China's Camc Engineering won the contract to build a major oil facility on Nicaragua's Pacific coast under the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA)—as Canadian mining companies rush into the country's remote interior.
More than 3,500 Honduran campesino families occupied land in estates in different parts of the country to demand implementation of an effective national agrarian reform policy.
The AFL-CIO has joined with two Honduran union federations to file a petition with the US Department of Labor asking the US to push the Honduran government to address labor violations.
Four Honduran campesinos were killed and 11 were wounded in an ambush in the northern department of ColĂłn just three days after a similar attack in the same area left five soldiers wounded.
Some 1,500 indigenous campesinos arrived in Guatemala City after an eight-day, 214-km walk from Cobán to promote their demands for land, debt cancellation and a halt to mining operations.
Former general Pedro Pimentel has been sentenced to 6,030 years in prison for his participation in a 1982 massacre of 201 civilians–most of them women and children–in the village of Dos Erres.
Ngöbe-BuglĂ© leaders reached an agreement with the Panamanian government that would ban mining in the group’s territory and limit hydroelectric projects–but there is strong opposition.
Women in the Honduran branch of the international campesino movement VĂa Campesina launched a new campaign on March 8 under the slogan “for women’s dignity, we demand our right to the land.”
The Ngöbe-Buglé indigenous group suspended talks with Panamanian officials and resumed a blockade of the Pan American highway after four young protesters were wounded by rubber bullets.
US Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano defended the US-backed war on the drug cartels, despite growing violence in Mexico and Central America—while Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla called for a regional debate on legalization.
The Honduran government signed an accord with two campesino organizations to finance the purchase of land for campesino cooperatives in an area where land disputes have left more than 50 dead in two years.
A federal immigration judge in Florida decided that former Salvadoran defense minister Gen. Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova can be deported for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during El Salvador’s civil war.
