In his tour of Mexico's northern state of Sonora, Zapatista Subcommander Marcos made public the existence of "forced labor camps," where mostly indigenous migrant laborers from Chiapas, Oaxaca, Guerrero and southern Veracruz live in "inhuman conditions" and "virtual slavery."

Thousands of people marched in San Juan, Puerto Rico on Oct. 8 to demand the release of four Puerto Rican political prisoners being held in US jails. Oscar Lopez Rivera, Carlos Alberto Torres and Haydee Beltran Torres have been jailed for over 25 years; they were arrested in the early 1980s for alleged involvement in the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN), a pro-independence group. Lopez Rivera, Torres and Beltran are serving stiff sentences for "seditious conspiracy" and other charges: 55 years, 78 years and life in prison, respectively. Jose Perez Gonzalez is serving a five-year sentence for acts of vandalism during the May 1, 2003 celebration marking the US Navy's departure from the Puerto Rican island of Vieques.

Paraguayan foreign minister Ruben Ramirez announced on Oct. 2 that in 2007 Paraguay will stop granting US troops immunity from prosecution. The change in policy is an effort to coordinate policies with the other member nations in the Mercosur economic bloc--Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and most recently Venezuela.

Late on Oct. 4, Julian Andres Hurtado Castillo was shot to death outside his home in the Las Granjas neighborhood of the Colombian city of Cali, in Valle del Cauca department. The killers--apparently paid professionals--were a man and a woman who approached on foot and killed Hurtado with a single shot to the head before fleeing in a public service vehicle. The taxi driver who had just dropped Hurtado off at the residence picked him back up and rushed him to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead. On Oct. 6, students held a funeral march for Hurtado through the streets of Cali. The local student association blames rightwing paramilitary groups for the murder.

In a class-action lawsuit filed on Sept. 25, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Southern California, the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project and the Stanford Law School Immigrants' Rights Clinic charged that ICE routinely holds immigrants longer than six months in defiance of the Supreme Court's June 2001 ruling in Zadvydas v. Davis. "These people have been kept away from their families, their communities and their lives for years--without even a hearing to determine if their prolonged detention is justified," said ACLU staff attorney Ahilan Arulanantham.

After a heated all-night assembly, on the morning of Oct. 22 delegates of 70,000 teachers in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca voted down a proposal to end a strike that has paralyzed the capital city, also named Oaxaca, for five months. At the beginning of the assembly, Enrique Rueda Pacheco, general secretary of Section 22 of the National Education Workers Union (SNTE), announced that in a membership consultation held Oct. 19-20, teachers had voted 26,000 to 15,000 to accept an agreement negotiated with the federal Governance Secretariat (interior ministry) and return to teaching on Oct. 30. But union delegates charged that the voting was "rigged" because of the way the questions were presented, and decided to hold a new consultation Oct. 23-24. Many denounced Rueda as a "sellout" and "traitor." Anger at Rueda is so intense that he tried to slip into the assembly through a back entrance while wearing dark glasses. (Reuters, Oct. 22; La Jornada, Oct. 21, 22)

On Oct. 20 Raul Ojeda Zubieta, center-left candidate for governor of the southern Mexican state of Tabasco, charged in a press conference that Andres Granier Melo, candidate for the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), had won in the Oct. 14 state election through the "manipulation and addition" of 89,689 votes. Demanding a recount, Ojeda said that in addition to buying votes and stuffing ballot boxes, the PRI had conspired with other parties, principally the center-right National Action Party (PAN), to shift votes from their candidates to Granier to give him his margin of victory. (La Jornada, Oct. 21)

The Permanent Human Rights Assembly (APDH) of Ecuador is protesting the Oct. 15 killing of two Ecuadoran campesinos by the Colombian armed forces. Blanca Vega and her son Hector Monar were traveling by boat along the San Miguel river en route to vote at their polling place when they were shot to death by Colombian troops. In Bogota, Gen. Freddy Padilla, commander of Colombia's military forces, claimed the two were "insurgents" traveling in "guerrilla" boats and were killed in an armed confrontation. (APDH, Oct. 18 via Resumen Latinoamericano)