Colombia's presidential election on May 30 is developing into an unexpectedly tight race between Juan Manuel Santos—incumbent hardliner Alvaro Uribe's former defense minister who pledges to continue the current aggressive military campaign against leftist guerillas—and Antanas Mockus, reformist, anti-corruption candidate of the Green Party (Partido Verde). In February, President Uribe was constitutionally barred from running for a third term, leaving Santos as his heir-apparent and presumed shoe-in. But polls are showing Mockus' potential as an upset victor.

Indigenous communities in Colombia's southwestern department of Cauca issued a statement May 11 calling upon all armed fighters to leave their territory, following the intensification of clashes between FARC guerillas and the army that left many civilians injured, displaced, or dead. "We have been left alone in the midst of the bullets of legal and illegal armed groups," said Miller Correa, indigenous governor of the resguardo of Tacueyó, Toribío municipality.

Anti-labor violence is again reaching a peak in Colombia, with four education workers affiliated to the Teachers' Association of Córdoba (ADEMACOR) assassinated in the northern coastal department since Jan. 28. The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), together with its Colombian affiliates, has strongly condemned these murders, noting that they have been simultaneous with a wave of threats and attacks against the leaders of the Teachers' Association of Antioquia (ADIDA).

Through a closed-circuit satellite link from a US federal prison in Virginia, where he is facing drug trafficking charges, former Colombian paramilitary chief Salvatore Mancuso asserted to a panel of his country's Supreme Court in Bogotá April 29 that his illegal forces supported Álvaro Uribe's election in 2002. He is now the fourth paramilitary chief to make the claim. Mancuso also declared that he participated in a plot against former Supreme Court magistrate Iván Velásquez, who was the leading judge investigating the Uribe government's collaboration with paramilitary groups.

Two Colombian soldiers, Sgt. Pablo Emilio Moncayo and Pvt. Josué Daniel Calvo, returned to their hometowns on April 15 following their release by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and more than two weeks of rest and medical tests in Bogotá. Calvo, who was freed by the FARC on March 28 after 11 months in captivity, was greeted by family, friends and the departmental governor in Popayán, capital of southwestern Cauca department, while Moncayo, released on March 30, arrived at Sandoná in the southwestern department of Nariño accompanied by his parents and other family members.

Peru's Sendero Luminoso guerillas, thought to be confined to a small pocket of high jungle known as the Apurimac-Ene River Valley (VRAE), on April 27 launched an attack on a government coca-eradication team in the Upper Huallaga Valley, a region to the north of the VRAE that had been the rebels' principal stronghold in the 1990s. One National Police officer and two eradication workers with Special Control and Reduction Project (CORAH) were killed in the ambush at Alto Corvina, Huánuco region. National Police say the VRAE faction, led by a commander code-named "José," has now been joined by a Huallaga Valley column, led by a commander "Artemio." (El Comercio, Lima, May 1; Prensa Latina, April 27)

In a case sensationalized by the Bolivian press as a crackdown on a "Norwegian Cartel," a Bolivian national was sentenced to 20 years in prison last month, and two Norwegians to 13 years each on charges of attempting to smuggle 22 kilograms of cocaine out of the country. The defendants, all in their 20s, were arrested in May 2008 with cocaine hidden in their backpacks. Bolivian authorities say they were recruited as drug-runners by crime bosses in Norway, with promises of luxury vacations as well as payments of $1,500. (Los Tiempos, Cochabamba, April 22)

The five ex-military chiefs who made up the Bolivian High Command in 2003 were cited by the Public Ministry last month for the apparent destruction of Armed Forces documents related to "Black October" violence of that year, which saw deadly repression against at least 60 indigenous protesters. Charges are still pending against ex-president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada in relation to the conflict, but the US has not extradited him back to Bolivia to face justice.