South Americans celebrated International Women's Day on March 8, the holiday's 100th anniversary, with actions calling attention to the murders of women, along with other forms of violence against women and failures by the region's governments to provide security from these crimes.

On March 3 Venezuela's highest court, the Supreme Tribunal of Justice (TSJ), ordered the conditional release of union leader Rubén González, who had been in prison since Sept. 29, 2009. Just two days before the TSJ order, Bolívar state judge Magda Hidalgo sentenced González to seven and a half years in prison for instigating a job action and blocking a highway in Ciudad Guayana at the government-owned Ferrominera Orinoco (FMO), an iron ore mining subsidiary of CVG, the national heavy industry holding company. González is general secretary of the Ferrominera Workers Union (SINTRAFERROMINERA). Under the terms of the conditional release, he is required to report every 15 days to the authorities in Ciudad Guayana.

US president Barack Obama expressed strong support for Mexico's "war on drugs" during a joint press conference in Washington, DC on March 3 with Mexican president Felipe Calderón Hinijosa. "I have nothing but admiration for President Calderón and his willingness to take this on," Obama said, referring to Calderón's militarization of the fight against drug trafficking since he took office in December 2006. Some 35,000 Mexicans have died in drug-related violence since then, and many Mexicans reject the militarization strategy.

Mexico's Foreign Relations Secretariat (SRE) said on March 5 that it had requested "detailed information" from the US government on Operation Fast and Furious, in which the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) reportedly allowed some 2,000 firearms to enter Mexico illegally in an effort to trace the activities of gun smugglers. The operation was said to be carried out without the knowledge of the Mexican government. (La Jornada, Mexico, March 6) Gun running from the US is considered a major source of weapons for drug cartels in Mexico, which has stricter gun control laws than several US states near the border.

Rightwing Panamanian president Ricardo Martinelli announced in San Félix, Chiriquí, on March 3 that he would ask the National Assembly to rescind a mining law that opponents said would encourage open-pit mining for metals by foreign companies and endanger the environment. "A president like me will always listen to his people," Martinelli wrote in his Twitter account, following nearly a month of demonstrations led by the Ngöbe-Buglé indigenous group. Polls reportedly showed 75% of Panamanians opposing the mining industry. (Adital, Brazil, March 3)

Some 17 Haitian groups have launched a new campaign against the neoliberal economic policies that Haiti has followed under successive governments over the last three decades. The immediate goal is to implement a moratorium "of at least five years on the trade liberalization agreements [between the Haitian government and international lending institutions] and the putting in place of an economic and social policy outside the logic of the market and of structural adjustment policies."

On Feb. 18 Puerto Rican education secretary Jesús Rivera Sánchez fired 11 members of the Executive Committee of the Teachers' Federation of Puerto Rico (FMPR) from their jobs in the public school system and cancelled their teaching certificates, depriving of them of the ability to teach in either public or private schools. In the letter terminating the teachers, Rivera Sánchez accused them of "abandonment of service," citing a one-day strike led by the FMPR and other education workers' unions last August to protest the system's failure to hire enough teachers. FMPR president Rafael Feliciano called Rivera Sánchez's action repressive and unprecedented. He said the fired teachers would continue to lead the union without pay. The FMPR, Puerto Rico's largest union, has a long history of militancy.

On the morning of Feb. 25 Mexican soldiers reported finding the bodies of María Magdalena ("Malena") Reyes Salazar, her brother Elías Reyes Salazar and Elías' wife, Luisa Ornelas Soto, by the Juárez-Porvenir highway, some three kilometers from their home in Guadalupe Distrito Bravos, near Ciudad Juárez in the northern state of Chihuahua. The three had been kidnapped by unidentified armed men on Feb. 7. [We first reported, following our source, that they were seized while riding in a truck; some reports now say they were taken from their home.] Six members of the Reyes Salazar family have been murdered in the past two years.