Child Migrants from Central America

The White House released a factsheet in June about the rapidly growing numbers of children from Central America unaccompanied by a parent and that are crossing the Mexico-U.S. border. The Administration remains greatly concerned by this rise and mentions that these children are vulnerable, and many become victims of violent crime or sexual abuse along the dangerous journey.

There has been a more than 120 per cent surge in the numbers of Honduran children picked up on the US border compared with 2013. Child migrants from El Salvador have increased more than 100 per cent and from Guatemala by nearly 60 per cent.

Causes and Types of Domestic Land Conflicts in Latin America

Many Latin American countries today are still suffering from domestic land conflicts, often resulting in violent actions and killings. These land conflicts may be limited to small parts of a country, effect whole regions or even the whole country. Land conflicts in Latin America have always existed since the Spanish and Portuguese conquest. To understand the root of these still existing land conflicts, you have to research history. I will try to do that in this blogpost. Resolving the conflicts will often have serious negative consequences, but not resolving the problem will have serious negative consequences too.

The Still Growing Violence and Crime in Venezuela

With 99.67% of the votes being counted on April 14th, it looks like Nicolás Maduro has beaten Henrique Capriles with 1.49% of the votes (50.61% vs 49.12%) in the presidential elections of April 14th 2013. The gap is 224,739 votes, which is only 112,370 voters that are making the difference. Capriles has called for a full audit of the election results, but it looks like he isn't going to get it. The National Electoral Council (CNE) said it would be legally impossible to carry out. What is agreed upon now is a partial examination of 56% of the votes cast, which is expected to take until June, but what exactly is examined is stil not agreed upon. The remaining 44% had been checked immediately after the election. On April 30 even fistfights have broken out in Venezuela's parliament over the recent disputed presidential election. It is obvious that Maduro and his PSUV campaign team used about the same pre-election fraud tactics  that were applied during the campaign of the 7 October 2012 presidential elections, that Chávez won. And maybe some real election fraud as well, according to Capriles. Maduro has to combat serious corruption crime and violence, but also a real economy that is ever more dependent of future oil sales. This seems like an impossible challenge for someone who has been Venezuela's foreign minister for 6 years and has very little experience in dealing with interior matters. It is very likely that the opposition will petition for a recall referendum in April 2016, after half of Maduro's term has elapsed. However, this blogpost is dealing about the serious violence and crime rates in Venezuela, its causes and Maduro's plans to combat this during his first term.

Emerging Paramilitary Groups in Mexico

Despite the efforts of former presidents Vicente Fox and Felipe Caldéron the drug cartel war and related violence in Mexico still continues today. More than 1.6 million Mexicans left their homes because of drug violence from 2006 to 2011, according to a May 2011 survey of the Mexico City polling firm Parametría. They might consider themselves lucky, because they are not among the 70,000 Mexicans slain in the drug war, or not between the 25,000 enforced disappeared according to a leaked list of the Ministry of Interior. Civilians seem to be fed up with threats, kidnappings, robberies, extortion and the failing anti-violence policies for a long time. The new arising (unlawful) Mexican self-defense vigilantes are the latest result of this desperate situation. There is growing concern about various paramilitary groups that are operating in Mexico. I will try to zoom in on those concerns here and will discuss the various paramilitary groups that are present in Mexico. 

The Violence in Honduras

Why is there so much violence in Honduras? Honduras has got a high homicide rate and a high crime rate compared to most Central- and South-American countries, while the average of these indicators in Latin American countries is already much higher than in the US or Western European countries. What are the causes and why is it still increasing as you can see in the charts below? There is no single answer to this question. As you can read below there are many causes and most of these causes are clearly related. That's why this violence is very difficult to combat. Measures that were taken in the past to decrease the violence often turned out to be symptomatic, non-consistent, small focus or small scale because of lack of vision or monies.