Voters chose Dilma Rousseff of the leftist Workers Party (PT) to be Brazil's 36th president in a runoff election on Oct. 31. Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE) president Ricardo Lewandowski said in a press conference in the early evening that Rousseff's victory was now mathematically certain. With 93.25% of the ballots counted, Rousseff had won 55.43% of the valid votes to 44.57% for José Serra of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB); the two candidates had led in the first round on Oct. 3. More than 93 million Brazilians participated in the Oct. 31 voting.

On Oct. 30 Mexico's Public Security Secretariat (SSP) announced that it had put two federal police agents "at the disposal" of Public Ministry officials investigating the shooting of a college student the evening before near the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez (UACJ) campus in the northern state of Chihuahua. José Darío Alvarez Orrantía, a sociology student at UACJ, was hit in the abdomen as dozens of students marched in the 11th Walk Against Death in Ciudad Juárez, an opening event in a three-day conference treating the dramatic surge in violence in northern Mexico. Alvarez Orrantía was reported in stable condition at the city's General Hospital after emergency surgery the night of Oct. 29 that included the removal of about one-third of his intestine.

Representatives of Honduran unions and grassroots movements agreed on Oct. 30 to schedule a series of actions over the next two weeks around four issues: the national minimum wage, a law suspending pay increases for teachers, restrictions on pay increases for other public employees, and proposed legislation to allow temporary work.

Hundreds of protesters marched on the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) military base at the city of Mirebalais in Haiti's Central Plateau on Oct. 29, charging that the Nepalese troops stationed there had caused a major outbreak of cholera. At least 330 people had died and 4,714 people had been hospitalized because of the disease as of Oct. 28, just eight days after the first cases were reported, mostly in Mirebalais and in the Lower Artibonite River region in the west. "Down with MINUSTAH, down with imported cholera," chanted the protesters, largely students and other youths.

Dr. Gabriel Timothée, the head of Haiti's Ministry of Public Health and Population (MSPP), announced on Oct. 23 that there were 208 confirmed deaths so far from a cholera epidemic that apparently broke out in the Lower Artibonite River region just a few days earlier. Of these, 194 deaths were in the western Artibonite region and 14 in Mirebalais in the Central Plateau, including three detainees in the Mirebalais prison. Fifty prisoners were infected, and a total of 288 people were hospitalized in Mirebalais; the number of people hospitalized in the northwest was 2,394. (Radio Kiskeya, Haiti, Oct. 23)

On Oct. 22 three Costa Rican environmental activists marked two weeks on hunger strike against the projected Las Crucitas open-pit gold mine in San Carlos in the north of the country. Some 14 activists from two organizations, the North Front Against Mining and the Not One Mine Coordinating Committee, began the action on Oct. 8 in an encampment in front of the Presidential Residence in San José. Most of the 14 ended their fast for medical reasons but continued to support the three remaining strikers.

Thousands of Argentines rallied in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires on Oct. 21 to protest the killing of the student Mariano Ferreyra during a demonstration the day before. Ferreyra, a member of the Trotskyist Workers Party (PO), was shot in the chest in what appeared to be a clash between armed members of the Railroad Workers Union (UF) and temporary workers demanding that laid-off workers get permanent employment with the Roca Railroad, which was privatized in the 1990s. Three others were wounded in the incident, one seriously. There were reports that the police did nothing to stop the supposed UF members when they attacked the protesters.

Two unidentified men shot and killed Catarino Torres Pereda, general secretary of the Citizen Defense Committee (Codeci), at the indigenous rights group's office in Tuxtepec in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca on the afternoon of Oct. 22. The murderers escaped in a car waiting for them nearby. In the evening members of Codeci and other organizations protested the assassination with a demonstration at the Alameda de León plaza in the city of Oaxaca, the state capital.