachovia accounts represents criminal revenue is anyone’s guess, because no further inquiries into the origin of these funds has been undertaken.
The bank, now a unit of Wells Fargo, leads a list of firms that have moved dirty money for Mexico’s narcotics cartels–helping a $39 billion trade that has killed more than 22,000 people since 2006. –Michael Smith, Bloomberg Markets Magazine, July7, 2010
Antonio Maria Costa, the UN Drug Czar, is a modest man, so when he stands up, as he did on June 23, and tells an audience at Johns Hopkins-SAIS, in Washington, DC, that we have to start thinking about transnational crime in an entirely different way—it’s news. Costa, whose degrees, from UC-Berkeley and the University […]
Journalists in Mexico are facing an increasingly hostile environment. On Sunday, 13 journalists on a tour in the state of Michoacan were kidnapped at machete point by Nahua Indians. They had been mistaken for a crew in the area to film a beer commercial, and were released, but their equipment was confiscated. According to the […]
By Cordelia Rizzo We knew that something was wrong with Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, former leader of the Legionaires of Christ, and his order, long before he was openly accused of child abuse in the ’90s. Last month, two years after Maciel’s death, Vatican has finally officially condemned Maciel’s behavior and is effectively imposing martial […]
At this point, it is unlikely that anyone has missed word of Arizona’s new immigration law. SB 1070 was signed by Governor Jan Brewer on April 23 and is the nation’s toughest law on unauthorized immigration. For the month since its passing, the country and the hemisphere have been abuzz debating the controversial nature of […]
By Cordelia Rizzo The recent deaths of two graduate students from the Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (the “Tec”), caught in a fight between the Mexican armed forces and a drug cartel gang, challenged the traditional view of the human toll of the country’s war against drugs. They showcased a singular feeling […]
Socialism and energy have a peculiar relationship to each other. In most countries, no matter who owns the surface land, the subsurface rights to the oil, gas, or (sometimes) minerals, belongs to the national government, and, in theory, the people of the country. The idea did not start with the 20th century: kings and rulers […]
A new story today by the BBC details the growing problem of police violence in Nigeria. The morgue at the Nigeria University Teaching Hospital overflows with bodies brought in by police, often unnamed but reported to be suspected criminals, such as armed robbers or thieves. In some cases, that may be the case but in […]
The global economic recession has had mixed effects on migration. In some cases it led to clear decreases in remittance-sending, while many migrants also lost their jobs. In the United States, for example, a large number of immigrants worked in low-skilled industries such as construction, where available jobs dropped precipitously after the collapse of the […]
A little over one year ago a 37-year old immigrant from Ecuador, Marcelo Lucero, was stabbed to death in Patchatogue, NY, a town on Long Island. The community recently held a vigil and called for increased understanding. One can only hope that the memorial service helps to spread open-mindedness and serve as a counterweight to […]
Over the past months significant press attention has focused on the Honduran government, after the ouster of its former president. Manuel Zelaya, however, is not the only person dislocated by the political crisis. Today, a National Public Radio (NPR) story highlighted the increased northward movement of Hondurans, as they seek employment, not to mention a […]
As if the passage northward were not dangerous enough for a migrant trying to enter the US without documentation, human rights organizations now report an epidemic of kidnappings. Irregular migrants are often beaten and detained by their captors until they provide the contact information of family members, who must then send money for their release. […]