🗒️⚖️ The Blind Spot in the Justice System
In.Visibles Weekly Newsletter 23 SPA
Hello!
On 7 June 2018, Camila Solange Medrano, 30, was arrested outside a shop in the city of Buenos Aires. She was accused of having participated in drug trafficking with her sister-in-law, with whom she lived.
A court sentenced her to six years' imprisonment for "possession of narcotics for the purpose of commercialisation". She spent five years under house arrest, unable to care for her daughters or help her mother, who was battling terminal cancer. She was finally released after she and her lawyer managed to argue that she had been forced to participate in the crime.
Her story illustrates the experience of hundreds of thousands of women in Argentina and Latin America.
"Prosecutors and judges only care about what happened and don't ask why it happened. I think someone who was not abused, who was not mistreated, would rarely do something like that (drug trafficking). I wouldn't do it now. I was recruited when I was very young and trained for it," Camila said.
You can read the full story, written by Camila Grigera Naón, who is part of Argentina's Federal Network of Judicial Journalism, published in In.Visibles, here.
Also, a roundup of the week's top stories to understand the impact of violence and organised crime in Latin America.
Thanks for reading and see you next week!
Josefina
1. 🇭🇹🚨 Peacekeeping Force. The United States and Ecuador on Friday circulated a proposal at the United Nations for the creation of a new peacekeeping force to replace the Kenyan police-led international mission seeking to reclaim territory controlled by violent gangs in Haiti, AP reported. "The mission itself needs to be renewed, that's what we're working on right now. But we also want something that's reliable, that's sustainable and we'll look at every option to do that; a U.N. peacekeeping mission is one option," said U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who visited the country on Thursday. Blinken, who met with Prime Minister Garry Conille, with whom he discussed progress around the development of an electoral council to organise general elections next year, said the situation in Haiti is "very challenging" but "promising".
2. 🇭🇳🎥 The Video. Honduran President Xiomara Castro is at the centre of a new scandal after the release of a video that allegedly links her government to drug traffickers. The video, released by InSight Crime on Tuesday, shows her brother-in-law, Carlos Zelaya, meeting with a group of powerful drug traffickers in 2013, who offered him money for a political campaign. That year, Castro tried to become president but failed. When she finally won the presidency in 2022, Castro promised to fight drug trafficking and corruption. On Tuesday, the president rejected the accusations and denounced a plan to "stage a coup d'état" against her government. InSight Crime investigators said the revelation raises questions about the influence of drug traffickers in the upper echelons of power in the current administration, which took over from former president Juan Orlando Hernández, who has been sentenced in the United States to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking. The explosive revelation came in the same week that President Castro cancelled Honduras' extradition treaty with the United States, which is considered a key instrument in the fight against drug trafficking in the Central American country. The opposition accused her of trying to protect her close entourage from facing justice.
3. 🇻🇪🗳️ Arrest warrant. On Monday, a Venezuelan judge issued an arrest warrant for Edmundo González Urrutia, who the opposition, and many international leaders, defined as the winner of the 28 July general election, BBC Mundo reported. María Corina Machado, an opposition leader who was not allowed to run in the election, said Nicolás Maduro's government has "lost all sense of reality". The United States, the European Union and others condemned the decision. Meanwhile, Argentina, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Paraguay, Peru, the Dominican Republic and Uruguay said in a statement that it "constitutes political persecution".
4. 🇲🇽⚖️ Reforma. The controversy and protests surrounding the judicial reform promoted by Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) in Mexico have failed to stop the project, which on Wednesday was approved in the Chamber of Deputies, where MORENA, the party of AMLO and president-elect Claudia Sheinbaum, has a majority. The reform, described as the most profound in the last three decades, will be debated in the coming days in the Senate. One of the most controversial aspects is the proposed election of judges through elections where each branch would present candidates. Opponents say this and other measures give the executive branch too much control over the judiciary, affecting its independence.
5. 🇸🇻🏛️ New Report. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organisation of American States denounced, in a new report, the impact of the state of emergency that has been in force in El Salvador since March 2022 and suspended basic rights. The report analyses the practices carried out in El Salvador within the framework of the international norms that the country has committed to respect and urges the state to repeal the state of emergency. It is the latest in a series of reports and complaints by national and international human rights organisations.
ALSO
Some of our other favourite reads this week
🇦🇷 With no homicides registered in the last month, a precarious calm tinges the city of Rosario (Ayelén Berdiñas, ElDiarioAR).
🇨🇴 Cocaine trafficking in the rugged Micay Canyon threatens Colombia's peace efforts (Marko Álvarez, AP)
🇨🇴 People starving to death in the prison that was once part of Pablo Escobar's opulent hacienda (Valentina Parada Lugo, El País)
🇻🇪 Maracaibo, the Venezuelan city hardest hit by the mass exodus (Frances Roble and Marian Carrasquero, NYT)
🌎 Kevin Casas-Zamora, democracy expert: "The presence of organised crime is the greatest risk to democracy in Latin America" (Juan Estebán Lewin, El País).