Brazil Launches "Brazil Without Poverty" Initiative

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff officially launched a new anti-poverty program Thursday aimed at eradicating extreme poverty in Brazil over the next three years. The “Brazil without Poverty” initiative will expand health, education, job training, and cash-transfer programs to the over 16 million Brazilians still living in conditions of so-called “misery.” The plan also seeks to help small farmers by setting food prices and will increase the flow of development aid to Brazil’s most historically marginalized regions through the creation of new basic infrastructure projects (See a May report from the Washington Post).

AP notes that between 2000 and 2010 the country’s poorest 50 percent saw their income increase by 68 percent. The income of the wealthiest 10 percent of the nation saw its income by 10 percent over that same period, marking an important shift against the country’s notorious problem of income inequality. Moreover, over 20 million Brazilians were lifted out of poverty and 36 million moved into the country’s middle class over that period. But Dilma insisted the government still had more to work to do.

“Fighting poverty is a government duty and a task for all Brazilians,” she said during her Thursday roll-out of “Brazil without Poverty.” “We cannot forget that the most challenging crisis, the biggest and most distressing problem in this country, is chronic poverty.”

According to AFP, Social Development Minister Tereza Campello says the “Brazil Without Poverty” program plans to budget around $12.5 billion dollars per year and will extend above and beyond the country’s widely-acclaimed Bolsa Familia cash-transfer initiative. “A country that has grown like Brazil can't be content with just having a big social program like Bolsa Familia, Social Development Minister Tereza Campello tells BBC Brasil.

More details in the coming weeks.

Today’s bullet points:

· In what is turning into a crisis in the Brazilian Amazon, yet another rural land activist was found murdered Thursday. As AP reports, the latest killing comes just days after Brazilian officials discussed how they might halt deadly disputes over logging in the region. The details of the latest killing are particularly gruesome. The police chief in the southeastern Pará town where the killing took place says two witnesses to the shooting tried to take the wounded activist to a hospital, but were pulled over on their way by gunmen who got out of their vehicle to “finish off the victim,” execution-style. The group Catholic Land Pastoral, a monitor of threats against land activists in the Amazon, has contended gunmen are frequently hired by loggers and ranchers to silence protests over logging and land rights issues in the region. Thursday’s murder follows the killing of three land activists and one witness to those killings last week in the same part of Pará state. Brazilian Justice Minister Jose Eduardo Cardozo said this week the armed forces, national guard, federal police and highway police will aid state police departments in their effort to stop the recent spate of killings, although details about what that cooperation might look like have not yet emerged.

· Amnesty International is the latest to issue a statement critical of the Brazilian government’s plans to move forward with a massive dam project on the Amazon basin’s Xingu River. On Wednesday Brazil’s environmental agency approved the construction of the Belo Monte dam, despite the on-going protest of environmental activists, indigenous groups, and human rights organizations, among them the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

· IPS offers a relatively optimistic look at the impact of Rio de Janeiro’s community policing program – a shift away from what the news agency calls a “war on drugs” model for taking on violence and trafficking. Meanwhile Insight republishes journalist Julia Michael’s more critical examination of the second-phase of the community policing program in Rio, which is supposed to bring new social investment to so-called “pacified communities.” The report comes from an interview this week in Brazil’s O Globo with state public safety secretary José Mariano Beltrame who says such investment has been too slow in its disbursement.

· As a high commission of former global leader’s released their damning assessment of the global war on drugs, calling it a “clear failure,” new figures from the epicenter of the drug wars – Mexico – show 70% of Mexicans in opposition to one of the commission’s principal recommendations: legalization. Additionally, 82% of those polled in the Encuesta Nacional sobre la Percepción de Seguridad Ciudadana en México, carried out by Mitofsky, say public security has worsened over the last two years while 71% say they approve of the decision to increase the presence of the military to take on problems of public security. Mexico’s Proceso reports.

· HRW’s Nik Steinberg, author of an excellent recent piece in The Nation on the drug wars in Monterrey, talks with WNYC’s Leonard Lopate about drugs, violence, and human rights abuses in what has long been considered one of Mexico’s most prosperous cities.

· AP says charges have been filed by Mexico’s Attorney General’s office against Tamaulipas Zeta cell leader Martin Estrada Luna – a man suspected of being involved in the killing of hundreds of individuals whose bodies have been pulled from mass graves in the northern Mexico state in recent months. The charges include kidnapping, drug trafficking, involvement in organized crime, and illegal possession of firearms but do not yet include murder of any of the individuals recovered from the San Fernando graves. Born in Mexico, Estrada grew up in the US and was only deported back to his home country in 2009.

· Ahead of Sunday’s presidential poll in Peru, the Wall Street Journal has a final look at the race between Ollanta Humala and Fujimori, as well as the vocal role author Mario Vargas Llosa has played during the election campaign. To those who have followed MVL’s thoughts on the economy over the last two decades, perhaps one of the most interesting splits this year’s election season has caused has been between the Nobel Prize winner (and his son, Alvaro), both unlikely Humala backers, and their (former?) friend and colleague, neoliberal economist Hernando de Soto. De Soto has come out in support of Keiko Fujimori. On Washington’s view of Sunday’s election, CEPR’s Mark Weisbrot comments in The Guardian on US government’s strong dislike of Humala. Bloomberg has final Ipsos/Apoyo poll numbers before Sunday which put Fujimori at 51.1% and Humala at 48.9%.

· In Venezuela, representatives from nine Latin American countries gathered yesterday to discuss the creation of a new continental news agency that might unite already existing state-backed wire services from around the region. TeleSur highlights the new umbrella body, apparently to be called the Unión Latinoamericana de Agencias de Noticias (ULAN).

· El Universal and TeleSur report on Lula da Silva’s visit with Hugo Chavez in Caracas yesterday – the ex-Brazilian president’s first since leaving office in January. AP highlights Chavez’s statements before that meeting re: his decision to continue handing over to Colombia FARC rebels picked up in Venezuelan territory. Next week Chavez heads south to Brasilia for his first meeting with Dilma Rousseff.

· And finally Mexico’s Central Banker Agustín Carstens was in Brazil this week, the second candidate for the IMF’s managing director opening to visit the country less than a week. (French Finance Minister Christine Lagard paid Brazil a lobbying visit earlier in the week). So far only Uruguay has publicly endorsed the Mexican economist in his bid break Europe’s monopoly atop the Fund. The Wall Street Journal reports, noting, among other things, that Carstens is a Chicago Cubs fan.

Former Leaders Call for Paradigm Shift in Global Drug Policy

A group of former world leaders says current global anti-drug policies have “clearly failed” in their objective to curtail both supply and consumption of illegal drugs. In a 24-page report, available here and set to be officially unveiled later today in New York, the Global Commission on Drug Policy recommends new steps be taken toward the legalization of certain drugs while also demanding an end to the “criminalization, marginalization and stigmatization of people who use drugs but do no harm to others.”

In addition, the commission calls on governments around the world to be more willing to experiment with alternative drug policies and legislation.

The BBC notes that the report is particularly critical of the US, saying the country must abandon anti-crime approaches to drug policy and adopt strategies rooted in health treatment and human rights.

“We hope this country (the US) at least starts to think there are alternatives,” says Cesar Gaviria, adding that the report’s authors do not believe US polices have been evolving in a way that is “compatible with our (countries’) long-term interests.” Gaviria says countries like Mexico and Colombia have an important role to play in pushing for such a discussion to begin in the US.

Responding to the report, the office of US drug czar Gil Kerlikowske rejected those claims, as well as many of the commission’s recommendations about legalization. “Making drugs more available - as this report suggests - will make it harder to keep our communities healthy and safe,” the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy said in statement released Wednesday.

Among the 19-person commission are former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo, Brazil's ex-President Fernando Henrique Cardoso and former Colombian President Cesar Gaviria. The group also includes former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, current Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, Latin American writers Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa, the EU's former foreign policy chief Javier Solana, and former US secretary of state George Schultz.

The Global Commission has been co-funded by Richard Branson of Virgin Group Ltd., George Soros's Open Society Foundation, the Instituto Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and the Centro Edelstein de Pesquisas Sociais in Brazil. It’s a continuation of the Latin American Commission on Drugs and published its report on drug policy in Latin America in 2009.

The Guardian notes that the release of the Global Commission’s report is accompanied in the UK today by an open letter from a variety of legal experts, academics, artists, performers, and politicians to PM David Cameron, urging Britain to undertake a “swift and transparent” review of its current drugs policies. The signatories call for new drug decriminalization policies similar to those implemented in Portugal in 2001. The letter comes on the 40th anniversary of Britain’s 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act.

Today’s bullet points:

· In a 32-1 vote in Washington, the OAS voted to restore Honduras to the inter-American organization Wednesday. The Miami Herald reports. Ecuador was the only country to vote against restoration at the present moment. With far-right opinions about Zelaya’s return over the weekend – a move which opened the door to Wednesday’s vote -- Roger Noriega and José Cardenas obsess over Hugo Chavez at Fox News and Foreign Policy, respectively. At Upside Down World, meanwhile, Chuck Kaufman of the Alliance for Global Justice writes on last week’s congressional briefing organized by the Americas Forum and entitled “How 21st Century Socialism Subverts Democracy in Latin America” – perhaps a sign of things to come, in Honduras or elsewhere, from the Latin Americanist Right.

· The Nation, in partnership with Haiti Liberté, has begun releasing stories from the Haiti archive of diplomatic cables obtained by Wikileaks. Dan Coughlin and Kim Ives report yesterday on the ultimately unsuccessful efforts of Washington and US petroleum companies to prevent then-President Rene Preval from joining Venezuela’s regional discount oil initiative, PetroCaribe. The full story is worth reading at The Nation.

· In Peru where the influence of Hugo Chavez has been much-written about in recent months, Jo-Marie Burt and Coletta Youngers profile left-leaning nationalist candidate, Ollanta Humala (See their profile of Keiko Fujimori here). The two authors highlight the coalition of intellectuals and former political figures who have lined up behind Humala, many out of fear over the possible return of fujimorismo. Last week former president Alejandro Toledo was the latest to come out publicly for Humala. Many figures in the country’s human rights community have made similar pronouncements. Perhaps the most unlikely Humala supporter has, of course, been Nobel Prize winning author Mario Vargas Llosa, who announced this week he will no longer allow Peru's El Comercio to reprint his biweekly column, calling the conservative paper “a propaganda machine” for Keiko Fujimori. El Comercio responds here. AFP, meanwhile, reports on a decision by indigenous activists in Peru’s Puno region to halt anti-mining protests against a Canadian silver company until after Sunday’s vote. The region, says the news agency, is considered to be a Humala stronghold.

· Lula da Silva is on a regional tour this week. After visits to Nicaragua, Panama, and the Bahamas, the former Brazilian president is meeting with Raul Castro today in Cuba before going on to Caracas. For his part, Hugo Chavez re-appeared in public Tuesday after being down for weeks with a bum knee. The Venezuelan president said he will be heading to Brasilia for his first official meeting with Dilma Rousseff on June 6 before going on to Ecuador and Cuba.

· The New York Times says final approval has been granted by Brazil’s top environmental agency for the construction of the huge Belo Monte hydroelectric dam. The Inter-American Commission for Human Rights (IACHR) has been among the dam’s critics. In mid-April Brazil withdrew the candidacy of the former Human Rights Minister Paulo Vannuchi for a seat on the IACHR because of the inter-American body’s request that the project be halted.

· CNN says a Spanish Court has approved the extradition of former Guatemalan interior minister Carlos Vielmann back to Guatemala to face murder charges stemming from incidents at two prisons in the country in 2005 and 2006. Vielmann will likely appeal the extradition ruling.

· Reuters with a long report on what drug wars in Monterrey could presage for the rest of Mexico.

· AP on the arrest of a top FARC commander, Guillermo Torres, alias "Julian Conrado," by Venezuelan authorities this week.

· Insight on the discovery of some 200 FARC “uniforms” in the possession of on-duty members of the Ecuadorean military. Three soldiers have been arrested.

· The Guardian says a Chilean judge will examine claims that agents of Augusto Pinochet injected poison into Neruda's stomach while he was treated in Santiago's Santa Maria clinic for prostate cancer less than two weeks after the Sept 11, 1973 coup against Salvador Allende. Chile's Communist Party called for the investigation after the poet's former driver said agents of the dictator injected the 69-year-old on the day he died.

· El Faro on Salvadoran Mauricio Funes’s proposal to implement a system of obligatory military service for “at risk” youth in his country.

· Colombia’s El Tiempo on the final approval of the Ley de Victimas. The bill now heads to the president’s desk for signing.

· Human Rights Watch’s Daniel Wilkinson pens an essay in the New York Review of Books reviewing Claudia Lopez’s new edited collection “And They Refounded the Nation” about parapolitics under Alvaro Uribe.

· And finally three human rights press releases: HRW condemns the imprisonment of six Cuban dissidents convicted in recent weeks for distributing pamphlets criticizing Raúl and Fidel Castro in Havana’s Revolutionary Square. Amnesty International calls on the Venezuelan government to investigate the murder of a seventh member of a single family killed over the weekend in Aragua. Aragua police officers are suspected to have been involved in each of the killings, says Amnesty. And the Committee to Protect Journalists condemns a grenade attack late Sunday on the offices of the Mexican newspaper Vanguardia in the Coahuila city of Saltillo.

Zelaya Returns to Honduras

On Saturday, former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya returned to his native Honduras, nearly two years after being ousted in a military-backed coup d’etat. Thousands of supporters greeted Zelaya as he touched down in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa. He was joined by an escort of representatives from various Latin American countries. Zelaya’s return came just days after the former president met with current Honduran President Porfirio Lobo to sign a political deal (the so-called Cartagena Accord), which, in addition to allowing Zelaya’s return home, opens the door for a national vote over a possible constituent assembly and eases requirements for transforming the National Front of Popular Resistance (FNRP) into an official political party.

The deal, mediated by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and his Colombian counterpart Juan Manuel Santos, also annulled – at least for the time being – of all remaining legal proceedings against Mel Zelaya.

As AP notes, the Organization of American States, which expelled Honduras shortly after the June 2009 coup, is expected to re-admit the Central American country ahead of the group’s annual meetings scheduled for this weekend. Thus far, the only Latin American country to have publicly questioned such a move has been Ecuador.

Nevertheless there do remain numerous questions about what the return of Zelaya and the likely re-admittance of Honduras to the OAS will mean for a national human rights situation that remains fragile, at best. Over a dozen journalists and more than 40 peasant and union activists have been killed since Lobo assumed office in 2010, many at the hands of paramilitary death squads, according to human rights organizations. The LA Times notes that former human rights ombudsman, Leo Valladares, was forced to flee the country because of ongoing death threats. Opinions (and links) on human rights worries from CEPR co-director Mark Weisbrot in The Guardian, historian Dana Frank in The Progressive, and anthropologist Adrienne Pine at NACLA. Also an excellent report over the weekend from the UK’s Observer on the growing crisis of gender-based murder or “femicide” which, according to a new report from Oxfam Honduras and the Honduran NGO, the Tribunal of Women Against Femicide, is now the “second highest cause of death for women of reproductive age” in Honduras.

Honduras Culture and Politics, meanwhile, posts and comments on a variety of reactions to the Cartagena Accord from different political sectors in Honduras. Following Zelaya’s return speech Saturday, the LA Times speculated that the former president would “immediately reengage in politics” and might lead a new party formed out of the FNRP. After meeting with OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza and Porfirio Lobo over the weekend, Zelaya said Monday his goals now were to help in the organization of a national constituent assembly and aid in the construction of a “broad front” coalition similar to the one which has governed Uruguay since 2005. (Democracy Now with more in an exclusive interview with Zelaya).

For its part, the Lobo government made an about-face Monday on one of the issues which precipitated the ouster of Zelaya in 2009: Honduras’s deepening relationship with Venezuela. On Monday, the government said it will seek re-entry into Petrocaribe in order to receive discounted oil from Venezuela. In March of last year Mel Zelaya was named head of Petrocaribe’s political council by Venezuela.

Various bullet points from the last week:

· Reuters reports on possible next steps from Venezuela after the US enacted new sanctions against Venezuelan state oil giant PDVSA last week. The US says PDVSA violated an economic embargo on Iran by sending the country fuel additives between December 2010 and March 2011. The sanctions, which affect a total of seven companies (including ones from the UAE, Israel, Singapore, and Monaco) will prohibit PDVSA from competing for U.S. government contracts, from securing financing from the US Export-Import Bank and from obtaining U.S. export licenses. They do not, however, apply to PDVSA subsidiaries like CITGO nor will they prohibit the export of crude oil to the United States. In Venezuela, the penalties have been met with swift condemnation by both the Chavez government and much of the political opposition (See, for example, a translation by the Center for Democracy in the Americas of an editorial last week by Tal Cual editor Teodoro Petkoff who calls the sanctions a form of “imperial arrogance”). AP reports on major demonstrations against the PDVSA sanctions in the capital of Caracas Sunday.

· In Colombia, lawmakers approved a long-awaited Victims’ Law last week. According to The Guardian, “the law aims to give financial compensation (of approx. $10,000) to every victim reported murdered or forcibly disappeared.” It could also mean the eventual return of millions of acres of land to some 3.4 million individuals internally displaced by the country’s decade’s long armed conflict. Last week the government said nearly 58,000 people remain missing because of that conflict and at least 15,600 of those persons are believed to have been “forcibly disappeared,” according to the UN high commissioner for human rights. Colombian Interior Minister German Vargas Lleras noted last week that the bodies of 10,000 disappeared persons have been recently identified for the purposes of compensating victims’ families.

· Peruvian voters will head to the polls this weekend to elect a new president. Most recent poll numbers show Keiko Fujimori and Ollanta Humala running in a dead heat. According to a mock nationwide vote organized by Ipsos and released over the weekend, Fujimori holds on to 50.5 to 49.5 percent lead over Humala with null and spoiled ballots excluded. A CPI mock vote shows Fujmori at 51.8 percent and Humala at 48.2 percent. Reuters reports on the final televised debate between the two candidates Sunday, writing that it “reflected a race that has become increasingly heated and based on personal attacks.” The New York Times profiled Keiko Fujimori on Saturday. TIME, meanwhile, profiles the man who could be the country’s next first gentleman, Fujimori’s American husband and self-described “Jersey Guy” Mark Villanella.

· A variety of reports over the weekend look at the race to head the IMF. The lead contender for that position, French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, began her campaign to replace the embattled DSK in Brazil this week, promising to continue IMF reforms that give emerging nations a larger say in Fund decision making. The Wall Street Journal says Brazil “stopped short of endorsing Ms. Lagarde, but Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega said her commitment to continued overhauls was the sort of reassurance the country would need to throw its weight behind a candidate.” Mantega is expected to meet Wednesday with the other contender for the position, Mexican Central Banker Agustín Carstens. The paper says despite regional affinities and Carstens’ recent calls for “bailout flexibility,” the “orthodox” Mexican market economist seems a dark horse to overtake Lagarde.

· The New York Times reports today on the issuance of arrest warrants by Spanish judge Eloy Velasco Nuñez for 20 former Salvadoran military leaders accused of planning and carrying out the killings of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador in 1989.

· Al-Jazeera on the exhumation last week of Salvador Allende’s body to determine definitively whether the late Socialist president of Chile took his own life or was killed by the Chilean military during the September 11, 1973 military coup that toppled his government. In the LA Times, Peter Kornbluh and Marc Cooper comment.

· IPS with a look at Amnesty International’s noble history in South America’s Southern Cone during the 1970s and 1980s as the rights group prepares for its fiftieth anniversary celebration.

· McClatchy’s Tim Johnson (Mexico-Guatemala) and NPR’s Jason Beaubien (El Salvador) with new reports on organized crime in Central America’s violent Northern Triangle. And in The Nation last week, Human Rights Watch’s Nik Steinberg with an excellent essay on drug-induced transformation of Monterrey, Mexico.

· Latin American News Dispatch highlights the killing of two environmental activists in the Brazilian Amazon last week. As LAND reports, the double murder came just hours after Brazil’s lower house voted to pass a controversial bill to reform the Forest Code, allowing small farmers more liberty to cultivate and deforest protected environmental areas within the Amazon.

· Mercopress on last week’s meeting of UNASUR’s Defense Council in Argentina for the inauguration of the Defense Strategic Studies Centre (CEED).

· Also from Mercopress, a look at Uruguay’s assumption of presidential powers on the UN Human Rights Council next month, and an upcoming visit by the UN Sec. General to the country.

· And BBC Mundo reports on new efforts by the Economic Commission for Latin America’s to boost regional cooperation through the expansion of broadband internet connections.

Over 500 Migrants Discovered in Southern Mexico

Mexican authorities in the state of Chiapas discovered 513 migrants from Central and South America, as well as Asia, crammed inside two trailers traveling north on Tuesday. The AP says the trucks were headed for the Mexican city of Puebla when an X-ray scanner at a highway checkpoint near Tuxla Gutierrez revealed the truck’s contents. In Puebla, some migrants say they were told they would be transferred to another set of vehicles for the final leg of the journey to the US border.

The individuals say they were charged approx. $7000 for the journey. BBC says four individuals have been arrested for running the smuggling operation. A police spokesman says the number of individuals recovered from the trucks was the “largest ever” to be discovered by Mexican authorities. Al-Jazeera’s Frank Contreras also reports, by video, from Mexico City.

Meanwhile, in a separate case in Chiapas, two more migration agents from Mexico’s National Immigration Institute (INM) were detained Tuesday for their alleged role in prostituting young female migrants from Central America. According to AP, those detained include the ex-assistant director of a migrant holding facility and a former assistant head of immigration services in a Mexican town near the border with Guatemala. Both will face human trafficking charges, along with charges of “corrupting minors.”

Today’s bullet points:

· The Wall Street Journal reports this morning on what is, for now, the final day of a 48-hour state of siege in the Peten region of northern Guatemala. The decree was issued by President Alvaro Colom after Sunday’s gruesome massacre of 27 laborers at a remote Peten ranch. In the Guatemalan press, El Periódico reports on the arrest of Hugo Gomez Vasquez, a man Guatemalan prosecutors allege is linked to the kidnapping and murder of three relatives of Otto Salguero, the owner of the Los Cocos ranch and the apparent target of this weekend’s brutal attack. According to the paper, officials suspect a link between the killings of those three individuals and the murder of day laborers employed by Salguero – perhaps related to some sort of unpaid debt owed by Salguero to the Zetas. El Periodicio and Prensa Libre highlight what may end up being the most significant element of the story: possible links between the Zetas in Guatemala (specifically the Zetas “Z-200 cell” cell which has operated in Guatemala) and former Guatemalan military men, including ex-members of the elite “Kaibiles” special forces. El Periodico says Hugo Francisco Chávez Méndez, an ex- sergeant in the Guatemalan military was also among those detained in recent days. For his part, President Alvaro Colom spokoe this week of evidence that “a lot of migration of ex-officials from the 1980s” joined groups like the ‘Zetas’” after the 1996 Peace Accords. Prensa Libre says Mexican authorities made similar claims about Zeta-Kaibiles connections in 2005. More from Mexico’s Proceso.

· In other Guatemala-related news, US Trade Representative Ron Kirk has asked an international commission to investigate the country’s failure to enforce labor rights protections under the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). The investigation would be the first labor case brought by the US against a free trade partner, according to Bloomberg. In an email Monday, USTR Kirk said, “While Guatemala has taken some positive steps over the past several months, its actions and proposals have been insufficient to address what we view as systemic failures.” The AFL-CIO labor federation and six Guatemalan unions first asked the U.S. to investigate the Guatemalan government’s failure to enforce labor laws in April 2008. It only took the US three years to respond – a fact that doesn’t bode well for labor groups in Colombia where an FTA could be completed this summer and where similar concerns about labor rights have continue to exist.

· The Obama administration also announced Tuesday that it will extend temporary protected status by one and a half years to Haitian immigrants in the US after last year’s quake. The extension will allow Haitians who arrived in the US as late as Jan. 12, 2011, and have lived here continuously, to apply for TPS. AP reports.

· AP also reports that Sweden and the U.S. will provide $2.6 million in aid to Haiti, specifically aimed at preventing sexual assaults in the country’s numerous camps for the internally displaced. The monies will be administered by the International Organization for Migration.

· Prosecutors in Ecuador say they will pursue an investigation against President Rafael Correa over alleged evidence pulled from the Raul Reyes laptops and published last week by a British think tank, suggesting the Ecuadorean president accepted campaign funds from the FARC in 2006. Both Correa and his foreign minister Ricardo Patino, have strongly denied those charges. The former has said he is willing to take a lie-detector test to prove his innocence. BBC reports.

· In Venezuela, new economic numbers released this week show the country’s national economy expanding by 4.5% over the first quarter of 2011—more confirmation that the country has, in fact, pulled itself out of an economic recession. According to central bank figures, the public sector grew 3.3 percent while the private sector grew at a rate of 4.6 percent over the quarter. AP and Bloomberg report. For its part, the Washington Post this morning reports from Brazil on what it describes as Venezuela’s “waning” regional influence, both economically and politically. As evidence Post correspondent Juan Forero highlights a still-stalled joint oil refinery project that was to be built by Venezuela and Brazil in the latter’s historically impoverished Northeast.

· A group of Latin Americanist right-wingers, among them Roger Noriega and former US Florida Republican congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart, gathered this week to discuss Peru’s upcoming elections and denounce the “international conspiracy” in favor of the left-leaning candidate Ollanta Humala. A former assistant secretary of state under George W. Bush, Noriega says that of the two Peruvian candidates, it’s only Humala who is “trying to hide his past and his dangerous ideas” and it’s only Humala’s political career which is “due to the ‘caudillo’ Hugo Chavez.” La República has an entertaining photo from a 2000 conga line which suggests Noriega’s candidate, Keiko Fujimori, has also gotten close to the Venezuelan president in the past. Meanwhile, Peruvian writer and pundit Alvaro Vargas Llosa joined his father, novelist Mario Vargas Lllosa, this week, announcing that he is backing Humala’s candidacy. Humala needs all the help he can get right now as Fujimori’s lead has grown to six points according to most recent poll numbers.

· Mexican anti-drug war poet Javier Sicilia is this week’s interviewee on TeleSur. In Mexico, meanwhile, Sicilia received a somewhat strange endorsement from the Beltran Leyva gang, which unfurled a banner in Cuernavaca saying the poet can “count on their support.” Insight and Proceso report in English and Spanish.

· Former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe is interviewed this week by FP’s Elizabeth Dickinson about Plan Colombia, Twitter, and his decision to remain active in politics.

· Former congressman David Bonior (D-MI) speaks with WOLA on significant changes in Cuba after recently returning from the island. President Obama, on other hand, said this week he has not yet seen any “significant changes” in Cuba.

· Plaza Pública has a long report on the Alfonso Portillo embezzlement case in Guatemala. Portillo and a number of other former high ranking officials were acquitted last week, but the former president still faces possible extradition to the US in a separate money laundering case.

· And Colombia has quickly appointed a new ambassador to Caracas. Ricardo Montenegro, former business attaché at the Embassy, will take over for Jose Fernando Bautista who resigned at the beginning of the week because of his ties to a Bogotá construction company currently being investigated for offering bribes to Colombian politicians. Colombia Reports with more.

Massacre in El Peten

Officials now say at least 29 individuals were killed on a coconut ranch in the Northern Guatemalan province of Peten, their bound, decapitated, and tortured bodies discovered early Sunday. AP calls the mass killings “one of the worst massacres” since the country’s nearly four-decade long civil war came to an end in 1996. Similar comments from police spokesman Donald Gonzalez who referred to the murders Sunday as the “worst massacre we have seen in modern times.”

The LA Times says the killings were carried out by a “small army” of some 200 gunmen who, according to witnesses, arrived at the ranch on buses but have otherwise been unidentified.

The victims all appear to have been laborers on the Peten ranch where they were found. Police are investigating whether or not the mass killings are connected to the Saturday death of Haroldo Leon, the brother of late Guatemalan drug boss Juan Jose “Juancho” Leon, himself killed in 2008. The Zetas, have long been suspected of being involved in the latter’s murder, which is said to have allowed the Mexican drug gang to gain control over transshipment routes in neighboring Alta Verapaz.

Officials found one wounded survivor of the massacre – an individual who says he evaded murder by pretending to have been killed. No details have yet been released about what specifically that individual is said to have witnessed.

More Spanish-language coverage from Guatemala’s El Periódico, highlighting the suspected relationship between Sunday’s massacre and the recent killing of Heraldo León.

This weekend’s bullet points:

· In Port-au-Prince Saturday, former pop singer Michel Martelly was sworn in as Haiti’s next president. AP reports while the Miami Herald looks at the various challenges the new president faces. The outgoing head of Minustah, Edmond Mulet says Martelly inherits a “failed state,” adding that in the coming days Martelly is likely to discover that “the state institutions, ministries, government agencies that should implement the vision and plans of the new government cannot deliver.” On Sunday, those close to the new president said the first major personnel announcement would be nominating businessman Daniel-Gerard Rouzier as the country’s next prime minister. Haiti’s parliament must approve the nomination. The prime minister will also serve (with UN special envoy Bill Clinton) as co-chair of Haiti's Interim Recovery Commission.

· Mexican immigration officials said Sunday they are prepared to subject migration agents to psychological, drug, and lie detector tests as part of a new effort to combat corruption in the country’s National Immigration Institute (INM). At a press conference Sunday, National Immigration Institute Commissioner Salvador Beltran del Rio said 40 agents are currently being investigated for a variety of abuses – this after the dismissal of seven regional immigration directors late last week. AP reports.

· The number of bodies at a mass grave site in the northern Mexico state of Durango jumped again over the weekend to 218, making it the largest such grave to have been discovered thus far in the country, according to AP.

· In the Mexican state of Oaxaca, AP says violence “motivated by an electoral dispute between indigenous communities” has left at least eight dead. The incident occurred near the town of Santiago Choapan.

· The New York Times profiles Mexican poet and anti-drug war organizer Javier Sicilia. According to the Times, Sicilia has “achieved what others have failed to do” in provoking “serial public responses from the Calderón administration” about the government’s prosecution of the drug wars. Calderón met with Sicilia privately one week ago, the Times reports. According to Sicilia, the Mexican president admitted in the meeting that he had “made a mistake” while adding “I can’t go back now.” Meanwhile, CNN reports that Sicilia and others are now in the process of planning a follow-up demonstration to last week’s anti-drug war march from Cuernavaca to DF. The demonstration is set for June 10 in Ciudad Juarez. The plans come as the Calderon government announced Thursday it would be sending hundreds of new troops to the border state of Tamaulipas in the coming days.

· Major protests against a planned hydroelectric dam in Southern Chile brought some 30,000 demonstrators to the streets of the Chilean capital of Santiago over the weekend. BBC Mundo reports that as many as 70 individuals were arrested during the demonstrations. A new poll shows that nearly ¾ of Chileans oppose the dam project.

· AP reports that a new effort to declassify US intelligence documents related to Argentina’s 1976-1983 dictatorship has failed in the US House. An amendment re-proposed by New York Democratic congressman Maurice Hinchey, calling for the U.S. intelligence agencies to declassify all of their files on Argentina’s 1976-1983 dictatorship, was rejected in a 214-194 vote Friday. A similar bill proposed by Hinchey in 1999 aided in the release of similar intelligence files on the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, the wire reports.

· In Uruguay, the left-leaning Frente Amplio coalition decided during a party plenary Saturday that it would go ahead with a contentious parliamentary vote later this week about whether or not to annul the country’s 1986 amnesty law. The so-called “Ley de Caducidad” continues to protect human rights violators from prosecution for abuses committed during the country’s 1973-1985 dictatorship. Notably, the decision to hold the vote was opposed by the country’s President, José Mujica, vice president Danilo Astori, and former FA president Tabaré Vázquez, all of whom fear the issue could cause irreparable divisions in the coalition. Uruguay’s two opposition parties have long opposed annulling the law. Mercopress reports in English; Uruguay’s El País in Spanish.

· Amnesty International released its 2011 annual report last week. The Americas section can be linked to here.

· In Ecuador, it looks increasingly like all ten of the referendum questions voted on last week and supported by President Rafael Correa will be approved. Current vote tallies available here as vote totaling continues.

· Two new polls from Ipsos and CPI in Peru show Keiko Fujimori continuing to extend her slim lead over Ollanta Humala before a June 5 runoff. The former has Fujimori obtaining 51.1% against Humala’s 48.9% while the latter poll shows Fujimori at 52.9% compared to Humala’s 47.1%. AP also reports on the most recent addition to Ms. Fujimori’s campaign team: former NYC mayor and one-time Republican presidential contender, Rudy Giuliani. The wire says Fujimori announced over the weekend that Giuliani was advising the campaign on citizen security issues and would be coming to Peru briefly sometime over the next few days.

· Finally, the New York Times front-page report Sunday on Blackwater founder Erik Prince’s new mercenary army in the United Arab Emirates has Latin American implications. According to the Times, an unspecified number of Colombians are among the 800 or so mercenaries who have been trained by retired American soldiers and veterans of the German and British special operations units and the French Foreign Legion employed by Prince’s new company, “Reflex Responses,” or “R2.” More on the Colombia-specifics from Colombia Reports. For other articles in recent years on itinerant guns-for-hire from Colombia, see the AP and CNN on Colombian mercenaries appearing in post-coup Honduras, as well as US-trained Colombian military and police officials working for Blackwater in Iraq, as reported by the LA Times and Mother Jones in 2005 and 2008, respectively.