At dawn on March 6, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents raided the low-income Canal neighborhood of San Rafael in Marin County, California. The raids, part of ICE's national "Operation Return to Sender," were supposedly based on 30 warrants for people who had prior deportation orders. The ICE agents returned to the neighborhood early on March 7 and carried out more arrests; at least one similar raid took place in nearby Novato over March 6-7. ICE agents apparently returned to San Rafael for the third consecutive day on Mar. 8 to make further arrests. San Rafael police were notified that ICE would be making arrests near the city's downtown area between 7 and 8 AM, said police spokesperson Margo Rohrbacher. Some of the immigrants may have been deported the same day they were arrested, an immigration official said on March 8. (Marin Independent Journal, Novato, March 7, 8, 9)

Some 130 inmates awaiting federal immigration hearings staged a protest to complain about conditions at the Monmouth County jail in Freehold, NJ. The inmates refused to eat or participate in activities to press their demands for more food, more Spanish-speaking officers and a television to be fixed. Officials say the protesters met with the warden, and ended their protest shortly afterward. However, no measures to address their demands have been decided on. (AP, NYT, March 19)

In a move reminiscent of the struggle over Liberation Theology in the 1980s, the Vatican has issued a stern warning to Jon Sobrino, a dissident Jesuit priest in El Salvador, sending a formal notification claiming two of his books "may cause harm to the faithful." The ruling from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—the Vatican’s ideological watchdog, formerly headed by Pope Benedict when he was Cardinal Ratzinger—finds various "flaws" in works by Sobrino.

Fired opposition lawmakers in Ecuador vow to break a police cordon around the Congress building and reclaim their seats, keeping up the pressure on populist President Rafael Correa. The 57 lawmakers were fired for trying to block a referendum on establishing a body to rewrite the constitution. "Either we all enter Congress or no one will," said Washington Vallejo, one of the fired lawmakers. "We will defend Congress." (Reuters, March 19)

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) states in its annual report that the "democratic security" policy of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe could have negative implications for human rights in the conflicted South American country. The report said the government should stop gauging the success of military operations by the number of casualties, which is one of the main incentives for extrajudicial killings.

Colombian officials announced they will consider seeking the extradition of senior executives of Chiquita Brands International after the company pleaded guilty in US federal court to making payments to paramilitary groups. Chiquita, one of the world's top banana producers, agreed to pay a fine of $25 million last week to the US Justice Department to settle the case. Chiquita admitted that from 1997 to 2004, its Colombia subsidiary paid $1.7 million to the paramilitaies. Chiquita said it voluntarily informed the Justice Department of its payments to the paramilitary groups in 2003, after their classification as terrorist organizations. The company said that the payments had been motivated by concern for the safety of employees, and that similar payments had been made to left-wing guerillas.

The annual US State Department report on global human rights, released March 6, notes improvements in the rghts climate in Mexico but says a "culture of impunity and corruption" persists. (La Jornada, March 7)

Indigenous peoples have no future under the neoliberal system, because it doesn't respect their traditional self-government (usos y costumbres) and seeks to eliminate their ethnic identity, said the Bishop Emeritus of San Cristobal de Las Casas, Samuel Ruiz Garcia, who brokered the dialogue with the Zapatista rebels in Mexico's southern state of Chiapas. He said that the salvation of the West is in the indigenous world, which poses a communitarian alternative to the individualist ethic which threatens contemporary societies. Ruiz was speaking at a conference at the Universidad Iberoamericana's Puebla campus. (La Jornada, March 14)