New Zealand's Maori Party harshly protested the Oct. 15 police raids on Maori activists in which 17 were arrested. "This action has violated the trust that has been developing between Maori and Pakeha and sets our race relations back 100 years," party leader Pita Sharples charged, using the Maori word for New Zealanders of European descent. He called the raids "storm trooper tactics" by a police force that consistently targets the indigenous population.

From the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Oct. 14, links added:

Vernon Bellecourt, a longtime leader of the American Indian Movement, died Saturday. He was 75. Bellecourt died at Abbott Northwestern Hospital of complications of pneumonia, said his brother, Clyde Bellecourt, a founder of the group.

Award-winning journalist Bill Weinberg will give a report-back in Missoula, MT, this week from an international conference on building solidarity with the Iraq Freedom Congress (IFC) held in Tokyo this past summer. The IFC is a coalition of trade unions, women's organizations, neighborhood assemblies and other civil society groups which have come together to oppose the US-led occupation and demand a secular government in Iraq. The IFC is leading a campaign against the pending law that would privatize Iraq's oil, and has established self-governing zones, which both occupation forces and sectarian militias are barred from accessing, in neighborhoods in Baghdad and Kirkuk. Recently, their leaders have been targeted for attack by US forces. The Japanese anti-war group Zenko last year raised $400,000 for the IFC to start its own satellite television station, Sana TV, which began broadcasting in April. Can anti-war forces in the US similarly organize effective political and material support for Iraq's civil resistance?

From SOA Watch, Oct. 12, via Upside Down World:

We are very excited to share that President Evo Morales announced Tuesday that Bolivia will gradually withdraw its military from the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), formerly known as the School for the Americas (SOA). Bolivia is now the fifth country—after Costa Rica, Argentina, Uruguay and Venezuela—to formally announce a withdrawal from this brutal military training school.

Local Colombian officials have accused two US soldiers, Michael J. Cohen and César Ruiz, of sexually assaulting a 12 year-old girl on Aug. 25. The soldiers are stationed at the Tolemaida Airbase near Melgar, Tolima, as part of Plan Colombia. According to witness statements collected by local authorities and published in El Tiempo [Oct. 8], at 4 AM, the soldiers entered the base with a young girl they had met at the "Ibiza" nightclub in Melgar earlier that evening. The girl claims that Ruiz assaulted her in the car on the way to the base and later lent his apartment to Cohen, who reportedly raped her. The pair later left the girl in the central park in Melgar in front of several witnesses.

On Oct. 12 Ecuadoran president Rafael Correa and Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez joined Colombian president Alvaro Uribe in Ballenas, in the northern Colombian department of La Guajira, to inaugurate the 224 km Trans-Oceanic Gas Pipeline, which will bring as much as 500,000 cubic feet of natural gas from Venezuela to Colombia each day. The three leaders also signed a "memorandum of understanding" to complete a network for gas supply between the three countries.

The town of Vicam in the northwestern Mexico state of Sonora was the site of the Meeting of Indigenous Peoples of America, which brought together some 1,500 representatives of indigenous groups from the US, Canada, Mexico, Central America and South America starting on Oct. 11 and continuing through Oct. 12. Organizers said misinformation from the government and media had put obstacles in the way of the meeting; they had been afraid it might have to be moved.

As has become traditional, thousands of indigenous people held meetings and staged protests in Latin America to mark the anniversary of Christopher Columbus' first landing in the Western Hemisphere in 1492. Oct. 12 is officially known in much of the region as the "Day of the Race" or the "Day of Spanishness." In Guatemala several thousand indigenous people and campesinos marched in the capital to celebrate what they defined as the "Day of Dignity and Peaceful Resistance."