A new wave of murders indicates that violence in the Lower Aguán Valley of Honduras is not subsiding despite several agreements aimed at ending the region’s longstanding agrarian conflict.
Cintia Yadira Herrera died of heart problems shortly after arriving in northern Honduras on a mass deportation flight arranged by US immigration authorities, who had ignored her complaints of feeling ill.
Some 1,500 workers went on strike for a week to oppose the Costa Rican government’s latest move in its campaign to privatize the country’s commercially important Caribbean ports.
A DEA agent shot a man to death in Honduras during a raid on a smuggling operation—marking the first confirmed time the DEA has killed during an operation since the agency began deploying teams to Latin America.
Alejandro Jimenez Gonzalez AKA “Palidejo,” accused in the slaying of Argentine folk-singer Facundo Cabral in Guatemala last year, has been indicted on drug trafficking charges in Nicaragua and Costa Rica.
Some 200 Honduran security agents descended on a campesino encampment in an early-morning raid in the northern department of Cortés, destroying homes and shops and arresting 30 people, mostly women.
A federal judge in the District of Columbia dismissed a lawsuit filed by seven Guatemalans who alleged that they had been the subject of non-consensual human medical experimentation by the US Public Health Service.
Telma Yolanda Oqueli, leader of protest blockades at EXMINGUA gold mine near Guatemala City, was shot in the chest and gravely wounded by gunmen on a motorbike. Local residents demand their right to be consulted on the mine.
After a 30-year struggle, two indigenous Wounaan collectives in the eastern Panamanian province of Darién received titles from the government to their traditional lands—but clashes over logging in the territory continue.
The Honduran government signed an agreement granting campesinos some 4,000 hectares of farmland in the conflicted north of the country—far less than the government agreed to provide in an accord two years ago.
Honduras passed a constitutional amendment drawn up by the administration of President Porfirio Lobo that allows the creation of “Special Development Regions” within the country—where the national state would have limited, if any, authority.
With anger still growing in Honduras over the Miskito Coast drug raid that left four dead and villagers terrorized, the White House shows no sign of reconsidering the Central American Regional Security Initiative.
