Guatemalan MP arrests Indigenous leader
April 24, 2025
Guatemalan authorities arrested Luis Pacheco, an Indigenous leader who serves in President Bernard Arévalo’s cabinet. The Attorney General’s Office has accused Pacheco of terrorism and illicit association, reports the Associated Press. Details of the case have not been made public, reports El País. (See also Prensa Libre.)
Pacheco led an alliance of Indigenous communities in peaceful protests in October 2023, in support of Arévalo and demanding the resignation of the country’s attorney general, Consuelo Porras. Porras led efforts to derail Arévalo’s electoral victory and has refused to resign, despite numerous accusations of corruption.
Arévalo said yesterday that the arrest was unfounded and “spurious” and “criminalizes principles and rights that are guaranteed.” Members of the 48 Cantones coalition, which Pacheco had led, said the case demonstrates the criminalization of Indigenous groups, a stance echoed by human rights organizations and government allied lawmakers. (El País)
Regional
“Organized crime — particularly cocaine trafficking — has been the main driver of homicides in Latin America and the Caribbean over the last decade, according to data compiled by InSight Crime.”
Chilean President Gabriel Boric said he will not respond to global trade tensions with "loud" declarations or retaliation, but rather through deeper regional integration, reports Reuters.
Brazilian diplomats are working closely with U.N. officials to encourage countries to file new emissions targets, called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), by September — and hopes to push large economies to be ambitious about emissions, especially China and the European Union, which have yet to present NDCs, reports Reuters.
Deportations
The United States carried out mass expulsions of 299 third-country nationals to Panama, subjecting them to harsh detention conditions and mistreatment, while also denying due process and the right to seek asylum, according to a new Human Rights Watch report.
Human Rights Watch’s report “exposes harsh detention conditions and mistreatment migrants experienced in the United States, along with the denial of due process and the right to seek asylum. It also details migrants’ incommunicado detention in Panama, where authorities kept their phones, blocked visitors, and isolated them from the outside world.”
A Venezuelan immigrant, Ricardo Prada has disappeared after being deported by the U.S. to an unknown destination. He was last heard from in U.S. detention on March 15 and is not on the list of people deported to El Salvador that day. His “disappearance has created concerns that more immigrants have been deported to El Salvador than previously known. It also raises the question of whether some deportees may have been sent to other countries with no record of it,” reports the New York Times.
Mexico
Mexico is becoming a migrant beacon — for people from the global south and north, according to Lydia Polgreen. “Under Trump — who has terminated the CBP One app, effectively shut down the border to asylum seekers and unleashed a cruel deportation campaign — the United States is turning into something darker and uglier. Mexico City’s allure, by contrast, is only growing,” she writes in the New York Times.
Haiti
Haitian gang members killed at least four soldiers and several civilians who worked with law enforcement to defend their communities, in the outskirts of Port-au-Prince yesterday, reports the Associated Press: “In videos posted on social media, gunmen are seen mutilating several bodies and picking up severed heads as trophies, saying, “We got the dogs.””
Brazil
A group of Brazilian coffee workers filed a civil lawsuit in the US against Starbucks, seeking financial compensation for slavery-like conditions at a farm supplying the global coffeehouse chain. (Guardian, El País)
The NGO Coffee Watch also filed a complaint with US Customs and Border Protection seeking to “exclude coffee and coffee products produced ‘wholly or in part’ with forced labour in Brazil” from being imported by Starbucks and other major companies such as Nestlé, Jacobs Douwe Egberts, Dunkin’, Illy and McDonald’s. (Guardian, El País)
Environmental groups are outraged that the world’s biggest meatpacking company, JBS, which has long been linked to Amazon’s deforestation, has received approval from US authorities to list on the New York Stock Exchange, reports the Guardian.
The Brazilian government said it was investigating a corruption scheme in which associations and unions allegedly stole money from retirees by skimming off part of their pensions, reports AFP.
Colombia
Former Colombian foreign minister Alberto Leyva’s allegations that President Gustavo Petro consumes illicit drugs reflects longstanding rumors, but also deep divisions among the ruling coalition regarding Laura Sarabia and Armando Benedetti, cabinet members and Petro confidants. (El País)
Mexico
Ioan Grillo delves into the history of “cartel propaganda videos,” which over the past 20 years have “evolved from what was initially almost all violence to messages that show the cartels as quasi-political players.” (Crashout)
Narcocorridos, a genre that glorify drug cartels, are increasingly being banned by Mexican localities. Opponents say the music glorifies criminals and the harm they inflict, while others are concerned about free speech in Mexico. (New York Times)
Regional
Selecting the first Latin American pope in 2013, the Catholic Church hoped to strengthen its position in a region where it was increasingly losing ground to other Christian denominations. But, “the bet never fully paid off,” reports the Washington Post. “In retrospect, religious scholars said, believing an entire region’s religious trajectory could be changed by a single person, no matter how charismatic or influential, was always a misunderstanding of the complexities of Catholicism in Latin America.”