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.
Nery JeremĂas Orellana, 26, the manager of Radio Joconguera in the town of Candelaria, in the western department of Lempira, Honduras, was gunned down on his way to a regional meeting of community radio stations.
Pedro Pimentel Rios, a veteran of Guatemala’s eilte military unit, the Kaibiles, was deported by ICE back to the Central American nation for his role in the 1982 massacre of at least 162 villagers at Las Dos Erres, in the northern jungle department of PetĂ©n.
The Guatemalan government failed to comply with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights’ order to help more than 600 campesino families that had been evicted from land they were farming.
Famed Argentine folksinger Facundo Cabral, an icon of Latin American protest music, was shot to death by unknown gunmen who ambushed his car on the way to the airport in Guatemala City.
The Honduras Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded that the removal from office of former President Manuel Zelaya was a coup—but also that Zelaya’s referendum on constitutional change was “a point of no return” in the crisis.
Hundreds of debt-ridden small merchants and farmers in northern Nicaragua launched a human blockade on the main road between the Caribbean coast and the capital in Matagalpa department.
UN Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers Gabriela Knau warned that a new law in El Salvador requiring its high court to issue unanimous judgments is an “attack” on judicial independence and the separation of powers.
