Mexican campesino rights activist América del Valle, leader of the land defense committee at the village of San Salvador Atenco, applied for political asylum at the Venezuelan embassy in Mexico City.
The Guatemalan government agreed to suspend operations at Goldcorp Inc.’s controversial Marlin gold mine, but says there is “no exact day yet” for closure of the facility.
Soldiers, police and private guards entered La Aurora estate in the Aguán Valley of northern Honduras and attacked campesinos encamped there. One youth was killed in the operation.
Some 85% of the gross profits from trafficking cocaine from South America to the US remain with US distribution networks, according to an official of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
The number of trade unionists murdered around the world increased by 30% in 2009, according to an annual survey released by the Brussels-based International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).
Venezuela’s Fedecámaras filed a complaint at a meeting of the International Labor Organization (ILO) in Geneva against the labor and business policies of President Hugo Chávez’s leftist government.
Mexico’s independent labor movement reacted angrily to the government’s use of hundreds of police agents to break a three-year strike at the giant Cananea copper mine in northern Sonora state.
Students and the Board of Trustees at the University of Puerto Rico reached an agreement to end a two-month strike that had closed 10 of the public university’s 11 campuses.
In meetings with striking students, officials announced that the University of Puerto Rico was $200 million in debt and that they intended to cover it with tuition surcharges.
Two indigenous Mexican women were released from prison after serving more than three and a half years of a 21-year sentence for allegedly kidnapping six federal agents.
Thousands of peasant farmers gathered in the main plaza in Hinche, a city in Haiti’s Central Plateau, to protest a donation of about 476 metric tons of hybrid seeds from Monsanto.
Edmond Mulet, acting head of the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), issued an apology for an incursion by a group of Brazilian soldiers into the State University of Haiti (UEH).
