This article published by the UK Embassy in Costa Rica. The Odyssey 2050 youth oriented climate change film sponsored by the British Embassy and produced by Synchro Studios here in Costa Rica will be making its world premier on September 26th at the Franklin Chang Diaz building of the National Center For Advanced Technology (CeNAT) located in Pavas. The Odyssey 2050project was declared ...

A US family that has spent the past 23 months on an odyssey through the treacherous terrain of Nicaragua’s legal system hopes the adventure will end soon, with Jason Puracal’s safe return home to Tacoma, Washington. Puracal, 35, a former US Peace Corps volunteer and beachfront realtor in Nicaragua, could be acquitted by an appeals court by the end of this week. That would conclude nearly tw...

Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Samuel Santos Lopez voiced his country's support for Iran's nuclear program. "We have always supported Iran's peaceful nuclear program and believe that all countries are entitled to peaceful nuclear energy", said Lopez to reporters on the sidelines of the foreign ministerial meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in Tehran on Wednesday. He further hailed e...

The two main El Salvadoran youth gangs along with the El Salvador government have exchanged the main points they wish to discuss in talks aimed at ending two decades of spiraling criminal violence. However, the media here, including legislators and the public at large remain hostile to making deals with criminal gangs. The leaders of Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18, the two gangs in ...

A mapping exercise has been launched by the government of Belize as part of a coordinated strategy to address security issues through foreign cooperation according to an official press release issued today. Being mapped-out during the exercise are ongoing programs and planned initiatives that the Government of Belize intends to undertake in the short, medium and long term. The mapping-e...

Honduras’s police force are sitting on more than 13,000 outstanding arrest warrants issued over the last six years, highlighting the beleaguered department’s struggle to address soaring crime rates. Honduran police have acted on less than half of the arrest warrants issued since 2007, according to a report by La Tribuna newspaper, with few signs of improvement; 2011 was the police force’s w...

A protected witness at the trial of alleged drug trafficker Henry Fariñas provided grisly details of how Fariñas' organization would smuggle cocaine for Mexican groups like the Familia Michoacana, and ruthlessly dispose of drug mules suspected of stealing the cargo. The witness, a Nicaraguan anti-narcotics officer, testified in court that many Nicaraguan drug mules, used to smuggle small a...

A group of suspected cash smugglers posing as journalists who were arrested last week reportedly traveled from Honduras to Nicaragua on several occasions since 2010, prompting an investigation into why Honduran and Nicaraguan authorities failed to apprehend the group. According to a report by El Nuevo Diario, the 18 people arrested in Nicaragua while posing as reporters crossed into Nicarag...

Costa Rican President Laura Chincilla celebrated the country’s 50th anniversary of diplomatic ties with Korea in Seoul on Monday. The relationship between Korea and the Central American country are based around the key elements of education, democracy and human rights, said Chinchilla during her reception. “Fifty years after the inauguration of relations, Korea has won its bet on the fut...

Fanny Pérez no longer sees her neighborhood of Los Guido, a district of Desamparados in the nation’s capital of San José, in a negative light. “Los Guido is coming back to life,” Pérez, 71, said. “It is not that gray neighborhood from before that gave you a weird feeling when you walked down the street.” Pérez is a member of the security commission in Los Guido, one of several programs t...

Nicaraguan officials have arrested 18 individuals posing as Mexican journalists on assignment to cover a high-profile criminal trial in the Central American country, accusing them of criminal ties and seizing at least seven million dollars in hard currency. The individuals, at least 17 of whom are Mexican citizens according to Proceso, apparently entered Nicaragua on August 22 and told cust...

An accused killer was burned to death Friday by a mob in a suburb of the Guatemalan capital, the municipal fire department said. Residents of Mixco beat Edin Estuardo Canon before dousing him with gasoline and setting him ablaze, department spokesman Raul Hernandez told reporters. The mob captured Canon after he allegedly shot Fernando and Erick Mendez, a father and son working together ...

Chiefs of Police in Central America, Mexico, the Caribbean and Colombia review today in Managua the capital joint plans to combat violence caused by drug trafficking and transnational crime. According to reports, the military institutions hope to adopt a common strategy to deal in a coordinated way with widespread phenomena like human trafficking, illegal trafficking of drugs and money laun...

The body of the president of the union at the National Autonomous University of Honduras was found in a well in the eastern city of Juticalpa, relatives said. Juan de Dios Saenz's body was discovered Wednesday in a 70-meter (230-foot) well at his house in Juticalpa, which is in Olancho province, the labor leader's sister, Marta Saenz, said. The university union president, who lived in Te...

Two local bosses of the Mara Salvatrucha gang have been killed by their underlings in El Salvador offering a glimpse at the tensions underlying the criminal pact that has precipitated a dramatic reduction in violence this year. As the newspaper El Diario de Hoy has reported, two alleged commanders of Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, were murdered Aug 20 in Soyapango, a sizeable suburb of San Sal...

A Guatemalan court has sentenced an ex-police chief to 70 years in prison for the 1981 disappearance and torture of a university student, in what Amnesty International says is a strong message that even after three decades justice can be delivered. On Tuesday a court in Guatemala City found Pedro García Arredondo, former chief detective of the now-defunct National Police (Policía Nacional,...

A Guatemalan man described by U.S. authorities as formerly one of that nation's top drug traffickers has been sentenced to 25 years in federal prison. Prosecutors said Wednesday that 43-year-old Mario Ponce-Rodriguez also must pay an $8.8 million judgment to the U.S. He was convicted in May by a jury of conspiracy to distribute cocaine into the U.S. U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration o...

The newly approved project establishes tax calculations based on the historical value of the properties, not applying the rates developed by the Ministry of Finance in 2008. The tables compiled by the Ministry of Finance "equate the value of agricultural land to urban and tourism projects, which made the price of farms engaged in agriculture go through the roof", reported Nacion.com Th...

Following the arrest and speedy release of Salvadoran drug kingpin 'Chepe Luna,' analyst Hector Silva Avalos looks back at the trafficker's friends in high places who have helped Luna escape justice many times before. Jose Natividad Luna Pereira is a man who owes his success, and his freedom, to his good friends. By the end of the 1990s, this man -- who is either Honduran or from Pasaquina ...

Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla Miranda will become the 12th foreign leader to become an honorary citizen of Seoul. Chinchilla (54) arrived in Korea on Sunday to meet with President Lee Myung-bak and leaves on Wednesday. She receives the honorary citizenship from Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon at City Hall on Tuesday afternoon. Chinchilla is the first directly elected female presi...

Representatives of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) met in Honduras yesterday in the central city of Comayagua, Honduras, to prepare the first summit on migration with the European Union. The high-level meeting is scheduled for January 2013 in Chile. To establish a regional strategy that promotes a holistic view of migration processes, both interregional and b...

After being on the backburner for over three decades, The Hague is finally ruling on a spat between Colombia and Nicaragua over a set of islands that includes San Andrés, Providencia, and Santa Catalina in the Caribbean Sea. While Nicaragua will argue that the border between the states should be located between its coast and Colombia’s—and not be defined by the 82nd meridian—there is little ch...

Five months into a historic ceasefire between El Salvador's street gangs, Investigators profile the complex history of the notorious Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13). While the MS-13 is more commonly associated with menacing tattoos and violent initiation ceremonies,  Investigation into the gang's history shows that this was not always the case. When starting out at the bottom of the food chain in ...

More families in Nicaragua will receive this week domestic animals for breeding, seeds and other agricultural inputs by the Food Production Bonus, to keep on reducing malnutrition and poverty, the government said. Official figures guarantee that the Bonus so far, benefited more than 100, 000 women, who are also trained for the job. This time the delivers will take place in the North Atla...

A new report examines a notorious gunfight in Honduras involving DEA agents, and offers a series of recommendations on how US officials can avoid such incidents in the future. The report from the Center for Economic Policy and Research (CEPR), a Washington think tank with a left-leaning slant, is titled “Collateral Damage of a Drug War”, and analyzes the events of May 11, 2012, in the commu...

A U.S. citizen serving a 22-year prison sentence in Nicaragua for drug trafficking and money laundering, who a United Nations group has said was wrongly convicted, appeared in court on Thursday for the start of a long-awaited appeals proceeding. In a brief statement before the court, Jason Puracal maintained his innocence, saying he hoped justice would prevail. Puracal, 35, was detained ...

A historical and wonderful thing is happening in the small country of Honduras in Central America. Despite terror imposed by the U.S. and Honduran ruling classes; despite beatings and assassinations; despite centuries-old poverty and misery, the masses and their organizations are organizing, mobilizing and fighting back. In fact, developments in Honduras today brilliantly bring to life the ...

Costa Rica and China congratulated one another on progress in their five-year relationship, with the addition of several cooperation agreements during the visit to this country of President Laura Chinchilla. The agreement to develop these connections transpired at a meeting held by the President of the Latin American country with Prime Minister, Wen Jiabao, at the beginning of an activity w...

On June 1, 2009 US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in San Salvador to attend the swearing in of El Salvador´s newly elected president, Mauricio Funes. Secretary Clinton was dressed in red, the color of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), the political party born of a former guerrilla army. Such a sight would have been impossible to imagine two decades ago when the ...

A Guatemalan police officer was arrested on charges of holding a 14-year-old girl as a sex slave for months, authorities said Friday. Marvin Florian, 40, was taken into custody on Thursday by personnel from the internal affairs unit, the national police said in a statement. The officer, who is accused of rape and torture, paid off the girl's mother to keep quiet about the arrangement, ac...

A hybrid military-police task force has been put in charge of providing security in Honduras' embattled northern province of Colon, home to strategic drug smuggling corridors and a violent land conflict. The Xatruch III Task Force, comprised of both military and law enforcement elements, assumed control over security in Colon on August 15, Proceso reports. Daniel Molina, official spokespers...

In the U.S. the number of people over 12 years old who use drugs increased from 5.8% in 1991-93 to 8.9% in 2008. In Mexico the war on drugs has killed over 50,000 people over the past 5 years. Juan Carlos Hidalgo wrote an article for Nacion.com in February 2012. His approach, denouncing the harmful effects of drug prohibition, was based on a proposal by the President of Guatemala, Otto Pe...

A new, in-depth report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) and Rights Action has found glaring inconsistencies in the accounts of what occurred on May 11, 2012, when four people were shot and killed in a DEA-related counternarcotics operation in the Moskitia region of Honduras. The report notes that while U.S. State Department officials have stated that the U.S. Drug Enforc...

The lush national parks of Costa Rica have long attracted tourists from around the globe with their evergreen rainforests, white beaches and thermal springs. Recently, they have lured more unsavory visitors in the form of drug traffickers. Organized crime cartels have turned to Costa Rica's treasured nature reserves as governments wage military offensives against the gangs throughout Mexico...

Honduran Foreign Minister Arturo Corrales said Monday that the country is cooperating with the United States investigation into allegations that the new national police chief once ran a death squad and that no US funds are being handled by the police chief. It wasn’t clear what police units would be affected by what the Honduran government called a temporary hold on funds while a US group l...

Officials in Guatemala claimed that a seizure of a large shipment of cocaine paste is evidence that the Central American country is increasingly becoming a cocaine processing hub. On August 13, authorities in Guatemala's largest Pacific Ocean port discovered 80 barrels of cocaine paste in a shipping container. The container was registered to a company from Guatemala City and was supposed to...

Nicaragua on Wesdnesday accused Colombia and Costa Rica of wanting to appropriate Nicaraguan territory. Land ownership disputes continued when Nicaraguan agent Carlos Arguello presented a claim Wednesday to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that Colombia and Costa Rica wanted to "own" the Inter-Oceanic Nicaragua Canal by any means possible. "The claims of Colombia and Costa Rica h...

Drug traffickers in eastern Costa Rica are reportedly keeping schoolteachers out of an indigenous town in an attempt to pressure locals into cultivating marijuana, pointing to criminal gangs’ increasing influence in the country. In a recent trip to the eastern Costa Rican province of Limon by Education Minister Leonardo Garnier to mark the opening of several public schools, La Nacion report...

While Guatemala saw a significant drop in homicides in the first seven months of 2012 compared to the previous year, the country continues to face a serious problem of violence and insecurity. Guatemala’s national forensic institute, INACIF, registered 3,410 homicides between January and July of this year. This statistic is down 7.7 percent from the same period in 2011, when there were 3,69...

The Board of Nutritionists of Costa Rica has threatened Home Economics high school teachers with lawsuits if they dare defy a new pilot program that favors the teaching of personal finance instead of cooking and household chores. According to a news report by Ana Amenabar of Diario Extra, the Association of Secondary School Teachers (APSE in Spanish) has filed an emergency motion for relief before...