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."

On Oct. 14, Iranian authorities arrested Emaddedin Baghi, a prominent activist who who heads the Committee for the Defense of Prisoners' Rights and has campaigned against the death penalty "He is charged with spreading propaganda against the regime and publishing secret government documents," his lawyer Saleh Nikbakht told AFP. Baghi is a former journalist who served a three-year prison term from 2000-2003 over his writings in several pro-reform newspapers. In recent months, he has publicly protested against a wave of public hangings that has swept Iran as part of a "security" campaign. In September he wrote an open letter to the heads of reformist parties—including former president Mohammad Khatami and ex-parliament speaker Mehdi Karroubi—complaining of their silence over the hangings. At least 207 executions have been carried out in Iran so far this year, already well above the figures for 2006. Baghi, who in 2005 was awarded a human rights prize by France for his work against the death penalty, was particularly prominent in cases in Khuzestan province, which has seen a spate of executions following the emergence of armed Arab separatist activity.

Mexico's Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), now convening an international forum on indigenous rights at Vicam, Sonora, are protesting comments by Supreme Court Justice Aguirre Anguiano dismissing the rebel movement as "folklore." The statement came in a case brought by 44 indigenous-majority municipalities, led by Coxcatlán, San Luis Potosí, challenging several articles of the federal telecommunications laws as failing to comply with constitutional changes on indigenous rights approved in 2001. Justice Aguirre argued for cutting off the debate, finding the claim without merit. When Justice Genaro Góngora Pimentel stated that the constitutional changes were part of the San Andrés Accords, which emerged from the government's peace dialogue with the Zapatistas, Aguirre responded: "For me... this is an ideological group and part of the national folklore...whose leaders...13 years ago declared war on the Mexican Army and have not fired one shot." (Proceso, Oct. 9)

On Oct. 12, the Regional Court in Ostrava, Czech Republic, awarded compensation of CZK500,000 (US$260,000) to a Romani woman, Iveta Červeňáková, 30, for having been sterilized against her will. Ostrava City Hospital is to pay the damages. According to Kumar Vishwanathan of the Vzájemné Soužití (Life Together) civic association, this is the Czech Republic's first case of compensation for coerced sterilization. Holubová was sterilized 10 years ago. "She was not sufficiently informed and did not even learn she had had such surgery until seven years later," Vishwanathan said. The hospital claims it has Červeňáková's written consent on file and is considering appealing. (Romea.cz, Oct. 12)