In very disturbing news from Mexico's northeast border state of Tamaulipas, police on Oct. 1 said they rescued 73 abducted migrants outside Reynosa after following their apparent captors to a house and hearing frantic calls for help. Of the victims, 37 were Mexicans, 19 were from Honduras, 14 from Guatemala and another three from El Salvador. They included women and minors, some of whom reported having been sexually abused. Three suspects were detained, who are believed to have seized the migrants on buses they stopped in the desert. Some of the victims had been held for up to four months while their captors demanded payment from their families, police said. Weapons and drugs were also seized at the home, including nearly 700 rounds of bullets, a hand grenade, and almost 10,000 kilograms (22,046 pounds) of what was "believed to be" marijuana. (Reuters, Oct. 2)

The Guyana-based Secretariat of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), an organization of 15 Caribbean countries, issued a statement on Oct. 17 criticizing a ruling by the Dominican Republic's Constitutional Tribunal (TC) that denied citizenship to people born in the country to undocumented immigrant parents. Immigrant rights activists say the TC's Sept. 23 ruling affects more than 200,000 Dominicans, mostly the descendants of Haitian immigrants, and includes people born as early as 1929 who have been recognized as Dominican citizens for more than a half century. The ruling makes people "stateless in violation of international human rights obligations," the CARICOM statement charged; the Secretariat called on the Dominican government to protect the rights of "those made vulnerable by this ruling and its grievous effects." Haiti is a CARICOM member; the Dominican government has indicated that it plans to join. (New York Times, Oct. 17, from AP)

A Palestinian group in Syria said Oct. 13 that over 200 Palestinians were aboard a boat which capsized off Malta's coast two days earlier. The Action Group for Palestinians in Syria said that at least 200 Palestinian refugees fleeing conflict in the country were aboard the boat, which left the Libyan port of Zwara on Oct. 10. Some 70 Palestinian refugees survived the shipwreck and are now in Malta, with the rest unaccounted for, the action group said. The boat was carrying up to 400 migrants, mostly Syrians. At least 33 people perished after the boat sank, a week after another shipwreck off Italy left at least 359 dead, prompting Malta to warn that the Mediterranean is becoming "a cemetery."

In a decision dated Sept. 23 the Dominican Republic's Constitutional Tribunal (TC) in effect took away the citizenship of all people born in the country to out-of-status parents since June 20, 1929. The court noted that the authorities are currently studying birth certificates of more than 16,000 people and have refused to issue identity documents to another 40,000; the justices gave electoral authorities one year to determine which people would be deprived of their citizenship. Since most undocumented immigrants in the Dominican Republic are Haitians, the ruling mainly affects Dominicans of Haitian descent. The TC is the highest court for constitutional issues, and the decision—TC/0168/13, in the case of the Haitian-descended Juliana Deguis Pierre—cannot be appealed.

Some 50 Mexicans and local supporters protested in front of the Mexican consulate in New York City on Sept. 13 to demand money that they say the Mexican government owes them from a 1942-1964 program that brought Mexicans into the US as farmworkers. The guest workers, known as "braceros" ("laborers" or "farmhands"), had 10% deducted from their wages by the US government; the money was supposed to go to Mexico's Campesino Savings Fund for their pensions. The US says it sent the deducted funds to the Mexican government, but the braceros and their survivors say the workers never got their pensions.

Savvas Michael-Matsas, leader of a small radical-left party, went on trial in Greece Sept. 3, charged with "libellous defamation," "incitement to violence and civil discord" and "disturbing the public peace" in a case brought by members of the far-right Golden Dawn party. Michael-Matsas' Revolutionary Workers' Party (EEK) has a slogan of "The people don't forget, they hang fascists." Michael-Matsas himself had publicly boasted: "I'm the embodiment of every fascist's fantasy. I'm a Jew, a communist—and a heretical communist, a Trotskyist, at that. I don't fit anywhere. The only thing I happen not to be is homosexual." Co-defendant Konstantinos Moutzouris, a former rector of Athens Polytechnic, stands accused of allowing progressive news website Athens Indymedia to use the university's server.

Six or more people were killed in the early morning of Aug. 25 when a freight train derailed near the border between the Mexican states of Veracruz and Tabasco. The federal government reported later in the morning that four people were killed and 35 were injured, some seriously; shortly afterwards, Jazmín Cano, the mayor of Las Choapas in southern Veracruz, put the number of deaths at six and the number of injured at 22. The accident was reportedly caused by the combination of rain and excessive speed.

The on-again/off-again Parisian intifada has exploded again, this time over the arrest of a man whose wife was ticketed for wearing a face veil in the suburb of Trappes. Police say the man "tried to strangle" the officer doing the ticketing. The Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF) published a statement on its website from the wife of the arrested man, accusing the police of being abusive and using unnecessary force. The incident was on the night of the 18th, and Muslim youth have been clashing with the police in Trappes since then. (Islamophobia Watch, July 21; AP, July 20)