by the El Reportero’s news services
Calixto Chipana
La Paz, Sep 21 (Prensa Latina) The Bolivian government announced planning of a law that identifies 10 prohibiting areas of child labor where children are facing situations of exploitation now.
According to the Labour Minister Calixto Chipana recollection of chestnuts in the Amazon, mines and sugarcane harvest, among others, are some of the areas in which minors are not allowed to do because they expose themselves to physic and physiological dangers.
Chipana informed the National Council of Economic Policy (CONAPE) is working on the rules and list of forbidden jobs.
Since that law come into effect we are all forced to avoid children from being in those places, he emphasized.
At the same time the Labor Minister also state forward that they will seek for policies to allow those minors that maintain their families can do it in worthy conditions and without violating their rights.
Ecuador takes back Manta
Ecuador formally reassumed control of the Pacifi c coast Manta airbase from the U.S. on Friday 18 Sept., two months after the US fl ew its last anti-drug trafficking surveillance fl ight from the base.
The government of President Rafael Correa marked the occasion with a bit of flag waving, and a dig at the US-Colombia relationship. That will have given some comfort to the government of President Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, which appears worried about the recent thawing of relations between Ecuador and the U.S./Colombia.
Rancorous Unasur summit fails to resolve US-Colombian base issue
Defense and foreign ministers from the 12-member Union of South American Nations (Unasur) gathered in Quito this week to follow up a summit of heads of state in Argentina at the tail end of last month [WR-09-35] at which Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe was forced to defend an accord with the U.S. over the use of military bases in Colombia. Once again, Colombia was put under pressure to reveal details of the deal. It refused to do so, arguing that it was yet to be fi nalized. Instead, it called on other members – notably Venezuela and Brazil – to divulge the exact nature of their recent arms deals with extra-regional powers which, it contended, raised the specter of an arms race.
Food crisis in Guatemala lays bare ‘intolerable’ inequalities President Alvaro Colom decreed a national ‘state of calamity’ on September 8 in response to chronic food shortages which have claimed hundreds of lives. The crisis has left 54,000 families without enough to eat and a further 400,000 families facing starvation by the end of the year.
Colom initially attributed the crisis to weather conditions – drought and the El Niño phenomenon, but has since acknowledged the structural causes of the problem as rooted in Guatemala’s unequal distribution of wealth. This is the main conclusion of UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter, who recently visited the country.
