Manuel Zelaya

This Sunday, Hondurans will mark the 6th anniversary of a military coup that catapulted the Central American nation into becoming the region’s murder capital – with targeted killings of journalists, political activists and labor leaders rising to unprecedented levels. One of the alleged orchestrators of that coup, Miguel Facussé Barjum, died late this past Monday night of causes not yet disclosed.

Lawyers for the four judges dismissed in Honduras for objecting to the country’s 2009 coup clashed with adversaries from the government on Tuesday at the closing of a hearing at the Costa Rica-based Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

Former Judge Guillermo López: “It’s unheard of that a high court of justice would make an effort to legitimize what had been a coup d’etat.”

Honduras, one of the poorest countries in Latin America, ridden by corruption, severely hit by violence, and showing some of the highest inequity levels in the region, seems set to build the first private city in the Central American nation’s history, to begin perhaps as early as next year.

Born in the Honduran mountain town of Siguatepeque, Brig. Gen. Romeo Orlando Vásquez Velásquez attended the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas near Ft. Benning, Georgia, in the 1970s and ’80s. Despite his lifelong love for the United States, he cannot set foot on U.S. soil.

Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández took office Monday promising to work with a fragmented Congress and stem the highest homicide rate in the world.