Talks on a Mexico-Central America free trade zone wrapped up as long-standing regional political disputes were officially resolved. But increased integration comes with stepped-up “anti-crime” military efforts.
Thousands of Hondurans gathered at Tegucigalpa’s Toncontín International Airport to greet former president Manuel (“Mel”) Zelaya (2006-2009) as he returned from a 16-month exile.
Ousted Honduran president Mel Zelaya and incumbent Porfirio Lobo signed a pact that will allow Zelaya to return to the country and “normalize” relations with the OAS. The next day, another journalist was shot in Tegucigalpa.
Guatemalan police arrested a presumed leader of the Zetas narco-paramilitary network who authorities say is likely commander of the assassin squad that carried out this week's grisly massacre of 27 farmworkers.
Honduran campesino Henry Roney Díaz was killed when soldiers, police and private guards tried to remove campesinos occupying an estate in the Aguán River Valley in the northern department of Colón.
Guatemalan authorities announced the discovery of 27 bodies—all but one decapitated—at a ranch in the northern jungle of Petén. The victims were farmworkers who were apparently massacred by a Zeta narco-trafficking cell.
From Chile to Mexico, Latin American May Day marches focused on demands for wage increases and for fighting the high cost of living following recent jumps in food and fuel prices.
Central American militaries are the main source of the Mexican cartels’ heavy weapons, the US embassy in Mexico wrote in a confidential 2009 cable released by the WikiLeaks.
Two European companies have backed out of Honduran carbon trading and biofuel deals after an international campaign around allegations of human rights abuses in the Lower Aguán Valley.
A meeting between the Honduran government and teachers’ union representatives in Tegucigalpa seemed to be heading towards a settlement of a month-long national strike by 60,000 teachers.
In a series of raids, some 1,000 soldiers and national police troops evicted more than 3,000 Q’eqchi Maya campesinos from lands claimed by an agribusiness firm in the Polochic Valley of Alta Verapaz department, Guatemala.
Thousands of Hondurans demonstrated in a “National Civic Strike” called by teachers’ unions and the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP), a coalition of unions and grassroots organizations.
