Hundreds of debt-ridden small merchants and farmers in northern Nicaragua launched a human blockade on the main road between the Caribbean coast and the capital at Río Blanco municipality, Matagalpa department, on July 2. The "No Pago" movement, led by Omar Vílchez, the former Sandinista mayor of Jalapa, is demanding renegotiation of local business' debts to micro-financing lenders. They are also demanding that the Supreme Court of Justice issue an order to halt the eviction of 2,500 local families whose homes have been repossessed. The government has pledged to send a negotiating team, but the protesters say they will launch new roadblocks until their demands are met. (EFE, July 3; Nuevo Diario, Managua, July 2)

UN Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers Gabriela Knaul warned July 2 that a new law in El Salvador requiring its high court to issue unanimous judgments is an "attack" on judicial independence and the separation of powers. The law, passed by the Legislative Assembly and issued by the president (as Decree 743), places requirements on the judgments of the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court. Knaul said that requiring unanimous rulings will harm the judges' ability to function effectively. She stated:

The UN on June 24 announced its approval of the arrest of a former top Guatemalan military figure accused of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Gen. Hector Mario López Fuentes, former chief of staff of Guatemalan armed forces from 1982-1983, is accused of directing military attacks against citizens, namely indigenous Mayans. Villages were destroyed and women and girls were systematically raped under his authorization. Fuentes was arrested a week earlier and charged for his involvement in Guatemala's 36-year civil war. Margot Wallstrom, the Secretary-General's Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, applauded the arrest:

Local environmental activist Juan Francisco Durán Ayala of El Salvador’s Cabañas department was found dead June 16, in an open field in the Lamatepec district of Soyapango municipality, outside San Salvador. Durán Ayala went missing on June 3—a day after hanging up posters and distributing flyers in his hometown of Ilobasco opposed to a gold mine operated by the Canadian Pacific Rim corporation. (See map.) He had continued his public opposition to the mine despite having received numerous threats. Activists are expressing outrage that his body was promptly buried by authorities in a "common grave" in the capital's Bermeja cemetery. The Environmental Committee of Cabañas (CAC), the National Board Against Metal Mining and the local Radio Victoria—whose operators have also recently received threats—are demanding that the national authorities reveal what they know in the case and launch an aggressive investigation. Durán is the fourth Pacific Rim opponent killed in El Salvador in the last two years. (Mining Watch, June 20; LaPágina, San Salvador, June 18; FSRN, Diario CoLatino, San Salvador, CAC statement, June 16)

Campesino organizations from the Lower Aguán Valley in northern Honduras marched in Tegucigalpa on June 9 to protest the killings of Aguán campesinos and to demand that the government act on its promise last year to distribute 3,000 hectares of land to campesino families. The Honduras section of the international campesino group Vía Campesina joined in the demonstration, along with the Alliance for Food Sovereignty and Agrarian Reform (SARA) and members of the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP), the country's main alliance of social movements. The groups say 39 campesinos have been murdered in the course of a longstanding land dispute in the valley.

The Guatemalan government is planning not to honor a year-old order from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR, or CIDH in Spanish) to suspend operations at the Marlin gold mine in the western department of San Marcos, according to members of the Sipacapa and San Miguel Ixtahuacán Mayan communities. The IACHR, a Washington, DC-based agency of the Organization of American States (OAS), issued the order in May 2010 in response to charges from the two communities that the mine was causing significant damage to residents' health and the local environment. The Marlin mine is owned by Montana Exploradora de Guatemala, SA, a subsidiary of the Canadian mining company Goldcorp Inc.

Representatives of the governments of Mexico and the Central American countries wrapped up a fifth round of talks on a regional free trade agreement last week. The negotiations took place in Mexico City, with the next round of talks to be held in August in El Salvador. The aim of the talks is to create a single free trade agreement that consolidates Mexico's 1995 pact with Costa Rica, its 1998 agreement with Nicaragua and its 2001 accord with Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador into a single deal. Mexico's trade with Costa Rica has soared by 2,100% since the signing of the trade agreement, while trade with the other Central American republics has increased by between 200 and 300%. (EFE, June 1)

Thousands of Hondurans gathered at Tegucigalpa's Toncontín International Airport on May 28 to greet former president José Manuel ("Mel") Zelaya Rosales (2006-2009) as he returned from a 16-month exile. After arriving in a Venezuelan plane proceeding from Managua, Zelaya told the crowd at the airport that he would continue to fight for a Constituent Assembly to rewrite the 1982 Constitution; a similar call for a Constituent Assembly was the pretext for a military coup that removed Zelaya from office on June 28, 2009. "We are going to power with the popular resistance," he said.