| |  | | Hurricane Beryl devastated small islands in the Caribbean last week before making landfall in Texas on Monday. The storm is the first hurricane of the season and the earliest Category 5 storm ever recorded for the Atlantic hurricane season. At least 11 people were killed by the storm across Grenada, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Jamaica, and northern Venezuela. While downgraded to a Category 2 storm as it hit the eastern coast of Mexico on Friday, wind gusts still reached 87 mph when the hurricane made landfall in the southern United States. At least eight people died as a result of the storm in southeast Texas and Louisiana, leaving some three million people without power on Monday. The damages have been most devastating in the Caribbean: two islands in St. Vincent and the Grenadines were almost entirely destroyed, with the island of Mayreu virtually erased from the map. An estimated 98 percent of structures were damaged or destroyed on Grenada’s Carriacou and Petite Martinique islands. Ralph Gonsalves, the prime minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, said almost all 2,500 inhabitants of Union Island lost their homes. "We are seeing what can happen in just a few hours—entire small islands decimated," said Gonsalves, calling along with the leader of Grenada for urgent climate financing to address the worsening impacts of climate change. Gonsalves added that the world’s major polluting nations were either not listening or lacked the political will to confront climate change. An investigation by Reuters published in May found that billions of dollars in climate mitigation funds are being funneled back to rich countries, including the United States, Germany, France, and Japan. The Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF), a regional pool of funds, said this week it would pay $44 million to Grenada, its largest-ever single payout. But Caribbean leaders say the payout is just a fraction of what is needed. Grenada Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell said in a press conference on Tuesday that damages amounted to “hundreds of millions of dollars in losses and hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild.” Jamaica’s Prime Minister Andrew Holness said that damages to road infrastructure alone amounted to an estimated JA$10.25 billion, or about $68 million. Writing for the Fall 2023 NACLA Report, authors Ketaki Zodgekar, Avery Raines, Fayola Jacobs, and Patrick Bigger highlighted the urgency of addressing fiscal precarity in the region’s entwined nexus of sovereign debt and climate change. “The Caribbean isn't vulnerable to supercharged storms just because of geography,” wrote Bigger this week on X in reference to Hurricane Beryl. “Legacies of colonization + slavery intersect with a rigged global economy that keeps Caribbean nations indebted & limits their ability to invest in safer climate futures.” Climate chaos in the Caribbean, fueled by rising temperatures and the profit whims of Global North countries, reveal that “climate and economic justice must go hand in hand, and reparations must be on the agenda,” note Nicole Burrowes and Mónica A. Jiménez, guest editors of NACLA’s “Afterlives of Empire in the Caribbean” issue. A week after Beryl plowed through the Caribbean, Grenadian Prime Minister Mitchell says the relief needs of impacted island residents remain critical: “The cost of living on the front lines of the climate crisis is too high for us to bear alone.” |
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| | NEW PODCAST EPISODE: THE U.S. SHADOW OVER COSTA RICA |
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| The abolition of Costa Rica's military 75 years ago has been highly celebrated at home and abroad. Yet the story is more complicated than the myth lets on. This week, host Michael Fox takes us on a dive into this so-called peaceful and democratic beacon for a region beset by dictatorships and violence. Under the Shadow is an investigative narrative podcast series that walks back in time, telling the story of the past by visiting momentous places in the present. Please consider making a donation to support our work! |
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| | | |  | Indigenous women and midwives perform a Tlalmanalli ceremony in Mexico City in 2021. Traditional and Indigenous midwives in Mexico recently achieved a breakthrough victory, allowing them to issue birth certificates for the almost 90,000 births they attend to every year. The legislation is particularly significant in Indigenous areas where traditional midwives deliver eight out of every 10 newborns. Read more in Becki Marcus's article for NACLA. Image: UN Women / Dzilam Méndez / Flickr |
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PANAMA TO DEPORT DARIEN MIGRANTS — José Raúl Mulino, inaugurated as Panama’s president on July 1, is already making moves to curtail migration across the perilous Darién Gap linking Panama to South America. During his short campaign—Mulino replaced the leading candidate two months before the vote—Mulino promised to shut down migration across the jungle corridor, traversed by more than half a million people in 2023. Immediately after delivering his first address as president, Mulino’s new foreign minister signed a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. government to “allow the closing off of the passing of illegal immigrants through the Darién.” The agreement stipulates that the United States will cover the costs of deporting migrants that cross the border into Panama irregularly. The country’s ministry of public security began installing barbed wire barriers along border crossings before Mulino was inaugurated, a move that Colombian authorities say was not agreed upon bilaterally and poses a humanitarian risk to migrants. Writing for Cenital, Jordana Timerman notes that experts consider it highly improbable that Mulino’s plan to close the Darién Gap “will be able to stem the migrant tide.” History shows that when one pathway is blocked, people seek more dangerous crossings. “The Darien case shows how restriction policies can fail spectacularly,” writes Timerman. -
CPAC IN BRAZIL — Argentine far-right President Javier Milei visited Brazil last weekend for the first time since taking office in December, although he made no effort to meet with his counterpart President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Instead, Milei headlined the CPAC Brazil gathering, an offshoot of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in the United States, standing alongside former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and positioning himself as the vanguard of the far right movement in Latin America. In his address Milei railed against the evils of socialism and said the criminal cases against Bolsonaro—he was indicted last week for money laundering and criminal association, his second indictment since leaving office—amount to political persecution. The CPAC rally was also attended by José Antonio Kast, the former presidential candidate representing the far right in Chile. On Monday, Milei canceled plans to attend the Mercosur trade bloc summit in Paraguay in a second snub to Lula, thus escalating an ongoing feud with Argentina’s biggest trading partner. |
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| - HUMAN COST OF BUKELE’S REPRESSION — The Salvadoran human rights organization Cristosal released a two-year investigation into the deaths of 265 people under President Nayib Bukele’s ongoing state of exception. Seventeen women and at least four children were among the dead, and another 176 children have been orphaned by Bukele’s extreme security measures, instituted in March 2022. Photographic evidence revealed that the bodies of deceased individuals were “bruised and had lacerations, dislocations, breaks, and other serious injuries.” The investigation also outlines the growing human and societal cost of the ongoing state of exception: the multiple roles women are forced to assume when male relatives are detained, women and girls who have suffered sexual abuse at the hands of security forces, and “the psychological and economic distress of children with incarcerated parents has led to the need to abandon their studies, violating their right to education.” Cristosal estimates that under the state of exception the government has detained the primary caregivers of more than 62,000 children under the age of 15. At least 21 human rights defenders have also been arbitrarily detained. See the full report in Spanish.
- RIGHTS OF RIVER RULING ECUADOR — In a ruling activists are calling “historic,” a court in Ecuador ruled that the contamination of the Machángara River, which runs through the capital of Quito, violates the rights of the river. The ruling is based on an article of the constitution that recognizes the rights of nature, and requires the government to come up with a plan to clean the polluted waterway. Quito’s city government has appealed the decision. The Machángara River starts in the Andes mountains and is heavily contaminated by people dumping sewage and industrial waste into the river as it passes through Quito, making it difficult for aquatic life to survive and thrive. The complaint was presented by social movements and by the Kitu Kara people. “The degradation of the Machángara River not only contributes to environmental insecurity, but also directly impacts the quality of life of citizens,” wrote the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature in a statement. “The Machángara River has lost its identity, it is no longer a symbol of pride that accompanied the history of the city and formed part of the life of its inhabitants.”
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NEW OIL FRONTIERS — The Guardian reports that at least 16 of the 33 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean are involved in major new oil and gas exploitation projects, revealing that the region is betting on hydrocarbons as a source of wealth and economic growth despite global efforts to transition away from fossil fuels. Brazil and Guyana are expected to account for two of the three largest increases in fossil fuel exports by 2035, playing a key role in shifting the geopolitics of oil and gas away from OPEC countries. In Argentina, President Javier Milei’s new investment bill, now being debated in the lower house of Congress, is designed to attract billions of dollars in the oil and gas industry and open the exploitation of vast new oilfields. “Like Brazil, Guyana, Suriname, Venezuela, Ecuador, Mexico, and some Caribbean nations,” reports Sylvia Colombo for The Guardian, “Argentina, under President Javier Milei’s climate crisis-denying administration, is gambling that its next decades’ economic and social development will come from fossil fuels and minerals.” Check out our recent reporting in partnership with Earthworks for more on oil and gas contamination and expansion in Brazil and Argentina. |
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| | | North American Congress on Latin America
53 Washington Sq South, Fl. 4W | New York, New York 10012
(212) 992-6965 | info@nacla.org |
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