The maternity hospital in question is the Sainte-Croix hospital in Léogâne, a town located some 40 kilometers southwest of the Haitian capital. ” On Wednesday, a gang from the Martissant district of Port-au-Prince seized the hospital truck. on board : two drivers and the new generator worth 38 000 dollars recently purchased on credit – and therefore not yet paid “, reports the Miami Herald. ” On Thursday, the two drivers were released. The gang members told them that if they wanted their truck and the generator, they should come back with the money. “.
Since, ” nurses and doctors are forced to use flashlights on their mobile phones to perform caesarean sections because it is above all women who come to the Sainte-Croix hospital to give birth. ” We perform six to seven caesarean sections per night “, explains the gynecologist-obstetrician Pierre Wilson Romestil in the columns of the daily newspaper. Last month alone, more than 100 women gave birth in this hospital in Léogâne.
Never seen. This affluence is explained by the fact that gangs block access to Port-au-Prince. ” We have become, in a way, the general hospital for all women in the southern peninsula of Haiti. “, underlines the director of Sainte-Croix. But without electricity, the hospital has been forced to refuse any new admissions since Thursday and will have to close its doors. ” Pregnant women and their babies are at risk of dying », Are alarmed the doctors.
And the Miami Herald to conclude : ” Haiti has the highest maternal mortality rate in the Western Hemisphere. And on 1 000 births, 50 Haitian babies die, compared to 16 in the rest of the region “.
Read also: In Haiti, two journalists murdered by a gang
Public holiday in the United States to commemorate the birth of Martin Luther King
The icon of the struggle for civil rights ” would certainly lament the state of the country today “, believes the Los Angeles Times : “ The persistence of police brutality that disproportionately targets African Americans and the reluctance of Congress to address it; state laws that attempt to limit the right to vote and the failure of Congress to guarantee that right for all. Nor would King look away from the streets of our cities where mostly black homeless people survive, suffering from untreated illnesses, amidst immense wealth. “.
” Racial inequalities still exist, and pointing them out – just like their root causes – caused something that could make us think of a flashback “, notes the Tulsa World. And the Oklahoma newspaper concludes: But Martin Luther King would call us to never give up “.
In Colombia, the ELN, the last guerrilla still in activity, stands up to President Ivan Duque
The Spectator reports that ” members of the guerrillas appeared this weekend in the streets of the department of Arauca, while at the same time the head of state held a crisis meeting there and announced the deployment of 700 additional soldiers to guarantee the safety of the civilian population “. ELN guerrillas and dissidents from the former FARC guerrillas are fighting a bloody battle for this territory, which is one of the drug trafficking routes between Colombia and neighboring Venezuela.
Precisely, in Venezuela, the army also announced this Sunday the deployment of troops on the border with Colombia. According to Tal Cual, we do not know the number of soldiers mobilized. But we know that they were sent to the state of Apure, neighboring Arauca in Colombia, where the village of La Gabarra was invaded on Friday by 50 ELN guerrillas who took control of the place. Local elected officials called on the government of Caracas for help.
In Peru, more than 5,900 women went missing in 2021
” These are very worrying figures. », is alarmed in the columns of the newspaper Milenio Deputy Commissioner for Women’s Rights: Especially since the majority of these disappearances concern girls and adolescents “. The Peruvian authorities highlight the Covid-19 pandemic which would have aggravated the phenomenon. On the contrary, feminist NGOs accuse the inaction of the police and the prosecutors, summarizes Milenio.
► Also to listen: In Peru, the worrying explosion of violence against women during the pandemic