Greenpeace Mexico, Amnesty International and the Tlachinollan Mountain Human Rights Center presented the Sierra Club’s Chico Mendes Award to Mexican winners Felipe Arreaga Sanchez, Albertano Peñaloza Dominguez, and Celsa Valdovinos on Aug. 9. Greenpeace Mexico Director Alejandro Calvillo asked the… Read moreMexico: persecuted peasant ecologists win Sierra Club award
Mexican authorities say they suspect drug traffickers are to blame in the killing of six people in three communities in the conflicted southern state of Chiapas. The first slayings occurred late Aug. 23 on a highway linking Tapachula with Tuxtla… Read moreNarco violence in Chiapas
Mexico’s Social Development Secretary Josefina Vazquez Mota announced Aug. 19 that the country has lived through a “lost decade” and that poverty levels are slightly worse today than in 1994. In a speech at the National Congress to Combat Poverty… Read moreMexico: NAFTA, transgenic maize impacts assessed
As the paramilitaries in Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas are re-asserting their reign of terror, their Zapatista enemies, in contrast, are disavowing a return to arms and trying to draw support for their national political mobilization, announced last month. At… Read moreChiapas: Zapatistas host national meetings
A new wave of paramilitary violence is reported from Mexico’s conflicted southern state of Chiapas. Within the last eight weeks, more than 20 Chol Maya families have been displaced from the community of Andres Quintana Roo, in Sabanilla municipality, by… Read moreChiapas: more paramilitary violence
A Nuevo Laredo police officer was killed and the ex-officer she was driving with injured in an attack by unknown gunmen Aug. 10—just two days after the US consulate in Nuevo Laredo re-opened—having closed its doors for a week in… Read morePress terrorized in Nuevo Laredo; fear grows in Texas
A previously unknown armed group, the Fatherland is First Popular Revolutionary Command (Comando Popular Revolucionario La Patria es Primero), has claimed responsibility for the July 6 assassination of former Guerrero state government secretary Ruben Robles Catalan, whose driver was also… Read moreNew armed group attacks in southern Mexico
In another sign that the administration of Mexican President Vicente Fox is seeking to capitalize on the Zapatista rebels’ new political direction to finally resolve the ongoing Chiapas headache, his government announced yesterday that it will release some 800 indigenous… Read moreMexico: government to free indigenous prisoners
The recent “red alert” and new political declaration by the rebel Zapatista army brought the impoverished and harshly divided southern Mexican state of Chiapas briefly into the news. Then, just as quickly, it disappeared. In the flurry of coverage, Chris… Read moreMisery in Chiapas
When Alejandro Dominguez was sworn in as police chief of violence-torn Nuevo Laredo June 8, reporters asked him if he was afraid of dying. “I believe the corrupt officials are the ones who are scared,” replied Dominguez, 52, former head… Read moreNorthern Mexico violence escalates
A dozen men armed with assault rifles killed two children of a man who belongs to a peasant ecologist group in Mexico’s Pacific coast state of Guerrero May 19, and soldiers arrested three members of the same group on weapons… Read moreMexico: children of campesino ecologist murdered
The Independent Task Force on the Future of North America, a New York-based body coordinated by the Council on Foreign Relations, has released a detailed set of proposals that build on the recommendations adopted by Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin,… Read moreNAFTA militarized
