CENTRAL AMERICA | Regional security centre. On 18 April, Sica's new operational regional security centre (COSR-Sica in the Spanish acronym) was formally inaugurated on the site of Senan, Panama's aeronaval service, on the banks of the Panama Canal. Its task will be to exchange information and provide follow-up for coordinated operations against organised crime carried out in fulfilment of the Central American security strategy (Esca). The decision to create this centre was taken at a meeting of Sica's security officials in Antigua, Guatemala, last September. An international conference to support the Esca will bring together the region's security officials and representatives of donor countries — which so far include Canada, Chile, Colombia, the EU, Finland, Germany, Italy, Israel, Mexico, the Netherlands, South Korea, Spain, the US and Taiwan.

CUBA | Prisoner releases. Following the arrival of a batch of 37 released Cuban prisoners on 8 April, the Spanish government announce that the Cuban government had completed its release of political prisoners and prisoners of conscience. It noted that of 115 prisoners released, 103 had gone to Spain, accompanied by 647 relatives. Of the 155, only 12 members of the Group of 75 had chosen to stay in Cuba.

The Spanish government's claim has, however, been challenged by José Gabriel Ramón Castillo, a released member of the Group of 75 who has been in Spain since 2008. He said that at least 55 ‘political prisoners who virtually nobody knows' are still being held in confinement. Of these, 52 are on a list compiled by the Council of Rapporteurs on Human Rights in Cuba, and three more, who are imprisoned in eastern Cuba, he knows personally.

Castillo's claim has been endorsed by another member of the Group of 75, Julio César Gálvez, who arrived in Spain last July. He mentioned the cases of three persons, imprisoned, respectively, in 1994, 1995 and 1998, whose situation had been ‘eclipsed' by the attention focused on the Group of 75.

GUATEMALA | Decrease in violent deaths reported. The Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo (GAM), an NGO that monitors human rights, reported on 13 April that in the first quarter of this year there were 874 homicides, compared with 909 in the same period of 2010. The GAM has noted, though, that the monthly death toll this year has been rising: 275 cases in January, 295 in February, and 304 in March.

In Q1 2011, there were 56 lynchings, 15 of which ended in the death of the victims. Of all the homicide victims in the first quarter, 35 were killed in nine incidents classified as ‘massacres' (collective killings). Typical of these was the 7 April attack on a bar in Chiquimula, in which five were killed and 12 injured.

Prominent among the homicide victims were 28 bus drivers and 20 public transport auxiliaries, killed by street gangs for resisting extortion. The next largest group of victims was shopkeepers, most of them presumed to have been killed for the same reason.