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Politics and the Environment in Nicaragua and Panamá
With Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s recent launch of Ecological Battalions, the green that has come to typify military wear now stretches beyond the realm of the army’s attire and into that of their mission. Ecological Battalions, composed of 580 army men and women, have been entrusted with the gargantuan task of “protecting the natural resources ...
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Debating Decriminalizing Drugs
Earlier this month, Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina announced that he would propose to his counterparts in Central America and the United States “analyzing the possibility” of decriminalizing drug commerce as a strategy for tackling the drug wars, fueling the fire of an important debate that has been largely absent from the political sphere. This ...
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Perez Molina’s First Month
Throughout the Guatemalan general election campaign last year, I wrote a number of opinion pieces on the potential threat that an Otto Perez Molina presidency posed to the already fragile state of human rights and the rule of law in Guatemala. Perez Molina, who was a military officer during the reign of military dictator Efrain Rios ...
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The Ngäbe-Buglé Protest and Democracy in Panamá: The Government’s Reaction
This is the first post in a two-part series covering the Ngäbe-BuglĂ© protest. The first addresses the government’s reaction to the protest, and the second the Ngäbe-BuglĂ©’s use of disruptive and violent tactics.    On February 7, over a week after members of the Ngäbe-BuglĂ© indigenous tribe from Panamá took to the streets to ...