An unidentified man shot and killed Honduran activist Mahadeo ("Emo") Sadloo on Sept. 7 at his small automobile tire shop in eastern Tegucigalpa. Sadloo had been active in the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP) from the time when the grassroots coalition was founded to oppose the June 2009 military coup against former president José Manuel ("Mel") Zelaya Rosales (2006-2009); he was also a strong supporter of teacher and student demonstrations in defense of public education. Zelaya called Sadloo's death a "political assassination" and a "declaration of war" against him and his supporters; the FNPR said it was "a political crime intended to demobilize and demoralize the Popular Resistance."

US diplomats suspected in 2004 that Honduran business owner Miguel Facussé Barjum may have been involved in three drug-related incidents at one of his properties, according to a secret US diplomatic cable released by the Wikileaks group on Aug. 30 of this year. The founder of the Grupo Dinant food product and cooking oil corporation and a member of a powerful family that includes media magnate and former Honduran president Carlos Roberto Flores Facussé (1998-2002), Miguel Facussé has been at the center of land disputes in the Lower Aguán Valley in the north of the country that have reportedly left 51 campesinos dead in the last two years.

Puerto Rican independence activist Hilton Fernández Diamante has charged that in June, US federal agents planted an electronic device in his car while it was parked in the apartment tower complex where he lives in Trujillo Alto, south of San Juan. Photographs, an eyewitness account and statements by the apartment complex's management confirm that people who identified themselves as Puerto Rican police agents were in the parking area while Fernández Diamante was in New York to meet with a lawyer. Told about the suspicious activity on his return, Fernández Diamante called the Puerto Rican police's bomb squad on June 15. Police agents evacuated the area and removed the device.

As of Sept. 2 it appeared that some of the 1,100 Uruguayan troops in the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) were about to be repatriated because of accusations of sex abuse at a base in the southern coastal town of Port-Salut. Eliane Nabaa, who handles communication and information for the United Nations military and police occupation force in Haiti, told the Haitian internet news service AlterPresse on Sept. 1 that repatriation was a possibility. On Sept. 2 an Uruguayan website said the soldiers would be sent home in the coming week.

On Aug. 29 Chilean prosecutors ordered the detention of Sgt. Miguel Millacura of the carabineros militarized police for the shooting death of 16-year-old Manuel Gutiérrez Reinoso in the early morning of Aug. 26 in the Villa Jaime Eyzaguirre neighborhood in Macul, a commune in Greater Santiago. Investigators found that Sgt. Millacura's Uzi submachine gun fired the shot that killed Gutiérrez, who had been walking with his brother to observe late-night protests following an Aug. 24-25 general strike. Millacura claimed he shot into the air.

Mexican marines shot and killed Gustavo Acosta Luján in the early morning of Sept. 1 in his home in Jardines de San Andrés, Apodaca municipality, in the northern state of Nuevo León. According to the Secretariat of the Navy, the marines, responding to an anonymous tip, were fired on from inside the house, and Gustavo Acosta, an "alleged criminal" with the alias "M-3," died in the operation. The marines said they found a 9 mm submachine gun, an AR-15 rifle and quantities of cocaine in the house. Mexican president Felipe Calderón Hinojosa has been using soldiers for police work in northern Mexico since militarizing the "war on drugs" shortly after he took office in December 2006.

The US Justice Department announced on Aug. 30 that Kenneth Melson, the acting head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), had been reassigned to another position in the department and that Dennis Burke, the US attorney for Arizona, was resigning from his post. The department didn't explain the reason for the changes, but they were clearly fallout from Operation Fast and Furious, a bungled ATF program that allowed some 2,000 weapons to go from the US to Mexico, where they were probably used in drug cartel violence.

A comparison that Danish and US researchers have made of the whole genomes of cholera bacteria found in patients in Haiti and in Nepal provides nearly conclusive evidence that Nepalese soldiers in the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) were the inadvertent cause of a cholera outbreak that has killed more than 6,000 Haitians. The genomes are "practically identical," Harvard University microbiologist John Mekalanos told the magazine Science. "This is as close as you can come to molecular proof."