On Jan. 10 the World Bank's Office of the Compliance Adviser Ombudsman (CAO) released a report criticizing the process through which the bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) granted a $30 million loan in 2009 to the Honduran-based food-product company Corporación Dinant. An audit that the CAO started in April 2012 found that the IFC failed to apply its own ethical standards in issuing the loan, which is to be used in part for growing African oil palms in the Aguán Valley in northern Honduras. The Aguán's largest landowner is Dinant’s founder, the politically well-connected cooking oil magnate Miguel Facussé Barjum. Producing palm oil has become highly profitable, since the oil can be used both for food and as biofuel.

Six workers at the One World Apparel S.A. garment assembly plant in the north of Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, were given notices of dismissal on Jan. 8, four weeks after workers shut down production in the city’s apparel sector with Dec. 10 and Dec. 11 protests demanding a daily minimum wage of 500 gourdes (about US$12.08). The fired workers--Jude Pierre, Luckner Louis, Deroy Jean Baptiste, Paul René Pierre, Jean Luvard Exavier and Rubin Mucial—are all on the executive committee of the Textile and Garment Workers Union (SOTA), a member union in the Collective of Textile Union Organizations (KOSIT), the labor alliance that led the December protests.

Division and confusion marred Dec. 16 celebrations by Haiti's Lavalas Family (FL) party in Port-au-Prince to commemorate the 23rd anniversary of the overwhelming 1990 electoral victory of the party's founder, former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide (1991-1996, 2001-2004). Hundreds of FL supporters marched from the site of the St. Jean Bosco church, where Aristide served as a priest in the 1980s, to the Jean Aristide Foundation in the northeastern suburb of Tabarre. But participants reported that when party coordinator Maryse Narcisse tried to speak, she was drowned out by supporters of Senator Moïse Jean-Charles and Deputy Arnel Bélizaire, two populist members of Haiti's Parliament. Following a dispute over planning for a November demonstration, the FL executive committee announced Dec. 2 that the party "protests with all its might against any public declaration" from Jean-Charles and Bélizaire, describing them as "some people who present themselves as Lavalas Family members."

Scores of Puerto Rican teachers briefly occupied the Senate chamber in San Juan on Dec. 19 to protest legislation proposed by Gov. Alejandro García Padilla to change the retirement and pension system for the island’s teachers. After scuffling with Capitol building employees, the chanting teachers, many wearing yellow T-shirts, pushed their way into the chamber, forcing the 16 senators present to move to another room. Protests continued at the Capitol throughout the week, with teachers and police clashing outside the building on Dec. 21. Despite the actions, both chambers of the Legislative Assembly narrowly voted to pass the bill—the House of Representatives on Dec. 21 by a vote of 26 to 20 and the Senate on Dec. 23 by a vote of 14 to 13.

The New York-based nonprofit Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO) announced on Jan. 6 that the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has recommended ending the group’s 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. Founded in 1967 by the late Rev. Lucius Walker, IFCO is the first national foundation in the US controlled by people of color. It is probably best known as the sponsor of Pastors for Peace, which for the past 22 years has organized the US-Cuba Friendshipment Caravan, an annual shipment of humanitarian aid to Cuba; Pastors for Peace has also provided such aid for Nicaragua, Haiti and other countries.

Haitian garment workers walked off their jobs in Port-au-Prince on the morning of Dec. 10, International Human Rights Day, starting off three days of strikes and marches for a higher minimum wage. The protests were in response to the Nov. 29 recommendation by the newly formed Higher Council on Wages (CSS) setting a minimum wage of 225 gourdes (US$5.44) a day for the country's 24 apparel factories—tax-exempt plants, known in Latin America as maquiladoras, which assemble products for export to North America. With hundreds of participants—or thousands, according to some sources—the actions were the largest demonstrations by assembly workers since August 2009.

Some 60 families left homeless by the earthquake that devastated southern Haiti in January 2010 were evicted from their improvised shelters in the vast Canaan camp a few kilometers north of Port-au-Prince on Dec. 7. According to residents, the removal was carried out—without an eviction order—by a justice of the peace and 17 police agents. The authorities were accompanied by a group of men armed with machetes and clubs who tore down homes, stole residents' belongings and assaulted more than a dozen people. Another 100 families were told they would be evicted later.

The Mexican Chamber of Deputies voted 353-134 on Dec. 12 to approve a series of constitutional amendments providing the groundwork for President Enrique Peña Nieto's controversial "energy reform." The Chamber's vote completed the amendments' passage through Congress, since the Senate had approved the measures on Dec. 10. The required ratification of the changes by 17 of the 32 state legislatures is considered certain, since the main sponsors of the "reform," the governing centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the center-right National Action Party (PAN), dominate the majority of state legislatures.