"What Argentina’s vote to legalize abortion means for the region" PBS NewsHour 12/30/2020
Excerpt
SUMMARY: Argentina on Wednesday voted to legalize abortion, making it the first major Latin American country to take the step. María Victoria Murillo, director of the Institute for Latin American Studies at Columbia University, joins Nick Schifrin to discuss what the historic vote means for Argentina and the region.
The idea is part of a raft of immigration proposals signed by Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly that are likely to spur international and legal challenges.
This article was co-published with Univision. (Spanish)
Update, Feb. 21, 2017:
In a call with reporters Tuesday morning, DHS officials confirmed they were working on a plan to send migrants who had entered the United States from Mexico back to Mexico, even if they were not citizens of that country.
Buried deep in the Trump administration's plans to round up undocumented immigrants is a provision certain to enrage Mexico — new authority for federal agents to deport anyone caught crossing the southern border to Mexico, regardless of where they are from.
If present immigration trends continue, that could mean the United States would push hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans, Hondurans, Salvadorans, Brazilians, Ecuadorans, even Haitians into Mexico. Currently, such people are detained in the U.S. and allowed to request asylum.
President Trump wants them to do so from Mexico, communicating via videoconference calls with U.S. immigration officials from facilities that Mexico would presumably be forced to build.
“This would say if you want to make a claim for asylum or whatever we'll hear your case but you are going to wait in Mexico,” a DHS official said. “Those are details that are being worked out both within the department and between the US government and the government of Mexico … there are elements that still need to be worked out in detail.
Kelly and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will travel to Mexico later this week to meet with representatives of the Mexican government. It remains unclear if they will discuss this issue.
The new authority for immigration agents is among the dramatic, some would say untenable, tactics the Trump administration is preparing to deploy as it upends President Obama's policies on illegal immigration.
A pair of memos signed by John Kelly, the Homeland Security secretary, and publicly released on Tuesday outline the plans for what present and former government officials say will be a massive roundup of undocumented immigrants. Near final drafts of the memos had leaked over the weekend and had been first reported by McClatchy.
Officials disclosed that two former Senate aides to Attorney General Jeff Sessions drafted the plan without input from career DHS policy staffers. The ideas aren't new. Many of the approaches described in the memos come from a 1996 law that policy makers and law enforcement agents had disregarded as either unenforceable or absurd.
“Most of these provisions of law have been there for decades,” the DHS official said. “We are simply trying to execute what Congress has asked us to do.”
Among them was the Mexico part of the plan, for example, which calls for returning undocumented immigrants “to the foreign contiguous territory from which they arrived.” The memo goes on to point out how foisting the immigrants onto Mexico would benefit DHS's budget, saying that it would, “save the Department's detention and adjudication resources for other priority aliens.”
However, former senior Mexican and American immigration officials said it could very well create new security problems along the border, as authorities in each country push unwanted migrants back and forth.
The American Immigration Lawyers Association said that the proposal would violate U.S. law and international treaty obligations. Mexico is as likely to embrace the plan as it did the notion of paying for a wall. “I would expect Mexico to respond with an emphatic 'No,'” said Gustavo Mohar, a former senior Mexican immigration and national security policy official.
Whether viable or not, the Trump administration's deportation plans mark a dramatic departure from decades of policy and practice. Current and former immigration policy officials say that while the details of how the administration intends to carry out the plans remain unclear — if not insurmountable — the administration's overall message to enforcement agents across the country is clear: the limits have been lifted.
President Obama attempted to focus enforcement efforts on immigrants who had been convicted of serious crimes, and on those who were caught while or shortly after illegally entering the country. Still, his administration deported record numbers of immigrants, most of whom had only been accused of minor crimes and immigration violations.
The Trump administration says it, too, is focused on deporting criminals, but it has redefined crimes to include any activity that might bring a conviction, including entering the U.S. without permission. Effectively, that makes virtually everyone in the U.S. without a proper visa subject to roundup at their workplace or home.
“If you are present in the U.S. without being admitted or paroled or having overstayed your visa, the immigration laws of the U.S. subject you to removal,” the DHS official said. “Everyone who is in violation of the laws is theoretically subject to enforcement. The Department has limited resources and we will, to the extent that we can, focus on folks who have committed serious crimes.”
The only clear exception, according to the enforcement plan and the DHS briefing, is for immigrants who were illegally brought to the U.S. as children, known as Dreamers.
“Anyone who complained about Obama as the deporter-in-chief,” said David Martin, formerly DHS's principal deputy general counsel, “is unfortunately going to get a taste of what it's like when someone is really gung-ho.”
Greg Chen, the policy director at AILA, said the Trump plan would “effectively unleash a massive deportation force with extremely broad authority to use detention as the default mechanism for anyone suspected of violating immigration law.”
The question looming over the proposals is how many of them, with all their legal and logistical obstacles, will the President actually be able to carry out.
The memos, for example, authorize the Border Patrol to hire 5,000 new agents, even though the force has never been able to fill the slots it has already been allotted. Some 60 percent of applicants to the Border Patrol fail the required polygraph, and those who pass take 18 months to get sent out into the field.
The Trump plan calls for the expansion of a George W. Bush-era program, known as 287g, which allows DHS to deputize state and local police as immigration agents. It was touted after 9/11 as a critical “force-multiplier.” But by 2010, some of the country's largest police departments were refusing to participate because they believed it would shatter the trust between their officers and the communities they were sworn to protect. Meanwhile, participating agencies, which foot the bill for the program, were suddenly saddled with new debts and hounded by accusations of racial profiling and other abuse, forcing the Obama administration to suspend expansion of the program.
Until now, the enforcement of summary deportation laws, known as “expedited removal,” have been limited to those apprehended within 14 days of illegally entering the country and within 100 miles of Canada or Mexico. The memos signed by Kelly would allow use of those laws anywhere in the country against anyone who entered illegally within the past two years.
Lucas Guttentag, a former DHS adviser and Stanford law professor, said this would “unleash chaos,” violate due process, and meet challenges in court, similar to those that scuttled the administration's travel ban.
There would also be aggressive challenges, lawyers said, to plans that would allow immigration agents to deport unaccompanied minor children who crossed the border illegally, rather than uniting them with parents or other relatives in the U.S.
The reason for discussing unaccompanied minors is “ that they have been abandoned by their parents or legal guardians,” the DHS official said. If it is “determined that there is a parent or guardian in the U.S. that they can be handed over to, then DHS needs to take a hard look over whether that person is actually'' an unaccompanied minor.
“There will be a renewed focus on ensuring that folks don't abuse the system,” the DHS official added.
They also expect legal opposition to a proposal that would strip undocumented immigrants of existing privacy protections, allowing personal information such as asylum cases or immigration violations to be publicly disclosed.
“We want to ensure that our privacy policies are consistent with the law,” the DHS official said. “The Privacy Act applies by statute to citizens'' and green card holders. “The President has asked us to align our laws with what congress has directed.”
“The Trump people have clearly bought into the model of harsh enforcement. They apparently think, 'we'll be tough, and a lot of people will leave on their own,'” said Martin, an immigration law professor at the University of Virginia. “They believe they'll win in the court of public opinion. I'm not sure about that. A lot of Americans know hard-working undocumented immigrants. The kind of enforcement Trump's people are talking about will visibly create many more sympathetic cases than unsympathetic ones.”
Some of the provisions explicitly acknowledge that it could take years before DHS has the manpower and money to pull off what the President has ordered. Immigration enforcement agents, however, have already begun filling the policy void by launching raids and deportations, including some that advocates worry are meant to test the limits. Meanwhile panic has taken hold in many immigrant communities.
“The level of fear is more than anything we've ever seen,” said Marielena Hincapie, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center. She said the plan's sweep, “sent a chill to my bones,” because it threatens to do irreparable harm to millions of families. She added, “This all seems aimed at changing who we are as a nation.”
SUMMARY: In a surprise vote, the Colombian people narrowly rejected the peace deal with guerrilla group FARC that would have ended Latin America's longest running conflict. After the vote, Colombia's president and the top FARC commander both appealed for calm and reiterated their support for peace. William Brangham speaks with Bernard Aronson, U.S. Special Envoy for Colombian Peace Process.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Now to a major upset in South America.
Yesterday, voters in Colombia rejected a peace deal between their government and the largest rebel group, known as the FARC. It was hoped the deal would put an end to 50-plus years of conflict that's left hundreds of thousands of people dead.
William Brangham has the latest.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM (NewsHour): Sunday's stunning outcome in Colombia touched off celebrations in parts of Bogotá. Voters narrowly rejected a peace accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, this despite predictions it would win easily.
CLAUDIA, ‘No' Supporter (through translator): We have all been victims of the FARC and this victory is calling to the government to renegotiate the agreements, not to hand over the country to the FARC. It's very emotional. This is what Colombia wants.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: But yes-voters complained opponents of the peace deal were misguided.
ANTONIO SANGUINO, ‘Yes' supporter (through translator): Fifty percent of the people who went out to vote allowed themselves to be convinced by a message of hate, a message of revenge, a message of keeping us in the past.
UC San Diego, Brazilian scientists infect pregnant mice with virus and detect harm to their babies
Scientists from Brazil and UC San Diego said Wednesday that they have produced the world's first direct evidence of how the Zika virus causes brain defects. Previous research had inferred this mechanism, but never demonstrated it in the lab.
In their new study, the Brazilian and San Diego scientists worked with pregnant mice. They found that the Brazilian strain of Zika crossed the placenta and into the mice's pups, reducing growth in the brain and the rest of the body.
The brain defects were similar to the microcephaly reported in some human babies whose mothers were infected with Zika during pregnancy.
Additionally, the researchers discovered that the virus caused similar damage in brain “organoids,” which are peasized structures grown from human stem cells. In essence, the study confirmed earlier findings of Zika's effects on brain organoids, including a report published this month by UC San Diego scientists.
But one strain of mice resisted Zika, the latest study found. The pups of those mice didn't show any signs of infection and tested negative for the virus. This suggests that the virus never crossed the placenta in those cases.
This particular strain mounted a “robust” antiviral immune response, the report said. If the effect can be extended to humans, it would help explain why some Zika-infected mothers give birth to newborns who have no detectable brain damage.
Virus has already achieved pandemic status
The new study was published in the journal Nature. It can be found at Nature International Weekly. Zika's stealthy attack on fetal brains makes it especially worrisome. Unlike Ebola's direct and deadly assault, Zika is rarely fatal. Most infected people don't feel any symptoms. So if a pregnant woman is infected, the real damage may not be known until her baby is born. Another concern: Zika can harm fetal development at all stages of a woman's pregnancy. The Brazilian strain of Zika is more aggressive than the African strain, said UC San Diego's Alysson Muotri, one of the new study's authors and a Brazilian native. The two strains share about 90 percent of their genes, meaning that the 10 percent difference is responsible for making the Brazilian version more dangerous.
That fact represents a monumental challenge to Brazil, which is set to host the Summer Olympics in less than three months. People will travel to Brazil from around the world, possibly become exposed to Zika and carry the virus back to their home countries. Zika is usually carried by mosquitoes of the genus Aedes, but it also can be transmitted sexually. The virus has already achieved pandemic status, and it has been reported throughout the United States. San Diego County's first case this year was announced in February. The patient was a woman who had become infected while in Colombia. She was not pregnant at the time and has recovered fully, public health officials said.
From Jan. 1 through May 4, a total of 472 Zika cases were reported in the U.S., including 40 in California, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Pregnant women were involved in 44 of those cases, and 10 of the infections were sexually transmitted.
There has been no “homegrown” Zika infection by mosquitoes in the United States, health officials said.
However, the potential for transmission is present in the form of the Aedes Aegypti mosquito. The species, a relatively recent arrival in San Diego County, is black with white stripes. Scientists not involved in the new study said it meshes with results from previous research and shows a way forward for potential counter- measures.
“This report has revealed a new approach to investigate the pathological outcomes of Zika infection in innovative experimental models and is the first of its kind,” said medical virologist Grant Hill-Cawthorne at the University of Sydney in Australia. His comments were provided by the Australian Science Media Center. “It has shown the experimental models used can reflect the clinical presentation of Zika infection and thus serve as an excellent basis to understand the disease process and evaluate strategies for prevention,” Hill-Cawthorne said. Dr. Nathalie MacDermott, a clinical research fellow at Imperial College London, said: “The study lends further support to the likelihood that the damage to the infant resulting in microcephaly, microencephaly and brain malformations occurs during the first and second trimesters of pregnancy, a time when the infant's brain is rapidly developing and nerve cells are migrating to the correct regions.” Her comments were provided by the United Kingdom-based Science Media Center.
SUMMARY: In Brazil, health workers are searching for the smoking gun link between the virus and infant microcephaly, while troops attack mosquito breeding grounds and mothers of affected children face the long-term consequences. Science correspondent Miles O’Brien reports.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Now to the growing effort to rein in the mosquito-borne Zika virus spreading through parts of South and Central America. It is suspected of being the cause devastating birth defects in children who are born to women who become infected during pregnancy.
Our science correspondent, Miles O’Brien, has been reporting on developments from Brazil, which has been hard-hit by the virus.
Tonight, he looks at ways doctors and scientists are racing to get ahead of the outbreak.
MILES O’BRIEN (NewsHour): It’s Carnival week in Brazil, the raucous run-up to Lent, when people take to the streets to party their worries away. But this year, it’s harder to mask reality, as a frightening epidemic also marches through the nation.
DR. ADRIANA SCAVUZZI, Obstetrician, IMIP: They come to us asking many questions, and we cannot say almost nothing with 100 percent sure. What we have to do is to support them. That’s all we have to do.
MILES O’BRIEN: Dr. Adriana Scavuzzi is an obstetrician at one of the largest hospitals in Recife, the epicenter of a fast-moving outbreak of the Zika virus; a flavivirus virus in the same family as Yellow Fever, West Nile, and Dengue.
In each case, the virus hitchhikes on a tenacious day-biting mosquito called Aedes Aegypti that has origins in Africa and is now spreading throughout the globe. Two-month-old Nicollas Pereira has an abnormally small head, microcephaly.
Doctors at this hospital would normally see 10 cases like this a year. But starting in August, there were suddenly 10 to 20 a month.
Dr. Ana Van Der Linden is a pediatric neurologist. She says Nicollas must contend with an array of permanent mental and physical problems.
DR. ANA VAN DER LINDEN, Pediatric Neurologist, IMIP (through interpreter): With this impairment, we see that reflex reactions are good, but voluntary actions that depend on better brain development will be impaired. He will have bad motor skills and mental development. He can also have abnormal vision, hearing disorders, and bone malformation.
SUMMARY: On Thursday, Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina was forced to resign. By the afternoon, he was in court, accused of taking part in a multi-million dollar bribery operation, and then he spent the night in jail. Judy Woodruff takes a closer look at the dramatic turn of events with Adriana Beltrán from the Washington Office on Latin America.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): We turn now to a major shakeup in the Central American nation of Guatemala.
On Thursday morning, President Otto Perez Molina was forced to resign. By Thursday afternoon, he was in court to face charges, and he spent the night in jail. He’s accused of taking part in a multimillion-dollar bribery operation. As the allegations were revealed over the summer, tens of thousands of Guatemalans took to the streets, demanding accountability.
For more on these allegations and what it means for that country, I’m joined now by Adriana Beltran. She’s a Guatemala expert at the Washington Office on Latin America. It’s a research group that advocates for human rights.
Welcome to the NewsHour.
ADRIANA BELTRAN, Washington Office on Latin America: Thank you, Judy, for inviting me.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, tell us, what are all these corruption charges about? What do they actually involve?
ADRIANA BELTRAN: Well, back in April, the Guatemalan public prosecutor’s office and the U.N.-led International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, or CICIG, unearthed a massive corruption scandal within the tax authority office.
It implicated a number of high-level officials that had essentially set up a scheme where they were accepting massive bribes for importers to be able to pay lower taxes, thereby defrauding the state of millions and millions of revenue.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And this has been unfolding over the year. Earlier this year, the vice president had to step down.
ADRIANA BELTRAN: Right.
So, due to these charges, the vice president was forced to resign in May. In August, following more investigations that were carried out by the prosecutor’s office and by the CICIG, they announced they had sufficient evidence to allege that both former Vice President Baldetti and now former President Otto Perez Molina were involved in this case.
SUMMARY: The deadly Ebola virus normally spreads among animals but occasionally spills over to humans, to dire effect. To understand how such diseases make that jump, scientists must find the animal host. But the hunt for live samples of Ebola in animals has never turned up a smoking gun. Science correspondent Miles O’Brien follows epidemiologists in Sierra Leone on their hunt for deadly diseases.
LINA MOSES, Tulane University: Kenema became the epicenter of the outbreak in July.
MILES O’BRIEN (NewsHour): Lina Moses is back at it, on the trail of a killer virus near Kenema, Sierra Leone. She is still haunted by memories of the worst days of the Ebola epidemic last year.
LINA MOSES: We didn’t go searching for Ebola. Ebola came to us. It came with a vengeance.
MILES O’BRIEN: She took us to the remote villages of Kpalu.
LINA MOSES: This is the first time we have trapped for a while since the Ebola outbreak started.
MILES O’BRIEN: An epidemiologist and disease ecologist with Tulane University’s Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Program, Lina leads a team focused primarily on a virus with Ebola-like symptoms, Lassa fever. Lassa and Ebola are so-called zoonotic diseases caused by viruses, parasites or bacteria that are normally spread among animals, but occasionally spill over to humans, often causing severe disease.
Understanding how these viruses make the jump into humans is at the core of her research.
LINA MOSES: Any time you’re looking at zoonotic disease, you have to start looking at the animal that carries it, the animal that maintains it in nature, and that’s the only way you can start to control it.
SUMMARY: In Sierra Leone, health care workers use infrared thermometers to monitor those who may have come in contact with Ebola. It takes 21 days before they can be deemed virus-free. That’s why researchers are trying to create more precise infection detection. In the second in the series, science correspondent Miles O’Brien looks at the efforts to create faster, more reliable testing for the virus.
SUMMARY: A Chinese-financed shipping canal in the works to connect Nicaragua’s Pacific Coast to the Caribbean would dwarf Panama’s famous waterway. But while Nicaraguan officials say the project will create much-needed jobs, human rights advocates and environmental groups are protesting the construction. Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports on the controversy.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO (NewsHour): They came by the busload. They piled into cattle trucks. They came by horse and mule from miles around for a rally that likely tripled the population of the dusty little town of Los Chiles.
At stake was Nicaragua’s sovereignty, they chanted, sold to the Chinese. The object of their protest is a shipping canal to be built by a Chinese company. As described in this video dubbed from Chinese into Spanish for Nicaraguans, it would stretch 170 miles across the country to connect its Pacific coast to the Caribbean and thus the Atlantic.
It’s not a new idea. The Americans once considered it. This map from 1870 shows a proposed route for a shipping shortcut between the Earth’s hemispheres. In the end, the U.S. Congress opted to build in Panama.
Nicaragua’s waterway will dwarf the Panama Canal, three times as long and twice as deep. Cost estimates range from $50 billion to $100 billion.
BILL WILD, HKND Group: It is by far the largest earth-moving project ever attempted in the world.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: The project’s chief engineer is Bill Wild, an Australian veteran of many big builds, but nothing approaching this one.
BILL WILD: There will be two large port facilities, one at either end of the project, hydroelectric schemes, and a number of other parts of the project. So, overall, it’s an incredibly exciting and large and challenging engineering project.
JOHN CARLOS FREY (NewsHour): Miguel Angel Gomez, a 30-year-old taxi driver here in El Salvador spends a lot of time looking in his rear-view mirror, worried that he’ll be the next victim of a notoriously violent street gang that already murdered Miguel’s brother.
A local news report showed the scene of the crime.
MIGUEL ANGEL GOMEZ: First they shot him and then they beheaded him. Here if they don’t like you or for any little thing, they have you killed.
JOHN CARLOS FREY: Miguel says his brother was not part of a gang and has no idea why his brother was killed. But Miguel says gang members are now after him because they believe that he’ll seek revenge.
What happens to you and your wife if you both stay here in El Salvador?
MIGUEL ANGEL GOMEZ: They will kill us.
JOHN CARLOS FREY: He and his wife are now planning to illegally cross the border into Texas, where they have relatives. Since last January more than 230,000 undocumented Central Americans, many of them children, have crossed into the United States fleeing violence perpetrated by gangs and drug cartels in countries like El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.
With all the reporting about the current crisis, what’s little understood is that the mass exodus to the United States earlier this year was actually thirty years in the making. Fueled by American foreign policy decisions in the 1980’s and an act of congress in the mid 1990’s.
AL VALDEZ, Orange County police: There are experts who say this is all Americans’ fault and there are those who say it’s not our fault because we’re following the rules. And then there’s people like me sort of on the fence.
JOHN CARLOS FREY: It all began in the early 1980’s when El Salvador was in the midst of a brutal civil war. It was the height of the cold war and the Reagan administration, fearful of communist expansion in Central America supported the military-backed government with arms and financing. Seventy-five thousand were killed in the conflict, mostly at the hands of government forces. It’s estimated that hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans fled their war-torn country seeking refuge in the United States.
AL VALDEZ: The mass exodus of Salvadorians to flee the conflict down there put a large population of Salvadorian immigrants in Los Angeles.
Al Valdez is a 28-year veteran of the police force in Orange County, California, who specialized in undercover field operations and headed the gang investigation unit for the Attorney General’s office there. He explains that many of these Salvadoran families lived in poverty in the rough neighborhoods around downtown Los Angeles. Some of these new immigrants joined Latino gangs like 18th street gang and Mara Salvatrucha 13, or MS 13, for both protection and a livelihood.
AL VALDEZ: Kids join gangs as a mechanism to survive. Now granted your life sucks, but at least you’re alive and you have food and water, and you have protection.
JOHN CARLOS FREY: Many of those Salvadoran gang members ended up in California prisons. And this is where that act of congress comes in. Before 1996, only criminals convicted of violent felonies with sentences of five years or more could be deported. But all that changed in 1996, when in an attempt to get tough on illegal immigration, congress passed a law allowing authorities to deport criminals if they had a prison sentence of just one year.
This led to the deportation of 10s of thousands of gang members to Central America, many to El Salvador. Once they arrived they set up shop here and recruited local Salvadorans into the gangs. Many of the new recruits were teenagers who joined for the money and for the street cred. Others because they’d been threatened that if they refused to join, they’d be killed.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): ..... Newly discovered by scientists and newly documented by the crowd.
Jeff is back to explain.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): It was an exceedingly rare discovery; a new species of mammal called the Olinguito, a small, furry, tree-welling member of the raccoon family, living in the forests of Colombia and Ecuador.
In the year since the announcement, the Olinguito has gone from literal unknown to being surprisingly well-documented through photos and videos shot by amateur naturalists, bird watchers, and others, a kind of crowd-sourced science.
Kristofer Helgen, a curator of mammals at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of Natural History, was part of the original discovery team, and joins us once again for an update.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): From shipping vessels to cruise liners to luxury yachts, over a million ships have passed through the Isthmus of Panama since its canal opened on August 15, 1914. Spanning a strip of mountainous land between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, the canal is a conduit for business and sea power, shortening the trip from New York to San Francisco by nearly 8,000 miles.
The triumph of engineering, man’s harnessing of water and moving of mountains, took over 30 years to complete.
KIM STEENTOFT, Ship captain: It’s a huge achievement they made when they produced 100 years back. If you think about the locks are nearly the same today, and it’s what they built 100 years back, it’s a huge achievement.
GWEN IFILL: The French broke ground on the project in 1881. But soaring costs, engineering problems, and a steep death toll from yellow fever estimated at 22,000 people ended French involvement.
But where the French saw failure, President Theodore Roosevelt saw opportunity, a chance to unlock America’s economic power. In 1903, Panama gained independence from Columbia, with U.S. support. In return for Washington’s backing and recognition, the new government surrendered sovereignty over a portion of the country that would become known as the Canal Zone.
The U.S. officially took over in 1904, but yellow fever, one of the major hurdles to the project’s success, remained. It wasn’t until Dr. Colonel William Gorgas targeted mosquitoes that health officials gained the upper hand.
The U.S. also came up with a new engineering approach, discarding plans for a sea level route, in favor of a series of locks that could lift ships as much as 85 feet through the complex mountain formations, before being lowered again to sea level.
But the massive excavation and construction process was still fraught with danger.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Infant mortality rates have fallen dramatically worldwide over the past 25 years. But, even as health officials celebrate that achievement, they also warn that those who survive malnutrition frequently face lifelong problems.
In the Americas, the situation is most dire in Guatemala, where roughly 50 percent of the children are so malnourished they’re stunted, physically and developmentally, for life.
Now, for the first time in decades, that country’s leaders have a coordinated program to bring those numbers down.
Hari Sreenivasan has our report, which was produced in collaboration with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): Each day around mid-afternoon, Maria Chamile begins a chore she knows may harm her children.
With no meat and few vegetables, she starts cooking dinner with the ingredients available to her. Usually, that’s just beans. It’s a staple meal here in the predominantly Mayan highlands of Guatemala, one containing so few of the vitamins and minerals children need to grow properly that roughly eight in 10 of them are stunted in some communities.
GWEN IFILL (Newshour): A month of protests reached a boiling point this week in economically strapped Venezuela. At the center of the uproar is a charismatic leader seeking to oust the current government.
Demonstrators burned trash, chanted, and made noise any way they could outside a Caracas court where a top opposition leader faced criminal charges.
Leopoldo Lopez is accused of fomenting protest during a tumultuous three weeks in Venezuela. The Harvard-trained economist surrendered to police yesterday, after imploring supporters to keep up the pressure on socialist President Nicolas Maduro.
LEOPOLDO LOPEZ, “Popular Will” Party (through interpreter): Every Venezuelan who wants change, gather ourselves, organize ourselves and hold nonviolent protests. I swear to you, we will overcome and very soon we will have a free and democratic Venezuela.
GWEN IFILL: The protesters have denounced Maduro’s stewardship of the oil-rich Venezuelan economy, also at issue, rampant crime, controls on media, and food shortages.
Five people have died in the last week, as protests turned violent, a turn many blame on so-called colectivos, a paramilitary citizens militia allied to the Maduro government.
MARIA SANCHEZ, (through interpreter): We cannot support Maduro. He’s a bad man. He’s worse than Chavez. There are no medicines. There’s nothing in this country. For how long are we going to continue to suffer in this country?
GWEN IFILL: Maduro, in turn, has minced no words in denouncing the protests.
PRESIDENT NICOLAS MADURO, Venezuela (through interpreter): I have been personally overseeing the operations, so that I can guarantee peace in the face of the fascists gathering today with their armed gangs, with their trained groups, so that there would be peace.
GWEN IFILL: Maduro was elected last April by a razor-thin margin. He’d been vice president for the late Hugo Chavez, who feuded with successive American presidents and accused the U.S. of orchestrating a 2002 coup.
Maduro has leveled the same charge this time. On Monday, Venezuela’s foreign minister ordered three American diplomats to leave the country. It’s been four years since the U.S. posted an ambassador there.
The White House rejected claims the U.S. is promoting unrest.
For now, a tense calm prevails in Caracas, as both sides wait for whatever comes next.
SUMMARY: Less than a year has passed since the death of Hugo Chavez and the election of President Nicolas Maduro, but the problems driving unrest in Venezuela have been building for a decade. Carl Meacham of the Center for Strategic and International Studies joins Gwen Ifill to offer background on the “snowballing” of anti-government sentiment and why neighboring countries have been shy to speak out.
SUMMARY: Thousands of species of plant and wildlife call Ecuador's Yasuni National Park home, but it is believed that beneath the lush floor lies $7.2 billion of oil. Drilling could threaten the rain forest's biodiversity and indigenous populations. Some scientists argue a balance could be found. Hari Sreenivasan reports.
HARI SREENIVASAN (Newshour): Ecuador's Yasuni National Park is teeming with plant and animal life. According to scientists, any football-field-sized area of Yasuni has more species of trees than the U.S. and Canada combined.
The park also includes 121 different species of reptiles, 150 species of frogs, 596 species of birds, and 187 species of mammals.
SUMMARY: Anti-government fury swelled to new heights across Brazil as at least a million protesters took to the streets overnight. The mostly peaceful week-long protests turned violent when masked youths challenged riot police. Jeffrey Brown reports on how the public outraged was sparked by a transit fare hike.
SUMMARY: At least a million Brazilian protesters flocked to the streets overnight. Margaret Warner talks with Matthew Cowley, Sao Paulo bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, about how worries about an economic slowdown and Brazil's upcoming hosting of major sports events have helped fuel the massive public protests.
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): And now to Venezuela. The South American country voted on Sunday for a new president to succeed the late Hugo Chavez.
And, as Ray Suarez reports, the results were far closer than many expected.
RAY SUAREZ (Newshour): The streets of Caracas were mostly quiet this morning, as Venezuelans digested the photo finish election and the immediate calls for a recount.
MARGLELIS QUINTERO, Venezuela: The gap was very small. Actually, I was expecting it to be bigger. But, well, the people expressed their will and it was the popular will, so it's necessary to respect the results.
GILMAR DOMINGUEZ, Venezuela: The difference was very, very little. And it's possible that there were mistakes during the counting. I agree they should have asked for a recount so we can clear the doubts.
RAY SUAREZ: Venezuela's electoral authority declared acting President Nicolas Maduro had won by a whisker, with just 50.7 percent of the vote.
TIBISAY LUCENA, Venezuela Electoral Authority: These are the irreversible results that the people of Venezuela have decided with the electoral process.
RAY SUAREZ: Maduro is the handpicked successor of President Hugo Chavez, who died of cancer last month after 14 years in power. Under Chavez, relations with Washington were strained, even as Venezuela became America's fourth largest supplier of crude oil.
Instead, Chavez transformed his country into a socialist ally of Cuba's Castro regime. Last night, with the vote in, Maduro told supporters they have done the will of the late leader.
PRESIDENT-ELECT NICOLAS MADURO, Venezuela: Long live Chavez, long live Chavez, long live Chavez, until victory forever. Let's go to the streets to defend this victory, to defend the triumph in peace, and in order to celebrate with the people and to remember that we have complied with the commander.
RAY SUAREZ: Still, opposition candidate Henrique Capriles said today Maduro's margin of just 235,000 votes demands a recount.
HENRIQUE CAPRILES RADONSKI, Venezuelan Presidential Candidate: I want to say to the government's candidate, the loser today is you. And I say that firmly. You are the loser, you and your government. We will not recognize the results until each and every Venezuela vote one by one has been counted.
RAY SUAREZ: Maduro said he's open to that idea.
And, in Washington, the State Department also endorsed it.
PATRICK VENTRELL, State Department Deputy Spokesman: The results reveal a Venezuelan electorate that is roughly evenly divided. In order to meet all of Venezuelans' democratic expectations, it makes sense that such a recount should be completed before any additional steps, including official certification of the results, occurs.
RAY SUAREZ: The poor showing for Maduro, who campaigned with all the advantages of government backing, may signal Venezuelans are weary of chronic inflation, shortages of basic goods and high levels of violent crime.
SUMMARY: Nicolás Maduro will be Venezuela's new president following Hugo Chavez's death in March. Ray Suarez talks with Cynthia Arnson of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research about Venezuela's election system, economy and how the United States is responding to the results.
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): Yesterday, a selection that took many by surprise. Today, the new pope spent his first day as head of the worldwide Catholic Church.
We begin with a report narrated by Jonathan Rugman of Independent Television News.
JONATHAN RUGMAN, Independent Television News: He's a Vatican outsider who speaks five languages, Pope Francis, or Jorge Bergoglio, celebrating mass in the Sistine Chapel tonight, with the cardinals who elected him decked in gold.
He's 76, a little unsteady on his feet here, but the Argentinean spoke in fluent Italian without notes. And last night, Italy's bishops were so convinced that one of their men had won back the papacy that they sent out a message of congratulation by mistake.
This morning, the pope, who is also bishop of Rome, visited one of its oldest churches, praying for the city's safety. He's the first non-European to become pontiff in 12 centuries, but his parents were Italian and the welcome here could not have been warmer.
From here, he took an ordinary police car to collect his luggage and pay his bill before the move into a more upscale neighborhood -- so, a no-nonsense debut from what appears to be a back-to-basics, down-to-earth pope, apparently hoping to change the Vatican more than it changes him.
St. Peter's Square heaving with excitement last night when his church pulled back the red curtain and sprung him on the world. He used to be known as Father Jorge. Now he's Pope Francis, but determined, it seems, that these dizzy heights won't change him, bowing his head and asking the people to pray for him, then sharing the bus back home with his fellow vicars.
ARCHBISHOP TIMOTHY DOLAN, Archdiocese of New York: We toasted him. The cardinal secretary of state toasted him, and then he toasted us and he simply said, "May God forgive you."
Which brought the house down. In other words, the -- I hope you -- I hope you don't regret this later.
JONATHAN RUGMAN: The biggest cheer, of course, from his fellow Latin Americans, for a man with the common touch, yes, but no doctrinal pushover, as tough on abortion or gay marriage or women priests as his bookish predecessor.
SUMMARY: Pope Francis is the first pontiff to hail from Argentina. He's also a huge soccer fan. For more on the pope's South American roots and his home country's reaction to the papal election, as well as the intersection of religion, populism and politics there, Jeffrey Brown talks with Hugh Bronstein of Reuters from Buenos Aires.
MARGARET WARNER (Newshour): The announcement of the Venezuelan leader's death came late this afternoon by the country's vice president, Nicolas Maduro.
Chavez had shown remarkable staying power, ruling the South American country for 14 years. He survived a coup that briefly deposed him, a constitution that term-limited him out of office, and won an October election after his first bout with cancer.
He and his brand of revolutionary socialism antagonized three U.S. administrations, as he cozied up to the world's most isolated regimes in Cuba, Iran, and Syria.
For more on his death and what it means for the future of Venezuela, I'm joined by Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, and Carl Meacham, head of the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): There was surprising news for many Venezuelans this morning, as they got word that their leader, Hugo Chavez, who had been away from his country for months, had returned there in the middle of the night.
Ray Suarez reports.
RAY SUAREZ (Newshour): Venezuela's minister of information, Ernesto Villegas, proclaimed the news on state television: President Hugo Chavez had returned.
MINISTER OF INFORMATION ERNESTO VILLEGAS, Venezuela: Congratulations to the Venezuelan people for the strength and maturity you have had during all of these days of companionship and solidarity with Commandant Chavez.
RAY SUAREZ: The fiery leftist leader seen in these photographs from Friday had spent more than two months in Cuba for cancer treatment. The photos showed Chavez, his two daughters, and that day's newspaper, as if to quash rumors that he had died.
But today, unlike previous returns from medical visits to Cuba, there were no images of his early morning homecoming. Still, supporters celebrated outside the military hospital where the 58-year-old Chavez is continuing treatment.
MAN: Venezuela waits for you with open arms, my commandant. We love you. We want you. And there's an entire population that will support you always.
RAY SUAREZ: And Chavez in his first direct communication with the world since departing for Cuba updated his followers via Twitter. "We have returned to the Venezuelan fatherland. Thank you, my God. Thank you, my beloved people. We will continue the treatment here." He added, "I remain attached to Christ and trusting in my nurses and doctors."
And he echoed the words of Cuba's Che Guevara: "Onward to victory forever. We will live and we will conquer."
Meanwhile, opposition leaders continued to criticize the secrecy surrounding the president's health. He won reelection in October and had been slated to be sworn in again in January, but the country's Supreme Court ruled the inauguration could be postponed until his health improved. That led to questions about who was actually running the oil-rich nation.
Chavez's main opponent in the last election, Henrique Capriles, who accused the government of lying about Chavez's condition, said today he hopes that now the government can refocus on the challenges facing the country.
HENRIQUE CAPRILES RADONSKI, Former Venezuelan Presidential Candidate: During the last few weeks, the only thing we have heard from them are insults, words of hate, which are making Venezuelans turn against each other. I also hope the return of the president means that the country is going to begin to know that things will be spoken of truthfully and furthermore to dedicate our time and energy to what is important.
RAY SUAREZ: No specifics were given today on Chavez's current state of recovery or when he might officially be sworn in to his new term in office.
SUMMARY: The return of Hugo Chavez inspires a myriad of questions about the president's health, the state of the country and who is really running Venezuela. To help address those questions, Ray Suarez interviews Ian James, Caracas bureau chief for the Associated Press.
RAY SUAREZ (Newshour): It's being billed as a battle between David and Goliath. Known as 7-0 for the 7th of October, when Venezuelans head to the polls, the election marks a watershed moment for the world's second-largest oil-producing nation and a critical supplier of crude oil to the U.S., its number one customer.
Towering above the race is incumbent President Hugo Chavez.
PRESIDENT HUGO CHAVEZ, Venezuela (through translator): We will raze the competition on Sunday the 7th. No one should have the smallest doubt.
RAY SUAREZ: And with him, legions of red-shirted supporters known as Chavistas from the United Socialist Party.
RAMON PINO, agriculture union leader (through translator): Starting on October 8, we social organizations are going to join the president to make radical changes to this country, so we can impose the revolution, and finally have a socialist system firmly set in Venezuela.
RAY SUAREZ: Through three U.S. administrations, the 58-year-old Chavez has shown remarkable staying power, surviving a coup that briefly deposed him, a constitution that term-limited him out of office, And for more than a year, his battle with cancer, all while openly antagonizing the United States, as he's cozied up to the world's most isolated regimes.
