On Feb. 7, some 20,000 Paraguayan campesinos held protests at 10 sites around the country as part of a national mobilization to draw attention to the low income they receive from agricultural production and to demand solutions to their plight. The protests were organized by the National Campesino Federation (FNC), which said they would continue throughout the week. "For now we will only do brief road blockades in the departments of San Pedro, Guaira, Caaguazu, Paraguari and Concepcion, among others, to get attention," said FNC general secretary Odilon Espinola. Heavy rains dampened turnout in some areas, according to Espinola.

On Dec. 29 Chilean judge Haroldo Brito sentenced 13 former security agents to prison terms ranging from five to 18 years for four revenge murders carried out after a September 1986 attempt to kill Gen. Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, dictator of Chile from 1973 to 1990. Alvaro Corbalan Castilla, the former operations chief of the National Information Center (CNI), received the heaviest sentence, 18 years; he is already serving a 15-year sentence in the 1987 "Operation Albania" murder case. The defendants are expected to appeal the sentences.

Paraguayan general Alejandro Fretes Davalos, who led the imprisonment and torture of hundreds of people under the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989), died on Dec. 29 following a lengthy illness. Fretes had graduated from Chile's Military School, where he served under Augusto Pinochet before Pinochet seized power. Fretes also trained at the US Army School of the Americas in Panama in 1956 while still a major, taking the "Field Grade Officer" course.

On Dec. 12, nearly 300 indigenous Tupinikim and Guarani people and supporters occupied the Portocel port facilities used by the Aracruz Celulose wood pulp company at Aracruz, in Brazil's Espirito Santo state. The protesters are demanding that the Brazilian government fulfill its constitutional obligation by demarcating the traditional territory of the Tupinikim and Guarani. The company has taken over more than 11,000 hectares of indigenous land. In February 2006, after federal police violently ejected the Tupinikim and Guarani people who had retaken their land, Justice Minister Marcio Thomaz Bastos promised to demarcate the territory as soon as the government's National Indigenous Foundation (FUNAI) approved it. FUNAI approved the demarcation last Sept. 12, but Bastos has not yet signed it. Bastos is due to leave the government at the end of January 2007.

Former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet Ugarte (1973-1990) died of heart failure at the age of 91 in the Santiago Military Hospital the afternoon of Dec. 10. Dozens of his right-wing supporters gathered outside the hospital as soon as they heard he had died. Heavily guarded by the police, they sang the national anthem, waved flags and photographs of the dictator and tried to assault reporters and photographers. Dozens of Pinochet's opponents gathered in the nearby Plaza Italia, embracing each other and carrying signs celebrating the general's death.

Paraguayan foreign minister Ruben Ramirez announced on Oct. 2 that in 2007 Paraguay will stop granting US troops immunity from prosecution. The change in policy is an effort to coordinate policies with the other member nations in the Mercosur economic bloc--Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and most recently Venezuela.

On Sept. 6, Chile's Senate voted 20-13 with two abstentions against a bill introduced by Socialist senator Alejandro Navarro which would have granted conditional release to jailed Mapuche activists. In May, four Mapuche political prisoners ended a 70-day hunger strike on the promise that the bill would be approved. Navarro said the bill sought to "correct an injustice" imposed on the Mapuche activists when they were given harsh sentences under a widely criticized anti-terrorism law. (Adital, Sept. 11; La Nacion, Sept. 6; El Mostrador, Sept. 6)

Thousands of people marched on Sept. 10 in Santiago, Chile to commemorate the Sept. 11, 1973 coup in which Gen. Augusto Pinochet Ugarte overthrew the democratically elected government of Socialist president Salvador Allende Gossens. The march led from the center of the capital along the Alameda Bernardo O'Higgins to the Santiago General Cemetery to remember the victims of the coup and the subsequent 17 years of brutal military dictatorship.