Labor ministry inspectors from the Argentine national government and the Buenos Aires provincial government said they found 199 farm workers in conditions close to slavery during raids carried out at the end of December and the beginning of January on estates in the area of San Pedro, about 100 kilometers west of the national capital. The inspectors said 130 of the laborers, including some 30 children and adolescents, were producing for the Dutch-based multinational Nidera, and 69 were producing for the Argentine company Southern Seeds Production SA; the workers appear to have been subcontracted through temporary agencies.

Criticism of both the Haitian government and the international community continues to mount as the Jan. 12 anniversary of Haiti's devastating 2010 earthquake approaches. The quake killed as many as 250,000 people and destroyed much of Port-au-Prince and other cities in southern and western Haiti, leaving more than 1.5 million people homeless. One year later the majority of the displaced still live in improvised shelters without proper nutrition, sanitation or medical care.

On Jan. 6 United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon announced the names of the four experts who will serve on a panel to investigate the causes of the cholera epidemic that broke out in Haiti in mid-October. The panel will be headed by Dr Alejandro Craviolo, a Mexican who works with the International Center for Diarrhoeal Diseases Research in Bangladesh; the Peruvian Claudio Lanata, a researcher at the Nutritional Research Institute in Lima; US national Daniele Lantagne, who works at Harvard University; and Indian national Balakrish Nair, director of the National Institute of Cholera & Enteric Diseases in Kolkata (Calcutta).

As of Jan. 7 it was still unclear when or whether the second round of Haiti's controversial Nov. 28 presidential and legislative elections would take place. A runoff was originally scheduled for Jan. 16 but has been postponed indefinitely as a result of charges that political groups, including the Unity party of President René Préval, compromised the voting through fraud. A 12-member technical team from the Organization of American States (OAS) was in Port-au-Prince analyzing the voting results and was expected to issue a report early in the week of Jan. 10 on the validity of the elections.

On Dec. 10 the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) bureau announced that it expects to start repatriating Haitian immigrants with criminal records in January, ending a temporary suspension of all deportations of Haitians that the US imposed after an earthquake hit Port-au-Prince and other parts of southern Haiti last January.

One protester was killed on Dec. 18 and three were arrested when Haitian police dispersed hundreds of residents demanding that the authorities close down a dump near the Duvivier neighborhood in Port-au-Prince's impoverished Cité Soleil section. The victim was identified as "Robin Raymond" or "Ramon Robert," the owner of a hardware store.

Honduran police, soldiers and private guards injured three campesinos and detained 12 on Dec. 15 during an attempt to evict a family from their home in Coyolito community on the Zacate Grande peninsula, Valle department, on the stretch of Pacific coast in the southwestern part of the country. The order for the Hernández family's eviction was based on a default on a mortgage held by the London-based HSBC multinational bank, but José Luis Hernández insisted that his family owned the house and that the person who took out the mortgage had never lived there. Coyolito residents responded to the eviction attempt by blocking a road. Among the detained were two reporters from La Voz de Zacate Grande, a local community radio station.

Mexican president Felipe Calderón Hinojosa has been trying to "repair" relations with Venezuela, according to an Oct. 27, 2008 US diplomatic cable obtained by the WikiLeaks group and posted by the Spanish daily El País on Dec. 18, but there are tensions because the two countries are both "looking to assert [their] leadership in the region, particularly in Central America."