Wave of protests and violence against austerity measures and political corruption swept Bolivia, Venezuela, Chile and other Latin American countries
Continue reading...Category Archives: Honduras
Berta Cáceres murder: seven convicted men sentenced to up to 54 years
Sentencing in environmental activist’s death comes more than a year after guilty verdict
The seven men found guilty of killing the Honduran indigenous environmentalist Berta Cáceres have been sentenced to 30 to 54 years.
Cáceres, a winner of the Goldman prize for environmental defenders, was shot dead late at night on 2 March 2016 – two days before her 45th birthday – after a long battle to stop construction of an internationally financed hydroelectric dam on the Gualcarque River.
Continue reading...Running dry: the water crisis driving migration to the US – podcast
Nina Lakhani explores how drought and famine are fuelling the wave of migration from Central America to the US. Plus: Emma Graham-Harrison on China and the Hong Kong protests
Victor Funez walks to a cemetery in Nejapa, El Salvador, every day and fills a three-gallon plastic pitcher with water before trudging home. He repeats this several times a day – it’s his family’s only source of water. The Guardian’s Nina Lakhani met him as part of an investigation into how a lack of access to clean water is a major driver of migration from Central America to the US.
She tells India Rakusen that rising sea levels are destroying coastal towns in Honduras and how drought and famine have prompted a mass exodus from Guatemala. In El Salvador, meanwhile, corporate interests, corruption and gangs worsen the problems caused by the lack of clean water.
Continue reading...‘It won’t be long’: why a Honduran community will soon be under water
Rising sea levels are destroying coastal towns in Honduras – and shrimp farms which export to the UK and US are making it worse
Eric Pineda runs a modest beachfront restaurant which serves up plates of fresh fish and rice – and faces imminent destruction.
A recent tidal surge razed the nightclub next door, leaving a pastel pink ruin, and in the past two years, several other businesses between Pineda’s property and the Pacific Ocean have been destroyed by sudden waves.
Continue reading...Honduras abortion misery a ‘frightening preview’ of America’s future – study
Reproductive rights pushback could leave American women facing same life-or-death choices as Hondurans, say researchers
One woman handcuffed by police after suffering a miscarriage, another forced to bear her rapist’s child. A doctor who risks imprisonment to end pregnancies that threaten the lives of patients. The reality of healthcare in Honduras provides a “frightening preview” of what could happen in America if the pushback on reproductive rights continues, Human Rights Watch has warned.
Researchers from the organisation spoke of the “enormous suffering” of women and girls in Honduras, where there is a total ban on abortion in all circumstances.
Continue reading...Honduras plane crash: five foreign tourists killed shortly after takeoff
Conflicting accounts say victims travelling on private plane off Roatán island were from US or Canada
Five foreign tourists died on Saturday after a private plane they were traveling in crashed into the sea shortly after taking off from the island of Roatán, near the Atlantic coast of Honduras, local authorities said.
Related: Australian man one of six dead after midair seaplane collision in Alaska
Continue reading...Campaigners fight to lift ban on morning-after pill in Honduras
Law against emergency contraception leaves desperate women, including rape victims, forced to buy medication on black market
A pioneering grassroots campaign to legalise emergency contraception is launched in Honduras this week amid ongoing false claims by church leaders, senior doctors and conservative politicians that the medication causes abortions, infertility and cancer.
Honduras is the only country in Latin America where emergency contraception is banned, forcing desperate women, including rape victims, to buy expensive and unregulated contraband pills on the black market.
Continue reading...Honduran transgender woman freed after a year in US detention
Nicole García Aguilar was granted asylum in October but was held another seven months while Ice appealed
A Honduran transgender woman who was detained in a US immigration facility for seven months despite being granted asylum has been released after a legal challenge.
Nicole García Aguilar was freed from the Cibola County detention facility in New Mexico on Wednesday night, a week after lawyers filed a habeas corpus writ challenging her unjustified and prolonged detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice).
Continue reading...Trump plans to cut Central America aid, blaming countries for migrant caravans
The US president accused Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador of ‘arranging’ exodus of migrants
The US has confirmed its intention to cut more than $450 million in aid to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, as Donald Trump accused the three Central American countries of “arranging” migrant caravans to the US.
Trump relented on his earlier vow to close the entire southern border with Mexico, claiming that the security forces there had begun arresting “a lot of people” in response to his closure threat. But he warned that if the Mexican authorities did not “keep it up” he would seal the frontier, no matter what the economic cost to the US.
Continue reading...Increase in migrant detentions at US border reveals Trump’s policy failure
Experts say officials have failed to acknowledge violence and instability in Central America and say system of ‘metering’ is not working
A staggering increase in the number of families apprehended at the US-Mexico border in February has highlighted the Trump administration’s failure to respond to the rise in Central Americans seeking protection in the US.
In February, 66,450 people were apprehended at the US-Mexico border by Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the agency announced on Tuesday – 17,800 more than were apprehended in January and double the number who were apprehended in February last year.
Continue reading...Tricked, abducted and killed: the last day of two child migrants in Mexico
The deaths show the vulnerability of migrants forced to ‘remain in Mexico’ under new US policy for asylum seekers
On a Saturday afternoon in December, three Honduran boys walked out through the gates of the blue stucco YMCA shelter for unaccompanied child migrants in Tijuana, and turned past the gas station next door on to Cuauhtémoc Boulevard for a walk.
Their destination was a sports centre-turned-migrant camp to visit people they’d met travelling north with a caravan of other Central Americans.
Continue reading...A day with the men about to make it across the US border – at any cost
Central American migrants escaping poverty and violence in their hometowns find crossing legally is a slow and difficult process
At the age of 14, Jonathan Levit was given an order by the infamously brutal Mara Salvatrucha gang in his native Tegucigalpa, capital of Honduras: to kill a friend he had known throughout childhood – “like a brother, all my life”.
Jonathan had, like almost every child in the city of Tela’s terrifying barrio of Colonia 15 de Septiembre, grown up in the gang’s shadow; there was no avoiding it, especially if you were partial to a smoke, as he was. And now the time had come for him to execute “a mission” for what is also called MS-13 – the gang which, Jonathan says, “doesn’t just run Colonia 15, they almost run Honduras”.
Continue reading...Latest migrant caravan marches on as Trump again demands border wall
The latest group set off from the notoriously violent Honduran city of San Pedro Sula at the start of this week
Hundreds of Central American migrants have continued their march towards the United States, crossing from Honduras into Guatemala, as Donald Trump again demanded the construction of a border wall he claims would keep such groups out.
Related: ‘No way to live here’: new Honduran caravan sets off north as Trump blasts warnings
Continue reading...‘No way to live here’: new Honduran caravan sets off north as Trump blasts warnings
As hundreds of migrants embark on a march towards ‘El Norte’, Trump launched a Twitter war against the caravan
Rosa López was six months pregnant with her seventh child when the killers came for her husband – unnamed assassins acting on orders she cannot, or dares not explain.
Ten months later the 30-year-old Honduran sits on a muddy embankment outside the San Pedro Sula bus station with her eldest son, Sergio, 12, getting ready to flee their homeland on the latest migrant caravan north.
Continue reading...Counting the cost of Honduran crime – in pictures
Honduras’s homicide rate has fallen significantly in recent years, but the country still has one of the highest murder rates in the world. The fall can be attributed to the initiatives of police and military forces against drug smugglers and gangs. In a country of 8 million people, there are an estimated 7,000-10,000 street gang members
Continue reading...Trump Threatens to Punish Honduras Over Immigrant Caravan
President Trump threatened on Tuesday to withhold aid from the Honduran government if it did not halt a mass migration of more than 1,500 people, mainly from Honduras, who crossed into Guatemala this week, many with the intention of reaching the United States. "The United States has strongly informed the President of Honduras that if the large Caravan of people heading to the U.S. is not stopped and brought back to Honduras, no more money or aid will be given to Honduras, effective immediately!" President Trump said on his Twitter account .
12-year-old girl from Honduras reunited with her family in NH
A girl from Honduras has been reunited with her family in New Hampshire after she was separated from them by the Trump administration's "zero-tolerance" policy on illegal border crossings. Twelve-year-old Nathalia Guzman travelled from Yoro, Honduras with her aunt Francia Guzman, her uncle, Henrry Cruz-Amaya, and her cousin, Fernando Cruz-Guzman.
Deported Into a Nightmare
Most Central American migrant children get deported before they even reach the U.S. One story shows what can await them when they get back to the countries they fled. SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras-Edwin VA squez, a 16-year-old, is learning how to live with fear.
Private jet from Texas crashes in Honduras, all passengers survive
A private jet travelling from Austin, Texas, crashed off the end of the runway of the Honduran capital's international airport and broke in half Tuesday, but the crew and passengers were rescued and reportedly out of danger. Video images posted online showed what appeared to be area residents pulling people out of the damaged fuselage of the white Gulfstream jet, while others sprayed it with hand-held fire extinguishers.
Migrant caravan arrives at California’s doorstep, amid protests, cheers and questions
A group of immigrants from Central America, whose caravan north earned the ire of President Donald Trump and became a flash point in the roiling debate over illegal immigration, requested asylum at the California border Sunday in a scene marked by emotion and theater. As the boisterous gathering at the border fence in Playas de Tijuana grew to hundreds, some waved Honduran flags, called out chants and waved bouquets of yellow flowers.