Honduras: killings continue as Aguán becomes “new Colombia”
Honduran campesino leader Pedro Salgado and his wife, Reina Mejía, are the latest victims in a decade-old struggle for land in the Central American nation’s conflicted Lower Aguán Valley.
Honduran campesino leader Pedro Salgado and his wife, Reina Mejía, are the latest victims in a decade-old struggle for land in the Central American nation’s conflicted Lower Aguán Valley.
El Salvador’s Supreme Court blocked the extradition of nine high-ranking military officers accused of overseeing the 1989 “Jesuit Massacre,” defying Interpol “red notices” for the suspects that had been issued at the request of Spanish authorities.
A group of men armed with guns wounded seven indigenous campesinos during an hour-long attack on an encampment in the Polochic Valley in the northeastern Guatemalan department of Alta Verapaz.
Campesino leader Secundino Ruiz was shot dead as he was leaving a bank in Tocoa in the northern Honduran department of Colón. This was the 12th killing in the Aguán Valley in a week.
Students have occupied some 150 public schools throughout Honduras over the past three weeks, and people are starting to compare the protests to the student movement in Chile.
Nine former Salvadoran military officials accused in the 1989 massacre of six Jesuit priests, including ex-Defense Minister Rafael Humberto Lario, were handed over to a court in El Salvador after Spain issued international arrest warrants.
Israeli officials responded harshly and immediately when Honduran president Pepe Lobo announced that his country plans to support statehood for Palestine during the UN General Assembly meeting in September.
A Guatemalan court convicted and sentenced four former soldiers to 6,060 years in prison each on war crimes charges related to the 1982 Dos Erres massacre, in which 250 unarmed peasants were killed by the military.
The US Coast Guard announced the interception of a so-called “narco submarine,” while in a joint patrol of Caribbean waters with the Honduran armed forces. Four crew members were detained with 7.5 tons of cocaine.
The labor and human rights of women workers are reportedly being violated at two factories in northern Honduras owned by the US clothing firm Delta Apparel, Inc.
Four former members of the Guatemalan army’s elite Kaibiles pleaded not guilty as the first war crimes trial over the 1982 Dos Erres massacre opened in the Central American nation’s capital.
The government and the unions representing medical workers for the Social Security Fund signed an agreement ending a strike that the unions had started four days earlier over economic issues.