Armed Groups Launch Major Offensive as Colombia Prepares to Head to the Polls in 11 Days
CAUCA — Colombia’s presidential election is 11 days away — and the FARC dissident group known as the Estado Mayor Central just launched a coordinated offensive across northern Cauca that targeted a senator’s security convoy, a sitting mayor, an indigenous guard coordinator, and the Colombian Army in the same afternoon. Senator Alexander López survived because he had switched vehicles at the start of his journey. A soldier did not. Sub-Lieutenant Ronald Darío Bedoya Rivero, 24, was killed by an explosive-laden drone in Suárez.
The attacks occurred one kilometer from the site where the same group killed 21 civilians on April 25 — and on a stretch of highway that President Petro himself acknowledged has no permanent armed forces presence.
Eleven days before Colombia votes, the corridor connecting Popayán to Cali is controlled by armed groups, not the state.
TEGUCIGALPA — Honduras became the latest Latin American government to formally designate Hamas and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as terrorist organizations, with President Nasry Asfura ordering the declaration as part of his administration’s strategic foreign policy alignment with Washington and Israel.
The decision carries a personal dimension: Asfura is of Palestinian Christian descent, making his designation of Hamas a deliberate rather than reflexive choice.
Honduras joins Argentina and the Dominican Republic in a coordinated realignment of Latin America’s conservative governments with Western counterterrorism frameworks — a shift that is redrawing the region’s foreign policy map along ideological lines more sharply than at any point in recent memory.
U.S. Indicts Cuba’s Raúl Castro 30 Years After Humanitarian Aid Shootdown. Miami Herald Gets Out of the Way This Time
MIAMI — On Cuban Independence Day, the U.S. Department of Justice announced criminal charges against former Cuban President Raúl Castro at Miami’s Freedom Tower — the building where generations of Cuban exiles first set foot in America. The charges stem from Castro’s role as Defense Minister in the February 24, 1996 shootdown of two Brothers to the Rescue civilian aircraft in international airspace, killing four men — three American citizens and one permanent resident.
A prosecution that federal prosecutors in Miami first drafted in the 1990s, abandoned after a press leak by the Miami Herald, and rebuilt over three decades, it places Castro formally in the same legal category as Nicolás Maduro — a foreign leader indicted by the United States for crimes against American citizens. For Miami’s Cuban community, the ceremony at the Freedom Tower was not about extradition. It was about accountability, thirty years overdue.
🇨🇺 Today marks the 124th anniversary of Cuban independence from Spain. We would like to extend our congratulations and celebrate a Happy Independence Day with our Cuban brothers & sisters & our readers in Miami and elsewhere — and may your cherished island see brighter days in the future.
