Since Guatemala ratified the Hague Convention there has been nothing new to report. Pre-approval from the American Embassy is taking around 60-70 days and PGN varies from case to case. Children are coming home and that is always good news. We’ll see what happens at the end of the year.

Standards and Poor gave Guatemala a thumbs up in the economic department, expecting the GDP to reach its highest rate in more than ten years. Apparently this is a sign of confidence in the economic policies continuing in the right direction. The president (Oscar Berger) was praised for cutting the army in half, making tax collection more efficient, giving independence to the Central Bank, and signing a free trade agreement with the U.S.

With elections on the horizon, all sorts of interesting facts are reemerging. Presidential candidate Otto Perez Molina was on the payroll of the CIA at one time, and Guatemalans are asking if he was spying on his own country during the Civil War.

Meanwhile, drug traffickers are getting very involved in the upcoming elections, particularly along the drug corridor between El Salvador and Mexico. By giving money to cooperative candidates and killing off the uncooperative ones, they are gaining control in areas where cocaine from Columbia is shipped through. There have been more than fifty election related murders this year already.

It is estimated that 31% of the political candidates are receiving money from organized crime, and 15% of those are from drug lords.

There are still no suspects in the murder of the four year old Guatemalan child Cesar, killed near his home in Lexington, Kentucky. The parents are taking him back to Guatemala to be buried, but his father says he will return, find and kill the person who murdered his son. Fear of deportation is apparently the reason why many illegal immigrants in the area who may have important information on this heinous crime, have yet to come forward.

In Naples, Florida, adoption worker Mary Bonn changed her non-guilty plea to guilty for bringing a child illegally into the U.S. Mary defends her actions by stating that when the prospective adoptive parents decided not to adopt her at the last moment, she didn’t want her put in an orphanage. The child is now residing with the parents who originally were to adopt her. Those parents do not agree with the story, and claim that Mary told them that the biological parents changed their minds about the adoption.

More about the Mary Bonn Case

Drugs and Corruption in Guatemala