Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva met with Cuban president Fidel Castro Ruz on Jan. 15 during a 24-hour visit to Cuba and met twice with interim president Raul Castro, who has headed the government since the summer of 2006, when Fidel Castro withdrew from public functions because of undisclosed intestinal problems. The visit included the signing of financial and commercial agreements, such as credits for food purchases and the expansion of the Che Guevara nickel plant, and offshore oil exploration. Brazil is Cuba's second largest trading partner in Latin America, after Venezuela; annual trade is worth about $450 million.

Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on a visit to Colombia Jan. 18 that the US is concerned about a Venezuelan military buildup, pointing to "what Mr. Chávez has done militarily in recent years and his acquisitions—both those he's made as well as those he states he's making for the future—high performance airplanes, modern submarines." President Hugo Chávez is negotiating with Russia to buy five diesel submarines that he says Venezuela needs to protect its extensive offshore oil drilling facilities. (AFP, Jan. 18) Days after Mullen's remarks, Miami's El Nuevo Herald cited anonymous Colombian intelligence officials as saying that the country's FARC and ELN guerillas are receiving ammunition manufactured in Venezuela. The officials said the 7.62mm AK-47 ammo recently captured from the FARC is produced by the state-owned Venezuelan Anonymous Military Industries Company (CAVIM). (Nuevo Herald, Bloomberg, Jan. 21)

In the wake of his successful negotiation of the release of two hostages held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has launched an initiative for the FARC and its junior counterpart, the National Liberation Army (ELN), to be recognized by the international community as legitimate "belligerents"—not terrorists. Chávez says the FARC is an "insurgent" force with legitimate political aims and that the terrorist label "has just one cause: pressure from the United States."

Two dozen heavily armed special police from the Venezuelan Interior Ministry searched the Hebraica community center in Caracas last month, ostensibly looking for weapons or evidence of "subversive activity." There were no arrests or seizure of property. The Venezuelan Jewish community's umbrella organization, the Confederation of Israelite Associations of Venezuela (CAIV), protested the raid as an "unjustifiable act" aimed at creating tensions between the community and the government of President Hugo Chávez. "It seems that the only interpretation is that this was an intimidation by the government," CAIV president Abraham Levy Benshimol told New York's Jewish weekly The Forward, noting that the raid came on the eve of the referndum on Chávez's proposed constitutional reform. "We're facing the first anti-Jewish government in our history," added Hebraica president Simon Sultan.

Mexican federal police backed up by the army's elite Airborne Special Forces Group (GAFES) detained at least six municipal police in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, in a surprise pre-dawn raid on their headquarters Jan. 19. Nuevo Laredo mayor Ramón Garza Barrios did not challenge the arrests, saying he would defer to federal authorities until more information is available. (El Universal, Jan. 19)

Tijuana Cartel gunmen and fought a three-hour battle with Mexican federal police and army troops in the border city Jan. 17, using machine guns and grenades and firing on a helicopter. One gunman was killed and four police officers were wounded in the fight; one officer died in the hospital the next day. Authorities later found six more bodies in the house where the gunmen made their stand, believed to be local kidnapping victims.

Local Oaxaca activist Simon Sedillo in a Jan. 15 report that appears on the Enemigo Comun blog:

On January 15th, 2007, before the beginning of a youth march for the liberation of political prisoners, Urban Paramilitaries (porros) initiated a series of provocations to defame the social movement. Known urban paramilitaries (identified as "Aladin" and "Crusty") have occupied and burned at least two buses to provoke violence before the march, and other urban paramilitaries have begun to open fire at UABJO (Benito Juarez Autonomous University of Oaxaca). Students are being forced out of classrooms and clashes have ensued.

Refuting widespread media portrayal of the "erosion" (desgaste) of the rebel Zapatista movement, Jorge Santiago, director of the local group Economic and Social Development of the Indigenous Mexicans (DESMI), which has been working with Maya communities in the Highlands of Chiapas for 35 years, told Blanche Petrich of the Mexican daily La Jornada that 14 years after the armed uprising, "we are stronger, because we are linked" with social struggles across Mexico. "Our word has to do with the words of others. The people are beginning to have confidence in themselves as builders of relations, with the local base." He especially credits the Zapatistas' maintenance of the moral high ground—"The decision not to instigate confrontations with the local enemies, in spite of harassment and the onslaught on their territory." (La Jornada, Jan. 6)