Americas Forum has developed a new, more interactive site that is now live at Americas-Forum.com. Our Spanish-language site is at ForoDeLasAmericas.org. Follow us on Twitter @americas_forum

QUITO - Human Rights Watch (HRW) said today that the statements of President Rafael Correa that the NGO is funded by the Sinaloa cartel are "irrational nonsense" and shows his "intolerance" of criticism.

QUITO - Ecuador's anti-American president, Rafael Correa, announced today that he will not attend the Summit of the Americas taking place in Cartagena, Colombia on April 14th and 15th because of the U.S. boycott of Cuba's participation in the summit.

"Personally I'm not ready to return to participate in these summits, in which they never discuss the problems of Latin American people," Correa said during a press conference in Ankara, Turkey, where he is on an official visit.

"In our region there are major problems, but they never discuss them in these summits. Even the U.S. embargo imposed on Cuba, they never debate it. Nor the British occupation of the Falkland Islands," Correa added.

"We organize a summit for Latin American countries, and exclude a Latin American country. Cuba is barred by the U.S. boycott," Correa reiterated.

"I'll be frank, I like America because I studied there, but I can not accept that a country excludes another. I am appalled and do not wish to hurt my American friends when I say that the people of Latin America not agree with them to organize these kind of summits, "he added.

CARACAS - In a telephone call from Cuba on Tuesday night, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez announced that he had approved funding "to ensure continuity of training of military officers and cadets in Belarus." Belarus was called "the last true remaining dictatorship in the heart of Europe" by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and it has been ruled by the dictatorial Alexander Lukashenko, who like Chavez, eliminated constitutional term limits to keep himself in office indefinitely. 

Despite near universal condemnation by international human rights groups for his oppression of Belarussians, Lukashenko has been able to count on support from Hugo Chavez throughout the last decade. Chavez was one of very few heads of state to support Muammar Qaddafi before his death at the hands of Libyan freedom fighters, and is still supporting Bashar al Assad of Syria even as Saudi Arabia has pulled its ambassador and closed its embassy in protest of his slaughter of innocent civilians. 

BUENOS AIRES - A live interview with the former Chief of Staff of Cristina Kirchner was cut off the air abruptly last night as the former official began to strongly criticize the Argentine president.

Alberto Fernandez was being interviewed by journalist Marcelo Longobardi live on C5N, when the show was abruptly cut off in mid-sentence, surprising both Fernandez and the show's host. 

Today, Fernandez described the event as "painful" and attributed it to calls received by the show's production staff from Kirchner staffers.

"It seems a sad fact of absolute mediocrity, I find it hard to offer details of the incident because I do not want to profit from something so pathetic," Fernandez said during a later interview on Radio Mitre.

Fernandez continued: "It was a strange thing. I was talking, and then I heard the closing music. I thought it could have been operator error, but no. Longobardi told me, 'They've stopped the program.' What I heard was that was the result of pressure they were receiving from the government."

HAVANA - A human rights crusader in Cuba managed to smuggle a cell phone with a camera inside one of the decrepit cells that the Castro regime forces them into after arresting them during their peaceful protests. 

The Castro regime refuses to allow the International Committee of the Red Cross or the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture to see these horrid cells, that have only been described in the past by those that have been lucky enough to experience them and live to tell the story.

Pope Benedict XVI is scheduled to visit the island at the end of the month,
and former political prisoner of conscience, Angel Moya Acosta, has called on all Cubans throughout the world to appeal to the Pope to at least meet with members of the oppressed resistance movement.  “We (the internal opposition) are asking that our brothers in exile help us so that when Benedict XVI comes to Cuba he will at least dedicate a minute to the opposition, to the outcasts, the persecuted…for this makes up a grand part of the social doctrine of the church“, Moya stated.

SAN SALVADOR - UPDATE: With most votes counted, the ARENA party appears to be winning by 40 percent to 37 percent against the left-wing FMLN party. 

All 84 seats of the unicameral legislature, as well as 262 mayoralties, were up for election. With most votes counted, it appears that ARENA will end up with 33 seats versus 31 for the FMLN, with the remainder distributed among smaller parties. 

The most important mayoralty, in the capital city of San Salvador, ARENA's Norman Quijano was re-elected, according to preliminary results. 

More notable in the election was the poor showing by ex-president Antonio "Tony" Saca, who many former allies say has sought to undermine the ARENA party, forming a coalition named GANA, which was touted to be a conservative coalition, while serving as a congressional ally of the far-left FMLN, a former terrorist group turned political party. Saca was coming in at a distant third as of midnight, with 12.1 per cent of the votes.

WASHINGTON, DC - General Douglas Fraser, the head of the U.S. Southern Command, testified on Monday in a congressional hearing that the U.S. is concerned about the potential for "geopolitical turbulence" in Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia and Haiti. 

According to Fraser's testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, Venezuela faces "uncertainty about President (Hugo) Chavez's health, continued economic instability, and escalating levels of violence that are placing increasing demands on the Venezuelan government." 

Fraser added that, besides the aforementioned problems in Venezuela's domestic problems, there was also concern about Venezuela's decision under Chavez to cease all cooperation with U.S. drug enforcement agencies, and its failure to police drug trafficking in its territory. Fraser stated that, "We are starting to see an increase" in activities such as the capture of a few Colombian drug traffickers, but, he added, that was too small an effort to make a dent in the increase in drug trafficking since Hugo Chavez expelled the Drug Enforcement Agency.

MIAMI - Thursday, March 8th, a number of Ecuadorian human rights and democracy organizations plan to hold public demonstrations against what they describe as transgressions against democracy, free speech and the rule of law by the government of Rafael Correa. 

Correa has prompted international opprobrium in recent months for his multiple lawsuits against journalists that have written critically of him and his administration, including one in which his personal lawyer allegedly wrote the decision for a lawsuit in which Correa was the plaintiff. The result was a sentence of three years in jail and $40 million in fines for one editorial that was critical of his handling of a police strike. Correa later issued a pardon after stinging editorials from worldwide newspapers that included the New York Time, the Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as a number of major international newspapers. 

Organizers of the protest in Miami say that the event will take place outside the Consulate of Ecuador, located at 117 NW 42nd Avenue from 11:00 am until 1:00 pm. The group released a resolution which states the following:

Amateur video captured the shots fired by supporters of Hugo Chavez at a peaceful campaign event for opposition candidate Capriles. Below, bystanders captured a photo of one of the shooters fleeing the scene after the shooting. Not the pistol still in the perpetrator's right hand. 

A supporter of Hugo Chavez was photographed fleeing the scene after firing shots at a crowd of Capriles supporters.

The son of Venezuelan congressman Ismael Garcia was wounded by gunfire in a campaign event of the opposition candidate Henrique Capriles on Sunday, according to news reports. 

In the city of Cotiza, west of Caracas, Chavez supporters dressed in their signature "communist red" uniforms, fired shots at a crowd of Capriles supporters who were participating in a campaign march. 

Ismael Garcia (the son of the congressman) is being treated in the emergency room of the clinic El Avila, after getting wounded in the right forearm. "This is all a result of this violence that the Chavistas want to implement in Venezuela," he said.

HAVANA - While the official word from both a government spokesman in Caracas and the Twitter account of Hugo Chavez himself is that the Venezuelan president is healthy and happy after successful surgery, the reality is that very few outside a tight circle of trusted advisors and doctors know how grave the ailing autocrat's condition really is. 

There has been a blackout on news of Chavez's condition from the moment that he announced that he was sick, and the credibility of the pronouncements from the regime's spokespeople has dropped demonstrably since Chavez announced that he had been "cured" after the last round of chemotherapy. 

But the blackout is speculated to be mostly the result of tightly-held Cuban control of Chavez's treatment regimen. It has been Fidel Castro that has been at Chavez's side since he first flew to Havana last year to receive treatment, even as many of his family and friends have cajoled him to get treatment in the far more advanced oncology centers in Brazil. 

HAVANA - Despite a news blackout in Cuba and Venezuela on Hugo Chavez's health status as he undergoes a third cancer surgery to remove what he says is a lesion in the area where a tumor was removed, news is coming from a Brazilian journalist who claims to have a source within the ailing autocrat's entourage.

Merval Periera, a journalist for Brazilian daily O Globo, published via his blog on Monday night that Chavez had undergone an "exploratory laparotomy" in the Cuban medical facility where he received earlier treatment. The procedure, also known as a celiotomy, is used to explore the abdominal cavity by breaching the abdominal wall, and would likely confirm the speculation that Chavez is being treated for colon cancer.

According to Periera, there is at least one Brazilian doctor on the team that is treating Chavez, and the test results produced in the procedures in Havana are being given to a specialist in Moscow for analysis.

The exploratory surgery was needed, according to Periera, to determine "the best way to proceed in this case, which appears to be more complicated than they initially thought."

QUITO - Under withering international condemnation for his attacks on freedom of the press in Ecuador, Rafael Correa announced today that he was issuing a presidential pardon for the four persecuted journalists of El Universo, as well as the two authors of "Big Brother," a book that exposed corruption in the Correa administration, mostly by the president's brother. The three directors and the editorial page editor of El Universo had been given prison sentences of three years each and a fine of $40 million for an editorial that the president didn't like, and the two book authors had been fined $1 million a piece for their work uncovering corruption. 

Correa had been universally condemned for his assault on independent media in his country, with blistering editorials from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as from a multitude of international newspapers. On Sunday, the San Francisco Chronicle actually agreed with the original El Universo article that Correa was a "dictator."

On its Sunday editorial page, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote about the recent attacks on freedom of the press in Ecuador by the regime of Rafael Correa, and its now infamous case against the newspaper El Universo.

It has long been argued that Correa, like his mentor Hugo Chavez, has been moving Ecuador in a dictatorial direction. But the Chronicle editorial marks the first time that a major U.S. newspaper has directly called Correa, or any of the so-called "ALBA" (Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas) leaders that includes Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Bolivia's Evo Morales and Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega, a dictator.

The Chronicle's editorial is reprinted below:

Ecuador libel ruling threatens press freedom

Protesters in Miami surrounded the Ecuadorian consulate today to protest the 
government of Rafael Correa's attacks on freedom of the press.

MIAMI - On Thursday, protests took place throughout the hemisphere against the government of Rafael Correa, Ecuador's litigious president who has drawn international condemnation for his attacks on free speech and freedom of the press. 

The issue drew out Ecuadorians living in Miami today, who surrounded the Ecuadorian consulate with signs, banners and blue and white flags of their home country.

EFE news agency of Spain reported that dozens of people showed up at the consulate to protest against the Correa government, raising large banners with messages  like "No More Lies!" and "Ecuador = Corrupt Government," and chanting about free speech and freedom of the press. 

MANAGUA - A report by an 80-person European Union electoral observation group on Nicaragua's November 6, 2011 elections condemns the country's electoral body as a tool of left-wing president Daniel Ortega and his political party, rather than an independent electoral body. 

The report confirms what international observers have claimed since November, that the November elections were not free and not fair, and that Ortega had politicized the electoral body for his and his party's political advantage. 

Aside from the politicization of the electoral oversight body, Ortega had also breached Nicaragua's own constitution to run for another term as president, by stacking the country's Supreme Court with supporters that enabled his candidacy by fiat, which prompted Vilma Nunez, the head of the Nicaraguan Center for the Defense of Human Rights, to state, "This is the only country in the world where the court has declared the constitution unconstitutional."

LIMA - It was falsely reported this morning that former president Alberto Fujimori had died after he was taken to a hospital emergency room. 

The former Peruvian president is serving time in prison for his connection to a incident in which civilians were killed in a counter-terrorism raid.

The former president was taken to a cancer hospital Wednesday morning for vascular problems, and it was said that his condition was "complicated." But the rumors of Fujimori's death were refuted when El Comercio reported that "in the last two days he has had (cardio)vascular problems," according to his personal physician, congressman Alejandro Aguinaga.

"The state of his health has been complicated for the last two days. He's being evaluated....he has vascular problems that are not connected to his cancer. I'm currently with him," Aguinaga told El Comercio.

Aguinaga said that he could not give any more information at the moment. The latest reporting is that Fujimori has been taken back to his cell at Diroes prison in Lima. 

BOGOTA - Fifty three Colombian newspapers, all members of the Colombian Association of Newspaper Editors and Media (Andiarios), will publish simultaneously on Thursday the opinion column written by journalist Emilio Palacio, 'No to lies', which Ecuador presdient Rafael Correa used to unjustly persecute Palacio and three directors of El Universo.

This was confirmed by the director of the organization, Nohora Sanin, who accepted the request of the director of the newspaper El Tiempo in Bogota, Roberto Pombo."We found a very important initiative and put it to the attention of all the papers of the Association. It was fitting that we unite as an act of protest. "

Sanin also said they want to "call attention to the plight against the excesses of power that are aimed at silencing the press and opinion." In an interview with WRadio of Colombia, Sanin said the media will print the facts and then simultaneously re-publish Palacio's article tomorrow.

ECUADOR - The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) has ordered the Government of Ecuador to suspend the sentences against the four journalists of El Universo (pending full review), who were sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to pay compensation of $40 million to Correa for an editorial that he found offensive.  

The Executive Secretary of the IACHR, Santiago Canton, announced that the IACHR had requested injunctive relief in favor of the directors of El Universo, César, Carlos and Nicolas Perez, as well as the newspaper's former chief of opinion Emilio Palacio, who is seeking asylum from Correa's government in Miami.

Specifically, it ordered the Correa government to "immediately" stop any action upon of the judgment of the National Court of Justice (CNJ) that took place on February 15, 2012, which ratified the judgment of Judge Juan Paredes in July of 2011. 

Canton explained that given the facts presented by the four journalists before the Commission, it believed that the verdict could result in "irreparable harm" to the right of freedom of expression.