The death toll after an attempted prison break in north-central Mexico's Durango state on Dec. 18 has risen to at least 23. Nine guards and 14 inmates were killed in clashes at the Social Reinsertion Center (CERESO) Number 2 in the city of Gómez Palacio. The facility's guards fired in the air to stop the jailbreak, and prisoners returned fire at the watchtowers and guard areas. Authorities are now investigating how the prisoners got hold of the weapons. The CERESO has been seized by the military, and the prisoners all relocated while the investigation is underway. CERESO Number 2 also made headlines in 2010 when the facility's warden was himself imprisoned after it emerged that inmates were allowed to borrow weapons from guards and leave the prison at night to carry out murders against gangland rivals. (La Jornada, Dec. 20; LAT, Dec. 19; Global Post, Dec. 18)

Seven men who were detained in March in Quito's southern district of Luluncoto on "terrorism" and "subversion" charges were freed Dec. 20, after a panel of three judges of the metropolitan province Pichincha found that they had been detained in violation of constitutional guarantees against arbitrary arrest. Three women who were arrested along with them remain detained and on hunger strike at Quito's El Inca women's prison. The seven men also went on hunger strike at Quito's Provisional Detention Center three days before their release. The so-called Luluncoto 10 were arrested in an operation code-named Red Sun, and accused of being part of an urban guerilla cell called the Popular Combat Group (GCP), which was supposedly planning attacks in the capital. (El Universo, Guayaquil, Dec. 20; El Comercio, Quito Dec. 17; El Comercio, March 6)

Residents and officials in Ecuador's port city of Guayaquil are protesting a planned gas pipeline that would run from Monteverde, in Santa Elena province on the coast to the west, to El Chorrillo, a town just north of the city—through densely populated areas. Hundreds have marched in protest of the line, and won the support of Guayaquil's municipal government. The city's development director José Nuñez asserts that the government's impact study for the project fails to provide adequate guarantees for the safety of some 300,000 residents in Guayaquil's outlying working-class districts. The city also charges that protests remain ongoing over non-payment of compensation to residents who were relocated by the Libertad-Pascuales pipeline, built some 10 years ago along a similar route, and fear it will be the same with the new line. But Petroecuador's pointman for the new pipeline, Rommel Tapia, insists the project is safe and necessary for Ecuador's energy security. (El Universo, Guayaquil, Dec. 18; El Universo via Ecuador Times, Dec. 17; La Linea de Fuego, Ecuador, Dec. 16; Andes, El Universo, Dec. 14; Andes, Dec. 13)

Rafael Arcangel Quispe Flores, leader of the Bolivian Aymara organization CONAMAQ this month denounced President Evo Morales before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, and also before the seat in that city of the International Labor Organization (ILO), whose convention 169 outlines the responsibilities of states to indigenous peoples. Quispe especially stressed the situation at the TIPNIS indigenous reserve on the edge of Bolivia's Amazon, threatened by a pending road project. (De-Bolivia, Dec. 5)

A ceremony was held on the floor of Peru's Congress Dec. 13 to commemorate the 1984 massacre of over 100 campesinos by army troops at the village of Putis, in south-central Ayacucho region. A full Congress honored the presence of Aurelio Condoray Curo, vice president of the Putis Political Violence Survivors Association, and families from the village. That same day, a Caravan for the Reconstruction of Putis left for the village with trucks of material aid from the Ayacucho city of Huamanga. The efforts were promoted by lawmaker María Soledad Pérez Tello, president of the Congressional Human Rights Commission. The local municipality of Huanta is still in the process of identifying bodies that have been unearthed from more than 40 mass graves in and around Putis.

On Dec. 15 in the city of Cajamarca, Peru, unknown persons broke into the house of attorney Mirtha Vásquez, a director of the NGO Grufides, a leading voice in the struggle against the controversial Conga mine project. One day earlier, the truck of Sergio Sánchez, a member of the Grufides team, was vandalized; five weeks earlier, the home of another Grufides activist, Ivett Sánchez, was similarly broken into. The incidents follow a report in Revista Caretas after Arana was assaulted by police during protests in July that the National Police had dispatched units of the Intelligence Directorate (DIRIN) to tail him. (GRUFIDES, Dec. 17)

Peru's Amazonian organizations AIDESEP, FENAMAD, ORAU and COMARU last week announced plans to sue both the government and oil companies over proposals to expand the huge Camisea gas project into land inhabited by "uncontacted" or isolated tribes. A consortium of companies in charge of the bloc—including Hunt Oil of Texas, Spain's Repsol and Argentina's Pluspetrol—plans to cut hundreds of testing tracks through the forest, detonate thousands of explosive charges, and drill exploratory wells. Some 75% of Block 88 lies inside the Nahua-Nanti Territorial Reserve, created to protect uncontacted and isolated peoples who are extremely vulnerable to disease and development projects on their land.

From AP, Dec. 19:

Truck Causes NY Traffic Pileup; 1 Dead, 33 Hurt
A tractor-trailer smashed into several vehicles on a major highway on Wednesday afternoon, setting off a chain reaction of fiery crashes, killing one person and injuring 33 others, police said.

The accident on the Long Island Expressway, about 70 miles east of New York City, left at least two dozen vehicles strewn across several hundred yards of the eastbound lanes. At least three vehicles, including the tractor-trailer, which was carrying storm debris, caught fire and were still smoldering into the early evening, a fire official said.