Honduran National Congress president Juan Orlando Hernández announced on Sept. 4 that the government’s Commission for the Promotion of Public-Private Alliances (COALIANZA) had signed an agreement for the first of three "model city" projects—semi-autonomous regions mandated under a 2010 constitutional amendment. COLIANZA claims the project, which still needs approval from the Congress, will create 5,000 direct and indirect jobs this year, 15,000 jobs in 2013, 30,000 in 2014, and 45,000 in 2015.

On Sept. 4 the giant California-based fruit and vegetable producer Dole Food Company, Inc. finally began funding a settlement it made more than a year earlier with some 5,000 former banana workers in Central America who said their health had been damaged by exposure to the pesticides Nemagon and Fumazone, brand names for dibromochloropropane (DBCP). Dole had refused to pay until all judgments against it had been dismissed and each of the plaintiffs had signed a release agreeing not to sue Dole again for injuries linked to DBCP.

Nicaragua will no longer send military personnel to the US military's controversial Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), formerly the US Army School of the Americas (SOA), President Daniel Ortega said during a meeting with a delegation of human rights activists in Managua on Sept. 4. Nicaragua will be the first Central American country to withdraw from the school, which critics say has trained many of Latin America's most notorious human rights violators since its founding in 1946. Five South American nations have ended their relations with SOA/WHINSEC: Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, Venezuela, and, as of June 27, Ecuador.

Global domination and corporate power are obviously inextricably linked to white supremacy, and certainly the prior two rose along with the last. But the three no longer form the seamless unity they did even a generation ago. This is what those on the left who repeat like a mantra that there is "no difference" between Romney and Obama don't seem to get. We have pointed out before Mitt Romney's use of coded messages to play to the racist vote while still maintaining  a veil (however diaphanous) of plausible deniability. Among his supporters at the GOP convention in Tampa last month, the veil was sometimes not there at all. Note this enlightening litany from the Washington Post, Aug. 29:

On the morning of Sept. 7, as workers arrived by bus at the giant Yanacocha mine in Peru's northern region of Cajamarca, agents of the National Police Criminal Investigation Directorate (DIRINCRI) arrived and arrested employee Jesús Elías Salcedo Becerra, 38, as suspected intellectual author of the Nov. 1, 2006 slaying of peasant ecologist Esmundo Becerra Cotrina, gunned down in a hail of 17 bullets while grazing his livestock at Yanacanchilla community, La Encañada district, Cajamarca province. National Police spokesman William Vásquez called the arrest a "preliminary detention," saying that an investigation is underway in cooperation with local offices of the Fiscalía, Peru's public prosecutor. Relatives of Becerra Cotrina arrived as Salcedo was being taken away, and fiercely beat him before being restrained by police and Yanacocha security.

The administration of Peru's President Ollanta Humala last week introduced a bill to the country's congress that would criminalize "Denial of Terrorist Violence," imposing a prison term of up to eight years for publicly "approving, justifying, denying or minimizing" acts committed by "terrorist organizations." Interior Minister Wilfredo Pedraza said the "Law of Denialism" was necessary to "protect society," citing the threat of  "nuevo senderismo"—meaning the recent resurgence of activity by surviving factions of the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso, or SL) guerilla movement, with new civil front groups such as the Movement for Amnesty and Fundamental Rights (MOVADEF) supposedly mobilizing in their support. He said the law would "avoid this process of justification of these behaviors, of this epoch of 20 years which was so hard for the country, which I reiterate has meant 70,000 deaths." (Radio Programas del Peru, RPP, Aug. 28)

Colombia's President Juan Manuel Santos rejected a proposal Sept. 6 by the FARC rebels for a bilateral ceasefire during talks set to begin in Norway next month, aimed at bringing an end to the country's long civil war. In an address at Tolemaida military base outside Bogotá, Santos pledged that the counter-insurgency campaign would continue across "every centimeter" of the country. "I have asked that military operations be intensified, that there will be no ceasefire of any kind," Santos said. "We won't cede anything at all until we reach the final agreement. That should be very clear."

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR, or CIDH in Spanish), a body of the Organization of American States (OAS), issued a statement Sept. 5 urging Venezuelan authorities "to conduct a thorough investigation" into assertions made by representatives of the Horonami Yanomami organization that an isolated Yanomami  community in southern Amazonas state was massacred by outlaw gold-miners who came across the Brazilian border. The statement came days after Venezuela's Minister for Indigenous People Nicia Maldonado and Justice Minister Tareck el Aissami both said that teams sent to the region had found no evidence of a massacre. The IACHR called on both Venezuela and Brazil to pursue a deeper investigation, and report back their findings to the international body.