Mexico City
U.S. dumps criminals: The U.S. is fueling violence in Mexico’s border region by dumping deported illegal immigrants there, Mexican President Felipe Calderón said last week. U.S. officials deported a record 400,000 people in fiscal 2011—the vast majority of them Mexican. More than half of the deportees were sent back after misdemeanor or felony convictions. Among them “are many who really are criminals, who have committed some crime, and it is simply cheaper to leave them on the Mexican side of the border than to prosecute them,” Calderón said. He said many end up joining the drug trade.
Guatemala City
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Stealing babies: A Guatemalan court has sentenced two women to 16 and 21 years in prison for trafficking a stolen baby, who was given to a U.S. family for adoption. Loyda Rodríguez’s 2-year-old daughter was kidnapped right in front of her five years ago, and was sent off to the U.S. by an adoption agency two years later. An agency worker and the agency’s lawyer, who falsified documents, were convicted in the trafficking. “These sentences confirm that there is a criminal structure in Guatemala that steals children,” said special prosecutor Lorena Maldonado. Rodríguez has already won a court order for the return of her daughter, now 7 and living in Kansas City, Mo., but it’s unclear whether the U.S. will honor it. Guatemala suspended foreign adoptions in 2007 because of widespread fraud, including charges of baby theft.
Buenos Aires
President re-elected: Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner won re-election this week in a first-round landslide, 37 points ahead of her nearest rival. It was the biggest winning margin since democracy was restored to Argentina in 1983. In her victory speech, Fernández paid homage to her husband, Néstor Kirchner, her predecessor as president, who died of a heart attack last year, calling him “the founder of this victory.” And indeed, she has continued the policies he began, using revenues from high prices for Argentina’s top crop, soybeans, to raise social spending while also printing money. The economy grew by 6 percent a year in her first term, but inflation is increasingly a concern.
