Latin America Roundup -- April 12/13

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Unrest continues in Haiti. Carol J. Williams of the L.A. Times reports today that lawmakers fired the Caribbean nation’s Prime Minister Jacques-Edouard Alexis on Saturday. A U.N. peacekeeper was killed in a vigilante attack in volatile Port-au-Prince over the weekend, the sixth death in more than a week of rioting over soaring food prices.

The Associated Press reported Saturday that Cubans were informed, via the first legal decree issued by Raul Castro since he took over the presidency from his brother Fidel, that they would be able to get title to state-owned homes. The new rules mean that workers wouldn’t lose their homes, even if they left their jobs working for their state employers.

Also in Cuba, Williams reports from Guantanamo that a U.S. Army special forces soldier mortally wounded in a 2002 firefight in Afghanistan may have been hit by ‘friendly fire,’ according to the lawyer for a young Canadian charged with his killing.

In Mexico, the excavation of two graves in the Mixtec Indian village of Tayata, in the state of Oaxaca along the Pacific Coast, has revealed evidence that the Mixtec cremated some of their dead as early as 3,000 years ago. Read the report here.

Two Ecuadoreans who have waged a 14-year fight to bring a U.S. energy giant to account for what they allege is massive oil contamination in the Amazon are among the winners of an international environmental prize, writes Chris Kraul from Bogota, Colombia.

Their legal campaign was prompted by what the men allege were massive oil spills and mismanagement of wastes in the Ecuadorean jungle from the mid-1960s until 1990, when Texaco produced oil in the region in partnership with the state-owned oil company, Petroecuador.

The case of Ana Puentes, an undocumented immigrant in Los Angeles who is awaiting her fourth liver transplant, highlights two controversial issues: Should illegal immigrants receive liver transplants in the U.S. and should taxpayers pick up the cost? Anna Gorman reports.

Life is returning to downtown Los Angeles’s Million Dollar Theatre. Mexico’s venerable Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlan is scheduled to appear May 11 -- the first major concert to be staged in the landmark theatre in about a decade. Read Agustin Gurza’s piece here.

In Pasadena, the Costa Chica soccer team is made up mostly of Mexicans with cultural and racial histories going back hundreds of years to the Spanish conquistadors and the African slave trade. This in-depth report from John L. Mitchell examines the unusual blend of Mexican and black cultures that developed along Mexico’s Pacific Coast and has been transplanted to Southern California.

This Los Angeles Times editorial says that Democratic speaker of the house Nancy Pelosi has “done well by her party” in blocking a vote on a free-trade pact with Colombia, but that it’s the wrong thing for the country.

Times columnist Tim Rutten adds his voice to the ongoing debate around the LAPD’s Special Order 40 in this op-ed column. He argues that anyone who proposes the rule is fishing in dangerous, potentially divisive civic waters.

A column by Gregory Rodriguez about the continuing construction of a wall along the border with Mexico prompted these letters to the editor.