LIGHT from thousands of bamboo torches cuts through the gathering darkness in Tegucigalpa, Honduras’s capital. The protesters who carry them call their demonstrations marchas de las antorchas (torch marches). They have been taking place weekly at dusk since May. Their purpose: to rail against what participants see as grotesque corruption at the highest levels of government. “We can’t take it any more,” says Yelso Serna, a salesman who has marched three times.
In neighbouring Guatemala the protests, and the scandals that provoke them, are even bigger. Every Saturday since April thousands have poured into Constitution Square in Guatemala City to demand an overhaul of the political system, starting with the removal of the president, Otto Pérez Molina.
The size and stubbornness of the crowds in both countries has prompted some observers to dub the protests a “Central American spring”, like the Arab revolts that toppled corrupt Middle Eastern regimes in 2011. They draw inspiration from Brazil, where hundreds of thousands of people, enraged by a multibillion-dollar bribery scandal involving Petrobras, the state-controlled oil company, have...
from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1Mm9Apo
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