Elliot Abrams, a former high level State Department official during the 1980s, testified last week that the Reagan administration knew that Argentina's military junta was systematically stealing babies from murdered and jailed democracy activists and giving them to right-wing families friendly to the regime. But this didn't deter the State Department at the time from granting Argentina certification indicating that the country's human rights record was improving.

“There is a war here in the Aguán,” says Juan, surveying the distant fields of African palm from the vantage point of his recently planted field of beans and corn. A young Honduran farmer, Juan lives in an encampment of 60 families, dedicated to growing basic grains and reclaiming their food sovereignty. “But the war is not against the drug traffickers, other countries or even organized crime,” he says. “It is a war against the campesinos.”

Violence and intimidation continue in El Salvador against environmental activists and human rights defenders who have publicly opposed metallic mining. The latest round of threats targetted a Salvadoran Catholic priest, Father Neftalí Ruiz, and a community radio station, Radio Victoria.

In the midst of Mexico’s senseless “Drug War” and the erroneous belief that drug-trafficking is the root of the country’s evils, Mexicans were given a powerful reminder last week of the deeper crisis affecting their fellow citizens.

The Aguán River Valley in the department of Colón, Honduras, is a site of both an ongoing conflict and a powerful social movement. In a struggle for land that greatly predates, but was also further exacerbated by, the 2009 military coup in Honduras, campesinos in the Aguán are constantly subject to human rights abuses, repression and injustice. Still, these communities are also unfailingly resilient. Poor, vulnerable, and landless, the Aguán campesinos truly represent and embody the Resistance movement in Honduras.

The current hype over an alleged Latin America-based alliance against the U.S. between Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Hezbollah and Hamas militants, drug cartels, leftists, and any other potentially unsavory regional outfit or trend has produced such ludicrous assessments as that, given similarities between Mexican and Lebanese terrain, Hezbollah is instructing drug smugglers in the art of tunnel construction.

A Senate report released in October 2011 urging the US government to expand the use of social media as a foreign policy tool in Latin America offers another warning for activists seduced by the idea of technology and social media as an indispensable tool for social change.

La Isla is a small community located on the outskirts of Chichigalpa, Nicaragua in the Central America lowlands. Its sole economy is the sugar cane industry which relies on young men desperate to provide for their families ensuring an endless supply of labor.