On Oct. 12 Colombian university students proceeded with plans announced in September to carry out an open-ended strike against proposed changes to the education system that they say will lead to privatization. A total of 32 public universities have gone on strike, according to the Broad National Student Panel (MANE), a national coordinating group, which has called for weekly demonstrations in support of the strike, including a special national mobilization at all public universities on Oct. 26.

About 50 Chilean students and their supporters took over a congressional budget subcommittee's meeting in Santiago on Oct. 20 to demand that the government hold a binding plebiscite on their demands. A massive student movement has paralyzed universities and secondary schools for nearly six months around calls for reversing the privatization and decentralization of the education system that started during the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Various polls show about 80% of the population supporting the students' demands, which won some 87% of the more than one million votes case in a nonbinding grassroots plebiscite students and teachers held Oct. 7-9.

Haitian activists marched in Port-au-Prince on Oct. 19 to demand the immediate withdrawal of the thousands of foreign soldiers and police agents in the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH); they also called for the United Nations to pay compensation for the country's current cholera epidemic. The organizers chose Oct. 19 for the protest to mark one year since the outbreak started, apparently because of poor sanitary conditions among Nepalese troops at a MINUSTAH base near Mirebalais in the Central Plateau.

Peru's National Police report the seizure of nearly a ton of cocaine, after two operations coordinated with the army in the conflicted Apurímac-Ene River Valley (VRAE). Victor Torres, police commander in the VRAE, said 540 kilograms of cocaine were seized in the first operation on Oct. 7, near the community of Boca Sonaro, in the province of Satipo, Junín region. Seven were arrested in the operation, led by the army's 31st infantry brigade. Officials reportedly seized 415 kilograms in the second operation, which took place on Oct. 12, in Llochegua, Huanta province, in Ayacucho region. The operation, involving helicopters, also saw the destruction of two cocaine laboratories. Torres told radio network RPP that "although the operations were carried out at different times both are related, because it is the same gang, headed by a Colombian national, who went by the name of 'Bellota,' operating in Llochegua." (Peru This Week, Oct. 13)

Peru's new populist president, Ollanta Humala, is facing his first corruption scandal, as his Second Vice President Omar Chehade has come under investigation by the Prosecutor General on charges of using his influence to arrange a police eviction of cooperative farmers at a disputed property outside Lima. Former National Police general Guillermo Arteta claims that Chehade participated in a meeting with three police chiefs at the famous Brujas de Cachiche restaurant in Lima's fashionable Miraflores district, to discuss the conflict over the Andahuasi cooperative sugar mill and plantation in the Huaura-Sayán Valley. Chehade's brother and cousin also reportedly took part in the meeting, where they lobbied the generals to evict the 1,500 workers at Andahuasi, so that Peru's agribusiness giant Grupo Wong could take control of the site. Arteta says he was fired in an earlier purge of senior police generals because he refused to evict the workers.

Swiss Federal Judicial Police on Oct. 19 arrested Algeria's former defense minister Khaled Nezzar for questioning by prosecutors on "suspicion of war crimes." Nezzar, 73, was detained while in Geneva for medical treatment. The Swiss group Track Impunity Always (TRIAL) said the investigation was prompted by complaints by two victims stemming from Algeria's 1990s civil war pitting Islamist extremists against government forces, in which some 100,000 were killed. "The winds of the Arab Spring have reached Switzerland," said TRIAL's director Philip Grant. However, TRIAL criticized the Swiss prosecutor for releasing Nezzar "on the basis of a promise to attend" future hearings. TRIAL said he should have been kept in protective custody as he presented a high flight risk. (El Watan, Algeria, Oct. 24; AFP, Reuters, Oct. 22)

King Emere Godwin Bebe Okpabi and four other tribal leaders in Nigeria's Ogoniland last week filed a lawsuit in US federal court against Royal Dutch Shell PLC, charing the oil giant polluted local groundwater with benzene at levels 900 times the limits set by the World Health Organization. The lawsuit is based on a UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report assessing the impact of oil contamination on the environment and public health in Ogoniland. The report, which was published in August, found high levels of the carcinogen benzene as well as several inches of refined oil floating in groundwater that the village uses for drinking and agriculture. The UN investigators suggested that both Royal Dutch Shell and Nigeria's state oil company (Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation—NNPC) were responsible for the pollution, although Shell abandoned the area in 1993. The complaint, filed in US District Court in the Eastern District of Michigan, contends that Shell's actions were willfully negligent in contaminating groundwater. Suing under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), the plaintiffs are seeking $1 billion in damages, an injunction and immediate cleanup.

The cross-country Eighth Indigenous March arrived in La Paz Oct. 19, to a tumultuous welcome. Cheering supporters lined the city's historic San Francisco plaza, including a large group of uniformed schoolchildren holding hand-made signs in support of the protesters. The marchers later established an encampment at Plaza Murillo, where the presidential palace is located. Two days later, President Evo Morales announced that he would alter plans for the road linking Bolivia with Brazil so that it will not pass through the TIPNIS indigenous reserve. "And so the matter is resolved," Morales told reporters. "For me, this is called governing by obeying the people." (AP, Oct. 21; La Opinión, Cochabamba, Oct. 20)