Following the very public femicide of a pregnant Ecuadorian woman by her partner, a Venezuelan immigrant, violent protests have erupted among Ecuadorian citizens who are demanding a crackdown on immigration from Venezuela. After the start of the protests, Ecuador’s President Lenín Moreno announced that new measures would be considered to limit immigration and that security forces would be deployed to monitor Venezuelan immigrants. These public reactions to the murder, and Moreno’s response, have been harshly criticized by those who view them as xenophobic against innocent Venezuelans.
After over 50 years of guerrilla war and the recent demilitarization of the leftist FARC guerrilla group, it has seemed that the violence in Colombia finally has an end in sight. The National Liberation Army (ELN) is the last remaining guerrilla group in Colombia, and until the past few years, had been rather quiet. When the finalization of the FARC-Colombia Peace Deal was announced in 2016, ELN began orchestrating more attacks on Colombia’s infrastructure.
Under the Donald Trump presidency, recent years have seen a substantial rise in the attention and emotion invested in the United States’ immigration debate. However, continuous criticisms of the country’s immigration system from both ends of the political spectrum fail to recognize the other countries that are being affected by the same migration patterns. Although all countries in Central America have been affected in some way by the recent waves of migration, Mexico is in the center—geographically and politically—of the movement, and is arguably more the subject of a ‘crisis’ of immigration than the United States.
In 2003, Brazil’s Senate passed a Disarmament Statute in response to spiking murder rates that is still in place today. The statute created a number of laws pertaining to gun ownership, including clauses that call for people interested in applying for a gun to be at least 25 years old, to be free of any criminal history, to have proof that they have a steady job and fixed residence, and to pass a psychological test and pass gun training courses.
