As of Sept. 2 it appeared that some of the 1,100 Uruguayan troops in the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) were about to be repatriated because of accusations of sex abuse at a base in the southern coastal town of Port-Salut. Eliane Nabaa, who handles communication and information for the United Nations military and police occupation force in Haiti, told the Haitian internet news service AlterPresse on Sept. 1 that repatriation was a possibility. On Sept. 2 an Uruguayan website said the soldiers would be sent home in the coming week.

On Aug. 29 Chilean prosecutors ordered the detention of Sgt. Miguel Millacura of the carabineros militarized police for the shooting death of 16-year-old Manuel Gutiérrez Reinoso in the early morning of Aug. 26 in the Villa Jaime Eyzaguirre neighborhood in Macul, a commune in Greater Santiago. Investigators found that Sgt. Millacura's Uzi submachine gun fired the shot that killed Gutiérrez, who had been walking with his brother to observe late-night protests following an Aug. 24-25 general strike. Millacura claimed he shot into the air.

Mexican marines shot and killed Gustavo Acosta Luján in the early morning of Sept. 1 in his home in Jardines de San Andrés, Apodaca municipality, in the northern state of Nuevo León. According to the Secretariat of the Navy, the marines, responding to an anonymous tip, were fired on from inside the house, and Gustavo Acosta, an "alleged criminal" with the alias "M-3," died in the operation. The marines said they found a 9 mm submachine gun, an AR-15 rifle and quantities of cocaine in the house. Mexican president Felipe Calderón Hinojosa has been using soldiers for police work in northern Mexico since militarizing the "war on drugs" shortly after he took office in December 2006.

The US Justice Department announced on Aug. 30 that Kenneth Melson, the acting head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), had been reassigned to another position in the department and that Dennis Burke, the US attorney for Arizona, was resigning from his post. The department didn't explain the reason for the changes, but they were clearly fallout from Operation Fast and Furious, a bungled ATF program that allowed some 2,000 weapons to go from the US to Mexico, where they were probably used in drug cartel violence.

Cars and buses were taken off the streets of Bolivia as the country held its first "National Day of the Pedestrian" on Sunday Sept. 4. All motor vehicles, including public transport, were banned for the day in cities across the country, as the streets were given over to youth festivals and sporting events. Said La Paz Mayor Luis Revilla: "We are enjoying this day in homage to the environment, but also and above all in homage to pedestrians. The city is not only for vehicles, but also for people."

Two Shipibo indigenous communites in the Peruvian Amazon have broken off negotiations with Maple Gas Corporation del Peru SRL., over the health and environmental impacts of six oil spills on their territory over the past three years. The move comes just one month after 32 Shipibo were forced to clean up a spill with their bare hands. The July 10 pipeline rupture in Maple Energy's Oil Block 31-E, 75 miles north of the city of Pucallpa, spilled crude oil into the Río Mashiria, a tributary of the Ucayali. The Shipibo communities of Nuevo Sucre and Canaán de Cachiyacu officially terminated the negotiations on Aug. 11, charging that Maple Gas, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Ireland-based Maple Energy (MPLE) was not acting in good faith.

An NGO has released a report condemning Colombia’s human rights record as part of a series of articles analysing the relationship between anti-terrorism policies and human rights since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH) report notes how shortly after September 11, the US financial aid from Plan Colombia, which had previously been earmarked for fighting drug trafficking, was also used to combat terrorism. At the same time the FARC, the ELN and paramilitary groups were added to the US list of terrorist organizations.

Residents of Kington's poor district of Tivoli Gardens reacted with shock and disbelief to the news that extradited accused drug kingpin Christopher "Dudus" Coke arranged a plea bargain this week at Federal District Court in Manhattan. "I'm devastated," one anonymous member of the Coke clan told the Jamaica Gleaner. Scores were killed in days of street-fighting in the district last year as police and army troops were deployed to hunt down Coke for extradition to the US. But in the end he cut a deal in which he pleaded guilty to trafficking large quantities of marijuana and cocaine, and approving the stabbing of a marijuana dealer in the Bronx in 2007, who apparently survived. Five murder charges that could have landed him life in prison were dropped. Coke faces a maximum term of 23 years; the plea deal does not require him to cooperate or testify on behalf of the government in any proceeding. (NYT, Jamaica Gleaner, Sept. 1)