U.S. Vice President Joe Biden will meet in Washington Wednesday with the presidents of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala to work on the Alliance for Prosperity that supports the three coffee-producing Central American nations in crisis. I hope the presidents brought their own roasted coffee to Washington.
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras – The Organization of American States on Monday established an ambitious new corruption-fighting commission in Honduras aimed at replicating the success of a similar, U.N.-backed body in Guatemala that brought down that country's government.
GUATEMALA CITY – It's time to leave the rhetoric aside, said Costa Rica President Luis Guillermo SolÃs as he kicked off a four-day visit to Guatemala Thursday with a call for a "more substantive" Central America integration.
The Obama administration is attempting to assemble a network of shelters on U.S. military bases and other federal facilities to lodge thousands of children awaiting immigration proceedings after fleeing violence in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
The Peace Corps has suspended its half-century-old program in El Salvador, highlighting the violence that has wracked the Central American nation and helped propel a wave of migration to the United States.
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras – Gunmen killed six people Sunday in Honduras, the first mass killing of the year in one of the world's most violent countries, police said.
The announcement recalled the sanctuary movement of the 1980s that provided safe haven to several thousand people fleeing civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala, with churches in Los Angeles, Chicago and other cities sometimes filled with people seeking asylum in the United States.
Central America's so-called Northern Triangle -- Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras -- recorded a total of 17,422 murders in 2015, 11 percent higher than for 2014, according to preliminary police tallies.
As unaccompanied minors have again crossed the southwest border in growing numbers in recent months, experts have agreed that the root causes of the surge lie in Central American violence and poverty that is driving people north.
Costa Rica is increasingly a destination for refugees from the Northern Triangle countries. Last year, according to U.N. data, Costa Rica received more asylum applications from Salvadorans than Colombians for the first time ever.
