In Brief 10/29/2009 Antigua and Barbuda, Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, St. Vincent and Grenadines, and Venezuela,

Leaders from member nations of the Venezuelan initiative, the Bolivarian Alliance for the People of Our America, or ALBA — Antigua and Barbuda, Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, St. Vincent and Grenadines, and Venezuela — agreed to launch a single, virtual currency for foreign trade within the bloc at its meeting in Cochabamba, Bolivia in mid-October. Member nations also agreed to create a special tribunal obligating companies to pay for the environmental damage they cause.

More than 90,000 children from Mexico were deported by US authorities in 2008, according to a report by the National Human Rights Commission of Mexico. Its report, “Letal Policies, Deadly Walls: The Death of Immigrants on the US Border,” presented Sept. 24, said Mexican minors suffered rights violations, when US authorities allegedly left the children in the middle of the night along the border, instead of handing them over to family members or their Mexican counterparts.

Nicaragua´s Supreme Court cleared the way for President Daniel Ortega to participate in the 2011 presidential elections, by knocking down a ban on consecutive reelection. The ruling, issued Oct. 15 by the six-justice panel of the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court — allies of the ruling National Sandinista Liberation Front — must be ratified by the entire Supreme Court, where the majority of seats are also held by pro-Sandinistas.

Some 15 metric tons of paper that were discovered in the basement of the Defense Ministry in Paraguay contained evidence confirming the 1954-89 military dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner´s participation in Plan Condor, a regional coordination of repressive South American dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s. Martín Almada, director of the Museum of Memory, who first discovered similar evidence, dubbed the Terror Files, in a police station in1992, said these documents outline surveillance of local and Argentine opposition leaders.

Some 21,000 public sector employees in Puerto Rico have been laid off by the government given the commonwealth´s grave fiscal crisis. Workers and labor unions held some of the island´s largest demonstrations in 40 years on Oct. 15, to protest the layoffs. Two weeks earlier, Gov. Luis Fortuño announced that 17,000 workers would be laid off, in addition to the 4,000 other workers who lost their jobs since May.