Approximately 250 Yemeni demonstrators gathered April 1 in front of the US Embassy in Sanna to demand the release of Yemeni detainees held at Guantánamo Bay. According to media sources, 90 out the 166 remaining Guantánamo detainees are Yemeni, and several have been detained for more than a decade. Protesters reportedly decried conditions at the prison, citing reports of inhumane treatment, water deprivation and forced feeding. Protesters also held up photos of their detained relatives and denounced treatment allegedly leading to several suicides, including that of Salah Al-Salami, who committed suicide while in detention in 2006. The protest prompted dispatch of the Yemeni military. Among the Yemeni detainees is Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is accused of bombing the USS Cole while it was in port in Yemen in October 2000.

Peru's Congress has opened a high-profile investigation into a contract with Israeli security firm Global CST, entered into by the previous government of Álan García, after an audit by the Comptroller General of the Republic found irregularities in the deal. The probe concluded that the Peruvian state had lost $16 million when the firm failed to fulfil terms of its contract with the Armed Forces Joint Command. A congressional oversight commission has questioned three former cabinet members in the scandal—ex-housing minister Hernán Garrido, and ex-defense ministers Ántero Flores Aráoz and Rafael Rey—as well as ex-Joint Command chief Gen. Francisco Contreras. Special anti-corruption prosecutor Julio Arbizu has called on García himself to testify before what is being called the Mega-Commission, and for the attorney general's office, or Fiscalía, to investigate the former president. 

Sebastián Muñoz, founder of the bicyclists' rights group Andando en Bici Carajo in Quito, Ecuador, was struck by a car and killed while on his bicycle March 22. It was a hit-and-run collision, with the motorist still at large. Muñoz had made  bicyclists' safety his special concern, leading a campaign to leave white-painted "ghost bicycles" at places around the city where cyclists had been killed, and painting murals advocating for the cause. A memorial bicycle ride for the fallen activist is planned for April 6, with stops at the murals and "ghost bicycles," culminating in the installation of a ghost bike in his honor at the intersection where he was killed. (La Línea de Fuego, Quito, March 25; El Comercio, Quito, March 24; El Comercio, March 22)

An Amazonian indigenous group said to be the Earth's most threatened tribe has sent an urgent appeal to Brazil's government to evict invaders from their forest homeland. Despite a federal judge's ruling that ordered Brazilian authorities to remove all invaders on Awá land by the end of March, not a single person has yet been evicted. The Awá are becoming increasingly desperate as illegal loggers close in on them and settlers encroach on their territory. In a rare video appeal to Brazil's Minister of Justice, an Awá man said: "I am angry, very angry… The loggers come here and chop down the trees…  The Minister of Justice in Brasília can help us here, now. He must help us now!"

With a strike that lasted from Feb. 24 to March 8, tens of thousands of Colombian coffee growers took to the streets in towns and cities across the country, demanding relief for a sector hard hit by neoliberal policies—and ultimately claiming victory despite government intransigence and calumnies. The cafeteros refused to harvest beans, blocked traffic, and prevented beans from being loaded at port terminals, in a wave of actions across Colombia's highland coffee belt, stretching from Nariño in the south to Antioquia in the north.

Seven were killed March 29 when a masked gunman in a bullet-proof vest and black uniform opened fire with an AK-47 in a bar in in the commercial center of Chihuahua City in northern Mexico. Three of the dead were women who worked at the bar, called Mogavi. The city has seen a wave of violence as the Juárez Cartel and Sinaloa Cartel battle for control of the strategic corridor leading to the border town of Ciudad Juárez, immediately up the highway to the north. In a similar incident that night, gunmen opened fire in a bar in Ciudad Altamirano, Guerrero state, killing four civilians and three off-duty federal agents. The previous night, an armed commando raided a nightclub called La Habana in Oaxaca City, in Mexico's south, menacing staff and patrons with AK-47s, shooting up the bar's facade, and abducting one man identified only by his nickname, "El Chiquilín."

Authorities in northern China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region earlier this month blocked an attempted cross-country march by traditional Mongol herders, with police assaulting hundreds in two incidents. In the first incident, herders from Inner Mongolia’s Durbed (Chinese: Siziwang) banner (county) gathered at Hohhot train station on March 1, intending to march nearly 500 kilometers to Beijing. But police quickly arrived and broke up the gathering, according to the Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center (SMHRIC). The following day, troops in a dozen police vehicles descended on Halgait village in Zaruud (Zhalute) banner, breaking up another group that intended to march on Beijing. The herders hoped to arrive in Beijing for the meeting of the National People's Congress where Xi Jinping was installed as president, to protest confiscation of grazing lands.

Thousands of rescuers are struggling to reach 83 workers trapped by a landslide at a gold mine at Gyama, Maizhokunggar county, in China's Tibetan Autonomous Region March 29. The facility is operated by the Tibet Huatailong Mining Development Co, a subsidiary of the state-owned China National Gold Group Corp. Ironically, the Gyama mine was something of a showcase for Beijing's development of Tibet; the Huatailong company took it over in 2009 from some dozen small-scale private companies that operated on the margins of the law in what official news agency Xinhua called a "rat race for the rich ore supplies." The disaster prompted a flurry of criticisms on Chinese social media, but AP reports these were quickly "scrubbed off or blocked from public view by censors."