After colonisation, dispossession and decades of military violence, indigenous women in Guatemala are closing in on justice at last.
Women protest outside a courtroom in San Salvador in 2017, demanding the government free women prisoners who are serving 30-year prison sentences for having an abortion.
(AP Photo/Salvador Melendez)
Pregnant teens take their own lives, raped children are denied abortions and women who suffer stillbirth are imprisoned for 30 years – El Salvador’s torturous anti-abortion regime must end.
Progressive values won in Costa Rica – for now, at least.
AP Photo/Arnulfo Franco
Nearly 40 percent of voters in Costa Rica supported an anti-gay evangelical for president. Maybe progressive Costa Rica is more like its troubled neighboring countries than it once seemed.
Oscar Romero’s canonization is controversial. The process stalled in the Vatican for decades.
Jose Cabezas/Reuters
On March 24, 1980, an outspoken Salvadoran bishop was murdered after decrying his country’s military regime. Thirty-eight years and one civil war later, Pope Francis is set to declare him a saint.
Transnational gangs like MS-13 are a major driver of violence in El Salvador, but they are far from the only problem.
Jose Cabezas/Reuters
The U.S. government has ended the protective status of 200,000 Salvadoran migrants. If deported, they would go back to one of the world’s deadliest places. How did violence in El Salvador get so bad?
Arrests aside, until the politicians who collude with gangs are stopped, crime in Central America will likely continue unchecked.
Reuters/Jose Cabezas
Corruption, not gang warfare, is the root cause of the record violence in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. Until public officials stop shielding criminal groups like MS-13, lawlessness will reign.
Undocumented migrants are among those helping to rebuild the hardest-hit areas of Oaxaca state, where federal aid has been slow to trickle down.
Presidencia de la República Mexicana CC-by-2.0
A brigade of migrants from Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala have interrupted their trek north to stay in Mexico and support earthquake recovery efforts.
‘I’m not inviting you to abort, I’m inviting you to decide.’ Can democracy exist if women aren’t recognized as people with full human rights?
Rodrigo Garrido/Reuters
Seventy-five percent of all abortions in Latin America are illicit. In Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador, where abortion is totally illegal, the bans correlate with a generalized failure of the rule of law.
Young people in El Salvador are finding themselves caught up in the war between the gangs and the state.
The Coast Guard Cutter Mohawk crew interdicts a group of Haitian migrants July 11, 2017, approximately 22 miles south of Great Inagua, Bahamas.
Coast Guard News/flickr
The mass movement of people across the world is nothing new, but migration today is so global and so unrelenting that it may well be the great humanitarian issue of our time.
Despite Trump’s rhetoric, Mexicans are no longer crossing the border in massive numbers. Data show a new group of migrants is arriving, and for very different reasons.
Workers wash freshly harvested bananas on a banana plantation near Parrita, Costa Rica.
AP Photo/Kent Gilbert
While Costa Ricans pride their country for being an oasis of stability in Latin America, the nation has struggled with restrictive laws and social attitudes toward immigrants from Nicaragua.
A poignant protest of an avoidable tragedy.
Oswaldo Rivas/Reuters
From Chinese laborers to ‘bad hombres,’ the US settler mentality has perpetuated an immigration system that pushes out unwanted groups and bypasses the Constitution.