A Honduran judge on Thursday charged the country's top military commanders with abuse of power for exiling President Manuel Zelaya in June. Honduran Supreme Court President Jorge Rivera has ordered all six members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to remain in the country and testify in court next week. The charge carries a sentence of three to six years in prison. The military chiefs, who wore their dress uniforms, met with Rivera for six hours before the charges were announced late Thursday....

Dina Meza lives and talks human rights at every opportunity she is given. As a journalist, an activist and a member of COFADEH (Committee of Relatives of the Disappeared in Honduras), one of Honduras' oldest human rights organizations, she knows all too well what it means to work on an issue that is not always popular with the authorities. The past five months have been particularly challenging for Dina and her colleagues at COFADEH. Its members have spent countless days and nights...

Before the political crisis blew up in Honduras, Donny Reyes was trying to put his country on the map internationally, working to raise awareness of the abuses and discrimination suffered by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and transgender people. But as the Central American nation slid into political turmoil, human rights were sidelined. “We had started talks with the Public Prosecutor’s Office, with members of the police and some members of the government for the...

Gilda Rivera works in an apparent oasis of calm on a hill in Tegucigalpa. When you are there, among the plants and paintings which decorate the building, it’s hard to imagine the stories she and her organization hear. But some days, an unknown car appears and parks suspiciously in the close vicinity of the offices for no apparent reason and waits, then it leaves. Gilda is the director of the Centre for Women’s Rights (Centro para Derechos las Mujeres), a group that works to...

The Colombian government should act swiftly to protect witnesses in criminal cases against members of groups that are successors to demobilized paramilitaries in the city of Medellín, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch called on the government to investigate attacks on witnesses and to bolster law enforcement efforts to stem the rapidly rising violence in the city attributed to the successor groups. On December 20, 2009, unidentified armed men repeatedly shot and killed...

Colombia's President Álvaro Uribe on Tuesday disavowed any aggressive statement against Venezuela, at a time when the relations between the two countries are going through the worst diplomatic crisis in recent history. Uribe's statements came a day after his Venezuelan counterpart Hugo Chávez presided over a military parade in a frontier zone in which he repeated his complaint that an attack on his country is being planned from Colombia, with the support of the United States....

The recent increase in anti-Semitic incidents in Argentina is "deeply troubling," B'nai B'rith International said. This week, swastikas were painted on some 30 graves at a Jewish cemetery in the province of San Luis. “Death to Jews” was also scrawled on the cemetery walls, according to a statement released Wednesday by the organization. In addition, Jewish graves at a cemetery in Buenos Aires were desecrated in early December. Also, the phrase “Argentina is a...

The killing of a state governor points up the cruel tactics of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas, who target and often kill civilians in Colombia's internal armed conflict, Human Rights Watch said today. On December 21, 2009, the FARC is believed to have abducted Luis Francisco Cuéllar, the governor of the southern state of Caquetá. His body, with his throat slit, was found on the afternoon of December 22 near the state capital, Florencia. "With...

The killing of an HIV/AIDS outreach worker on December 14, 2009, is part of a pattern of violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in Honduras that seems to have accelerated in the turbulent months since the June 28 coup, Human Rights Watch said today. The organization called on Honduran judicial authorities to open full investigations of all the reported killings, and to provide human rights training for the police and the judiciary about sexual orientation and...

President Hugo Chávez warned the Colombian government that it would regret an eventual aggression against Venezuela. He also said that Colombian "unmanned spy planes" have violated Venezuela's airspace and ordered his military to "shoot down" any such aircrafts. "A few days ago, at midnight, one of these unmanned aircrafts flew over the military garrison of Fuerte Mara (state of Zulia, western Venezuela); our soldiers saw it; they called the on-duty officer,...