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MEXICO CITY—For the past three years, protesters have staged a monthly demonstration outside the office of Mexico’s attorney general. The participants, most of them impoverished farmers from the southern coastal state of Guerrero, include the parents and loved ones of the 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College who, in September 2014, were abducted after they hijacked buses for a political protest in the city of Iguala. Mexican authorities have said the abductions were carried out by corrupt municipal police officers who handed the students over to drug traffickers. But the case is still mired in controversy, with families […]

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing series about religious minorities in various countries around the world. On April 13, two lawmakers from India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, resigned amid nationwide blowback over their public support for a group of Hindu men accused of the rape and murder of an 8-year-old Muslim girl. The party’s leader, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, broke his silence on the episode the same day, saying “no culprit will be spared.” The high-profile case has raised concerns about worsening intercommunal tensions in India under the right-wing, Hindu nationalist BJP. In January, Human […]

Last month, Armenia’s National Assembly elected onetime Prime Minister Armen Sarkissian as the country’s next president, replacing the long-tenured Serzh Sargsyan as head of state. It was the first presidential election since a 2015 constitutional referendum that was designed to shift power in Armenia from the presidency to parliament and, mainly, the prime minister. For the first time, Armenia’s president was selected by the National Assembly, rather than by popular vote. While presidential votes have typically been contentious affairs in Armenia, Sarkissian’s election was initially met with comparative shrugs, and not just because the real power will now shift to […]

The United Nations Security Council needs some quiet time. The past week was the most fraught in the council’s recent history, as the U.S. and its friends went all-out to shame Russia over its Syrian ally’s use of chemical weapons in Douma. The Russians responded with a furious barrage of denials, accusing the Westerners of whipping up the controversy to justify a military response. The two sides met almost daily to berate each other in baroque terms, with U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley claiming the Russians’ hands were “covered in the blood of Syrian children.” By the end of the week, […]

Earlier this month, after Israeli soldiers killed 17 Palestinians during protests near Gaza’s border with Israel, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu engaged in a war of words. Erdogan called Netanyahu a “terrorist,” while the Israeli leader responded on Twitter by saying he would not be lectured to by someone who has been “bombing civilians indiscriminately for years” in Syria. The public spat has threatened to undo a rapprochement agreement between Turkey and Israel signed in late 2016. Nearly six years ago, diplomatic ties were severed following Israel’s attack on a Turkish-flagged aid flotilla heading […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, WPR Senior Editor Robbie Corey-Boulet curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. It was a rare example of a protest in the Central African Republic that managed to get the world’s attention, however briefly. On Wednesday, demonstrators placed at least 16 dead bodies outside the offices of the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the capital, Bangui. The demonstrators said the dead were civilians killed by U.N. peacekeepers during recent operations in a mostly Muslim neighborhood of Bangui known as PK5. For the past several years, the Central African Republic has been […]

On this week’s Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein, managing editor, Frederick Deknatel, and associate editor, Omar H. Rahman, discuss the political fallout from another suspected chemical weapons attack in Syria, including a potential military response from the United States. For the Report, Celeste Hicks talks with WPR’s senior editor, Robbie Corey-Boulet, about how courageous survivors of sexual violence helped bring Chad’s former dictator, Hissene Habre, to justice. If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to […]

Over the past three decades, since the end of the era of dictator Ferdinand Marcos, the Philippines has often combined corrupt and semi-authoritarian electoral politics with strong cultural and institutional checks on its elected leaders. Among the most powerful checks have been the Philippines’ vibrant media and highly active civil society, including NGOs, unions and other actors. The Catholic Church, at times, has pushed back against politicians’ graft and amassing of power. This active civil society, sometimes buttressed by a judiciary asserting its independence, has been essential to keeping the Philippines from deteriorating democratically, including in the 2000s when it […]

A little more than a year into his administration, President Donald Trump is facing a major decision on America’s next steps in Syria. His predecessor, Barack Obama, first sent U.S. troops into the country’s civil war to help local opposition forces defeat the self-styled Islamic State. Trump then increased the number of U.S. forces on the ground there. But now that the Islamic State has been driven back in Syria, losing much of the territory it once claimed as its “caliphate,” Trump has indicated that he might withdraw U.S. forces “very soon.” Officials in the Pentagon advocate a different approach. […]

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing series about religious minorities in various countries around the world. Since early March, the government of President Paul Kagame in Rwanda has ordered the closing of thousands of churches and dozens of mosques, citing unsafe conditions for worshippers. It also banned mosques in the capital, Kigali, from using loudspeakers for the Muslim call to prayer. Kagame insists that there is no reason for so many places of worship in a small, developing country like Rwanda. The predominantly Catholic country has seen a proliferation of non-Catholic churches in the decades since the […]

An opinion poll conducted in January and February offered a window into the mindset of voters in the Democratic Republic of Congo as they headed into another year of political uncertainty. Perhaps surprisingly, the news wasn’t entirely grim. While 82 percent of respondents said they believed the country was heading in the wrong direction, and 80 percent reported having a negative opinion of President Joseph Kabila, a majority nevertheless expressed faith that things would improve. In fact, nearly two-thirds of Congolese felt “very optimistic” about the future of the country over the next five years—a figure that rose to 82 […]

Almost a month after voters went to the polls in the first round of elections, Sierra Leone has chosen a new president. Julius Maada Bio, the candidate for the Sierra Leone People’s Party, secured 51.8 percent of the vote in the March 31 runoff against Samura Kamara of the ruling All People’s Congress. Maada Bio, who lost in the first round of 2012’s presidential race, was sworn in as president on April 4. This is not the first time Maada Bio has led Sierra Leone, as he was the military head of a transitional government for three months in 1996. […]

The outlook for this week’s Summit of the Americas changed abruptly just three days before it was scheduled to start, when the White House announced that President Donald Trump was canceling his plans to attend the meeting in the Peruvian capital, along with a scheduled side trip to Colombia, due to the crisis in Syria. Trump’s presence at the summit, in what was meant to be his first visit to Latin America, would surely have monopolized the spotlight. Without Trump, the focus instead will be on the substance of the summit. Unless, that is, an even more dramatic arc unfolds. […]

On April 1, Bahrain announced that it had made a huge discovery of offshore oil and gas in the Persian Gulf that far exceeds its current reserves. Drilling by two U.S.-based firms confirmed that the Khaleej al-Bahrain basin may contain more than 80 billion barrels of shale oil and around 13.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. For the cash-strapped government in Manama, which has faced a mounting fiscal deficit and nagging social pressures, the news came as a major relief. While just a minor player in the oil market today, Bahrain actually gave birth to the industry on the […]

U.S. President Donald Trump has promised that Syria, Russia and Iran will pay a price for the latest use of chemical weapons against civilians in Syria’s brutal civil war. But if he does decide to carry out punitive strikes for the chemical attack in the rebel-held Damascus suburb of Douma, they will do little to satisfy advocates for a more forceful U.S. involvement on humanitarian grounds. Nor are they likely to deter future outrages, if the missile strike Trump ordered last year after a previous use of chemical weapons is any indication. More importantly, they will leave unresolved the geopolitical […]

After six days of deliberation, a jury in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, last week declared Bolivia’s former president, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, and defense minister, Carlos Sanchez Berzain, guilty under U.S. law of extrajudicial killings committed in Bolivia 15 years ago. Damages of $10 million were awarded to the case’s eight plaintiffs, who all lost family members during the 2003 security crackdown on protests in Bolivia over a proposed natural gas pipeline running to Chile. Both Sanchez de Lozada and Sanchez Berzain have been living in exile in the United States since they fled Bolivia after the violence in what became […]

On March 27, Japan announced an extensive reorganization of the main branch of its military, known as the Ground Self-Defense Forces. The government described it as the most sweeping revamp since the forces were founded in 1954. The restructuring includes integrating the five regional armies that make up the Ground Self-Defense Forces under a single command. While Japan’s postwar constitution restricted the country’s military capabilities, escalating threats from China and North Korea have raised concerns for Tokyo, and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has taken steps to loosen the constitutional constraints. In an email interview, Michael Green, the senior vice president […]