The Supreme Court of Honduras June 25 rejected President Manuel "Mel" Zelaya's dismissal of the country's senior military officer, Gen. Romeo Vásquez, deepening a confrontation over Zelaya's proposal to reform the constitution. Zelaya vowed to push ahead with a vote scheduled for June 28 to measure public support for holding a National Constituent Assembly. At a rally in Tegucigalpa, he told supporters that the court's decision amounted to a coup. As tens of thousands of Hondurans rushed to the defense of the president, filling and surrounding the presidential palace, soldiers were ordered into the streets.

Indigenous Mam campesinos set fire to a pickup truck and an exploration drill rig on June 12 at the Marlin gold mine in San Miguel Ixtahuacán municipality in the western Guatemalan department of San Marcos, according to media reports. The protesters said the mine—operated by Montana Exploradora de Guatemala, SA, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Canadian mining company Goldcorp Inc.—had illegally placed its equipment on their land, endangering their water supply, and that they had been asking for two weeks for the company to move the equipment.

A Council of Elders of the Miskito indigenous people on Nicaragua's Caribbean coast, citing the central government's opening of the region to corporate exploitation with little return to local residents, have announced their secession from the country and declaration of a "Communitarian Nation of Mosquitia." But the ruling Sandinista government are charging that the US embassy has fomented the move.

Thousands of Guatemalan campesinos blocked roads at seven or more sites on June 4 in a nationwide protest organized by the Committee for Campesino Development (CODECA) to demand that the government carry out agrarian reform, provide agricultural products for about 25,000 campesinos, buy land for cultivation and forgive debts that some campesinos incurred by taking out bank loans to buy land. CODECA spokesperson Mauro Bay said the campesinos had been making these requests of President Alvaro Colom's government since Feb. 5, 2008 but had received no response. Presidential spokesperson Fernando Barillas said the government had offered to meet with CODECA leaders on the demands but CODECA turned down the offer.

On May 21 Assistant US Trade Representative Everett Eissenstat told a Senate Finance Committee hearing that the administration of US president Barack Obama won't seek the approval of Congress for a free trade agreement (FTA) with Panama until the president has established a new "framework" for trade. "It's clear that trade agreements in the last few years have been much too divisive," Eissenstat said. "We want to make sure that Panama doesn't contribute to that divisiveness." This was a reversal from the administration's plan in March to push for early approval of the pact; the change followed a statement by John Sweeney, president of the main US labor federation, the AFL-CIO, opposing the Panama FTA.

Tens of thousands of Guatemalans have taken to the streets since the May 10 slaying of a prominent lawyer who left behind a videotape saying that if anything happened to him it was at the behest of the country's president. "If you are watching this message, it is because I was assassinated by President Álvaro Colom with help from Gustavo Alejos," the president's private secretary, the lawyer, Rodrigo Rosenberg, said in the video. Rosenberg was shot while riding his bicycle near his home. In the tape, Rosenberg said officials might want to kill him because he represented a businessman who had refused to cooperate in a money-laundering operation sought by President Colom. The businessman, Khalil Musa, was killed with his daughter in April. Colom rejects the accusation, and has called for the FBI and UN-backed International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) to investigate the case.

The Costa Rica-based Inter-American Human Rights Court (CIDH) of the Organization of American States (OAS) ruled on May 6 that the Honduran government shared responsibility for the murder of environmental activist Blanca Jeannette Kawas Fernández at her home in Tela on Feb. 6, 1995. Kawas Fernández, the president of the Foundation for the Protection of the Natural Resources of Lancetilla, Punta Sal and Texiguat (Prolansate), had accused timber companies of illegal exploitation of the Punta Sal peninsula and of plans for its illegal appropriation, along with damage to the National Park and other protected sites. She had also opposed several economic development plans in the region.

Canadian mining company Pacific Rim, acting through a US-based subsidiary, announced this week that it will sue the Salvadoran government over its refusal to issue mining permits for the El Dorado silver and gold mine in the department of Cabañas. The case will be heard by a special international arbitration court established by the 2006 US-Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).