Uribe uses this as an excuse to call for a military rather than negotiated solution to the hostage crisis. But the families and supporters of some of the FARC's hostages aren't buying it. From Merco Press, Oct. 21:

But, as we noted as long ago as 2003, the Shining Path guerilla movement has fractured, with a new ultra-hardline element refusing to accept the ceasefire call issued (whether under coercion or not) by Abimael "Chariman Gonzalo" Guzmán upon his arrest in 1992. From Latinamerica Press, Oct. 19:

Our friend Ivo Skoric of the Balkans Pages interviewed WW4 REPORT Editor Bill Weinberg via e-mail last weekend for the Croatian alternative e-zine H-Alter, as the first in a series of interviews with American left-wing bloggers. The interveiw appears in both English and Croatian:

From the Washington Post, Oct. 20:

Court Told It Lacks Power in Detainee Cases
Moving quickly to implement the bill signed by President Bush this week that authorizes military trials of enemy combatants, the administration has formally notified the U.S. District Court here that it no longer has jurisdiction to consider hundreds of habeas corpus petitions filed by inmates at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.

Fred Rosen writes for Mexico's El Universal, Oct. 15:

NAFTA: An interim assessment

Because the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is a prototype for Washington´s larger plans for the Americas, the nearly 13-year-old trade pact among the United States, Mexico and Canada, has been subject to continual interim assessments and analyses.

The recently created Honduran anti-delinquency task force Operación Trueno [Operation Thunder] proved critics fears on October 12, when a member of the force shot and killed an innocent citizen Henry Esaú García Fuentes, 25 years old. Fuentes ran away from soldiers who were demanding to talk to him and was shot twice in the back. The soldier who shot Fuentes, against police orders, was identified only by the last name Palma Aguilar in the warrant for his discipline. The mother of the victim, Bertilia Fuentes, requested better military training for force members: "I know that nobody will give my son's life back to me, I can only tell the competent authorities that they must educate the personnel that they send on these operations, that they can't send inexperienced people because what they are going to do is take innocent lives. They need to educate people because, in the same way my son died, many innocent people have died, and if they continue this way, it's going to keep happening."

Two thousand people from the National Forum for the Defense of the Sustainability and Right to Water marched in El Salvador's capital Oct. 18 against privatization and for universal access to quality water. Members of labor, environmental, women's, religious and community groups from throughout the country gathered downtown at the Rio Acelhuate, where San Salvador pumps its sewage. The music, presentations and popular theater all resonated with the main message of the protest: water is a public and social resource and the government's responsibility is to administrate the resource in an integral and sustainable manner – not make it a source of profit for private corporations.

Subcommander Marcos (now known as "Delegate Zero") and other members of the Zapatista delegation arrived in Tijuana Oct. 18 after traveling up the Baja California peninsula, with stops in Ensenada and other communities where they met with Mixtec migrant laborers from Oaxaca. Marcos remarked publicly on their abysmal living conditions in shanties around the agribusiness farms, and attacked Baja California Gov. Eugenio Elorduy as "stupid" for tolerating such conditions. He also expressed solidarity with the struggle in the Mixtecs' native Oaxaca. In Tijuana, where the delegation is hosted in a reconverted theater by the local Multikulti collective, Marcos is scheduled to meet with maquilladora workers. The delegation also atteneded a demonstration outside the local Sempra Energy gas plant, which is accused of contaminating local waters. (APRO, Frontera, Oct. 18)