(Reuters) - Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador have agreed to join forces and seek support from Mexico to forge a joint strategy in response to Donald Trump winning the U.S. presidency, El Salvador's foreign minister told Reuters on Wednesday. Trump's election upset has sent shockwaves through Mexico and Central America, which rely heavily on U.S. remittances and bilateral trade.President-elec...

(EFE).- Reporters crowd behind yellow ribbons to record with their devices the brazen way that organized crime and street gangs spill blood on the streets of Central America's Northern Triangle, but the indifference of the government and of the media leave these journalists in the line of fire as well. The region made up of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras is considered one of the deadliest ...

By Wendy Anders Over $180,000 in cash a Honduran man tried to smuggle into Costa Rica in a jalapeño-filled truck. This weekend at Costa Rica’s northern Peñas Blancas border with Nicaragua, anti-drug police seized some serious cash hidden in a jalapeño-filled truck arriving from Honduras, reported the Public Security Ministry press office. All told, a Honduran man had US$182,680 in bills ...

SAN JOSÉ, Costa Rica, Oct. 19 — A recent study paints a panoramic picture of a surging global trade in illicit cigarettes that is funding groups from Hezbollah and Hamas to the Central American Los Zetas cartel. Contraband cigarettes in Singapore, Facebook, photo for illustrative purposes. The study, "From Ant Smuggling to an Elephant in the Market,” was conducted by CID Gallup for the Cost...

OCTOBER 17, 2016: The Austrailian immigration department devised a proposal for Australia to take refugees from Central America as part of a U.S.-led program. Honduras peasant lawyer killing, file photo. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull made the announcement during a speech to President Barack Obama's invitation-only, high-level summit on refugees and migration in New York in September durin...

Cancun, Mexico, Oct 15 — Mexico has signed a memorandum of understanding with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras that lays the groundwork for a joint plan to support migrant workers, Mexico's Labor and Social Welfare Secretariat said. Suger cane workers. Under the Temporary Migrant Labor Program, workers from the three Central American countries will be authorized to work in Mexico for a p...

Tegucigalpa, Oct 14 — Amnesty International presented a report last Friday in Honduras that puts much of the blame for the worsening refugee crisis in Central America on the governments of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. Honduras home owners are vulnerable to gang extortion, photo for illustration. "Although countries like Mexico and the U.S.A. are utterly failing to protect Central Am...

Thomson Reuters Foundation/by Anastasia Moloney - Gang violence has become so deadly in parts of Central America that many people are living in what is a war zone, Amnesty International said on Friday, adding that some migrants who have fled danger are killed within weeks of being deported home. Every year violence at the hands of gang members drives tens of thousands of people, including child...

By Jessica Farber, Research Associate at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs  To download a PDF version of this article, click here. In an opinion piece that appeared in the New York Times on August 11, titled “How the Most Dangerous Place on Earth got Safer,” Sonia Nazario paints a misguided picture of Honduras as a country that was once ravaged with violence, but has since been bravely resc...

NIcaraguan forces. File photo By Patricia Pernas for EFE Governments in Central America, one of the world's most violent regions, are expanding the role of their militaries in civilian affairs and increasing their weaponry, thus posing a threat to democracy, an expert told EFE. "This strengthening of the armed forces does not come in response to national security problems," Alberto Mora,...

By Wendy Anders This morning in Geneva, Switzerland, Costa Rica’s Security Minister Gustavo Mata reiterated Costa Rica’s wholesale commitment to the effective implementation of the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty. The Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) is a multilateral treaty regulating international trade in conventional weapons, according to the United Nations website that entered into force in Dec...

ICR-CRS Archive/FILE (Pictured: Workers at a multinational medical device manufacturing company's facility in Heredia, Costa Rica) By Wendy Anders The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) in its most recent edition of an annual series on Foreign Direct Investment in Latin America (June 2016) reported that FDI flows to Central America were up by 6 pe...

MS-13 tattoo (El Salvador) - Wikimedia Commons The governments of the Northern Triangle of Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras) will create a tri-national force to combat organized crime, with a special target on gangs, following an agreement signed Saturday in the Salvadoran capital by defense and security authorities. The proposal, called "Elite Security Group" was sugges...

By Wendy Anders Mexican soldiers fighting the Drug War. Wikimedia Commons A recent political analysis of the region raises questions about the continuation of a militarized approach to illegal drug trafficking in an era where the decades long US sponsored “war on drugs” has been repeatedly called a failure. From 2004-2014 the United States provided $768 million in police and military aid...

Thousands of Cuban migrants remain in shelters across Costa Rica. (CIDH/Twitter) By Wendy Anders After months of behind the scenes meetings and dialogue, the eight Central American Integration System (SICA, in Spanish) members met last week on Roatán Island, Honduras and welcomed Costa Rica back. At the June 28-30 meeting, leaders agreed to a forward-looking agenda that convinced Costa R...

Zika is spread by the Aedes aegyptie mosquito (Wikimedia Commons) TEGUCIGALPA (EFE) Honduran health authorities reported Tuesday that they have registered 35 cases of the nerve disorder known as Guillain-Barre syndrome linked to the Zika virus. "At this time, we have 35 cases of Guillain-Barre, of which one adult and one little boy are on artificial respirators," Deputy Health Minister Fran...

Source: Flickr Commons Tegucigalpa, Nov 28 (EFE).- A nurse of the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders, or MSF, kidnapped last Nov. 25, was found murdered Saturday in a village near the Honduran capital, officials said. The body of nurse Henry Marcial Matamoros, 45, was buried in the mountain village of Yaguacire on the south side of Tegucigalpa, and was discovered by a group o...

The Governments of the United States and Brazil today formalized a partnership with the Government of Honduras to increase agriculture production, decrease undernutrition, and promote renewable energy in Honduras, one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere. “By leveraging the joint expertise of the United States and Brazil we have an opportunity to help Hondurans rise out of pov...