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.
At least 20 inmates were killed and 12 injured in rioting at a prison in the violence-torn Mexican border city of Matamoros. Federal and state police as well as army troops were brought in to help guards restore control of the facility.
More than 20 displaced indigenous Triqui members of the Autonomous Municipality of San Juan Copala were arrested by local police in the “official” municipality of Oaxaca de Juárez for attempting to occupy lands they say were usurped by paramilitaries.
Firearms Mexican police seized last April at the home of an alleged drug trafficker in Ciudad Juárez turn out to be among the 2,000 weapons that reached Mexico in the ATF’s bungled Operation Fast and Furious.
Another 32 bodies were found in three houses in the Mexican port city of Veracruz, the latest in a series of attacks on presumed members of Los Zetas narco-network by a rival group calling itself the Mata Zetas, or Zeta Killers.
Noel Salgueiro Nevarez AKA “El Flaco” (Skinny), the Sinaloa Cartel’s top boss in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, was captured by army troops in Culiacán. But the cartel’s maximum boss, “Shorty” Guzmán, remains at large.
The UN High Commissioner of Human Rights voiced concerns regarding the growing number of journalists killed in Mexico, and called for Mexican authorities to investigate these crimes and bring those responsible to justice.
Police in Mexico’s resort city of Acapulco found five decomposing human heads left in a sack outside a primary school. The city’s schools have been closed since last month with teachers on strike in response to extortion threats from criminal gangs.
The US Treasury Department imposed sanctions on four Colombian nationals and 12 companies said to be linked to Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel. The move comes amid charges that US law enforcement is favoring the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico’s bloody narco wars.
The Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) agreed to end a sit-in the unionists had been holding in Mexico City’s main plaza since March; the government has agreed to find jobs for laid-off workers.
Two half-naked mutilated bodies left hanging from a bridge in the Mexican border town of Nuevo Laredo were accompanied by “narco-messages” scrawled on cardboard saying the killings were an example of the will happen to “Internet busybodies.”
Leaders of 71 unions in 18 countries have called for Mexico’s federal government to take over the stalled investigation of a US union activist’s murder in 2007. Santiago Rafael Cruz was organizing migrant laborers in Monterrey when he was beaten to death.
