Why the public sector?

Governments lacking a functioning health system are unable to scale up to deliver key health services, even if medications and equipment are donated. Understandably, this sparks a sense of urgency to find other ways to deliver those services. 

The alternative that has emerged is to channel money instead to the private sector for service delivery, including to NGOs and for-profit companies. In the quest to see progress, international donors often fund disease-specific and time-limited services.  These programs may deliver results in the short term, but they lead to fragmented and inefficient health care, and risk leaving communities with nothing again when the funding runs out.

The public sector holds the most promise for providing comprehensive, quality, equity-based health care across an entire country, avoiding duplication and ensuring coverage. No matter where a person lives, he or she deserves the chance for a healthy life.

The NGO Code of Conduct for Health Systems Strengthening is a response to the recent growth in the number of international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) associated with increase in aid flows to the health sector. It is intended as a tool for service organizations – and eventually, funders and host governments. The code serves as a guide to encourage NGO practices that contribute to building public health systems and discourage those that are harmful. The document was drafted by a coalition of activist or service delivery organizations, including Health Alliance International, Partners In Health, Health GAP, and Action Aid International.

“We inhabit a bizarrely unequal planet,” Dr. Farmer said. “What does it mean to die unattended of a severe asthma attack in the age of Facebook and LinkedIn ... I hope all of you will keep tabs on our world’s growing inequalities.”

NIMBY - n. - someone who objects to siting something in their own neighborhood but does not object to it being sited elsewhere; an acronym for not in my backyard.

I think we should even return from Marx back to Hegel. So this is the focus of my work. Then come all the things for which I’m unfortunately better known, for example, my dealings with critique of capitalism, analysis of popular culture and so on and so on. But frankly, to use the not very appropriate metaphor known from today’s military adventures, all this, my writings on politics, on analysis of Hollywood and so on, is more or less collateral damage of my basic work.

I think this is also what has to be done today. The danger today is precisely a kind of a bland, pragmatic activism. You know, like when people tell you, oh my God, children in Africa are starving and you have time for your stupid philosophical debates. Let’s do something. I always hear in this call there are people starving. Let’s do something. I always discern in this a more ominous injunction. Do it and don't think too much. Today, we need thinking.

Thirty years ago, at the height of the civil war in Guatemala, a group of government soldiers led an assault on the northern village of Dos Erres, massacring more than 250 men, women, and children.

They left just two survivors: two light-skinned, green-eyed young boys.

Last year, more than a decade after he moved to Framingham to seek work, Oscar Alfredo Ramírez Castañedareceived a call from his hometown in Guatemala that would change his life.

The 32-year-old father of four learned that he was one of those two survivors, and that he had been kidnapped and raised by the family of one of the commanders who led the raid on Dos Erres.

He also learned that there was another survivor who happened to be away from the village on that bloody day in 1982: his father.

BACKGROUND: U.S. manufacturers, including hundreds of thousands of small businesses, have been suffering for decades due to competition from factories overseas and from technology that has increasingly made some manufactured goods obsolete. The Brookings Institution estimates that the U.S. lost 41 percent of its manufacturing jobs between June 1979, when employment at U.S. factories peaked, and December 2009, the recent low point for the industry. The biggest concern for many manufacturers, their employees and lawmakers is China, where a huge array of goods, or the components that go into goods, are manufactured more cheaply than in the U.S. China's entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 cost the U.S. 1.8 million manufacturing jobs between that year and 2007, according to economist Robert Scott with the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.

THE QUESTION: List three specific things you would do to help U.S. manufacturers compete with companies overseas.

ROMNEY'S POSITION:

Gov. Romney is committed to cutting the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent. This lower tax burden will enable manufacturing companies to reinvest more of their profits back into the company and offer higher wages to skilled workers.

Protecting the competitive edge of U.S. manufacturers will also require assertive trade policies that open new markets for American businesses and workers while stopping countries like China from cheating on their trade commitments. Gov. Romney will confront China over its intellectual property theft, its closed market and its currency manipulation and make clear to all countries that the United States embraces free trade but only with countries willing to play by the rules.

Acknowledging the importance of research and development to the manufacturing industry, Gov. Romney will also make permanent the R&D (research and development) credit. This credit promotes innovation in both manufacturing and non-manufacturing industries, and helps businesses plan their innovation spending. With a strong, permanent credit, companies will be able to invest for the future with confidence.

FACT CHECK: The vast majority of manufacturers are small businesses that wouldn't benefit from a cut in the corporate tax rate. According to 2008 Census figures, the most recent numbers available, nearly 99 percent of manufacturers had fewer than 500 employees. More than 80 percent of small businesses are either not corporations, or they're what are known as S corporations, according to the National Small Business Association. In all these cases, owners pay taxes on the business, at an individual rate that may be higher than the corporate rate.

The U.S. had a trade deficit with China of $295.5 billion in 2011. The deficit for the first three months of 2012 was at $67.1 billion, ahead of the $60.2 billion for the same period of last year. Some of the imbalance is due to the fact that goods are manufactured more cheaply in China, but the country also has been criticized by lawmakers and business groups in the U.S. because of its limits on imports of foreign goods. The country also has much looser laws about copyright and trademark infringement. In December, Assistant U.S. Trade Rep. Claire Reade told Congress, that "counterfeiting and piracy in particular remain at unacceptably high levels in China and continue to cause serious harm to U.S. businesses."

China has been accused of keeping its currency, artificially low. That helps make it easier to export its goods and, critics say, undercut the prices of U.S. manufacturers.

OBAMA'S POSITION:

The president has put in place a strong agenda for manufacturing. Building on that, the president has proposed:

Tax reform to create incentives for domestic manufacturing: The president has put forward a framework for corporate tax reform that would strengthen incentives for manufacturers to create jobs in the United States. That effort includes:

—Lowering marginal rates: The corporate rate would be dropped to 28 percent. On top of that, the domestic production deduction - which only applies to production taking place in the US - would result in a 25 percent rate for manufacturers. The president's plan would also double the credit for advanced manufacturing technologies from 9 percent to 18 percent.

—Putting in place a minimum tax on foreign earnings: Under the minimum tax, U.S.-based companies would have to immediately pay a minimum rate of tax on foreign income. This would end tax incentives that make it cheaper to invest overseas - and which put domestic manufacturers at a disadvantage.

—Ending tax incentives to outsource: Under current law, costs incurred to outsource US jobs are tax deductible. The president proposes ending this deduction, and creating a new 20 percent income tax credit for expenses incurred to move jobs from abroad to the U.S.

Continuing key tax incentives for manufacturers: Making the R&D credit, which has been temporarily extended 14 times since it was created in the mid-1990s, permanent would provide certainty to manufacturers making R&D investment decisions. Likewise, the president has proposed to extend a tax credit for advanced energy manufacturing, which would support over $15 billion in manufacturing investments.

The president is also taking steps outside of the tax code to help manufacturers compete. He has launched partnerships between government, private sector, and vocational schools to train 2 million Americans with skills that will lead directly to a job. He proposes supporting natural gas development by incentivizing greater use of natural gas in transportation. He is proposing a one-time, $1 billion investment to launch the National Network of Manufacturing Innovation, as well as an increase in funding for advanced manufacturing R&D by 50 percent over the fiscal year 2011 level.

FACT CHECK: Most small manufacturers would not benefit from a cut in the corporate tax rate. While Obama has proposed a cut in the corporate rate, his budget for the fiscal year that begins in October calls for a top individual tax rate of 39.6 percent. Many small business owners are likely to fall in the higher tax brackets.

U.S. companies are currently not taxed on money they earn overseas. They aren't taxed until they transfer those profits back to the U.S., so as long as the money stays overseas, companies don't pay taxes, and this makes it cheaper for them to operate overseas. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has argued in favor of lowering taxes on overseas profits to 5.25 percent from 35 percent, which it say would encourage companies to bring their profits home. And it says that would help create 2.9 million jobs in the U.S.

As for the National Network of Manufacturing Innovation, it was announced in March. It is not yet known how well the program is doing.

ANALYSIS: "The vast majority of small businesses ... are sole proprietorships or family owned firms, and most of them are less concerned about their tax rates than they are about having a positive income that could be taxed," says Chester Chambers, an assistant professor of manufacturing strategy at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School. Chambers says simplifying the overall tax code is likely to be a more significant for smaller manufacturers than adjusting rates. "To say that broad actions such as cutting a corporate tax rate serves manufacturing is a red herring." He says it affects larger manufacturers such as car makers "but is far less relevant to the average firm."

Of Obama's plan to tax foreign profits, Chambers says, "this is a very tricky issue because such a policy motivates the firm to avoid reporting foreign income."

Stephen Gold, president of the Manufacturers Alliance for Productivity and Innovation, a policy and research group, says Obama's plan to tax overseas earnings won't stop companies from opening factories overseas because those plants tend to make goods to sell in those markets. Instead, he says, "it will provide an incentive for U.S. manufacturers with large global operations to shift their (operations) overseas." Moreover, he says, to remove the tax deduction that manufacturers get for building plants overseas will make them less competitive in other countries.

Chambers says the issue of China trade is more complex than the Romney statement makes it appear. "Many firms in China are responsive, consistent, inventive, and work in full compliance with national and international law. Some other firms do not. There is no doubt about that." But, he says, small businesses "are more concerned about identifying reputable partners at home and abroad than they are in the headlines about treaties or high level negotiations."

Meanwhile, Gold says of Romney's concerns about Chinese intellectual property theft and currency manipulation, they "are the same expressed by many industries that want to do business in China. But as politicians before him - including Presidents Obama and Bush - have discovered, political considerations seem to put a damper on the best of intentions." Gold says, "the most effective thing any national leader could do is to rally other trading partners into pressuring China to accept a more responsible role in the world trading community."

Chambers says Obama's training programs are what manufacturing needs. They're "more in keeping with what small producers routinely complain about - the lack of skilled labor," he says. "It is hard to find the technicians ... to actually do the production. The lack of machinists, welders, pipe-fitters, electronics repairmen, and the like is what most growing manufacturing firms cite as the major impediment to growth."

Gold's take on the training programs: A national manufacturing skills certification system "demonstrates that he and his administration understand that this is one of the largest challenges our manufacturing sector faces today."

Salvadoran security minister David Munguia Payes hosted counterparts from Guatemala and Honduras in San Salvador this week in a conference on organized crime in the region. According to La Prensa Grafica, the focus of the meeting was on the truce between El Salvador’s Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18 gangs, which has drastically reduced homicides in recent months. Raul Mijango, a former congressman who worked with the Catholic Church to mediate the truce, was also in attendance.

After the meeting, Guatemalan Interior Minister Hector Mauricio Lopez told local press that he considered the truce “very innovative,” and said it was “worthy of being studied” to see if it could be exported.

Honduran Security Minister Pompeyo Bonilla also praised the results of the deal, noting its dramatic impact on the homicide rate. “[The truce] is a lesson which deserves to be replicated, to attempt it in my country, where we regrettably have the highest homicide rate,” said Bonilla.

InSight Crime Analysis
The fact that the Salvadoran government is talking about the truce as a kind of "model" is significant, as this recognizes the fact that it played a role in the initial negotiations. In the past the government has tried to distance itself from the process, crediting the Church and civil society groups with brokering the agreement independently.

It remains to be seen whether El Salvador’s neighbors will seek to imitate the truce, or whether Guatemalan and Honduran officials were merely paying lip service to it. In Guatemala, such a development would be especially unusual considering President Otto Perez’ s “iron fist” policies aimed at cracking down on criminal activity. He recently lobbied Congress to pass a law which would allow courts to try children as young as 12, ostensibly to reduce gang violence.

Also, it may be too soon to describe El Salvador’s truce as a “success.” While such agreements tend to bring a temporary drop in violence, they have proven difficult to transform into long-term arrangements. In 2010 civil society groups helped broker a similar truce between rival gangs in Medellin, Colombia, but the deal eventually fell through after several months, followed by a sharp rise in violence.

Interior Minister Mauricio Lopez said that 2.4 billion quetzales ($308 million) of poppy was destroyed in the municipalities of Tajumulco and Ixchiguan, reports Prensa Libre.

The 800 agents involved in the operation, which took place between Monday and Wednesday, also eradicated more than Q80 million ($10 million) of marijuana plants.

The minister said that the government had destroyed drug crops worth more than $1.3 billion so far in 2012.

InSight Crime Analysis
The US State Department says that Guatemala is a minor, but growing, producer and exporter of opium poppy, estimating that it has more than 1,000 hectares under cultivation. It is now thought to be the second biggest poppy producer in the region, with Mexico in first place and Colombia in third.

Guatemala's eradication of the plant increased more than three-fold over the last few years, up from 489 hectares in 2005 to 1,490 in just the first nine months of 2011. As InSight Crime has pointed out, this rise in eradication is likely a sign that more poppy is being grown, not that the government is getting better at removing it.

San Marcos is the location of most of the country's poppy production, and was the stronghold of Juan Alberto Ortiz Lopez, alias "Juan Chamale," who was known as Guatemala's "heroin king" until his arrest in March last year. The poppy is usually shipped to Mexico for processing, using San Marcos' loosely guarded sea ports and land border crossings, before being sent to the United States.

(Reuters) - Facebook Inc and banks including Morgan Stanley were sued by the social networking leader's shareholders, who claimed the defendants hid Facebook's weakened growth forecasts ahead of its $16 billion initial public offering.

The defendants, who also include Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, were accused of concealing from investors during the IPO marketing process "a severe and pronounced reduction" in revenue growth forecasts, resulting from increased use of its app or website through mobile devices. Facebook went public last week.

The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan on Wednesday, according to a law firm for the plaintiffs. A day earlier, a similar lawsuit by a different investor was filed in a California state court, according to a law firm involved in that case.

In the New York case, shareholders said research analysts at several underwriters had lowered their business forecasts for Facebook during the IPO process, but that these changes were "selectively disclosed by defendants to certain preferred investors" rather than to the public generally.

"The value of Facebook common stock has declined substantially and plaintiffs and the class have sustained damages as a result," the complaint said.

Representatives of Facebook and Morgan Stanley did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Facebook shares fell 18.4 percent from their $38 IPO price in the first three days of trading, reducing the value of stock sold in the IPO by more than $2.9 billion.

(Reporting by Dan Levine in San Francisco and Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick and Lisa Von Ahn)

(c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2012. Check for restrictions at: http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp

Studying these spaces, one can’t help noticing that the décor seems to bear little relationship to the way people actually live: deer antlers adorn the walls of people who almost certainly don’t hunt; vintage typewriters sit on school desks too small to be functional; books have been arranged on shelves by color to reflect some perceived notion of good design.

GUATEMALA CITY – Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina announced Friday the lifting of the state of siege imposed more than two weeks ago on an indigenous community where protesters stormed the local army garrison.

The decision was based on the “good results” produced by measures to restore order in the western town of Santa Cruz Barillas, the president told reporters.

The state of siege, imposed on May 1, was originally intended to continue until the end of the month.

Dozens of human rights groups and peasant and grassroots organizations denounced the state of siege as the militarization of law enforcement to benefit companies building a controversial hydroelectric dam in Santa Cruz Barillas.

The violence that prompted Perez Molina to impose martial law on the town was connected to the dam project.

Most of the roughly 500 army troops and 350 national police officers deployed to Santa Cruz Barillas “will begin to gradually withdraw” from the town, Interior Minister Mauricio Lopez said Friday.

He added, however, that a force of up to 150 members will remain in the town “to guarantee security and avert new disturbances.”

The trouble in Santa Cruz Barillas began with the murder of community leader Andres Francisco Miguel, allegedly by security guards working for Hidro Santa Cruz, the main contractor on the hydroelectric dam.

Hidro Santa Cruz and its parent company, Spain’s Hidralia Energia S.A., have denied any involvement in the murder.

Guatemalan authorities have arrested 17 people for attacking the army barracks and damaging property during the protests following Miguel’s death, but there is no word of progress in the murder investigation. EFE

“The basic distinction between the criminal justice system and a war is that the former does not tolerate “collateral casualties” whereas the latter regards them as an inevitable cost of military conflict. DEA agents are never permitted to be involved in the killing of innocent people, whether or not they are in pursuit of criminal suspects. What happened in Honduras appears to have crossed the line – an action that was not approved by the U.S. Congress – and is, ultimately, unethical.

"Neither the drug czar nor anyone else in the Obama administration, or even in the Bush administration before that, likes to use the phrase “the war on drugs.” But what happened in Honduras last week suggests that U.S. drug policy abroad – and often in the U.S. – increasingly resembles a real war, despite U.S. officials’ efforts to abandon that rhetoric.”

Worse, it is a never-ending war with the unattainable (and undesirable) goal of achieving "a drug-free society." Even in this context, measures like last week's raid stand out as worse than futile. Seizing those 1,000 pounds of cocaine was not worth risking a single person's life, since it accomplished absolutely nothing of consequence, even as measured by the drug warriors' goal of reducing the supply of cocaine or raising its price. Governments can create black markets by fiat, but they cannot control the ever-adaptable operation of those markets, which will always override attempts to disrupt production or block supply routes. Is it any wonder that Latin American leaders are increasingly angry about arrogant U.S. demands that they participate in the vain crusade to stop Americans from getting the drugs they want? 

American officials have told reporters that the boat passengers were probably participating in the intense trafficking of illegal drugs that is known to take place here. Official accounts described how gunfire came from Ms. Lezama’s boat, leading Honduran police officers on the ground and in one of the helicopters to fire back, killing what these officials described as two traffickers. The authorities later seized 1,000 pounds of cocaine from another boat at the landing.

But residents and officials in this poor town tell a different story, and an official report, scheduled to be issued on Saturday by the Honduran Army, has also concluded that four innocent people were killed.

“It’s terribly sad,” said Col. Servio Arita, the Honduran military officer who led the investigative team, which interviewed survivors of the episode on Thursday. “It was an error.”

Who is responsible for that error will continue to be the subject of dispute, here and among government officials from Honduras and the United States.

Colonel Arita — whose investigation did not include interviews with the Honduran authorities involved in the operation — said that many residents here told him they believed that American agents played at least some role in the shooting because they saw them get off one of the helicopters that landed after the brief firefight. Ms. Lezama said that the agents she saw, including one who spoke Spanish, looked afraid. “They knew what had happened here,” she said.

Still, she added, it was impossible to know who fired the fatal shots. “We were facedown on the ground,” Ms. Lezama said. “How could we see anything?”

Honduran and American officials continue to insist that only the Honduran authorities fired. The Honduran foreign minister, Arturo Corrales, said during a routine trip to Washington on Friday that his nation’s minister of security confirmed that the initial inquiry had shown that “our police responded,” not the American agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration’s commando squad.

He also continued to challenge the version of events offered by villagers, noting that the exchange of fire occurred when “it was totally dark, in a place that is not a fishing spot.” He added: “It’s in the jungle. It is very hard to believe that at 2 a.m., in the jungle, the people in a boat that is beside another boat with 400 kilograms of cocaine were fishing.”

In fact, Ms. Lezama and her husband say, they were not fishing, as the mayor initially suggested — they were returning from a daily trip in which they dropped off lobster fishermen at the Caribbean coast, coming back with passengers picked up at several spots along the river.

“We’ve been doing this for 25 years, day and night,” Ms. Lezama said. Her husband and other relatives, surrounding her as she lay in bed, nodded. They and other town residents confirmed that the family business had been making the trip for years.

And the spot in the river where the shooting occurred is not as isolated as Honduran and American officials have suggested.

“The Patuca River is like a highway; it’s always full of traffic from the village,” said Mayor Lucio Baquedano. Indeed, on Friday afternoon the landing where witnesses said the shooting occurred looked like a taxi stand: about 20 long, skinny boats bobbed in the brown water. A gray Yamaha motor hung from the back of one carrying families east to Brus Laguna, a larger town where Ms. Lezama’s boat usually stops. In another sat a red bike, while in a third, a man carried a hunk of freshly cut wood as long and wide as his leg.

TEGUCIGALPA - Las cuatro personas que murieron e igual número de heridas en un operativo antidrogas no eran narcotraficantes, pues eran ciudadanos humildes y honestos, aseguró ayer el diputado de Gracias a Dios, Wood Grawell Maylo; y el alcalde del municipio de Ahuas, Lucio Baquedano.

MEXICO CITY — Residents of the isolated Mosquito Coast of Honduras have burned down government buildings and are demanding that American drug agents leave the area immediately, intensifying a dispute over whether an antidrug operation there last week left four innocent people dead, including two pregnant women.

Lucio Baquedano, the mayor of Ahuas, the town where the operation occurred, said Thursday in an interview that residents rioted in the streets after learning that he and others had accused the Honduran police and the United States Drug Enforcement Administration of killing four people who had been fishing.

...

“It is critical that both Honduran and U.S. authorities ensure that the killings are thoroughly investigated to determine whether the use of lethal force was justified,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. “If evidence demonstrates that security forces violated international standards, they must be held accountable.”

...

While acknowledging that the circumstances of a middle-of-the-night firefight are murky, an American official briefed on the matter cast doubt on the local account. The official said that the operation began with a report from Colombian intelligence of an inbound plane. An American surveillance plane captured video of the plane landing in a small field at 1:46 a.m. last Friday and about 30 men unloading cocaine bales and putting them on a truck, which drove to a nearby river.

Four helicopters, owned by the State Department but flown by Guatemalans, carried a strike force of Honduran counternarcotics police officers from an American-built base to the river, where they landed and seized a boat on which the cocaine — which weighed more than 1,000 pounds — had been loaded. They also seized an M-4 assault rifle and ammunition. As the helicopters approached, men who were loading the boat fled, the official said.

At 2:40 a.m., as the government forces were still on the ground, a second boat approached and began to fire, the official said. The Honduran police unit returned fire and was supported by the door gunner of at least one of the helicopters. After a brief firefight, the shooting stopped and the second boat is said to have withdrawn.

The official also expressed doubts that villagers would be out fishing in the middle of the night, near where helicopters had landed an hour or so earlier. The official added that the large number of people seen in surveillance video unloading the plane showed that many members of the impoverished community of Ahuas were involved in drug trafficking.

“There is nothing in the local village that was unknown, a surprise or a mystery about this,” the official said. “What happened was that, for the first time in the history of Ahuas, Honduran law enforcement interfered with narcotics smuggling.”

WASHINGTON — A commando-style squad of Drug Enforcement Administration agents accompanied the Honduran counternarcotics police during two firefights with cocaine smugglers in the jungles of the Central American country this month, according to officials in both countries who were briefed on the matter. One of the fights, which occurred last week, left as many as four people dead and has set off a backlash against the American presence there.

It remains unclear whether the D.E.A. agents took part in the shooting during either episode, the first in the early hours of May 6 and the second early last Friday. In an initial account of the second episode, the Honduran government told local reporters that two drug traffickers had been killed and a large shipment of cocaine seized; he did not mention any American involvement. Several American officials said the D.E.A. agents did not return fire during the encounter.

But this week, a local mayor and a Honduran lawmaker said that four innocent bystanders had been killed and called for an investigation into what the Honduran news media are now portraying as a botched D.E.A. operation.

Lucio Baquedano, the mayor of Ahuas, a small town near the incident, told El Tiempo, a Honduran newspaper, that a helicopter-borne unit consisting of both Honduran police officers and D.E.A. agents was pursuing a boatload of drug smugglers when it mistakenly opened fire on another boat carrying villagers. Four people died — including two pregnant women — and four others were wounded, he said.

But the murky circumstances surrounding the firefights underscore the potential successes and risks in the United States’ escalating efforts to help small Central American governments battle well-armed and financed transnational narcotics smugglers by adapting counterinsurgency techniques honed in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. The challenge has been to help bolster local security forces without raising a nationalist backlash fueled by memories of interventions by the United States during the cold war.

The American efforts include the use of D.E.A. commando squads — called FAST, or Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team — to train and work along side specially vetted local forces in the Western Hemisphere. This year, the military built three “forward operating bases” in isolated areas of Honduras to prestage helicopter-borne units so they could more quickly respond.

...

But Mr. Baquedano told El Tiempo that the helicopter was pursuing the drug traffickers when they mistook another boat, filled with villagers and traveling with a light on, for the traffickers, whose boat was unlighted. He said gunners on the helicopter fired on the villagers’ boat, while the smugglers abandoned their boat and escaped. Mr. Baquedan said the four slain villagers were innocent bystanders.

Just as in operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Yemen, it is often difficult to distinguish insurgents from villagers when combating drugs in Central America. One official said it is a common practice for smugglers to pay thousands of dollars to a poor village if its people will help bring a shipment through the jungle to the coast.

...

Because they are considered law enforcement agents, not soldiers, their presence on another country’s soil may raise fewer sensitivities about sovereignty. The American military personnel deployed in Honduras, for example, are barred from responding with force even if Honduran or D.E.A. agents are in danger. But if their Honduran counterparts come under fire, FAST teams may shoot back. For similar reasons, the helicopters are part of a State Department counternarcotics program — and not military.

WASHINGTON — Late on a moonless night last March, a plane smuggling nearly half a ton of cocaine touched down at a remote airstrip in Honduras. A heavily armed ground crew was waiting for it — as were Honduran security forces. After a 20-minute firefight, a Honduran officer was wounded and two drug traffickers lay dead.
Related

Several news outlets briefly reported the episode, mentioning that a Honduran official said the United States Drug Enforcement Administration had provided support. But none of the reports included a striking detail: that support consisted of an elite detachment of military-trained D.E.A. special agents who joined in the shootout, according to a person familiar with the episode.

The D.E.A. now has five commando-style squads it has been quietly deploying for the past several years to Western Hemisphere nations — including Haiti, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Belize — that are battling drug cartels, according to documents and interviews with law enforcement officials.

The program — called FAST, for Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team — was created during the George W. Bush administration to investigate Taliban-linked drug traffickers in Afghanistan. Beginning in 2008 and continuing under President Obama, it has expanded far beyond the war zone.

...

The Americans work with specially vetted units of local security forces that they train and mentor. In “exigent circumstances,” they may open fire to protect themselves or partners.

...

The FAST program is similar to a D.E.A. operation in the late 1980s and early 1990s in which drug enforcement agents received military training and entered into partnerships with local forces in places like Peru and Bolivia, targeting smuggling airstrips and jungle labs.

The Reagan-era initiative, though, drew criticism from agency supervisors who disliked the disruption of supplying agents for temporary rotations, and questioned whether its benefits outweighed the risks and cost. The Clinton administration was moving to shut down the operation when five agents died in a plane crash in Peru in 1994, sealing its fate.

...

A diplomatic cable describes another mission in Guatemala. On July 21, 2009, seven American military helicopters carrying D.E.A. and Guatemalan security forces flew to the compound of a wealthy family, the Lorenzanas — four of whom were wanted in the United States on drug trafficking charges.

Conducting operations during a recent day at the outpost were members of the Honduran Tactical Response Team, the nation’s top-tier counternarcotics unit. They were working alongside the Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team, or FAST, created by the Drug Enforcement Administration to disrupt the poppy trade in Afghanistan. With the campaign in Afghanistan winding down — and with lowered expectations of what Washington can do to halt heroin trafficking there — FAST members were in Honduras to plan interdiction missions in Central America.

And Honduran Special Operations forces, with trainers from American Special Forces — the Army’s Green Berets — were ferried from the outpost by Honduran helicopters to plant explosives that would cut craters into smugglers’ runways. Honduran infantrymen provided security for the outpost, which remains under Honduran command.

Those missions were conducted amid reminders of the dirty wars of the 1980s. One such reminder was a delegation of Congressional staff members visiting recently to assess local forces’ respect of human rights. Legislation prohibits United States military assistance to foreign forces that violate human rights, so before Joint Task Force-Bravo can cooperate with Central American militaries, they must be certified by American embassies in the countries where those operations are to take place.

Another reminder sits across the runway at Soto Cano Air Base, the large Honduran base outside the capital that hosts a local military academy and Colonel Brown’s headquarters. Behind a high fence is a compound once used by Mr. North, a Marine lieutenant colonel at the center of the Iran-contra operation, a clandestine effort to sell weapons to Iran and divert profits to support rebels in Nicaragua, despite legislation prohibiting assistance to the group because of human rights abuses. Today, tropical undergrowth is erasing traces of the secret base.

But that history still casts a shadow, skeptics of the American effort say.

“We know from the Reagan years that the infrastructure of the country of Honduras — both its governance machinery as well as its security forces — simply is not strong enough, is not corruption-proof enough, is not anti-venal enough to be a bastion of democracy,” said Larry Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, a policy research group in Washington.

["Colonel Brown is now commander of Joint Task Force-Bravo, where he and just 600 troops are responsible for the military’s efforts across all of Central America."]

Cervical cancer has a major impact on women’s lives worldwide, particularly in developing countries where it is the leading cause of cancer deaths among women. According to the latest global estimates, 493,000 new cases of cervical cancer occur each year, and 274,000 women die of the disease annually. Because the disease progresses over many years, an estimated 1.4 million women worldwide are living with cervical cancer, and two to five times more—up to 7 million worldwide— may have precancerous conditions that need to be identified and treated.

...

In Guatemala, cervical cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths among women of reproductive age, with 3.77 million Guatemalan women currently at risk for this potentially fatal cancer. Over 60 percent of female cancer cases attended by the National Cancer Institute in Guatemala are cervical cancer, which accounts for more than breast, skin, ovarian and stomach cancers combined.

Cervical cancer is a slow-growing cancer, easily prevented through regular screening and treatment of pre-cancerous lesions, which can reduce incidence and mortality by as much as 90 percent. Unfortunately, Guatemala, like most developing countries, has no effective national screening program, and hundreds of Guatemalan women continue to die unnecessarily each year from this preventable disease. Women in poor, rural areas are at especially high risk for cervical cancer due to factors such as unfaithful partners, early initiation of sexual activity, high fertility, poor nutrition and lack of access to health services. More than 75 percent of the women living in Guatemala’s rural areas and poor urban communities have never been screened for cervical cancer.

...

Both WINGS and Faith in Practice utilize the low-cost VIA/Cryo method (visual inspection of the cervix with acetic acid and same-day treatment using cryotherapy), also called the “see and treat” method or la prueba rápida. This technique is especially appropriate for low-resource settings because results can be given the same day, and up to half of abnormalities detected can be treated immediately using cryotherapy, a simple procedure which involves freezing the surface of the cervix. VIA/Cryo greatly diminishes the need for return visits, which are often prohibitively difficult or expensive for women in isolated or low-income areas. In addition, when the result of a screening is negative, the test only needs to be repeated every three years, whereas Pap smears should be repeated annually because of the high prevalence of false negatives with the Pap smear test. VIA/Cryo can be performed by any trained healthcare provider, not necessarily a physician, and costs less than $6 per patient (including the cryotherapy needed by some 5 percent of the women). The cost per person of the WINGS program, including the follow-up treatment that WINGS pays for (colposcopies, biopsies, assistance at INCAN) comes to $14 a person.

At a recent meeting about the dam project, Dimer Dominguito captured the collective mood of desperation and outrage among the Ashaninka. “In the city they make money and buy whatever they need, but here we live by our customs, our market, eating what we plant, and we are happy,” he said. “We want to defend our right to what is natural, to defend our market, and we support the government, but who supports us?”

Americans have rarely explicitly voted for equality; history, through institutions and a few courageous leaders, has enacted it.

From Aristotle through the Renaissance (and then again in the 19th century, thanks to that Jew-baiting former Jew Karl Marx), thinkers believed that money should be considered sterile, a mere means of exchange incapable of producing additional value. Only labor could be truly productive, it was thought, and anyone who extracted money from money alone — that is, through interest — must surely be a parasite, or at the very least a fraud. The Bible also contended that charging interest was sinful, inspiring Dante to consign usurers to the seventh circle of hell (alongside sodomites and murderers). In other words, 500 years ago, the phrase “predatory lending” would have been considered redundant.

Lending at interest was thus forbidden across Christian Europe — for Christians. Jews, however, were permitted by the Roman Catholic Church to charge interest; since they were going to hell anyway, why not let them help growing economies function more efficiently? (According to Halakha, or Jewish law, Jews were not allowed to charge interest to one another, just to gentiles.) And so it was, Muller explains, that Judaism became forever fused in the popular mind with finance. In fact, Christian moneylenders were sometimes legally designated as temporary Jews when they lent money to English and French kings.

GUATEMALA CITY — A Guatemalan judge has ordered a former national police official to stand trial in the deaths of 37 people killed by a fire at the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala in 1980.

Indian demonstrators had taken over the embassy to call attention to rights abuses during Guatemala's 1960-1996 civil war. Security forces attacked and set fire to the embassy.

The charges filed Monday claim former police official Pedro Garcia Arredondo refused requests by the Spanish ambassador to withdraw police from the embassy and allow firefighters in to extinguish the blaze.

Judge Jose Eduardo Cojulum says Garcia Arredondo faces up to 50 years in prison on each homicide count if found guilty.

Among those killed in the fire was the father of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchu.

Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina moved on Saturday to the poorest district of the western city of Huitan, following government-backed charity initiative, Univision TV channel reported.

Molina, a retired military officer who acquired presidential post on January14, decided to spend weekend with an impoverished family in Huitan where a child suffers from chronic malnutrition.

The president said that this experience would help him to understand aspirations and problems of ordinary people better. He will be among other 5,000 volunteers of the government-backed program “We All Can Do Something” that is aimed to provide help to families with low income.

Guatemala, one of the poorest countries in Latin America, had over 56 percent of citizens living below the poverty line in 2011, according to the Central Intelligence Agency’s data.

[graph -- European countries are very dissimilar]

Here is what this chart shows. Compared across more than 100 factors measured by the World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Report, from corruption to deficits, JP Morgan analyst Michael Cembalest calculates that the major countries on the euro are more different from each other than basically every random grab bag of nations there is, including: the make-believe reconstituted Ottoman Empire; all the English speaking Eastern and Southern African countries; and all countries on Earth at the 5th parallel north.

And here is your tweetable fact: A monetary union might make more sense for every nation starting with the letter "M" than it does for the euro zone.

If you find yourself wondering, as I did, how the 50 states within the U.S. would compare across this measure of dispersion, remember that the nice thing about the United States is that baked into the first word of our name is not only a monetary union (i.e.: we all use dollars) but also a fiscal union. If Mississippi has a bad year (or decade, or century), Washington doesn't debate whether we should force the state to raise taxes or cut spending to become more competitive. We just keep paying it Medicaid, which is basically a transfer from rich Americans to poor Americans, many of whom live in Mississippi.

Germany doesn't want to establish any sort of "Peripheraid" -- a permanent transfer program from the core to the periphery. And that's why you should be about as optimistic about the future of the current euro zone as you are about a monetary union for the all the countries in the world that start with the letter "M."

[graph -- fiscal transfers between US states vs. the euro-zone model]

The Germans call this sort of thing "a permanent bailout." We just call it "Missouri."

Hanna Rosin:

I have rehearsed my objections to the breast-feeding cult at great length in the past, in my Atlantic story, "The Case Against Breast-Feeding,” and more broadly against attachment parenting in a recent Slate discussion of Elisabeth Badinter’s book, The Conflict.  There is the very basic objection that it is virtually impossible to do what the advocates say is best for your baby and have a job, which the vast majority of American mothers have these days. In the Time magazine story, which is largely a profile of attachment guru William Sears, he answers this objection by arguing that attachment parenting is perfect for working mothers because as soon as they get home they can instantly rebond with their babies by strapping them up in a sling and then sleeping with them the whole night. Voila! Instant maternal bliss!

But this leads to my second and more profound problem with it. Attachment parenting demands not just certain actions you take with your baby but also certain emotional states to accompany those actions. So, it’s not just enough to breast-feed but one has to experience “breast-feeding induced maternal nirvana.” And it’s not enough to snuggle—you have to snuggle enough to achieve a spiritual high. As Badinter has said, once women were just expected to tolerate their babies, Betty Draper style, but now they are expected to experience “jouissance,” loosely translated as “orgasm.” And this is what makes the movement truly oppressive.

From “Land of Wonder and Fear” by F.A. Mitchell-Hedges, The Century Company, 1931. Page 113-114.

“I shall never forget the next morning. Five thousand one hundred and fifty feet above sea-level lay Lake Atitlan, seventeen miles long, without a ripple, green-blue in colour, and completely surrounded by gigantic mountains. Rising sheer from the edge of the water were the two volcanoes Atitlan and San Pedro, towering twelve thousand feet to the skies. Indian women in beautifully worked, brilliantly coloured costumes, and men with strangely woven coats, short pants and skirts, were already busy doing nothing as usual among the masses of flowering plants, bushes, and trees. The sky was mottled with gold flecks–a miracle of beauty which changed continually as the sun rose higher until, as it appeared above the heights, the lake shimmered, a molton silver mirror, reflecting the volcanoes and mountains perfectly. Humming-birds and gorgeous butterflies fluttered everywhere, adding splashes of vivid colouring to the exotic scenery. The lazy drone of insects arose through the heavily scented air; the lure, the insidious lure of the tropics enervated us with its narcotic somnolence. Addicts, we revelled in the drug.”

The Guatemalan government has declared a state of siege in the town of Santa Cruz Barillas following clashes over the death of a community leader.

Residents briefly took control of a military outpost on Tuesday, hours after discovering the body of a local resident who had opposed the construction of a hydroelectric dam.

More than 200 troops and police officers have been sent to the area.

At least eight people have been detained.

Army spokesman Rony Urizar said some 200 residents armed with machetes and guns attacked the local barracks in Huehuetenango province.

He said they beat up several soldiers and set buildings ablaze.

Drug gangs

President Otto Perez Molina said the situation in the area was now under control, but the state of siege would be in place for 30 days.

Mr Perez Molina, a retired army general, said the attack was a provocation against the armed forces.

He said that those who took part in the riot could be linked to drug traffickers based in the scarcely policed region, near the Mexican border.

But a resident of Barillas told the AP news agency that they were demanding justice for the killing of an indigenous leader, Andres Francisco Miguel.

His body with bullet wounds was found on Tuesday night.

Hours after the discovery, protesters marched on the local barracks.

Residents believe Mr Miguel was killed for opposing to the construction of the hydroelectric plant.

"We received several reports of harassment in Huehuetenango allegedly connected to the hydroelectric plant," said Alberto Brunori, the representative of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Guatemala.

"But those are reports that have to be investigated," he told AP.

Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
And Babylon, so many times destroyed.
Who built the city up each time? In which of Lima's houses,
That city glittering with gold, lived those who built it?
In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished
Where did the masons go? Imperial Rome
Is full of arcs of triumph. Who reared them up? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Byzantium lives in song.
Were all her dwellings palaces? And even in Atlantis of the legend
The night the seas rushed in,
The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves.

Young Alexander conquered India.
He alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Was there not even a cook in his army?
Phillip of Spain wept as his fleet
was sunk and destroyed. Were there no other tears?
Frederick the Great triumphed in the Seven Years War.
Who triumphed with him?

Each page a victory
At whose expense the victory ball?
Every ten years a great man,
Who paid the piper?

So many particulars.
So many questions.

Over the past two decades, however, many researchers have concluded that three’s a crowd when it comes to marital satisfaction. More than 25 separate studies have established that marital quality drops, often quite steeply, after the transition to parenthood. And forget the “empty nest” syndrome: when the children leave home, couples report an increase in marital happiness.

But does the arrival of children doom couples to a less satisfying marriage? Not necessarily. Two researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, Philip and Carolyn Cowan, report in a forthcoming briefing paper for the Council on Contemporary Families that most studies finding a large drop in marital quality after childbirth do not consider the very different routes that couples travel toward parenthood.

Some couples plan the conception and discuss how they want to conduct their relationship after the baby is born. Others disagree about whether or when to conceive, with one partner giving in for the sake of the relationship. And sometimes, both partners are ambivalent.

The Cowans found that the average drop in marital satisfaction was almost entirely accounted for by the couples who slid into being parents, disagreed over it or were ambivalent about it. Couples who planned or equally welcomed the conception were likely to maintain or even increase their marital satisfaction after the child was born.

Marital quality also tends to decline when parents backslide into more traditional gender roles. Once a child arrives, lack of paid parental leave often leads the wife to quit her job and the husband to work more. This produces discontent on both sides. The wife resents her husband’s lack of involvement in child care and housework. The husband resents his wife’s ingratitude for the long hours he works to support the family.

I then became aware of some striking statistics. According to 2004 U.S. Census Bureau data, the proportion of childless women 15 to 44 years old was 44.6 percent, up from 35 percent in 1976. The higher a woman's income, I learned from another study, the less likely she is to have children: Nearly half of women with annual incomes over $100,000 are childless.

GUATEMALA CITY — Authorities detained eight people Wednesday for allegedly participating in a mob’s seizure of an army outpost in northern Guatemala that led officials to declare a state of siege.

Defense Ministry spokesman Rony Urizar said 100 soldiers and 160 police officers were sent to Huehuetenango province on the border with Mexico after 200 people armed with machetes and guns briefly took over the outpost and beat up several soldiers Tuesday. They then left and set some buildings ablaze in the town of Barillas.

A resident of Barillas had been killed hours earlier and the group was demanding justice and a stop to what they say are attempts to intimidate them because of their opposition to the construction of a hydroelectric plant in their town.

Residents believe the man was killed in retaliation for opposing the project, Urizar said.

On Wednesday, President Otto Molina, a retired army general, defended his decision to declare a state of siege and said those who participated in the riot are accomplices of drug traffickers based on the loosely guarded border with Mexico.

Alberto Brunori, the representative of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Right in Guatemala, said community leaders in Barillas had reported acts of intimidation involving the hydroelectric project.

“We received several reports of harassment in Huehuetenango allegedly connected to the hydroelectric plant, but those are reports that have to be investigated,” Brunori said.

For years, farmers and human rights activists in Guatemala have filed complaints against companies trying to take their land, often with the consent of the government, to expand agro-industrial or hydroelectric projects.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights said in March that Guatemala’s judiciary had issued at least 44 land eviction orders in 2011 throughout the country.

GUATEMALA CITY – Security forces arrested nine people suspected of leading disturbances that left one person dead in an Indian community in northwestern Guatemala, Interior Minister Mauricio Lopez said Thursday.

More than 600 soldiers, police and prosecutors are seeking a score of additional suspects in connection with Tuesday’s violence in Santa Cruz Barillas, 415 kilometers (258) kilometers from Guatemala City, the minister told reporters.

Guatemala’s president, Otto Perez Molina, suggested Wednesday that drug traffickers might have been behind the trouble in Santa Cruz Barillas.

The unrest could have been meant to provoke incidents between troops and civilians in hopes of rousing public opinion against the presence of the army, the retired general said.

But residents of Santa Cruz Barillas said the protest was sparked by the death of an indigenous man at the hands of private security guards employed by a firm building a hydroelectric dam in the area.

One person was fatally shot and two others wounded as a mob of more than 200 people went on a rampage, destroying a hotel and several shops and storming the local army garrison, where they stole at least four combat rifles.

Three of the rifles were subsequently recovered.

The violence in Santa Cruz Barillas prompted the Guatemalan government to impose a state of siege, which entails a prohibition on public meetings, among other restrictions. EFE

The first priority of Otto Perez has been to establish the best relations with the economic powers of Guatemala. It must not be forgotten that many members of this sector where his campaign financiers. It has also been clear that several ministries are used to pay political favors. The second priority has been vindication of the military. This process has been reported and discussed in the national media. The rest of Guatemala’s problems are on backburner.

Relations with the private sector.

Tax Reform. The news about drug legalization debate in Guatemala was a great and very effective smokescreen to pass the fiscal package through congress at the speed of light. The middle class is paying the bill. The increase in taxes will not be enough to cover the cost of government programs. Never in Guatemalan history has the congress approved taxes or any other law at this speed. The comprehensive fiscal reform lost the concept of “comprehensive” very fast.

On April 19, Robert Zoellick, the President of the World Bank expressed that the economic powers of Central America needed to pay more taxes, participate actively in strengthening democracy in their countries, get involved to improve the security problems of their countries. He stated that they could not just reap the profits and then go to Miami. The Guatemala private sector answered: “we pay enough taxes.”

Tax exemptions: Currently the economic power of Guatemala is very actively negotiating new tax exemptions, on top of all the old ones they already have. The argument is an old one: “we need to be competitive and attract foreign investment.”

Tax amnesty: The other tax news is that there will be a “tax amnesty”, meaning big business that has not paid taxes for a while in the past; don’t have to pay the backload or penalties. It is a very good deal for the biggest companies operating in the country; some of them owe millions of dollars in taxes. (Published by all mayor media in Guatemala, Prensa Libre, El Periodicos, Siglo XXI, La Hora.)

Transnational Mining Industry: The Minister of Mining and Energy, Erick Archila has made a deal with the companies, they pay more then 1% of the revenues to the Guatemalan government, but what they pay above that is voluntary.

If asked, the Guatemala’s private sector is pleased with President Otto Perez.

Daewoo Logistics of South Korea has secured farmland in Madagascar to grow food crops for Seoul, in a deal that diplomats and consultants said was the largest of its kind.

The company said it had leased 1.3m hectares of farmland – about half the size of Belgium – from Madagascar’s government for 99 years. It plans to ship the maize and palm oil harvests back to South Korea. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The pursuit of foreign farm investments is a clear sign of how countries are seeking food security following this year’s crisis – which saw record prices for commodities such as wheat and rice and food riots in countries from Egypt to Haiti. Prices for agricultural commodities have tumbled by about half from such levels but countries remain concerned about long-term supplies.

Meles Zenawi, prime minister dictator of Ethiopia, said this year its government was “very eager” to provide hundreds of thousands of hectares of agricultural land to Middle Eastern countries for investment.

The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation warned this year that the race by some countries to secure farmland overseas risked creating a “neo-colonial” system. Those fears could be increased by the fact that Daewoo’s farm in Madagascar represents about half the African country’s arable land, according to estimates by the US government.

Shin Dong-hyun, a senior manager at Daewoo Logistics in Seoul, said the company would develop the arable land for farming over the next 15 years, using labour from South Africa, and intended to replace about half South Korea’s maize imports.

South Korea, a heavily populated but resource-poor nation, is the fourth-largest importer of maize and among the 10 largest buyers of soyabeans.

Carl Atkins, of consultants Bidwells Agribusiness, said Daewoo Logistics’ investment in Madagascar was the largest it had seen. “The project does not surprise me, as countries are looking to improve food security, but its size – it does surprise me.”

Concepción Calpe, a senior economist at the FAO in Rome, said the investment came after this year’s food crisis. “Countries are looking to buy or lease farmland to improve their food security,” she said.

Al-Qudra Holding, an investment company based in Abu Dhabi, said in August it planned to buy 400,000 hectares of arable land in countries in Africa and Asia by the end of the first quarter of 2009.

Tenant farming was popular in rural America until the Dust Bowl years of the Depression, but the practice is making a comeback on an epic scale in much of Africa. This time, however, the "tenants" are not simply family farmers down on their luck and willing to work land they don't own; they're major international corporations and governments looking to compensate for shortages of arable land in their own countries by setting up massive industrial farms abroad. South Korea's Daewoo Logistics this week announced that it had negotiated a 99-year lease on some 3.2 million acres of farmland on the dirt-poor tropical island of Madagascar, off southern Africa's Indian Ocean coast. That's nearly half of Madagascar's arable land, according to the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and Daewoo plans to put about three quarters of it under corn. The remainder will be used to produce palm oil — a key commodity for the global biofuels market.

A Daewoo manager, Hong Jong-wan, told the Financial Times that the crops would "ensure our food security" and would use "totally undeveloped land which had been left untouched." Land is scarce and expensive in South Korea, making it the world's third-largest importer of corn. Daewoo says the Madagascar land will be leased for about $12 an acre, which is a fraction of the cost of farmland in the corporation's home country.

...

The U.N.'s World Food Programme (WFP) runs school-feeding schemes for children in Madagascar, where about 70% of the country's 20 million people live below the poverty line. The island's residents also rely on WFP emergency-food-relief programs because of the frequency with which they are struck by cyclones and droughts. Given those hardships, the prospect of a corporate giant growing hundreds of tons of food to be consumed by people and animals in Korea raises "ethical concerns," says David Hallam, head of the FAO'S Trade Policy Service in Rome. "If we have another world food crisis, and you have a poor country where food is produced by foreign investors and then repatriated, that is ethically and political tricky," Hallam warns.

Those ethical quandaries have not prompted restraint on the part of other outside investors moving into Africa to exploit its agricultural potential. Several European companies have leased land during the past two years to grow crops for food and biofuels (though on a far smaller scale than Daewoo's plans in Madagascar), including the British company Sun Biofuels, which is planting biofuel crops in Ethiopia, Mozambique and Tanzania.

GUATEMALA CITY – Guatemala’s President Otto Pérez Molina inaugurated on Monday a financial assistance program titled “Mi Bono Seguro” (My Secure Bond) that will pay 757,000 families living in poverty a one-time payment of $40 to “reduce poverty” and provide access to health care, officials said.

The payment of Q300 ($40) must be used for health care services or education, and to receive it, parents must bring children under 6 to health centers for checkups and vaccines.

“We are taking the steps to accomplish what we offered in the campaign, when we said that social programs would continue, but be transparent,” Pérez Molina said.

Official figures indicate that 43 percent of Guatemala’s 14 million people live in poverty, and according to the U.N., one in two Guatemalan children under 5 suffer from malnutrition.

Autoridades católicas de Santiago Atitlán, Sololá, prohibieron el ingreso de 11 cofradías a la iglesia de ese municipio para realizar ceremonias mayas lo que provocó que estas tomaran el edificio religioso incumpliendo la orden.

-------------------

SOLOLÁ - A pesar de que la Iglesia católica interpuso una denuncia en el Ministerio Público y prohibió desde hace un año la realización de ceremonias, autoridades mayas de 11 cofradías decidieron ingresar al templo y ofrendar a sus respectivos altares. Para el catolicismo esta práctica se considera libertinaje.

Nicolas Tzapalú Toj, alcalde indígena, destacó que la toma de la iglesia fue pacífica y que cada cofrade “tomó su altar para rendir homenaje a su santo, sin perjudicar a nadie”, destacó que estas ceremonias se realizaron durante muchos años. “No venimos hacer daño a nadie simplemente venimos a exigir nuestros derechos, porque la iglesia es del pueblo y del 100 porciento de los habitantes del municipio el 60 porciento pertenece a las cofradías”, dijo.

José Rolando Cumes Tuyuc, párroco de la iglesia, dijo que es difícil relacionar la religión con las costumbres del lugar, pero instó a conformar una mesa de diálogo para definir el uso que se dará a la Casa de Dios.

Las cofradías que colocaron sus altares dentro de la iglesia e iniciaron con las ceremonias son; Cofradía de el Rosario, San Nicolás, San Felipe, San Gregorio, San Antonio, San Francisco, San Juan, Santa Cruz (Maximón), Santiago Apóstol, Concepción y la Virgen de Guadalupe.

Nicolas Chávez, líder de la localidad, dijo que el problema inició nuevamente en Semana Santa, cuando la Iglesia católica sacó a las calles una procesión y se elaboraron alfombras en las principales calles y avenidas del municipio que luego fueron bloqueadas por integrantes de las cofradías, se solicitó la presencia de la Policía Nacional Civil para despejar el paso.

GUATEMALA CITY (AP) - A Guatemalan judge has ordered a former national police official to stand trial in the deaths of 37 people killed by a fire at the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala in 1980.

Indian demonstrators had taken over the embassy to call attention to rights abuses during Guatemala's 1960-1996 civil war. Security forces attacked and set fire to the embassy.

The charges filed Monday claim former police official Pedro Garcia Arredondo refused requests by the Spanish ambassador to withdraw police from the embassy and allow firefighters in to extinguish the blaze.

Judge Jose Eduardo Cojulum says Garcia Arredondo faces up to 50 years in prison on each homicide count if found guilty.

Among those killed in the fire was the father of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchu.

GUATEMALA CITY — Guatemala has declared a state of siege for a province on the border with Mexico where 200 people armed with machetes and guns briefly took over an army outpost Tuesday night to demand justice for a man killed hours earlier.

Interior Secretary Mauricio Lopez Bonilla says he is sending troops and police from Guatemala City to the province of Huehuetenango to “restore order.” A state of siege gives the army emergency powers, including permission to detain suspects without warrants.

Defense Ministry spokesman Rony Urizar says the mob took over the outpost in the town of Barillas and beat up soldiers, one gravely. They then left and set some buildings ablaze in the town.

Urizar says residents of Barillas oppose the construction of a hydroelectric plant in their town and believe the man was killed in retaliation.

In 2005, the United States spent $11 million on "Child Survival and Health" programs in Guatemala. Was this the right thing to do? Guatemala ranks 134th among countries in infant mortality, with almost 37 deaths per 1,000 live births. It certainly seems that it could use the help.

Eleven million dollars was an amount clearly insufficient to solve the problem. Should more money have been spent? Should the United States have used that money in a different country with greater child health needs? Haiti's infant mortality rate, for example, is 74 deaths per 1,000 live births. Or perhaps the money could have been better used in Guatemala for other purposes, such as improving education or reforming the criminal justice system. How should U.S. policymakers decide among competing priorities for foreign assistance? And how can they tell whether the money has advanced U.S. interests?

Hospital bed density:

0.6 beds/1,000 population (2009)

Guatemala City. The State of World Population 2011 reveals that Guatemalan women between 15 and 49 years have on average 3.8 children (2010-2015), when the average Latin-American level is 2.2. For indigenous women, this percentage is 4.5 children per female of reproductive age, which continues to place the country as the holder of the highest fertility rate in Latin America.

...

In Guatemala City, Marcela Suazo, regional director of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) for Latin America and the Caribbean, said the problem is not population growth, but the lack of state services. "It's not necessarily the number of children, but the conditions into which the children are born, they need an environment where they have development, access to education and opportunities to change their life and destiny to leave the cycle of poverty," she said.

...

Structural causes for Guatemala’s hunger, poverty and population growth

Land ownership: only 2 percent of Guatemala’s population owns most of the land of the nation, Guatemala has one of the highest inequity rates in the world.

"If the Guatemalan private sector clearly does not assume their responsibility to pay taxes in order to have stronger institutions, there will be gaps and there will be inadequate resources to meet the needs of the population," said Leonor Calderón, UNFPA Representative.

"There must be a commitment to address the challenge, and overcome the problems of the country that has 14 million 713 thousand possibilities," she said, in relation to the number of inhabitants.

System fails

Rafael Espada, Guatemala’s Vice President, insisted that during the transition phase to handover power to the next government tax reform has to be discussed. "Fiscal reform must be honest, transparent and ensure controlled public spending. Equally important is to fight tax evasion and incorrect tax privileges. We need to be responsible with our finances” said. Espada

Poverty in Guatemala increased from 51% to 54.1% -55%, according to the latest data published by the Central American Business Intelligence, CABI. CABI informed that poverty, infant and maternal mortality have increased in Guatemala due to the global economic crisis between 2009 and 2010. This has severely affected local efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).


In their study, CABI reported that the fall in economic growth in Guatemala caused the poverty level to rise from 51 percent to 54.1 percent and in some cases to 55 percent. Among the causes that increased poverty, the agency cited the loss of formal jobs, reduction in real wages (inflation) and bankruptcy of small businesses.

The agency stressed that the annual cost to address maternal and child mortality in Guatemala is not high, it takes only 0.25 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). If the investment in health is reduced it will adversely affect progress recorded in the field. The decrease of remittances of 9.3% in 2009 (Bank of Guatemala) had a very negative impact in the fight against poverty in Guatemala, in addition, despite the boost from programs like Social Cohesion, which distributes 300 Quetzals, (approximately US $ 38.4 depending on the exchange rate) per family, poverty has risen since 2007.

Guatemala has improved access to primary education and quality of education; however, there are serious deficiencies in pre-primary and basic level. The lack of sustainability of the current government’s social programs is another very important consideration for the future of the fight against poverty.

Now this has been standing here for centuries. The premier work of man perhaps in the whole western world and it’s without a signature. Chartres. A celebration to God’s glory and to the dignity of man. All that’s left, most artists seem to feel these days, is man. Naked, poor, forked radish. There aren’t any celebrations. Ours, the scientists keep telling us, is a universe which is disposable. You know it might be just this one anonymous glory of all things, this rich stone forest, this epic chant, this gaiety, this grand choiring shout of affirmation, which we choose when all our cities are dust; to stand intact, to mark where we have been, to testify to what we had it in us to accomplish. Our works in stone, in paint, in print are spared, some of them for a few decades, or a millennium or two, but everything must fall in war or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash: the triumphs and the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life… we’re going to die. ‘Be of good heart,’ cry the dead artists out of the living past. Our songs will all be silenced - but what of it? Go on singing. Maybe a man’s name doesn’t matter all that much.

WASHINGTON – In a major concession, Obama administration officials say they could support allowing Iran to continue a crucial element of its disputed nuclear program if the government in Tehran took other major steps to curb its ability to develop a nuclear bomb.

The officials told the Los Angeles Times they might agree to let Tehran continue enriching uranium up to concentrations of 5% if the Iranian government agreed to unrestricted inspections, and strict oversight and safeguards that the United Nations long has demanded.

Iran has begun enriching small amounts of uranium to 20% purity in February 2010 for what it contends are peaceful purposes, although most of its stockpile is purified at lower levels. Uranium can be used as bomb fuel at about 90% enrichment.

The question of whether to approve even low-level enrichment is highly controversial within the U.S. government and among its allies because of the risk that Iranian scientists still might be able to gain the knowledge and experience to someday build a bomb.

But a consensus has gradually emerged among U.S. and foreign officials that the Iranians are unlikely to accede to a complete halt to enrichment, and that pushing this demand could make it impossible to reach a negotiated deal to stop Iran’s program short of a military attack.

Marvin Romero, director de la Autoridad para el Manejo Sustentable del Lago de Atitlán y su Entorno (Amsclae), informó que la planta beneficiará a 70 familias, aunque su capacidad máxima es para 140, incluyendo la Escuela Oficial Rural Mixta de la localidad.

Agregó que la planta funciona con el sistema de fosa séptica, como primer tratamiento. Cuenta con filtros de grava y arena de flujo horizontal para eliminar los restos orgánicos y patógenos y patios de secado de lodos donde se producirá abono orgánico.

Esta obra es un plan piloto que podría ser implementado en otras localidades de Sololá y con ello mejorar la salud de las familias y proteger de mejor manera el Lago de Atitlán”, expuso Romero.

Pedro Palax Tuiz, presidente del Consejo Comunitario de Desarrollo, argumentó que la planta se construyó en un área comunal de 750 metros cuadrados y se utilizó tubería de PVC para el alcantarillado, la cual tuvo un costo de Q815 mil 442.66.

El alcalde Pedro Saloj Quisquiná indicó que espera que las próximas autoridades municipales continúen invirtiendo en este tipo de obras, pues son necesarias en las comunidades, sobre todo para evitar la contaminación del Lago.

CIUDAD DE GUATEMALA – La publicación que entra en vigencia este sábado fija a Amsclae la función de planificar, coordinar y ejecutar las medidas y acciones necesarias para la conservación del ecosistema del Lago de Atitlán.

La entidad estará bajo la dirección de la vicepresidencia con fondos del presupuesto general de la Nación y se denomina como el ente rector de los proyectos que permitan la conservación del lago, además de la educación ambiental.

This week brought good news from the Pastoral Commission for Peace and Ecology (COPAE), a UUSC partner in Guatemala. COPAE, their legal advisors, and the indigenous communities organized under the Council of Western Peoples (known by its Spanish acronym, CPO) filed a claim in March 2012 that argued — in the face of harmful effects from unchecked Goldcorp silver and gold mining — that a Guatemalan law allowing such mining is unconstitutional on procedural grounds. In an exciting development, a court decided Wednesday to allow the petition to go forward.

The communities claimed the mining law is unconstitutional because it did not follow legal requirements for "free, prior, informed consent" of communities affected by extractive industries — nor Guatemala's obligations under international law to obtain such consent from indigenous communities. The court, which has discretionary power to advance or deny petitions, found that there was evidence and significance in the petition based on insufficient consultation with affected indigenous communities. The mining law remains in effect during the case, but public hearings are now required.

This is an important first hurdle in the case. The timing, just weeks before Goldcorp's annual general meeting, is ripe for UUSC shareholder action. UUSC has co-filed a shareholder resolution requiring the corporation to implement a reclamation plan for the Marlin mine, for which the mine has currently placed a bond of only $1million dollars. UUSC member expert Rob Robinson and his team estimate the cost of reclamation — restoration of the land that has been damaged by mining — to be $49 million. Molly Butler, a lawyer and member of Robinson's team, notes that the mine made earnings of $607 million in 2011 and revenues of $907 million (as seen on page 14 of a Goldcorp financial report).

After the shareholder resolution was filed, Goldcorp published a reclamation plan that was previously not made public. Communities have until April 23 to give their views on the plan. Robinson and his team are busy analyzing the plan and preparing for meetings in Timmins, Ontario, and the Goldcorp annual general meeting of shareholders.

France and its low rate of obesity. France has the 7th lowest obesity rate of the 30 OECD countries. How does it manage this when the nutritional composition of its cuisine has the highest fat content in Europe (42% of food energy in France comes from fats), when France is the largest sugar producer in Europe and the largest consumer of bread and cheese, the two foods which have the highest salt content? We also have a post describing this interesting case study. Could it be the amount of physical exercise taken by the French? This is not very likely, France is ranked second from the bottom in terms of the proportion of the adult population taking a satisfactory amount of physical exercise in Europe (less than 25%, against a European average of over 30% and… 41% in the Netherlands). It probably has nothing to do either with the French genes, as the population is so heterogeneous. It is difficult to believe that it could be due to drinking wine, in any case consumption has been on the decline since 1960, in parallel with the reduction in cardio-vascular diseases. The determinants for the control of obesity in France could however be essentially cultural: France is one of the few European countries that still has three meals a day and nothing (or very little) between meals. On the whole, our children continue to be brought up in this tradition. It would appear that, even if the food on the plate has the worst possible nutritional composition, if it is not too copious (French nouvelle cuisine has set the standard for small portions) and if we only eat three times a day, then we are unlikely to become obese easily. Obesity among children is the lowest in Europe and there has been no noticeable increase in the past ten years. Some (North American) studies have shown the links between meals taken regularly en famille, sitting in front of the TV or playing video games for less than two hours a day and the low levels of obesity. So long as the French keep this cultural advantage, they will perhaps be protected against the epidemic of obesity that is lapping at our borders and nearly everywhere throughout the world.

Pitt and Jolie’s choice legitimizes the sinister advertising of diamond engagement rings—whether from Procop or Kay Jewelers—that stretches back to the 19th century.

Cecil John Rhodes formed the De Beers Mining Company in 1888. At the time, South Africa supplied 90 percent of the world’s diamonds, and Rhodes systematically acquired control of all of it. Rhodes established two policies that have haunted the diamond industry ever since: He artificially inflated the price of diamonds by cutting production in half, then put a stranglehold on the gem’s distribution, limiting it to a single cartel of London middlemen called “The Syndicate.” These days, De Beers systematically stockpiles diamonds in its London headquarters to keep market supply low. No one knows what the actual market value of a diamond would be in a free economy because the De Beers group has controlled its price and supply for over 125 years.

But Rhodes couldn’t have done it alone—it took some significant marketing collusion to make romantics believe a diamond was the ultimate expression of love and fidelity. In the 1930s, at the brink of World War II, De Beers employed a prominent ad firm to help cinch the American market. A female copywriter, Frances Gerety, spearheaded the campaign to transform the diamond’s reputation as a “trinket of the rich” to a necessary token for everyday couples. Gerety coined the phrase, “A diamond is forever, ” and her agency pushed the bauble to Hollywood. Marilyn Monroe cemented the diamond’s reign when she sang “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The paparazzi zoom lenses trained on Jolie’s ring finger suggest the diamond marketing campaign is still alive and well.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Diamond companies launched a similar advertising blitz in Japan starting in the 1960s, and the gemstone stuck there, too. In 1966, fewer than 1 percent of engagement rings in the country contained diamonds. By 1981, the number had leapt to 61 percent. In the 1990s, more than 90 percent of Japanese women received diamonds upon getting engaged. But once the 1997 Asian financial crisis hit, the trend reversed. Couples reassessed their finances and decided to spend money on mortgages and savings funds instead of artificially marked-up jewels. Now, Japanese diamond engagement rings have downsized. A watch is an acceptable substitute.

Americans have yet to loosen the diamond’s grip on their ring fingers. Many were momentarily appalled when the controversy surrounding conflict diamonds—and the millions of people they’ve killed or misplaced—first surfaced in the late '90s. De Beers came under fire for its ties to diamonds sourced from Angola and Sierra Leone, among other African conflict zones. The issue even circled all the way back to Hollywood in 2006’s Blood Diamond. But Americans alone still buy more than $30 billion worth of diamonds a year.