Ecuador's National Assembly on Jan. 7 approved a new Law on Rural Lands and Ancestral Territories by a vote of 98 in favor, three against and 23 abstentions. Celebrating the law's passage, National Assembly president Gabriela Rivadeneira said, "The land must belong to those who work it." The law instates incentives for land to be used productively, and allows for the expropriation of idle estates. It creates a National Land Authority to redistribute plots among rural families and small and medium producers, provide credit and technical assistance, build irrigation infrastructure, and oversee conflict resolution. Carlos Viteri, president of the National Assembly's Specialized Permanent Committee for Biodiversity and member of the ruling PAIS Alliance, hailed the law as "a symbol of the transformation of the country." Viteri, an indigenous Kichwa leader from the Amazon region, added that the reform will eliminate the legacy of previous land laws, which allowed a few families to concentrate ownership at the expense of campesinos and small farmers. 

Riot police fired rubber bullets and tear-gas at protesting public-sector workers recently laid off by budget cuts in Argentina's La Plata municipality on Jan. 8, with several left wounded. The workers were protesting a decision by local mayor Julio Garro that canceled 4,500 contracts on Dec. 31. The country's new right-wing President Mauricio Macri's administration has laid off 10,000 public-sector workers since the beginning of 2016. In his one month since taking office, he has signed 29 Necessity and Urgency Decrees (DNUs) intended to institute structural reform and reverse the legacy of his center-left predecssor  Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. The mass lay offs have affected workers throughout Argentina and more are expected. (La Nación, TeleSur, Revolution News, Jan. 8; Perfil, Jan. 3)

Ecuador will make a $1 billion payment to US oil giant Occidental Petroleum following a settlement on terms of a World Bank arbitration panel, President Rafael Correa announced Jan. 9. The International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) initially ordered Ecuador to pay the company $1.77 billion plus interest in the 2012 ruling. Correa in his weekly media address said that his government had succeeded in negotiating the sum down significantly. In his radio address, Correa said that in "a good faith gesture" Ecuador made an initial payment last month of 100 million dollars, and set up a schedule to complete payment of the balance by April. "We signed an agreement with Oxy yesterday and we have settled the matter in an amiable way," he said.

As officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) launched a new wave of deportations of Central American migrants who entered the US illegally over the past two years, protests against the government action were carried out across the country. Dozensoccupied the intersection outside the Immigration Court on Varick Street in Lower Manhattan on Jan. 8, with seven arrested. An action was also held outside the West County Detention facility in Richmond, Calif., days earlier. At the close of the Jan. 2-3 weekend, 121 adults and children had been taken into custody in Georgia, Texas and North Carolina, according to Jeh Johnson, head of the Homeland Security Department, who warned of thousands more to be deported within the next weeks because they have exhausted their legal appeals. Johnson added that the number of people trying to cross the border illegally has begun to climb again in recent months—despite just over than 330,000 migrants having been apprehended in 2015, the second-lowest number in more than four decades.

Colombian prosecutors will seek to charge some 1,500 civilians with conflict-related crimes allegedly committed by guerilla groups like the FARC, which is currently negotiating peace with the government. The civilians are all suspected of having either ordered or taken part in crimes like homicide, kidnapping, extortion and forced displacement carried out by  leftist guerilla groups during Colombia’s more than 50-year-long armed conflict. Vice-Prosecutor General Jorge Fernando Perdomo said the civilians were incriminated by demobilized guerrillas of the FARC, ELN, EPL, ERG and ERP. In total, the transitional justice tribunal that will be put in place if peace is reached between the FARC and the administration of President Juan Manuel Santos will prosecute tens of thousands of people allegedly involved in war crimes or crimes related to the conflict.

Prosecutors in Guatemala on Jan. 6 announced the arrest of 14 former military and government officials for alleged crimes against humanity committed during the country's 1960-1996 civil war. Among the detained is Benedicto Lucas García, chief of the army High Command under the rule of his late brother, ex-dictator Fernando Romeo Lucas García, between 1978 and 1982. Also detained were retired Gen. Francisco Luis Gordillo, who helped bring José Efrain Rios Montt to power in the coup that toppled Lucas García in 1982, and Byron Barrientos, who was interior minister during the 2000-2004 presidency of Alfonso Portillo. "The cases that we have documented were [attacks] against the non-combatant civilian population including children," the country's chief proscutor Thelma Aldana said, asserting that they were among "the largest forced disappearances in Latin America."

Israeli forces on Jan. 6 demolished five dwellings housing Palestinian Bedouin families in the Abu Nuwwar community east of Jerusalem—part of the wider E1 corridor—leaving 25 people homeless. Dawood al-Jahalin, a spokesperson for the Abu Nuwwar Bedouin community, told Ma'an News Agency that Israeli military and police vehicles surrounded the area at around 8:30 AM, before bulldozers demolished five dwellings and an agricultural structure. The families were not given any time to remove their belongings before the dwellings—made of steel, wood, and canvas—were torn down, he said. "I showed them a court decision banning demolition, but the officer in charge refused to see it and instead told me he had a demolition order from the Civil Administration," al-Jahalin said.

A Kashmir-based militant coalition, the United Jihad Council, claimed responsibility for an attack on the Indian air force base at Pathankot, which has left five militants and seven soldiers dead in three days of fighting. The attack on Pathankot—in northern Punjab state, near the borders with both Jammu & Kashmir state and Pakistan—is seen as an attempt to derail recent peace moves by India and Pakistan. The attack came about a week after a surprise visit by India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi to his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif—the first Islamabad visit by an Indian premier in 12 years.