Aymara communal peasants in Bolivia’s PotosĂ department, seized two engineers at the local Malku Khota mining operation, to press their demand for the release of their leader Cancio Rojas, who was arrested last month.
A “humanitarian caravan” arrived in Colombia’s Cauca department, bringing aid to hundreds of campesinos who have been maintaining a protest encampment to prevent the military from establishing a new base.
The government of Peru’s President Ollanta Humala opened a new investigation into anti-mine protest leaders in Cajamarca. But protesters responded by holding a mock funeral for the president on his 50th birthday.
In a second day of mobilization, some 20,000 informal gold miners filled the streets of Puno in southern Peru, demanding that the regional government support their demands for “free sale” of gold.
Alexander Fernández and two other leaders of the Yukpa indigenous movement for land recovery in Venezuela’s Zulia state were killed by sicarios, or hired assassins. Two other Yukpa leaders were killed weeks earlier.
Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa, at a meeting in Quito with a delegation of the US-based activist group SOA Watch, made the announcement that Ecuador is ceasing to send soldiers to the School of the Americas.
The Ninth Indigenous March, now camped at Yolosa on the edge of the Bolivian Altiplano, held a celebration of the Aymara New Year festival, Willkakuti or “Return of the Sun”—marking year 5520 in the Aymara calendar.
One protester was gravely hurt as police attacked a demonstration against the planned Conga gold mine project in Peru’s northern city of Cajamarca. President Humala meanwhile plugs a “new mining” policy at the Rio summit.
A mutiny by National Police officers demanding higher wages spread across Bolivia, as mineral giant Glencore International protested the government’s decision to nationalize the Colquiri zinc and tin mine.
Will Julian Assange protest restrictions on press freedoms in Ecuador? Is Sweden any more likely to extradite him to the US than Britain? Will he come clean on WikiLeaks’ collaboration with the Belarus dictatorship?
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad arrived in Bolivia for his third visit with President Evo Morales—a champion of Latin America’s indigenous peoples who has nothing to say about Iran’s oppression and persecution of the Kurds.
A US prosecutor has filed drug trafficking charges against retired Colombian police general Mauricio Santoyo Velasco—who was former President Alvaro Uribe’s security chief from 2002 to 2006.
