Rufino Machaca Quinto, a representative of the Natural Resources Defense Front protest organization, announced after a meeting with leaders of the Mines and Energy Ministry (MINEM) in Lima June 23 that the government has agreed in principle to overturn Supreme Decree 083–2007, which gave approval to a controversial mining project in the southern Peruvian region of Puno. Overturning the decree has been a key demand of the Aymara protest movement in Puno. However, more meetings with MINEM chief Pedro Sánchez Gamarra and other cabinet ministers are planned, and the decision is not official yet. The Front's director, Walter Aduviri, emphasized that the movement has other demands—including a halt to oil exploitation in Puno and the planned Inambari hydro-electric project—and that the protests will continue until these are met as well. (Radio Onda Azul, Puno, June 23; Mariátegui blog, Lima, June 21)

US president Barack Obama and congressional leaders "are within striking distance of a deal" to ratify free trade agreements (FTAs, or TLCs in Spanish) with Colombia, Panama and South Korea, US Chamber of Commerce president Thomas J. Donohue said at a news conference in Washington, DC, on June 15. Donohue said the Chamber is "optimistic" that the trade agreements can be approved by July 1.

Walter Aduviri, leader of the Aymara protest movement in Peru's conflicted Puno region, on the morning of June 17 left the installations of Lima's Panamericana TV, where he had spent the last 24 hours holed up under threat of arrest, after authorities agreed not to carry out the warrant against him pending a review. Upon leaving the building, he was met with a tumultuous crowd of his Puneño supporters and the media. After telling reporters that the warrant against him "doesn't have legal or technical substance, nothing," he led the crowd to the Congress building, where a protest vigil is currently underway. Aduviri pledged to remain at chambers until he is granted the right to address the Congress over his demands that controversial mining leases in the Puno region be overturned. (La Republica, Lima, June 17)

Rolando Páucar, president of the Lima-based Institute for the Investigation of Energy and Development (IEDES), hailed the Peruvian government's official cancellation of the Inambari hydro-electric complex, saying that while he is not opposed to hydro-power in general, projects that would flood vast expanses of land must be rethought. "the Inambari project alone would inundate 47,000 hectares of Amazon rainforest," he said. But he proposed nuclear energy as an alternative to the project, calling upon president-elect Ollanta Humala to pursue development of a nuclear plant in Peru, as pledged in his official Plan of Government. The platform pledges that within his first 100 days in power, Humala will approve an expansion of uranium mining in Peru, as a first step towards a nuclear development plan. Páucar also proposed that Peru and Brazil jointly build a "binational" nuclear plant as a substitute for the 1,200-megawatt Inambari project, which would have exported electricity to Brazil. (La Republica, June 13)

Walter Aduviri, leader of the Aymara protest movement in Peru's southern Andean region of Puno, is currently under police siege in the studios of Lima's Panamericana TV station. Following an interview the morning of June 15 on the program "Buenos Días Peru," Aduviri was approached by an officer of the Judicial Police, who requested that he follow him. Aduviri—who has been under arrest orders since May 9—declined, and instead returned to the Panamericana studios. Both a large contingent of police and some 60 of Aduviri's supporters gathered outside, and the stand-off continues at this hour. "I am not detained, but under refuge," Aduviri told his supporters in a subsequent interview on Panamericana's Chennel 5. "If I am taken and the population finds out, there will be extreme confrontations, and this we do not want." (RPP, AFP, Living in Peru, June 15)

After a temporary suspension to allow for Peru's presidential elections to take place in the southern Puno region, local Aymara activists announced June 10 that they will resume their strike civil strike indefinitely, and thousands immediately joined roadblocks on the main highway to Bolivia near the border town of Desaguadero. The protesters are no longer just demanding cancellation of Bear Creek Mining's concession at the local Santa Ana Mining Camp and repeal of President Alan García's Supreme Decree 083-2007 of Nov. 29, 2007 which approved the project, but also the dropping of charges against numerous community leaders that have been brought following last month's unrest in the region. Aymara leader Walter Aduvirii pledged that the protest campaign will radicalize unless demands are met. The national government has agreed to open talks with the protesters, and 58 community leaders have been chosen from the Puno provinces of Chucuito and El Collao to travel to Lima this week to meet with members of the Council of Ministers, or cabinet. The government has agreed to a 14-month suspension of the Santa Ana project while talks proceed. (Mariátegui blog, June 11; RPP, La Republica, AFP, Global Voices, June 10; Los Andes, May 26)

Afro-Colombian community leader Ana Fabricia Córdoba, from the Santa Cruz neighborhood in Medellín, was shot dead by an unidentified gunman on a bus in the city June 7. Córdoba was a leader of communities displaced to Medellín by political violence in the Pacific coastal department of Chocó. She arrived in the city in 2001 when she was forced to flee after paramilitary groups killed her son in Urabá, the violence-torn region that straddles the north of Chocó and Antioquia departments. A second son was killed at the hands of presumed paramilitaries just last year. With her organization, Ruta Pacifica de las Mujeres, she was a leading advocate for the recovery of usurped Afro-Colombian lands in the coastal region.

Ecuador's government sent in army troops backed up by helicopters into the jungles of the northwest coastal province of Esmeraldas to shut down illegal gold mining operations last week, saying the highly polluting activity is associated with drug trafficking and protected by armed militias. Several back-hoes, diesel generators and dredges were destroyed in controlled explosions. The small-scale mining operations in the cantons of Eloy Alfaro and San Lorenzo near the Colombian border were "totally illegal" and violated the country's mining, environmental and tax codes, Minister of Non-Renewable Natural Resources Wilson Pástor and Environment Minister Marcela Aguiñaga said in a press conference. Aguiñaga reported that arsenic and heavy metals like mercury are found in the waters of tributaries of the Rio Santiago. "This will cause cancer and other diseases in the short term," she said. Added Pástor: "Ecuador is not a no man's land. Illegal mining has to stop. We have to put a stop to exploitation of the local workforce. We have to put a stop to drug money laundering. And we're tired of the plundering of our natural resources." (IPS, June 1)