World

Taking advantage of the political capital it gained with the Colombian military rescue of high-profile Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) prisoner Ingrid Betancourt on July 2, the government of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe has launched a major crackdown on political opponents and social movement leaders.

For four months following the historic elections for a constituent assembly — which formally ended the monarchy and established a republic — the small Himalayan nation was in a state of limbo as right-wing forces disrupted attempts to establish a national consensus government.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has promised new Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo “all the oil he needs” during a public event in Uruguay after Lugo was inaugurated on August 15.

The admission by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) that it knows the location of loyalist paramilitary weapons dumps, is no surprise considering the involvement of police in the six counties that make up Northern Ireland with loyalist killer gangs over the years, according to Sinn Fein’s Alex Maskey.

Political and social conflict continues to grow in Peru in the wake of a general strike against the neoliberal policies of President Alan Garcia’s government, which saw much of the country paralysed on July 9.

Indonesian labour activist and chairperson of the Deliberative Council of the National Liberation Party of Unity (Papernas), Dita Sari, has declared that she will run for the Star Reform Party (PBR) in the 2009 legislative elections.

With 99% of votes counted, Bolivia’s first indigenous president won a crushing 67.43% vote in the August 10 recall referendum.

On August 7, after a week of border clashes, Georgia’s pro-Western President Mikheil Saakashvili launched a military attack against South Ossetia.

Over the past few months, the Cuban government under President Raul Castro has announced a series of reforms to the island nation’s agriculture and food production policies.

Cooperativist ecological farmers supported by the Venezuelan government’s land reform programs were attacked on August 7 by armed and masked men who, the farmers say, were hired by large estate owners in the area to cut short the changes heralded by the Bolivarian revolution in their rural Andean mountain valley of El Vallecito.

El Salvador is an exciting Central American nation to be watching at the moment, because if current polls are to be believed, the left-wing Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), looks set to win the parliamentary elections in January, and the presidential elections in March.

The below appeal for solidarity has been issued by Peace and Justice for Colombia (PJFC), . Liliany Obando was a featured international guest at the Latin America and Asia International Solidarity Forum held in Melbourne over October 11-14 last year. Obando has been contracted to carry out work for Agricultural Workers Union Federation (FENSUAGRO), although she was never an official representative or member of a leadership body of the union.