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)

Could someone possibly please explain what this one is all about? A rather opinionated report from the right-libertarian Liberty Forum, Oct. 20:

Thessalonica - The Greek Government will move, as early as this weekend, to have armed police forcibly remove the monks of the Holy and Sacred Monastery of Esphigmenou from their monastery property. Over 150 police have been deployed on Mt. Athos, an unprecedented number in a community entirely populated by peaceful and defenseless monks.

Our friend Ivo Skoric of the Balkans Pages interviewed WW4 REPORT Editor Bill Weinberg via e-mail last weekend for the Croatian alternative e-zine H-Alter, as the first in a series of interviews with American left-wing bloggers. The interveiw appears in both English and Croatian:

From the Washington Post, Oct. 20:

Court Told It Lacks Power in Detainee Cases
Moving quickly to implement the bill signed by President Bush this week that authorizes military trials of enemy combatants, the administration has formally notified the U.S. District Court here that it no longer has jurisdiction to consider hundreds of habeas corpus petitions filed by inmates at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.

The recently created Honduran anti-delinquency task force Operación Trueno [Operation Thunder] proved critics fears on October 12, when a member of the force shot and killed an innocent citizen Henry Esaú García Fuentes, 25 years old. Fuentes ran away from soldiers who were demanding to talk to him and was shot twice in the back. The soldier who shot Fuentes, against police orders, was identified only by the last name Palma Aguilar in the warrant for his discipline. The mother of the victim, Bertilia Fuentes, requested better military training for force members: "I know that nobody will give my son's life back to me, I can only tell the competent authorities that they must educate the personnel that they send on these operations, that they can't send inexperienced people because what they are going to do is take innocent lives. They need to educate people because, in the same way my son died, many innocent people have died, and if they continue this way, it's going to keep happening."

Two thousand people from the National Forum for the Defense of the Sustainability and Right to Water marched in El Salvador's capital Oct. 18 against privatization and for universal access to quality water. Members of labor, environmental, women's, religious and community groups from throughout the country gathered downtown at the Rio Acelhuate, where San Salvador pumps its sewage. The music, presentations and popular theater all resonated with the main message of the protest: water is a public and social resource and the government's responsibility is to administrate the resource in an integral and sustainable manner – not make it a source of profit for private corporations.