A state of emergency has been declared in Ecuador as the National Police launched a rebellion over cuts to their benefits. President Rafael Correa, who was assaulted by police, warned of a coup attempt.
The Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, located in the Urabá region of northwestern Colombia, charged that right-wing paramilitaries are continuing to attack and threaten its members.
A general strike shut down the Peruvian highland city of Cusco after police repression of campesino protests against the mega-scale Majes-Siguas II irrigation project left one dead.
Top FARC commander Jorge Briceño Suárez AKA “Mono Jojoy” was killed in an airborne raid by Colombian government forces in the latest blow against the guerilla organization.
A Los Alamos scientist and his wife have been indicted for conspiring to sell nuclear weapons information to an individual they believed worked for the Venezuelan government.
Colombia’s Mobile Anti-Riot Squad (ESMAD), backed up by two armored personnel carriers, invaded the campus of the University of Antioquia in Medellín, battling student protesters.
Quito’s Foreign Minister Ricardo Patiño said that the dramatic attack by FARC guerillas on the border town of San Miguel in Colombia’s Putumayo department was not launched from Ecuador.
Twelve people were injured when a bomb went off in front of the local office of the Administrative Security Department (DAS), Colombia’s secret police agency, in the southern city of Pasto.
The US military pact with Colombia that would open seven bases in the country to the Pentagon faces an uncertain future following a ruling of the Andean nation’s Constitutional Court.
Georgetown University announced that former Colombian president and accused war criminal Álvaro Uribe will be named a “distinguished scholar in the practice of global leadership.”
Gilberto Valencia, a young Afro-Colombian cultural worker, became 2019's first casualty of political violence in Colombia, when a gunman opened fire on a New Years party he was attending in his village in Cauca region. As the death toll from around the country mounted over the following weeks, the UN Mission to Colombia warned President Iván Duque that he must address "the issue of the assassinations of social leaders and human rights defenders." Colombia's official rights watchdog, the Defensoría del Pueblo, acknowledges that there was an assassination on average every two days in the country last year—a total of 172, and a rise of more than 35% over 2017. (Photo via Caracol Radio)
Trump, the great enthusiast for dictators, suddenly develops a touching concern with democracy in Venezuela, grasping at the opportunity for long-sought regime change. Predictably overlooked in the world media's Manichean view of the crisis are voices of Venezuela's dissident left that takes a neither/nor position opposed to both the regime and the right-wing leadership of the opposition. Also unheard are voices of indigenous dissent and resistance. In an episode that received little coverage, December saw protests in the remote Orinoco Basin after a leader of the Pemón indigenous people was killed in a confrontation with elite Military Counterintelligence troops. The military operation was ostensibly aimed at clearing the region of illegal mining—while the Pemón themselves had been protesting the mining. The indigenous leaders view the militarization of the region as intended to make way for corporate exploitation under the Orinoco Mineral Arc plan. (Photo: EcoPolitica Venezuela)
