Guatemala: wins, threats for peasant ecologists
Charges were dropped against 10 campesino opponents of a hydro-electric project on Maya lands in Guatemala, but other leaders remain in prison and face death threats.
Charges were dropped against 10 campesino opponents of a hydro-electric project on Maya lands in Guatemala, but other leaders remain in prison and face death threats.
A government commision has signed an agreement for the first of three “model city” projects, semi-autonomous regions mandated under a controversial 2010 constitutional amendment.
Dole Food has finally begun funding a settlement it made more than a year ago with some 5,000 former banana workers with health problems linked to the use of pesticides.
Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega has agree to discontinue the training of his country’s military personnel at the US military’s controversial School of the Americas (SOA).
The US praised the decision of Guatemala’s Constitutional Court allowing former president Alfonso Portillo to be extradited to the US on charges of embezzling foreign donations.
Five people died violently in the Aguán region in less than a week; at least two of the deaths appeared related to campesino struggles for land now held by big landowners.
Swiss prosecutors announced that Erwin Sperisen, former commander of Guatemala's National Police, was arrested in Geneva and will stand trial for extrajudicial killings.
Some 45 campesinos from Honduras’ conflicted Aguán Valley were arrested in protests demanding the Supreme Court issue rulings in favor of campesino struggles for land.
A court in Guatemala City sentenced Pedro García Arredondo, former chief of the National Police, to 70 years in prison for the 1981 disappearance and torture of a university student.
The military forced 100 impoverished families to move out of land in Guatemala City where they’d lived since January—and removed them again when they tried to settle nearby.
A total of 25 high school students from the Honduras Technical Institute in Tegucigalpa were arrested when the National Police broke up a protest with clubs and tear gas.
Student protesters clashed with police in Guatemala’s capital after students occupied several campuses to oppose a right-wing “reform” of the country’s educational system.