From the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), July 29:

As student groups prepare to commemorate the anniversary of an infamous massacre of students by government forces on July 30, 1975, political violence continues in El Salvador 33 years later. In the last two years, social organizations, human rights monitors, community groups and the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) political party have publically denounced the alarming increase in politically-motivated assassinations of their members and leadership. 2008 has been particularly violent for organized sectors of the population.

In a letter from chancellor Jaime Bermúdez, the Colombian government formally rejected Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega's offer to mediate in a peace process with the FARC guerillas. The letter also objected to Ortega's reference to the FARC as "brothers," calling it "offensive to the Colombian nation to grant this kind of treatment to...a terrorist group that commits crimes against humanity." (ANMCLA, July 20)

Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS) told the Biloxi Sun Herald July 2 he witnessed a confrontation between John McCain and a Nicaraguan Sandinista leader—a lieutenant of President Daniel Ortega—during a 1987 diplomatic mission in which the Arizona senator "got mad at the guy and he just reached over there and snatched him." In a tense atmosphere, as the US was pressing Nicaragua "pretty hard," Cochran noticed a disturbance at the meeting table in a room lined with armed personnel:

Taking a tip from their counterparts in Colombia, young opponents of President Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua used Facebook to launch a protest campaign—under the slogan "Democracy yes, dictatorship no." A June 20 protest brought out some 4,000 in downtown Managua in support of former Sandinsita commandante Dora María Téllez, who ended a 12-day public hunger strike four days earlier at the request of her doctors. (Miami Herald, June 22) Téllez led a new march of several thousand through Managua June 27, accusing Ortega's government of a "totalitarian vocation." (Nuevo Diario, Managua, June 28)

On May 28, a court in Salamá, Baja Verapaz, Guatemala, sentenced five former members of the Civil Patrols, a paramilitary network established by the army during the counter-insurgency war, each to 780 years in prison for the killing of 26 indigenous Maya villagers in the 1982 Río Negro massacre, in which 177 women and children lost their lives. The five, former Civil Patrol members from the hamlet of Xococ, will serve 30 years, the maximum allowed by law, and will have to pay damages to the families of the victims. Arrest orders have also been issued for army captain José Antonio Solares, who oversaw the patrol and remains at large.

From Reuters, May 22:

Tito Santana, one of the last tribal kings in the Americas, has been driven into exile from his lands deep in the Panamanian jungle by a fight over a hydroelectric project that has divided his tiny kingdom.

Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega is under scrutiny for supposed links to Colombia's FARC guerillas. In one "partially decoded" February e-mail supposedly recovered from the computer of late FARC commander Raúl Reyes, fellow FARC director Iván Márquez wrote that Ortega could send via Venezuela's Hugo Chávez "some old caucheras they are keeping there [in Nicaragua], and he believes still function." Cauchera is said to be code for rifles.

May 5 marked the beginning of an intended thirty-day strike, with public transport workers and truckers in Nicaragua protesting rising fuel costs and the lack of government impetus to do anything about it. With road blockades in several places in Managua and almost no public intercity transport allowed whatsoever, Nicaragua is at an effective standstill. Containers full of goods sit stalled on the sides of highways, and even sports teams have canceled weekend matches. When baseball is put on hold in Nicaragua, you know it is serious.