A sudden surge in violence in the Mexican Pacific resort of Acapulco is baffling authorities. In the last year, nine police officers have been killed in Acapulco, a city of 700,000 in the southern state of Guerrero. Since January alone,… Read moreFear in Acapulco
Three unidentified men armed with two AK-47 assault rifles and a 9-mm pistol shot and killed former political prisoner Miguel Angel Mesino in broad daylight on Sept. 18 in the town center of Atoyac municipality in the southern Mexican state… Read moreMexico: campesino leaders assassinated in Guerrero
Mexico was jolted by revelations this week by Defense Secretary Gen. Ricardo Clemente Vega linking elite Guatemalan commandos to a Mexican drug cartel operating on both sides of the US-Mexico border. In an appearance before the Mexican Senate, Gen. Clemente… Read moreGuatemalan commandos linked to Mexican cartels
On Sept. 15 a state judge in Zihuatanejo in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero ordered the release of Felipe Arreaga Sanchez, a leader in the campesino environmental movement who had been held in prison since November 2004. Judge Ricardo… Read moreMexico: peasant ecologist freed
Activists from Mexico’s east-central indigenous region of La Huasteca held a press conference in the national capital Sept. 21 to protest a growing presence of soldiers and paramilitaries in the the zone, citing a wave of assassinations of peasant leaders…. Read moreMilitarization in Mexico’s La Huasteca
In a new two-part communique published in the newsweekly Proceso, southern Mexico’s mysterious Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR), both admits to errors and reproaches the rival Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN). The communique, “A little more about the history of the… Read moreMexico’s EPR rebels admit errors, reveal history
Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) in the southern state of Chiapas announced Sept. 16 he will leave the group’s jungle strongholds and embark on a six-month tour of all of Mexico, promising to “shake this country… Read moreChiapas: Marcos announces national tour
From the Arizona Daily Star, Aug. 31, online at Chiapas95: The North American Free Trade Agreement may have boosted big business, but it has had a disastrous effect on Mexicans, a Chiapas economist said. “There have been losers, and the… Read moreChiapas economist: NAFTA displaced Mexican campesinos
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 PeƱaloza 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
