Paraguay’s President Fernando Lugo fired the head of the armed forces two days after he sacked the commanders of the army, navy and air force amid rumors of a coup.
The trial of Argentina’s last military ruler, Reynaldo Bignone, opened this week at a Buenos Aires sports arena, attended by hundreds of relatives of his victims from the “dirty war” years.
Two weeks after Rio de Janeiro won the 2016 Olympics, the Brazilian city was rocked by an intense gun battle that left 12 dead and a Military Police helicopter in flames.
Argentina’s former President Carlos Menem was charged with obstructing an investigation into the 1994 bombing of the Argentine Jewish Mutual Aid Association (AMIA) in Buenos Aires.
Spanish police arrested former Argentine military pilot Juan Alberto Poch on charges that he flew “death flights” in which some 1,000 dissidents were thrown from planes into the sea.
Striking subway workers in Buenos Aires opened the turnstiles for two hours, letting commuters ride for free.
Jaime Mendoza Collío, shot by police in the community of Angol in the southern Chilean region of Araucanía, marks the third indigenous activist killed since the restoration of democracy in 1990.
A judge in Chile has charged an ex-soldier in the 1973 murder of folk singer Víctor Jara. Up to now, the only man prosecuted in the case was the commander at the prison camp where Jara was shot.
A Lebanese man held in Brazil for three weeks for posting anti-US comments on the Internet is not a member of al-Qaeda, as one Brazilian newspaper reported, federal prosecutors said.
An Argentine district attorney requested an international arrest warrant for a Colombian suspected of plotting the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires with Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
A Brazilian cattle-ranching company is seeking permission from Paraguay’s government to destroy forest inhabited by one of the world’s last uncontacted tribes.
In Latin America, as in much of the world, the traditional May Day marches this year focused on the global economic crisis and especially on the unemployment rate—approaching 10% in many areas.
