Powerful 7.3 Earthquake Rocks Guatemala and Mexico as Residents Evacuated from Buildings

 

Incredible Amount of Earthquakes Hit...

As Migration From Guatemala Surges, U.S. Officials Seek Answers

A group of deported migrants after landing in Guatemala City.

Daniel Volpe for The Wall Street Journal

Several countries in the region ‘are really struggling to feed their people,’ says Customs and Border Protection commissioner


By
Alicia A. Caldwell

Oct. 13, 2018 7:00 a.m. ET

QUETZALTENANGO, Guatemala—These rugged rural highlands bordering the Pacific Ocean have become a prime source for the skyrocketing number of immigrant families crossing the U.S. border illegally and asking for asylum.

Migrant families from Guatemala seeking asylum in the U.S. have surged past those from neighboring El Salvador and Honduras. More than 42,000 Guatemalans traveling as families were arrested at the U.S. border from last September through August, up 71% from the same period a year ago, according to federal government data.

The reasons why aren’t clear. Guatemala hasn’t recently seen an upswing in violence, poverty hasn’t worsened and the national political situation hasn’t changed.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan went to the area seeking to understand why so many Guatemalans are heading north. Before his trip, he suspected hunger to be the leading cause.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan, center, meets members of an agricultural cooperative. Photo: Daniele Volpe for The Wall Street Journal

Several countries in the region “are really struggling to feed their people,” Mr. McAleenan said in an interview.

Shocking Videos Of Volcano Fuego Eruption In Guatemala (June 4, 2018)

Notable sinkholes from around the globe

Aug 12, 2013



1 of 34 photos

Sinkholes are very much in the news this week after a building partially collapsed over a sinkhole at Summer Bay Resort near Disney World in Clermont, Florida. The 40 to 60 foot sinkhole opened up under the resort building reportedly beginning late August 11 into early August 12. To explore this geological phenomenon, we took a look at some of the more notable sinkholes to form worldwide, as well as a few that made headlines in Maryland in the last 10 years.



A building sits partially collapsed over a sinkhole at Summer Bay Resort near Disney World in Clermont, Florida. The 40 to 60 foot sinkhole opened up under the resort building reportedly beginning late August 11 into early August 12. There were no injuries or deaths reported. (Gerardo Mora/Getty Images)


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6.2 quake hits near Guatemala City

by The Canadian Press - Story: 89389
Mar 25, 2013 / 5:39 pm



Photo: Contributed - beachcomberpete.com
Guatemala City

A 6.2-magnitude earthquake struck near Guatemala City on Monday, but residents said they barely felt the temblor and authorities had no immediate reports of damages or deaths.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake's epicenter was located 3 miles (6 kilometres) northwest of San Jose Pinula and had a depth of 200 kilometres (124 miles).

"So far we have received no reports of damage and we're monitoring nationwide," said Mario Cruz, a spokesman for firefighters.

The quake was only 6 miles (9 kilometres) from Guatemala's capital, but was barely felt, perhaps because of its depth.

In November 2012, a magnitude-7.4 earthquake left 42 people dead in Guatemala. The quake, which was just 32 kilometres (20 mile) deep, was centred off the coastal town of Champerico. It was the strongest earthquake to hit Guatemala since a 1976 temblor that killed 23,000.


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Deadly quakes hit Guatemala

Published: Sept. 19, 2011 at 11:27 PM


GUATEMALA CITY, Sept. 19 (UPI) -- Guatemala was hit by four earthquakes in succession Monday, the largest measuring a magnitude of 5.8, that left at least one person dead, officials said.

El Periodico reported at least one person, identified as Jesus Floridalma, 38, of Cuilapa, was killed and three others were missing in the Santa Rosa department. Another newspaper, Prensa Libre, said Floridalma was killed when a wall fell on him.

El Periodico said several other people had minor injuries.

Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom said the military, national police, local firefighters and volunteers were converging on the affected communities.

Prensa Libre said a number of homes, schools and other buildings were damaged by the quakes, which also opened large cracks in streets and roads. The tremors led many people to move to emergency shelters or to spend the night outside in open areas.

Margarita Cortez, director of Cuilapa Hospital, said the building structure did not sustain major structural damage but patients were evacuated as a precaution.

Departmental Gov. Mynor Morales said the initial damage assessment was that Cuilapa and Santa María Ixhuatan were the hardest-hit municipalities.

The Central American nation's education minister suspended school activities in the region Monday and Tuesday.

The national communications minister warned people to beware of landslides along roadways.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the first quake, measuring 4.8-magnitude, occurred at 12:01 p.m. local time at a depth of 37.9 miles. The epicenter was 25 miles southeast of Guatemala City and 52 miles west-southwest of Chiquimula.

The second temblor -- the most powerful at 5.8-magnitude -- occurred 33 minutes later at a depth of 24.5 miles, the USGS said. It was centered 32 miles southeast of Guatemala City, 42 miles east of Escuintla and 45 miles west-northwest of Santa Ana, El Salvador.

The third quake came at 1:18 p.m. and registered 4.8-magnitude. It was 22.9 miles deep and centered 31 miles southeast of Guatemala City, 39 miles east off Escuintla and 47 miles west-northwest of Santa Ana.

The fourth shaker at 2:30 p.m. was 4.5-magnitude at a depth of 25.4 miles. It was centered 37 miles east-southeast of Escuintla, 42 miles south-southeast of Guatemala City and 44 miles northwest of Acajutla, El Salvador.

All four were nearly 700 miles east-southeast of Mexico City.


Source: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2011/09/19/Deadly-quakes-hit-Guatemala/UPI-51071316486004/#ixzz1YSil9wCI

Violence Against Latin American Adventists

Not many people in States even hear about it

By Greg Szymanski, JD
Aug. 24, 2010

GRANADA, NICARAGUA — In neighboring Guatemala, a rash of violence against 7th Day Adventists pastors and church members has virtually gone unreported in the States.

According to onlookers of the worldwide religious scene, Adventists are “the last of the Christians” to make a pure stand against Rome, “the Beast in Revelations”, bent on creating a one world religion based on anti-biblical principles.

The Vatican itself has admitted in many of their formal writings the battle lines of Christianity will come down to the Sabbath, saying either you follow 7th Day Adventists and worship on Saturday, the seventh day, or follow Roman Catholic tradition and worship on Sunday, the first day of the week.

Although the day of the Sabbath seems meaningless to many modern day “Christians”, the issue according to uncompromising Bible scholars is paramount, pitting God’s Commandment and law set forth in both the Old and New Testament against man’s authority touted through Roman Catholic dogma and tradition.

This will be the final clash, says internationally known 7th Day “Adventist speaker, Professor Walter Veith adding, Rome will demand its authority through a Sunday law be recognized. Those who refuse, Veith continues, will be classified as heretics and will face the long standing Roman Catholic punishment of death.

Whether the string of violence against Adventists in Guatemala is related to the above struggle is unknown, but it should be considered, according to numerous true Bible believing onlookers, especially when looking at how Rome has dealt with true Bible believers in the past.

Here is a story that appeared in 2009 after an Adventist pastor was gunned down in Guatemala: .
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Jimmy Carter And Human Rights: Behind The Media Myth

Jimmy Carter And Human Rights: Behind The Media Myth


Media Beat (9/21/94)

By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon


Jimmy Carter's reputation has soared lately.

Typical of the media spin was a Sept. 20 report on CBS Evening News, lauding Carter's "remarkable resurgence" as a freelance diplomat. The network reported that "nobody doubts his credibility, or his contacts."

For Jimmy Carter, the pact he negotiated in Haiti is the latest achievement of his long career on the global stage.

During his presidency, Carter proclaimed human rights to be "the soul of our foreign policy." Although many journalists promoted that image, the reality was quite different.

Inaugurated 13 months after Indonesia's December 1975 invasion of East Timor, Carter stepped up U.S. military aid to the Jakarta regime as it continued to murder Timorese civilians. By the time Carter left office, about 200,000 people had been slaughtered.

Elsewhere, despotic allies — from Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines to the Shah of Iran — received support from President Carter.

In El Salvador, the Carter administration provided key military aid to a brutal regime. In Nicaragua, contrary to myth, Carter backed dictator Anastasio Somoza almost until the end of his reign. In Guatemala — again contrary to enduring myth — major U.S. military shipments to bloody tyrants never ended.

After moving out of the White House in early 1981, Carter developed a reputation as an ex-president with a conscience. He set about building homes for the poor. And when he traveled to hot spots abroad, news media often depicted Carter as a skillful negotiator on behalf of human rights.

But a decade after Carter left the Oval Office, scholar James Petras assessed the ex-president's actions overseas — and found that Carter's image as "a peace mediator, impartial electoral observer and promoter of democratic values...clashes with the experiences of several democratic Third World leaders struggling against dictatorships and pro-U.S. clients."

From Latin America to East Africa, Petras wrote, Carter functioned as "a hard-nosed defender of repressive state apparatuses, a willing consort to electoral frauds, an accomplice to U.S. Embassy efforts to abort popular democratic outcomes and a one-sided mediator."

Observing the 1990 election in the Dominican Republic, Carter ignored fraud that resulted in the paper-thin victory margin of incumbent president Joaquin Balaguer. Announcing that Balaguer's bogus win was valid, Carter used his prestige to give international legitimacy to the stolen election — and set the stage for a rerun this past spring, when Balaguer again used fraud to win re-election.

In December 1990, Carter traveled to Haiti, where he labored to undercut Jean-Bertrand Aristide during the final days of the presidential race. According to a top Aristide aide, Carter predicted that Aristide would lose, and urged him to concede defeat. (He ended up winning 67 percent of the vote.)

Since then, Carter has developed a warm regard for Haiti's bloodthirsty armed forces. Returning from his recent mission to Port-au-Prince, Carter actually expressed doubt that the Haitian military was guilty of human rights violations.

Significantly, Carter's involvement in the mid-September negotiations came at the urging of Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras — who phoned Carter only days before the expected U.S. invasion and asked him to play a mediator role. (Cedras had floated the idea in an Aug. 6 appearance on CNN.)

Carter needed no encouragement. All summer he had been urging the White House to let him be a mediator in dealings with Haiti.

Carter's regard for Cedras matches his evident affection for Cedras' wife. On Sept. 20, Carter told a New York Times interviewer: "Mrs. Cedras was impressive, powerful and forceful. And attractive. She was slim and very attractive."

By then, Carter was back home in Georgia. And U.S. troops in Haiti were standing by — under the terms of the Carter-negotiated agreement — as Haiti's police viciously attacked Haitians in the streets.

The day after American forces arrived in Haiti, President Clinton was upbeat, saying that "our troops are working with full cooperation with the Haitian military" — the same military he had described five days earlier as "armed thugs" who have "conducted a reign of terror, executing children, raping women, killing priests."

The latest developments in Haiti haven't surprised Petras, an author and sociology professor at Binghamton University in New York. "Every time Carter intervenes, the outcomes are always heavily skewed against political forces that want change," Petras said when we reached him on Sept. 20. "In each case, he had a political agenda — to support very conservative solutions that were compatible with elite interests."

Petras described Carter as routinely engaging in "a double discourse. One discourse is for the public, which is his moral politics, and the other is the second track that he operates on, which is a very cynical realpolitik that plays ball with very right-wing politicians and economic forces."

And now, Petras concludes, "In Haiti, Carter has used that moral image again to impose one of the worst settlements imaginable."

With much of Haiti's murderous power structure remaining in place, the results are likely to be grim.

Source: http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2263

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Eyewitness: Guatemala food crisis

Page last updated at 12:49 GMT, Monday, 14 September 2009 13:49 UK

Eyewitness: Guatemala food crisis

Children in eastern areas of the country are suffering from malnutrition


Guatemala has been hit by severe food shortages, with some 54,000 families living in the east of the country facing a critical situation.

President Alvaro Colom last week declared a "state of public calamity" to try to mobilise funding to tackle severe food shortages in the country.

Lida Escobar is a field monitor for the UN's World Food Programme (WFP) in Guatemala. She sent this update on the situation there to BBCMundo.com.


In the eastern city of Jalapa I was astonished by what I saw.
There were many many children with severe malnutrition problems.

We found 22 children with marasmus and kwashiorkor [two nutrient deficiency diseases] in the hospital.





Lida Escobar has visited some of the areas worst affected by the crisis








Kwashiorkor is a type of malnutrition in which the children swell because they retain liquids because of protein deficiency.

Their hair can also become discoloured and they develop some skin lesions.

Marasmus is another form of malnutrition in which the skin barely covers the bones because of a protein and calories deficiency.

The children become very thin, lose hair and can become very irritable.

In Jalapa, the children are not only suffering from malnutrition but they also have to fight other diseases like bronchial pneumonia, gastrointestinal problems and diarrhoea.

They lose their appetites and their bodies don't absorb the nutrients when they eat. As their body defences are low, they get sick very easily.

I also went to Chiquimula, in the town of Jocotan.

I visited two nutritional treatment centres which have been treating children from the indigenous area known as Chorti.

We found eight children recuperating there, most of them with Marasmus and Kwashiorkor.

The crisis has very complex causes.






Some children have developed these conditions because of the lack of food, but some because they have related diseases and are weak.





The mothers say the children have fever and nausea and that, since they are not hungry, they don't give them anything to eat.

The Chorti community have access to medical services through non-governmental organisations contracted to the ministry of health.

To reach them, you have to drive and the walk for two hours through a mountainous area.

In some cases there is help available, but there are problems with education.

We found one girl that was very cold and about to die.

We asked the mother why she hadn't taken her to the centre and she replied that they only take their children to the centre when the local shaman cannot do anything else to help.

In the most vulnerable areas, the WFP helps with a project in which we exchange food for work.

This gives the community an opportunity to work in projects like soil conservation, reforestation, growing vegetable, fertilising and training.

We also provide young children, lactating mothers and pregnant women with Vitaceral, which is a mixture of corn with fortified soy, micronutrients and fortified biscuits.

It's very sad to see the children with marasmus and kwashiorkor.

They just stare into space and it makes you wonder what they are looking at. What is their future? What are they thinking about?


Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8254841.stm
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