Unidentified assailants shot Honduran campesino José Trejo Cabrera on the evening of Feb. 16 as he was riding on his motorbike to his home in the San Isidro section of Tocoa in the northern department of Colón. Trejo was taken to a local hospital, where he died a few minutes later. The victim's brother, Antonio Trejo Cabrera, an attorney who defended campesino activists and fiercely opposed plans for autonomous "model cities" in Honduras, was gunned down the evening of Sept. 22, 2012, in Tegucigalpa near the Toncontín International Airport. Both brothers were members of the Authentic Claimant Movement of Aguán Campesinos (MARCA), one of several collectives seeking the return of land in the Lower Aguán Valley that they say big landowners bought illegally.

IndustriALL Global Union, a European industrial union federation founded in Copenhagen on June 19, 2012, is calling for "mobilizations, awareness-raising activities, and letter writing" Feb. 18-24 to protest labor violations in Mexico, with a special focus on the Finnish-based auto parts multinational PKC Group. In December the company's Mexican subsidiary, Arneses y Accesorios de México, SA de CV, laid off 122 workers from its three plants in Ciudad Acuña, in Coahuila state near the border with Texas; all the members of a militant union's local executive committee were among those dismissed, and the rest were thought to be supporters of the local. PKC has since signed a contract with what the laid-off workers describe as a company union.

The Haitian labor organizing group Batay Ouvriye reports that in early February Leo Vedél, a worker at the Premium Apparel assembly plant in Port-au-Prince, was assaulted and then fired when he demanded that he be paid the legal minimum wage for piece work in the assembly sector, 300 gourdes (about US$7.12) for an eight-hour day. When management rejected the demand, the majority of the plant's workers organized a protest. A manager named Gédéon beat Vedél, who had to be treated in a hospital. Premium, owned by Clifford Apaid of the Apaid family, produces T-shirts for Montreal-based Gildan Activewear Inc. The Rapid Response Network, established by Florida-based One Struggle, is asking for calls to Jason M. Greene, Gildan's supply director in South Carolina (843-606-3750), to demand Vedél's reinstatement with compensation for time and injuries, the firing of Gédéon, and respect for workers' rights. (Rapid Response Network, Feb. 17)

A contingent of some 30 soldiers and police agents arrested Juan Ramón Chinchilla, president of the largest campesino organization in northern Honduras' Lower Aguán Valley, the evening of Feb. 8 in the central park in Tocoa, Colón department. Police then drove Chinchilla, who heads the Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA), 60 kilometers to a court in the city of Trujillo, where he was charged with "usurpation of land." After a two-hour hearing, the judges released Chinchilla conditionally at about 2 am; he is required to stay in the country and to report to the court every Monday.

On Jan. 25 Colombian judge William Andrés Castiblanco sentenced Jaime Blanco, a former contractor for the Alabama-based Drummond Co. Inc. coal company, to 37 years and 11 months in prison for masterminding the March 2001 murders of two union leaders in the northern department of Cesar. The court found that Blanco, who supplied food services for Drummond's La Loma mine, had arranged with right-wing paramilitaries, including one known as "Tolemaida," for the killing of Valmore Locarno and Víctor Hugo Orcasita, leaders of the mine's union. Blanco's assistant, Jairo Charris, was convicted in 2009 in the same murder plot and was sentenced to 30 years.

The Justice and Transparency Foundation (FJT), a Dominican civil organization, has filed for an injunction against a contract the government signed with the Toronto-based Barrick Gold Corporation for the Pueblo Viejo gold mine in Cotuí in the Dominican Republic's central province of Sánchez Ramírez. The mine, a joint venture of Barrick and the Vancouver-based multinational Goldcorp Inc., opened last August despite strong opposition from environmental groups. It is set to begin exporting gold in February.

The effort to bring former Haitian "president for life" Jean-Claude ("Baby Doc") Duvalier (1971-1986) to trial for human rights abuses inched forward on Feb. 7 when an appeals court panel in Port-au-Prince heard from lawyers representing people who say they were victims of his regime. Duvalier had failed to appear at an earlier hearing, scheduled for Jan. 31, and he refused to attend the new hearing, which fell on the 27th anniversary of his 1986 overthrow. Defense lawyers read the judges a letter from Duvalier saying that Feb. 7 should be "a day of national reconciliation" and complaining about "abominable acts" that he said were committed against his supporters after his ouster—apparently a reference to the lynching of some members of the notorious Tonton Macoute paramilitary group.

José Antonio Elena Rodríguez, a 16-year-old Mexican shot dead by US Border Patrol agents at the Mexico-US border near Nogales, Arizona, the night of Oct. 10, 2012, was hit by at least eight bullets and maybe as many as 11, according to an autopsy report made available to reporters on Feb. 7. The report, prepared by doctors for the Sonora State Attorney General's Office, found that at least seven of the bullets hit the unarmed teenager in the back. The shooting came a week after an Oct. 2 incident in which a Border Patrol agent was shot dead by other agents in the dark near the border in Cochise County, Arizona.