(From Periodico, Las Tunas, Cuba) SAN JOSE, February 26.— Tens of thousands marched through downtown San Jose to the Congress building on Monday demanding legislators reject a free trade pact between Central America, the United States and the Dominican Republic.

 

Telesur television reported on its website that representatives of unions, students, public workers, farmers, environmentalists and other civic organizations joined forces to express their opposition to the agreement known as CAFTA-RD.

 

Jesus Vazquez, a leader of the Association of Secondary School Teachers told DPA, “It is more than obvious that the Costa Rican people are telling the government to withdraw the trade pact from the legislature,”

 

Meanwhile, on Sunday, President Oscar Arias continued to defend the agreement. Speaking on a TV program he said that ratifying the CAFTA-RD should be decided on in the coming weeks.

 

Costa Rica is the only nation of the five Central American countries that has not ratified the treaty that would include it in a free trade zone with the US, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic.

 

One Year After Cafta

As the Central American Free Trade Agreement marks its one-year anniversary Friday, it's a good time to remind Capitol Hill protectionists how wrong they were when they tried to kill the deal in 2005. Every country that entered into Cafta is enjoying new benefits, including the U.S.

The U.S. and El Salvador were the first two countries to begin trading under Cafta last March. In the months that followed, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras made it official. The Dominican Republic and Costa Rica have yet to join. Both have signed onto the negotiated agreement, but without implementing legislation before Feb. 29, 2008, they could end up shut out of the free-trade area. Costa Rica hasn't even ratified the deal yet.

The rest of the article can be found at http://www.truthabouttrade.org/article.asp?id=7104

 

(From the BBC) Four Guatemalan policemen arrested in connection with the murders of three politicians from El Salvador have been killed in jail, police say.

They were shot dead inside the maximum security Boqueron prison, east of Guatemala City.

A riot is reported at the jail, with several officers taken hostage.

The bodies of the three Salvadorean lawmakers and their driver were found in their burnt and bullet-ridden car near Guatemala City last Monday.

For the rest of the story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6396051.stm

The Associated Press
Thursday, February 22, 2007; 11:43 AM

Jason Wallach

More than 500 students aligned with the Revolutionary Brigade of Salvadoran Students (BRES) shut down streets surrounding El Salvador’s National University to decry the disappearance of Francisco Contreras, 21, who they claim was taken off of a bus by Homocide Division Police, but hasn’t been heard from since. Students say that Contreras’ case is evidence that forced disappearances have not ended in El Salvador. Contreras, who is an activist with the Popular Youth Bloc (BPJ), was on his way home from school, when the bus in which he was riding was reportedly stopped by Homocide Police on the Santa Tecla-Lourdes Colon Highway. Contreras was taken off the bus by police, who have yet to confirm his capture publicly. The arrest has sparked fears that a return to El Salvador’s not-so-recent death squad past could be close by. Those fears were stoked a week ago, when the United Nations Office on Forced Disappearances issued a new statement on El Salvador which declared that disappearances are still common. The report referred to the “continued and permanent nature of the crime in question,” and that in El Salvador forced disappearances were, “not a thing of the past.” Last Friday’s student protest created a cordon around the University that mimicked a similar cordon established by police after the events of July 5th of 2006. A protest against bus fare and electricity rate hikes on that day turned violent and two police were shot dead. For days afterward, police secured a perimeter around the campus, shutting off traffic to the usually busy intersection. Students copied that strategy in the interest of gaining more attention for the Contreras case.

International Herald Tribune:  SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador: Officials said the grisly killings of three Salvadoran members of the Central American Parliament were premeditated and may have been politically motivated.

Eduardo D'Aubuisson — whose father purportedly led the death squads in El Salvador's 1980-1992 civil war — was killed along with two other lawmakers and a driver, and their charred bodies left on a roadside in Guatemala on Monday, the eve of the 15th anniversary of his father's death.

"It was not by chance," Guatemalan President Oscar Berger said of the killings. "We have various theories, and we are not ruling out the possibility that it was a political crime."

Salvadoran President Tony Saca declined to speculate on a possible motive for the killings, but said the killers had followed the lawmakers car in the capital of Guatemala City and said the crime was "premeditated with brutality, treachery to capture and kidnap them."

The killed parliament members all belonged to El Salvador's ruling party.

(From Pro-Búsqueda)  On January 5 ^th the Salvadoran legislature passed a bill with 71 votes in favor, and 0 votes against, making March 29 of every year the day of children who disappeared during the armed conflict.  This measure renders invalid the previous mandate of September 29, 2005 which commemorated on this same date "the reunion of families with children who were lost due to various motives during the armed conflict".  This new bill has come about as a result of intensive lobbying by Pro-Búsqueda, to force the Salvadoran State to recognize the existence of the phenomenon of forced disappearance in our country, rather than covering it up using the concept of 'lost children'.