Colombia campesinos launched a new national strike on April 28, blocking roads through the departments of Antioquia, Caldas, Tolima and Risaralda. Cesar Pachón, spokesman for campesinos in the central department of Boyacá, said the strike will continue indefinitely until the government of President Juan Manuel Santos helps resolve problems, include small farmers' debts of more than $1 billion. Pachón estimates that 100,000 have joined the strike so far. The decision to strike if the government did not respond by the end of April was taken during the Campesino, Ethnic, and Popular Agrarian Summit, held from March 15-17 in Bogotá. (AP, EFE, El Tiempo, April 28; MR Zine, April 17)

Emilio Marichi Huansi, the apu or traditional chief of the indigenous Shawi community of Santa Rosa de Alto Shambira (Pongo de Cainarachi district, Lamas province, San Martín region), was assassinated April 5—two days before the opening a meeting of apus that had been called by the Shawi Regional Federation of San Martín (FERISHAM) to discuss the process of demarcating and titling the group's ancestral territories. FERISHAM said in a statement that he was killed by sicarios (hitmen) and that he had received threats from local "mafias" and "traffickers in land" who oppose the process of demarcation. (Kaos en La Red, April 12; Servindi, April 10)

A Colombian activist for restitution of usurped lands who was supposedly under special government protection was killed April 9. Colombia's official human rights ombudsman said Jesús Adán Quinto—who had previously reported that agents assigned to protect him had failed to show up—was killed by sicarios (hitmen) as he stepped outisde his home at Turbo in Urabá region of Antioquia department. Quinto was a leader of the displaced population from Cacarica (Riosucio muncipality, Chocó department), a self-declared "peace community" where the Afro-Colombian campesinos have been massively targetted by paramilitary forces since announcing their non-cooperation with all armed actors in 1999. Quinto's fellow activist Carmen Palencia told AFP news service that the people now occupying the lands of the displaced are hiring assassins to terrorize those those who demand return of usurped properties. She said there have been 70 people associated the peace community killed in similar circumstances since 2005. The violence-torn region of Urabá straddles the north of Antioquia and Chocó departments. (AFP, El Espectador, Justicia y Paz Colombia, April 9)

A court in Salto de Guairá, Paraguay, on April 9 refused to grant house arrest to five imprisoned campesinos held since 2012 despite having never been brought to trial or convicted. The denial of their petition came on the 55th day that the five prisoners have been on hunger strike. The five, Adalberto Castro, Felipe Benítez, Néstor Castro, Rubén Villalba and Amado Quintana, were arrested during the June 2012 violent eviction of peasant squatters at Curuguaty, in which 11 campesinos and five police offers lost their lives. The five, who deny their guilt in any slayings, have been tranferred against their will to a military hospital. (Prensa Latina, April 9; Radio Mundo Real, March 14)

Four people died the morning of April 5 in a confrontation between indigenous Mexicans over land in Chilón municipality in the highland region of the southeastern state of Chiapas. The violence broke out when some 25 people tried to remove members of the Regional Organization of Autonomous Ocosingo Coffee Growers (ORCAO) from a 84-hectare ranch; sources differ on whether the ranch is called San Luis or Luis Irineo. The attackers were apparently egged on by the former owner of the ranch, which a group of ORCAO members took over in 1994. On April 6 the state attorney general's office announced that four people had been arrested in the incident. (La Jornada, Mexico, April 6; SDP Noticias, Mexico, April 6)

Starting on the evening of March 25, thousands of Paraguayan unionists, campesinos and students participated in a 24-hour general strike to protest the economic policies of President Horacio Manuel Cartes Jara. Union sources said the action shut down transportation, schools and most businesses in Asunción. This was the country's first general strike in 20 years, and the first major demonstration against the government since President Cartes' inauguration last August. Cartes, a member of the rightwing Colorado Party, was elected in April 2013; the previous elected president, the left-leaning former Catholic bishop Fernando Lugo, was removed from office by Congress in a de facto coup on June 22, 2012, one year before the end of his term.

More than 15,000 Brazilian campesinos marched some 9 km from a meeting at the Nilson Nelson Gymnasium stadium in Brasilia to the Plaza of the Three Powers on Feb. 12 to protest the slow pace at which the center-left government of President Dilma Rousseff is implementing agrarian reform. The protesters had been attending the Sixth Congress of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST), the largest of the Brazilian groups organizing landless campesinos. Kelli Marfort, from the MST's Gender sector, called the government's policy an "embarrassment." "Last year 7,000 families were settled," she charged, saying that the MST alone has 90,000 families living in encampments and waiting for land. "A total of 150,000 families are in encampments in Brazil, many of them for more than 10 years. We're here to announce that we're not satisfied, and we're asking for a people's agrarian reform."

In a retrial held on Feb. 7, a court in La Ceiba, in the northern Honduran department of Colón, convicted campesino José Isabel Morales ("Chavelo" or "Chabelo") on one count of homicide; the judges are expected to sentence him to 20 years in prison. Morales, a resident of Guadalupe Carney community in Trujillo municipality, Colón, belongs to the Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MCA), one of several grassroots organizations in the Lower Aguán River Valley demanding land that campesinos say wealthy landowners acquired illegally. He was first arrested on Oct. 17, 2008, in connection with an incident in which 10 people were killed, including Carlos Manrique Osorto Castillo, a member of a landowning family and the nephew of a local police agent, Henry Osorto. Prosecutors charged Morales on 14 counts, 10 of them for homicide. Morales was acquitted of 13 counts in the first trial, but the court convicted him of Manrique Osorto's death.