The carbon trade doesn’t just fail to address climate change. In countries like Honduras, it fuels a perverse incentive structure by funneling cash to notorious human rights abusers engaged in extractive industries.
Emphasis, as always, added.
Guatemala’s highest court, ruling on appeals filed by the defense, has annulled former dictator Jose Efrain Ríos Montt’s 80-year sentence for genocide and crimes against humanity. The Constitutional Court declared invalid all proceedings that took place after April 19, including the verdict and sentencing. Whether the trial can be picked up again from that date is unclear. What is clear, however, is that the trial has lifted the curtain on Guatemala’s bloody past. The verdict reached far beyond the question of how a man who once commanded a brutal army will spend his last years.
According to the study, Hispanics will use more government handouts than the average citizen and drain government resources.
The implication that Congress is preventing the closure of Guantánamo is disingenuous.
John Kerry’s ascent to U.S. Secretary of State generated a discussion about taking Cuba off the State Department’s list of “state sponsors of terrorism.” Given Kerry’s generally reasonable position on Cuba in the past, it was perhaps not surprising that he considered this option. Nonetheless, on May 1, the U.S. State Department announced that Cuba would remain on its list. It’s a serious mistake.
The U.S. government stands alone among major world governments in refusing to recognize the results of the recent Venezuelan presidential election. The petulant position of the Obama administration harms U.S. relations across the entire hemisphere and feeds a scenario of violence in that Caribbean country.
Coletta A. Youngers is the Latin America Regional Associate with the International Drug Policy Consortium and a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America. She is an analyst of international drug policy, human rights and political developments in the...
Dr. Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and president of Just Foreign Policy, an independent and non-partisan membership organization dedicated to reforming U.S. foreign policy. He is also a weekly columnist for the Guardian.
Areas of interest and expertise are Latin America (especially Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru), Southeast Asia (especially Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam) and North Africa and the Middle East (especially Libya and to a lesser degree, Syria). Strategic Planning and Commercial...