A “humanitarian caravan” arrived in Colombia’s Cauca department, bringing aid to hundreds of campesinos who have been maintaining a protest encampment to prevent the military from establishing a new base.
The government of Peru’s President Ollanta Humala opened a new investigation into anti-mine protest leaders in Cajamarca. But protesters responded by holding a mock funeral for the president on his 50th birthday.
In a second day of mobilization, some 20,000 informal gold miners filled the streets of Puno in southern Peru, demanding that the regional government support their demands for “free sale” of gold.
Alexander Fernández and two other leaders of the Yukpa indigenous movement for land recovery in Venezuela’s Zulia state were killed by sicarios, or hired assassins. Two other Yukpa leaders were killed weeks earlier.
Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa, at a meeting in Quito with a delegation of the US-based activist group SOA Watch, made the announcement that Ecuador is ceasing to send soldiers to the School of the Americas.
Police detained 89 demonstrators after more than 6,500 people flooded Tel Aviv’s Habima Square to protest the arrest of Daphni Leef, a leader of last summer’s mass movement against the high cost of housing in Israel.
Three Federal Police officers were killed in a shoot-out with two other Federal Police at a food court in Mexico City’s airport. The Federal District police commander denied any knowledge of narco-corruption at the facility.
After more than a week of student anti-austerity demonstrations in Sudan, President Omar al-Bashir finally responded to the movement, dismissing the protesters as “bubbles and aliens” who will be “dealt with.”
The Ninth Indigenous March, now camped at Yolosa on the edge of the Bolivian Altiplano, held a celebration of the Aymara New Year festival, Willkakuti or “Return of the Sun”—marking year 5520 in the Aymara calendar.
A DEA agent shot a man to death in Honduras during a raid on a smuggling operation—marking the first confirmed time the DEA has killed during an operation since the agency began deploying teams to Latin America.
It made headlines when Mexican officials had to back-pedal after announcing they had arrested the son of fugitive kingpin Chapo Guzmán, but the real war underway just over the Texas line in Tamaulipas remains invisible.
Peasants throughout Paraguay have called for a national mobilization to oppose the impeachment and removal of populist President Fernando Lugo—called an “express coup d’etat” carried out in violation of legal norms.
