Authorities in Ciudad Juárez said March 14 they had discovered a further 19 bodies buried behind two houses used by drug dealers, bringing the total number of corpses found there to 33. Agents began digging behind the houses on March 1, after raiding one, confiscating 3,700 pounds of marijuana and arresting several people. All but three of the bodies appear to be men, and most have been buried at least five years. Some were dismembered. It's the second such find in less than a month: federal authorities also unearthed nine bodies buried in the yard of a Ciudad Juárez home in late February after a drug bust. (LAT, NYT, March 15)

Mexico's lower House of Deputies voted to open an investigation into accusations that Government Secretary Juan Camilo Mouriño improperly helped his family win contracts from the state oil monopoly Pemex. The accusations stem from contracts Mourino signed between 2000 and 2004 when he acted as the legal representative of his family's company while also working as a lawmaker and then as deputy energy secretary. The move comes as President Felipe Calderon, who campaigned on an anti-corruption platform, is seeking to further open Pemex to foreign investment.

More than two weeks after Colombia's military incursion into Ecuadoran territory to take out Raul Reyes, a top-ranking leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), voices are being raised about possible US complicity or direction in the hit. On March 9,Simon Romero in the New York Times took a tentative stab at it, noting a similarity between the tactics of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and his pal George Bush—e.g. Washington's nearly identical hit on supposed al-Qaeda militant Abu Laith al-Libi in Pakistan last month...

We've noted that CentCom commander Adm. William Fallon is an exponent of the "pragmatist" view on Iran—a point also stressed by this March 11 AP account of his sudden resignation. Does this signal a silent coup by Cheney and the neocons—and point towards an "October surprise" invasion of Iran? We sure hope not.

Chaldean Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho, kidnapped in Iraq last month, was found dead on March 13, his body half-buried in an empty lot in the northern city of Mosul. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki blamed Rahho's death on al-Qaeda and said his Shi'ite-led government was committed to protecting Christians, who make up about 3% of Iraq's population. "The perpetrators of this horrible crime will not run from the hand of justice," Maliki said. Pope Benedict, who had made several appeals for Rahho's freedom, called his death "an act of inhuman violence that offends the dignity of the human being" in a letter to Iraqi church leaders. (Reuters, March 13)

We're surprised the right-wing blogosphere hasn't yet accused the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) of being behind the revelations of gubernatorial hanky-panky-for-pay in New York state. Among the now-shamed Elliot Spitzer's many enemies is Richard Grasso, the former NY Stock Exchange CEO brought down in 2003 by then-Attorney General Spitzer over "compensation issues." (In a March 13 Newsweek commentary, wittily entitled "Spitzenfreude," Daniel Gross invokes his name while noting the unseemly "joy at the governor's suffering" among The Street's bottom-feeders.) In June 1999, Grasso flew into the jungles of Colombia to meet with the FARC guerillas at their then-autonomous zone in Caquetá department, in an unlikely bid to convert them to capitalism. (Reuters, June 26, 1999) Actually, given the FARC's control over a sizable chunk of Colombia's cocaine trade, maybe the meeting wasn't all that unlikely. In any case, the visit served the rebels well in their bid for international legitimacy. There is a picture of Grasso hugging the late FARC commander Raul Reyes on his Wikipedia page.

A gay teenager who sought sanctuary in the UK after his boyfriend was executed by the Iranian authorities now faces the same fate after losing his legal battle for asylum. Mehdi Kazemi, 19, came to London to study English in 2004 but later discovered that his boyfriend had been arrested by the Iranian police, charged with sodomy and hanged. Kazemi's father in Tehran told him by telephone that before the execution in April 2006, his boyfriend had been interrogated about sexual relations he had with other men. Kazemi filed for asylum, but late in 2007 his case was refused and he fled for The Netherlands.

The US State Department's new annual human rights report accuses China of "extrajudicial killings, torture and coerced confessions of prisoners and the use of forced labor." Russia and Sudan were also especially criticized. Ten countries were named as under "unaccountable rulers [who] remained the world's most systematic human rights violators": North Korea, Burma, Iran, Syria, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Eritrea and Sudan. It noted improvements in Mauritania, Ghana, Morocco and Haiti, but little or no progress in Nepal, Russia, Georgia Kyrghyzstan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan or Iraq. (AlJazeera, March 11)