As of Sept. 1, Honduras' National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP) said it had collected 1,019,765 signatures on petitions calling for a constituent assembly to rewrite the country's 1982 Constitution and for the safe return of former president José Manuel ("Mel") Zelaya Rosales (2006-2009) from his exile in the Dominican Republic. One of the FNRP's coordinators, union leader Juan Barahona, called reaching the number "a triumph" and said he was "sure we'll pass the minimum goal we proposed of 1.25 million signatures" by Sept. 15, the final day of the campaign. (The population of Honduras is about 7.5 million, and there were 4.6 million registered voters in the country at the time of the November 2009 elections.)

Honduran president Porfirio ("Pepe") Lobo Sosa announced on Aug. 30 that he had signed an agreement with the education workers' unions ending a 26-day strike by some 55,000 teachers. The job action was marked by militant demonstrations by the teachers and by repression by the police. The strikers were to return to work on Aug. 31.

Honduran police arrested some 150 people while using tear gas and water cannons to disperse a demonstration by teachers, students and others in Tegucigalpa on Aug. 27, the 23rd day of a strike by teachers over their pension fund and other issues. The protest, which blocked Central America Boulevard for three hours, was called by the Federation of Teachers Organizations of Honduras (FOMH), which includes six unions, and the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP), a coalition that formed last year to oppose the June 2009 military coup against then-president José Manuel ("Mel") Zelaya Rosales.

Thousands of Honduran workers marched in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula on Aug. 18 to demand an increase in the minimum wage and to show solidarity with teachers who were in the 14th day of an open-ended strike. The protest—initiated by the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP), Honduras' main coalition of labor and grassroots organizations—was part of a strategy to build gradually for a national general strike against the government of President Porfirio ("Pepe") Lobo Sosa, according to Juan Barahona, an FNRP leader.

Hundreds marched in Changuinola, the capital of the northwestern Panamanian province of Bocas del Toro, on Aug. 8 in memory of two workers who were killed a month earlier while protesting legislation opposed by unionists and environmental activists. Erasmo Cerrud, a local leader in the country's largest union, the Only Union of Construction and Similar Workers (SUNTRACS), charged that there had been no progress in the investigations into the deaths of the two workers, Antonio Smith and Virgilio Castillo, in confrontations with anti-riot police. "The dead and the wounded won't be forgotten, and the struggle will continue," Feliciana Jaén, a leader of indigenous women, told the marchers.

Local police detained a national Honduran campesino leader, Juan Ramón Chinchilla, on Aug. 4 in Copán Ruinas in the western department of Copán and held him almost 21 hours without offering a legal justification. Police stopped Chinchilla at around 11:30 AM as he was returning with friends from a wake for a relative in a nearby community; the charge was apparently riding without a seatbelt. Chinchilla's friends paid a fine for the traffic violation, but police continued to hold the campesino leader on various pretexts, such as a supposed need to wait for a deputy commissioner. They finally released him at 8 AM on Aug. 5.

On July 30, hundreds students from the University of El Salvador took to the streets, accompanied by professors, staff and other sectors of the social movement. The march, filled with street theater, papier-mâché tanks and a 20-foot gorilla, was a commemoration of the the military regime's massacre of student protesters that occurred on July 30, 1975.

In a decision with implications for the national sovereignty of member states under US trade pacts, a World Bank tribunal has approved a Canadian mining company's controversial lawsuit against the government of El Salvador. In 2009, Pacific Rim Mining filed the suit under the rules of the US-Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), demanding hundreds of millions of dollars from the Salvadoran government, which rejected the Vancouver-based company's application for mining permits.