The Homecoming: For Those Migrants Returning To Honduras, Little Has Changed
NEED TO KNOW
The Homecoming: For Those Migrants Returning To Honduras, Little Has Changed
HONDURAS
Emerson Colindres, 19, and his family fled Honduras and applied unsuccessfully for asylum in the United States in 2014. Since then, they had been in the immigration system, waiting to receive a date to leave the US. Then, agents detained Colindres when he showed up for a routine immigration check this month in Ohio.
Colindres, who has no criminal record and just graduated from high school, spent two weeks in the Butler County jail near Cincinnati before he was deported back to Honduras, the Cincinnati Enquirer wrote. “It was kind of more traumatizing because I haven’t been to my birth country in years,” Colindres told WCPO, a local television station.
If his mother and sister leave Ohio to join him, as they say they will, they will join other Honduran immigrants who are opting to self-deport from the US under a new program called Project Homecoming, according to CNN. The US government initiative pays those in the US illegally $1,000 to leave the country. A group of 38 Hondurans who opted to self-deport recently landed at Ramón Villeda Morales International Airport in northeastern Honduras.
This direction of traffic is a trickle compared with the number of Hondurans who have migrated to the US in recent years. Between 2000 and 2021, the Honduran migrant community in the US grew from 240,000 to 1.1 million, an increase of 374 percent, the Pew Research Center said.
There are many reasons why Colindres’ family took him from the Central American country of around 10 million, namely the poverty, the violence, and the corruption in the narco-state. Things haven’t changed in the 11 years since they left.
For example, late last year, a scandal erupted in the country over meetings between senior government officials associated with President Xiomara Castro and drug traffickers who donated to her campaign and paid bribes to Castro’s husband, former President Mel Zelaya, who went into exile following a 2009 coup, and Zelaya’s brother, explained the Wilson Center.
Castro’s predecessor, ex-President Juan Orlando Hernández, is now serving a 45-year prison sentence in the US for trafficking in guns and drugs.
The country lacks the civil society institutions, independent judiciary, and watchdog groups to combat this corruption, analysts say. In the past, American officials might have had more power to help Honduras foster democracy and law, the Christian Science Monitor noted. Now, however, as the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) lamented, the US has taken a more antagonistic stance toward Castro due to her left-wing views, including her ties with China and her support for the authoritarian regimes of Nicaragua and Venezuela.
As a result, the US shuns the country: “During his tour of Central America in early February 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not include Honduras on his itinerary, sending a strong message,” WOLA wrote.
In November, Hondurans will elect a new president who might change the direction of the country, the Associated Press reported. Candidates from Castro’s leftist LIBRE party and Hernández’s conservative National party will likely dominate the vote, which means little will change, analysts say.
As a result, the reasons people like the Colindres family left the country won’t be solved anytime soon. Still, some are hopeful.
“While electoral violence is a significant threat, and democratic degradation is indeed a concerning trend in the region, these challenges are by no means insurmountable,” wrote the US Institute of Peace. “Central American neighbor Guatemala rose from its contentious 2023 elections with a citizenry hopeful of a renewed democratic spring capable of strengthening justice while delivering social dividends for its society. Hondurans still have time to make next year’s elections their watershed moment towards building a stronger, more inclusive and responsive democracy.”
THE WORLD, BRIEFLY
Canada To Resume Trade Talks With US After Ditching Digital Tax
CANADA
Canada rescinded a digital services tax this week in a bid to advance trade talks with the United States, a decision that followed the Trump administration’s decision to end negotiations and threaten to create new tariffs on the country’s exports, the Guardian reported.
On Sunday, the Canadian government announced that it is withdrawing the tax measure, adding that the country’s Prime Minister Mark Carney and US President Donald Trump would resume talks to reach a deal by July 21.
The decision comes as Canada and the US have been engaged in trade talks for months. But the negotiations ended Friday after Trump accused Ottawa of imposing unfair taxes on American technology companies in a “direct and blatant attack on our country.”
The president also threatened to impose new tariffs on Canadian goods later this week.
Canada’s digital services tax would have imposed a three percent levy on revenues earned from Canadian users by tech firms generating more than $14 million annually. It would have applied to both domestic and foreign companies, including US tech giants Amazon and Google.
First introduced in 2020, the Canadian government said the tax would address the gap that allowed large tech firms to generate substantial profits in Canada without paying local taxes.
It would have applied retroactively to 2022 and was to be collected Monday before the government’s move, according to CNBC.
Canada is the US’ second-largest trading partner after Mexico: In 2024, US trade with Canada totaled roughly $762 billion.
Canada’s reversal follows similar developments in the European Union and the United Kingdom, where pressure from Washington has influenced policy on taxing the tech giants, Politico added.
European leaders are debating whether to soften provisions in the Digital Markets Act to facilitate trade deals with Washington, as US tariffs are set to kick in next week.
Serbian Protesters, Police Clash After Arrests in Anti-Government Protests
SERBIA
Serbian police early Monday removed street blockades in the capital, Belgrade, that thousands of demonstrators had set up in response to the violence and arrests of anti-government protesters who took part in a massive anti-graft rally over the weekend and called for new elections, the Associated Press reported.
Demonstrators placed metal fences and garbage containers in various locations around the country on Sunday evening and early Monday to block access. They also shut off a key bridge crossing the Sava River in the capital.
In the northern city of Novi Sad, protesters egged the offices of the ruling populist Serbian Progressive Party, according to Al Jazeera.
They are demanding that all arrested demonstrators be released.
About 50 officers and 22 protesters were injured in the clashes on Saturday night, which started after the official part of the rally was over. Police in riot gear used batons, pepper spray, and shields to charge at demonstrators, who threw rocks at police cordons.
Out of the 77 people arrested, 38 remain in custody, mostly facing criminal charges over their alleged roles in the violence. Authorities also detained at least eight university students accused of planning attacks on state institutions.
This weekend’s protests mark a major escalation in the ongoing demonstrations that were ignited after a train station canopy collapsed in Novi Sad in November, killing 16, Deutsche Welle noted.
The incident, widely blamed on graft-fueled negligence in state infrastructure projects, sparked student-led demonstrations accusing the government of corruption and demanding new elections to oust populist President Aleksandar Vučić, whose government protesters call “illegitimate.”
Before Saturday’s demonstration, organizers had given Vučić the “ultimatum” to call snap elections, which are not otherwise scheduled until 2027.
Vučić, however, has refused. He has accused the students and professors who are the driving force behind nearly eight months of almost daily protests of “terror,” accusing the demonstrators of seeking to destroy the country.
Critics say that Vučić has become increasingly authoritarian since coming to power more than a decade ago, suppressing democratic freedoms while allowing corruption and organized crime to flourish. He denies these accusations.
While Serbia is formally seeking membership in the European Union, Vučić’s government has been cozying up to Russia and China, analysts say.
Ashes Versus Dust: Another Hong Kong Pro-Democracy Party to Disband
HONG KONG
One of Hong Kong’s last standing opposition parties disbanded on Sunday due to “immense political pressure,” five years after Hong Kong’s national security law was passed to thwart what remained of the country’s pro-democracy movement and press freedoms, France 24 reported.
“Over these 19 years, we have endured hardships of internal disputes and the near-total imprisonment of our leadership, while witnessing the erosion of civil society, the fading of grassroots voices, the omnipresence of red lines, and the draconian suppression of dissent,” wrote Hong Kong’s League of Social Democrats (LSD) in a statement.
Announcing the move at a press conference, members of the party sat in front of a banner that read, “I would rather be ashes than dust,” the Hong Kong Free Press wrote.
The party, known as the last protest group in Hong Kong, said the fallout from the 2020 national security law was the main reason it was disbanding. Party members also cited an atmosphere of repression with officials targeting political dissent, and that numerous party members have been arrested over the past few years.
Chan Po Ying, the chair of the party, told the BBC, “The red lines are now everywhere.”
Officials have long said the national security law was necessary following the violent pro-democracy protests that broke out in 2019, sparked by fears of losing Hong Kong’s autonomy. However, critics say the law has been used to dismantle the political opposition.
The LSD was founded in 2006, and while it never had many seats in the semi-autonomous Chinese city’s legislature, it was known for pushing for democratic reforms and advocating for the rights of the working class.
The LSD is the third major Hong Kong opposition party to dissolve this year, joining the dozens of political parties, labor unions, and civil society groups that have disappeared since the security law took effect.
The remaining pro-democracy voices in Hong Kong are in hiding or exile, fearing the reach of the national security law, observers say.
Alongside political opponents, journalists are also self-censoring, according to a report by the Reuters Institute for Journalism.
DISCOVERIES
Neanderthal Symbolism
Archeologists have long been convinced that only modern humans (Homo sapiens) were capable of complex symbolic behavior, such as creating art or jewelry, or engaging in rituals.
Now, growing evidence is suggesting that Neanderthals also developed symbolic behavior independently, at around the same time as H. sapiens, New Atlas explained.
After more than two years of research, archaeologists have found the oldest Neanderthal fingerprint and think the meaning behind it is highly symbolic.
The fingerprint, in the form of a red ochre dot on a granite stone, dates back almost 43,000 years. It was discovered in 2022 at the Abrigo de San Lázaro archeological site in central Spain.
Archaeologists hypothesize that the rock represented a human face with eyes, mouth, and nose to the Neanderthal who found it, brought it inside the rock shelter, and deliberately placed the ochre dot on it after dipping their finger in ochre pigment. They add that it was likely placed at the center of the rock to highlight the nose ridge, while two smaller pits serve as the eyes, and a larger pit serves as the mouth.
The team said that the dot was deliberately applied to complete the image of a human face and that it is, so far, the oldest representation of portable art associated with Neanderthals, they wrote in an article on their discovery in the Conversation.
“This object contributes to our understanding of Neanderthals’ capacity for abstraction, suggesting that it could represent one of the earliest human facial symbolizations in Prehistory,” the authors wrote in their study.
Meanwhile, at the same site hosting the fingerprint, the team found 23 pebbles, generally used as tools. However, analysis using electron microscopy (SEM) and multispectral analysis revealed the fingerprint, which would have otherwise been invisible to the naked eye. It also showed that the one stone with the red dot was manipulated for decorative purposes.
Through multispectral techniques and forensic identification, researchers confirmed that the mark came from a human and was not the result of the decomposition of minerals in the granite itself.
The behavior of interpreting the natural features of an inanimate object as mimicking facial traits is called face pareidolia. It’s a sophisticated cognitive process, and some scientists believe it offered evolutionary advantages by heightening social interaction.