Week 12: Speaking Truth To Power

The stories of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo is a chilling tale of what authoritarian governments, left or right wing, can do and the people that it impacts. Here mothers of abducted students in the 1980s protested the government when very few groups would be tolerated as protesters.

Elsewhere in Latin America the war on drugs was in full swing with U.S. imperialism having a heavy swag in the internal politics of affected nations; with the U.S. demanding that governments comply or be hit with sanctions and a loss of U.S. trade and aid. During this time the pressure on governments to capture the drug smugglers and producers that innumerable human rights violations took place.

Also in this time we began to see the issue of illegal immigration into the U.S. take a forefront, culminating in the Mexican government giving out a Migrant Guide that infurated the U.S. government because the Mexican government was helping people to break U.S. immigration law, highly undiplomatic at the least. However these illegal immigrants were important for Mexico as remittances were the 3rd largest source of foreign revenue to the country.