News stories by Danilo Valladares, page 11

Waste recycling as a way to save money, create jobs and take care of the environment is finding footing in Central America, where hundreds of tonnes of paper, plastic, tyres and other products are now being marketed through innovative initiatives.

Guatemala's election campaign got off to a controversial and premature start, with an evangelical pastor, a military officer, a former president, the president's wife and the daughter of a general who led a coup emerging as presidential hopefuls, although three of them face legal barriers to their candidacy, according to experts.

Having suffered the devastation of extreme weather phenomena in recent years, such as hurricanes Mitch, Stan and Agatha, the countries of Central America will head to the next global climate summit with an emphasis on their vulnerability and demand access to better conditions for dealing with climate disasters.

As the movement for the abolition of the death penalty gains ground worldwide, Guatemala is seeking to reintroduce capital punishment, which has been in legal limbo since 2000. Congress has already approved a law paving the way for the execution of 41 death row inmates.

Guatemala needs to take steps to prepare for even worse problems of hunger in 2011, caused by climate change and farmers' heavy dependence on a few basic crops like corn and beans, experts warned on the occasion of World Food Day, celebrated Saturday.

A high-level commission has been set up to look into appalling medical experiments carried out by U.S. researchers on hundreds of Guatemalans in the 1940s, and the government of this Central American country is debating alternative ways for the United States to make reparations.

Travelling without documents to the United States from Latin America can turn into an odyssey, in which migrants have to elude common criminals and drug traffickers along the way, not to mention the laws on migration. But now another obstacle is emerging: a wall between Guatemala and Mexico.

New challenges and a long list of shocking cases involving hidden power structures are faced by the new head of the United Nations-mandated International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG).

'I used to work on the south coast, cutting sugar cane, and I would go all the way to Belize to pick oranges during the harvest. I went through a lot so we could get by,' Héctor Pan, a Q'eqchi Indian in Guatemala who has now abandoned farming to become a river rafting guide, told IPS.

'Three-quarters of the fields are still under water. Maize, plantains, okra and pasture are all lost,' José Asencio told IPS at the village of Santa Ana Mixtán in southern Guatemala, the area worst affected by tropical storm Agatha.