As popular organizations called a one-day general strike July 9 to protest rising food and fuel prices, Peru's President Alan García accused leftist opponents of plotting to overthrow him. "What we are seeing is a conspiracy that is underway," García told reporters. Protesters filled the streets of cities across the country, halting traffic and shutting down rail access to Machu Picchu, Peru's top tourist destination. "They want to attack the democratic system...and take power by force," García said.

US authorities could demand the extradition of two FARC guerilla leaders arrested by Colombian commandos during their rescue of 15 hostages, Justice Department officials said July 7. FARC leaders Gerardo Antonio Aguilar Ramírez AKA "César" and Alexander Farfán Suarez AKA "Enrique Gafas", were indicted by a US federal court in May 2006, on charges of belonging to a terrorist organization and of holding hostages. The US also holds them personally responsible for kidnapping three US contractors, who were freed in the Colombian military operation after five years in captivity.

The Matsés, a tribe of 2,500 people in the remote Peruvian Amazon, have rejected plans by the Peruvian government to explore for oil on their land. The government has created five exploration "lots" overlapping Matsés territory, and signed deals opening them to two companies, Pacific Stratus Energy and Occidental Oil & Gas of Peru. "No adequate process of consultation was carried out during the creation of these lots, not as the lots were being auctioned, nor when the contracts were signed between the oil companies and the Peruvian government," said a statement from Matsés Council. "This is in clear contravention of the International Labor Organization's Convention 169 and the United Nations' Declaration of Indigenous Peoples' Rights."

Uncontacted indigenous peoples in the Peruvian Amazon are being killed and having their houses burned to the ground by illegal loggers, according a statement from the International Indigenous Committee for the Protection of Peoples in Voluntary Isolation (CIPIACI). The loggers have invaded the Murunahua Territorial Reserve, a remote area near the Brazilian border set aside in 1997 for uncontacted indigenous peoples, and built an illegal network of roads, the statement charges.

In the concluding event of ten days of anti-G8 protests, hundreds of activists from protest camps established in the area of the summit marched in a demonstration organized by the Ainu, the disenfranchised indigenous people of Hokkaido Island. The march was surrounded by several rows of police the entire time. Protesters held signs in English and Japanese reading "No G8" and "Japan is a police state." (Media G8way, July 9)

Police discovered the tortured and burned bodies of six men in an empty lot in Tijuana July 7, bringing the total found over the weekend to 11—including the corpse of a woman found in a barrel. The three-day tally pushed the city's death toll this year to more than 260, compared with about 152 homicides at this time last year. Authorities are just beginning to identify the bodies, and so far confirm speculation the deceased were involved in the drug traffic. Some of the victims' heads were wrapped in plastic, and a body found July 7 in the Tijuana River bore signs of torture and was wrapped in a carpet.

The families of two girls from Matamoros who drowned in the Rio Grande held a protest in the Mexican border city last month after authorities across the river in Brownsville, TX, ruled the death of a third girl in the incident, Yadira Jazmine Hernández, 13, an accident. At the foot of the international bridge linking the two cities June 12, the parents of victims Nayeli Martínez and Marlene Pérez García, both 14, held placards calling for the Mexican consul in Brownsville to intervene in the case. Guadalupe Martínez Reyes, mother of Nayeli, demanded a timely autopsy on the two remaining victims, who were found on the Mexican side, and that Matamoros authorities take a clear stance in the case. "They close and open the case every minute, and we really don't know what's going on," she said.

On June 30 El Heraldo de León, a newspaper based in León in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, released two graphic videotapes showing police agents from León's Special Tactical Group (GET) torturing other agents during training sessions. The victims, who had reportedly volunteered, were subjected to a practice known as the tehuacanazo, in which mineral water is forced up the nose, and were threatened with the pocito, in which the subject's head is submerged in excrement. In one scene, a trainee collapses and throws up; another agent then pushes him into his own vomit.