News

Friday June 18, 2010


A Desperate Battle – Last Call!

Matthew C. Hoffman is the Latin America Correspondent for LifeSiteNews.com. His articles have appeared in dozens of major newspapers and magazines including the Wall Street Journal, Sunday Times of London, Detroit News, Miami Herald, and many others. Matthew has produced major investigative reports for LifeSiteNews that have received international attention and led to dramatic developments regarding the issues reported.

While the abortion industry and the homosexual lobby are fighting to protect their growing empire in the English speaking world, they are simultaneously seeking to conquer new territory elsewhere. One of their primary targets is Latin America, which has historically been a bastion of pro-life and pro-family values.

Millions of dollars are pouring into Latin American countries from foundations in the US, Canada, Britain, and other “first world” nations dedicated to establishing abortion and gay “marriage” as “rights,” encourage promiscuity through contraception, and create lurid sex “education” programs seemingly designed to destroy the moral fabric of Latin American culture.

Latin America is a relatively poor and “undeveloped” region of the world, with deeply ingrained Christian traditions and strong families, and is fighting a desperate battle against a well-armed foe. As LifeSiteNews’ Latin American correspondent, I’m here to keep you informed about the battles raging there, as Ibero-Americans struggle to protect themselves from the humanitarian and demographic disaster already ravaging the “developed” world.

My job requires me to track events happening in twenty-one Latin American countries in three languages, as well as the US territory of Puerto Rico, and the Iberian nations of Spain and Portugal. Each country has its own history, culture, and laws, which must be understood in order to properly report the news from those countries, requiring me to do an immense amount of background research and analysis.

LSN’s reporting on Latin America has made a real difference in the lives of the people who live here. In 2006, LSN exposed the fact that an American pro-abortion organization, Ipas, had falsified a story about a woman in El Salvador imprisoned for abortion (she had been convicted of killing her child after it was born), forcing the New York Times to retract its story and helping to reduce the pressure on the tiny Central American country to relax its absolute prohibition on all direct abortions.

LSN also helped to bring international attention to the story of “Rosita,” a girl who had become the pro-abortion movement’s poster child in Nicaragua.

“Rosita,” whose real name was never revealed by the press, was impregnated at the age of nine after claiming to have been raped by a stranger, and her situation was used as a “hard case” to promote the cause of “therapeutic” abortion in Nicaragua. However, after a network of feminist organizations obtained a well-publicized abortion for the girl and used her stepfather and mother as spokesmen for the abortionist cause, it was revealed that her stepfather was the real father of her child, and the abortion had been used to cover up his crime.

LSN was not only able to bring the “Rosita” story to an international audience, but also placed an important article on the case in the Nicaraguan newspaper La Prensa, exposing the criminal behavior of the international and local feminist activists who had, in effect, covered up a sex abuse case for years in order to sell abortion to the Nicaraguan people.

LSN’s presence in Latin America also enabled us to produce a crucial series of articles on the famous “Recife Affair,” in which Brazilian Archbishop Jose Cardoso Sobrinho fought bravely to prevent a nine year old girl from having an abortion, and then excommunicated the doctors and others who had assisted with the deadly procedure.

After a Vatican official, Archbishop “Rino” Fisichella, wrote an article for L’Osservatore Romano blasting Cardoso Sobrinho, this reporter wrote a series of exposes exonerating Cardoso Sobrinho, based on Portuguese sources not available in English. The articles were widely distributed among Vatican officials and helped to bring about a corrective article published in L’Osservatore Romano.

LSN Editor John-Henry Westen does a great job of briefly summarizing the saga in the video of his presentation to the HLI conference at the time of the most recent Washington March for Life.

Having a reporter with a Latin America focus also enabled LSN to blow the lid off the Development and Peace scandal, showing that the Canadian Catholic bishops’ organization, through its international aid arm, were unwittingly supporting multiple pro-abortion groups in Mexico. After LSN published its initial story on five groups supported by D&P, numerous other pro-abortion D&P partners around the world were exposed by LSN, as well as by the blog Socon or Bust and the National Catholic Register, alerting Catholics to the situation and initiating a reform process for the organization.

The blunt reality is that without the generous financial support of LSN’s readers, such stories would never have been made available to an international audience, and Latin Americans would be lacking an important aid in the battle for life and family.

In the face of massive financial support from pro-abortion and anti-family foundations, one of the only weapons at the disposal of Latin Americans is the pen — or in this case, the keyboard. LSN’s articles on Latin America enable the pro-life and pro-family movements in Anglo-America and worldwide to keep abreast of developments there and to come to the aid of their counterparts in Latin America.

In the past year, LSN has also begun a service in Portuguese, Noticias Pro-Familia (Pro-Family News), which publishes translations of our articles for Brazilians and Portuguese speakers worldwide.

We are also seeking to begin a similar service in Spanish, and hope to eventually have a bureau in Latin America with reporters writing original stories in the local language.

When readers choose to support LSN, they reach far beyond the borders of their own countries and help to preserve an invaluable resource in the global struggle to protect the values of life and family worldwide. No other resource exists on the internet, or elsewhere, providing the kind of broad, international reporting offered by LSN for the pro-life and pro-family movement.

If each LSN reader contributed only $5 per year, we would have more than enough to sustain us.

This is our LAST CALL and the last in our series of articles for the current campaign. If you have not donated yet, now is the time to do so. We are 60% of the way to our goal. You could make the final difference to get us to that necessary 100% over the weekend.

Please, donate today and help ensure that those fighting the good fight for life and family, both domestically and internationally, will have the information they need to win.

For life and family,

Matthew Hoffman,

Latin America Correspondent

LifeSiteNews.com