Baja California Prosecutor General Rommel Moreno Manjarrez has announced that Colombian specialists will provide anti-kidnapping training to state law enforcement officials. Members of the Colombian National Police were in Baja California this week to lay the groundwork for the training which will be offered to 35 personnel attached to the state prosecutor general's office. Officers selected for the training will be vetted by the Colombians, Moreno said.

In the early morning hours of June 5, Peruvian national police forces staged a violent raid on a group of indigenous people at a peaceful blockade on a road outside of Bagua, in a remote area of Amazonas region. Several thousand Awajun and Wambis indigenous people were forcibly dispersed by tear gas and bullets, leaving at least 25 dead and many more injured.

The Colombian government is in favor of national biofuel production and boasts that Colombia is the world's second biggest producer of biofuels (after Brazil). But human rights groups denounced the cultivation of biofuel crops such as palm tree oil in Colombia to BBC World June 3, charging their production is linked to land theft and atrocities by paramilitary groups.

Former Colombian Senator Teodolindo Avendaño was sentenced to eight years house arrest June 3 for not voting on the 2006 re-election of President Alvaro Uribe in exchange for favors. Avendaño, theretofore a vociferous opponent of the constitutional change, disappeared on the day of the vote that would allow the 2006 re-election of Uribe. According to the prosecution, the senator received 200 million pesos (US$97 thousand) for his failure to show up for the vote.

Colombian paramilitary operative Diego Alberto Ruíz Arroyave was sentenced to seven and a half years in a US prison June 2 for trying to acquire anti-aircraft missiles, grenade launchers and other powerful weapons for $25 million worth of cocaine. Ruíz Arroyave pleaded guilty in October to conspiring to provide material support and resources to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), designated a foreign terrorist organization by the US government.

A judge in Chile has charged a former soldier in the 1973 murder of internationally renowned Chilean folk singer Víctor Jara. Up to now, the only person prosecuted in the case was the commanding officer at the temporary prison camp where the songwriter was killed shortly after the Sept. 11, 1973 coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

On May 20 about 100 residents of seven rural communities in Cunduacán municipality in the southern Mexican state of Tabasco blocked access to the Madrefil-1 oil well to demand compensation for what they say is damage to their lands. Drilling on the well, which belongs to Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), the government's giant oil monopoly, started at the beginning of the year. The campesinos say the work has already killed their crops and livestock and damaged their homes. "We asked the PEMEX engineers to take us into account, but they didn't pay any attention," one protester told the media.

Indigenous protesters June 1 seized two valves on the pipeline that moves natural gas from Peru's Camisea field in the Amazon rainforest to the Pacific coast—the lastest escalation in a campaign across the region to force the government to resist new laws that would ease corporate access to natural resources on indigenous lands. Transportadora de Gas del Peru (TGP), a consortium of energy firms that includes Argentina's Pluspetrol and US-based Hunt Oil, said about 50 protesters took control of the valves over the weekend. The operators said flows have not yet been affected. (Reuters, June 1)