They came looking for flour, pasta and cooking oil. They came looking for blood pressure medicine, spark plugs and condoms. They came looking for loved ones and a way out.

Declassified documents released Monday show efforts by President Jimmy Carter and his top aides to pressure Argentina’s military dictators to ease repression as part of Carter’s broader initiative to push human rights around the world.

ANALYSIS

The easiest way to think about this is as a four-stage cycle of doom that begins with inflation, continues to price controls, then shortages, and finally nationalizations. Here's how it works, or rather doesn't.

The only obstacle preventing Islamic State terrorists from pulling off a highly prized attack on the Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro would be the group’s inability to do so in Brazil, even as frequent attacks in Europe continue, experts say.

In a statement, the Uruguayan Foreign Ministry said that Jihad Ahmed Mustafa Dhiab had come to the consulate in Caracas to inform officials of his intent to travel to Turkey or another country in order to see his family.

A paratrooper from Mexico has been identified as the soldier killed during an airborne training exercise at Fort Bragg last week.

Hundreds of thousands of athletes and tourists are about to arrive in Rio de Janeiro from around the world for this year's Summer Olympics, whose opening ceremony is just more than two weeks away. Security is going to be extremely tight. The police and army are on high alert for copy-cat attacks after European cities have suffered one terrorist assault after the other.

Extra measures will be imposed including intensified searches, increased security on streets, restrictions on traffic on some routes, and an increased safety cordon around some venues, ministers said, without providing details.

The top commander of U.S. forces in Latin America said Wednesday that his counterparts in the region have expressed concerns about Islamic self-radicalization and the return of fighters from Iraq and Syria.

An Iraqi captive accused of commanding al-Qaida’s Army in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks returned to the war court Tuesday with his lawyers seeking a freeze in proceedings over four missing civilian counsel.

Oscar Naranjo, the former head of Colombia’s national police and one of the most lauded lawmen in the hemisphere, will be in South Florida next week to try to build support for a peace deal with the country’s largest guerrilla group.

Ex-Colombian president Alvaro Uribe called for a signature-collecting campaign of "civil resistance" to the government of President Juan Manuel Santos, who is nearing a peace accord with leftist rebels that would end 52 years of fighting. After nearly four years of formal talks with the FARC, Santos insists that the accord his government has negotiated be put to a referendum.

It's a hot Saturday morning and the crowd is churning at Nooo! Que Barato!, the sprawling discount store where many Cuban Americans buy cheap goods for their relatives back home. But lately, shoppers at the store, whose name roughly translates to Wow! That's Cheap!, are exhibiting more discerning tastes.

A South American airline is asking its employees to be on the lookout for a former Guantanamo Bay detainee who was resettled in Uruguay after being freed by U.S. authorities.

While the world lauded the opening of the $5.4 billion expansion of the Panama Canal last weekend, Panama continues to grapple with how best to emerge from back-to-back financial scandals.

All 17 people aboard a military helicopter that crashed in a mountainous area over the weekend were found dead when searchers reached the site in western Colombia, the army said Monday.

Base residents couldn’t recall a show of this magnitude since Jimmy Buffett played the open-air Lyceum movie theater in December 2002. Magic! played the 2015 Fourth of July and Jimmy Eat World the year before.

The original canal opened in 1914 to accommodate ships carrying as many as 5,500 cargo containers, the new locks can handle ships ferrying 13,000 such containers.

As the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) seem poised to sign a peace deal that might end the country's half century conflict, women on both sides of the political divide are trying to guarantee that female fighters don’t lose their hard-earned status as they reenter a society that’s often resisted gender equality.

The $5.4-billion project is aimed at boosting the competitiveness of the 50-mile shortcut between the Atlantic and the Pacific and maintaining its ability to generate billions of dollars a year for the Central American nation.

On Monday, a Muslim woman and her 4-month-old son were shopping at the Superking Supermarket in London, Ontario. According to a statement by London Police, a woman wearing a shirt exclaiming "CANADA" approached the unnamed victim and her baby and allegedly began screaming at them.

A former Guantanamo Bay prisoner transferred to Uruguay in 2014 has vanished and is believed to have quietly slipped into neighboring Brazil, U.S. officials said.

Just weeks before it stages the 2016 Olympics, the state government of Rio de Janeiro has declared a "state of public calamity in financial administration" and warned that the situation is so dire it impedes its ability to meet Games commitments.

The House took aim at President Barack Obama's efforts to winnow the population of detainees at Guantanamo on Wednesday, approving a measure that would prohibit him from releasing any of the remaining prisoners at the prison camp.

The Colombian government and the country’s largest guerrilla group agreed Friday to introduce out a crop-substitution program aimed at weaning tens of thousands of farmers from coca — the raw ingredient of cocaine.

For some folks living in a cluster of small towns straddling the U.S.-Canadian border here, life could not feel more comfortably secure.

The Library of Congress will pay the former chief military prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay $100,000 and correct his personnel file to settle his claim that he was wrongly fired for criticizing military commissions for detainees.

American taxpayers got a dismal return on their $4.3 billion investment in the Colombian drug war between 2000 and 2o08, according to a new analysis by economists at MIT and Colombia's Universidad de los Andes.

Congressional Republicans are starting to declare victory in their bid to keep President Barack Obama from fulfilling his campaign promise to shut down the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and move prisoners to the United States.

Brian Brimager, 40, pleaded guilty in February to stabbing to death Yvonne Baldelli in an apartment they shared in Bocas Del Toro, an island off the Panamanian coast, almost five years ago.

Bringing Sinaloa cartel chief Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman to American soil could take years, but once the process starts, it will probably be lightning quick and as scripted as it has been for other extradited drug lords, terrorists and fugitives.

The war court defense office lifted a ban on sleeping at Guantanamo’s Camp Justice, saying that a contaminated trailer park is now habitable.

The Senate Armed Services Committee’s version of the annual Pentagon policy bill reignites a long-simmering debate over the Guantanamo Bay detention facility with a new provision that would allow the Defense Department to plan and design a stateside facility to one day house the detainees.

The Mexican government has approved the extradition of drug lord Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzman to the United States, a decision aimed at delivering one of the world's most notorious criminals to the U.S. justice system to face a vast array of drug trafficking and organized crime charges.

In a letter to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection, advocacy groups called for an investigation into "unchecked abuse" at the southwest U.S.-Mexico border.

Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff was impeached Thursday and will be suspended from office after senators voted overwhelmingly to put her on trial for allegedly breaking budget laws.

U.S. multinational companies are saving $100 billion a year by shifting their profits overseas to lower their tax bills, according to a study released Tuesday that found that corporate tax-dodging is a bigger problem than previously estimated.

Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman might be on his way to a prison he can't escape.

Wildfires ravaging the center of Canada's oil production region in northern Alberta extended their reach overnight, covering 390 square miles as police began shepherding a convoy of 1,500 vehicles to safety through the now-devastated town of Fort McMurray.

Analysis

It's come to this: The country with the largest oil reserves in the world can't afford to brew its own beer, stay in its own time zone, or even have its own people show up to work more than two times a week.

For about two years, the bloody war between the Salvadoran government and powerful gangs abated, thanks to a negotiated truce. That agreement, which broke down in 2014, was always controversial. But until this week, it wasn't a crime.

Underage drug mules, if apprehended, were rarely prosecuted in Cochise County. Prosecutors stopped accepting such cases in 1973 under the premise the county did not have the resources to handle them. The same was — and still is — true in other Arizona counties. Not surprisingly, that made children ideal drug mules.

As passengers cheered, Carnival Corp.’s Fathom Adonia arrived at Havana harbor on Monday morning, officially re-establishing the U.S. cruise business in Cuba.

Analysis

Jim Yong Kim, an idealistic Korean-American physician and anthropologist, helped organize a conference in Lima that was staged like a teach-in. Hundreds of shantytown residents met development experts and vented their anger with the World Bank. Over the next half decade, Kim would become a vociferous critic of the World Bank, even calling for its abolition. In a 2000 book, Dying For Growth, he was lead author of an essay attacking the "capriciousness" of international development policies.

The killing of Bertha Caceres and allegations that Honduran authorities have bungled the investigation have created a dilemma for the Obama administration. The White House supports Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez — even as some U.S. officials suspect state or state-supported assassins killed the activist.

The Obama administration is proposing to hold parts of the Guantanamo trials by video feed and let war court judges outsource some legal decisions to secondary military judges in a bid to speed up the war court.

A U.S. military advocate for a Guantanamo “forever prisoner” is asking for a parole board do-over, saying prison camp guards mistakenly delivered the Yemeni captive to the wrong lockup at the U.S. Navy base in an episode that so rattled the captive he blew his hearing.

Cuban President Raúl Castro has reiterated his intention to step down two years from now, at age 86, and has said that in the future, all top Communist Party and other officials should be restricted to two five-year terms and should retire when they reach 70.

Cuban President Raul Castro delivered a grim report on the state of the country on Saturday, saying that the communist bureaucracy had failed to implement most of the hundreds of changes the ruling party launched five years ago to stimulate the stagnant centrally controlled economy.

Saudi Arabia took in nine Yemeni detainees from the Guantanamo Saturday in a breakthrough deal with the at-times stubborn Saudis that left 80 captives at the U.S. military detention center in Cuba.

The Guantanamo parole board has rejected a plea for freedom from the prison’s oldest war-on-terror captive, a 68-year-old Pakistani businessman, citing the prisoner’s past ties to al-Qaida and declaring him too dangerous for release.

The general overseeing Guantanamo war court defense teams has issued an order forbidding his staff to sleep at the Camp Justice compound following a new health risk assessment on cancer-causing agents there.

Carnival Corp.’s maiden voyage to Cuba next month will be filled with almost 700 cruisers looking to spend time assisting in economic, environmental and community development there. The one thing the boat won’t be carrying, however, is any Cubans.

Remarks by political leaders stretching back to the George W. Bush presidency have the potential to taint Guantanamo’s Sept. 11 death-penalty trial, the case’s military judge has ruled, meaning defense lawyers may more liberally scrutinize the jury of U.S. military officers.

The Guantanamo parole board has decided that a Yemeni man once considered a candidate for trial, but never charged, is too dangerous to release, essentially rebranding him as a “forever prisoner.”

Canada and the Turks and Caicos Islands are united by a curious dream — that the Caribbean archipelago may one day actually join Canada as the North American nation's newest province.

The rise of Donald Trump and the anti-immigrant wave he is riding in his campaign for president have alarmed the Mexican government so much that it has reshuffled top diplomats and launched a new strategy to defend the image of Mexicans abroad, according to Mexican officials.

A Mexican-born construction worker says he hung his native country's flag high above Vancouver to remind Donald Trump that his compatriots built a 63-storey tower that carries the billionaire's name.

The military judge in the Sept. 11 case abruptly canceled two weeks of pretrial hearings at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that were scheduled to start on Tuesday after receiving a secret notice from a Justice Department attorney.

The Pentagon has notified Congress that it intends to resettle nearly a dozen detainees held at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility, including a Yemeni man who has been on hunger strike since 2007 and had lost about half his body weight, U.S. officials said.

ANALYSIS

The Colombian government and leftist FARC rebels have been talking about a peace deal for more than three years, but the process appears to be stuck at a critical juncture: the part where they have to stop talking and actually make peace.

Mustafa al Shamiri spent most of his years at Guantánamo wrongly described as an al-Qaida trainer and facilitator, a captive of consequence, until his first parole-style hearing revealed an astonishing admission. An intelligence review “discredited” the most damning parts of his prison dossier in his 14th year of U.S. military detention. He was mistaken for someone else with a similar name.

When U.S. President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro stepped up to a podium Monday in Havana to mark the first visit by a U.S. president there in 88 years, the event came with a remarkably sharp exchange on several issues. Among them: It's time, Castro said, for Washington to give back the "illegally occupied" naval base at Guantanamo Bay back to Cuba.

Google is opening a cutting-edge online technology center at the studio of one of Cuba's most famous artists, offering free Internet at speeds nearly 70 times faster than those now available to the Cuban public. President Obama says Google's efforts in Cuba are part of a wider plan to improve access to the Internet across the island.

Analysis

It's a key tenet of what might be called the Obama Doctrine: That engaging with isolated authoritarian regimes can bring about greater prosperity, peace, democracy and human rights.

The new commander of the U.S. Southern Command told Congress on Thursday that some of the Guantanamo prison infrastructure is “deteriorating rapidly” but stopped short of seeking additional funding for new construction at the downsizing detention center.

Despite withdrawing its strike aircraft from participation in the anti-Islamic State coalition in Iraq and Syria, Canada's new government has moved to reassure the United States that it will boost its overall contribution to the U.S.-led campaign.

As U.S. diplomatic relations with Cuba normalize, a California congressman wants to know what the federal government is doing to bring back the man who kidnapped him and a plane full of people in November 1971.

Though the United States has restored diplomatic relations with Cuba, and President Barack Obama is planning to visit the island later this month, it’s unclear whether the two countries have declared a truce in the spy wars they have waged for more than 50 years.

Secretary of State John Kerry spoke with Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez by phone Friday morning and both expressed commitment to making President Barack Obama’s trip to Cuba later this month a success but the issue of human rights could still prove to be a minefield during the historic visit.

House lawmakers worried President Barack Obama is set to give away the Navy base at Guantanamo Bay to Cuba mounted a pre-emptive legislative strike this week.

Legal marijuana may be doing at least one thing that a decades-long drug war couldn't: taking a bite out of Mexican drug cartels' profits.

Gone are opportunities to interview guards, meet with mental health professionals, taste a detainee meal and compare life in maximum-security detention for those who misbehave to those in communal captivity and get many more privileges.

A 9/11 trial prosecutor dismissed a Muslim sensitivity argument Friday and urged a military judge to let female guards resume handling the former CIA detainees accused of orchestrating the Sept. 11 hijackings to and from court and legal meetings.

President Barack Obama's plan to close Guantanamo Bay outright faces stiff political opposition from Congress. But the plan the president outlined Tuesday could all but empty out the military prison by the time he leaves office.

In the latest effort to remove barriers with Cuba, the Obama administration has softened the language of a Bill Clinton-era emergency decree that bans U.S. boats from entering Cuban territorial waters.

ANALYSIS

The Obama administration’s rollout of its plan to close the detention center in Cuba by releasing some captives and moving others to a site in the United States revealed some intriguing aspects of its vision of a “Guantanamo North” now forbidden by Congress.

A San Diego-area man at the center of a Panamanian murder investigation pleaded guilty in San Diego federal court Wednesday, admitting to fatally stabbing his girlfriend, dismembering her body with a machete and dumping her remains in the jungle.

The Pentagon on Tuesday sent a plan to Congress that outlines the long-awaited closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention center and remains committed to moving some detainees from the controversial facility in Cuba to an existing prison in the United States.

The Obama administration is expected to meet a Tuesday deadline to give Congress its plan to close down Guantanamo, but the move will likely do little to help the president keep his campaign promise to shutter the detention facility there.

The national security parole board has approved a former Osama bin Laden bodyguard for release to another country as the Pentagon-run panel works to accelerate reviews.

Amid a resurgence in the pace of unaccompanied migrant children crossing the U.S. border, President Barack Obama is facing angry opposition as he searches for places to house them temporarily.

After urging Mexico’s political and religious leaders to take stronger stands against organized crime, Pope Francis on Tuesday is taking his message to a front line of the drug war, the western state of Michoacan, where many hope he will keep up the pressure.

Change is on the horizon for the North American Aerospace Defense Command as Canada reviews its military for the first time in more than 20 years, the top Canadian general in Colorado Springs said.

Sitting in the office of his Bayshore Boulevard home, Jay Hood holds a picture of five bearded men — all Taliban leaders taken off the battlefields of Afghanistan and detained at Guantanamo Bay until they were swapped for an Army sergeant who walked away from his post.

When Pope Francis visits the western state of Michoacan Tuesday, he will step into a plaza that holds the memory of one of the drug war’s most heinous acts of violence.

Before her son was born, Danielle Alves didn't know Luiz Gustavo would have microcephaly, a condition that has left the 3-year-old so disabled he can't walk, talk or eat without help.

Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro moved to increase the military's involvement in the country's oil and mining industries with the creation of a new state company that will report to the Defense Ministry.

Detainee Mohammed Bwazir’s fateful decision to stay in a cell at Guantanamo rather than start anew in Europe came down to a calm, 10-minute standoff when the warden of the war-on-terror prison urged him to board a C-17 cargo plane carrying two other captives to new lives.

More than 26 years after the 1989 massacre at the University of Central America, a North Carolina judge has cleared the way to extradite a retired colonel and arrest warrants have been issued for former military officers in El Salvador.

Otto Macias was 19 when he left Cuba in the throes of a socialist revolution, enlisted in the U.S. Army and went to fight communists as a machine-gunner in Vietnam. He returned from battle in 1969 — broken and suffering from post-traumatic stress and schizophrenia, his family says. After years of hospitalization in New York, Macias, then a U.S. citizen, was well enough in 1980 to fly to Cuba to visit relatives he hadn't seen in decades. He never returned.

While destroying the Islamic State remains the State Department’s top priority in President Barack Obama’s new budget request for 2017, curbing illegal immigration from Central America has become a major priority, on par with countering Russian aggression.

President Michel Martelly made his farewell speech to Haiti as he departed office Sunday with no successor yet chosen because a runoff election was scrapped last month amid violent protests and deep suspicions about vote rigging.

Pope Francis travels to Mexico this week, saying he wants to “live the faith” of the overwhelmingly Catholic country but will not shy away from confronting issues of violence and corruption that could make his governmental hosts quite uncomfortable.

Securing a performance by the nine-jet Canadian Armed Forces Snowbirds demonstration team was so important that Owensboro, Ky. will move its fifth annual Air Show back a month to Sept. 30-Oct. 2 this year.

A pregnant servicemember stationed in an area where the Zika virus has been detected was moved to avoid contracting the disease, though no troops are known to have the mosquito-borne illness, a U.S. Southern Command spokesman said Thursday.

As Fulgenico Quenguan walked down a narrow dirt path on the farm he calls his family’s future, he stumbled on a vestige of his past: a stout coca plant — thriving despite years of fumigation, uprooting and neglect.

As negotiations to end Colombia's half-century conflict close in on a final deal, attention is turning to the fate of an aging bank manager-turned leftist rebel who is being held at a U.S. maximum security prison alongside notorious terrorists.

The Obama administration announced new regulations Tuesday designed to further expand commerce with Cuba that include permission to finance licensed exports to the island — except agricultural products.

American Airlines’ Howard Kass is hopeful that the airline will be flying regularly scheduled service between the United States and Cuba within the first half of this year and says Miami will play a big role in resumption of commercial flights to the island.