On Dec. 13, over 100 people (50 according to the Village Voice) braved the freezing rain to take part in an interfaith candlelight vigil outside the Varick Street service processing center in downtown Manhattan, New York City, where ICE processes immigrant detainees. The pro-immigrant vigil was hosted by the New York City New Sanctuary Movement, a coalition of 19 churches that have banded together to protect and assist families facing deportation. Organizers said they were seeking to remind the public that the Varick Street processing center is often the first stop for New Yorkers who are ultimately deported and separated from their families. "People do get deported straight from Varick Street, or held here for 48 hours before being sent upstate or to New Jersey," said Angad Bhalla, a New Sanctuary organizer. "We just wanted to highlight what is happening right downtown in a building we all pass by all the time." Seven people from a group calling itself New Yorkers for Immigration Control and Enforcement (NY ICE) held a counter-demonstration, yelling insults at the crowd. (Report from the Varick Street Vigil by Juan Carlos Ruiz of New Sanctuary Movement, Dec. 18; Village Voice, Dec. 18)

The US has issued subpoenas to three Puerto Rican activists to appear before a federal grand jury in New York on Jan. 11. The activists have been identified as graphic designer Tania Frontera, social worker Christopher Torres and filmmaker Julio Antonio Pabon. There are indications that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is also trying to locate Hector Rivera, one of the founders of the Welfare Poets, a New York-based collective of activists and poets, in order to serve him with a subpoena.

United Nations spokesperson Michele Montas confirmed on Dec. 18 that the organization was investigating allegations of fraud and mismanagement totaling more than $610 million in procurement for peacekeeping missions in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Haiti. The cases are "under consideration in the internal justice system in accordance with established procedures," according to Montas, and "are being accorded the highest priority." (AFP, Dec. 18) [Montas is a Haitian journalist and the widow of murdered Radio Haiti Inter director Jean Dominique. The 9,200-member United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) is already under investigation because of allegations of sexual abuse of women and minors by its soldiers and officers.]

On Dec. 20 El Salvador's Legislative Assembly approved a request by President Antonio Saca to extend the presence of Salvadoran troops in Iraq until Dec. 31, 2008. This will give Saca the authority to send two more six-month rotations; Salvadoran soldiers have been part of the US-led occupation force in Iraq since August 2003. El Salvador, which has lost five soldiers, is the only Latin American country with troops in Iraq. The leftist Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation (FMLN) opposed the extension, which was supported by Saca's Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA); 46 of the Assembly's 84 deputies voted for keeping troops in Iraq. (El Diario-La Prensa, NY, Dec. 22 from AP)

Two masked men forced their way into the Catholic diocese's Human Rights Center in Saltillo, in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila, on the evening of Dec. 20. The men struck Mariana Villarreal, who works in the center's legal and educational programs, and kept her locked in a bathroom while they rummaged through the center's files, according to Bishop Raul Vera, who was in the southeastern state of Chiapas at the time, attending commemorations of the 10th anniversary of the massacre of 45 campesinos in the community of Acteal by rightwing paramilitaries. Two weeks earlier Villarreal received an anonymous phone call saying her sister, who heads the center's legal department, had been killed in an accident. The sister hadn't been harmed; Vera called the message "psychological warfare."

On Dec. 28 a number of Mexican campesino organizations announced plans for protests starting on Jan. 1, when tariffs will be eliminated on the importation of corn, beans, sugar and powdered milk from Canada and the US under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Labor and human rights organizations in both Mexico and the US plan to support the demonstrations, saying the free flow of government-subsidized US agricultural products will continue the deterioration of Mexican rural production.

At the start of December, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez conceded defeat in his referendum on constitutional reform—but stated: "This is not a defeat. This is another 'for now.'" The proposed amendments included some populist measures (formal prohibition of torture and incommunicado detention, reduction of the workday to six hours and prohibition of forced overtime, reduction of the voting age to 16, a social security program for "informal" workers) as well as some authoritarian ones (press censorship and suspension of habeas corpus in states of emergency, suspension of the presidency's two-term limit, raising the signatures needed for presidential recall votes)—and some which were both populist and authoritarian (expropriation of private property by presidential decree, executive branch control over the central bank). There may be a paradoxical unity in these two faces of chavismo. As we asked our readers: "Should this be read as a carrot-and-stick tactic: wealth redistribution and social security guarantees to sweeten the pot as an authoritarian state is consolidated? Or are the populist and repressive measures more fundamentally unified: draconian measures will be necessary in order to effect the wealth redistribution—especially given the demonstrated putschist designs on Chávez by Washington and its local proxies?"

As part of a new partnership with Nicaragua's Sandinista President Daniel Ortega, Iran and Venezuela have announced a plan to help finance a $350 million deep-water port at Monkey Point on the country's remote Miskito Coast—envisioned as the first step towards a "Dry Canal" corridor of pipelines, rails and highways across the country to the Pacific port of Corinto. Iran recently established an embassy in Managua, and is boasting new cultural exchange programs in Nicaragua to encourage trade and investment. A Dec. 17 account from Iran's official news agency IRNA noted a visit to Managua by Ezzatollah Zarghami, president of Iranian state radio and television, who pledged to make programming available for local broadcast. However, the Iranian presence is being met with suspicion by the indigenous inhabitants of the Miskito Coast, who have always jealously guarded their local autonomy. From a Dec. 18 San Antonio Express-News account of a recent visit by an Iranian team to Monkey Point, arriving in Nicaraguan army helicopters: