Chris Kraul and Patrick J. Mcdonnell report from São Paulo on the growing popularity of Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. "Buoyed by a robust economy and his ability to work with leaders across the ideological spectrum, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has emerged as the chief power broker and mediator in South America.
"Lula's rise has paralleled the decline of U.S. influence in its 'backyard,' analysts say, a result in part of Washington's plummeting global prestige and the Bush administration's unremitting focus on the Middle East.
"A moderate with an unassailable leftist background, Lula has become the point man for healing regional crises such as the current turmoil in Bolivia and the recent escalation of tensions among Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador."
Click here for more about Brazil.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Photo: Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, second from the right, with Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, Bolivia's Evo Morales and Ecuador's Rafael Correa at the meeting in which they talked about regional integration in Manaus, Brazil. Credit: Antonio Lacerda / European Pressphoto Agency
As his popularity has surged and his nation's booming economy has lifted thousands from poverty, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has largely refrained from the angry criticism of the United States that can be heard nearly any day from other South American leaders.
Not this time, reports Joshua Partlow for the Washington Post.
Last week, Lula told the U.N. General Assembly that the "boundless greed" of a few should not be shouldered by all, and on Monday, he said emerging economies had done their best to have "good fiscal policy" and "can't be turned into victims of the casino erected by the American economy."
"This crisis belongs to the American bankers, to the European bankers. It doesn't belong to the Brazilian bankers," Lula said Monday. "It's not fair for Latin American, African and Asian countries to pay for the irresponsibility of sectors of the American financial system."
Earlier this week, Chris Kraul reported from Ecuador on why Latin America should worry about the economic crisis in the United States.
Read the rest of the report from the Washington Post here.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
After being lectured for 20 years about the superiority of the free market, officials in Latin America see no small irony in the effort to bail out the U.S. banking system, writes Chris Kraul from Ecuador.
Latin America has several reasons to worry about the U.S. economic meltdown. Ecuador, for instance, fears the possible loss of duty-free export markets for its coffee, fish and flowers.
People here are also worried the crisis will cut into the $2 billion in annual remittances sent home by Ecuadoreans living in the U.S., and wonder whether the nation's use of the dollar as the national currency, a move made in 2000 to curb inflation, still makes sense.
But there is an undercurrent of schadenfreude when it comes to America's pain. Commentator Boaventura de Sousa Santos scolded the United States for its "ironhanded evangelizing" that free markets, privatization and deregulation were innately more virtuous than "corrupt and efficient" state-run economies.
"Millions were thrown into unemployment, lost their land and labor rights and had to emigrate," the Portuguese-born Santos wrote in an article widely distributed over the Internet.
Read more about how the United States woes are also Latin America's problems.
Click here for more on business.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Photo: Stock traders negotiate at the Mercantile & Futures Exchange in Sao Paulo, Brazil, last week. Credit: Mauricio Lima / AFP / Getty Images
Guatemala is to send an additional 1,300 soldiers to its border with Mexico in an effort to slow the illicit flow of people, drugs and contraband across the frontier that it shares with its northern neighbor, according to the Associated Press this morning.
The Guatemalan authorities also plan to send more police and immigration personnel to administer the 935-kilometer-long (580-mile) border.
President Alvaro Colom of Guatemala made the announcement Saturday night during a session called "Government With the People," says the report.
Guatemala's border with Mexico is the principal point of passage through which migrants from that country make their way north to the United States.
Times staff writer Héctor Tobar visited the frontier this year and wrote: Staff and equipment shortages are endemic to every law enforcement and military agency operating in the region, officials say. An overstretched army brigade of about 700 soldiers covers an area the size of Belgium. Guatemala's air force owns just two helicopters and no tactical radar capable of seeing low-flying aircraft.
To read the rest of the AP report on renewed efforts by the Guatemalan authorities to police its border with Mexico, click here.
Click here for more on Mexico, here for more on Guatemala and here for more about immigration.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Photo: A Guatemalan soldier patrols a nature preserve in the Peten, Guatemala, a region said to be crisscrossed with drug traffickers' illegal landing strips. Of one criminal band in the area, an official says, "There's no way to oppose them. The only way you can come in here is with heavy weapons." Credit: Héctor Tobar / Los Angeles Times
Salvador Gomez Gochez was 25 when he first came to Los Angeles with $3 in his pocket and painful memories of his Salvadoran homeland torn apart by repression and war, reports Teresa Watanabe.
Working his way up from a parking lot attendant to a manager, he learned English, bought a home, volunteered for a Salvadoran community organization and became a U.S. citizen, grateful to the country he says saved his life.
But Gomez Gochez, now 54, also retained his Salvadoran citizenship. Now, as a dual citizen, he has made the dramatic decision to return to his impoverished hometown in El Salvador and run for mayor after nearly three decades away. His hope: to revive his town's agricultural base with his U.S. contacts and empower the villagers with U.S. practices of participatory democracy.
As international business, travel and communications explode, a growing number of nations are allowing dual citizenship, and more immigrants are claiming it. Some, like Gomez Gochez, aim to use their bilingual and bicultural experiences to infuse their homelands with U.S. values and strengthen bonds between both countries.
But the trend is also stirring some unease.
Read more about Americans with dual citizenship here.
Image: Mario Fuentes poses at outside of Trinity Episcopal Church that hosts his L.A.-based community organization. Fuentes, an immigrant from El Salvador, is a middle-class homeowner, fluent English speaker and labor and community organizer. Credit: Los Angeles Times
A work-site raid at a Palm Springs bakery Wednesday resulted in the arrests of 51 illegal immigrant workers from Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala and their current and former supervisors, who allegedly hired the employees in exchange for money, reports Anna Gorman.Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said the agency had opened an investigation into Palm Springs Baking Co. based on a tip in 2006 that the business was hiring unauthorized workers. During the investigation, officials said, they discovered that more than 100 of 130 Social Security numbers were invalid or didn't match the names of employees. Many of the Social Security numbers belonged to U.S. citizens or legal workers from California and several other states, as well as to people who had died, according to court papers. About 25 people were using fake numbers, court papers said.
Both the current supervisor, 52-year-old Margarita Avilez Hernandez, and the former manager, 36-year-old Alicia Ramirez, face criminal charges and could get six months in federal prison if convicted.
The arrests were the latest in a string of immigration enforcement actions at work sites nationwide during the past year. Between Sept. 30 and Aug. 30, the agency arrested about 4,700 illegal workers on suspicion of administrative immigration law violations and 1,070 others on criminal charges.
One of the biggest of those raids was on a meat-packing plant in Postville, Iowa, in May, in which nearly 400 people were arrested.
Read more about the ICE raid in Palm Springs here.
For more on immigration, click here.
-- Deborah Bonello
In the film "Paraíso Travel,” a young immigrant named Marlon finds himself lost and broke shortly after arriving in New York and being separated from his girlfriend, the cunning and sexy Reina, played by Angélica Blandón. He meets an older man, a fixer for new arrivals, who helps him find shelter and asks the naive illegal what else he might need, writes Agustin Gurza.
"How do I get rid of this fear?" asks Marlon, somewhat overplayed by Aldemar Correa.
Of course, the old man can't help him with the dread that haunts strangers in a strange land, except to say that in time it goes away. That small, intimate moment in this occasionally overwrought drama offers a glimpse into the emotional and mental toll of the immigrant experience, which is often seen through ideological eyes.
"Paraíso," the year's biggest box office hit in Colombia, will have its West Coast premiere during the 12th annual Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival, which begins Friday. It's one of 132 films that will screen at the festival, co-founded by Edward James Olmos, Marlene Dermer and the late George Hernández to spotlight Latino films. Ironically, the festival has suffered from the very success it has sought as top Latino filmmakers now find themselves courted by other festivals. Still, many consider the festival (which counts The Times as a sponsor) as a special opportunity to show their work in the U.S.
Read more about the Los Angeles Latino Film Festival here.
For more on film on La Plaza, click here.
Image: The film, featuring Aldemar Correa and Angélica Blandón, middle, is one of seven from Colombia that is screening at the festival. Camilo George Jimeno / Grand Illusions Entertainment
The United States and Mexico made hard going of it against Central American opposition Wednesday night but came away with World Cup qualifying victories over Guatemala and Honduras, respectively, writes Grahame L. Jones.
A 69th-minute headed goal by Carlos Bocanegra off a DaMarcus Beasley corner kick earned the U.S. a 1-0 win, its first in Guatemala in more than 20 years and only its second ever. It was Bocanegra's 10th goal for the national team.
Mexico, meanwhile, gave former England coach Sven-Goran Eriksson a 2-1 victory in his first game in charge, but it was anything but easy and only because of the skill and finishing ability of veteran Pavel Pardo.
In front of a packed Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, with the crowd including the presidents of both countries, Honduras took the lead in the 35th minute, very much against the run of play, when Julio Cesar Leon struck a free kick off the underside of the crossbar and into the net.
Read about both matches in full here.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Rocky Delgadillo, the Los Angeles city attorney, oversees the enforcement of 57 gang injunctions, including ones against the MS-13 and 18th Street gangs. In Opinion today, he talks about how combating Los Angeles gangs is not a local challenge, but an international one. "The two fastest-growing and most powerful gangs in the world are homegrown products of Los Angeles. The Mara Salvatrucha gang, or MS-13, and the 18th Street gang, known in Central America as Mara 18, sprang up in Pico-Union and the densely populated neighborhoods around MacArthur Park. But unlike many local street gangs, these two were entrepreneurial: They recruited Central American immigrants across the city and then expanded farther -- throughout Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Conservative estimates put MS-13's ranks at 20,000 and 18th Street's at 30,000 worldwide.
"Stopping street gangs is no longer a local matter -- a point driven home to me during a symposium in El Salvador. During the conference, two points of consensus emerged. First, MS-13 and 18th Street have become an international concern -- indeed, even Interpol is now involved in the fight. Second, past strategies to handle these gangs have failed."
Read the full Opinion piece here.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Robbers with machetes hacked a U.S. tourist to death and seriously wounded his wife aboard the couple's sailboat in northeastern Guatemala, the woman said Sunday.
In a telephone interview from her hospital bed, Nancy Dryden, 67, said her husband, Daniel Perry Dryden, 66, was killed by four men who boarded their boat late Saturday while it was anchored in Lake Izabal, reports the Associated Press.
Read here for the rest of the report on the killing of a tourist in Guatemala.
For more on Guatemala, click here.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
The New York Times reports from Guatemala on Luis Alberto Jiménez, who was deported from the United States by a hospital in which he was receiving treatment after a car crash with a drunk driver in Florida. Since his arrival in his home country, Jiménez, who sustained a severe traumatic brain injury, has received no medical care or medication. Over the last year, his condition has deteriorated. "Eight years ago, Mr. Jiménez, 35, an illegal immigrant working as a gardener in Stuart, Fla., suffered devastating injuries in a car crash with a drunken Floridian. A community hospital saved his life, twice, and, after failing to find a rehabilitation center willing to accept an uninsured patient, kept him as a ward for years at a cost of $1.5 million," writes Deborah Sontag.
"What happened next set the stage for a continuing legal battle with nationwide repercussions: Mr. Jiménez was deported — not by the federal government but by the hospital, Martin Memorial. After winning a state court order that would later be declared invalid, Martin Memorial leased an air ambulance for $30,000 and 'forcibly returned him to his home country,' as one hospital administrator described it."
Continue reading here...
 DNA tests for the first time have confirmed that a baby was stolen from her mother and adopted for profit in Guatemala.
The baby, Esther Zulamita, was taken by armed men in 2007 at her family's shoe shop. Her mother, Ana Escobar, has spent the last year searching for the child.
Read more about adoptions from Guatemala here.
The apparent confirmation of an actual case of "baby theft" raises doubts about a law passed in December by Guatemalan legislators to overhaul the nation's poorly regulated adoption system, "in which poor mothers were paid to turn over their children to American couples," as the New York Times reported last year.
The New York Times reported that:
"The new law, pushed by the United States government, allows thousands of pending adoptions, most to Americans, to proceed. Guatemala sends more adopted children to the United States than any other country except China; this year [2007] it has sent 4,700. The new law also creates a government authority to handle future adoptions, bringing Guatemala in line with the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption and wresting the system away from lawyers who charge as much as $30,000 per child." -- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Photo: Antonietta, held by a lawyer, awaits adoption by a Pennsylvania couple at a Guatemala government office. Credit: Daniel Hernandez-Salazar for The New York Times
Here in the Wild West of the Central American isthmus, tough hombres like "the Bald Guys" make mahogany trees disappear in the middle of the night. Here, "cattle ranch" cowboys wrangle cocaine that falls from the sky, writes the L.A. Times' Héctor Tobar from Guatemala.
This is the Peten, for centuries a thinly populated frontier where jaguars ruled an unspoiled natural kingdom and the rainbow-colored scarlet macaw flew unmolested over towering Maya temples.
Now the jungle region is a lawless no-man's land, prized by smugglers for its proximity to the lightly guarded border with Mexico and for the swamps and dense forest undergrowth that give them an advantage over the ragtag forces of law and order. It's a place where the immigration police have no guns, the park rangers have neither radios nor automobiles, and the Guatemalan air force can't see or chase the "kamikaze" cocaine-smuggling pilots.
Read on...
-- Deborah Bonello in Los Angeles
Photo: A Guatemalan soldier patrols a nature preserve in the Peten, a region said to be crisscrossed with drug traffickers' illegal landing strips. Of one criminal band in the area, an official says, "There's no way to oppose them. The only way you can come in here is with heavy weapons."
Credit: Héctor Tobar / Los Angeles Times
 Playing soccer in the United States is a rejection of traditions back home -- where soccer is too macho a game for women. But playing the sport in the United States makes some undocumented Guatemalan women feel like real Americans, writes Molly Hennessy-Fiske in this Los Angeles Times report.
" 'Be like the men -- aggressive,' Elda called out. During the week, the sisters spend their days like scores of other illegal immigrant women in Los Angeles: Wedged behind Singer sewing machines, they feed pants and shirts under the needle until their shoulders grow stiff.
"But on the weekends they play a game that was off-limits to them in Guatemala. It is on the soccer fields that the Lopez sisters feel like American women....
"On any given weekend, scores of immigrants line the hills of the bowl-shaped field where Celestina and her sisters play in MacArthur Park. Vendors with strollers full of Gatorade and Cheetos compete for territory closest to the field, bickering in Spanish. Men stand in clusters on the sidelines, following the action. Mothers dressed in heels and glitter-dusted jeans watch with babies hoisted on their hips. Boys and girls roam nearby, passing soccer balls."
Read on here, where you can watch a multimedia slide show of the women's games.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Photo: Celestina Lopez, left, battles for the ball during a game at MacArthur Park. She says playing soccer has made her feel less stress, and she's encouraging her daughter, Erica Hernandez, 8, to play. Credit: Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times
"Leftist ideology may be gaining ground in Latin America. But it will never set foot on the manicured lawns of Francisco Marroquin University," writes The Times' Marla Dickerson from Guatemala City.
For nearly 40 years, this private college has been a citadel of laissez-faire economics. Here, banners quoting "The Wealth of Nations" author Adam Smith -- he of the powdered wig and invisible hand -- flutter over the campus food court.
A sculpture commemorating Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" is affixed to the school of business. Students celebrated the novel's 50th anniversary last year with an essay contest. The $200 cash prize reinforced the book's message that society should reward capitalist go-getters who create wealth and jobs, not punish them with taxes and regulations.
"The poor are not poor just because others are rich," said Manuel Francisco Ayau Cordon, a feisty octogenarian businessman, staunch anti-communist and founder of the school. "It's not a zero-sum game."
Welcome to Guatemala's Libertarian U. Ayau opened the college in 1972, fed up with what he viewed as the "socialist" instruction being imparted at San Carlos University of Guatemala, the nation's largest institution of higher learning.
-- Reed Johnson in Mexico City
Photo: Manuel Francisco Ayau Cordon, founder of free-markets bastion Francisco Marroquin University in Guatemala City. Credit: Rodrigo Abd / For The Times
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Chris Kraul
Buenos Aires:
Patrick McDonnell
Caribbean:
Carol Williams
Mexico City:
Hector Tobar
Deborah Bonello
Marla Dickerson
Ken Ellingwood
Reed Johnson
San Diego:
Richard Marosi
Washington:
Nicole Gaouette