23 captivating photos of Latin America from 2015

Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, along with his Brazilian counterpart Dilma Rousseff, has been one of the most embattled leaders in the region.

Peña Nieto stumbled into the year with the memory of the violent attack and suspected murder of 43 protesting students in southwest Mexico fresh in the minds of his countrymen. His reputation took hits from multiple reports of corruption and influence-peddling that emerged throughout the first half of the year.

In what was likely the most embarrassing moment for Peña Nieto during 2015, Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán broke out of jail in July and continues to elude authorities. In the weeks after the jailbreak, Peña Nieto suffered yet more embarrassment when it was revealed he continued to play dominoes immediately after learning of the escape.

Peña Nieto will close 2015 with the lowest approval ratings of any Mexican president since the early 1990s (when the country was suffering a debilitating economic crisis), largely due to his government's security shortcomings as well as a mixed economic performance that has left many Mexicans struggling to make ends meet.

Insecurity in the Northern Triangle region of Central America (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador) deepened in 2015, with some measures putting El Salvador's homicide rate above 100 per 100,000 people, the highest in the region.

A wave of child migrants arriving at the US southern border in 2014 prompted American officials to push Mexico to do more to intercept Central American migrants transiting Mexico, and data collected during the first half of 2015 reveal that the Mexican government complied.

When not dodging Mexican immigration officials, those migrants also had to contend with gangs and other criminals in Mexico, who robbed, beat, and raped vulnerable migrants as they traveled through the country.

Hundreds of Hundrans blocked several streets to protest against corruption in the administration of President Juan Orlando Hernandez who is being accused of using public funds for his 2013 election campaign.

Like people from El Salvador and Guatemala, many Honduras found themselves migranting north to escape rampant violence, economic instability, and a fractious political environment — and they too experienced the hardships of the journey through Mexico.

"When you live in Honduras, you quickly learn that anywhere and anything is better,” a 17-year-old migrant said last summer, “but then you get to Mexico and you understand that hell extends beyond Honduras."

Anticorruption campaigns brought down several high-profile politicians in Latin America in 2015, and perhaps chief among them was Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina.

Pressure grew on Perez Molina to resign as business and government offices closed, protesters marched, and the attorney general's office urged him to step down "to prevent ungovernability that could destabilize the nation," according to the Associated Press.

After widespread protests and condemnation, including from the Guatemalan comptroller's office, which Perez to resign over the swirling corruption scandal, the embattled president stepped down in early September. (The vice president is serving the remainder of his term, which ends January 14, 2016.)

Prosecutors alleged that Perez was involved in a multimillion-dollar bribery scheme, among other charges, but the disgraced former president said he could have made "10 or 15 times" the money if he had taken the bribes offered him by "El Chapo" Guzmán, who Perez, as an army general, led the operation that caught Guzmán in Guatemala in 1993.

Some of the Nicaraguan faithful coat their bodies in black motor oil, red paint and wear traditional clothes as a promise for a prayer or miracle they believe was performed or answered by Managua's patron saint, Santo Domingo de Guzman.

Due to storms driven by the El Niño weather system, intense flooding in Paraguay, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil has forced more than 150,000 people to evacuate and find temporary shelter.

In late December, the Paraguay River was at its highest level since 1984 and threatened the poor districts that surround the capital, forcing about 100,000 people to shelters.

More than 1,000 Cuban migrants heading north to the US tried to cross the border from Costa Rica into Nicaragua, causing tensions to soar between the neighbors as security forces sought to turn them back.

Nicaragua's government responded furiously on Sunday with a statement saying that Costa Rica "had deliberately and irresponsibly thrown, and continues to throw" the Cuban migrants into its territory, violating its national sovereignty.

Residents had also begun putting up flags on their houses to mark independence day celebrations, which commemorate the country's break away from Colombia.

Disputed election results have brought a renewed surge of paralyzing street protests in Haiti and many broad accusations of electoral fraud from civil society and opposition groups. A runoff election between the two top finishers in an earlier round of voting that was slated for December 27 has been postponed.

Thousands of Haitians and people of Haitian descent have fled the Dominican Republic in 2015, setting up encampments along the Haiti side of the border, cut off from the jobs that sustained them in the Dominican Republic.

The Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia rebel group signed a historic agreement in Havana in September in Havana.

Both parties said they had surmounted the last significant obstacle to a peace deal by agreeing on a formula to compensate victims and to punish combatants for human-rights abuses.

Amid his country's political and economic crises, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro clamped down on the country's border with Colombia, claiming that rampant smuggling across the frontier was destabilizing Venezuela's economy.

Maduro also cracked down on thousands of Colombian living in Venezuela's border areas without documentation, arguing that they were complicit in widespread smuggling operations that they were responsible for the violence in the region.

Maduro's critics said the moves were meant to distract from his government's failure address the country's problems, and that he was attempting to ward off the resounding electoral defeat his government suffered in parliamentary elections on December 6.

Hundreds of thousands of Brazilians have taken to the streets in dozens of cities to criticize President Dilma Rousseff and her Workers' Party for a massive corruption scandal at the state-run oil company. Public distaste for Rousseff's government has been compounded by the country's lackluster economic performance in recent years.

As the corruption scandal has widened and embroiled many more legislators and other state-run enterprises, calls for Rousseff's impeachment have grown louder and proceedings have begun to remover her from office.

While the World Indigenous Games went smoothly (and yielded a number of amazing photographs), the outlook for the 2016 Olympic Games to be held in Rio de Janeiro in summer 2016 is much more bleak.

The region around Rio has been afflicted by severe drought over the past several years, and the waterways slated for use during the games are heavily polluted, in part because of the city's poor infrastructure.

Macri won Argentina's historic runoff election against governing-party candidate Daniel Scioli, putting an end to the era of outgoing President Cristina Fernandez, who along with her late husband, dominated Argentine politics for 12 years.

Adel bin Muhammad El Ouerghi is one of six detainees who were released from a US prison at the naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after nearly 13 years in detention for alleged ties to al-Qaida.

But the men have failed to thrive in Uruguay, unhappy about their circumstances and the amount of aid the government has extended.

Protests roiled Chile in 2015, considered one of the most developed countries in the region, as teachers and students asked for better salaries and participation in the government's education reform.

Many marches, like the one pictured above, ended with some incidents between groups of hooded or masked protesters and police.

Bolivia made progress in its effort to regain access to the Pacific Ocean when a UN court ruled that it could review a suit brought by Bolivia to compel Chile to negotiate over territory lost to the latter country in the War of the Pacific in the 1880s.