Argentina signed an agreement with Iran on Jan. 27 to create an independent Commission of Truth to investigate the 1994 bombing of the Buenos Aires Jewish community center. Argentinian courts have accused Iran of sponsoring the attack, which killed 85 people, and in 2007 Argentine authorities secured Interpol arrest warrants for five Iranians, including current Defense Minister Gen. Ahmad Vahidi. Despite strong objections by Israel, the US and the Argentine Jewish community, Argentina's Foreign Minister Hector Timerman, who is Jewish, and his Iranian counterpart Ali Akbar Salehi have been involved in a series of bilateral talks that began with their first meeting at the UN headquarters in New York in September.

Sugar-cane cutter Cícero Guedes dos Santos, a leader of Brazil's Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Campos dos Goytacazes, Rio de Janeiro state, was shot dead by unknown gunmen Jan. 26 as he was riding his bicycle home from work. The attack came near an abandoned sugar plant which MST members have occupied amid a legal battle between the landless and the heirs of its deceased owner. A judge ruled last year that the plant and its lands of some 3,500 hectares were "unproductive" and should be expropriated. The heirs are appealing the decision. The MST, who had occupied the land for six years before being evicted by police in 2006, launched a second occupation in November.

Chilean landowner Werner Luchsinger and his wife, Vivianne McKay, died in a fire set by some 20 masked attackers on Jan. 4 at their Lumahue estate in Vilcún, in the southern region of Araucanía. Luchsinger, who was 75 years old, reportedly fought back against the intruders with a firearm, wounding at least one. The couple, who owned some 1,000 hectares of farmland in the region, had resisted demands for land from the indigenous Mapuche community. Pamphlets were found at the site commemorating the fifth anniversary of the death of Mapuche student Matías Catrileo Quezada, who was shot in the back by a police agent on Jan. 3, 2008 during an occupation of an estate owned by Werner Luchsinger's cousin, Jorge Luchsinger.

Argentina's President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner on Jan. 3 issued an open letter to Prime Minister David Cameron, published as a paid advertisement in British dailies, urging the UK, a "colonial power," to abide by a UN resolution to "end colonialism in all its forms and manifestations" and return the Malvinas/Falkland Islands to Argentina. In The Telegraph, Nile Gardiner, a former aide to Margaret Thatcher, responded by charging the letter is "stuffed full of falsehoods and has no regard for reality." Gardiner asserts: "The Falklands are not a colony, but a self-governing British Overseas Territory." (The Guardian, Jan. 3)

Chilean judge Miguel Vázquez Plaza issued an order on Dec. 28 for the detention and trial of eight former military officers for their alleged participation in the murder of renowned singer and songwriter Víctor Jara during the military coup that established the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. The leftist musician was one of the first and best known of the estimated 3,000 people murdered or disappeared by the dictatorship.

On Dec. 27 an Argentine federal appeals court upheld a lower court's decision to stay a possible prosecution of former president Fernando de la Rúa (1999-2001) in connection with the deaths of 39 people during protests and massive looting after an economic collapse in December 2001. De la Rúa had been under investigation for the killing of five people and the wounding of 110 others by federal police when thousands of people defied the state of siege by demonstrating in Buenos Aires in the Plaza de Mayo and at the Obelisk in the Plaza de la República. The other 34 victims were killed in the provinces, where the police were not under the orders of the federal president.

Minera Argenta, the Argentine subsidiary of the Vancouver-based mining company Pan American Silver Corp., announced on Dec. 21 that it was suspending its Navidad silver mining project in the southern province of Chubut and would close its offices in Puerto Madryn and Trelew. The principal reason for the suspension was the failure of the province's governor, Martín Buzzi, to get the legislature to back his plan to circumvent Law 5001, which bans open-pit mines and the use of cyanide in mining operations in Chubut. Residents of the province had organized popular assemblies to oppose Buzzi's plan; dozens of mining opponents were injured when construction workers attacked them in Rawson, the province's administrative capital, on Nov. 27.

An Argentine federal court handed down life sentences on Dec. 19 to former Buenos Aires province interior minister Jaime Smart (1976-1979), former Buenos Aires province police investigations director Miguel Osvaldo Etchecolatz and 14 former police and military personnel for genocide and crimes against humanity in the cases of 280 people detained during the 1976-1983 "dirty war" against suspected leftists. Another seven police agents and civilians were given sentences of two to 25 years.