Representatives at the third Continental Summit of the Indigenous Peoples and Nationalities in Iximche, Guatemala, spoke out against US plans to use corn crops to produce fuel. "We have a long tradition as corn growers, and using corn to produce fuel will be like sacrilege, commercializing our heritage for the benefit of large transnationals," said Cesar Tahu, a Quiche Maya leader. Juan Tiney, member of the Continental Summit Committee, emphasized the traditional place of corn as the staple food of Native Americans, protesting that "it will now be used to feed machines, for money and profits, destroying thousand-year-old cultures." (Press TV, Iran, March 31)

Protests that led the Brazilian state oil company to halt production in the Ecuadoran Amazon have ended, Ecuador's Energy Ministry announced March 30. The Ministry statement said losses from the strike totaled more than $40 million, or 840,000 barrels of crude.

Ecuador‘s highest electoral court fired a judge who tried to return half the country‘s legislators to their posts March 28, as a political crisis deepened over a planned referndum on rewriting the constitution. President Rafeal Correa told 2,000 supporters that day that opposition "political mafias" were trying to block the referendum, and that the Ramirez‘s injunction reinstating the 57 dismissed legislators was "illegitimate." Some who gathered to hear him speak burned in effigy giant rats with the word "Congress" scrawled across them.

Attorney Luz María González Armenta, founder of the local group Defense and Promotion of Human Rights-Emiliano Zapata (DEPRODHEZAC), was arbitrarily arrested March 30 at a protest vigil she was leading outside the municipal presidency office in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico.

On the night of March 23, four young people associated with the anarchist punk fanzine Pensares Y Sentires were arbitrarily attacked, beaten and detained by police on the outskirts of Oaxaca City. The black-clad attackers, who repeatedly fired their pistols in the air to intimidate the youths, belonged to the municipal police force of Santa Lucia del Camino, the Oaxaca district where Indymedia reporter Brad Will was killed last year. The detainees were taken to the Santa Lucia del Camino jail, and released at 1:30 AM, charged with disorderly conduct. Two days earlier, they had particiapted in the ceremony and hunger strike to demand the Brad's killers be brought to justice. The detained were also members of the local Somos Resistencia collective, part of the Anarkalactica youth culture network. (Kolectivo Todxs Somos Presxs, March 24)

Speaking to supporters and the press at the opening of the second phase of the Zapatistas' "Other Campaign" in the Chiapas highland city of San Cristobal de Las Casas, Subcommander Marcos said that capitalism is provoking a "fourth world war" for control of the resource-rich lands of poor countries. He said global capitalism has entered a new phase, seeking total market control over lands, waters and even genetic resources. He cited as an example the struggle over Cerro Huitepec, a hill just outside San Cristobal where the developers of a soft-drink plant hope to mine water, with no benefit to the inhabitants of the city. He said that in the new order "national governments are mere managers, and a manager is not a director." (Notimex, March 25)

Cuban leader Fidel Castro, in his first editorial since largely disappearing from public view due to illness last year, charged US demand for biofuels directly hurts the world's poor. The article, appearing in the official Cuban newspaper Granma, was titled "Over three billion people in the world condemned to premature death due to starvation and thirst," charging that biofuel demand pushes farmers worldwide to plant fuel crops instead of food crops needed by the world's poor.

Fighting continues between Pashtun tribesmen and foreign al-Qaeda militants in Pakistan's Tribal Areas. Both sides used mortars, heavy guns and rocket-propelled grenades in battles overnight in South Waziristan, following the collapse of a week-long ceasefire. Violence first erupted March 19 when a Taliban commander-turned-government supporter ordered Uzbek and Chechen militants to disarm, leaving 160 dead last week. Tribesmen March 29 seized control of a school which the Uzbeks were using as their base in Ghawakha, near Wana. At least eleven have been killed in clashes this week. (AFP, March 30)