GUATEMALA CITY – A Guatemalan judge has ordered eight suspects to stand trial in the killing of a prominent lawyer who accused the country's president of his murder in a video made before his death.
Judge Veronica Galicia said Friday she ordered the eight suspects to stand trial after hearing recorded telephone calls tying them to the killing of attorney Rodrigo Rosenberg. (Yahoo)
embezzled $3.9 million from the Defense Ministry and stole at least $1.5 million in donations from the government of Taiwan intended to buy books for school libraries. (NYT)The Guatemalan courts approved his extradtion, but before authorities could arrest Portillo, who was out on bail after his extradition from Mexico, he disappeared. They searched four of his properties without any luck. Apparently, he wasn't as good at hiding as those witnesses who were scheduled to testify against him. They've just disappeared without a trace.
Police captured ex-President Alfonso Portillo at a beach preparing to flee Guatemala by boat Tuesday, a day after U.S. authorities charged him with laundering money stolen from foreign donations to buy children's books.
Dozens of police, soldiers and federal agents arrested Portillo during a raid on a house in the coastal province of Izabal, said Carlos Castresana, head of the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, a U.N. agency created to battle corruption and crime in this Central American nation. (Washington Post)
Treaties allow extradition only for a stated purpose, and the 2008 extradition from Mexico sent Portillo back to face corruption charges in Guatemala, where he was freed on bail.I will be disappointed if Portillo is extradited to the US to face charges. His arrest was a significant victory for the people of Guatemala and the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG). His arrest and trial might spur the congress and the courts to implement several additional requests made by CICIG deemed necessary in the fight against impunity.
Portillo's lawyer, Humberto Castillejos, said Mexico's ambassador to Guatemala approved the detention of the former leader Tuesday on the U.S. extradition request, but the attorney argued that was not legally sufficient.
Mexico's Foreign Relations Department disagreed. It said Wednesday that Mexico properly gave consent for Portillo's detention.
The department also said that sending Portillo to the United States would require a separate approval from Mexico, but it said no request for permission had yet been received. (Miami Herald)
NEW HAVEN, Conn. – A Colorado man charged with sexually abusing boys at a school he founded for street children in Haiti faces new charges that raise the number of alleged victims to 18.
Authorities accuse Douglas Perlitz of enticing children at the Project Pierre Toussaint school in Cap-Haitien into sex acts by promising them food, shelter, cash, cell phones, electronics and shoes. They say he also withheld benefits and threatened to expel the boys if they refused his wishes.
A new 19-count indictment incorporates old and new allegations against the 39-year-old Perlitz, federal prosecutors said Thursday. (Yahoo)
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador, JAN. 26, 2010 (Zenit.org).- The episcopal conference of El Salvador has expressed to Benedict XVI its hopes for the canonization of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero.
Archbishop Romero was assassinated March 24, 1980, when celebrating Mass. He was a staunch critic of the El Salvadorian government and defender of the poor.
Auxiliary Bishop Gregorio Rosa Chávez of San Salvador reported in a parish publication that the bishops decided at their first meeting of 2010 to make an appeal to the Holy Father.
Saudi girl faces beating over phone at school
Rights group: Teenager sentenced after being caught with banned device (MSNBC)Honestly, the headline appears to be quite misleading.
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - A teenage girl has been sentenced to a 90-lash flogging and two months in prison as punishment for assaulting a teacher, a Saudi judge said in an interview published Sunday.
Human rights group Amnesty International said the assault happened after the girl was caught with a camera phone at school.There are also questions about the age of the girl. The school headmaster says the girl is "about twenty" years old while Amnesty International claims that the girl is 13.
“Máncora”: Also released this month is the Peruvian-American production “Máncora,” a film about the love affair between a man and his stepsister in a small Peruvian coastal town.
With a diverse set of actors from all corners of Latin America, “Máncora” is just a sample of the variety of points of view that exist in Latino cinema, said Oscar Torres, one of the film’s writers.
“ ‘Máncora’ gives a good way to show that Latin America is not only Mexico,” Torres said by phone from his Los Angeles home.I guess I won't understand how a love affair between a man and his stepsister can be characterized as a "popcorn romance" until I see the film.
“ ‘Máncora’ is completely different,” he said. “It is a popcorn romance to have a good time.”Anyway, take a look at Innocent Voices if you haven't had the opportunity. It works well in courses realted to Latin America, El Salvador, revolution / civil war, and child soldiers.
The United Nations System in Guatemala condemns the recent threats against Mrs. Norma Cruz, Director of the Survivor Foundation, who reported having received intimidating phone calls related to her work at the organization. Fundacion Sobrevivientes (Survivors Foundation) is formed by survivors of violence that work as Human Rights Defenders for women's rights in cases related to domestic violence, sexual violence, human trafficking and murder of women.
Castresana said the commission's theory is that Rosenberg was motivated by a sense of guilt and frustration over what he believed was the government's involvement and failure to properly investigate the killing of his client and girlfriend, Marjorie Musa, along with her father, Khalil Musa.
Rosenberg had advised Khalil Musa to accept a seat on the board of directors of the private- and government-sponsored Rural Development Bank. In his video, Rosenberg said if he were slain, it would be to silence him for discovering the killings were linked to money laundering at the bank.
Castresana said that blaming Colom apparently was a way of shaking up the powers that be and "opening up a Pandora's box that would result on change in the country."
Rosenberg also appeared to be depressed about the recent death of this mother and losing custody of his children, the investigation said. (Yahoo)The protests that followed the killing and the distribution of the video almost brought down the Colom government. However, CICIG cleared Colom and matters settled down.
After the murder of the Musa family members he tried to prove that the government and other officials he named in the video where responsible for Kalil and Marjory's Musa´s murder. He could not find any proof. To intimate friends he says repeatedly "I am disintegrating emotionally, I am in despair and there is no justice in Guatemala."
Previous to his death, he buys 2 graves, one for himself and one for Marjory Musa. He leaves all his personal and professional issues in order. He announces to his staff at the office that he will retire from the law office. He leaves lawyers in charge of legal issues of his children.The only evidence that CICIG is missing, so far, is that an insurance policy was taken out by Rosenberg in the days before his death. I'm kidding.
He taught and worked on a farm that helped support an Indian school. And he helped Mayan Indians study their own culture and trained them to be teachers so they could go back to the villages and educate. But there was another reason for the education: to keep the Indians from being conscripted into the army.While the Guatemalan government's official version was that Miller was killed by "subversive criminal elements," other evidence leads on to conclude that he was killed by the military because of a case of mistaken identification.
Years later, a close friend of his with ties to the military confided to the brothers that Miller was misidentified.
“He said the priest we killed was by mistake,” Spellman said. “Brother James would have been the last one (to be assassinated), but to them, we all looked the same.”The Catholic Church is currently exploring Brother Miller's candidacy for sainthood.
Political scientists aren't going to like this book, because it portrays politics as it is actually lived by the candidates, their staff and the press, which is to say -- a messy, sweaty, ugly, arduous competition between flawed human beings -- a universe away from numbers and probabilities and theories.I don't know about that. Most political scientists are people too. We probably like unsubstantiated gossip as much as the next person and would enjoy the book after we finish with this week's National Enquirer.
According to news reaching here, polling firm JBS Opinion Publica found that 54.2 percent of Salvadorians described Funes' performance as "good," 17.7 percent said it had been "very good" and 16 percent rated him as "excellent." (People's Daily Online)
Seventy-Five percent of respondents said that Funes was wise in distancing himself with the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), the party that brought him to power.This is going to be a long four more years.
GUATEMALA CITY – Some 708 women were killed in Guatemala in 2009, based on Interior Ministry figures released on Saturday.
According to official figures, murders of women last year were less than in 2008, when 773 women died violent deaths in this Central American country.
Most crimes against women have gone unpunished despite the existence, since April 2008, of a specific law against femicide...
Guatemala is second in the world in murders of women after Russia, which posts more than 10,000 crimes against women, according to the Human Rights Prosecutor’s Office. (LAHT)
This month marks the 10th anniversary of the murder in Guatemala of Doniphan native and University of Missouri graduate Larry Lee. Not only has this crime not been solved, it has been virtually uninvestigated. Neither Guatemalan nor American officials seem too disturbed by that.According to the story, forty-one Americans have been murdered in Guatemala since Mr. Lee's death with only a single conviction to date. Unfortunately, the US State Department and the Guatemalan authorities have shown little interest in solving the crime.
Larry, a decorated journalist, was in Guatemala as a full-time employee of BridgeNews, a division of St. Louis-based Bridge Information Systems, which went bust in 2001. He had been in Guatemala reporting on the country's coffee, sugar and financial industries for more than a year when he was found stabbed to death in his apartment on Dec. 27, 1999.
