The wives of eight campesinos from Ayacucho, Peru, who were arrested for involvement in a December ambush on a police patrol have began a hunger strike to demand the their release. Peru's Interior Minister Pilar Mazzetti admitted in a press conference Jan. 9 that National Police investigators have not find any relation between the arrested men and the Shining Path guerilla movement.

From La Jornada, Jan. 10 via Chiapas95 (our translation):

Hundreds of inhabitants of the Sierra de Chiapas blocked trucks and machinery transporting wood from the zone, and initiated a protest vigil in front of the municipal presidency in Motozintla in protest of the timber companies which are exploiting the resouces without any plan for forest recovery.

From El Universal, Jan. 10 via Chiapas95:

Soaring tortilla prices have touched off a budding crisis, threatening the traditional affordability of the nation's most politically sensitive food product.

Cindy Sheehan, mother of a US soldier killed in Iraq, was among several US citizens who arrived in Cuba on Jan. 6 in preparation for a series of actions Jan. 9-13 to protest the US military's use of its Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba to detain Muslim men captured as alleged "enemy combatants" in the "war on terror." The rest of the delegation is scheduled to arrive on Jan. 9 for a press conference that day in Havana, followed by a Jan. 10 conference in the Cuban city of Guantanamo on prison conditions and international law.

On Dec. 29 Chilean judge Haroldo Brito sentenced 13 former security agents to prison terms ranging from five to 18 years for four revenge murders carried out after a September 1986 attempt to kill Gen. Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, dictator of Chile from 1973 to 1990. Alvaro Corbalan Castilla, the former operations chief of the National Information Center (CNI), received the heaviest sentence, 18 years; he is already serving a 15-year sentence in the 1987 "Operation Albania" murder case. The defendants are expected to appeal the sentences.

Paraguayan general Alejandro Fretes Davalos, who led the imprisonment and torture of hundreds of people under the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989), died on Dec. 29 following a lengthy illness. Fretes had graduated from Chile's Military School, where he served under Augusto Pinochet before Pinochet seized power. Fretes also trained at the US Army School of the Americas in Panama in 1956 while still a major, taking the "Field Grade Officer" course.

On the night of Jan. 1, an armed group entered the village of El Cedro in Yarumal municipality, in the Colombian department of Antioquia, and shot to death four civilians, two men and two women. The victims included Yolanda Munoz Herrera, vice president of El Cedro's Community Action Board, and Jose Argemiro Mora Zapata, who was the Community Action Board's president and managed a local radio station in the village.

A little more than a year ago, it was a mysterious sweet smell that mystified New Yorkers. This time a mysterious sinister smell. A psychological warfare experiment? From Reuters, Jan. 10:

A powerful, mysterious smell of gas wafted through much of Manhattan and parts of New Jersey on Monday, forcing building evacuations and a temporary suspension of commuter train service before dissipating by mid-afternoon.