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.
Having dismissed a case brought under CAFTA, a World Bank tribunal granted Pacific Rim Mining jurisdiction under El Salvador’s own investment law to sue the Central American republic for failure to approve a mine opposed by local campesinos.
The Guatemalan government has begun a process virtually closing down the agency in charge of preserving and investigating military and police records from the country’s bloody 1960-1996 civil war.
In the latest Honduran police scandal, an ex-agent is prime suspect in the kidnapping and murder of journalist Angel Alfredo Villatoro. He had been shot twice in the head, and media reported that the body was dressed in a police uniform.
Guatemala’s President Otto Perez Molina imposed a state of siege on the remote Maya village of Santa Cruz Barillas after residents overran an army outpost following the assassination of a community leader in the struggle against a hydro-electric project.
Indigenous Miskito residents of Ahuas village on the remote Caribbean coast of Honduras are demanding justice in the wake of a deadly helicopter raid by Honduran National Police and DEA agents—with details still emerging on the scope of the violence.
A Guatemalan judge ruled that former dictator Efrain Rios Montt will have a second genocide trial for ordering a 1982 massacre in which 201 people were killed at the jungle village of Dos Erres.
Campesinos from Honduras’ sprawling and rugged department of Olancho protested outside the national electric company in Tegucigalpa to demand cancellation of the Patuca III hydro-electic project until land rights in the area have been clarified.
