Various reports, entirely nonexistent in the U.S. mainstream press according to Google News, tell of the U.S. constructing (or maybe reopening) a military base, with airfield, in Paraguay near the Bolivian border.  It's being staffed with Marines, a few hundred so far, assertedly there for humanitarian work.

They're doing it with video games.

In Gary Webb's final weeks, The Sacramento News & Review published his piece on the U.S. military's devising and releasing some video games to recruit, profile its recruits, and generally penetrate civilian society.  http://www.newsreview.com/issues/sacto/2004-10-14/ cover.asp.  Released so far are the shooter games "America's Army," "Tactical Ops: Assault on Terror," and the more tightly targeted recruitment tool "Special Forces."

Some quotations from Webb's article:

Al's hasta luego from Big Left Outside reminds us of the "continuing the battle South of the Border where we are moving toward authentic democracy rather than, as in the North, away from it.." The mean little war criminal in the White House's handlers have reeminded him of it too.  Frank Gaffney has outlined a 7-point "checklist." According to Portside, No. 7 is: "Bush must adapt "appropriate strategies for contending with China's increasingly fascistic trade and military policies, [Russian President] Vladimir Putin's accelerating authoritarianism at home and aggressiveness toward the former Soviet republics, the worldwide spread of Islamofascism, and the emergence of a number of aggressively anti-American regimes in Latin America"

   All is not politically harmonious among the various Tzotzil communities in the mountains around Zinacantán, Chiapas.  A recent conflict is reported by Alex Contreras Baspineiro
at http://narconews.com/Issue33/article961.html, the first of a series of four good articles.  Here's a perspective the articles leave mostly unexplored.

   Water is the flashpoint.  A minority of the communities around Zinacantán identify with the Zapatistas.