Mexican president Felipe Calderón Hinojosa has been trying to "repair" relations with Venezuela, according to an Oct. 27, 2008 US diplomatic cable obtained by the WikiLeaks group and posted by the Spanish daily El País on Dec. 18, but there are tensions because the two countries are both "looking to assert [their] leadership in the region, particularly in Central America."

Mexican human rights activist Marisela Escobedo Ortiz was buried in Ciudad Juárez in the northern state of Chihuahua on Dec. 18, two days after she was shot dead by an unidentified man as she was protesting in front of the main government office in the state capital, also named Chihuahua. Police provided security for the funeral, which was originally planned for Dec. 21 but was rescheduled after a group of at least 10 men burned down the lumberyard belonging to Escobedo's husband, José Monge Marroquín, earlier on Dec. 18 and kidnapped his brother.

Bolivian prosecutors brought charges Dec. 19 against 39 people in an alleged plot to assassinate President Evo Morales and launch an armed rebellion last year. The accused include leading opposition politicians and Gary Prado, the ex-general who captured legendary guerilla leader Che Guevara in 1967. The supposed plot was uncovered in April 2009, when national police killed three suspected European mercenaries in the eastern lowland city of Santa Cruz. The accused deny the charges, calling them politically motivated. Most of those charged are already in custody, but 17 are now living outside Bolivia. The most prominent figure among the accused is Branco Marinkovic, a business leader and former head of the opposition Civic Committee of Santa Cruz, who is exiled in the US.

Police in Argentina sealed off the Villa Soldati area of Buenos Aires Dec. 14 following a week of violence between squatters, authorities and local residents in which at least three have been killed. Some 1,000 people, mostly of Bolivian and Paraguayan origin, had pitched tents in the local Indoamericano Park after being evicted from a shantytown. A Paraguayan and a Bolivian were killed Dec. 7 when city police, executing a court order secured by the Buenos Aires municipal government, attempted to remove the squatters. Two days later, clashes between residents and the okupas, as the squatters are known, resulted in the death of another Bolivian. Four men are still in the hospital. Prosecutors in Buenos Aires are investigating the clashes.

On Dec. 3 the government of Brazil announced that it was recognizing Palestine as an independent state within the borders defined in 1967. Argentina followed on Dec. 6. Uruguay is planning to recognize Palestine in 2011, Foreign Relations Vice Minister Roberto Conde has told the AFP wire service.

Students from the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) started a 48-hour strike on Dec. 7 to oppose plans for an $800 tuition surcharge at the public university beginning on Jan. 1. Five people were injured during the first day of the strike as students confronted guards at the Río Piedras campus in San Juan, and the campus was closed down through Dec. 8. On Dec. 10 police chief José Figueroa Sancha announced that police agents would patrol UPR campuses, at the request of university president José Ramón de la Torre. This is the first time the police have had a presence in the university in nearly 30 years.

On the evening of Dec. 7 Haiti's Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) announced the preliminary results of presidential and legislative elections held on Nov. 28. The elections had been chaotic and sometimes violent, and the majority of the presidential candidates denounced the process as fraudulent even before the polls closed.

A report by a leading French cholera expert, Dr. Renaud Piarroux, concludes that the outbreak of the disease in Haiti in mid-October originated at a base maintained by the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) near Mirebalais in the Central Plateau. "No other hypothesis could be found," Piarroux wrote, even though he and his team had looked for "another explanation, even an improbable one, [that] could be advanced to explain the sudden occurrence of this cholera epidemic."