Women, Peace, and Security News archive: Latin America & The Caribbean
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Brazil | Colombia | El Salvador | Guatemala | Nicaragua | Peru | Haiti

2007 Latin America & Caribbean News Archive

Sex scandal in Haiti hits U.N. mission
December 16, 2007 - (Baltimore Sun) Charges of abuse investigated; some Sri Lankan troops expelled. Girls as young as 13 were having sex with U.N. peacekeepers for as little as $1.

Escaping El Salvador's sex traffickers
December 13, 2007 - (BBC) Trafficking around Central America is endemic and often women and children are forced into prostitution. But now decisive international collaboration is beginning to have an impact.

Rape of Girl, 15, Exposes Abuses in Brazil Prison System
December 12, 2007 – (The New York Times) The police jail at Abaetetuba could not be torn down soon enough for Márcia Soares, a lawyer and federal human rights official here. To her, the jail has come to symbolize everything that is wrong with Brazil’s efforts to safeguard women and children from violence.

GUATEMALA: Impunity Fuels Violence Against Women
November 24, 2007 - (IPS) - "I still have the scar," says Valeria Díaz, running her hand over the mark left by her husband when he beat her eight years ago. "But it's nothing compared to what I have here," she adds, pointing to her head, in allusion to the psychological damages left by his abuse. The domestic violence complaint filed by Díaz (not her real name) was one of nearly 140,000 filed in the last seven years in Guatemala.

HAITI: Treatment centre reports rising sexual violence and HIV
November 1, 2007 - (IRIN) Apart from HIV, sexual violence against women in Haiti is another virus that has so far proved resistant to a cure. Activists say they are unsure whether the rise in cases over the last few years is due to violence becoming more widespread, or the result of campaigns calling on women to speak out.

South America Ushers In The Era of La Presidenta - Women Could Soon Lead a Majority of Continent's Population
October 31, 2007 - (Washington Post) Here in the land of machismo, where leaders were long supposed to conform to the standard of the strong-armed military man in epaulettes, a rising wave of leaders is working on a new 21st-century cliche: la presidenta.

Nicaragua: New Abortion Ban Puts Women’s Lives at Risk
President Ortega Should Show Leadership by Protecting Women s Lives
October 2, 2007 - (Human Rights Watch) Nicaragua’s blanket ban on abortion, which criminalizes life-saving medical treatment, has had a devastating impact on women’s health and lives, Human Rights Watch said today in the first-ever report on the human rights consequences of the ban, which was enacted in November 2006.

Guatemalan Survivors Struggle to Pursue Justice
August 27, 2007 – (OneWorld) Twenty-five years after 177 indigenous women and children were massacred at Rio Negro, central Guatemala, the search for justice continues. And, as a new publication from survivors makes clear, the campaign is encountering red tape, a shortage of money and outright intimidation.

Haiti: UN SUPPORTS NATIONWIDE POLICE EFFORT TO RECRUIT MORE FEMALE OFFICERS
August 10, 2007 - (UN News) Thousands of Haitian women this week registered to join their country's police academy in a campaign led by the national police service and backed by the United Nations to encourage the recruitment of more female officers.

Peru: Rapes during the armed conflict regarded as strategy of war
August 1, 2007— (IACHR, Press release) The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) held its 128th period of sessions from July 16 to 27. During the sessions, the IACHR held 25 public hearings in which it received valuable information from the States, civil society organizations and petitioners. It also held 15 working meetings on pending petitions and cases, had a productive meeting with the Ambassadors from the Andean region, and discussed and approved 44 reports. The IACHR values and appreciates the active participation of the States and civil society in the sessions, which strengthens the inter-American system for the protection of human rights.

Officials visit Haiti as part of UN efforts to boost economy, status of women
April 18, 2007 – (UN News Centre) Officials from the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and Division for the Advancement of Women have arrived in Haiti as part of the world body's efforts to help the country as it works to consolidate democracy.

Femicide in the Aftermath of Guatemalan Civil War
April 8, 2007 – (IndibayNews) Ever since I was a little girl I remember my father telling me about Guatemala with an almost mythic reverence. He had traveled to Lake Atitlan in the 1950's as a young man with a group of archeologists to explore the rich waters filled with treasures from the ancient Mayan civilizations. He spoke not only of this beautiful country, rich and green, filled with ancient Mayan cities, but of a culture of people like no other he had ever met; warm and gracious, an intellectual culture that loved life, and loved and valued their fellow man.

Maria Julia Hernandez, 68; rights activist: The Salvadoran worked to expose abuses committed during her country's civil war
April 1, 2007 - (The Times) Maria Julia Hernandez, a celebrated human rights activist who spoke up for victims during El Salvador's protracted civil war and tended to their families in the years that followed, died Friday of a heart attack. She was 68.

Shedding Light on Humanity's Dark Side. The Outspoken Survivor of Slaughter
March 14, 2007 – (The Washington Post) Rufina Amaya, the woman who was often identified as the last, or only, survivor of the massacre at the village of El Mozote, died last week. She was not, strictly speaking, the only survivor of that monstrous event, but she appears to have been the only one who emerged with her wits about her, a clear memory of what took place, and the will to describe how hundreds of people, including her husband and four of her children, were systematically butchered on Dec. 11, 1981, in an impoverished corner of El Salvador.

Haiti kidnap wave accompanied by epidemic of rape
March 8, 2007 - (Reuters) Haiti's violent gangs are increasingly using rape to terrorize hostages and other victims, government officials and health workers say. Sexual assaults of women appear to have become a fixture of the kidnappings for money carried out by gangs in a crime wave that developed after the ouster in February 2004 of former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Leftist party backs Maya Nobel Menchu election bid
February 22, 2007 - (Reuters) Guatemala City: Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchu, a Guatemalan Maya Indian, has chosen a left-leaning party to back her bid to become Latin America's first indigenous woman head-of-state. Menchu, a defender of Mayan victims of Guatemala's bloody 1960-1996 civil war, will run in the September 9 election backed by an alliance of the Together for Guatemala party and Winaq, a newly formed coalition of indigenous leaders.

New Rights, Old Wrongs: Colombia has eased some abortion restrictions—but displaced women still suffer
Winter 2007 – (Ms. Magazine) Last August, Columbia's first legal abortion took place—on a pregnant 11-year-old girl raped by her stepfather— after the Constitutional Court overturned the outright ban on abortion (see Ms., Summer 2006). Despite protests from the Catholic Church, Colombia decriminalized the procedure in cases of rape, incest, when a woman’s life or health is in danger, or when a fetus is expected to die.

Demobilisation of female ex-combatants in Colombia
January 25, 2007 – (ReliefWeb) Among the millions of Colombian IDPs one group is particularly invisible – women and girls associated with illegal armed groups. The current demobilisation process does not adequately address the consequences of the sexual violence they have suffered before, during and after conflict.

COLOMBIA: Women Suffer Abuse Behind the Front Lines
January 23, 2007 - (IPS) "The actors in the Colombian armed conflict, in particular the paramilitary groups and the guerrilla, employ physical, sexual and psychological violence against women as a strategy of war," stated the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). This is one of the conclusions of the IACHR's Rapporteurship on the Rights of Women. The Commission forms part of the Organisation of American States (OAS), which cooperates in Colombia with the non-governmental Corporación Sisma Mujer.

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