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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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
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