Mexican poet Javier Sicilia, who has led a national protest movement against the militarization of the “drug war” since losing his son to narco-violence, met at the Federal District’s Chapultepec Castle with President Felipe Calderón.
The US Border Patrol shot dead a Mexican national who was among three men allegedly attempting to cross the frontier at San Ysidro—almost exactly a year after a similar incident at El Paso.
Health workers in Colombia’s remote southeast report an outbreak of respiratory disease in the Nukak-Maku, one of the Amazon’s last nomadic tribes—whose numbers have already been decimated by flu, malaria and political violence.
Representatives of the Aymara protest movement in southern Peru’s Puno region met with leaders of the mining ministry in Lima, who agreed in principle to put a halt to the operation that sparked the protests.
Aerial photos released by Brazil’s indigenous affairs agency reveal evidence of one of the world’s last “uncontacted” tribes, in the Vale do Javari region of the Amazon. FUNAI warns that illegal timber operations threaten the tribe’s survival.
A group of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and the United States have written an open letter to Cynthia McKinney expressing their “severe disappointment” at her support for Moammar Qaddafi.
Paramilitaries linked to organized crime have used death threats and violence to cause a general exodus of several campesino communities in the Sierra del Sur of southern Mexico’s Guerrero state.
Prominent Mexican journalist and commentator Miguel Angel López Velasco, who covered narco trafficking for the Veracruz daily Notiver, was shot dead along with his wife and son by gunmen who broke into the family’s home.
Juan Francisco Durán Ayala, a young opponent of the local Pacific Rim gold mine in El Salvador’s Cabañas department, was found dead days after his disappearance last week—and quickly buried by authorities in a mass grave.
Some 10,000 marched in Casablanca in answer to a call from Morocco’s youth-based February 20 Movement, which has rejected constitutional reforms proposed by King Mohammed VI.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged for the first time that the US had opened preliminary talks with members of the Taliban as part of an effort to end the war in Afghanistan.
The Qaddafi regime showed off the bodies of Tripoli civilians killed by a NATO air-strike in a lugubrious display to journalists, while US Defense Secretary Robert Gates insisted that the Libya intervention does not constitute “hostilities.”
