Turkish politician and Kurdish rights activist Leyla Zana was sentenced April 8 to three years in prison for spreading terrorist propaganda. Zana was convicted by a court in the city of Diyarbakir for two speeches delivered at a Kurdish political congress in 2008. Zana has previously been convicted for spreading propaganda under Turkey's anti-terrorism laws, most recently facing a 10-year sentence in 2008 for supporting the Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK). She remains free pending appeal.

A private guard shot Honduran campesino Miguel Alonso Oliva dead on April 1 when a group of campesinos attempted to occupy an African palm farm in the northern Honduran department of Colón, according to the German-based organization FoodFirst Information and Action Network (FIAN). The victim was a member of the Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA), a group based in the Aguán River Valley that has fought since 2001 for some 20,000 hectares of land it claims were bought illegally by a group of influential landowners, Miguel Facussé, Reinaldo Canales and René Morales. Morales holds the title to the farm where the April 1 killing took place.

Up to 3,000 Dominicans marched in Cotuí in the central province of Sánchez Ramírez on Apr. 3 to protest against the Pueblo Viejo gold mine, which is operated by the Toronto-based Barrick Gold Corp. Many of the protesters were local, but several dozen youths had walked the 105 kilometers from Santo Domingo, starting on March 31. An encampment was set up in Cotuí by the same young activists that successfully demonstrated last year for a suspension of construction of the Consorcio Minero Dominicano's cement factory near Los Haitises National Park.

On the morning of March 29 unidentified people assaulted and stabbed Silvia Suppo in her crafts shop in the small town of Rafaela in Argentina's northeastern Santa Fe province; she suffered 22 knife wounds and died later that day in a hospital.

World War 4 Report will be at a reduced level of activity for the month of April while editor Bill Weinberg is traveling overseas, including to attend the alternative conference on climate change that Evo Morales has called in Bolivia. Please check back with us periodically, and feel free to make a small donation to facilitate this work.

As of March 26 sources in the Mexican military had admitted that it was probably soldiers who killed two graduate students the early morning of March 20 in front of the prestigious Institute of Technology and Higher Education's Monterrey campus (ITESM) in the northern state of Nuevo León. The sources said that the soldiers had just been in a firefight with sicarios (hit men) from a drug cartel and probably confused the students with the men they had been fighting.

On Feb. 26 the International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF) charged that the government of Costa Rican president Oscar Arias Sánchez had in effect "illegally established a 'yellow' (unrepresentative, undemocratic, employer-run) trade union" for the 1,500 dockworkers at the Atlantic coast city of Limón. The government's interference in the union—"in contravention of…conventions 87 and 98" of the United Nations' International Labor Organization—is intended to bring about "the kind of privatization that has led to joblessness and misery in Limón's sister port of Caldera" on the Pacific side, the ITF said.

Former US presidents George W. Bush (2001-2009) and Bill Clinton (1993-2001) visited Haiti for one day on March 22 to call for international aid for the country. The visit helped set the stage for a United Nations (UN) donors' conference which is to be held in New York on March 31. Current US president Barack Obama appointed Bush and Clinton to head up US relief efforts following a Jan. 12 earthquake that killed more than 220,000 people in Port-au-Prince and other parts of southern Haiti. This was Bush's first visit to Haiti, but the third since the earthquake for Clinton, who is also the UN's special envoy for Haiti.