Fred Rosen writes for Mexico's El Universal, Oct. 15:

NAFTA: An interim assessment

Because the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is a prototype for Washington´s larger plans for the Americas, the nearly 13-year-old trade pact among the United States, Mexico and Canada, has been subject to continual interim assessments and analyses.

The recently created Honduran anti-delinquency task force Operación Trueno [Operation Thunder] proved critics fears on October 12, when a member of the force shot and killed an innocent citizen Henry Esaú García Fuentes, 25 years old. Fuentes ran away from soldiers who were demanding to talk to him and was shot twice in the back. The soldier who shot Fuentes, against police orders, was identified only by the last name Palma Aguilar in the warrant for his discipline. The mother of the victim, Bertilia Fuentes, requested better military training for force members: "I know that nobody will give my son's life back to me, I can only tell the competent authorities that they must educate the personnel that they send on these operations, that they can't send inexperienced people because what they are going to do is take innocent lives. They need to educate people because, in the same way my son died, many innocent people have died, and if they continue this way, it's going to keep happening."

Two thousand people from the National Forum for the Defense of the Sustainability and Right to Water marched in El Salvador's capital Oct. 18 against privatization and for universal access to quality water. Members of labor, environmental, women's, religious and community groups from throughout the country gathered downtown at the Rio Acelhuate, where San Salvador pumps its sewage. The music, presentations and popular theater all resonated with the main message of the protest: water is a public and social resource and the government's responsibility is to administrate the resource in an integral and sustainable manner – not make it a source of profit for private corporations.

Subcommander Marcos (now known as "Delegate Zero") and other members of the Zapatista delegation arrived in Tijuana Oct. 18 after traveling up the Baja California peninsula, with stops in Ensenada and other communities where they met with Mixtec migrant laborers from Oaxaca. Marcos remarked publicly on their abysmal living conditions in shanties around the agribusiness farms, and attacked Baja California Gov. Eugenio Elorduy as "stupid" for tolerating such conditions. He also expressed solidarity with the struggle in the Mixtecs' native Oaxaca. In Tijuana, where the delegation is hosted in a reconverted theater by the local Multikulti collective, Marcos is scheduled to meet with maquilladora workers. The delegation also atteneded a demonstration outside the local Sempra Energy gas plant, which is accused of contaminating local waters. (APRO, Frontera, Oct. 18)

The state leader of the Chiapas branch of the Independent Center of Campesinos and Rural Workers (CIOAC), Luis Hernandez Cruz, told a march of some 15,000 followers in the state capital, Tuxtla Gutierrez, that if the Federal Electoral Tribunal (TRIFE) overturns the victory of leftist gubernatorial candidate Juan Sabines Guerrero, there will be a "social explosion" throughout Chiapas, similar to that in Oaxaca. (APRO, Oct. 18)

Following an extended debate, a Mexican Senate committee voted 11-3 late Oct. 18 not to dissolve the Oaxaca state government, while demonstrators demanding a solution to the five-month crisis announced plans to escalate protests. In Oaxaca City, a teacher was shot and killed by unknown assailants after leaving a late-night meeting with other teachers.

Even Bush appears to be facing the grim music from Iraq. Asked in an ABC News interview Oct. 18 whether he agreed with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman's opinion that the violence in Iraq was "the jihadist equivalent of the Tet offensive," Bush responded: "He could be right. There's certainly a stepped-up level of violence, and we're heading into an election." Attacks in Iraq killed about 40 people on Oct 19. The death toll for US troops rose to 72 for October, which could become one of their deadliest months in two years. (Stuff.com, Oct. 20) Iraq’s interior minister, Jawad al Bolani, has pledged to purge his offices of sectarian influence, but this has failed to stem the escalating violence. (NYT, Oct. 14) Recent proposals by Washington to partition Iraq may be merely accepting a fait accompli. The south already appears to be a Shi'ite sectarian zone in Iran's orbit, and the north is de facto an independent Kurdish state. All that remains is for a Taliban-style Sunni theocracy to be declared in the center. This Oct. 16 report from Britain's The Herald indicates this may have already come to pass:

This marks the first time a church has actually followed through with divesting from companies involved in Israel's illegal occupation and colonization of Palestinian territory.