Thousands of riders were stranded in Lima early on June 30 at the beginning of a 24-hour national strike by Peruvian urban transportation workers and owners. The strikers were protesting new regulations that were to take effect on July 1 and a new rate for fines that starts on July 21. In the southern Lima neighborhood of Villa El Salvador, a group of strikers hurled rocks at buses not honoring the strike call; police agents responded by shooting in the air, according to Radio Programas del Perú (RPP). In the north of the city some strikers stoned buses and burned tires; others used rocks to block the Carretera Central, which links Lima to the center of the country.

The former top leader of the disbanded United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), Salvatore Mancuso, presented government prosecutors with the names of 31 high-ranking military and police officers who had ties to the outlawed paramilitaries—and even allowed them to carry out several massacres. Caracol Radio made public a document from the Fiscalía, or public prosecutor's office, that mentions the names of soldiers ranging from the rank of sergeant to general who Mancuso said participated in joint operations with the paramilitaries.

Bolivian President Evo Morales lashed out at Barack Obama July 1, a day after the US ended trade benefits in a move that could cost thousands of jobs in Bolivia's export industries. "President Obama lied to Latin America when he told us in Trinidad and Tobago that there are not senior and junior partners," Morales said, refering to Obama's outreach to regional governments at the April Summit of the Americas. A day earlier, officials in Washington said they had ended import duty waivers because Bolivia is not doing enough to combat coca cultivation. (NYT, July 1)

President Barack Obama met at the White House with his Colombian counterpart Alvaro Uribe June 29. In comments after this initial meeting between the two heads of state, Obama emphasized his commitment to move ahead with a Free Trade Agreement with the Andean nation which is the hemisphere's worst human rights abuser.

Coca cultivation in Colombia dropped by 18% in 2008, following a 27% rise in 2007, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime says in a new report issued June 19. Cocaine production in Colombia, the world's largest producer of the drug, also fell 28% from a year earlier. These declines were partly offset by increases in coca cultivation in Bolivia, up 6%, and in Peru, up 4.5%, the report said. UNODC executive director Antonio Maria Costa warned: "Peru must guard against a return to the days when terrorists and insurgents profited from drugs and crime." (NYT, BBC News, June 19)

Salvatore Miceli, dubbed the "Mafia's foreign minister," will be deported to Italy after his capture in Caracas June 21 in a joint operation by Venezuelan and Italian police. Italian authorities charge Miceli worked as a middleman between Italy's Cosa Nostra and 'Ndrangheta networks and the Colombian cocaine cartels.

In a new report issued after a a 10-day fact-finding trip to Colombia, a UN investigator accuses the country's military of killing hundreds of civilians over the past six years and falsely identifying the dead as guerilla fighters. Philip Alston, UN rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, said June 19 that the killings, which mostly took place since 2002, were part of a widespread systematic practice (known in Colombia as "false positives").

Colombia's Supreme Court will not allow captured FARC operative Heli Mejia Mendoza AKA "Martin Sombra"—known as the guerilla army's "jailer"—to be extradited to the United States. The high court found he committed no border-crossing crimes. "Sombra" spent 40 years of his life in the ranks for the guerrillas and managed several FARC prisoner camps. He was arrested in February 2008. The US want to try him for his alleged responsibility in the captivity of three US military contractors, who were held in the Colombian jungle for more than six years.