Full Coverage: Latin America & Caribbean

30.06.2006 California-based Global Exchange is monitoring the conditions for democracy in the run-up to Sunday's presidential election in Mexico--the first since the end of the 71-year power monopoly of the old ruling party, the PRI.

30.06.2006 Global trade can promote economic and social progress, but a ten-lane super highway, which could begin construction as early as 2007, may pose serious environmental, trade, and national security risks, warns the Worldwatch Institute.

26.06.2006 BOGOTA, Jun 26 (IPS) - Legend has it that Ciudad Bolivar, a poor neighbourhood strung along the hills on the south side of the Colombian capital, is so called because independence hero Simon Bolivar briefly took refuge in the area after narrowly escaping an assassination attempt in 1828. Today, it is riddled with the concrete failure of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe's push for paramilitary demobilisation.

26.06.2006 At a national Other Campaign gathering in Mexico City on May 29, Subcomandante Marcos called on members of the Other Campaign across the country to gather in Mexico City on June 30 for two days of debate and, on election day, Sunday July 2, to “interrupt into the calendar of the elite [los de arriba] with civil and peaceful organizing and mobilizations.”

23.06.2006 According to a new report released by Amnesty International, weak national legislation and deeply entrenched social and cultural attitudes in Jamaica encourage gender discrimination and violence against women.

22.06.2006 Journalists, media entrepreneurs, government and civil society representatives, academics, and students met last week in UNESCO’s Montevideo Office to analyze and evaluate the situation of media, development and poverty reduction in Uruguay and the region, and to make recommendations for UNESCO’s action in this context.

22.06.2006 The Brazilian authorities have every reason to be grateful that the soccer world cup in Germany arrived just in time to divert people's attention from the crisis of violence and confrontation in the country's largest city, says Sue Branford.

21.06.2006 What’s the best way to move entire towns from poverty to the middle class? Buy each and every child in the community a $100 laptop computer, said MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte at a recent conference launching the IDB’s new Building Opportunity for the Majority initiative.

20.06.2006 As four Mapuche activists imprisoned under draconian anti-terrorist laws spend over two months on hunger-strike, journalist Justin Vogler looks at the troubled relationship between the Chilean state and "the oldest of Chileans".

20.06.2006 In early June U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick had the nerve to speak publicly against “interventionism” in Latin America at a meeting of the Organization of American States in the Dominican Republic. Ironically, a few days later the U.S. Congress voted to continue supporting military intervention in Latin America...

19.06.2006 Journal writers are masters of half-truths and distortion that goes along the the paper's policy of being hostile to any government not in line with the neoliberal Washington Consensus (wreaking havoc wherever it spreads) and not fully subservient to US wishes.

19.06.2006 The passionate loyalty of "Portenos" for their city's soccer clubs is more than a matter of familial and local tradition, says Carlos Forment: amid social and economic crisis it becomes a source of the remaking of civic identity.

19.06.2006 About 30 per cent of people surveyed in Brazil, Britain, Canada, Guatemala, India and South Africa have been the victim of gun crime or know someone who has been a victim in the last five years.

17.06.2006 Pro-whaling nations led by Japan failed to gain a majority at the International Whaling Commission in St Kitts and Nevis, but environmental group Greenpeace said it would return to the Southern Ocean this year to oppose the continued ‘"scientific hunt".

16.06.2006 The Guatemalan government has been urged to enact the pending Adoption Law in order to protect thousands of children from being turned into "a lucrative export business".

16.06.2006 On the eve of today's controversial International Whaling Commission meeting, a poll shows that citizens from 10 countries in the Pacific and Caribbean, whose governments repeatedly vote to resume commercial whaling, do not support the hunt.
* Whales' fate hanging in the balance
* Campaigners demand governments unite against Japan's massive porpoise hunt

16.06.2006 Patricia Mercado, a feminist candidate in this year's Mexican presidential election and a founding member of the Social-Democratic Alternative and Farmer party, has made news with her firm pro-feminist and pro-LGBT rights platform.

15.06.2006 Brazil's Indians are suffering high levels of violence linked to the loss of their land, says a new report.

15.06.2006 A Greenpeace ship has been refused entry to St Kitts, where a controversial International Whaling Commission begins on Friday - a meeting the environmental lobby group says will be a disaster for whales.

15.06.2006 The Pan American Health Organization observed World Blood Donor Day on June 14th, honoring 14 volunteers from throughout the Americas who have made notable contributions to the promotion of voluntary, unpaid blood donations in their countries.