By Agencies
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Ecuador’s president has declared a state of emergency in three western provinces because of rising crime.
Guillermo Lasso tweeted that a curfew will be imposed and thousands of soldiers and police officers will be sent to Guayas, Manabí and Esmeraldas to «enforce peace and order».
Ecuador has seen a sharp increase in murders and gang-related crime.
This is the second time Mr Lasso has used emergency powers to curb violence since he took office last year.
«The streets will feel the weight» of the security forces, Mr Lasso tweeted. He said 4,000 police officers and 5,000 troops from Ecuador’s armed forces would be deployed throughout the three provinces.
He also said the curfew, which would only be enforced in certain areas, would be from 23:00 to 05:00 local time.
«Society will not be subdued,» he wrote. «Our peace will never be sacrificed to criminal gangs.»
President Lasso has blamed drug trafficking for Ecuador’s crime problems.
The Andean country is used as a transit route for cocaine smuggled from neighbouring Peru and Colombia, and the powerful Mexican drug cartels are said to operate through local gangs.
The port city of Guayaquil, in the Guayas province, has been ranked the 50th most violent city in the world by Insight Crime.
The investigative journalism website reports that Ecuador’s homicide rate increased faster than any other country in Latin America or the Caribbean in 2021.
ARGENTINA
Several feminist groups are calling for protests in support of a community of cloistered nuns who have caused shockwaves by accusing the archbishop of a northern Argentine province and other church officials of gender-based psychological and physical violence.
The pairing of feminists and Carmelite nuns is unusual in a country at the forefront of Latin America’s women’s movement where activists are often at odds with the Roman Catholic Church. The support illustrates how rare it is for this type of dispute to make it to the courts.
A court hearing set for Tuesday was called off Monday when the defense said the archbishop of Salta province, Mario Antonio Cargnello, will be participating in a meeting of the Episcopal Conference of Argentina outside Buenos Aires. A future date for the hearing has not been set.
“It’s historic in the feminist struggle for a bishop and other religious leaders to be warned in this way by the courts,” said Tania Kiriaco, legal adviser to the Gema, Gender and Masculinities Foundation, which is one of several groups calling for activists to protest outside the nun’s convent in Salta Tuesday to express their support for them.
In a twist in the case, the Vatican had earlier sent an envoy to look into the complaints by the nuns but Bishop Martín de Elizalde has become a defendant in the case himself. He is accused of consenting to the abuse but not actually carrying it out.
The 18 nuns who are part of the San Bernardo Convent of Discalced Carmelites filed a judicial complaint on April 12 against Cargnello, Elizalde and Father Lucio Ajalla.
The nuns have issued a “desperate cry for help” because “they feel violated as women,” their lawyer Claudia Zerda Lamas said. The nuns, she added, have “consistently felt scared” due to threats from Cargnello over the past few years, including warnings they could be expelled from the congregation.
The nuns also accuse the archbishop of economic harm by supposedly blocking the appointment of a new prioress, which makes it difficult to run the monastery.
Eduardo Romani, a counsel for the archbishop, vehemently denies all accusations against his client and insists there is more to the story than meets the eye. The other two defendants have yet to declare their own counsels before the court.
Cargnello has long had a dispute with the nuns over the “Madonna del Cerro,” a popular figure in Salta who a woman in the province said appeared to her in a vision in the 1990s. Cargnello does not recognize the figure, but the nuns do.
Lawyers for the nuns are hesitant to release many details of the accusations against the defendants amid a gag order imposed by the judge. But they did specify two instances of alleged abuse. One involved threats made by Cargnello during a wake for one of their sisters after he saw an image of the “Madonna del Cerro” close to the coffin.
EL SALVADOR
Human rights groups on Monday criticized the massive arrests of suspected gang members in El Salvador.
The roundups, begun in late March after a spike in homicides, have resulted in the arrest of over 22,000 presumed gang members.
But as of May 2, only 10,885 of them have been ordered held pending trial.
The government has decreed a state of emergency that extends to 15 days the time that someone can be held without charges.
Rights groups have criticized the measures, saying arrests are often arbitrary, based on a person’s appearance or where they live, while Police have also reported being forced to meet arrest quotas.
In late April, El Salvador’s congress voted to grant a request by President Nayib Bukele to extend the anti-gang emergency decree for another 30 days.
The original 30-day state of emergency restricts the right to gather, to be informed of rights and have access to a lawyer.
“A growing amount of evidence indicate that Salvadoran authorities have committed serious human rights violations since the emergency decree was approved” on March 27, according to a report by Human Rights Watch and the Cristosal Foundation.
The two groups interviewed 43 victims, relatives or lawyers and reviewed arrest records.
“We have found evidence of arbitrary detentions of innocent people, who have in some cases been disappeared for short periods of time, as well as alarming cases of deaths while in custody,” said Tamara Taraciuk Broner, the acting Americas director for Human Rights Watch.
The two groups documented two cases where people died in policy custody, and found press reports of three other cases.
And the decree has almost certainly added to dangerous overcrowding in Salvadoran prisons, which were already at 136% of capacity in December.
The government has pledged to build more prisons, but that will take time.
The emergency decree came after a spate of homicides in late March, when gangs were blamed for 62 killings in a single weekend, a level of violence the country of 6.2 million people has not seen in years.
Bukele has also established a raft of other measures, among other things, they lengthened sentences, reduced the age of criminal responsibility to 12.
Gang members held at Salvadoran prisons have been put on reduced food rations, denied mattresses and frog-marched around.
Bukele has unashamedly filled his social media platforms with photos of handcuffed and bloodied gang members.
At the same time, he has lashed out at human rights organizations and international agencies critical of some measures.
For example, Bukele has taken to calling Human Rights Watch, the international advocacy organization, “Homeboys Rights Watch.”
Gangs control swaths of territory through brutality and fear.
They have driven thousands to emigrate to save their own lives or the lives of their children who are forcibly recruited.
BRAZIL
Brazil’s electoral authority said Tuesday that the European Union won’t be monitoring upcoming elections in Latin America’s largest country despite an earlier announcement it had invited the European representatives.
The electoral court said in a statement that “all the necessary conditions were not present to enable a comprehensive electoral observation mission,” which requires the visit of dozens of technicians ahead of the October vote.
In March, the court invited the European Commission to send an exploratory mission to Brazil, to examine the usefulness and feasibility of deploying a full-fledged mission in a hotly anticipated election expected to feature President Jair Bolsonaro and his political nemesis, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
That would have been a first, because The European Commission has not observed elections in Brazil before.
Bolsonaro, who will seek a second term, has repeatedly claimed that the country’s electronic voting system is unreliable, but never provided any evidence.
For many Brazilians he is using the dirty tactics of former US president Donald Trump, before losing the election to Joe Biden.
“In a way, the electoral court issued an international warning, a cry for help,” said Oliver Stuenkel, a political analyst who teaches at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, a university in Sao Paulo.
He said the electoral court backed down under pressure from Brazil’s foreign ministry, which did not approve of the invitation.
In its statement, the court said a smaller and purely “technical” commission from the EU might still be invited in coming months.
Other groups that have previously observed Brazilian elections will be coming back, the court said, including the Organization of American States and the Community of Portuguese Language Countries. It also invited the Carter Center, among others.
HAITI
A diplomat from the Dominican Republic apparently has been kidnapped in neighboring Haiti, prompting Dominican authorities to call for his safe release.
The local newspaper El Dia reported Tuesday that the government also had beefed up its military presence on the border, though officials did not immediately have any comment on that.
The Dominican government said in a weekend statement that Carlos Guillén Tatis, the agriculture counselor at its embassy in Port-au-Prince, apparently was kidnapped on Friday while travelling toward a border crossing.
Ambassador Faruk Miguel Castillo said Guillén Tatis apparently was kidnapped in the Croix-des-Bouquets district of the Haitian capital. That area is a stronghold of the 400 Mawozo gang that kidnapped 17 people from a U.S. missionary group in October and held most of them until December.
Dominican authorities said they had given Haitian police evidence from the diplomat’s mobile telephone that indicated he’d been kidnapped.
In what may have been an unrelated development, Haiti’s National Police announced that one of the top leaders of the 400 Mawozo gang, Germine Joly, was extradited to the United States on Tuesday aboard an FBI plane.
It said he faces U.S. charges involving smuggling, import of weapons of war and kidnapping.
Joly, known as “Yonyon,” had been in a Haitian prison for several years.
The police statement noted that his gang was involved in bloody gang clashes that broke out late last month in the Croix-des-Bouquets area. At least 20 people were killed and thousands fled their homes.
