Seeking to build trust between the United States and Latin America, President Obama reiterated his promise to release classified documents that could shed light on U.S. involvement in Argentina's "dirty war." "I hope we can reconstruct the confidence that was lost between our two countries," he...
President Obama sat down Tuesday with some of the most well-known members of Cuba’s small, beleaguered dissident community, including several who had been arrested just two days earlier. Ladies in White They included Berta Soler, head of the Ladies in White (“Damas de Blanco”) movement of wives...
In recent years, Afro-Cuban intellectuals have started gathering in a cramped Havana apartment to discuss a topic long considered off-limits in Cuba: race. Fidel Castro’s communist revolution 60 years ago promised to wipe out racial divisions and level the playing field for all Cubans, regardless...
President Obama, after a series of major policy changes toward Cuba, is the first sitting U.S. president to visit the island nation in 90 years.
President Obama set foot in Cuba on Sunday, the first sitting U.S. president in nearly 90 years to visit this island nation, amid hopes that his push to mend a half-century of Cold War enmity will launch a new era of cooperation.“This is a historic visit and a historic opportunity,” Obama said...
President Obama will be the first U.S. chief executive to travel to Cuba since Calvin Coolidge, and during a two-day tour will address a large audience in Havana, watch a baseball game (Tampa Bay Rays versus the Cuban national team) and even dine at the Palace of the Revolution. But will he sample...
All three branches of Brazil's government are accused of wrongdoing. Old political heroes are being cast in new, unflattering light. And streets across the country have been filled with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators. Ge de Souza, a doorman in downtown Sao Paulo, pointed to streets Saturday...
Nine Cuban migrants died at sea and 18 were rescued by a cruise ship after their 30-foot boat was found about 130 miles from the Florida coast, the U.S. Coast Guard said. The migrants were severely dehydrated when they were found Friday and said they had been at sea 22 days. The bodies of those...
Cuba is preparing for a Category Five storm. Locals are calling it Hurricane Obama. When President Obama touches down Sunday night in Havana — the first American leader to visit in nearly 90 years – he will find freshly paved streets and hotels that have been cleared of tourists to make room for...
On the eve of President Obama’s historic visit to Cuba, authorities there are ordering dissidents invited to meet with the American leader to stay home instead, a leading human rights activist said Saturday.Elizardo Sanchez, a Cuban anti-government activist who chronicles political detentions month-to-month,...
Shouting “I’m free!” to dozens of her supporters, activist and U.S. citizen Nestora Salgado stepped outside a Mexican prison Friday after spending 2 1/2 years in what a United Nations panel ruled was an illegal detention. Her offense? Organizing a community self-defense group amid the chaos and...
Cuba has stood for decades in U.S. politics as a bitter symbol of the Cold War, but the recent diplomatic thaw is scrambling that narrative as Americans increasingly see the Caribbean island nation as a land of exotic tourism and lucrative business opportunities. Even as those giddy expectations...
The White House moved Tuesday to ease major restrictions on Americans traveling to Cuba and on Cuba’s use of U.S. dollars for international transactions, announcing the shift as President Obama prepares to make an historic trip to Havana next week. The new rules mean Americans will be allowed to...
The system for disciplining abusive or corrupt Border Patrol agents and officers is so flawed that it hardly acts to deter criminal misconduct in the nation's largest law enforcement agency, according to an independent task force that investigated the problems. The team's 49-page final report will...
Kate del Castillo ended two months of silence about her and Sean Penn's controversial meeting with then-fugitive drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, saying Penn's account of an encounter with a Mexican military checkpoint never happened.The Mexican-born actress spoke in three days of interviews...
The long-running corruption scandal that has gripped — and perplexed — Brazilians for months reached a new level this week as state prosecutors filed for the "preventive arrest" of former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on money-laundering and criminal misrepresentation charges. The request,...
President Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Thursday announced a wide range of environmental initiatives to combat climate change, expand renewable energy and protect a fragile and remote region important to both nations -- the Arctic. The most notable commitment, outlined in...
The Zika virus sweeping across South America may be only one of several long-dormant infections that will resurface in coming years because of climate change and deforestation, says a Johns Hopkins University neurologist now leading research efforts in Colombia, one of the countries hardest hit...
As the Zika virus, which has been linked to birth defects, spreads across Latin America, the demand for abortions is increasing in countries where there are few legal avenues to obtain one.“It has made the issue more salient and has highlighted the cruelty behind some of these restrictive abortion...
Former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was questioned by federal police Friday as part of investigations into accusations of massive, long-running corruption and money laundering schemes involving the state oil company Petrobras and a string of major construction firms.Authorities...
Honduran human rights activist and environmental leader Berta Caceres had complained of death threats, and a prominent human rights organization had urged the government to provide her with protection. But Caceres, who led a successful campaign against the construction of a Chinese-financed dam...
Secretary of State John F. Kerry has canceled a tentative trip to Cuba two weeks before President Obama visits the communist-ruled nation as diplomats haggle over which Cuban dissidents the president will be allowed to meet. The back and forth over human rights is another sign of how prickly U.S.-Cuba...
For decades, U.S. patients have crossed into Tijuana for lower-cost medical care, from plastic surgery to dental procedures to stem-cell treatments. Developers of a planned high-rise now say they hope to capture a share of that market, offering a wide range of services in one facility, just yards...
Tijuana’s top police official, Alejandro Lares Valladares, stepped down from his position on Friday, saying that he “wanted to avoid the continuation of the perverse media campaign” against the department. Lares did not elaborate on the specific reasons for his resignation. He defended his record,...
Dalton Javier Avalos Ramirez remembers watching Donald Trump announce his candidacy for the U.S. presidency last June. In that speech, Trump lobbed the first in an eight-month stream of insults, saying that Mexico was sending many of its worst north of the border and that such immigrants are “bringing...
Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman is willing to accept extradition and plead guilty to charges in a United States court if he can negotiate an “unelevated” prison sentence in a medium security prison, his lawyer has told reporters here. In an interview Thursday with Radio Formula of Mexico...
The former president of Mexico Vicente Fox has a blunt rebuttal to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s plans to build an enormous wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. “I’m not going to pay for that f------ wall,” Fox said in an interview with Univision's "Al Punto" set to air Sunday, in...
If 10th-graders took Luciano DiNardo’s high school English class, it was a sure bet they were going to read “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Harper Lee’s classic novel about racial injustice in rural Alabama. DiNardo also gave them assignments to write about civil rights and prejudice. He showed them such...
When the Chinese took over the Las Bambas copper mine here in the Andes Mountains in 2014, Beto Chahuayllo at first barely noticed the change. He kept on painting buildings at the mine, a job he’d been doing for four years in hopes of saving enough to leave his village and his dirt-floor hut and...
By many measures, things had been going well for Bolivian President Evo Morales. Since he took office in 2006, the economy has averaged annual growth of 5%, and he has used revenue from mining and natural gas sales to build roads, schools and clinics, raise incomes and reduce the extreme poverty...
Three months ago, most Canadians had never heard of Harjit Singh Sajjan. But after newly elected Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tapped him to be defense minister in November, a 2006 photograph of the former soldier went viral on the Internet. It shows him on duty in Afghanistan, wearing a wide smile,...
Sixteen-year-old Angie Paola Castro gave birth last month to an apparently healthy boy. It has been a month of both celebration and anguish: In her eighth month of pregnancy, Castro contracted the Zika virus, which researchers say may trigger serious neurological problems in the womb. Hundreds...
Menacing, crudely written signs hung from highway bridges or left with mutilated corpses have delivered the message: Mexico's fastest-growing drug trafficking group, Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion, is now in Tijuana — and fighting to expand its influence. The group's growing presence coincides...
An air of caution and concern hung in the air as gasoline prices in Venezuela shot up Friday to 15 cents a gallon – a paltry amount elsewhere but a startling increase in this oil-rich yet financially-beaten country. The price had been less than a tenth of a penny per gallon the day before, and...
After ending a dramatic tour of Mexico, Pope Francis on Thursday seemed to open the door for limited use of artificial contraception, long prohibited by the Roman Catholic Church, to prevent pregnancies at risk from the disastrous, fast-spreading Zika virus. Speaking to reporters aboard his flight...
President Obama will visit Cuba for two days next month in a historic trip aimed at sweeping away half a century of frozen relations between the two countries, he announced on Twitter on Thursday. First Lady Michelle Obama will join him for the trip March 21-22, the first by a sitting president...
Haiti had been without a president for a week when on Sunday a collection of politicians and business leaders chose an interim leader to fill the void. The appointment stalled a deepening political crisis in the nation of 10 million — at least for now. Not that presidents have always been so great...
President Obama will embark on a historic and long-awaited trip to Cuba next month, becoming the first sitting president since 1928 to visit the island nation. The visit will help usher in a new era of detente between the two countries that began at the end of 2014 when Obama and Cuban President...
He never set foot on U.S. soil, never left Mexico. But the presence of Pope Francis could still be felt north of the Rio Grande. Early Wednesday, Raul Gallegos, an Uber driver, was one of the few motorists cruising through downtown El Paso. He said he'd never seen the city so quiet on a weekday...
Pope Francis concluded an emotional, provocative journey through Mexico on Wednesday, symbolically tracing the path of migrants headed for the United States and ending up at the border that divides and unites two societies. Tens of thousands of people gathered on both sides of the border — an election-year...
Iris Alondra Hipolito, a 17-year-old high school student from Los Angeles, didn’t know what was coming. She and her brother Luis, 14, had traveled on an overnight bus to El Paso and arrived Tuesday morning as part of a group of Catholics and immigrant rights activists from Southern California....