Seventy-six members of the Nukak-Makú, the last nomadic indigenous group in Colombia, including 27 children, arrived March 6 at the town of San José de Guaviare, on the edge of the Amazon rainforest. They arrived naked, exhausted and frightened, fleeing their home region of Tomachipán, some nine hours away by fast launch on the Rio Inírida. It is estimated they marched two months through the forest.

WW4 REPORT editor Bill Weinberg will be speaking Thursday, April 6 on New York's Lower East Side, on "International Solidarity with Iraq’s Freedom Struggles." The presentation will also include a screening of the new DVD Go Forward, Iraqi Freedom Congress!, produced by Japanese peace activsts and documenting the activities of a new anti-occupation civilian coalition in Iraq. Weinberg recently returned from a conference in Japan where he met with and interviewed leaders of the Iraqi Freedom Congress.

More than 500,000 people marched in Los Angeles on March 25 to demand legalization for out-of-status immigrants and protest anti-immigrant legislation being considered by the Senate. Police estimated the crowd size using aerial photographs and other techniques, police commander Louis Gray Jr. said. (AP, March 26) The LA demonstration was the largest of a wave of protests sweeping cities across the US, starting with Feb. 14 rallies and strikes in Philadelphia and Georgetown, Delaware, and energized by a massive March 10 rally in Chicago. According to a March 25 article by New American Media, more than 50 demonstrations took place over the previous few weeks, including in Minneapolis, Knoxville, Seattle, St. Louis, Portland (OR), Staten Island (NY) and Grand Rapids (MI).

The Colombian Attorney General's office suspended for 90 days retired army general Pablo A. Rodriguez and Col. Javier V. Hernández for failing to provide security for the village of San José de Apartadó, the self-declared "peace community" in the wartorn Urabá region of the country. The ruling said that the officials' actions left the community "vulnerable to illegal armed groups on several occasions."

From Reuters, March 30:

CANBERRA - An Indonesian cartoon depicting Australia's prime minister and foreign minister as fornicating dingoes was "grotesque", Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said on Thursday as bilateral tension flared with Jakarta.

From Earth First!, March 29:

Environmental Activists Jailed as Grand Jury Indictments Increase

San Francisco, CA—As attorneys argue in federal court in San Francisco on March 30 to quash a grand jury investigating a protest in San Francisco, activists point to current trends that use secret grand juries to carry out broad, politically-motivated sweeps of environmental and other activists around the country.

From the technology news site CNET, March 29:

Unmanned aerial vehicles have soared the skies of Afghanistan and Iraq for years, spotting enemy encampments, protecting military bases, and even launching missile attacks against suspected terrorists.

Some 15,000 people marched along Mexico City's Reforma avenue on March 16 to protest water privatization plans as the representatives of 140 countries met nearby for the opening of the 4th World Water Forum. "Water isn't for sale and won't be sold," the marchers chanted, denouncing all three major Mexican political parties for water policies that "degrade and profit from the suffering of the people." In 1993 the then-ruling centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) awarded a 30-year water concession in Cancun, Quintana Roo, to the French multinational now known as SUEZ, while the Federal District, governed by the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), recently signed a contract with the Mexican water bottler Bonafont, owned by the French multinational Groupe Danone. Mexican president Vicente Fox Quesada, of the center- right National Action Party (PAN), is the former head of Coca- Cola Mexico, which sells Agua Ciel brand bottled water. (Adital, March 17; Minga Informativa de Movimientos Sociales, March 22)