Category Archives: Honduras

‘Everything buried in mud’: Hurricane Eta’s devastating blow to Honduras

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Flooding left thousands trapped for days without food or water and death toll may never be known

Across a sea of putrid mud a metre or so deep, Marvin Argueta pointed to the remnants of what a week ago was his home on the banks of the Chamelecón River. He had lost everything – but he still considers himself lucky.

“If we hadn’t got out in time, we all would have died,” said Argueta, 22, who along with his wife and four children abandoned their house when the flood waters reached waist height in the middle of the night. “A friend of mine lost his entire family.”

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Storm Eta death toll rises to 100 after devastating mudslides

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Rescuers reach remote mountain village in Guatemala where people were buried in their homes

The death toll from the calamitous Storm Eta in Central America soared on Friday after the Guatemalan military reached a remote mountainous village where torrential rains had triggered devastating mudslides, killing about 100 people.

Many of the dead were buried in their homes in the remote village of Quejá in the central region of Alta Verapaz, where about 150 houses had been swallowed by mudslides, said army spokesman Rubén Téllez.

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Tropical storm Eta expected to become hurricane and heads to Central America

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System formed in the Caribbean and tied record for most named storms in a single Atlantic hurricane season

Forecasters said they expected the newly-formed Tropical storm Eta to become a hurricane by Monday, shortly after the system formed in the Caribbean and tied the record for most named storms in a single Atlantic hurricane season.

Related: Is climate change making hurricanes worse?

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Thousands of migrants cross into Guatemala with slim hopes of reaching US

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The caravan from Honduras is the biggest since the pandemic hit Central America in March, triggering a rise in unemployment and poverty

Thousands of Honduran migrants hoping to reach the United States have entered Guatemala, testing the newly reopened frontier that had been shut by the coronavirus pandemic.

Authorities had planned to register the migrants as they crossed and offer assistance to those willing to turn back, but early on Thursday, the group pushed past armed guards without registering. By midday more than 3,000 migrants had crossed illegally, said Guatemalan officials.

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La Caravana del Diablo: a migrant caravan in Mexico – photo essay

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Photojournalist Ada Luisa Trillo has won the Guardian’s Portfolio Review award at Format photography festival this year. Her powerful piece of work on the migrant caravan follows the people who left Central American countries to reach the US

In January 2020, fleeing violence and poor economic conditions, a group of Hondurans organised a huge migrant caravan that travelled through Guatemala into Mexico. After travelling for eight days, the caravan crossed the Suchiate River into Mexico and were met by the recently established Guardia Nacional composed of former federal, military and naval police.

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Record 212 land and environment activists killed last year

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Global Witness campaigners warn of risk of further killings during Covid-19 lockdowns

A record number of people were killed last year for defending their land and environment, according to research that highlights the routine murder of activists who oppose extractive industries driving the climate crisis and the destruction of nature.

More than four defenders were killed every week in 2019, according to an annual death toll compiled by the independent watchdog Global Witness, amid growing evidence of opportunistic killings during the Covid-19 lockdown in which activists were left as “sitting ducks” in their own homes.

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Fears growing for five indigenous Garifuna men abducted in Honduras

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The Triunfo de la Cruz region has been embroiled in a struggle to save their ancestral land from developers and drug traffickers

Fears are growing for the safety of five black indigenous men in Honduras who were abducted from their homes last weekend by heavily armed gunmen in police uniforms.

The victims are Garifuna fishermen from the town Triunfo de la Cruz on the north coast – a region where communities are embroiled in a longstanding struggle to save their ancestral land from drug traffickers, palm oil magnates and tourism developers aided by corrupt officials and institutions.

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Twitter deletes 20,000 fake accounts linked to Saudi, Serbian and Egyptian governments

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Accounts also linked to Honduras and Indonesia violated policy and were ‘targeted attempt to undermine the public conversation’

Twitter has deleted 20,000 fake accounts linked to the governments of Serbia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Honduras and Indonesia, saying they violated company policy and were a “targeted attempt to undermine the public conversation”.

Yoel Roth, the head of site integrity, said the removal of the accounts was part of the company’s ongoing “work to detect and investigate state-backed information operations”.

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US prosecutors accuse Honduran president of taking drug money

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Juan Orlando Hernández allegedly took $25,000 in 2013 in exchange for protecting trafficker from law enforcement

US prosecutors have said that the president of Honduras met a drug trafficker in around 2013 and took $25,000 in exchange for protecting the trafficker from law enforcement.

The US attorney’s office for the southern district of New York issued a statement referring to President Juan Orlando Hernández only as a “high-ranking Honduran official” or as “CC-4”, a co-conspirator.

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How the American dream died on the world’s busiest border

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It is a place where worlds converge, a vast melting pot of different peoples, all in search of a better life. Yet the US-Mexico border is also, increasingly, a focal point for human suffering

Milson, from Honduras, sits with his 14-year-old daughter, Loany, on the reedy riverbank beside the bridge connecting Matamoros, in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, with downtown Brownsville, Texas, across the Rio Grande.

On the far reach – a few yards but another world away – is a vast tent (officially a “soft-sided facility”) erected to cope with the sheer numbers seeking asylum in the US. In a few weeks’ time, on the date stipulated on their “notice to appear” document, the people staying here will have their “credible fear interview” by video link.

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Hundreds of Central American migrants rounded up by guardsmen at Mexico border – video

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National guardsmen in riot gear have blocked the path of hundreds of Central Americans near the town of Frontera Hidalgo in southern Mexico. 

Security forces corralled the migrants and hauled them on to buses, as Mexico continues with efforts to contain mass migration under pressure from the Trump administration.


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Central American migrants meet with armed guardsmen at Mexico border

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Mexico continues with efforts to contain the procession under pressure from the Trump administration

National guardsmen in riot gear have corralled hundreds of Central Americans and hauled them on to buses as Mexico continues with efforts to contain mass migration, under pressure from the Trump administration.

Security forces blocked the migrants’ path near the town of Frontera Hidalgo on Thursday afternoon, after hundreds had swept into Mexico across the Suchiate River that divides the country from Guatemala.

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Scuffles erupt between migrants and troops at Guatemala-Mexico border – video report

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Scuffles have broken out between hundreds of Central American migrants and National Guard agents at the border between Guatemala and Mexico. The troops formed a barrier to stop the migrants from entering deeper into Mexico as they attempted to cross into the US

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US agents aid in Guatemalan crackdown on hundreds of migrants headed north

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Move in effect dashes migrants’ plans to travel together in a ‘caravan’ to the United States

Guatemalan police accompanied by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have swept up hundreds of migrants, returning them to the Honduran border and in effect dashing their plans to travel together in a “caravan” to the United States.

Other, smaller groups traveled on in dribs and drabs in a movement involving several thousand people but very different from previous caravans.

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More than 300 human rights activists were killed in 2019, report reveals

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Colombia was the bloodiest nation with 103 murders and the Philippines was second, followed by Brazil, Honduras and Mexico

More than 300 human rights defenders working to protect the environment, free speech, LGBTQ rights and indigenous lands in 31 countries were killed in 2019, a new report reveals.

Two thirds of the total killings took place in Latin America where impunity from prosecution is the norm.

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Berta Cáceres murder: seven convicted men sentenced to up to 54 years

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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.

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Running dry: the water crisis driving migration to the US – podcast

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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.

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‘It won’t be long’: why a Honduran community will soon be under water

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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.

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Honduras abortion misery a ‘frightening preview’ of America’s future – study

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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.

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