More than 200 people have been killed over the past seven days in Mexico’s most violent week since President Felipe CalderĂłn unleashed federal forces against the country’s warring drug cartels.
Peruvian National Police clashed with protesting workers of the troubled US-owned Doe Run Peru metal smelter at La Oroya, which faces closure over severe environmental degradation.
Colombian presidential candidates Antanas Mockus and Juan Manuel Santos both went on record supporting the Colombian army’s successful rescue of four hostages held by the FARC guerillas.
The Collective Security Treaty Organization, an alliance of former Soviet republics led by Russia, held an emergency meeting in Moscow to consider intervention in conflicted Kyrgyzstan.
Violence in Mexico claimed the lives of 15 federal police officers and 29 prison inmates in three separate incidents in Michoacán, Culiacán and Ciudad Juárez.
Narco News quotes an alleged former CIA asset who says that a secret US Special Forces unit dubbed Task Force 7 has been operating in Ciudad Juárez for the past year.
Saeed Torabian, a board member of the Tehran bus drivers’ union (Vahed Syndicate), was arrested by Iranian security forces and is being held incommunicado, whereabouts unknown.
Venezuela’s government praised a ruling by a World Bank arbitration panel that should drastically limit compensation ExxonMobil is seeking for the nationalization of its Orinoco oil projects.
Narco-violence claimed 39 lives in two northern Mexico states, as gunmen executed 19 at a Chihuahua rehab center and left 20 tortured bodies around Ciudad Madero, Tamaulipas.
At least 23 people have been killed and more than 300 injured in clashes in Osh, Kyrgyzstan’s second largest city, between ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbek residents.
Schoolchildren marched in Erbil against Iranian shelling of Iraqi Kurdistan, while Kurdish journalists have launched a campaign to demand justice in the torture-slaying of a colleague.
A Hunt Oil-led consortium opened a new liquefied natural gas plant on the Peruvian coast, with President Alan GarcĂa attending the ceremony. But the project has sparked a storm of protest.
