Chinese President Hu Jintao was in Astana Dec. 13 to unveil the Kazakh section of a 7,000-kilometer (4,300-mile) natural gas pipeline joining Central Asia to China. Hu was joined by Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbayev at the inauguration, where the two leaders together pressed a symbolic button to open the 1,833-kilometer Kazakh section. Nazarbayev said: "This is a grand construction project that will in time resurrect the ancient Silk Route." Hu is next due to head to a commissioning ceremony in Turkmenistan, where the pipeline actually begins. He is expected to be joined there by President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, the fourth country involved in the project.

The family of Kenyan Guantánamo Bay detainee Mohamed Abdulmalik has filed a lawsuit against the Kenyan government claiming that he was illegally detained, tortured, and renditioned to US authorities. The suit seeks Abdulmalik's return to Kenya and $30 million in damages.

The Mexican authorities must protect residents of disputed land who have been intimidated and attacked by the security guards of local landowners who are contesting the ownership of the land, Amnesty International said Dec. 11. The call comes after a woman living in the Lomas de Poleo area in Chihuahua state was shot and injured at her home by two men in balaclavas.

A US government investigation has found evidence of a massive drug smuggling operation out of Venezuela, linking a powerful trafficker who is accused of supplying arms to Colombian guerrillas with a fugitive Venezuelan businessman, according to a report in Miami's El Nuevo Herald. At the center of the investigation is Walid Makled, whose family controlled Venezuela's leading airline and operated one of the largest cargo facilities at Puerto Cabello, the country's second largest port.

On Dec. 10, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights delivered a sharp rebuke to the Mexican government, accusing it of inaction in preventing, investigating and prosecuting the murders of young women in the border city of Juárez. The Court specifically found that authorities failed to adequately investigate the murders of Claudia Ivette Gonzalez, 17; Irma Monreal Herrera, 15; and Laura Berenice Ramos, 20—who were among the eight victims whose bodies were discovered in 2001 in a cotton field across the street from the city's Association of Maquiladoras.

Washington's embassy in Ecuador Dec. 11 denied any US involvement in Colombia's 2008 raid on a FARC camp at Angostura in Ecuadoran territory. A new report by Ecuador's government says US military personnel stationed at the Pentagon's forward operating location (FOL) at Manta air base helped with intelligence to plan the attack. The embassy statement said "these accusations were made before... [T]he embassy strongly rejects them. Manta's FOL was not involved by any means, neither with the Colombian raid in Angostura nor giving intelligence information." (Xinhua, Dec. 11; NYT, Dec. 10)

Former navy captain Alfredo Astiz AKA "Blond Angel of Death" went on trial Dec. 10 with 18 other former police and military officers charged with crimes against humanity during Argentina's 1976-1983 "dirty war." Astiz, whose nickname came from his cherubic looks when in the 1970s he infiltrated human rights groups whose members were later abducted, is charged in the killings of two French nuns, and the disappearance of dozens—including an Argentine journalist, a Swedish adolescent, and the founder of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo movement, Azucena Villaflor. With his co-defendants, Astiz is accused of overseeing abuses at the Navy Mechanics School detention center. Dozens of people, among them relatives of people who disappeared, attended the opening of the trial, holding pictures of the victims. (BBC News, Dec. 12; AFP, Dec. 11)

Leaders of local peasant organizations marched on the offices of the judicial authorities in Piura in northwest Peru Dec. 10 to demand justice in the deaths of Vicente Romero Ramírez and Cástulo Correa Huayama, shot by police Dec. 2 in the hamlet of Cajas Canchaque, Huancabamba province. Police were apparently attempting to arrest local comunero Lorenzo Rojas García, suspected in a Nov. 1 attack on the "Henry's Hill" mining camp, run by Rio Blanco Copper, local venture of the Chinese Zijin Consortium with the UK's Monterrico Metals. Two security guards and the mine site manager were killed in the armed attack. The site has been the focus of repeated violent protests over land rights and environmental impacts, which have left two other local campesinos dead since 2004. (CNR, Dec. 10; UDW, Dec. 7; LAHT, Dec. 3)