Sendero Luminoso guerillas scored two attacks on army “counter-terrorist bases” in as many weeks, leaving one solider dead and one wounded. One attack was in Huancavelica, far outside Sendero’s usual jungle territory.
Bolivian police used tear gas, pepper spray and blasts from a water cannon mounted on an armored vehicle against protesters at the camp established by the Ninth Indigenous March just off Plaza Murillo in central La Paz.
With Peru’s northern Cajamarca region under a state of emergency, police again fired on protesters in a rural town, leaving one dead. Protest leader Marco Arana was meanwhile arrested and beaten in the regional capital.
Three people were killed—including a youth of 17 years—when National Police and army troops fired on protesters opposing the US-backed Conga gold mine project in Peru’s northern region of Cajamarca.
Under a new pact, Iran is to provide counter-narcotics aid and training to Bolivian forces. Bolivia meanwhile credits Brazilian reconnaissance drones for recent strikes against narco-traffickers in the country’s lowland east.
Aymara communal peasants in Bolivia’s Potosí 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.
