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.
Thousands of members of Black and indigenous groups in Honduras marched on the capital, Tegucigalpa, to demand territorial rights and protest recent repression by the regime of Porfirio Lobo.
Honduran riot police threw a tear gas canister at journalists Lidieth DĂaz and Adolfo Sierra from TV Cholusat Sur (Channel 36) as they were trying to film a protest by striking teachers.
Honduran teacher Ilse Ivana Velásquez RodrĂguez died in a Tegucigalpa hospital from injuries she received when riot police attacked a demonstration of thousands of teachers.
Women’s rights organizations marked International Women’s Day with street protests demanding that Central American governments take measures to stop the killings of women.
Panama’s President Ricardo Martinelli said he will ask legislators to rescind a mining law opponents say would encourage open-pit mining by foreign companies and endanger the environment.
