The news at a glance ... Americas

Baja, Mexico

Strong quake: A magnitude 7.2 earthquake jolted the Mexican state of Baja California this week, ripping cracks in roads and rocking buildings hundreds of miles away in Los Angeles and Phoenix. Three people were killed by collapsing walls in the border city of Mexicali, while hundreds were injured. The quake was similar in force and depth to the January earthquake in Haiti, but Baja is sparsely populated, so damage was much less extensive. “If you had to place a large earthquake, this was a good location,” said seismologist Susan Hough of the U.S. Geological Survey. Scientists say there is no connection between the Baja quake and recent ones in Haiti and Chile, as all occurred on different fault lines.

Port-au-Prince, Haiti

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Back to school: Thousands of youngsters finally returned to school in Haiti this week, three months after a devastating earthquake killed more than 200,000 people and leveled much of the country. Nobody wants to go back into the few concrete schools that remain standing, so teachers greeted students in makeshift tent classrooms. The Education Ministry said the next two weeks would be devoted to letting students share their personal stories of trauma, and teaching them about why earthquakes happen and what to do when one strikes. International donors pledged nearly $10 billion for Haiti’s reconstruction at a U.N. conference in New York last week, and the government said building safe schools would be a top priority.

Caracas, Venezuela

Jailing dissidents: In a flurry of arrests, the government of President Hugo Chávez has been cracking down on prominent critics, including businessmen, politicians, and even judges. Financier Eligio Cedeño, a top funder of opposition parties, was jailed on currency fraud charges that international observers called bogus; when Judge María Lourdes Afiuni overturned the conviction, she too was jailed. Intelligence agents also arrested former opposition presidential candidate Oswaldo Álvarez Paz for the vague crime of “conspiracy.” From his jail cell, Álvarez Paz said the government “is fraudulently inventing conspiracies, assassination plots, and national emergencies” in a bid to squelch dissent ahead of the September parliamentary elections.

Para, Brazil

Farm activist murdered: A Brazilian activist who’d campaigned for the rights of landless peasants was killed last week, evidently the latest casualty of a struggle between powerful cattle barons and poor farmers. Pedro Alcantara de Souza, leader of the Federation for Family Farmers, was gunned down by two men on motorcycles in what appeared to be a contract killing. Conflicts between ranchers and subsistence farmers over land rights have led to 1,200 murders across Brazil in the past 20 years, many of them allegedly contracted by the ranchers. Brazilian law allows landless peasants to appropriate fallow farmland, but in practice, loggers and ranchers using that land fight off their attempts to do so. Half of Brazil’s arable land is owned by just 1 percent of the population.