Two residents, including an 11-year-old boy, are dead following riots at the village of Cubulco in Guatemala's Baja Verapaz department. Protesters torched the home of the mayor, Rolando Rivera, and the village remains occupied by a large detachment of the National Civil Police (PNC) and elite Special Police Forces (FEP). Police used tear gas in clashes with residents who responded with Molotov cocktails. The deaths apparently occurred when Rivera's private security force opened fire on protesters. The protests were sparked by Rivera's plans to renovate the town's central park two weeks before the municipal elections, in which he is running again with the right-wing Patriot Party (PP). (Prensa Libre, Aug. 28) Forty have been murdered nationwide in political violence during the presidential campaign now underway, in which a leading candidate is the PP's Otto Perez Molina, a former military intelligence chief who promises a security crackdown under the slogan of "The Iron Fist." (The Telegraph, Aug. 26)

We recently posed the question of whether the relentless bloodshed in Iraq is fundamentally a national liberation struggle or a sectarian civil war. Which does it look like to you? From AP, Aug. 28:

31 killed at Iraqi religious festival
BAGHDAD — A power struggle between rival Shiite groups erupted during a religious festival in Karbala on Tuesday, and at least 31 people were killed by gunmen with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades who fought street battles amid crowds of pilgrims.

From the New York Times, Aug. 25:

Head-On Collision in Connecticut Kills 4 Teenagers and Injures 3 Adults
BRISTOL, Conn. — Four teenagers from nearby towns who had met on MySpace never made it home from an evening swim at another friend’s pool on Thursday night. They were killed when the driver of their speeding Subaru sports car lost control and veered into an oncoming car in the opposite lane, according to the police and interviews with young people who knew them.

Two days after launching aerial attacks on Shi'ite enclaves in Baghdad, the US is accused of air raids on police stations in the Kurdish autonomous zone. Jabar Yawer, spokesman for the Kurdish peshmerga militia, said a US helicopter attacked two Kurdish police outposts on Aug. 26, killing four police, wounding eight and destroying two vehicles. "We demand American troops to give an explanation for the US air strike against a police station," the Kurdish Interior Ministry said in a statement. The US military said it was investigating the report.

The president of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission (CIDH), Florentín Meléndez, interviewed the brothers Flavio and Horacio Sosa Villavicencio, leaders of the Popular People's Assembly of Oaxaca (APPO), at the maximum security prison of Altilplano, in the state of Mexico, Aug. 8. From there, the CIDH chief traveled to Oaxaca on a fact-finding mission. (La Jornada, Aug. 9) The following day, in Oaxaca City, he issued a statement calling on Gov. Ulises Ruiz Ortiz and Mexican President Felipe Calderón to address the human rights crisis in the state, in compliance with international norms and Mexico's own stated policies. (El Universal, Aug. 10)

Mexican federal agents and Chiapas state police evicted several families Aug. 19 from the predios (collective farms) of Nuevo Salvador Allende and El Buen Samaritano, in the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve. Six family heads were detained, accused of environmental crimes and property damage; another 39 were taken to a shelter in the town of La Trinitaria. The relocation was undertaken after the residents of the predios—Tzeltal and mestizo peasants—refused to negotiate with the Agrarian Reform Secretariat, asserting that they had been living in the zone for 30 years. (La Jornada, Aug. 19) The following day, two other small communities were similarly evicted from the reserve. (La Jornada, Aug. 20)

The LA Times reports Aug. 25:

U.S. forces firing from helicopters Friday pursued militiamen loyal to a radical anti-U.S. Shiite cleric into a west Baghdad district, killing at least 18 people, reportedly including some civilians...

The New York Times reports Aug. 25: "The number of detainees held by the American-led military forces in Iraq has swelled by 50 percent under the troop increase ordered by President Bush, with the inmate population growing to 24,500 today from 16,000 in February, according to American military officers in Iraq." A smaller AP story published the same day stated: "The number of Iraqis who have fled their homes under threat of sectarian violence has more than doubled since the start of the year, despite the increase in American troops that began in February, a humanitarian aid organization said Saturday. The number of displaced Iraqis has shot upward from 447,337 on Jan. 1 to 1.14 million on July 31, according to the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization."