Deja Vu in Peru — 15 Years After NAFTA
For those following the cycle of free trade "reform" and resultant revolutionary upsurge in Latin America, there was a sense of deja vu in this year's bloody headlines from Peru. In 1993, in preparation for NAFTA, Mexico pushed through constitutional changes allowing privatization of communally held peasant lands. This was the key factor that led to the indigenous Zapatista uprising in Chiapas on New Years Day 1994, the exact moment NAFTA took effect. The Zapatistas anticipated—correctly—that the new policy would mean a massive expropriation of the peasantry from their ancestral lands and a flight to urban shantytowns and ultimately, north of the border. This history now appears to be repeating itself in Peru—where government plans to privatize the communally held indigenous lands of the Amazon rainforest to international oil companies in preparation for a new Free Trade Agreement with Washington has sparked a popular uprising and an unprecedented alliance between Amazonian peoples, highland campesinos and urban workers.

The US Department of Justice announced Nov. 30 and Dec. 1 the transfer of four detainees from Guantánamo Bay to three European countries, as the detainee population at the detention facility continues to be reduced. Two of the former detainees, Tunisian natives Adel Ben Mabrouk and Mohamed Riadh Ben Nasri, were transferred to Italy and will stand trial there. The other detainees include an unidentified Palestinian man transferred to Hungary, the first to be accepted under the agreement forged between the US and Hungary in September, and an Algerian, Saber Lahmar, who was transferred to France. It is unclear when the Italian trial will begin, though Italian authorities may be waiting for transfer of a third Tunisian man. (Jurist, Dec. 1)

Former US soldier Steven Green Nov. 30 challenged the law used to convict him in civilian court for his role in the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the murder of her family in Mahmudiya. Green filed an appeal in the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit seeking to overturn the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act (MEJA), which gives the US federal courts jurisdiction over cases involving crimes committed overseas by people serving in the US armed forces. He is arguing that he should not have been tried in civilian court but rather a military trial. Green is also challenging the validity of his discharge from the military, which enabled him to be tried in civilian court under MEJA.

President Barack Obama has ordered 30,000 more US troops to Afghanistan, but pledged he would begin to withdraw the military by 2011. The new deployment over six months will bring US troop strength in the country to more than 100,000. (Shortly after taking office, Obama doubled US troop levels in the country from 30,000 to 60,000.) Some 32,000 other foreign troops are serving in Afghanistan. In his Dec. 1 speech at the West Point military academy, Obama said any comparison with Vietnam was based on "a false reading of history." (BBC News, AlJazeera, Dec. 1)

At about 10 PM on Nov. 29, Honduras' Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) announced at a press conference that Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo Sosa of the center-right National Party (PN) had won the presidency in the general elections held that day; Hondurans also voted for deputies to the National Congress and the Central American Parliament (PARLACEN) and for members of the nation's municipal governments. With 8,682 ballot boxes counted, about 60% of the total, Lobo had won 52.29% of the votes, while his main rival, Elvin Santos of the badly divided Liberal Party (PL, also center-right), trailed with 35.74%. The remaining three candidates got less than 3% each; more than 6% of the votes were blank or invalid. The TSE projected that the turnout was 61.3% of the voting population, about six percentage points higher than in the 2005 elections.

Thousands of campesinos blocked highways in western Guatemala on Nov. 25 to press a demand for the government to allocate 350 million quetzales (about $42 million) to the National Lands Fund (Fontierras) for renting farmland to be used by more than 100,000 campesino families. The protesters stopped traffic on six highways in Cuatro Caminos, Totonicapán, Los Encuentros, and La Cumbre at kilometer 123 of the Las Verapaces and Las Victorias road, between Quetzaltenango and Colomba Costa Cuca. According to José Hernández—one of the leaders of the Coordinating Committee of Regional, Campesino and Independent Organizations, which called the protest—every two hours the protesters were opening the roads up and letting traffic pass for one hour. The organizers said 10,000 campesinos took part; the police estimate was 5,000.

On Nov. 25, Haiti's Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) announced that it was rejecting the applications of 16 of the 69 parties that submitted candidates for legislative elections scheduled to be held on Feb. 28. The largest of the rejected parties is the Lavalas Family (FL) of former president Jean Bertrand Aristide (1991-1996 and 2001-2004); among the others were the Lespwa ("Hope") coalition, until now the party of current president René Préval; Working Together to Build Haiti (KONBA); the Union party; and the Solidarity Effort for the Construction of the People's Camp (ESCAMP), formerly part of Lespwa. Voters are to elect 98 of the 99 members of the Chamber of Deputies and 10 of the country's 30 senators.

Honking car horns and waving flags in a heavy rain, tens of thousands of Uruguayans gathered on Montevideo's main avenues the evening of Nov. 29 to celebrate the victory of José "Pepe" Mujica in that day's runoff election for the presidency. According to projections based on early returns, Mujica, the candidate of the center-left Broad Front (Frente Amplio, FA), had won 50.1-51.6% of the votes, against 44.4-46.2% for former president Luis Alberto Lacalle (1990-1995) of the center-right National Party. Mujica had been heavily favored in opinion polls, and Lacalle quickly conceded in a televised address.