After dodging prison terms for murdering campesinos and protecting drug lords, US-trained Gen. Acosta Chaparro is gunned down by an unknown assailant at a Mexico City auto shop.
Eight indigenous Purépecha were shot dead near the autonomous community of Cherán in Michoacán, the center of a year-long struggle to protect local forests from illegal loggers.
The Argentine government moves to take control of 51% of the shares in YPF SA, the country’s largest oil company—with the support of the politicians who privatized it 20 years ago.
More than 3,500 Honduran campesino families occupied land in estates in different parts of the country to demand implementation of an effective national agrarian reform policy.
Campesino groups around the world planned arches and land occupations to mark the International Day of Campesino Struggles, demanding agrarian reform and an end to land-grabbing by rich landowners.
Special Rapporteur on Rights of Indigenous Peoples James Anaya will visit the United States to launch the UN’s first ever investigation into the rights situation of Native Americans, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians.
President Ollanta Humala boasted a new “expert review” of the controversial Conga gold mine project in Peru’s northern Cajamarca region, but regional president Gregorio Santos charged Humala is “on his knees” before corporate power.
Amid rival protests for and against re-opening the idled US-owned metal smelter at La Oroya in the Peruvian Andes—one of the 10 most polluted spots on Earth—the owners are suing Peru’s government for violating terms of the FTA.
Supposed ecological crusader and Avatar creator James Cameron, along with Google heavies Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, is among the “investor and advisor group” of Planetary Resources Inc—which aims to start mining the asteroids.
Weeks after Tuareg rebels seized the northern half of the country (with its precious uranium deposits) no move has been made by Mali’s government to try to take it back—a sign that the state has in fact collapsed.
UN aid agencies in the occupied West Bank protested that Israel destroyed 21 homes of Palestinian Bedouin refugees at Khalayleh north of East Jerusalem—leaving 54 people homeless, including 35 children.
China and Russia team up for joint maneuvers in the East China Sea, while the US and Philippines do the same in the South China Sea. The drills follow confrontations in the South China Sea between Chinese, Philippine and Vietnamese forces.
