On Oct. 12 Colombian university students proceeded with plans announced in September to carry out an open-ended strike against proposed changes to the education system that they say will lead to privatization. A total of 32 public universities have gone on strike, according to the Broad National Student Panel (MANE), a national coordinating group, which has called for weekly demonstrations in support of the strike, including a special national mobilization at all public universities on Oct. 26.

About 50 Chilean students and their supporters took over a congressional budget subcommittee's meeting in Santiago on Oct. 20 to demand that the government hold a binding plebiscite on their demands. A massive student movement has paralyzed universities and secondary schools for nearly six months around calls for reversing the privatization and decentralization of the education system that started during the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Various polls show about 80% of the population supporting the students' demands, which won some 87% of the more than one million votes case in a nonbinding grassroots plebiscite students and teachers held Oct. 7-9.

Haitian activists marched in Port-au-Prince on Oct. 19 to demand the immediate withdrawal of the thousands of foreign soldiers and police agents in the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH); they also called for the United Nations to pay compensation for the country's current cholera epidemic. The organizers chose Oct. 19 for the protest to mark one year since the outbreak started, apparently because of poor sanitary conditions among Nepalese troops at a MINUSTAH base near Mirebalais in the Central Plateau.

Just as opposition to neoliberal economic policies was generating new protests around the world, on Oct. 12 the US Congress passed long-delayed neoliberal free trade agreements (FTAs, or TLCs in Spanish) with Colombia, South Korea and Panama. The three agreements were negotiated by the administration of former US president George W. Bush (2001-2009); the Colombia FTA was signed in 2006, and the Korea and Panama FTAs were signed in 2007. But approval by Congress was delayed because of partisan maneuvering and the unpopularity of previous agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Many Democrats and US labor leaders opposed the Colombia pact because of continuing murders of unionists in the South American country.

Latin America's protests on the Oct. 15 global day of action around the economic system were not especially large—in comparison either to the massive protests in Europe that day or to many Latin American demonstrations around the same issues over recent years. But for leaders, writers and activists in the region the day was an historic event, both because of the participation of people around the globe and because of the unusual leading role of a movement based in the US.

Joining others in more than 900 cities around the world, Latin American activists protested on Oct. 15 to demonstrate their discontent with the global economic system. The demonstrations got a significant boost from Occupy Wall Street, a US movement that started with an action in New York on Sept. 17, but the Latin American protests also referenced the Real Democracy Now movement that developed in Spain last spring; the Spanish protests were inspired in turn by protests in Tunisia and Egypt at the beginning of the year. In Spanish-speaking countries the movement is widely known as "15-M," from May 15, the day when protests started in Madrid. Like the Spanish protesters, Latin American participants call themselves los indignados and las indignadas—"the angry ones," or "the indignant ones."

Forty of the firearms that Mexican police seized on April 30 at the home of an alleged drug trafficker in Ciudad Juárez in the northern state of Chihuahua turn out to be among the 2,000 weapons that reached Mexico as a result of the US government's bungled Operation Fast and Furious. The house, which was empty when police arrived, belonged to José Antonio Torres Marrufo, considered by US authorities a top enforcer for the Sinaloa drug cartel of Joaquín Guzmán Loera ("El Chapo"). The weapons were bought legally in Phoenix, Ariz., then taken to El Paso, Tex., and smuggled across the border to Ciudad Juárez.

Right-wing Puerto Rican governor Luis Fortuño is now trying to control damage from a Sept. 8 report by the US Justice Department condemning unconstitutional conduct by the island's police force. The report cited "continued civil rights violations," "the failure to implement meaningful reforms," discrimination against Dominicans, and failure to report and investigate alleged sex crimes and domestic violence. The US government's criticisms followed repeated charges of police brutality from Puerto Rican student protesters and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).