SAN SALVADOR (Reuters) – The pregnant woman at the centre of an abortion controversy in El Salvador had her malformed foetus delivered on Monday by Caesarean section to save her life and avoid breaking the law, although the baby did not survive.

El Salvador’s Health Ministry said doctors attending the woman, who uses the name “Beatriz” to protect her identity, performed a Caesarean to remove the foetus, thereby avoiding an abortion, which is illegal in the country.

SAN SALVADOR (Reuters) – The woman at the center of an abortion controversy in El Salvador will be granted a Caesarean section to end a pregnancy endangering her life and avoid breaking the law in the Central American nation.

El Salvador’s health ministry said late on Thursday doctors attending the woman, who uses the name “Beatriz” to protect her identity, could perform a Caesarean to remove her malformed fetus and circumvent an abortion, which is illegal there.

SAN SALVADOR/MEXICO CITY, Jan 17 (Reuters) – Central
American farmers who produce some of the world’s most
sought-after coffee beans are grappling with the re-emergence of
a merciless old foe: a tree-killing fungus spread by the wind.

Aggressive outbreaks of the blight known as roya have hit
Central America’s major coffee-producing nations and Mexico,
which are home to more than a fifth of the world’s arabica
coffee production. The pandemic risks decimating yields,
threatening hundreds of thousands of livelihoods and export
revenues in some of Latin America’s poorest countries.

WASHINGTON/SENSUNTEPEQUE, El Salvador (Reuters) – The United States on Thursday imposed financial penalties on violent Latin American street gang MS-13, which has thousands of members operating in the United States and has been accused of human trafficking, kidnapping, murder, rape and other criminal activities.

MS-13, whose U.S. members are mostly first-generation Salvadorean-Americans or Salvadorean nationals, was added to the Obama administration’s list of transnational criminal organizations – a label designed to cripple a criminal group’s finances.

QUEZALTEPEQUE, El Salvador (Reuters) – Victor Garcia, alias ‘The Duck,’ at 39 has survived longer than most gang members in El Salvador, and has seen hundreds of his ‘homies’ killed by rivals over the years.

The relentless tit-for-tat murders between El Salvador’s two largest street gangs – “Calle 18″ and “Mara Salvatrucha” – made the country the most murderous in the world last year after neighboring Honduras, also ravaged by gang violence.

SAN SALVADOR (Reuters) – The U.S. and British ambassadors to El Salvador raised concern on Tuesday about a deepening political crisis in the Central American country that has pitted the Supreme Court against Congress.

The crisis centers on a decision last month by El Salvador’s top court to annul the election by Congress of 20 new judges.

SAN SALVADOR (Reuters) – No one was murdered in El Salvador on Saturday, officials said, in what was the first homicide-free day in nearly three years for the Central American country plagued by violent drug gangs.

“After years when the number of murders reached alarming levels of up to 18 per day, we saw not one homicide in the country,” President Mauricio Funes said in a statement released on Sunday. The murder-free day was the first recorded since leftist Funes took office in June 2009.

SAN SALVADOR (Reuters) – Rival gangs operating in El Salvador have called a truce as the Central American country confronts a plague of violent crime, according to a statement issued on Friday by the gangs and endorsed by local Roman Catholic church leaders.

The document, signed by representatives of the country’s two most powerful gangs, Mara Salvatrucha and gang Mara 18, was delivered to various media and has been endorsed by the Salvadoran Catholic Church, local church leaders said.

SAN SALVADOR/TORONTO, March 23 (Reuters) – The parent
of an aircraft maintenance company spun off by Air Canada
is expanding in El Salvador even as its Canadian arm
liquidates its assets after terminating more than 2,600
employees.

Aveos, which shut its doors in Canada earlier this week, has
corporate ties with El Salvador’s Aeroman, with Aero Technical
Support & Services Holdings, a closely held company domiciled in
Luxembourg, owning both of them.

SAN SALVADOR (Reuters) – El Salvador’s ruling leftists suffered a bruising defeat in congressional elections, hurt by frustration with rampant violence in the small, impoverished Central American nation, preliminary results showed on Monday.

The opposition conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) was on course to take over as the biggest party in Congress, adding 15 seats for a total of 33 out of 84, with almost all of Sunday’s voting counted by the country’s supreme electoral tribunal.