The AFL-CIO presented its 2011 George Meany-Lane Kirkland Human Rights Award to Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, general secretary of the Mexican mineworkers union, now living in exile in Vancouver.
The discovery of a drug tunnel linking San Diego and Tijuana warehouses led to the seizure of some 17 tons of cannabis as well as a large grow operation in the industrial area of Otay Mesa east of San Diego.
The decapitated and mutilated body of an unidentified man was found in Nuevo Laredo. A message left under the decapitated head named the man as “El Rascatripas”, a moderator for a website where citizens anonymously report narco-violence.
The Mexican Senate has called on the government of President Felipe Calderón to start criminal proceedings against US officials involved in two programs that let firearms enter Mexico illegally.
Mexican Governance Secretary Francisco Blake Mora was killed when his helicopter crashed near Chalco—one week after a memorial ceremony for Juan Camilo Mouriño, his predecessor who had been killed in a plane crash three years earlier.
After 40 days without food, 10 prisoners in Mexico’s Chiapas state ended a hunger strike, citing the threat to their health and the lack of any response to their demands. Supporters launched a protest vigil outside one prison, and blocked a nearby highway.
Mexico’s military and police commit widespread rights violations with “near total impunity,” Human Rights Watch says, documenting of numerous cases of torture, “disappearance” and extrajudicial killings since President Calderón took office.
Residents of San José del Progreso, Oaxaca, say they are continuing their three-year struggle against a mine operated by Toronto-based Fortuna Silver Mines Inc. The struggle is documented in the new film Minas y Mentiras (“Mines and Lies”).
A scandal involving US law enforcement programs to let guns “walk” into Mexico has now widened to include the 2001-2008 administration of former president George W. Bush—after Republican politicians have used the scandal to attack Obama.
Mexican officials are having to deny that US agencies were violating Mexican sovereignty by carrying out undercover operations aimed at Mexican drug cartels.
Mexico’s former President Vicente Fox again spoke out for drug legalization, telling a Washington DC meeting of the right-libertarian Cato Institute that prohibition bears responsibility for the horrific toll in his country’s cartel wars
The clandestine online activist network Anonymous released an Internet video demanding that Los Zetas, Mexico’s bloodiest drug cartel, release one of its members who was kidnapped from a street protest in Veracruz.
