Amid the hideous internal conflicts in
• The Economic Commission for
• Latin America has the highest murder rate in the world for those aged between 15 and 24 and the probability of a young person being murdered is 30 times higher than in
• About 37 million Latin Americans are illiterate and 20 million of them are in
• After South African cities, those of
• According to an opinion poll,
• The Economist magazine put
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• Malnutrition affects eight out of ten children in
• More than 8,000 children work without pay in sugarcane fields in the
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• The security magazine Jane’s has put
• The former Peruvian President, Alberto Fujimori, now standing trial for human rights abuses, is living a life of luxury in prison with unauthorised visits from, among other, fortune tellers and making phone calls to withdraw money from
• An Amerindian tribe at the point of extinction with hardly 56 surviving members won an agreement with the state that returns their ancestral forest to their control. The Queros now have big plans for the future.
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• More than 12 million trees were replanted in 14,000 hectares in the last two years in
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• President Rafael Correa promised to set up an integrated health system with health centres in strategic locations and helicopters ferrying patients to hospitals.
• The office of the Mothers of the Plaza in
• Following a campaign by the Mothers of the Plaza, a former naval school in Buenos Aires will become the Cultural Centre of Our Children dedicated to the memory of those disappeared by the Argentine military.
• A bacterial infection in famed Argentinean hamburger, when undercooked, is killing mainly children under five and is caused by less stringent safety standards for the domestic market.
• There are close to 20,000 Colombian prisoners in 50 countries, most of them linked to drug trafficking.
• Some 20,000 children died from drinking contaminated water because money earmarked for the supply of potable water was diverted by mayors and governors.
• A million Colombian children are exploited at work, half of them in farms and the rest in the service sector, mainly street trade, as also those sexually exploited by the armed groups.
Chile
• A study of 40 countries has found that students in
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• Five hydroelectric projects planned in the heart of
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• A Chilean collector has found a 14-page manuscript of poems by Pablo Neruda in
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• The Guatemalan President said he would open up the military archives containing records on human rights violations for 1960-1996 in which more than 200,000 were killed or disappeared. He said he first had to ensure the records could not be destroyed before making the announcement.
El Salvador
• Spanish rights groups started legal moves against the former Salvadoran President, Alfredo Cristiani, relating to the murder of six Jesuits and two of their collaborators.
• The Leftist FMLN grouping looks set to win the 2009 presidential elections with TV host Mauricio Funes as its projected candidate, says an academic study which found the Left was handling the election work much better than in the past.
• A dispute over allegedly contaminated water melons that
• The
• The island has the lowest child mortality rate in the developing world, 7/1,000, followed by
• A 9.5 ton steel sculpture by the legendary Brazilian architect Oscar Neimeyer, who turned 100 last year, called the Imperialist Monster, showing a flag-waving Cuban confronting a dragon-like figure, has been installed in
•
• Poor children in the state of
• One child between the ages of 5 and 14 is murdered every 10 hours in
• Seven out of 10 homeless people have work and almost 75% of them are literate and none of them receive any help from the State.
• A Brazilian prison is experimenting with allowing inmates of a maximum security prison look after animals and birds which were rescued from illegal captivity and the results are proving even better than expected. The animals include wild boar, ram, goats and even 3-metre crocodiles as well as peacock, ostrich and exotic bird species.
• President Lula is the most popular Brazilian President since the Nineties, more popular in fact than in his first term.
• There were 3,116 marches, demonstrations or blockades in Mexico between December 2007 and November 2008 in which more than 9.2 million people participated, mostly about local matters but almost a fourth related to political issues and a fifth had to do with labour disputes.
• More than half the rural population in
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• The average Mexican is exposed to 47,450 TV commercials a year, watching 3.2 hours of television a day, with TV the most popular media, followed by radio and the print media. The adolescents watch most television.
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• Among
• The Mexican squad to
• Sixty-nine per cent of Mexicans are overweight, 30% of them being obese. A third of teenagers and 26% of children 5 and 11 are overweight and the country is second only to the
• A member of the Mexican President’s team was caught on camera stealing mobile phones during his tour of the
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