Latin America: Week in Review, North America, United States
Arizona: Jan Brewer Orders Redistribution of SB 1070 Training Video
June 14, 2012 By Staff
Top Story — Anticipating that the U.S. Supreme Court will uphold the bulk of SB 1070, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer has asked to redistribute a training video originally sent to law enforcement across the state two years ago, when the controversial law first went into effect. The Supreme Court began to hear arguments on the legality of the law in April, and may render a decision as early as Monday on whether or not the law should be overturned. Among other things, SB 1070 requires police to determine immigration status when making a detention or arrest, and makes undocumented status a state crime. Portions of the law have been temporarily suspended by lower courts, but Brewer has appealed those decisions. On Tuesday, Brewer issued an executive order to the Arizona Peace Officer Standards and Training Board requiring the video to distribute the video by Friday. Depending on the court’s ruling, the standards and training board said it may need to distribute supplemental information later.
Read more from USA Today.
Headlines from the Western Hemisphere
North America
- Mental health experts in the U.S. say that many child immigrants from Mexico are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder due to violence in their home country.
- The ACLU said it would sue the federal government for inhumane conditions that immigrant detainees allegedly face at the Pinal County Jail in southern Arizona.
- Young Mexican political activists have launched a strong online campaign to challenge Mexican presidential front-runner Enrique Peña Nieto of the PRI, impacting his support among younger voters.
Caribbean
- Cuban authorities have reportedly detained two dissidents who participated in a video conference with the U.S. Senate to render testimony before a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Foreign Affairs Committee last Thursday.
- The Cuban government announced Wednesday that Communications Minister Medardo Diaz Toledo and Minister of Basic Industries Tomas Benitez Hernandez will step down amid reports of corruption, to be replaced by Vice Minister Maimir Mesa Ramos and deputy Alfredo Lopez Valdes, respectively.
- Families are mourning the loss of eleven Haitian migrants who died when the 28-foot boat known as the Glory Time sunk off the coast of the Bahamas last week.
- A Jamaican prosecutor charged police officer Jeffrey Peart with the murder and beheading of a witness against him in a corruption case.
Central America
- Police in northern Honduras said they’d arrested 30 peasant activists during the forced removal of about 100 laborers, mostly women, who had been occupying agricultural land since May 23.
- Guatemalan police on Tuesday arrested alleged members of a criminal gang thought to have extorted $500,000 from bus drivers over the last four years.
- Nicaraguan police said they had arrested 7 people and 4,400 gallons of precursor materials to make methamphetamine, suggesting that meth production in Central America is spreading.
- Seven Costa Rican police officers were sentenced to 22 years in prison each for international drug trafficking and embezzlement.
Andes
- Oscar Mollohuanca, the mayor of Espinar province in Peru, was released Wednesday after being detained since May 30 for his role in protests against Xstrata PLC’s Tintaya copper mine.
- BP said that Venezuela holds the largest petroleum reserves in the world, overtaking Saudi Arabia at 296.5 billion barrels at the end of last year.
- An appellate court rejected Chevron’s petition to gain access to documents from a consulting group for the Amazon rainforest communities that sued the company and is currently owed $18 billion.
- U.S. Representative Chris Smith traveled to Bolivia this week to meet with imprisoned American contractor Jacob Ostreicher, who is suspected but not charged with money laundering and has been imprisoned since June 2011.
Southern Cone
- Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff opened the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, or “Rio +20” summit, Wednesday, the largest in the 20 years since the first Earth Summit in 1992.
- Falkland Islanders are embracing the idea of a referendum to demonstrate that they do not want to be returned to Argentina on the anniversary of that country’s surrender of the islands to Britain in 1982.
- The Global Peace Index listed Chile as the most peaceful country in Latin America and Colombia was listed as the least peaceful.
Image: JoshBerglund19 @ Flickr.
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