Amid new massacres—49 mutilated bodies found on a roadside in Nuevo León, another 15 along a highway in Jalisco—Mexican federal authorities have finally detained high-ranking military officers in an investigation of cartel collaboration.
Campesinos from Honduras’ sprawling and rugged department of Olancho protested outside the national electric company in Tegucigalpa to demand cancellation of the Patuca III hydro-electic project until land rights in the area have been clarified.
Miskito Indians in Honduras burned down government offices in angry protests over a DEA helicopter raid they say killed innocent villagers in a fishing boat. The fracas comes as the Pentagon has established three new bases in Honduras.
The Israel Corporation, with holdings in the energy sector across South and Central America, has especially targeted Peru for massive expansion—but found its holdings in Bolivia expropriated in President Evo Morales’ nationalization of the grid.
The Asháninka indigenous people helped beat back the now-resurgent Shining Path in Peru’s Apurímac-Ene River Valley, but now oppose a government hydro-electric mega-project that would flood their traditional territories.
Two ministers have resigned and the army chief has been sacked after charges that Peru’s armed forced abandoned stranded troops in a guerilla-controlled jungle. Local indigenous residents now charge a “dirty war” is being carried out in the zone.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced by fighting in northern Mali and dozens have been subjected to arbitrary detention, extra-judicial executions or sexual violence including rape, Amnesty International reports.
An exorbitantly priced “Citibike” bicycle-sharing program named and colonized by Citibank is unveiled in New York—a perverse betrayal of the legacy of Amsterdam’s radical Provos, who pioneered the first bike-sharing initiative in 1967.
A federal judge strikes down provisions of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act in a legal challenge by Chris Hedges. But does the ruling protect journalists, while legitimizing indefinite detention of “advocates of violence”?
Mass arrests, incommunicado detentions and torture persist at Camp Honor, a prison in Iraq’s capital Baghdad that the Iraqi government promised to close last year, Human Rights Watch reports.
Venezuela is demanding the US extradite ex-supreme court judge Eladio Aponte to face drug trafficking charges. Aponte was flown to Miami by the DEA after he accused high-ranking Caracas officials of links to drug-trafficking.
Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike in Israeli facilities agreed to an Egyptian-brokered deal ending the strikes in exchange for improved conditions and a pledge to release the detainees at the end of their “administrative detention” terms.
