Dilma Rousseff: Brazil's new president is latest female leader in Latin America

Brazilians partied on the beaches of Rio and Brazilian stocks rose with anticipation Monday morning as results from Sunday's runoff election confirmed Dilma Rousseff as the South American nation's first female president.

Rousseff, who has never held elective office, won largely due to her ties to her mentor, outgoing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a beloved figure credited with transforming Brazil into a world player. "It's historic," a government worker celebrating Rousseff's win in Brasilia told the Daily Mail. "Brazil elected a factory worker and now a woman. Dilma will be a mother for the Brazilian people."

In her victory speech, Rousseff promised to further attack poverty in Brazil. Making reference to her historic win, she said, "I hope the fathers and mothers of little girls will look at them and say yes, women can."

Here's more coverage in The Times.

Rousseff joins a small but celebrated group of female leaders in Brazil's long history. The last time a woman ruled over Brazil was in the early 19th century, when Princess Maria Leopoldina served briefly as empress consort of the Brazilian empire, and was instrumental in Brazil's declaration of independence from Portugal in 1822. In the final period of the Brazilian monarchy, Princess Isabel, serving as regent, abolished slavery by signing the Ley Aurea in 1888 (link in Spanish).

The abolition of slavery in Brazil triggered the fall of the monarchy.

Brazil became a constitutional republic in 1889. The country witnessed a repressive military dictatorship between 1965 and 1985. It was during this time that Rousseff, daughter of a Bulgarian immigrant and a teacher, became active in Brazil's guerrilla resistance movement.

In this manner she is similar another modern female leader in the Americas. The popular former president of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, was a member of the resistance during the Pinochet dictatorship and was jailed and tortured, as Rousseff was in Brazil.

Three other women currently serve as leaders in Latin America. Laura Chinchilla was inaugurated as the first female president of Costa Rica in May. Weeks later in Trinidad and Tobago, Kamla Persad-Bissessar became the first female prime minister. Argentina is led by Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, its first elected female president.

Brazil hosts the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympic Games in 2016, and is set to become a major oil exporter in the coming years.

-- Daniel Hernandez in Mexico City

Photo: Dilma Rousseff looks up to a television screen during a presidential debate on Oct. 25. Credit: Reuters

U.S. apologizes for experiment that infected Guatemalans with syphilis

The United States apologized to Guatemala on Friday for a 1940s research program in which Guatemalans were intentionally infected with the sexually transmitted disease syphilis without their knowledge or consent.

Between 1946 and 1948, the agency then known as the U.S. Public Health Service infected Guatemalan sex workers, prison inmates, and mental health patients with syphilis. The program was conducted in order to examine whether penicillin, relatively new at the time, could be used to treat the disease. It was led by John Cutler, the U.S. doctor who later led the infamous Tuskegee experiment, in which African American men in Alabama infected with syphilis were observed without receiving treatment.

The Guatemala program was "clearly unethical," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a joint statement.

"Although these events occurred more than 64 years ago, we are outraged that such reprehensible research could have occurred under the guise of public health," the statement said. "We deeply regret that it happened, and we apologize to all the individuals who were affected by such abhorrent research practices."

Archival research conducted by medical historian Susan Reverby, a professor at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, uncovered the Guatemala syphilis experiment. Reverby, who has written extensively on the Tuskegee experiment, found documents on the Guatemala program at a library at the University of Pittsburgh. The professor discovered that the Public Health Service sent Cutler to Guatemala to study syphilis transmission, with the backing of Guatemalan health officials and the Pan-American Sanitary Bureau.

Cutler and Guatemalan doctor Juan Funes induced the disease by allowing prison inmates to have sex with infected prostitutes, or by inoculating the syphilis-causing bacteria in inmates through a solution. The patients, who remained uninformed, were then given penicillin to see if the antibiotic could treat syphilis.

"In addition to the penitentiary, the studies took place in an insane asylum and an army barracks," Reverby said in a Wellesley College release on her work. "In total, 696 men and women were exposed to the disease and then offered penicillin. The studies went on until 1948 and the records suggest that despite intentions not everyone was probably cured."

The Wellesley release has more details. U.S. Health and Human Services has posted an information page on the Guatemala syphilis study at its website.

President Barack Obama called Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom on Friday to apologize on behalf of the United States for the 1940s syphilis program. Colom's government posted a message on its official website condemning the experiment and requesting a full investigation, which the U.S. has promised to carry out.

A separate statement on the government's Facebook page said Guatemala "reserves the right" to further denounce the experiment in an international forum, but did not elaborate.

-- Daniel Hernandez in Mexico City

Photo: U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. Credit: Agence France-Presse

Warning signs came before landslide in Oaxaca

Residents of the remote village in the Mexican state of Oaxaca where a landslide swept away several hundred homes early Tuesday had warned of the precariousness of the rain-soaked hillsides. On Sept. 13, the newspaper OaxacaHoy reported that earth was already pressing into the walls of some homes in Santa Maria Tlahuitoltepec, where, between 2 and 4 a.m. today, a mountainside gave way and slammed into about 300 homes (link in Spanish).

"The humidity and softening of the earth is generating signs of sinking in the hill," OaxacaHoy said. "Due to the unevenness, homes are showing cracks and there is fear a tragedy could occur in the area."

Rescue workers were still struggling to reach the remote village on Tuesday afternoon. Flooding, persistent fog and rain, as well as previous mudslides, are blocking roads up into the Mixe mountain region, where Santa Maria Tlahuitoltepec is located.

The first word of the landslide came from a resident who used a satellite phone to call Oaxacan civil protection officials just before dawn. State authorities have so far confirmed seven dead, but little else is known about exactly how many people are missing. A bridge connecting Oaxaca City with the affected area is on the brink of collapsing, further hampering the rescue efforts (links in Spanish).

Much of southern and eastern Mexico as well as Central America have been battered by unusually heavy seasonal rain and several major storms, including Hurricane Karl and Tropical Storm Matthew. Elsewhere in Oaxaca in recent days, at least two rivers have overflown, the Espiritu Santo and Los Perros (links in Spanish).

On Tuesday, a bridge connecting Oaxaca City to its airport had also been shut down because of rain damage (link in Spanish).

-- Daniel Hernandez in Mexico City

Photo: Motorists and rescue workers are stranded at a weakened bridge on the Macuiltxochitl River in Oaxaca, Mexico. Credit: El Universal

 

Guatemala tapping volcanoes as new energy sources [Updated]

Dotted with volcanoes, Guatemala is seeking to harness their geothermal energy to create green power sources, part of a growing trend in Central America, Reuters reports.

By harnessing the heat of steam and water trapped deep under the active Pacaya volcano, Guatemala's two geothermal plants are already producing energy that serves as an alternative source to fossil-fuel power.

The plants, run by an Israeli company, are also hailed by environmentalists because they do not require widespread alteration of the landscape as hydroelectric dams do. Hydroelectric power sources also have a somewhat haunted history in Guatemala, with the Chixoy dam massacre of 1983, and are vulnerable to storms and hurricanes, which have increasingly beset the region.

Guatemala is offering tax breaks to companies willing to build more geothermal energy plants, and El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica are also investing in geothermal energy development, the news agency says.

Guatemala hopes to meet at least 60% of its energy needs (link in Spanish) through geothermal and hydroelectric sources by 2022, the country's National Electric Energy Commission says.

— Daniel Hernandez in Mexico City

[For the record, 10 a.m. Sept. 23: An earlier version of this post incorrectly said Guatemala hoped to meet as much as 60% of its energy needs with geothermal and hydroelectric sources. Officials hope to produce at least 60% of its needs through renewable energy by 2022.]

Photo: Pacaya volcano in Guatemala. Credit: Moon.com

Columnist: Immigrant rights community must react to Mexico migrant massacre

The massacre in Mexico of 72 migrants bound for the U.S. should be met with outrage and introspection by immigrant-rights groups, but has so far been met mostly with silence, Hector Tobar argues in a Thursday column in The Times. The columnist writes that people in the immigrant-rights community readily protest anti-immigrant legislation in the United States but rarely address the root causes for illegal migration from Latin America.

The migrant massacre (which La Plaza has covered here, here, and here) was an "act of psychological warfare" by suspected members of the Zetas drug gang, the columnist writes, and it exposes multiple failures in immigration reform in the U.S., Mexico's drug war, and the lack of economic opportunity across the region. An excerpt:

Most of the country's leading immigrant rights groups haven't even bothered to issue a news release.

That doesn't surprise me. Generally speaking, the U.S. immigrant rights movement doesn't have much to say about the social and political conditions that lead so many to leave their native countries and place themselves at the mercy of an increasingly violent smuggling industry.

Indeed, the United Nations released a condemning statement just days after the migrant killings, but major immigrant-rights organizations in the United States apparently did not.

An Amnesty International report released in April says Central and South American migrants seeking to cross Mexico to reach the U.S. embark on "one of the most dangerous journeys in the world," as human smugglers and corrupt officials routinely expose migrants to abuse and violence, including the rape of female migrants. Those who survive the trek across Mexican territory then face the increasing risk of death along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Mexico's national human rights commission estimates that 20,000 migrants are kidnapped each year in the country, a startling figure. On Wednesday, as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton likened violence tied to Mexican drug trafficking groups to a Colombian-style "insurgency," sparking rebukes in Mexico, authorities said they arrested seven gunmen suspected of participating in the Aug. 23 massacre in Tamaulipas state.

Tobar, an author and most recently an L.A. Times foreign correspondent in Mexico and Argentina, writes a regular column in the paper.

-- Daniel Hernandez in Mexico City

Photo: Coffins of victims of the Mexico migrant massacre return to Honduras. Credit: Agence France-Presse

Deadly mudslides in Guatemala as rainy season's storms batter region [Updated]

Heavy rainfall unleashed mudslides in Guatemala that have claimed at least 45 lives, and officials say hope is fading to find any survivors trapped under mud in two separate slides on the same highway in western Guatemala (link with video by the BBC).

[Updated at 11:04 a.m.: A previous version of this post erroneously said the two mudslides in Guatemala occurred in the north.]

Widespread flooding was also reported in southeastern Mexico over the weekend, killing at least 11 (link in Spanish). Flooding in the region during the current rainy season has killed 55 people in Honduras, at least 40 in Nicaragua, nine in El Salvador and three in Costa Rica, the Agence France-Presse news agency said.

In Guatemala, a mudslide on the Inter-American Highway in the village of Nahuala, west of Guatemala City, engulfed a bus and other vehicles on Sunday, and later another slide claimed would-be rescuers. President Alvaro Colom declared a state of emergency and a national day of mourning. Including victims from Tropical Storm Agatha in May, this rainy season is the worst the country has seen in 60 years, killing at least 236 people, said Guatemala's La Prensa Libre (link in Spanish).

On Tuesday, the newspaper reported that one motorist who witnessed slides along the highway said 1,000 vehicles are still stuck in the mud (link in Spanish).

Elsewhere in the region, a surging Tropical Storm Hermine made landfall early Tuesday in northeastern Mexico, prompting officials to urge residents to move to shelters. Mexico's southeast -- including the states of Chiapas, Tabasco, and Veracruz -- has been hard hit by a separate storm that displaced almost half a million people over the weekend.

-- Daniel Hernandez in Mexico City

Photo: Quiche indigenous children and women at a funeral for a Guatemala mudslide victim. Credit: Moises Castillo / Associated Press 

A third migrant said to survive massacre, as bodies return home

Now, a third migrant is said to have survived last month's massacre in Tamaulipas, Mexico. El Salvador's president, Mauricio Funes, asserted Sunday -- almost two weeks after the killings took place -- that one Salvadoran citizen survived and is in the U.S.

Funes gave no further details, and it is not clear how the Salvadoran survived or made it to the U.S. Late Monday, however, the Mexican government expressed doubts about the existence of a third survivor, saying officials would check out the story but that there was no corroborating evidence at this point of another survivor.

Alejandro Poire, the Mexican government's security spokesman, also said a Mexican is under arrest on suspicion of involvement in the massacre, and three bodies found on a road Aug. 30 are believed to be men who participated.

The massacre has reverberated across Latin America. Confirmed victims include citizens of Brazil, Honduras, Guatemala, Ecuador and El Salvador. Reporting from the home village of one of the Salvadoran victims, a 15-year-old girl, Times special correspondent Alex Renderos says that a majority of children in school there have parents living in a U.S. city.

"There are sons and daughters living alone here, taken care of only by their grandparents," a school teacher told Renderos. "And the parents want to hug their daughters and sons and give them a better life."

In this video report by La Prensa Grafica, Funes is shown addressing officials and mourners during a ceremony at a hangar to receive the bodies of 11 of the Salvadoran victims (link in Spanish). The gray caskets are seen driven through streets where passers-by stopped to weep. El Mundo published the names of 10 Salvadorans identified so far (link in Spanish). Their ages run between 22 and 55. Three are women.

The number of Central and South Americans taking the treacherous path through Mexico to reach the United States has taken a drop in recent years, The Times reports. Yet Mexico's National Human Rights Commission estimates that 1,600 migrants are kidnapped in Mexico each month. The story adds: "In El Salvador and other countries from which the victims came, the massacre has raised another dark question: How many others have met the same fate, but were never found?"

-- Daniel Hernandez in Mexico City

Photo: Relatives of slain migrant Armando Nieto grieve in El Salvador as 11 bodies return from Mexico. Credit: Associated Press

Second survivor confirmed in migrant massacre as Latin America mourns

Authorities in Mexico have confirmed that a second person -- a Honduran citizen -- survived the massacre of 72 migrants last week in the state of Tamaulipas, but the man's identity and location are being closely guarded to protect his safety. The revelation came Wednesday, after Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa mentioned another survivor and his nationality, prompting the Honduran government to chastise Correa for releasing the information.

"There's no name for what happened in Mexico last week," Correa said, according to Agence France-Presse.

The investigation is delicate because of the international nature of the incident and because survivors of major crimes in Mexico are often at risk for reprisal violence. An investigator in Tamaulipas has already been reported missing. Fifty-eight men and 14 women from several Central and South American countries were killed execution-style near the town of San Fernando after refusing to work for the ruthless Zetas gang, the Ecuadoran survivor told authorities. Luis Freddy Lala Pomavilla, 18, was repatriated to Ecuador on Sunday and will be placed in a witness protection program.

Some of the bodies were moved to a morgue in Mexico City on Wednesday as the process to identify the remains continued. Those identified so far include 16 Hondurans, 13 Salvadorans, five Guatemalans and one Brazilian. Families seeking information on missing loved ones are crowding outside embassies and foreign offices in their home countries. Many are in mourning for victims of an incident that highlights the extreme risks that migrants undertake as they cross Mexico to seek better lives in the United States. Look for our upcoming special report from El Salvador.

"I haven't heard anything from him in a week. The last time we talked he was in Tamaulipas," one woman in San Salvador said of a loved one who went missing, according to MSNBC. "Some men called and asked for $400, and I sent it."

-- Daniel Hernandez in Mexico City

Photo: Workers begin examining the bodies of migrants killed in Tamaulipas at a morgue in Mexico City. Credit: Fernando Antonio / Associated Press

'Danielismo': The cult of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua

The president of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, certainly has high self-esteem. Since the former leftist guerrilla was elected back into the Nicaraguan presidency in 2006, Ortega "has built a national homage to himself," writes Tracy Wilkinson in the L.A. Times, from Managua:

"Billboards dot this sprawling, haphazard capital with a larger-than-life picture of him alongside national heroes Ruben Dario and Augusto Sandino. Nicaraguans speak less of Sandinismo and more of Danielismo."

Ortega's government last year opened a Museum of the Sandinista Victory, in which the president "is everywhere." Other crucial revolutionary leaders who helped depose the right-wing regime in 1979 "have been erased," said a former vice president from Ortega's first term in office.

Read Wilkinson's entire story here.

Since resuming the presidency, Ortega has visited Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and he said "the revolutions of Iran and Nicaragua are almost twins." Ortega's government has sought to silence political opponents and journalists, including former allies in the Sandinista Revolution. The left-leaning Washington Office on Latin America has since expressed alarm at "the growing climate of intolerance for those who are perceived as critics of the federal government" in Nicaragua.

Ortega, now a self-described Christian who often invokes Christian themes in his speeches, is making attempts to change the constitution in Nicaragua so that he may seek reelection next year.

-- Daniel Hernandez in Mexico City

Image: A historical Time magazine cover featuring Daniel Ortega. Credit: Google Images

A Chamorro wins journalism prize -- again

 Thirty-three years after his father was awarded the prestigious Maria Moors Cabot journalism prize, Carlos Fernando Chamorro has received the same honor. The veteran Nicaraguan journalist said he was "overwhelmed and humbled" and inspired to redouble efforts to honor his father's memory.

The parallels were lost on no one. Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, the father, was the editor of La Prensa in the 1970s who challenged dictator Anastasio Somoza. Pedro Joaquin won the Cabot Prize in 1977; months later, he was assassinated by Somoza loyalists, an event that helped galvanize opposition and trigger the revolution that brought the Sandinista Liberation Front to power two years later.

Today, Carlos Fernando, the son, is one of the most vocal critics of the Sandinista government under President Daniel Ortega, whom enemies see as a Somoza-like dictator.

The Cabot Prize is administered by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, which said in its citation that Chamorro "serves as an outstanding example of courage in standing up to abuse by an authoritarian regime."

Chamorro, one of four 2010 Cabot Prize recipients, directs a nightly television program, Esta Noche, and a newsletter, Confidencial.

Reading a statement on the program (link in Spanish), Chamorro said the prize would serve to "call attention to the vigor of independent journalism in Nicaragua, which, despite all the intimidation campaigns, has maintained its credibility intact."

As The Times reported last year, Chamorro has been subjected to government raids on his offices and protracted but ultimately unsuccessful attempts by Ortega to prosecute him. Nicaragua is often listed by rights groups as a country where the government seriously harasses journalists.

--Tracy Wilkinson in Mexico City

Photo: Carlos Fernando Chamorro. Credit: Confidencial.