Walter Aduviri, leader of the Aymara protest movement in Peru’s southern Andean region of Puno, is under siege in the studios of Lima’s Panamericana TV station, with police surrounding the building to carry out arrest orders.
After a suspension to allow for presidential elections to take place in the Puno region, local Aymara activists announced that they will resume their strike civil strike indefinitely, and immediately erected roadblocks on the main highway to Bolivia.
Ana Fabricia Córdoba, a leader of displaced Afro-Colombians seeking return of their usurped lands, was slain by an unidentified gunman on a city bus in Medellín. Her daughters received a phone threat that they would “end up the same way.”
Ecuador sent the army into jungles along the Colombian border to crack down on illegal small-scale mining operations—as the government moved ahead with new mining contracts with industry majors.
Peruvian voters elected the fiery populist Ollanta Humala to the presidency, dealing a defeat to neoliberal candidate Keiko Fujimori—and precipitating a plunge in the Lima stock market.
A federal court in Florida issued a ruling in the case in re Chiquita Brands, allowing lawsuits brought by some 4,000 Colombians seeking compensation for violence by armed groups the company backed to move ahead.
Hugo Chávez and the US State Department alike denied claims touted by neocon think-tanks that Iran is establishing missile bases in Venezuela. But the State Department sanctioned Venezuela’s state oil company for aiding Iran’s energy sector.
Thousands of Aymara protesters took over the city of Puno, demanding an end to a Canadian silver mining project. Peasants from the Bolivian side of the lake have joined the barricades, and the city remains shut down.
Colombia’s mineral code was struck down by the supreme court, citing insufficient protection for indigenous rights. But ecologists fear new environmental protection provisions could be left out of the new bill.
Colombia passed a Victims and Land Restitution Law to compensate victims of the armed conflict. Yet paramilitary terror continues to claim lives across the country as peasants mobilize to reclaim usurped lands.
Ecuador and Bolivia have joined Peru in a regional bloc to regain lands and waters lost to Chile in the 1879-83 War of the Pacific. A case against Chile is pending at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
Hugo Chávez is playing it cool over a report by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies accusing him of collaboration with the FARC guerillas—but Venezuela’s UK embassy dismissed it as a “dodgy dossier.”
