On June 1, a tribunal of the World Bank's International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) granted jurisdiction to Canada's Pacific Rim Mining Corp, allowing the final phase of the company's arbitration case against El Salvador to go forward. The tribunal dismissed objections filed by the Government of El Salvador, ruling that the case can proceed under El Salvador's own Foreign Investment Law. Since 2009, the Vancouver-based company has been seeking $100 million from El Salvador for having turned down the company a permit to mine gold in the northern region of Cabañas.

During the last week of May the government of Guatemalan president Otto Pérez Molina began a process that human rights defenders charge will virtually close down the Peace Archives, the agency in charge of preserving and investigating military and police records from the country's bloody 1960-1996 civil war. Newly appointed Peace Secretary Antonio Arenales Forno announced that the agency was unnecessary. Its function, he said, is "to computerize and analyze military archives to establish human rights violations, but this is the responsibility of the human rights community, and the investigation of crimes is the responsibility of the Prosecutor's Office."

The body of Honduran journalist Angel Alfredo Villatoro Rivera, a reporter and news coordinator for the HRN radio chain, was found in Tegucigalpa on the evening of May 15, six days after he was kidnapped while driving to work. He had been shot twice in the head, according to Security Ministry spokesperson Héctor Iván Mejía; local media reported that the body was dressed in a police uniform. (EFE, May 15 via Univision)

Petitioned by local leaders, Guatemala's President Otto Perez Molina lifted the state of siege May 18 on the remote Maya village of Santa Cruz Barillas, Huehuetenango, imposed there after disturbances that left one person dead on May 1. Residents are still demanding the release of 17 arrested in connection with the unrest. Authorities say a gang of some 200, armed with machetes and guns, overran a local army outpost—and charged that they were led by members of the notorious Mexican narco-paramilitary network, Los Zetas. Local residents, represented by the Maya Waqib Kej National Coordination and Convergence, say the group was protesting the killing of a local community leader that day, Andrés Francisco Miguel, a leading opponent of a hydroelectric dam planned for the area. Villagers believe he was killed by security guards working for Hidro Santa Cruz, the Spanish-backed company building the local hydro-dam, and that the killers were being protected in the army outpost. Perez Molina visited Santa Cruz Barillas in the aftermath of the confrontation, and said human rights would be respected but that he would not tolerate residents taking the law into their own hands. Hundreds of army and National Police troops have been mobilized to the village.

Indigenous Miskito residents of Ahuas village on the remote Caribbean coast of Honduras are demanding justice in the wake of a deadly raid by Honduran National Police and DEA agents May 11—with details still emerging on the scope of the violence. Villagers report that machine-gun fire from two helicopters lasted 15 minutes near the man village pier, adding to initial accounts of four killed in a combined air and ground assault on a canoa or pipante (dugout canoe) on the Río Patuca. As residents cowered in their homes, the two choppers—marked with the US flag, villagers say—next landed and disgorged some 50 heavily armed and uniformed men, who then proceeded to break down the doors of local homes. Residents were menaced at gunpoint and threatened with death to demand information about one "El Renco," as their modest homes were ransacked. Residents say English-speaking "gringos"—presumably, DEA agents—took part in the raids and rough interrogations, which lasted up to two hours.

A Guatemalan judge ruled May 21 that former dictator Efrain Rios Montt will have a second genocide trial for ordering a 1982 massacre which killed 201 people. Judge Carol Patricia Flores found enough evidence linking Rios Montt to the Dos Erres massacre for another genocide trial. The massacre, which took place when about 20 soldiers were ordered to search a village for weapons, was one of the country's deadliest during the 36-year Guatemalan civil war. Rios Montt's defense lawyer argued that he was not present during the killings and, therefore, cannot be liable for the massacre. The prosecution maintains that the massacre was part of a military operation ordered by Rios Montt. The second genocide charge comes just months after Rios Montt's trial for the killing of 1,700 indigenous peasants.

Following last month's nationwide campesino mobilization in Honduras, campesinos from Patuca and Catacamas municipalities in the country's sprawling and rugged northeastern department of Olancho held a protest outside the offices of the National Electric Energy Company (ENEE) in Tegucigalpa, the national capital. The April 25 protest demanded cancellation of the planned Patuca III hydro-electic project until land rights in the area have been clarified. The government claims that last year it delivered promised compensation to campesinos whose lands would be flooded by the Patuca III project, on the river of the same name, and is preparing to commence construction. But the protesters say some 320 affected campesinos have received no compensation. Many of these lack official title to their lands, and protesters say the government has not followed through on pledges for a demarcation of peasant lands in the affected zone. (El Heraldo, Proceso Digital, Honduras, April 25 )

Residents of the villages of Ahuas and Patuca, in the remote Miskito Coast of northeast Honduras, took to the streets May 11 to protest a deadly DEA raid, demanding the US agency leave their territory—and burning down four government offices to make their point. In the incident in the pre-dawn hours that morning on the Río Patuca, four were killed—including two pregnant women—and another four wounded when DEA agents and Honduran National Police agents in a US State Department-contracted helicopter piloted by Guatemalan military men fired on a boat they apparently believed was filled with drug traffickers. Local residents—backed up by the mayor of local Ahuas municipality (Gracias a Dios department), Lucio Baquedano—say they were humble villagers who were fishing on the river, and had nothing to do with drug trafficking.