The week at a glance...Americas

Tijuana, Mexico

Staying put: The “great migration” of Mexicans to the U.S. has ended, the Pew Hispanic Center said in a report released this week. Over the period from 2005 to 2010, the number of legal and illegal Mexican immigrants coming to the U.S. was less than the number of those leaving—for the first time since the 1930s. The report also found that more of those deported say they won’t try to return to the U.S. The reversal may be due to smaller Mexican families, the recent increase in U.S. border security, and dimmer job prospects in the U.S., the report speculated. “It’s not the United States it was 30 years ago,” said Norma Ibarra, a Mexican immigrant in Los Angeles. The U.S. still has some 12 million Mexican immigrants, about half of them illegal.

Palmarito de Cauto, Cuba

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Hunger strike: The man The Miami Herald calls Cuba’s “most aggressive dissident” has gone on a hunger strike during his fourth week in jail without charges. José Daniel Ferrer García was one of 75 dissidents jailed in the 2003 Black Spring and released last year after intervention by the Catholic Church. Most of those freed agreed to go into exile in Spain, but Ferrer was among those who insisted on staying in Cuba. After getting out, he had been holding weekly protest marches in and around his hometown of Palmarito de Cauto; he was arrested last month during one of them. “They are killing me slowly,” he told his wife this week.

Caracas, Venezuela

Proof of life: Eager to dispel rumors that he was on his deathbed, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez appeared on TV this week for the first time in nearly two weeks. Chávez, who is in Cuba for cancer treatment, had been heard from only on Twitter, prompting rampant speculation on social-media sites that he was too sick to speak. In the new TV images, he was seen playing a bowling game and reading from a recent newspaper, and he lambasted the rumormongers. “Do I need to carry four sacks of cement to show my strength?” he asked.