The labor and human rights of women workers are being violated at two factories in northern Honduras owned by the US clothing firm Delta Apparel, Inc., according to a July 25 statement by the Honduran Women's Collective (CODEMUH). Workers at Delta Apparel Honduras and Delta Apparel Cortés, maquiladoras (tax-exempt assembly plants producing for export) in Cortés department, say management uses harassment, reprisals and threats of firing to get employees to meet excessively high production quotas. Some workers reportedly suffer muscle or bone injuries because of long hours in uncomfortable positions; they say that when they are reassigned due to the injuries, they are called "the sick ones" and "the Barbies."

Four former Guatemalan soldiers pleaded not guilty July 26 as the first war crimes trial over the 1982 Dos Erres massacre opened in the Central American nation's capital. Carlos Antonio Carias, Manuel Pop, Reyes Collin and Daniel Martínez are accused of being members of a military force that allegedly killed more than 250 people in the village of Dos Erres in 1982 during the country's 36-year civil war. Three of the men were members of a special forces unit known as the Kaibiles, at least part of which is alleged to have played a role in the massacre. The military force was attempting to rout out insurgents during Guatemala's military rule under Gen. Efrain Rios Montt. The four men pleaded not guilty arguing that they were not stationed with the group that carried out the atrocities at Dos Erres. They are accused of killing 201 farmers. There are also allegations that many women and girls in Dos Erres were raped and killed during the massacre. The Guatemalan civil war resulted in more than 200,000 deaths, mostly among Guatemala's large indigenous Mayan population. According to a UN report released in 1999, the military was responsible for 95 percent of those deaths.

After 24 hours of negotiations, the Costa Rican government and all the unions representing medical workers for the Costa Rican Social Security Fund (CCSS) signed an agreement on July 23 ending a strike that the unions had started four days earlier over economic issues. This was the first major strike to confront President Laura Chinchilla since she took office in May 2010. As in a number of Latin American countries, social security includes medical care in Costa Rica, and the CCSS employs some 48,000 medical workers at 29 hospitals.

Nery Jeremías Orellana, 26, the manager of Radio Joconguera in the town of Candelaria, in the western department of Lempira, was gunned down the morning of July 14, bringing the number of Honduran journalists killed since the start of the year to three. A total of 12 journalists have been killed in the past 18 months in Honduras without any of their murders being solved. "Orellana headed a commercial radio station that works with civil society organizations and belongs to an alternative network of community radio stations," Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said. "He was also a member of the Broad Front of Popular Resistance (FARP), an opposition movement. All this means that he was [the] kind of journalist who was liable to be a target for violence."

A 54-year-old resident of Santa Ana, Calif. suspected of taking part in the Guatemalan army's December 1982 massacre of at least 162 villagers was deported to that country July 12, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced. Pedro Pimentel Rios was arrested last July by ICE agents for allegedly participating in the massacre at Las Dos Erres, in the northern jungle department of Petén. The bodies of 162 people, including children, have been recovered at Dos Erres, but another 100 people are unaccounted for, so the death toll from the massacre could be much higher. Rios was among 20 members of an elite Guatemalan army unit, the Kaibiles, accused in the massacre.

As of July 5 the Guatemalan government had still failed to comply with instructions from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR, or CIDH in Spanish) to help more than 600 campesino families that had been evicted from land in the Polochic Valley in the northeastern department of Alta Verapaz. The IACHR, the human rights arm of the Organization of American States (OAS), gave the government 15 days to carry out "precautionary measures" (medidas cautelares) to guarantee the life and physical integrity of the displaced campesinos, to ensure that they had food and shelter, and to report on investigations into the violence that accompanied the evictions.

Famed Argentine folksinger Facundo Cabral was shot to death early July 9 by unknown gunmen who ambushed his car on the way to the airport in Guatemala City. A total of eight bullets struck Cabral and his Nicaraguan concert promoter Henry Fariña. The singer’s white Range Rover and a Chevrolet Tahoe carrying his bodyguards attempted to seek cover in a fire station. A firefighter witnessed gunfire from two black vehicles. Initial claims that the attack was an armed robbery have now been dropped; there is some speculation that Fariña, who survived, was the actual target of the attack. Authorities said one of the attackers’ vehicles, pock-marked with bullet-holes and strewn with casings, has been located in El Salvador. Cabral, 74, rose to fame in the 1970s, an icon of protest music in an era of harsh repression across Latin America. Guatemala's President Alvaro Colom personally called his Argentine counterpart, Cristina Fernandez, to tell her of the slaying. (NDTV, LAT, La Republica, Lima, July 10; ThirdAge, July 9)

The Honduras Truth and Reconciliation Commission, headed by former Guatemalan vice president Eduardo Stein, presented the report to current Honduran President Porfirio Lobos, Honduran chief justice Jorge Rivera Avilez and OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza in Tegucigalpa July 7. The report concludes that the June 28, 2009 removal from office of former President Manuel Zelaya was in fact a coup d'etat—and not a constitutional succession as some of Zelaya's opponents claimed. The report further asserted that National Congress overstepped its powers when it nominated its speaker Roberto Micheletti as interim president. According to the commission, the interim administration was therefore illegal and a "de facto regime."