In Mexico, cases of missing and disappeared persons have reached crisis levels. During the administration of President Felipe Calderon, who assumed office in 2006, thousands of Mexicans have vanished without a trace and some families are trying to make sure the issue isn’t lost in the upcoming presidential transition. Shannon Young reports. Continue reading
17 OCTOBER 2012
Dear President-Elect Peña Nieto,
You are ending a European tour with a visit to Paris before being sworn in as your country’s next president on 1 December. Tomorrow you will meet with French President François Hollande and the next day you will address the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on “Changes in Mexico and their role in the panorama of global change.”
Will the changes your refer to include the tragic toll of a decade of extreme violence in your country? Are they the proposals you plan to submit to you embattled country during your six years in office”
Culminating with outgoing President Felipe Calderón’s federal offensive, the Mexican tragedy has had a toll of more than 60,000 of your fellow citizens killed in the cross-fire between the drug cartels and security forces that are often infiltrated by organized crime. Continue reading
To the international community To the international human rights organizations To the workers, civil rigts, and student movements Today, october 14th, the Federal Goverment of México, with complicity of the State of Michoacan, deployed Federal Police to violently supress a student strike action at the rural and indigenous teaching schools of Trietio, Arteaga, and Cherán, towns on the state of Michoacán. Continue reading
MEXICO CITY | Sat Sep 22, 2012 7:34pm EDT
Seven decapitated bodies that had been chopped into pieces and burnt were left on a highway in western Mexico on Saturday in a region where rival drug gangs are waging a bloody dispute.
The bodies were found in plastic bags in the cargo bed of a burnt-out pick-up truck in the state of Michoacan near the town of Venustiano Carranza and the border of Jalisco state, the Michoacan attorney general’s office said in a statement.
The killings had all the hallmarks of a drug gang attack, a local official said on condition that he was not identified.
Independent Mexican journalist and blogger Ruy Salgado “El 5anto”, the founder of www.el5antuario.org, has disappeared on 8 September 2012 after he stopped transmitting his online webcast. He was supposed to attend a protest in support of the former presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, but never showed up. Continue reading