The investigation into the February killings of three Salvadoran legislators has stumbled because of obstacles and poor police work. It now seems unlikely that the Guatemalan authorities will uncover the masterminds of a crime that shook Central America's political establishment. According to Guatemalan officials, the principal suspects are local drug traffickers and mid-level rogue police officers. However, US officials and FBI agents have been highly critical of how the investigation has been conducted, accusing the Guatemalan authorities of deliberately impeding the investigation by withholding key information that could shed light on the case. Meanwhile, Interior Minister Adela de Torrebiarte, and Attorney General Juan Luis Florido, have denied the allegations, claiming that progress is being made on the case. In recent months, the media hype surrounding the forthcoming September elections has detracted attention away from the case. However, the latest allegations show that the case cannot simply be swept under the carpet.

Therapeutic abortion may soon be legal once again, just months after it was criminalized. But no branch of government wants to touch the issue. The deadline for the Supreme Court to rule on the law's constitutionality has come and gone. However, it is widely speculated that the judges will throw the political hot potato back to the National Assembly. There, many legislators are expected to reverse the vote they cast for Law 603, the law that criminalized therapeutic abortion. When the law was passed, many observers accused the Sandinistas of seizing on the issue not out of conviction, but in an effort to win the Catholic vote in the November 2006 presidential elections. If the decision to scrap the medical practice was the factor that won Daniel Ortega the presidency, it has come at a cost: without legal access to therapeutic abortion since the decision was taken, 42 women have died in preventable childbirths, leaving 90 children orphaned.

After three years of negotiations, a free trade agreement between Panama and the United States is imminent. After eleventh hour modifications, the parties signed a treaty in late June; Panama's National Assembly promptly ratified it. The Democratic Party in the US Congress, having recently declared itself on the side of those forsaken by globalization, is the only remaining hurdle. But by all accounts Democrats are set to approve the agreement. Thus, Panamanians will soon discover whether free trade with the US will drastically improve living standards, as promise the treaty's advocates, or destroy homegrown industry and agriculture, as warn its opponents.

On the cusp of becoming an urban nation, Honduras perfectly typifies the worldwide trend towards urbanization, announced a recent United Nations report. By 2008, more than half the world – including Hondurans – will live in cities, largely because the rural poor are continuing to migrate to urban areas. But the UN report is clear that this internal migration will not necessarily be a simple displacement of poverty – historically, great social gains have been made in the rural to urban exodus. However, in places like Choloma, Honduras, the nation's fastest growing city, the rural poor are finding only temporary relief by working in clothing assembly plants, known as maquilas. After several years of grueling, poorly paid work, it is often physically impossible to continue in the maquilas, with workers subsequently finding themselves underemployed, living in slums, and forgotten by both the globalized economy and the local government.

On June 23, the people of Santa Cruz Barillas, Huehuetenango voted categorically for the cessation of mining projects in their village, the latest in an ever-multiplying number of communities to do so through a consulta popular . However, the Constitutional Court recently ruled that these “good-faith consultations” have no legal bearing, so mining will continue in Barillas, and everywhere else it has been rejected by consulta popular , as the prerogative of the federal government. Experts say that if local communities want their will to matter, they must ratchet up pressure on the federal government through constitutional appeals and legislative reform. Until then, mining interests will endure in dominating the Ministry of Energy and Mines.