But 20 years ago, the so-called Paulina Case made headlines around the world, her name synonymous with Mexico’s strict rules and attitudes on abortion.

In 1999, aged 13, Paulina was raped and was left pregnant by a man who broke into her family’s home. Following the brutal attack, she sought an abortion, fully legal in Mexico in cases of rape. However, Paulina was harangued by conservative doctors, state officials and priests who put up constant obstacles to stop her from terminating the pregnancy.

“I heard the doctors say ‘I’m not doing it, they’ll sack me. I’m not a murderer’,” she recalls in her sweltering home-town of Mexicali on the US-Mexico border.

The campaign of intimidation was relentless. One doctor told Paulina she could bleed to death or be left sterile from an abortion. A priest told her she might be excommunicated.

“They brought pro-life representatives to my room who showed me pictures of dead foetuses and the image of Christ,” she says. “It was a very difficult time, I was still dealing with the trauma of the rape.”

Their cruel tactics worked. Eventually the 12-week deadline for an abortion passed and Paulina, still only a child herself, had to carry the baby to full term.

The suffering of that time has never fully left her but she is greatly encouraged by a unanimous ruling from Mexico’s Supreme Court last month to decriminalise abortion. Specifically the decision referred to the law in the northern state of Coahuila but it set a precedent for the entire country.

“I cried! I cried when I heard!” smiles Teresa Mesa, a single mother-of-three in Coahuila. When she became pregnant a fourth time, Teresa decided the most responsible thing to do was to abort – then illegal in her home state.

“It wasn’t easy. At that time, there was no legal protection for women, no places of an adequate health standard to carry them out, and really a lot of social stigma.”

Teresa hopes the measure will make it easier for other girls to have an abortion than it was for her, particularly as neighbouring Texas in the US moves in the opposite direction, towards much stricter control.

“This is just the start. There’s still mountains to overcome before this is fully legal. We need proper health clinics which carry out abortions and doctors that are prepared to do them.”

“And it’s not just about normalising abortion,” she continues, “but also making visible the domestic violence under which so many women live in Coahuila. Eight in every 10 women here experience some form of violence at home.”

While the Supreme Court’s ruling set a historic change into motion, there are several legal challenges ahead before safe abortions are available across the country.

In the meantime, many women – including Teresa – must turn instead to the Safe Abortion Network, an abortion rights’ group which operates on the margins of the law. I met members of the Coahuila branch as they plastered posters with their contact details on them at bus stops around the state capital, Saltillo.

“We helped nearly 300 women last year to obtain abortion pills or travel to Mexico City,” where abortion is legal, the group’s founder Malu Reina told me.

Although their opponents paint them as somehow “promoting abortion”, Ms Reina says that is a deliberate mischaracterisation, and that the co-operative provides sexual health education and support to vulnerable mothers in Coahuila’s marginalised communities.

Nevertheless, there are some powerful forces in Mexico lined up against the new law. Mexico is Latin America’s second-biggest Catholic nation and anti-abortion campaigners have held several demonstrations outside the Supreme Court recently. They say they are determined to block the court’s decision.

“The Supreme Court has failed against the fundamental freedom of life,” argues Rodrigo Ivan Cortes, president of the National Front for the Family.

“Now they also want to proceed against the fundamental freedom of the health sector and take out the freedom of conscious objection for doctors and nurses. That is very, very dangerous for a democratic country.”

Still, such campaigners appear to be losing ground. Across Latin America, attitudes on abortion are shifting. In Chile, Argentina, Mexico and beyond, younger generations are slowly knocking down the traditional positions of their parents and grandparents.

Paulina Ramírez’s son is now 20 and they have a strong relationship. But she deeply resents her harrowing treatment as a teenage rape victim, shamed and victimised by those legally obliged to help her.

“Everyone decided for me except for me. All I wanted was to exercise my rights and they didn’t let me.”

Forced teenage pregnancies in impoverished circumstances will not vanish overnight in Mexico. But decriminalisation, Paulina says, is the first step to make sure no other girl goes through the same trauma she did.

BBC- The US says more than 1.7 million migrants were detained along its border with Mexico in the past 12 months – the highest number ever recorded.

More than one million of them were expelled to Mexico or their native countries, according to data from US Customs and Border Protection.

Agents apprehended people from more than 160 countries.

President Joe Biden’s popularity in opinion polls has been sinking, partly as a result of his immigration policy.

Just 35% of Americans said they approved of his handling of the issue, in an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey earlier this month.

Mr Biden promised a more humane immigration policy than his predecessor Donald Trump, but the US-Mexico border has been engulfed in crisis for much of the Democrat’s nine-month-old presidency.

The detention numbers for the 2021 fiscal year, which ended in September, are the highest since 2000. That year, more than 1.6 million migrants were held at the US-Mexico border. But the number has not reached 1.7 million since US authorities first began tracking such entries in the 1960s.

“The large number of expulsions during the pandemic has contributed to a larger-than-usual number of migrants making multiple border crossing attempts,” the US Customs and Border Protection said.

Those trying to enter the US illegally were mainly from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

Of all those detained, the biggest category were adults travelling without children – more than 1.1 million (or 64%).

At the same time, the US authorities said they encountered more than 145,000 unaccompanied children – a record number.

Almost 11,000 of those children remained in government custody on Friday.

A BBC investigation of the Fort Bliss detention centre in Texas earlier this year found reports of sexual abuse, Covid and lice outbreaks, hungry children being served undercooked meat and sandstorms engulfing the desert tent camps where the young people were being held.

Republicans have blamed Mr Biden’s promise to create a pathway to citizenship for immigrants for fuelling the surge.

Mr Biden – who is making one of his regular trips to his home in Delaware this weekend – has been facing questions this week about why he has not visited the border.

The White House press secretary told reporters on Friday that Mr Biden drove by the border in 2008 when he was campaigning to be Barack Obama’s vice-president.

BBC[ One of Ecuador’s best-known athletes, Alex Quiñónez, has been shot dead.

He was shot along with another person outside a shopping centre in the city of Guayaquil on Friday night. A motive is not yet clear.

Tributes have been pouring in for Mr Quiñónez, 32, who was described by Ecuador’s athletics federation as the country’s greatest sprinter.

President Guillermo Lasso promised that those behind the killing will be found and punished.

It comes after a 60-day nationwide state of emergency came into force in Ecuador on Monday in response to a wave of violent crime.

Official figures suggest the number of murders in the first eight months of this year are double those in the same period last year.

“With great sadness, we confirm the murder of our sportsman Alex Quiñónez,” the Sports Ministry announced on Twitter.

“We have lost a great sportsman, someone who allowed us to dream, who moved us….he was the greatest sprinter this country produced.”

Mr Quiñónez won bronze in the 200 metres at the 2019 World Athletics Championships in Doha. He was suspended prior to the Tokyo Olympics due to “breach of his whereabouts obligations”.

President Lasso tweeted his condolences.

“May he rest in peace. Those who take the lives of Ecuadoreans will not remain unpunished,” he said.

This is the second killing of an international athlete this month.

Agnes Tirop, a Kenyan runner who recently broke the women-only 10km road race world record, was stabbed to death in her home. Her husband has been arrested on suspicion of murder.

BBC- Colombia has announced that the country’s most wanted drug trafficker will be extradited to the US after he was captured in a raid.

Dairo Antonio Úsuga, known as Otoniel, was seized after a joint army, air force and police operation on Saturday.

He led the country’s largest criminal gang and has been on the US Drug Enforcement Agency’s most wanted list for years.

US officials had placed a $5m (£3.6m) bounty on his head.

They accused him of importing at least 73 metric tonnes of cocaine into the country between 2003 and 2014.

Colombia’s Defence Minister Diego Molano told El Tiempo newspaper that the next step for officials was to comply with the US extradition order.

Authorities have now taken Otoniel to a military base in the capital Bogotá ahead of his extradition, according to newspaper El Nuevo Siglo.

Being locked up in a jail thousands of miles from their home country, in a place where they have few connections and no means to intimidate guards or prison directors is a fate many Colombian drug traffickers fear.

The late drug lord Pablo Escobar said that he would prefer “lying in a grave in Colombia than being locked up in a cell in the US”.

Except for a six-year period between 1991 and 1997, when Colombia’s constitution banned extraditions of Colombian citizens, a number of top level traffickers facing indictments in the US have been sent to stand trial there.

Among them are the co-founder of the Medellín cartel, Carlos Lehder, drug lord Daniel “The Madman” Barrera and paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso.

Otoniel, who was indicted in the the US in 2009, will faces a number of charges, including sending shipments of cocaine to the US, killing police officers and recruiting children.

Otoniel was captured in his rural hideout in Antioquia province in north-western Colombia, close to the border with Panama.

The operation involved 500 soldiers supported by 22 helicopters. One police officer was killed.

Otoniel had used a network of rural safe houses to move around and evade the authorities, and did not use a phone, instead relying on couriers for communication.

In the past, police have found special orthopaedic mattresses for Otoniel in these sparse homes, as he suffered back pain from a herniated disc.

Police chief Jorge Vargas has said the drug lord was fearful of capture, “never approaching inhabited areas”.

But El Tiempo reported that authorities managed to pinpoint the location where he was eventually captured two weeks ago.

Chief Vargas said his movements were traced by more than 50 signal intelligence experts using satellite imagery. US and UK agencies were involved in the search.

Mr Duque described the operation as “the biggest penetration of the jungle ever seen in the military history of our country.”

Colombia’s armed forces later released a photo showing its soldiers guarding Otoniel, who was in handcuffs and wearing rubber boots.

There have been several huge operations involving thousands of officers to capture the 50-year-old in recent years.