Full Coverage: Central America

30.06.2006 California-based Global Exchange is monitoring the conditions for democracy in the run-up to Sunday's presidential election in Mexico--the first since the end of the 71-year power monopoly of the old ruling party, the PRI.

30.06.2006 Global trade can promote economic and social progress, but a ten-lane super highway, which could begin construction as early as 2007, may pose serious environmental, trade, and national security risks, warns the Worldwatch Institute.

26.06.2006 At a national Other Campaign gathering in Mexico City on May 29, Subcomandante Marcos called on members of the Other Campaign across the country to gather in Mexico City on June 30 for two days of debate and, on election day, Sunday July 2, to “interrupt into the calendar of the elite [los de arriba] with civil and peaceful organizing and mobilizations.”

19.06.2006 About 30 per cent of people surveyed in Brazil, Britain, Canada, Guatemala, India and South Africa have been the victim of gun crime or know someone who has been a victim in the last five years.

16.06.2006 The Guatemalan government has been urged to enact the pending Adoption Law in order to protect thousands of children from being turned into "a lucrative export business".

16.06.2006 Patricia Mercado, a feminist candidate in this year's Mexican presidential election and a founding member of the Social-Democratic Alternative and Farmer party, has made news with her firm pro-feminist and pro-LGBT rights platform.

13.06.2006 A delegation led by the not-for-profit Guatemala Human Rights Commission/USA is to visit Guatemala to study violence against women, particularly the 1,800-2,400 women murdered in the last five years.

09.06.2006 The test of a televised debate is not what the candidates say but how they do. This makes the end result look more like soap opera auditions than a public forum of ideas. It is doubtful that Tuesday night's spectacle swayed much of the coveted “undecided vote.” Predictably, everyone pronounced their own candidate the “winner.

02.06.2006 Researchers at Costa Rica’s flagship biodiversity institute are hoping that an ambitious new project - that aims to find chemicals in wild species that could form the basis of new drugs - will ease its financial worries.

02.06.2006 The United States and Canada have instated public registers that inform residents about the pollutants released into their communities, but Mexico has been dragging its feet for ten years on the issue, says environmental journalist Talli Nauman.