Latin American Lowdown

  Would you like to receive a weekly email updating you on stories added to this site? If so, Messenger me your email address.  “Guatemala Suspends President-Elect's Party,” Wall Street Journal, August 29, 2023   Guatemala’s electoral court has ratified Bernardo Arévalo as president-elect but suspended his Semilla party, a step that could prevent its legislators from taking their seats in Congress. Arévalo, who campaigned on an anti-corruption platform, was a surprise landslide winner of the recent presidential election but may find his center-left government weakened by the suspension, wrote  Journal reporters Santiago Pérez and Juan Carlos Rivera. “We knew that it was going to be complicated because this system of corruption clings and we threaten it,” said Samuel Pérez, a leader of the Semilla party. He and other members of the party filed an appeal with Guatemala’s top electoral court of the suspension decision by a lower electoral court. “We know that we ar...

  “Dreams and Deadly Seas,” Washington Post, July 31, 2023   The island nation of the Bahamas has stepped up patrols in response to a record increase in migration to and from its shores. It apprehended 3,605 migrants in 2022, most of them Haitians. That’s more than in the three previous calendar years combined. The upsurge in migration fuels an activity with a long history in the Bahamas -- smuggling. First came gold, then rum, then cocaine, but now smugglers are making big money moving people, many of them desperate Haitians, who are fleeing the violence and chaos in their country in hopes of reaching the United States. But many perish because the treacherous combination of the northward Florida current meeting strong winds coming down from the north creates steep waves that capsize overloaded or unseaworthy boats smugglers use to try to reach the U.S. At least 349 people either died or disappeared in the Caribbean last year, according to the U.N., almost twice as many as the...