Haiti asks for peacekeepers
Haiti’s Transitional Presidential Council officially asked the United Nations to transform an ongoing Kenya-led international security support mission into an official UN peacekeeping mission. The U.S. sought this evolution last month, but was forced to drop the Security Council proposal due to opposition from Russia and China. It is unclear whether they would back a peacekeeper mission now that Haiti has requested one, reports the Miami Herald.
Haitian gangs have escalated violence and expanded operations, the top U.N. official in the country told the U.N. Security Council this week, Special representative Maria Isabel Salvador said that more than 700,000 people are now displaced in the country and the political process launched in March is facing “significant challenges.” (Associated Press)
She pointed to mounting attacks over the past week around the capital, its suburbs, the surrounding farming region. (Reuters)
Haiti’s Justice Ministry called for an increase in security for Prime Minister Garry Conille and other Cabinet officials in response to unspecified threats in the midst of still-increasing gang violence in the country, reports the Associated Press.
Regional Relations
The BRICS are meeting in Russia — and the summit shows some of the members’ divergent views of what the bloc’s ultimate goal is. “Both Russia and China see the BRICS as an institution that can help them organize a coalition of non-Western states to tacitly hedge against and confront a hostile West,” writes Ishaan Tharoor in the Washington Post. Others, notably Brazil and India, hope the BRICS will further a “multipolar” world, but “are not interested in subscribing to an anti-Western alliance.”
Last year’s BRICS expansion tilted the bloc’s balance against democracies, and make Brazil’s political calculus increasingly difficult, argues Oliver Stuenkel in Americas Quarterly. “Behind closed doors, it is now common to hear Brazilian diplomats express concern about Brazil’s diminishing capacity to control intra-BRICS dynamics and to use the outfit to its benefits.”
Venezuelan politician Maria Corina Machado called on Colombian President Gustavo Petro to be decisive and recognize the opposition’s victory Venezuela’s contested July presidential election. (Associated Press)
Mexico
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced a policy to shore up the country’s food sovereignty, focused on traditional ingredients like tortillas and beans. (Associated Press)
Sheinbaum’s administration is also advancing on a promise to build a million homes in six years, reports El País.
Nineteen alleged gang members were killed in a shootout with Mexican military forces in Sinaloa state, reports Reuters.
Self-defense squads surged in Mexico about a decade ago. The vigilante groups combat violent drug cartels — while some defend their local communities, others become predatory in their own right, writes Max van der Graaf in CrashOut.
Ecuador
Gang violence has shot up in Ecuador’s capital Quito, which had, until now, been distant from the organized crime wave in the rest of the country, reports El País.
Ecuadorean President Daniel Noboa announced a massive increase in the country’s coca-cultivating figures — however, some security experts believe the figure to be an overestimate, a political move ahead of the February presidential election, reports InSight Crime.
Cuba
Amnesty International declared four people prisoners of conscience in Cuba, where a new wave of state repression is targeting dissidents and journalists.
Colombia
Colombian President Gustavo Petro added details to allegations that NSO, an Israeli software company, collected 11 million dollars in cash for the Pegasus spy virus, in 2021. (El País)
“For the first time, a US bank has admitted to helping criminal networks in Colombia launder hundreds of millions of dollars in dirty money, highlighting the fruits of a renewed push to target those aiding the region’s money launderers,” reports InSight Crime.
Panama
A plan to dam Panama’s Indio River would bring much needed water to the country’s canal, but “it also would flood villages, where about 2,000 people would need to be relocated and where there is opposition to the plan, and curb the flow of the river to other communities downstream,” reports the Associated Press.
Argentina
Argentine President Javier Milei has maintained the verbally aggressive style that characterized his presidential campaign — lobbing machista cusses at political opponents, journalists and anybody else who crosses his path, reports El País.
FOPEA, a nonprofit that monitors attacks on journalists, reported that out of every recorded attack on journalists—mostly rhetorical—between April 18 and July 17, almost one-third involved Milei. (Colombia Journalism Review)
Milei insists the worst economic pain of his austerity measures is past, “but most foreign investors want to see how durable the Milei experiment proves before opening their cheque books,” reports the Financial Times.
“Argentines hold an estimated $277bn outside of their financial system, according to official estimates for 2024, equivalent to almost half of the country’s annual economic output,” reports the Financial Times. “Commonly referred to in Argentina as “the dollars under the mattress”, the money stashed away represents 10 per cent of all the physical dollars in circulation worldwide, according to a 2021 estimate by a then-central bank chief.”
Histories
Father Gustavo Gutiérrez, a Peruvian priest who founded liberation theology, a movement advocating an active role for the Roman Catholic Church in fighting poverty and injustice, died this week in Lima. He hailed as a “prophet of the poor.” Gutiérrez’s 1971 book “A Theology of Liberation” had a profound impact by proposing a faith based on social justice focused on the poor and positing that poverty “is a scandalous state, an attack on human dignity, and therefore, contrary to the will of God.” (BBC, Guardian, Associated Press)