A Honduran truth and reconciliation commission on May 4 began investigating the June 2009 coup that removed Manuel Zelaya from power. The commission is tasked with understanding the circumstances that led to the coup, and making recommendations for the future. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has praised the commission as "an important first step toward reconciliation" in Honduras. The commission is also supported by the US government, and Honduras hopes it will result returning Organization of American States (OAS) recognition to the Central American republic. "We want to do what we can to leave behind the shock to our economy," Foreign Minister Mario Canahuati told Bloomberg. "Our intention is to have friends and alliances."

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on May 5 arrested a South Florida man accused of involvement in Guatemala's December 1982 massacre that left more than 250 dead. Authorities claim that Gilberto Jordan illegally concealed his past military service and involvement in the killings on his US immigration forms. Jordan is accused of being one of 20 Guatemalan special forces soldiers known as "Kaibiles" who killed men, women, and children in the village Dos Erres (Petéñ department) during Guatemala's civil war.

In Panama, thousands of workers marched on May 1 to oppose the neoliberal economic policies of President Ricardo Martinelli's government, which they said was seeking to "take the workers back to the labor conditions of the 19th century." They protested an increase in prices of staple goods, an increase in consumption taxes, government plans for labor "reform," and a law which imposes prison sentences of up to two years for blocking traffic during protests—an effort "to stop the unions and to criminalize social protest," according to Mariano Mena, director of the National Coordinating Committee of Organized Workers.

On April 22 the French nongovernmental organization Doctors of the World (MdM) released a report on the condition of women in Guatemalan maquiladoras in the apparel and food processing industries. "The job is unstable and badly paid, the work is dangerous for health, there is psychological and sexual harassment, insults, physical abuse, unjustified firings and interminable workdays," according to the report, based on interviews in 2006-2009 with 530 women working in 16 factories in Chimaltenango and Sacatepéquez departments in western Guatemala.

On April 9 Biddy Martin, the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin (UW) in Madison, announced that the institution was cancelling its sports apparel contract with Oregon-based Nike, Inc because of the company's failure to provide legally mandated back pay and severance packages worth some $2.1 million to more than 1,600 workers for two Nike contractors in Honduras. This was the first victory in a campaign started by students at various North American campuses last fall around the closing of two plants, Vision Tex and Hugger de Honduras, in January 2009. UW made some $49,000 in 2008 and 2009 for allowing Nike to use the university logo on its clothing and products.

On April 15 the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR, or CIDH in Spanish), a Washington, DC-based agency of the Organization of American States (OAS), issued its 2009 report on human rights in the hemisphere. For the first time the IACHR included Honduras among the countries that it "believed warranted special attention." The inclusion of Honduras is based on a report, "Honduras: Human Rights and the Coup d'État," by an IACHR commission that visited Honduras in August 2009 to investigate the human rights situation following a June 28 military coup.

On April 18 Honduran president Porfirio ("Pepe") Lobo Sosa signed an agreement with the Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA) granting some 2,600 campesino families about 11,000 hectares of land in the lower Aguán River Valley in northern Honduras. MUCA has fought since 2001 for 20,000 hectares which the group says were bought illegally by three wealthy business owners, Miguel Facussé Barjum, Reinaldo Canales and René Morales. The agreement came after several months of heightened tension in the area, with four murders of MUCA members in March and April; around April 11 Lobo's government launched an unprecedented mobilization of soldiers and police agents into the area, with troops surrounding some campesino communities.

China signed a free trade agreement on April 8 with Costa Rica—a country that only established diplomatic ties with the Asian giant in 2007. China's Commerce Ministry said in a statement that the pact was signed in Beijing by Commerce Minister Chen Deming and his Costa Rican counterpart Marco Ruiz. President-elect Laura Chinchilla, who takes over from Oscar Arias next month, will need support from opposition lawmakers to approve the deal and make Costa Rica the third Latin American nation to seal a trade agreement with the People's Republic.