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.
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.
