The week in Latin America: Peru's African legacy

Here are stories that made top headlines in Latin America this week, and highlights from our coverage of the region by Times reporters and your blogger here at La Plaza:

Significant court ruling in Mexico

In Mexico, the Supreme Court ruled that human-rights abuse claims against the military must be tried in civilian courts and no longer in closed-door military tribunals.

The ruling presents a test to Mexico's fledgling civilian justice system, still in dire need of reform, as well as President Felipe Calderon's military-led strategy against organized crime. Abuse claims against Mexico's armed forces have skyrocketed since soldiers and marines were dispatched to the streets in 2006 to combat the country's drug cartels.

Searching for the missing children of El Salvador

Times correspondent Ken Ellingwood was recently in El Salvador, where he reported a profile of an organization, named Pro-Busqueda, which uses the modern tools of social media as well as "old–fashioned grunt work" to locate missing children from El Salvador's brutal civil war.

Read the story here. 

Excavating Afro-Peruvian history

From Peru, Times correspondent Tracy Wilkinson offers a look at an acclaimed singer who is seeking to reclaim and celebrate the country's rich history of African migration and culture.

One such icon of the Afro-Peruvian past, says singer Susana Baca, is the instrument known as the cajon, or box, which Baca has incorporated into her records. "A lot of people saw this as the music of the slaves," she explains. "They were ashamed of it."

Gun scandal grows in the United States

With wide implications for Mexico and its conflict against organized crime, the Fast and Furious gun-running scandal continued to reverberate north of the border. This week, the federal government imposed a tougher rule for the reporting of semiautomatic weapon sales in border states.

Revelations from the scandal, in which deadly weapons were knowingly "walked" into Mexico by U.S. agents, confirm that the United States government has been essentially arming both sides of the drug war in Mexico.

-- Daniel Hernandez in Mexico City

Photo: Peruvian singer Susana Baca, left, in the village of Santa Barbara, Peru. Credit: Giancarlo Aponte, For The Times

La Plaza comments switching to Facebook

La Plaza today is switching to a new commenting system.

The system requires commenters to sign in through their Facebook accounts. People without Facebook accounts will not be able to leave comments.

Readers will have the option of posting their La Plaza comments on their Facebook walls, but that's not required.

Readers are welcome to express their opinions about the news -- and about how the new Facebook comments system is working.

Jimmy Orr, the Los Angeles Times managing editor in charge of latimes.com, discussed our online comments and the Facebook system in greater depth in a March entry to the Readers' Representative Journal.

We hope to see your comments on Facebook.

-- The Foreign Staff of the Los Angeles Times

Ricardo Stein, an architect of peace in Guatemala, is dead at 62

Ricardo Stein, a Guatemalan intellectual and human rights advocate who became one of the key architects of the 1996 peace accords ending the country's long civil war, has died of cancer. He was 62 (link in Spanish).

Stein spent much of his life fighting rights abuses in Guatemala and neighboring El Salvador during a dark era of dictatorships and death squads in Central America.

Trained in mathematics and physics in his homeland and the United States, Stein received a doctorate in education from Boston University.

He spent a number of years in El Salvador, where he created the Center for Information, Documentation and Support for Research at the Jesuit-run University of Central America. He returned home to Guatemala in 1989 and became an advisor in peace negotiations and later in the verification of the peace accords. In 1998, he became executive director of the Soros Foundation Guatemala (link in Spanish), a position he held until 2006.

Stein was also a special counselor and coordinator for the U.N. Development Program in Guatemala.

"One of Stein's visionary ideas was to use the Soros Foundation strategically as the instrument to create a new Guatemala,” said Fernando Carrera, now executive director of the Soros Foundation Guatemala. “He innovated and designed a small laboratory of ideas where intellectuals, military officers, businessmen and Mayans shared and contributed ideas.”

Among Stein's achievements, Carrera said, was establishing a Mayan political leadership, championing Mayan women as leaders and pushing to transform human rights organizations from protest groups into catalysts for a new vision of the state of law. "These ideas may sound easy to anybody today, but they are not if you take into account that Stein developed these ideas at a time of Guatemala's political upheaval,” Carrera said.

Stein died Monday after a long battle with lung cancer, according to his cousin, Eduardo Stein, a former vice president.

-- Alex Renderos in San Salvador

 

Obama to visit grave of slain Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero

President Obama is visiting Latin America this week, and on Wednesday he will make what may be the most dramatic gesture of the trip.

Obama is scheduled to pay homage to Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was assassinated by a sniper as he said Mass on March 24, 1980, in the early days of El Salvador's civil war. Obama's planned stop at Romero's tomb in the National Cathedral will mark the first time a U.S. president has done so, a "truly extraordinary" gesture, the Salvadoran news website El Faro said in an editorial. 

Romero's killer was a member of the death squads that worked on behalf of the side in the civil war that the U.S. government came to support against leftist guerrillas. Today, those guerrillas, recast as a political party capable of winning elections, are in power.

Obama's action demonstrates just how far the process of democracy and reconciliation has come in post-war El Salvador, the country's ambassador to the United States, Francisco Altschul, said in a telephone interview from Washington.

"Monsignor Romero is a universal symbol of justice, peace, human rights and reconciliation," Altschul said. "We are incredibly satisfied and appreciative" of Obama's visit to the grave.

But reconciliation goes only so far. One person Obama will not meet with is the country's top security official, even though public security is a major topic on the agenda. Justice and Security Minister Manuel Melgar is considered by Washington to have blood on his hands, having been implicated in a guerrilla attack on a Zona Rosa sidewalk cafe in San Salvador in 1985 in which four U.S. Marines were killed along with nine civilians. Melgar's exact role is in dispute, but U.S. officials as a matter of course steer clear of him.  

-- Tracy WIlkinson in Mexico City 

Photo: Salvadoran children march with photographs of Archbishop Oscar Romero. Credit: Mauro Arias / El Faro

Guatemala declares 'state of siege' to combat Mexican drug cartel, limiting rights

The brutal Mexican drug-trafficking organization known as the Zetas has made inroads in Guatemala, controlling territory near the Central American country's border with southern Mexico and prompting the Guatemalan government on Sunday to declare a "state of siege" aimed at curbing the gang's growing power.

The state of siege declaration for the northern Guatemalan department of Alta Verapaz in turn prompted worry among human rights activists and the Guatemalan press. The declaration allows the government to detain suspects or conduct searches without warrants, and limits public gatherings and the news media.

President Alvaro Colom's government said the state of siege -- which is just below a declaration of war -- would be in place for at least a month and could be extended to the four departments, or provinces, along the Mexican border.

Cartels from Mexico are believed to be taking over established crime rings in Guatemala and recruiting among locals, including the country's poverty-stricken indigenous groups. The Zetas -- one of Mexico's fiercest cartels -- are reportedly attempting to wrestle control of the lucrative trafficking corridor through northern Guatemala from local groups, seizing rural farms to use as depots for drugs and weapons. Meanwhile, in western Guatemala, Mexico's powerful Sinaloa cartel is also setting up bases, reports have said.

Leaked U.S. cables recount tensions between El Salvador's Mauricio Funes, FMLN

 

El Salvador's first leftist president, Mauricio Funes, harbored fears for his personal safety last year and suspected his offices had been bugged, newly disclosed secret U.S. cables reveal. However, the perceived threat was not from El Salvador's right wing but from members of the very coalition that brought Funes to power, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front.

The cables, part of the WikiLeaks trove published this week in El Pais newspaper, recount the growing tensions between the moderate Funes and the more hard-line wing of the leftist FMLN coalition of former guerrillas.

The Salvadoran government "can best be characterized as schizophrenic," U.S. diplomats wrote in a communication dated Jan. 26 of this year. FMLN hard-liners, led by Vice President Sanchez Ceren, have been making anti-U.S. speeches and frequent contacts with leftist governments like those of Venezuela and Cuba, without Funes' authorization, the report says.

Another cable, from last year, quotes a close aide of Funes (whose name is blacked out) as saying the president is worried about his "physical security" and asks for protection from the United States.

"The message from [the unnamed associate] on behalf of Funes was clear: we have great confidence in the USG [United States Government], real security concerns, and need your help," the cable said.

Tensions between Funes and the FMLN, which fought against the U.S.-backed right in El Salvador's long civil war, have been mounting for months. He never belonged to the party but was its candidate in historic elections in March 2009 which put a leftist in the presidential office for the first time in the country's history.

 --Tracy Wilkinson in Mexico City

Photo: Mauricio Funes, left, and Sanchez Ceren in a campaign appearance ahead of last year's presidential election. Credit: AFP.

 

Report: The Salvadoran ex-guerrilla advising Mexico's drug-war leaders

Nearly 30,000 people, the latest figure being used, have died in Mexico's drug war in the nearly four years since President Felipe Calderon dispatched the military to disrupt the country's drug-trafficking organizations.

Calderon's administration has consistently claimed that the high casualty rate is a sign of success. The Mexican president might have a former guerrilla commander to thanks for that approach.

As The Times' Mexico City bureau chief Tracy Wilkinson reports, the most influential mind behind Calderon's drug-war strategy is a man named Joaquin Villalobos, an ex-rebel leader from El Salvador who has rebranded himself as an Oxford-educated security consultant. In recent speeches, op-eds and interviews, Calderon's rhetoric on the drug war is almost indistinguishable from that of Villalobos, Wilkinson writes. They both claim that rising numbers of dead are a sign that Mexico's cartels are eliminating one another, and that Mexican society must be prepared to absorb more violence in the overall effort against drugs.

Read the whole story here.

The reach of Villalobos' influence in recent security policy in Mexico is apparent in the image above, published in January in the daily La Jornada (link in Spanish). Villalobos, right, is handing over a weapon to Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the controversial president of Mexico between 1988 and 1994. The gun was given personally to Villalobos as a gift by none other than Fidel Castro, the paper says, and the photo was taken inside Los Pinos, Mexico's presidential residence.

Villalobos has worked as a consultant off and on for years in Mexico, as well as for Colombia's right-wing former president Alvaro Uribe. From his guerrilla days with the FMLN and EPR movements in El Salvador, Villalobos remains implicated to this day in the execution of poet Roque Dalton.

Today, Villalobos is a seen as a "guru" among Calderon's advisors in Mexico. The ex-guerrilla, who may be mulling a future run for the presidency of El Salvador, laid out his security advice for Mexico's drug war in an essay published in the magazine Nexos on Jan. 1. Here's the link in Spanish for "Twelve Myths of the Narco War." His "myths" are:

1. "We should not have confronted organized crime."

2. "Mexico is Colombian-izing and is in danger of becoming a failed state."

3. "The intense debate over insecurity is a sign of its worsening."

4. "Deaths and violence is a sign that we are losing the war."

5. "Three years is a long time, the plan has failed."

6. "Attacks by narcos prove they are powerful."

7. "Let's first do away with corruption and poverty."

8. "There are powerful politicians and businessmen behind narco-trafficking."

9. "The only way out is to negotiate with the narco-traffickers."

10. "The strategy should guide itself to the legalization of drugs."

11. "The military's participation is negative and should be drawn back."

12. "The fastest and most effective end to crime is the pursuit of justice by its own account."

Here's an automated translation of the piece into English, alternating between sentences. La Jornada offers a rebuttal of the piece here, in Spanish, and here, in automated translation to English.

-- Daniel Hernandez in Mexico City

Photo: Former Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, left, receives a weapon as a gift from former Salvadoran guerrilla leader Joaquin Villalobos, in Los Pinos in Mexico on April 7, 1993. Credit: La Jornada

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