News from Central America

Here are a few English-language stories related to Central America, most of which should be interesting to you I hope.

On Tuesday, the people of El Salvador celebrated Missing Children's Day with a variety of activities throughout the country. The day´s activities included a moment of silence in schools, the issuing of a commemorative stamp, a university essay contest award ceremony, and signing performances.

Pro-Busqueda is an organization that remains at the forefront of helping to locate children who were disappeared during the war.

In Big Fish Eat the Small Fish, Danilo Valladares discusses the difficulties confronting "Thousands of small-scale fishers in Central America [are] fighting for survival in the face of free trade deals, transnational corporations, mega tourism projects and pollution that is harming marine life." Large-scale commercial fishers have mainly benefited from recent trade deals.

Valladares also has the story of Guatemala: Forced evictions - peasant farms razed to the ground, a story about the displacement of indigenous farmers in Alta Verapaz.
Eleven Guatemalan women are suing Toronto-based HudBay Minerals and its subsidiarity, HMI Nickel, for $55 million dollars. The women claim that they were assaulted and gang-raped by security and police forces near the company's operations in 2007. Some of the attackers were wearing company uniforms.

Emily Ruiz, a 4-year-old US citizen who was deported along with her grandfather, to his (and her parents') native country, Guatemala, has finally returned to New York. When her grandfather with whom she was travelling was denied entry to the US, she was sent back to Guatemala with him.
 
Albright College and Alvernia University, two Pennsylvania colleges, are working with Salvadoran filmmakers on a Documentary To Focus On Violent Gang With Ties To Reading.
 
Fox News Latino has a brief blurb on weapons entering Mexico from Central America that appeared in US cables released through Wikileaks (Mexican cartels get heavy weapons from CentAm, U.S. cables say).

Ex-Interior Minister Carlos Vielmann appeared before a Spanish court to fight his extradition back to Guatemala. He stand accused of a variety of crimes, including the 2006 summary executions of seven inmates at the Pavon prison and the killing of three inmates from another jail a year earlier.
Also check out two recent Hemispheric Briefs for coverage of event in Honduras (one and two - halfway down each post). And since I don't comment much on Honduras, you should always check out Honduras Culture and Politics for insightful commentary.

Now back to one of my "favorite" books on El Salvador, Paying the Price: Ignacio Ellacuria and the Murdered Jesuits of El Salvador by Teresa Whitfield.