News stories by Marcela Valente*

Hundreds of Spanish companies continue to do business in Argentina, despite Madrid’s campaign in defence of Repsol, which controls YPF — the oil company that the government of Cristina Fernández plans to renationalise.

As Mercosur foreign ministers gather this Monday ahead of Tuesday's summit of heads of state, political harmony is growing between the governments of member countries, although free trade not only remains a pending challenge but is increasingly facing pitfalls.

In the 1970s, with no Internet or social networking sites to get information out, Amnesty International managed to become a thorn in the side of the dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America, several people who benefited from its advocacy work recalled on the occasion of the rights watchdog's 50th anniversary.

The governments of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay are drafting laws to curb acquisition by foreigners of extensive tracts of their fertile agricultural land.

'The pipeline will carry gas to Bolivia and seven provinces in Argentina, but we who live in Campo Durán, where the pipeline starts, will not have gas,' Julio Palavecino told IPS.

The nuclear disaster in Japan has revived the debate in Latin America on the pros and cons of expanding the use of nuclear energy. While both Argentina and Brazil, which had put the greatest emphasis on nuclear power, plan to continue down that road, other countries have put plans and unfinished projects on hold.

With the string of announcements in South America of recognition of a Palestinian state this month, the region's integration process showed a new interest in and capacity to reach common positions in the realm of foreign policy.

Created with the aim of recovering the remains of the victims of forced disappearance from Argentina's 1976-1983 dictatorship, the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team has already worked in 40 countries and is expanding the scope of cases that it investigates.

They left behind months or years of slaving away -- in some cases, literally -- in garment sweatshops, working long hours for little to no pay. But breaking free from modern-day slavery or forced labour wasn't enough for a group of textile workers from Argentina and Thailand, who have gone on to forge a new kind of cooperation reaching halfway across the globe.

NGOs and ordinary citizens around the world plan to help raise awareness on the problems caused by climate change and urge governments to adopt policies to combat the phenomenon, with more than 7,000 activities in 188 countries on Sunday.