Word: poore
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Reforma in eastern Guatemala doesn't seem like the kind of place that would have a first-rate hospital and a handful of mansions. There's no bank, no grocery store and more than 70% of the inhabitants of the municipality that includes La Reforma, called Huite, are poor. But officials tell TIME they suspect a few locals are making a handsome profit by assuring that Colombian cocaine makes it safely through Guatemala to Mexico and then...
Former villagers tell TIME that La Reforma's alleged narco-big shots have secured the town's love and loyalty by giving to the poor and throwing elaborate public parties. Perhaps most important, they've created jobs - both directly for their alleged drug-running enterprises and indirectly through businesses that federal officials say are possible fronts for laundering drug profits. "They're the source of employment," says a 30-year-old woman who grew up near La Reforma and now studies law in Guatemala City. "They're the principal investors." The woman has family in Huite and asked...
Guatemala has long been a drug transshipment point between South and North America. But only in recent years have investigators begun to see how firmly a narco-economy is taking hold there, which is always bad news for small, poor and corrupt countries like Guatemala. Experts say it's hard to know just how much the Guatemalan economy depends on drug profits, but they agree that it's a significant source of employment and capital today. If trafficking and related businesses were shut down, unemployment would skyrocket in certain parts of the country, like La Reforma, says Leonel Ruiz, second...
...majority of her childhood friends are now employed in some form by people she calls drug traffickers. In the past, she notes, most local youth had to migrate to the U.S. to look for work. It's also common, she adds, to see long lines of La Reforma's poor waiting for favors outside the homes of suspected narcofamilies, who also send food to remote villages and help pay for families' funeral costs. "People respect them a lot for that," she says...
Third: remember your base - a big reason for Gandhi's appearance at the farm-belt rally. The rural poor still make up the vast majority of voters, and no party can win a general election without their support. Gandhi spoke to several thousand Congress supporters in Bhatinda, a small town dominated by mango, kinnow and guava orchards in the heart of rural Punjab. He trumpeted the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, a welfare scheme for the poor that offers a minimum of 100 days of paid work to one person per family per year, and boasted about the Congress Party...