The three main demands of the strike are that the environmental licenses for the Quimbo Hydroelectric Project and Emerald Energy be immediately suspended, public environmental hearings be held for the project in affected communities and for multinational corporation Emgesa to immediately repair the Paso del Colegio Bridge and other highways that have been damaged while working on the Quimbo project.

María Elizabeth Macías Castro had a great fondness for the internet. It gave her comfort and hope, and was an indispensable element of her work as moderator of a website where organized crime is reported. This everyday tool would also be the cause of her death. 

Exactly one week before our July 1 visit, police entered Rigores and at gunpoint burned the homes of 135 families, killed their animals, bulldozed their orchards, the school, and two churches. Six months later all but four families remain on their land. They have rebuilt their houses, although now from branches and mud wattle where before stood larger block or poured cement homes.

Surrounding the November 13 elections in Michoacán, one mayor was shot dead, fifty candidates from several parties stepped down due to threats, an indigenous community boycotted the election and instituted their own electoral processes, and an entire city’s police force resigned.  In the last five years, Michoacán has seen some of the worst gang violence in the country outside of the border region and has been heavily militarized. Both institutionalized political pressure and “narco-influence” have continue to call in to question the possibility of free and fair elections in Mexico.

Chile’s supreme court of appeals has temporarily suspended the exile sentence imposed upon an ex-militant of the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR).  Accused of involvement in the killing of former Santiago mayor Carol Urzúa Ibáñez, Hugo Marchant and his family were arrested and tortured by Centro Nacional de Intelligencia (CNI) agents.

The U.S.military approach to undocumented immigrants has moved further south - to a new military academy in Panama. The new school, which Panama announced in early December, will bring together U.S. and Colombian trainers to train Central American police units in border patrol, countering drug traffic, and “combatting undocumented persons.”

Trampling out the Vintage explains better than any other book how the UFW under Chavez’s leadership became in the 1960s and 1970s one of the most remarkable and successful unions in U.S. history but then crashed and burned so breathtakingly fast that by the end of the 1980s it had pretty much disappeared from the fields.