Free Republic

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio accused the governments of Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba on Tuesday of being “enemies of humanity” and causing the migration crisis in the region. “These three regimes that exist in Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba are enemies of humanity and have created a migration crisis. If it weren’t for these three regimes, there wouldn’t be a migration crisis in the hemisphere,” Rubio said at a press conference in Costa Rica. “They created it because they are countries where their systems don’t work,” declared the U.S. chief diplomat, son of Cuban immigrants, in Spanish. Cuban President Miguel...

The Panama Canal is a great creation of the people of Panama, and China has always supported the people of Panama in their just struggle for sovereignty over the Canal, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said on Monday, when commenting on US President-elect Donald Trump's recent claim that the canal is a "vital national asset" for the US, which he threatened to reassert US control over. Trump's remarks put this key waterway in South America under the spotlight, after he threatened Sunday to reassert US control over the Panama Canal. He accused Panama of charging excessive rates to use...

Officials in Central America are already complaining that they do not have the “capacity” to accept potentially hundreds of thousands of their nationals back from the United States when President-Elect Donald Trump carries out his historic deportation program.

Nicaragua’s communist dictator Daniel Ortega ordered the house arrest of his younger brother, Humberto Ortega, on Tuesday after the younger Ortega questioned how the Sandinista regime would survive without Daniel. Humberto Ortega, 77, is a retired military official who accompanied his brother during the Sandinista revolution and served as a crucial military figure, aiding Daniel Ortega in ruling Nicaragua during the 1980s. He issued his remarks on Sunday in an interview with the Argentine news outlet Infobae. Infobae published an interview with the younger Ortega in which he described his relationship with his brother as “complicated.” Daniel Ortega has accused...

Honduras announced on Friday night the construction of a mega-prison for 20,000 inmates, among more than a dozen measures, by declaring a “security emergency” to combat the overwhelming crime. In a national radio and television broadcast, President Xiomara Castro and other members of the National Defense and Security Council (CNDS) unveiled the “crime solution plan” in response to public outcry over the surge in violence. “Given this declared security emergency, the immediate construction of an Emergency Detention Center (CRE) with a capacity for 20,000 inmates in the unpopulated area between the departments of Olancho and Gracias a Dios (east) is...

Harris hasn't visited the border or the countries below it since early 2022.

Fox News reporter Bill Melugin, one of the few national journalists who focuses on the crisis at our southern border and is often down there filming the ongoing tragedy, posted a disturbing story to X Sunday describing how an illegal immigrant who sexually abused at least one minor was released -- only to go out and commit more offenses.How did this happen? Easy. The perp was allowed to walk the streets because, once again, local authorities -- especially those in sanctuary cities and states -- often refuse to cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).Authorities in Fairfax County, Virginia...

A tropical depression to the west of Central America could be the next storm to strengthen quickly in the eastern Pacific before threatening land later this week. AccuWeather meteorologists are keeping their eyes on what was a tropical depression that developed in the western Caribbean and crossed over Central America earlier this week. The moisture associated with that system has now emerged in the eastern Pacific and may not only become the next named tropical storm of the 2023 season, but conditions could allow it to intensify rapidly, similar to Otis and Norma earlier this month. On Saturday afternoon, Tropical...

The Biden administration, desperate to mute headlines about record illegal immigrant crossings, has secretly started a new system to let in potential lawbreakers that also puts them on a fast track to legal status. The program amounts to an amnesty ticket and preselects some of those caught up in Mexico’s immigration controls. Word of the program has spread like wildfire, swamping border camps involved in the program, according to a report by immigration expert Todd Bensman with the Center for Immigration Studies. In his report, shared with Secrets Monday, Bensman said, “Thousands are hearing about this new legal way in...

The medical aid nonprofit Doctors Without Borders is providing and distributing maps for migrants that show routes through Central America to reach the United States, according to a new report by the Daily Caller.And the kicker? The organization providing the maps is funded by "a number of prominent tech companies". Called “shelters for people on the move” in Spanish, the map lists clinics and aid areas along routes to the U.S. It shows paths that start in Guatemala that lead to the U.S.-Mexico border and lists clinics and shelters along the Mexican border that migrants can stop at during their...

An exiled Nicaraguan journalist says she fears a growing presence of Russsian troops in her homeland as the country grows increasingly isolated on the world stage. Berta Valle — wife of imprisoned Nicaraguan opposition leader and presidential candidate Felix Maradiaga — told The Post on Monday that Nicaraguans are “terrified” of dictator Daniel Ortega’s decision to welcome Russian soldiers to the Central American country after seeing what they’ve done in Ukraine. “Ortega invited the Russian military into Nicaragua. Publicly, he says Russia is supporting the military training of the Nicaraguan military. But we are terrified, because our country is hosting...

ROME – Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega expelled the Missionaries of Charity, the religious order founded by Mother Teresa of Kolkata, and closed two Catholic TV stations as he continued his campaign to end any form of real or perceived opposition to his regime. The announcement confirming the closure of all their activities came June 28, as the government of Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, announced they were closing another 101 NGOs “urgently.” Since a civil uprising of April 2018, the government has cracked down on voices of opposition. To date, there are 150 opposition leaders in prison,...

“Those Cuban-CIA men (Bay of Pigs vets) were as tough, dedicated and impetuous a group of soldiers as I’ve ever had the honor of commanding,” wrote legendary anti-communist mercenary “Mad Mike” Hoare, commander of the “Wild Geese,” in his book Congo Mercenary. ''This is the history of a failure,'' said the oddly frank opening lines of Che Guevara’s Congo Dairies. “I stood above Che Guevara, my boots near his head, just as Che had once stood over my dear friend and fellow 2506 Brigade member, Nestor Pino. ‘We're going to kill you all," Che said to Pino.’ Now, the situation...

Squirrel breeding is a real job—and apparently a very dangerous one if you're dealing with the wrong kind of squirrel. After the mysterious deaths of three German men who all worked as breeders of variegated squirrels—a kind of squirrel native to Central America that's sometimes kept as an exotic pet—researchers have identified a new virus that had apparently jumped from the squirrels to the men, LiveScience reports. The men, who were in their 60s and regularly socialized together, died between 2011 and 2013 from inflammation of the brain, and researchers say at least two of them had been scratched or...

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted Tuesday that Vice President Kamala Harris has not been “directly” involved in his department’s key policy decisions during her nearly eight months tackling the “root causes” of illegal immigration for the Biden administration. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) recalled that President Biden had called Harris the “most qualified person” to stem the flow of migrants coming to the US-Mexico border from Central America and elsewhere when he tapped her for the role in March.... ...CNN reported over the weekend that some Harris allies believe the White House is laying the way for Transportation Secretary Pete...

Vice President Kamala Harris released a sweeping strategy on Thursday to address the root causes of migration amid the recent surge in illegal U.S.-Mexico border crossings. The strategy states that the pandemic and “extreme weather conditions” have exacerbated the root causes of migration, which includes corruption, violence, trafficking and poverty. The announcement comes as the administration faces a southern border crisis, with migrant detentions hitting 20-year highs in recent months. More than 1.1 million apprehensions have been recorded during the first six months of this fiscal year, according to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. And a record high of...

In the aftermath of Vice President Kamala Harris’s embarrassing trip to Guatemala and Mexico, we need to be clear about what triggered the crisis at the border.Vice President Kamala Harris didn’t need to visit Guatemala and Mexico this week to discover the “root causes” of illegal immigration, or, as she put it, “understand that there’s a reason people are arriving at our border, and ask what is that reason and then identify the problem so we can fix it.” The reason migrants are arriving at our southwest border in near-record numbers — the “root cause,” if you will — is...

A stark reality faces the vice president as she visits the region: Expanding aid programs have failed to stem migration. An American contractor went to a small town in the Guatemalan mountains with an ambitious goal: to ignite the local economy, and hopefully even persuade people not to migrate north to the United States. Half an hour into his meeting with coffee growers, the contractor excitedly revealed the tool he had brought to change their lives: a pamphlet inviting the farmers to download an app to check coffee prices and “be a part of modern agriculture.” Pedro Aguilar, a coffee...

Veep Harris was tasked with fixing our Border crisis three months ago but has been utterly AWOL. When she was asked about it last month she slithered away from the matter: “You know, I come at this issue from the perspective that most people don’t want to leave home. They don’t want to leave their grandparents. They don’t want to leave the place where they grew up. Where they speak the language, where they know the culture.” It was her way of saying that she intended to tackle the issue by engaging in conceptual dialogues with parties in Mexico and...

In her quest to find all those root causes for the current migrant surge into the U.S., Kamala Harris has focused on Central America, where two-thirds of the illegal aliens pouring over our border are coming from. And not surprisingly, instead of going to the border and asking a border surger about it, or even doing diplomacy, as she claims, she's got big plans to bring in huge corporations and NGOs to the region, kind of like the United Fruit Company, which lefties in the past have complained about. It's downright laughable.Here's her press release:As part of this Call to...