Sorted by date Results 1 - 25 of 33
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Once nearly impenetrable for migrants heading north from Latin America, the jungle between Colombia and Panama this year became a speedy but still treacherous highway for hundreds of thousands of people from around the world. Driven by economic crises, government repression and violence, migrants from China to Haiti decided to risk three days of deep mud, rushing rivers and bandits. Enterprising locals offered guides and porters, set up campsites and sold supplies to migrants, using color-coded wristbands to track who had p...
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Six of the 43 college students "disappeared" in 2014 were allegedly kept alive in a warehouse for days then turned over to the local army commander who ordered them killed, the Mexican government official leading a Truth Commission said Friday. Interior Undersecretary Alejandro Encinas made the shocking revelation directly tying the military to one of Mexico's worst human rights scandals, and it came with little fanfare as he made a lengthy defense of the commission's report released a week earlier. Last week, despite d...
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (AP) — Police arrested former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández at his home on Tuesday, following a request by the United States government for his extradition on drug trafficking and weapons charges. The arrest came less than three weeks after Hernández left office and followed years of allegations by U.S. prosecutors of his alleged links to drug traffickers. Hernández exited his home flanked by police, shackled at the wrists and ankles, and wearing a bulletproof jacket. He got into a police vehicle and was driv...
All the former hostages from a U.S.-based missionary group kidnapped in Haiti have been flown out of the country after a two-month ordeal, the leader of their Ohio-based missions organization said Friday, as he also extended an offer of forgiveness to their captors. David Troyer, general director of Christian Aid Ministries, said in a video statement that a U.S.-flagged plane left the Caribbean nation Thursday afternoon carrying the last 12 kidnapped missionaries, hours after they were freed earlier in the day. "Everyone including the...
LES CAYES, Haiti (AP) — The home of clothing merchant Felix Pierre Genel collapsed before he could flee outside as a powerful earthquake shook southwestern Haiti. He was dug out of the rubble that same day with a broken arm and was among the somewhat fortunate ones who promptly received medical care at a local hospital. But even so, he could not escape amputation, a common consequence of the calamity. Doctors at first told the 36-year-old they would try to save his right arm. He had surgery to place rods in to stabilize the broken bone. Then c...
LES CAYES, Haiti (AP) — Orderlies pushed Jertha Ylet's bed from the center of the hospital ward to one side so Dr. Michelet Paurus could plug in his electric saw. She was silent as the doctor cut off her plaster cast in measured strokes. Today she would have to leave the hospital, the doctor said. Ylet had resisted until the cast came off. She'd been at Les Cayes' General Hospital since being brought there Aug. 14, unconscious and with her leg crushed, after a 7.2-magnitude earthquake destroyed her house, killing her father and two other r...
MEXICO CITY (AP) — In a camp at the U.S.-Mexico border, some asylum seekers were told by officials that the U.S. government may reopen their cases and they would eventually be able to enter the U.S. to wait out the asylum process. The new opening for people previously denied came as Mexican authorities worked to close the improvised camp along the banks of the Rio Grande, across the border from Brownsville, Texas, that has housed thousands of asylum seekers over the more than two years it existed. Late Friday night, an official with Mexico's F...
MEXICO CITY (AP) — In a camp at the U.S.-Mexico border, some asylum seekers were told by officials that the U.S. government may reopen their cases and they would eventually be able to enter the U.S. to wait out the asylum process. The new opening for people previously denied came as Mexican authorities worked to close the improvised camp along the banks of the Rio Grande, across from Brownsville, Texas, that has housed thousands of asylum seekers over the more than two years it existed. Late Friday night, an official with Mexico's Foreign A...
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — The coronavirus pandemic accelerated across Latin America on Friday, bringing a surge of new infections and deaths, even as curves flattened and reopening was underway in much of Europe, Asia and the United States. The region's two largest nations — Mexico and Brazil — reported record counts of new cases and deaths almost daily this week, fueling criticism of their presidents, who have slow-walked shutdowns in attempts to limit economic damage. Brazil reported more than 20,000 deaths and 300,000 confirmed cases, makin...
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (AP) — After a young Texan went on a shooting rampage that appeared to target Hispanics at a Walmart in El Paso, killing 22 people, including eight Mexican citizens, there were no protests on the other side of the Rio Grande in neighboring Ciudad Juarez, only a small vigil honoring all the dead. Community leaders didn't talk of boycotting El Paso, a city that depends heavily on Mexican shoppers. On the contrary, in the following days Mexicans have packed the international bridges going to jobs, stores and schools like a...
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico's Senate voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to ratify a new free trade agreement with the United States and Canada, making it the first of the three countries to gain legislative approval. Mexico's upper chamber voted 114 to four with three abstentions in favor of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA. It will replace the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, which U.S. President Donald Trump had threatened to withdraw the United States from if Washington did not get a better deal. Mexican President A...
TIJUANA, Mexico (AP) — Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said he was reluctantly prepared to slap retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods if negotiators in Washington had failed to strike a deal, addressing a boisterous celebratory rally Saturday in the border city of Tijuana. The president's comments came shortly after his foreign minister and chief negotiator, Marcelo Ebrard, told the rally the country had emerged from the high-stakes talks that avoided U.S. tariffs on Mexico's exports with its "dignity intact." López Obrador said that...
MEXICO CITY (AP) — As Washington and Mexico City both took victory laps Saturday over a deal that headed off threatened tariffs on Mexican imports, it remained to be seen how effective it may be and migration experts raised concerns over what it could mean for people fleeing poverty and violence in Central America. Other than a vague reiteration of a joint commitment to promote development, security and growth in Central America, the agreement focuses almost exclusively on enforcement and says little about the root causes driving the surge i...
TIJUANA, Mexico (AP) — Before dawn each morning, migrants slip away from a Tijuana shelter within sight of the U.S. border to head to jobs across this sprawling city. Moving solo or in pairs, they are easily recognized by their determined strides as people with someplace to be. By sunrise, another crowd has gathered at a corner near the shelter to wait for job offers. On a recent morning, a dozen migrants scrambled into the bed of a Dodge pickup, their enthusiasm bringing a chuckle from the driver. The migrants didn't even know where they w...
TIJUANA, Mexico (AP) — Before dawn each morning, migrants slip away from a Tijuana shelter within sight of the U.S. border to head to jobs across this sprawling city. Moving solo or in pairs, they are easily recognized by their determined strides as people with someplace to be. By sunrise, another crowd has gathered at a corner near the shelter to wait for job offers. On a recent morning, a dozen migrants scrambled into the bed of a Dodge pickup, their enthusiasm bringing a chuckle from the driver. The migrants didn't even know where they w...
TIJUANA, Mexico (AP) — Aid workers and humanitarian organizations expressed concerns Thursday about unsanitary conditions at the sports complex in Tijuana where more than 6,000 Central American migrants are packed into a space adequate for half that many people and where lice infestations and respiratory infections are rampant. As a chill rain fell, the dust that coated everyone and everything in the open-air stadium turned to mud Thursday, making the already miserable conditions worse. On one side of the complex, a mud pit grew where people t...
TIJUANA, Mexico (AP) — As Mexico wrestles with what to do with more than 5,000 Central American migrants camped out at a sports complex in the border city of Tijuana, President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's government signaled Tuesday that it would be willing to house the migrants on Mexican soil while they apply for asylum in the United States — a key demand of U.S. President Donald Trump. Mexico's new foreign minister also called on the Trump administration to contribute to development projects to help create jobs in Central America to...
TIJUANA, Mexico (AP) — U.S. border agents fired tear gas on hundreds of migrants protesting near the border with Mexico on Sunday after some of them attempted to get through the fencing and wire separating the two countries, and American authorities shut down border crossings from the city where thousands are waiting to apply for asylum. The situation devolved after the group began a peaceful march to appeal for the U.S. to speed processing of asylum claims for Central American migrants marooned in Tijuana. Mexican police had kept them from w...
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Thousands of Central American migrants set up tents and strung tarps at a stadium in the central Mexican city of Queretaro, where they arrived Saturday afternoon after departing the country's capital at dawn on their long trek to the U.S. border. Their day began with dedicated Mexico City metro trains whisking them to the outskirts of the capital. At the end of the metro line, migrants began making their way to a main highway to resume walking and hitching rides with the tacit approval of Mexican officials. Near a major t...
MEXICO CITY (AP) — About 750 Central American migrants headed out of Mexico City on Friday to embark on the longest and most dangerous leg of their journey to the U.S. border, while thousands more were waiting one more day at a massive improvised shelter. The group that got a head start bundled their few possessions and started off, taking a subway to the north part of the city and then hiking down an expressway with a police escort. For many, it was the first time they had ever been in a metro system, and they had little knowledge of the c...
MEXICO CITY (AP) — The migrants in a caravan used by President Donald Trump as a campaign issue were almost universally unaware of the results of the U.S. midterm elections. The Central Americans were more concerned with the dangers of northern Mexico as they struggled to reach the U.S. border, still hundreds of miles away, than with who controls the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. Kenia Johana Hernandez, a 26-year Honduran farmworker, left her country with her 2-year-old daughter because she couldn't afford child care or s...
TRANCAS VIEJAS, Mexico (AP) — On a day when a migrant caravan of several thousand was still crawling through far southern Mexico, hundreds of young men were walking swiftly between train rides more than 200 miles to the north. Some of them had left Honduras the same day as those in the caravan. One had left a week later. The difference: They were moving along one of the traditional Central American migrant trails, riding the freight trains known as La Bestia, or "the beast," that have been speeding — and maiming — migrants on their journ...
MEXICO CITY (AP) — A United Nations report released Wednesday on four months of unrest in Nicaragua describes a comprehensive effort of repression by the government that extends from the streets to the courts. The report by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights calls on the government of President Daniel Ortega to immediately halt the persecution of protesters and disarm the masked civilians who have been responsible for many of the killings and arbitrary detentions. More than 300 people have been killed in violence since m...
MANAGUA, Nicaragua (AP) — The 21-year-old university student, nearly two months pregnant, had hoped to escape Nicaragua with her boyfriend, but a police officer on a motorcycle blocked their path as they were getting into taxis with other students to go to a safe house. Five police trucks loaded with masked and armed men dressed in civilian garb surrounded them. Uniformed officers began to search the students' backpacks. One pulled out a blue-and-white Nicaraguan flag. "These are the terrorists who killed our fellow police," the officer s...
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Killings of land and environmental activists rose in 2017 as Mexico and the Philippines registered worrying increases in such murders and Brazil saw the most ever registered in a single country, a watchdog group said Tuesday. At least 207 people who were protecting land and resources from business interests were slain last year, up from 201 the year before, according to Global Witness. That makes 2017 the deadliest year since the group began formally recording such deaths in 2015. The group said that its figures were almost c...
