from Weekly News Update on the Americas

HONDURAS: GARIFUNA WOMAN MURDERED

On the evening of Aug. 6, a group of masked men armed with AK-47 assault rifles forced 19-year-old Mirna Isabel Santos Thomas from her home in the Honduran Garifuna community of San Juan Tela, in the Caribbean coastal department of Atlantida. Santos' body was found the next morning along the road leading to Triunfo de la Cruz and La Ensenada, several kilometers away on the other side of the town of Tela. The latest killing comes amid a wave of repression directed against the Garifuna community of San Juan Tela, which is resisting plans to build tourism projects on Garifuna ancestral lands in the Tela Bay area.

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

GUATEMALA: TRADE PROTESTERS SEIZE ESTATES

The Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) went into effect in Guatemala on July 1 amid protests against the US-sponsored pact, which seeks to bring Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and the US together in a trade bloc. The agreement took effect in El Salvador on March 1, and in Honduras and Nicaragua on May 1. Costa Rica's legislature has not yet approved the pact. (Yahoo en Espanol, July 1 from AFP)

DR-CAFTA was scheduled to go into effect in the Dominican Republic on July 1, but the implementation was delayed by a disagreement over US demands for legislation protecting industrial secrets for pharmaceutical companies. "We're not giving in," Marcelo Puello, Dominican assistant secretary for foreign trade, said on June 30. "The negotiating team closed this chapter, and the people in charge of implementation agree that we won't give in on something that would be outside the text of the treaty." (El Diario-La Prensa, NY, July 1)

From the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, July 3:

Nicaraguan presidential candidate Herty Lewites died late Sunday of an apparent heart attack. The son of a Jewish migrant, Lewites, 66, was the country's best-known citizen of Jewish descent.

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

Thousands of workers from Costa Rica's Social Security Institute, Electricity Institute, National Insurance Institute and other companies marched in San Jose on June 7 to oppose the US-sponsored Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) and to protest a recent Constitutional Court decision annulling a series of benefits public workers had won through collective bargaining. According to the march organizers, 15,000 people participated.

The unionists said the court decision was intended to "smooth the way for CAFTA." "The first victims of this CAFTA are the labor rights we've won," National Association of Public and Private Employees (ANEP) general secretary Albino Vargas told the ACAN-EFE wire service. "With CAFTA, Costa Rica will have to agree to downgrade its labor legislation with the rest of the Central American countries, which means taking away rights from those who won them through struggle." Costa Rica signed on to DR-CAFTA, but it is the only signatory nation whose legislature hasn't ratified the agreement. President Oscar Arias, who was inaugurated on May 8, is a strong supporter of the accord. Arias was on a visit to Europe on June 7, and Vargas charged that the new president would be holding a "chat" with the International Labor Organization (ILO) in Europe while his country is "violating labor rights." (La Nacion, Costa Rica, June 7)

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

MAYDAY ANTI-CAFTA MOBILIZATION

As they did last year, many Central American workers marked May 1 with demonstrations protesting the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA), a US-sponsored trade bloc composed of Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and the US. Many marchers also expressed solidarity with hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers demonstrating the same day in the US.

More than 20,000 workers, indigenous people, unionists, women and older people marched in Guatemala City, burning US flags and effigies of US president George W. Bush and Guatemalan president Oscar Berger. "The DR-CAFTA is a plague that will kill the people who live in extreme poverty," campesino leader Daniel Pascual told the ACAN-EFE wire service. "Today is a day of Latin America inside the US," said Jose Pinzon, a leader of the General Workers Central of Guatemala (CGTG), one of the country's largest labor federations. The more than 1.2 million Guatemalans living in the US sent $3 billion back to Guatemala in 2005; some 60% of them are reportedly undocumented. US restaurant chains in Guatemala City's historic center seemed empty as workers honored a boycott of US products in support of immigrants' demands. (La Nacion, Costa Rica, May 1)

When Slobodan Milosevic died, he was in a prison cell at The Hague facing war crimes charges, and it made world headlines. The May 27 passing of Guatemala's equally genocidal dictator of the late '70s and early '80s, Romeo Lucas Garcia, was largely confined to the obituary pages and wire copy, and he died a free man, passing his final years in luxurious Venezuelan exile. Nothing could indicate more clearly how much cheaper life is for indigenous peoples such as Lucas Garcia's Maya Indian victims, and for those whose oppressors happen to be on the good side of US imperialism. Obits have generally noted his bloody 1980 attack on the Spanish embassy after it was occupied by Maya protesters. This is because Spanish judicial authorities would later seek his extradition over the affair. Forgotten is what the embassy occupiers were protesting--the reign of terror in the Guatemalan countryside that (carried on by Lucas Garcia's successor Rios Montt) would ultimately leave some 50,000 dead, a million displaced and hundreds of villages destroyed. The obits have generally not used the "G word," but the 1999 findings of the UN-backed Guatemala Historical Clarification Commission estimated 200,000 dead in the civil war that lasted from 1962 to 1996, squarely accusing the Guatemalan state of "genocide." (BBC, Feb. 25, 1999) The Lucas Garcia-Rios Montt period was the bloodiest of the war, and that in which the violence was most explicitly aimed at the Maya ethnicity. This typically abbreviated account from Reuters, May 29:

No Business as Usual as CAFTA Takes Effect

by Paul Pollack

SAN SALVADOR, March 1 -- There was little fanfare and much protest today as the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) went into effect in El Salvador. The country is the first Central American nation to honor CAFTA and for the second straight day, thousands marched and traffic was snarled throughout San Salvador. Five other signatory nations have failed to meet US requirements necessary to join the agreement.

The day before, Salvadoran President Tony Saca proclaimed the start of CAFTA by announcing to George Bush (who was not present), "Come with your basket empty and take it home full."

The New Corporate Agenda for Central America

by Tom Ricker and Burke Stansbury

What does tightening intellectual property laws have to do with "free" trade? That's the question many people in Central American and the Dominican Republic are asking as the United States trade representative continues to insist on dramatic changes to constitutional laws in the six countries involved in the US-Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement (otherwise known as CAFTA).

As if the agreement itself weren't bad enough for the region—critics say CAFTA will hurt small farmers, worsen workers rights, and lead to environmental degradation, among other negative effects—the US is manipulating the implementation process to demand even further concessions by the six countries involved.