The week at a glance...Americas

Guelph, Ontario

Election fraud: Canada’s election oversight board has exposed a sophisticated attempt to suppress opposition turnout for May’s general election in at least one district. Voters registered with parties other than the ruling Conservatives received robocalls telling them—falsely—that their polling place had been changed. Hundreds of voters showed up at the wrong polling station and were told they had to vote elsewhere. One polling official told Elections Canada that some voters “just stormed out,” while others ripped up their voter cards, “which suggested they had no longer any intention of casting a ballot.” The calls came from a prepaid phone registered to a fake name, “Pierre Poutine of Separatist Street.” The opposition Liberal candidate won anyway.

Mexico City

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U.S. supports drug war: U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano defended U.S. and Mexican efforts against drug dealers this week, saying the war on drugs “is not a failure.” On a tour of Mexico and Central America to discuss security issues, including drug violence, Napolitano said that she expected authorities to catch Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who escaped from prison in 2001 and runs the Sinaloa drug cartel, Mexico’s most powerful criminal group. “It took us 10 years to find Osama bin Laden, and we found him,” Napolitano said. More than 47,000 people have been killed in Mexico’s drug war since 2006.

Port-au-Prince, Haiti

Political turmoil: Under pressure from President Michel Martelly, Haitian Prime Minister Garry Conille resigned last week after just four months in office. Tensions between the two leaders were well-known; after Martelly was inaugurated as president in May, it took him six months to approve Conille, holding up billions of dollars in aid for victims of the 2010 earthquake. Conille, a physician who was a top aide to former President Bill Clinton when he served as U.N. envoy to post-earthquake Haiti, had been investigating spending practices and auditing the many reconstruction contracts granted in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake. Martelly reportedly opposed that oversight. “This is a big, senseless step backward,” one Western diplomat in Port-au-Prince told Time. “It’s the last thing Haiti needed right now.”

Caracas, Venezuela

Chávez’s cancer returns: Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez went under the knife again this week for an operation to remove another cancerous tumor. Doctors in Cuba excised the growth, about an inch in diameter, from the same area of the pelvic region where they took out a baseball-size tumor last summer. “President Chávez is in good physical condition,” Vice President Elías Jaua told the National Assembly in Caracas. Lawmakers responded with a standing ovation, shouting, “Onward, Commandante!” Chávez has never specified the exact type or stage of his cancer, and rumors abound that it is worse than he claims. President for the past 13 years, he is running for another six-year term in October.