A high-level al-Qaeda suspect who was in CIA custody for more than four years has alleged that his US captors tortured him into making false confessions about terrorist attacks in the Middle East, according to newly released Pentagon transcripts of a March 14 military tribunal hearing at Guantánamo. Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who US officials link to the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings and the 2000 USS Cole bombing in Yemen, told a panel of military officers that he confessed torture. "The detainee states that he was tortured into confession and once he made a confession his captors were happy and they stopped torturing him," Nashiri's representative read to the tribunal. "Also, the detainee states that he made up stories during the torture in order to get it to stop." (AND from WP, March 31)

Talli Nauman writes for Mexico's El Universal, April 2:

Environmentalists are rejoicing over the cancellation of a liquid natural gas (LNG) terminal project that the federal government had licensed Chevron Texaco to undertake adjacent to the Coronado Islands proposed protected area near Ensenada on the Pacific Coast of Baja California state.

Representatives at the third Continental Summit of the Indigenous Peoples and Nationalities in Iximche, Guatemala, spoke out against US plans to use corn crops to produce fuel. "We have a long tradition as corn growers, and using corn to produce fuel will be like sacrilege, commercializing our heritage for the benefit of large transnationals," said Cesar Tahu, a Quiche Maya leader. Juan Tiney, member of the Continental Summit Committee, emphasized the traditional place of corn as the staple food of Native Americans, protesting that "it will now be used to feed machines, for money and profits, destroying thousand-year-old cultures." (Press TV, Iran, March 31)

According to reports in major Dominican dailies on March 30, the Central Electoral Council (JCE) is planning to annul the Dominican birth certificate of human rights activist Sonia Pierre, the head of the Dominican-Haitian Women's Movement (MUDHA). JCE chief inspector Juan Tavarez Gomez and JCE security chief Victor Lantigua reportedly have determined that Pierre's birth certificate was based on false information and is therefore invalid.

Protests that led the Brazilian state oil company to halt production in the Ecuadoran Amazon have ended, Ecuador's Energy Ministry announced March 30. The Ministry statement said losses from the strike totaled more than $40 million, or 840,000 barrels of crude.

Ecuador‘s highest electoral court fired a judge who tried to return half the country‘s legislators to their posts March 28, as a political crisis deepened over a planned referndum on rewriting the constitution. President Rafeal Correa told 2,000 supporters that day that opposition "political mafias" were trying to block the referendum, and that the Ramirez‘s injunction reinstating the 57 dismissed legislators was "illegitimate." Some who gathered to hear him speak burned in effigy giant rats with the word "Congress" scrawled across them.

According to residents of Puerto Nuevo, in the Ecuadoran province of Sucumbios near the border with Colombia, on March 22 Colombian soldiers fired a grenade at the home of Ecuadoran citizen Jorge Plaza Mantilla in Puerto Nuevo. Fifteen Colombian soldiers then entered Plaza Mantilla's house, seized him and headed back toward Colombian territory. While on the way to the border, the soldiers also captured Colombian citizen Daniel Marroqui Ortega and took him with them into Colombia. Later, the Colombia military turned the two men's dead bodies over to the Colombian Red Cross and Public Defender's Office. The Colombian military claimed the victims were linked to Colombian guerrilla groups, a charge their relatives rejected.

On March 24, Brazilian federal police and environmental agents shut down a major deep-water port on the Amazon River owned by Cargill Inc., saying the US-based multinational agribusiness firm failed to provide an environmental impact statement required by law. Cargill's controversial soy export terminal port is located in the town of Santarem, in Para state. Judge Souza Prudente ordered the port shut down late on March 23. Federal police agent Cesar Dessimoni said Cargill had prepared an environmental assessment that did not meet federal standards. "They'll have to do it correctly, as the law demands," he said. "A big step forward has been taken in enforcing the responsible use of natural resources and bringing greater governance in the Amazon," Paulo Adario, Greenpeace Amazon Campaign Coordinator in Brazil, said in a statement.