On December 21 2011, the U.S. Peace Corps released a statement declaring that it would be pulling out 158 active volunteers from Honduras in January 2012 as a result of the ongoing violence there perpetrated by organized criminal gangs. Furthermore, the Peace Corps intends to reevaluate the safety situation for volunteers serving in other Central American countries – Guatemala and El Salvador, and have canceled the upcoming 2012 training sessions that were to be...
Inside houses held together by a collection of sticks, mud brick and plastic table cloths one can hear the hum of a stainless-steel refrigerator and the shrill buzz of a flickering thirty-inch color television set. These appliances of modern convenience mix casually with poverty, a contrast almost obscenely commonplace throughout many parts of Latin America and especially Central America. Small towns in the campo, where unemployment seems to run close to 90 percent and the...
An abridged version of the following publication was first featured on the DOHA Centre for Media Freedom website. In 2005, with the United States facing resilient resistance in Iraq, Newsweek reported that officials in the Pentagon were debating the use of the “Salvador Option,” referring to the US-supported death squads that terrorized El Salvador through the 1980s as part of the first ‘War on Terror.’ These groups were notoriously barbaric, using random violence, decapitations,...
After almost two months of tension between Congress and the Corte Suprema de Justicia (CSJ), Congress finally repealed Decree 743 with a vote of 57-27. Passed on June 2, the Decree rendered the CSJ virtually ineffective because it mandated that the five judges must vote unanimously to pass a ruling. Motivation for such a motion arose from concerns surrounding rumors of the court abolishing the amnesty law of 1993, a measure which protected those...
