El Salvador Perspectives

Last week the Mara Salvatrucha and 18th Street gangs signed a truce in Honduras, modeled on the one in El Salvador.   Again, persons from the Catholic Church were involved in mediating the agreement. Blogger Boz wrote about the new truce in the region in his blog : 1. The truce is unlikely to have the same level of success in Honduras as it did in El Salvador. Even those brokering the Honduran truce admit that. The gangs in Honduras are more diverse with less centralized leadership. There are also other actors involved in the crime and violence, including the Honduran police, that complicate the issue.  2. Let me add a bit of caution to that first point. Many analysts, myself included, underestimated the potential success of the Salvadoran gang truce when it was first reached. I did not expect the truce in El Salvador to lower the violence by nearly half, nor did I think it would remain so solidly in place over a year later. I'd be happy to be similarly wrong about Hondu...

A negotiated solution to the crisis in Honduras appears to have been reached. Ousted president Zelaya and the de facto government will form a power-sharing government and respect the outcome of the upcoming November presidential election according to this report from the BBC. The Honduran Congress must approve the deal. The consitutional crisis began in Honduras on June 28 of this year, when democratically-elected president Manuel Zelaya was forced out of the country by the Honduran military. In September, Zelaya snuck back into the country and has been holed up in the Brazilian embassy ever since then. The period since Zelaya's ouster has been marked by significant protests by citizen groups and repression by the de facto government.

In a dramatic development today, ousted Honduran president Manuel Zelaya secretly made his way back into Honduras where he could be found today at the embassy of Brazil. The Honduran government has demanded that Brazil turn him over since there were orders to arrest Zelaya if he ever came back into the country. Al Jazeera English network has a good video report of the day's events: The ousted Honduran president has returned to his country nearly three months after being forced from power and into exile by a military-backed coup. Manuel Zelaya took refuge at the Brazilian embassy in the capital, Tegucigalpa, on Monday, prompting Roberto Micheletti, the man who replaced him, to declare an overnight curfew and demand that Brazil hand him over. Thousands of Zelaya supporters gathered outside the embassy as helicopters flew overhead and a small group of police stood nearby. The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, called for dialogue between Zelaya and the de facto government and ...

If, like me, you are looking for good resources to help you understand the events in Honduras, a very good site is the AS/COA Resource Guide to the Crisis in Honduras . There you will find collected news analysis as well as links to original documents such as the decrees of the Honduran Supreme Court and the Honduran constitution.

One week ago, the military in Honduras ousted Manuel Zelaya as president of that country. Since that time, the great majority of the world community, including the United Nations, the Organization of American States (OAS), El Salvador and the US have condemned the military coup. When the OAS declared that Honduras would be suspended from the organization if the country did not restore Zelaya to the presidency by Saturday, July 4, the new government in Honduras responded by quitting the OAS. Tensions are running high today as Zelaya plans to return to Honduras and the government plans to stop him. I'm not a student of Honduran government and politics, so I have not been writing about the coup in this blog. The blogging community does have several good sources of information in English and Spanish about the evolving situation. A Global Voices blog post published just before the ouster of Zelaya gives an overview of the tensions in the country in the days leading up to the co...

Military forces ousted Manuel Zelaya, the democratically elected President of Honduras early Sunday morning in a coup. Salvadoran president Mauricio Funes condemned the overthrow and announced that El Salvador would not recognize the new government installed in Tegucigalpa. Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua all announced they would close their borders to land trade with Honduras for 48 hours.