Nine US human rights activists are holding a vigil at the Tolemaida military base near Bogotá with a 12-foot banner that reads “U.S. MILITARY OUT OF COLOMBIA.”
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights issued a statement strongly condemning the murder of Wayuu indigenous leader Luis Alfredo Socarras Pimienta in Colombia's Guajira region.
Peru will cancel the license of the US company Doe Run for a smelter complex at La Oroya, Junín region in the central Andes, said to be one of the most polluted locales on the planet.
Mexican army Special Forces troops killed Ignacio Coronel Villarreal AKA “Nacho”—a leader of the Sinaloa Cartel. But the cartel’s top kingpin, Joaquín Guzmán AKA “El Chapo,” remains at large.
A new report by the interfaith peace group Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) details how US funding to the Colombian military supports army units whose members have killed hundreds of civilians.
With banners reading “Defend the Rainforest” and “No Dams on Our Rivers,” indigenous followers of the Native Federation of the Rio Madre de Dios (FENAMAD) marched on the Peruvian jungle city of Puerto Maldonada July 28. As Peru celebrated its Independence Day, much of the southern regions of Cusco, Puno, Madre de Dios and Apurímac were paralyzed by a general strike to call a halt to the export of natural gas from the Camisea field in the rainforest of Cusco region, as well as construction of the Inambari hydro-electric plant. It is the second general strike in as many months to halt traffic and business in Peru’s Southern Macro-Region—and this time the strike has been declared open-ended.
Photo: FENAMAD
In a move protested by rights groups, French President Nicolas Sarkozy will evict some 300 squatter camps in a sweeping crackdown on Roma immigrants and “travellers.”
Amid the US military documents released by WikiLeaks are nearly 200 involving Task Force 373, a unit charged with killing combatants in Afghanistan, but also responsible for numerous civilian deaths.
Indigenous rainforest dwellers are occupying the site of the Dardanelos hydro-dam in the Brazilian Amazon, demanding that they be compensated for the damage caused to their lands.
Regional states of emergency have been declared across much of Peru in response to extreme weather and a devastating toxic spill that sparked campesino protests in Puno region.
Nuevo León state police uncovered a total of 51 bodies from a clandestine narcofosa (“narco-grave”) in a garbage dump outside Monterrey—the biggest such find among numerous in recent months.
Colombian authorities deny reports of a mass grave found in Meta department on the eastern plains, charging the allegation is a strategy to derail the Andean nation’s trade pact with the EU.
