Honduras rallies for minimum wage rise

Senior National Popular Resistance Front activist Carlos Reyes, who helped organise the demonstration, reported that thousands of other citizens held strikes and blocked stretches of highway in cities across the country.

In the capital a small group of protesters broke windows at two television stations which supported the June 28 2009 coup that toppled Mr Zelaya and the human rights commissioner's headquarters.

Others tore down the blue-and-white national flag that had been put in place last week by municipal authorities at the start of festivals commemorating the country's independence and hoisted the red-and-black banner of the Resistance Front.

Union leader Israel Salinas said that the progressive coalition of grass-roots organisations and left-wing political parties has so far collected over one million signatures on petitions calling for a constituent assembly to rewrite the country's 1982 constitution, which was largely drafted by the military, and for the safe return of Mr Zelaya from his exile in the Dominican Republic.

And Mr Salinas reported that workers in the country are seething because the right-wing government of President Porfirio Lobo, who won widely condemned elections organised by the coup chiefs who overthrew Mr Zelaya, has still failed to approve a minium wage rise that should have been delivered in April.

The current minimum monthly salary in Honduras is just 5,500 lempiras (£187).

Mr Salinas said that unions are demanding a rise of 15 per cent, while the country's main employers' association is only offering 5 per cent.

Labour Minister Felicito Avila said that the minimum wage rise could be set next week.

Four men armed with assault rifles burst into a shoe factory in the country's main industrial city on Tuesday and opened fire, killing at least 18 workers and wounding five.

National police spokesman Leonel Sauceda called the attack in San Pedro Sula a massacre.

Assistant police commissioner Hector Ivan Mejia said that the massacre was perpetrated "as part of a turf battle between small-scale drug gangs."