Argentina's Past That Has Not Yet Passed

Fifty-two year-old Argentine rights activist Victor Oscar Martinez re-appeared late Wednesday after disappearing three days prior. After leaving his home in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Palermo on Monday, Martinez’s lawyer said Thursday that her client was abducted, heavily sedated, and held in an unidentified location. Martinez says his captors threatened him and his family, saying he should leave the country and not testify in a new human rights investigation against a former military official he has long said was involved in the death of Bishop Carlos Horacio Ponce de León over thirty years ago.

On July 11, 1977, Martínez was traveling with the Bishop to the deliver evidence of military human rights crimes to the Vatican’s embassy in Buenos Aires when the car the two were traveling in mysteriously crashed. Martínez, then just 19, survived the accident but says he was later detained and tortured by the military who sought information about the work being carried out by Bishop Ponce de Leon.

The New York Times says a new inquiry into the Bishop’s death is in the process of being reopened and Martinez was expected to be called to testify once again.

Argentina’s Página 12 has the first interview with Martinez since being released.

Today’s bullet points:

· In Honduras, Grupo Dinant, a biofuels company controlled by Honduran oligarch Miguel Facussé, may be folding after recently losing a $20 million loan from a German development bank – this according to Dinant’s treasurer Roger Pineda who spoke with Bloomberg earlier in the week. The German environmental and rights groups CDM Watch and Food First Information and Action Network were among those lobbying the German Bank to halt its loan to Facussé, saying Dinant may not hold legal claims to its land and is suspected of being involved in the killings of peasant activists in the Lower Aguan Valley. Pineda calls those claims blackmail and says the jobs of as many of 8,000 are now in jeopardy. Last week Grupo Dinant also lost the backing of the EDF Trading – a French carbon trading company – on a biogas project in the Aguán Valley. Rights abuse claims are suspected of influencing that decision as well. More from Honduras Culture and Politics.

· McClatchy has the latest story on the growing presence of drug gangs in Central America, reporting from San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Mexico’s Proceso looks at the presence of Mexican drug cartels in Costa Rica. The Washington Post reports on the now deserted Highway 101, aka the “Highway of Death,” in Tamaulipas near which 145 bodies have been found in recent weeks. Reuters says the body count at a new mass grave in the state of Durango has risen to 37. And Moises Naím, at the Huffington Post, asks, who is responsible for “losing” Mexico? Decades of tolerance for traffickers by the Mexican government? The Calderón government’s militarization of the drug wars in 2006? The drug market in the US? Naím argues all of these things are to blame. His conclusion: that the problem start being treated as a national one, rather than one that can be attributed to any particular leader or party, past or present.

· Uruguay’s lower chamber is expected to approve new legislation that will allow personal cultivation and consumption of small amounts of marijuana next week. Uruguay’s El País reports.

· The US Treasury Dept. has finally published new Cuba travel rules announced by the Obama administration in January. Details from the Miami Herald.

· Venezuelanalysis reports on protests by rural activists in Venezuela demanding an investigation into the killing of two peasant activists a week and a half ago in the state of Barinas.

· BBC with the latest look at growing divisions between Rafael Correa and indigenous groups in Ecuador

· And Raúl Zibechi, at the Americas Program, has an extraordinary look at major worker protests that erupted in Brazil’s Amazon last month. Thousands of workers have been brought into formerly isolated regions of the Amazon to implement the government’s infrastructure construction agenda – most notably dam building. Zibechi focuses on the plan to construct four dams on the Madeira River, two of which have already begun along the Bolivian border. Some 20,000 workers are now working on those two projects alone, often in less than decent conditions.