Juan de Dios Sáenz Rosales, president of the Union of Workers of the National Autonomous University of Honduras (SITRAUNAH), was killed on Aug. 22. Late last night, Honduran authorities announced that his son had been arrested for the murder.* The AFL-CIO stands in solidarity with SITRAUNAH as they mourn this loss and urges the government of Honduras to continue to investigate and prosecute this case vigorously until ensure justice has been is achieved for Juan de Dios Sáenz and his loved ones

There are doubts about the institutions responsible for the rule of law in Honduras and the government’s protection of human rights, acknowledged the U.S. State Department in an Aug. 8 report. Unfortunately, the State Department says virtually nothing about the widespread impunity regarding violations of freedom of association or the threats and violence aimed at labor activists.

Pacific Rim Cayman LLC, the mining company determined to extract gold along the banks of El Salvador’s Lempa River, has failed in its
attempt to use the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) to force the Salvadoran government to allow it to mine in the region. El Salvador has opposed Pacific Rim’s plans because the process threatens cyanide leakage into the Lempa River, whose basin covers 49 percent of the territory of El Salvador and is the main water source for a majority of the nation’s population.

The U.S. government will investigate charges that the government of Honduras has failed to address “repeated and well-documented violations of workers' rights.” Those charges were made in a petition filed in March by the AFL-CIO and major Honduran trade unions with the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Trade and Labor Affairs (OTLA).

Guatemalan workers received support from an unexpected quarter this week. A group of global clothing brands (including the Gap, Liz Claiborne, Nike, Under Armour, American Eagle, Adidas, PVH and PF) and an association to which they are affiliated with, the Fair Labor Association, wrote to the Government of Guatemala to urge it to move swiftly to reach a satisfactory resolution to a complaint filed four years ago by the AFL-CIO and six Guatemalan unions under DR-CAFTA (the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement). 

Citing “repeated and well-documented violations of workers' rights” that the Honduran government has “utterly failed to address,” the AFL-CIO and the major Honduran trade unions are asking the U.S. government to act under the terms of the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA).

Seven current or former members of the Guatemalan  banana workers’ union have been murdered since 2011. Most recently, Miguel Angel González Ramírez, a member of the Izabal banana workers’ union, was shot while he was holding his young son.

Pacific Rim Cayman LLC, the mining company determined to extract gold along the banks of El Salvador’s Lempa River, is seeking to use the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) to force the Salvadoran government to allow it to have its environmentally disastrous, gold-digging way. Since 2009, four activists opposed to Pacific Rim’s mining plans have been killed.

Ever since it was passed five years ago, the Central America Free Trade Agreement-Dominican Republic  (CAFTA-DR) has led to an increase in unemployment, violations of worker rights and discrimination against women in Honduras, according to an about-to-be-released documentary.

Join the human rights advocacy group STITCH and the women of its Central America Network of Women for Social and Economic Justice on a 10-day delegation July 27 to Aug. 6, 2011, to Honduras to see firsthand the impact of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) five years later.