Victims of the massive scandal that has brought down one of the most prominent families in Honduras, the Rosenthals, now include an estimated 11,000 crocodiles and seven lions kept at the family's 30-hectare ranch, who were at risk of starvation after unpaid workers abandoned the ranch. The Honduran Forest Institute had arranged for the usual supplier to ‘donate’ two tonnes of “cow entrails and chicken”, local media reported in early November, although this would last only a few days at most, the ranch manager admitted. The fate of the animals is illustrative of the sheer depth of this scandal, which…

Inequality down: On 14 October Panama’s economy and finance minister, Dulcidio de la Guardia, gave a press conference in which he told reporters that for the first time in 23 years, the Gini coefficient that measures income inequality (where 0 is perfect equality and 1 perfect inequality) was below 0.50 last year for Panama for the first time in 23 years, registering 0.49. Pointing to an overall decline in poverty – from 25% (of the population of some 3.99m) in 2014 to 22% in 2015 – De la Guardia said that this downward trend looks to have been maintained this…

Foreign cooperation: On 2 October Nicaragua’s central bank (BCN) released its latest report on official foreign cooperation which showed that this reached US$527.8m (4.3% of Nicaragua’s GDP) in the first half of 2015, up 2.4% on the same period the previous year. Of this total, 59.3% went to the private sector and the rest to the public sector. While still the biggest source of bilateral funding, Venezuelan cooperation to Nicaragua in the first half of 2015 reached just US$193.3m of which US$172.8m were loans from Venezuela’s state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela (Pdvsa), while US$20.5m was via foreign direct investment…

Public sector unions staged a strike on 26 October in a dozen different places across Costa Rica to demand better worker conditions and to demonstrate against being stigmatised for the alarming increase in the fiscal deficit. The government led by President Luis Guillermo Solís struck an eight-point accord with the unions two days later. The government has got no further with its attempt to push through the 57-seat legislative assembly a proposed tax reform to combat the fiscal deficit. Sent down on 10 August, this consists of replacing the current sales tax of 13% with a value added tax (VAT)…

The public security focus in El Salvador has shifted, at least briefly, from the violence taking place in the streets to the debate taking place in the 84-seat legislative assembly. In the space of a few days in late October, the government sent a special bill to the legislative assembly for the rehabilitation and reinsertion into society of members of mara gangs and won approval for two new taxes to help fund its national security plan ‘El Salvador Seguro’. The central idea behind the special ‘rehabilitation and reinsertion’ bill is to undercut the power and influence of the mara gangs…