The Conservatives tabled the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement in Ottawa's Parliament last week, reviving a deal opposed by labor and human rights activists. "International trade is critical to our economic recovery," said Minister of International Trade Peter Van Loan in a press release. "As we move beyond stimulus spending and diversify opportunities for Canadian business abroad, this free trade agreement will help Canadians prosper."

The governor of Bolivia's Chonchocoro prison has been sacked after a number of violent incidents at the facility, as well as revelations that former military ruler Luis García Meza was being housed in a luxury cell. Investigators searched the facility after several prisoners were injured in a turf war between inmates that involved a grenade attack and a shooting. They found that García Meza's quarters included a gym, sauna, tennis table, dining room and barbecue grill. He is serving a 30-year term for abuses dating back to his period in power in the early 1980s. Interior Minister Sacha Llorenti said prison governor Col. Gilmar Oblitas and other police officers would face penalties. (BBC News, March 16)

According to a report in the Peruvian daily La República on March 5, Jesús Sosa Saavedra, a former agent of Peru's Army Intelligence Service (SIE), has confessed to prosecutor Alicia Chamorro Bermúdez that he participated in the 1988 "Operation Lucero," in which the SIE captured and executed alleged Ecuadorian spy Enrique Duchicela and Lt. Marco Barrantes, a Peruvian officer also accused of espionage. Sosa Saavedra said Col. Oswaldo Hanke Velasco, then the head of the SIE, ordered the operation. According to La República, this testimony may bring Hanke Velasco to trial; he had avoided prosecution in the past.

The Bolivian Armed Forces has completed the declassification of files from the years of military dictatorship. According to Defense Minister Ruben Saavedra, Chief of Staff General Ramiro de la Fuente handed over the files to Public Ministry officials three days before schedule last month. The files are mostly from the regime of Gen. Luis García Meza (1980-1981), and will be placed at the disposal of judicial authorities to investigate the disappearance of opposition figures under his rule.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez on March 14 called for Internet controls and demanded that authorities crack down on a website he accused of spreading false information. "The Internet cannot be something open where anything is said and done. No, every country has to apply its own rules and norms," Chávez said during a televised speech, singling out Noticiero Digital, a Venezuela news site he said falsely reported the assassination of one of his ministers.

Venezuela on March 13 tested six training and light attack jets bought from China for defense and anti-drug flights in a deal that dodges an embargo banning sales of US weapons parts to the left-populist government of Hugo Chávez. Caracas ordered a total of 18 K-8 jets from China after a plan to buy similar jets from Brazil's Embraer fell through, apparently because they include US electrical systems. Said Chávez during a televised display of the jets' capabilities: "Thank you, China. The empire wanted to leave us unarmed. Socialist China, revolutionary China appeared and here are our K-8 planes."

On the morning of March 1 members of Bogotá's Small Transport Providers Association (APETRANS), which represents about 90% of the Colombian capital's transport owners and workers, pulled some 16,400 buses and collective taxis out of service in a dispute with Mayor Samuel Moreno Rojas over his plans for modernizing the city's public transportation. Bogotá residents used trucks, bicycles and even vehicles drawn by animals to get to work and school in what most observers described as "chaos." On March 3 Mayor Moreno ordered the closing of public schools to relieve the congestion caused by the strike and authorized the sharing of individual taxis and other alternative transportation methods. He also sent 500 extra police agents to the streets in collaboration with the army's 13th Brigade.

A confrontation on March 3 between police agents and market vendors in Piura, capital of Peru's northwestern Piura province, resulted in the deaths of at least five civilians, according to the authorities; 95 civilians and 25 agents were injured in the incident, and 137 people were arrested. The vendors were protesting Piura mayor Mónica Zapata's plan to remove them from their current location in the Modelo Market to a new market area that they considered inadequate.