Honduras

The Organization for American States has voted to readmit Honduras. The vote follows an accord last month that allowed the return to Honduras of ousted leader Manuel Zelaya. Zelaya was overthrown and spirited out of Honduras almost two years ago. International sanctions and months of international negotiations failed to persuade an interim government to restore him. In elections in November 2009, Porfirio Lobo was voted into office. The U.S. and other countries restored ties shortly after Lobo took power.

The newest top cop who President Porfirio Lobo is giving the responsibility of cleaning up the national police force has faced questions in the past about his record on human rights. Lobo swore in Juan Carlos Bonilla Valladares, a veteran law enforcement official known as "El Tigre" or "The Tiger," late Monday to replace Ricardo Ramirez del Cid, who held the job for little more than six months. Assistant Communications Minister Mario Mejia Alas said that he didn't know the reason for the change and that Security Minister Pompeyo Bonilla praised Ramirez's performance in announcing his...

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras - Honduras’s Supreme Court rebuffed a personal appeal from the Americas’ top international diplomat yesterday, refusing to restore ousted President Manuel Zelaya before a deadline today. José Miguel Insulza, who heads the Organization of American States, flew to Honduras in an attempt to persuade the forces that ousted Zelaya to take him back in the face of overwhelming international condemnation and economic sanctions. Insulza met for two hours with Jorge Rivera, president of the Supreme Court that authorized the military to seize Zelaya on Sunday and fly him into exile.

WASHINGTON - US officials maintained Thursday that no Drug Enforcement Administration agents fired weapons during a shootout last week in the jungles of Honduras that left several people dead. The officials also offered new details about the episode, which has touched off anti-American protests in the Central American country. The officials said the DEA agents - part of a commando-style squad called FAST, or Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team, that was on a counternarcotics mission - were allowed by the rules of engagement to shoot back if fired upon to protect themselves and their Honduran...

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras - Two unidentified gunmen killed a journalist who reported on the wave of violent crime in Honduras, police said yesterday. Assailants stopped Rafael Munguia, 36, as he was driving Tuesday night in the city of San Pedro Sula, dragged him from his vehicle and shot him at least eight times, according to a news release from the San Pedro Sula police department. It was not immediately clear if the shooting was tied to Munguia's work. Munguia worked for Cadena Voces radio station.

Down to 10 players after seven deserted and another was suspended for a red card, Cuba dropped a 2-0 decision to Honduras last night in Group A play in the CONCACAF Olympic qualifying tournament in Tampa. Five players left the under-23 squad after a 1-1 draw with the United States Tuesday night. Two more players disappeared Wednesday night, and Roberto Linares was automatically suspended a game for receiving a red card. Cuban coach Raul Gonzalez , upset with a question about the possible defection of an assistant coach, left in the middle of his postgame press conference.

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras - The interim government made a new offer in talks on resolving Honduras’s political standoff yesterday, just hours after a negotiator for ousted president Manuel Zelaya said the negotiations had been broken off. Vilma Morales, a representative of interim President Robert Micheletti, said the administration was willing to allow Zelaya to appeal directly to the country’s legislature to decide whether he should be restored...

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras - The interim government said yesterday that it was canceling a visit by foreign delegates aimed at resolving the country’s political crisis because it could not accept the participation of a regional official who insists on reinstating the ousted president. Interim President Roberto Micheletti is willing to reschedule the delegation’s visit, previously planned for tomorrow - as long as Organization of American States chief Jose Miguel Insulza is excluded, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Carlos Costly scored two second-half goals -- including the winner in injury time -- to lift Honduras over four-time champion Mexico, 2-1, yesterday in East Rutherford, N.J., and revive its hopes of advancing to the quarterfinals of the CONCACAF Gold Cup. Both of Costly's goals came after Mexico was reduced to 10 men in the 49th minute when Cuauhtemoc Blanco, who is expected to join the Chicago Fire this season, was expelled for elbowing defender...

Midfielder Jorge Claros of Honduran first-division team Motagua is being treated for gunshot wounds after being attacked in an apparent robbery attempt. Dr. Oscar Benitez, who is treating Claros, said Wednesday that the player’s wounds are not life-threatening. Benitez said Claros sustained a grazing wound to the head and could recover within three weeks. The gunmen attacked Claros’ vehicle in an apparent failed robbery attempt Wednesday at a petrol station near Honduras’ Atlantic coast.

Bullets flew as U.S. helicopters swooped toward a river boat. Honduran national police rappelled to the ground and locals scattered after loading close to 1,000 pounds of cocaine. Now reverberations from a drug raid that locals say killed four innocent people are being felt from the sultry jungles of Central America to Capitol Hill. Last week's DEA-supported predawn raid on the banks of a remote Honduran river began when U.S. drug agents and Honduran national police tracked an airplane loaded with cocaine as it entered the country from South America, Honduras National Police Chief...

Federal authorities have arrested 28 people and charged them with participating in a cocaine-smuggling ring that brought millions of dollars in drugs from Honduras to northern Virginia over the past six years. Court records indicated that many of those arrested were illegal immigrants living in northern Virginia. The smugglers would bring in several pounds of cocaine at a time by hiding it in common items like shoes and wooden frames on flights from Honduras to the United States.

Officials in Honduras say four soldiers have been wounded in a confrontation with 30 armed assailants in a region torn by a land dispute. Army Gen. Rene Osorio says he suspects farmworkers in the Aguan River Valley could be getting military training "from instructors brought in from Nicaragua and Venezuela. " But Osorio hasn't offered any evidence to back the claim. Farmers movement leader Juan Chinchilla denies that any farmers were involved in Monday's clash. Osorio said Tuesday that three of the soldiers suffered serious wounds in the fight.

Press groups on Monday called for an international investigation into attacks on journalists in Honduras after a radio host was killed by machete blows, bringing to 19 the number of media employees slain over the past two years. Reporters Without Borders said Fausto Hernandez Arteaga, 54, of Radio Alegre de Colon was killed Sunday in Saba in the Colon province in northern Honduras. Hernandez Arteaga was director of the station's "Voice of the News" program. The killing "shows once again the chaotic situation of lack of safety in which Honduras is submerged," the press group said in...

A Honduran citizen living in Los Angeles was wrongly deported in October, and went on to die in last month's massive prison fire in his home country, immigration officials said Friday. Nelson Avila-Lopez, 20, was mistakenly deported in October, and was one of the 360 inmates who died in the Feb. 14 fire at the Comayagua prison in Honduras, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement told KPCC radio in a statement. Four years earlier in an attempt to avoid gang recruitment in Honduras, Avila-Lopez crossed the border illegally at age 16 to be with his mother in Los Angeles, KPCC...

A doctor in Honduras says another victim of the worst prison fire in a century has died, bringing the death toll to 359. Dr. Juan Carlos Funez says 30-year-old Wilson Garcia has died of kidney failure as a result of burns over 70 percent of his body. The announcement Sunday brings to six the number of prisoners who have died since being taken to Hospital Escuela in Honduras' capital of Tegucigalpa. The fire broke out late Tuesday in Comayagua, about 55 miles (90 kilometers)

Guatemala played with nine men in the final 11 minutes, but managed to tie Honduras 0-0 on Monday night in the second game of a Group B doubleheader at the CONCACAF Gold Cup. After the first group games, Jamaica holds first place with three points and a goal differential of plus-4 following its 4-0 victory over Grenada earlier Monday. Guatemala and Honduras are tied for second with one point. Guatemala’s Gustavo Cabrera was ejected in the 61st minute after receiving his second yellow card.

MANAGUA, Nicaragua - Honduras’s deposed president headed toward his nation’s border yesterday to prepare a risky return, an attempt to reverse an ouster that is testing the vitality of democracy in Latin America. The interim government that sent Manuel Zelaya into exile vows to arrest the elected president if he sets foot in Honduras. Zelaya said he would make a second attempt to return home, probably this weekend, saying US-backed attempts at mediation had broken down. Accompanied by Venezuela’s foreign minister, Nicolas Maduro, Zelaya drove a jeep out of the...

COMAYAGUA, Honduras - Six guards, 800-plus prisoners in 10 cellblocks, one set of keys. The numbers added up to disaster when fire tore through a prison and 355 people died, many yet to even be charged with a crime, much less convicted. The deadliest prison blaze in a century has exposed just how deep government dysfunction and confusion go in Honduras, a small Central American country with the world's highest murder rate. Prisoners' scorched bodies were being brought to the capital, Tegucigalpa, yesterday for identification, a process authorities said could take weeks.