Latin America & Caribbean

By  
Steven Herran
May 13, 2021
How appropriate that in Colombia, "crushing tax reform" is spoken of as “reforma tributaria” (tributary reform). I am hard pressed to find...
By  
Steven Herran
July 10, 2020
As citizens hit the streets banging their pots and pans, the Cacerolazo (“pot/pan” style of popular protest) resounded nationwide with the...
By  
Belén Fernández
May 16, 2019
After graduating college at the age of 21, Warscapes contributor Belén Fernández exiled herself from the United States and began traveling...
By  
Richard Raber
May 31, 2018
Refusing to leave his people and his community, Father Rogelio Cruz continues to stand tall in the face of corruption, intimidation and...
By  
Naomi Cohen
October 27, 2017
“Ecuador won’t be destroyed by natural disasters, but rather by bad politicians.” So go the words of Mariana de Jesus, patron saint of...
By  
Laurence O'Dwyer
May 30, 2017
Erzulie Dantor During the night we rode through town on scooters. Down the alleys, it’s like a carpenter’s yard after a bomb has exploded...
By  
Nicole Rothwell
May 17, 2017
Charo Minas Rojas has a long history of challenging Colombia’s patriarchal society. In 2014, she led a group of Afro-Colombian women on a...
By  
Andrew Ryder
March 20, 2017
Nicaragua was an international cause célèbre in the 1980s. Activist and intellectuals from around the world visited and wrote about this...
By  
Christiane Wilke
November 2, 2016
One of the most counterintuitive sights in the referendum on Colombia’s historic peace agreement between the government and FARC rebels was...
By  
Fabio Andrés Díaz
October 17, 2016
Looking back, it seems like Gabriel Garcia Marquez foresaw what would happen in Colombia this month when he wrote in his seminal work, One...
By  
Michael Busch
October 14, 2016
Pleasant surprises are tough to come by these days. But on Friday, a World Bank tribunal delivered one by rejecting a multinational mining...
By  
Fabio Andres Diaz
October 2, 2016
Who would vote against a peace agreement? This might sound like a tricky question, but in fact Colombians went to the polls today and...
By  
Melissa Kitson
September 27, 2016
A man stands in front of a building with his hands in a giant V — it’s the kind of pose seen in tourist snaps in front of the Eiffel Tower...
By  
Asiya Haouchine
August 16, 2016
With the Rio Olympics in full swing and news about countless human rights violations connected to the recent building of sports stadiums...
By  
Paola Chaves
July 12, 2016
The historic bi-lateral ceasefire recently signed by the Colombian government and the FARC seems to consolidate the possibility of a final...
By  
Michael Bronner
June 3, 2016
On Thursday morning, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, author of the acclaimed memoir Guantánamo Diary and one of Gitmo’s longest-resident prisoners,...
By  
Fabio Andrés Díaz
June 1, 2016
In the past week, several promising reports emerged regarding the current peace process between the FARC-EP and the Colombian Government...
By  
MV Bill
May 31, 2016
By walkie-talkie Bolha passed the order along to his managers: “Look alive there! It’s one bundle for Sergeant Gonçalves’s squad, two for...
By  
Annabelle Orlando
May 3, 2016
The displacement of locals to make way for major sporting events is becoming routine in Rio de Janeiro. To make way for renovations, new...
By  
Deepali Srivastava
April 20, 2016
Spare a thought for Panama, folks. Yes, that tiny nation sandwiched between North and South America where the world’s rich and powerful...
By  
Fabio Andrés Díaz
April 14, 2016
On April 9, 1948 a series of important events occurred in Bogota, Colombia. On that day, one of the meetings establishing the Organization...
By  
Greg Shupak
April 11, 2016
The apparent thaw in US-Cuba relations is welcome and has been demanded by Cubans since the start of US aggression against the island...
By  
Mike Allison
March 9, 2016
While civil charges involving illicit enrichment have recently moved forward against former Salvadoran president Mauricio Funes , he might...
By  
Steve Shaw
March 9, 2016
Human rights groups have condemned the murder of the environmental rights activist Berta Cáceres and called for the government of Honduras...
By  
February 11, 2016
Yuri Herrera's Signs Preceding the End of the World (translated from Spanish by Lisa Dillman) is a strange and dreamlike narrative: the...
By  
Michael Busch
February 7, 2016
Last month, a court in Spain issued a request for the arrest of seventeen former military officers connected to crimes committed during El...
By  
Jo-Marie Burt
January 19, 2016
The genocide retrial of former Guatemalan strongman José Efraín Rios Montt, a process which has been plagued by interruptions and delays...
By  
Michael Busch
January 14, 2016
Last summer, El Salvador’s Supreme Court issued a ruling that dismissed challenges to a terrorism law that had been on the books for nearly...
By  
Michael Busch
January 11, 2016
In Guatemala today, the trial of the former general and dictator, José Efraín Rios Montt, is scheduled to begin again after nearly six...
By  
Michael Busch
January 8, 2016
Remember Nicaragua’s plans for a grand canal ? A little over a year ago, contractors broke ground on the ambitious scheme to construct a...
By  
Michael Busch
January 2, 2016
By most measures, 2015 was a dismal year for El Salvador. The country’s economy, in tatters, continued to stall. Women’s reproductive...
By  
Mike Allison
October 30, 2015
Nearly two months after his surprising victory in the first round of Guatemala’s presidential elections, Jimmy Morales, a comedian-turned-...
By  
Mike Allison
September 21, 2015
Just days after jubilantly celebrating the resignation and arrest of its former president, retired general Otto Perez Molina, approximately...
By  
Fabio Andres Diaz
September 7, 2015
One of the most important—if not the most important—elements animating the current peace process between the FARC and government...
By  
Mike Allison
September 5, 2015
Guatemalans head to the polls today to elect a president and vice president, 158 members of Congress, 333 mayors and municipal councils,...
By  
Michael Busch
September 3, 2015
In El Salvador, each month is proving worse than the last. The country suffered an astonishing climb in murders this August—by far the...
By  
Dawn Paley
August 8, 2015
This Mother’s Day, Hortensia Rívas Rodriguez wasn’t at home enjoying brunch with her family. Instead, she traveled from her home in Piedras...
By  
Michael Busch
August 3, 2015
A Warscapes reader from El Salvador wrote to me last night, requesting clarification on something I wrote in my post on El Salvador’s gangs...
By  
Michael Busch
August 1, 2015
The carnage being wrought in El Salvador this year is slowly attracting the attention of major English-language media in the United States...
By  
Michael Busch
July 26, 2015
The Economist needs to get its facts straight. The magazine ran an article this past week on the escape of Chapo Guzman from a maximum...
By  
Michael Busch
July 25, 2015
Efforts at bringing Efraín Ríos Montt to justice for war crimes in Guatemala suffered another delay this week. The former dictator and war...
By  
Belén Fernández
July 13, 2015
In May 2011, the government of Honduras hosted an economic conference in the city of San Pedro Sula to promote foreign and domestic...
By  
Michael Busch
July 11, 2015
Since late December, when preliminary work on a transoceanic canal traversing Nicaragua began, there’s been little cause for optimism...
By  
Michael Busch
July 7, 2015
This past month was the bloodiest yet for El Salvador in a year marked by spiking violence and insecurity. Some 677 people were murdered...
By  
Gaiutra Bahadur
June 15, 2015
“Dougla” is a slur meaning “bastard” or “mutt.” It has its origins in Bhojpuri, the dialect of Hindi spoken by the majority of Indians who...
By  
Gaiutra Bahadur
June 11, 2015
Three months ago, Guyana’s new president, then the candidate of an opposition coalition hoping to unseat the country’s ruling party, was...
By  
Michael Busch
May 18, 2015
Since the 1980s, lawyer and activist Lucha Castro has been one of Mexico’s most prominent human rights defenders. In a country where...
By  
Danielle Villasana
May 17, 2015
Weighing only 80 pounds, Piojo sat slumped on her bed in a small, dark room thick with damp and stagnant air. There was no light, no window...
By  
Dawn Paley
May 13, 2015
The first attack came at 2:30am on January 6, 2015. Federal Police opened fire on members of the Fuerzas Rurales, who were protesting in...
By  
John Pedro Schwartz
May 13, 2015
The third installment of a three-part investigative series. Origins and Fate of the Vigilantes Buenavista and La Ruana, Tierra Caliente,...
By  
Zaneta Denny
May 4, 2015
“We used to go to another neighborhood to get water. Everyone lived with a bucket of water on their heads. We also had no light. The light...
By  
John Pedro Schwartz
April 27, 2015
The second installment of a three-part investigative series. Photographs by Nathaniel Parish Flannery. Click here for PART I On the Road...
By  
Fabio Andrés Díaz
April 20, 2015
Recent fighting in which soldiers from the Colombian Army were killed in the province of Cauca seems to have placed the current peace...
By  
John Pedro Schwartz
April 17, 2015
The first installment of a three-part investigative series. Photographs by Nathaniel Parish Flannery. Vigilantes versus the Knights Templar...
By  
Michael Busch
March 26, 2015
This past week, the Institute for Economics and Peace issued its 2015 “ Mexico Peace Index .” The report assesses Mexico along seven...
By  
Fabio Andrés Díaz
March 12, 2015
Despite being one of the oldest armed insurgent groups in the world, the National Liberation Army of Colombia (ELN) has hardly featured in...
By  
Michael Busch
March 11, 2015
At Insight Crime , Patrick Corcoran has a piece up arguing that Mexico needs to rethink how it pursues leaders of the country's drug trade...
By  
Michael Busch
January 12, 2015
A team representing the private consulting firm of Rudolph Giuliani will arrive in El Salvador this coming weekend to advise local leaders...
By  
Michael Busch
January 7, 2015
Since the days of William Walker , Nicaragua has suffered routine plunder by thieves, near and far. Americans—mercenaries and businessmen—...
By  
Michael Busch
January 5, 2015
What appeared to be some good news out of Guatemala today took a disappointing turn this afternoon. The retrial of former army general and...
By  
Michael Busch
January 4, 2015
A couple of nights ago, I tweeted an article —which inspired a blog post —about the dramatic rise in murders reported by the Salvadoran...
By  
Andrew S. Vargas
December 20, 2014
In an effort to understand the consequences of the recent historic shift in diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba, it's...
By  
Mary Angelica Molina
November 6, 2014
It’s 9am on a Sunday and I find myself walking amongst the tall red brick buildings that make up one of Bogota’s residential neighborhoods...
By  
Garrett Connolly
November 5, 2014
“I am certain that my sacrifice will not be in vain, I am certain that, at the very least, it will be a moral lesson that will punish...
By  
Frankétienne
October 2, 2014
Preface Frankétienne (1936-) is considered one of the most important figures in twentieth and twenty-first century Haitian literature and...
By  
Frank Smith, translated by Vanessa Place
September 4, 2014
Editor's Preface The texts which follow are excerpted from Frank Smith’s Guantanamo. The book is comprised of his French translations and...
By  
Nathalie Handal
August 20, 2014
Foreword by Editor “We understand we can’t repeat what God tells us.” These six “flash reportages” by Nathalie Handal offer us new ways to...
By  
Jason Huettner
June 26, 2014
As the World Cup presses on, the Verso Books blog features a critique of the games , recognizing the wave of demonstrations and labor...
By  
Jeong Chang
June 17, 2014
The opening line from Eduardo Galeano’s Soccer in Sun and Shadow lays out the trajectory of the book: “The history of soccer is a sad...
By  
Mary Angelica Molina
March 23, 2014
It’s not just new films that you’ll witness at this year’s Colombian Film Festival in NY , but the evolution of a new genre. For it’s...
By  
Michael Busch
March 18, 2014
After a week of uncertainty, the results of last week’s presidential election in El Salvador have been confirmed. The contest was...
By  
Samantha Ruggiero
March 11, 2014
Is it possible for a city’s government to host an international sporting event without sacrificing the social and political rights of its...
By  
Michael Busch
March 8, 2014
Two years ago, prospects for peace between El Salvador’s gangs seemed good. In May 2012, MS-13 and MS-18 agreed to a peace pact brokered by...
By  
Teun Voeten
January 15, 2014
Drug violence in Mexico has been raging now for nearly a decade. Approximately 80,000 people have been killed, but news hardly reaches the...
By  
Kenneth Bunker
November 25, 2013
On November 17, 2013, Chile held its sixth presidential election and seventh legislative election since the return of democracy in 1989...
By  
Michael Busch
November 2, 2013
NOV 2nd, 2013: Enrique Krauze has an editorial in yesterday's New York Times analyzing the resistance to all-but-a-done-deal oil reforms in...
By  
Michael Busch
August 3, 2013
The internet came alive this past week with reaction to word out of Mexico that Miguel Angel “Z-40” Treviño Morales—leader of the...
By  
Paola Flores
May 31, 2013
LA PAZ, Bolivia — The growing global demand for quinoa by health food enthusiasts isn't just raising prices for the Andean "super grain"...
By  
John Harold Giraldo Herrera
May 1, 2013
Photographs by Rodrigo Grajales Murillo Living in La Bella, a township of the city of Pereira, Colombia, María Isabel never thought that...
By  
Matt McGregor
April 11, 2013
Your first thought on picking up Necropolis , the latest from Colombian novelist Santiago Gamboa, is that it has a rather awesome title...
By  
George Ciccariello-Maher
November 1, 2012
“In their housing developments they placed first, broken bottles on top of their walls, then, barriers and armed guards, barbed wire, bars...
By  
Michael Busch
July 10, 2012
Amidst ongoing controversy surrounding the results of last Sunday’s presidential election in Mexico, the declared winner of the contest,...
By  
Mary Angelica Molina
April 24, 2012
On September 12, 2005 a man in a wheel chair hijacked a plane traveling from Tolima to Bogota with two grenades hidden in his diaper...