The “Shining Path” branch, active in the “VAREM area” of Peru, has returned to older, more violent ways, while drug traffickers are terrorizing parts of Paraguay. 

After the murders and disappearances of students in the town of Iguala, Guerrero, a series of clandestine graves were uncovered; so far none have been shown to hold the bodies of the disappeared students, but the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team that examined the scene is not ready to make a definite determination.  Calls continue to

At least a million girls have been victimized in Colombia’s armed conflict; in Medellín a human rights leader barely survived an assassination attempt. 

Retired Colonel Esteelmer Francisco Reyes Girón and military ex-commissioner Eriberto Valdez Asij will face trial for allegedly subjecting a group of indigenous women to labor and sexual slavery. 

The Dirección de Lucha contra el Narcotráfico of Honduras, DLCN, will launch an investigation of “around 35 ‘narcoalcaldes’ ” and President Ollanta Humala of Peru asserted that criminal activity related to drugs is the main challenge in Peru and in the region.   

Two proposals for the legalization of self-cultivated marijuana are currently being debated in the House of Representatives, but many officials only want to consider therapeutic uses; journalist Audeliza Solano says she has been getting death threats from the mayor of the municipality of Samaná, Nadín Miguel Bezi Nicasio. 

OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza insisted that now a “regional consensus” exists regarding drug use and trafficking throughout the hemisphere. 

Colombia rebels and the government published the accords agreed to at talks, while President Santos can imagine Colombia without coca and without conflict. 

Thirty years ago, the National Commission on the Forced Disappearances of Persons (Conadep) handed the seminal “Never Again” report to then-president Raúl Alfonsín. 

The “Libro Amarillo” (“Yellow Book”) is a document that is believed to have been prepared by the Salvadoran military in the 1970s and 1980s, and contains nearly 2,000 names.  Historical evidence shows that four in ten of the people on that list were tortured, disappeared or killed.  Researchers believe it is genuine.