After an eight-month strike, the Grupo Mexico mining company has started to shut down its San Martin copper, silver and zinc mine in Sombrerete municipality in the central Mexican state of Zacatecas, according to Jesus Jiménez, a delegate in Zacatecas and Jalisco for the National Union of Mine and Metal Workers of the Mexican Republic (SNTMMRM). Jiménez said the company has already terminated 100 of the mine's 450 workers on a claim that the mining operation was unsustainable. The workers went on strike on July 30, 2007, as part of a strike over safety conditions that included the huge copper mine in Cananea, Sonora, and a mine in Taxco, Guerrero. Grupo Mexico has reportedly lost $120 million in revenues at San Martin since the strike began. (La Jornada, April 18)

Which is worse: that Absolut vodka is commodifying Mexico's claim to its lost northern territories (Aztlan), or the predictable uptight gringo backlash? From the Daily 49er, the Cal State Long Beach student newspaper, April 15:

Mexican booze ad not intoxicating to U.S. buyers
A recent Absolut Vodka ad running in Mexico City has shaken, not stirred, some of the American public. With its recent advertising campaign strategy, Absolut attempts to tap into some very real nationalistic sentiment of Mexico.

James McKinley reports for the New York Times April 16 that cartel wars for control of Ciudad Juárez are reaping a "Wild West Blood Bath" in the border city, with more than 210 lives lost in the first three months of this year. The number of homicides this year is more than twice the total number for the same period last year. Mass graves hiding a total of 36 bodies have been discovered in the backyards of two raided cartel safe-houses. At the height of the violence, around Easter, bodies were turning up every morning—at a rate of nearly 12 a week. Mayor José Reyes Ferriz and Chihuahua state authorities have asked the federal government to intervene. "Neither the municipal government, nor the state government, is capable of taking on organized crime," Reyes Ferriz said. In late March, President Felipe Calderón sent in 2,000 soldiers and 425 federal agents, who patrol in convoys of Humvees and pickup trucks, wearing ski masks to hide their faces.

Two announcers of the radio station "La Voz que Rompe el Silencio" (the Voice that Breaks the Silence) were assassinated on April 7 while traveling by car in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, according to the civil society organization Centro de Apoyo Comunitario Trabajando Unidos (Center for Community Support-Working in Unity, CACTUS). According to State Police the two women were killed and four injured—including two children—when their car was shot up near Putla de Guerrero in the indigenous Mixteca region 350 kilometers west of Oaxaca City.

On the evening of April 3 Mexican federal police agents arrested two activists in the northern state of Chihuahua for their roles in militant protests blocking federal highways: Cipriana Jurado Herrera, a leader in the movement demanding justice for the more than 450 young women killed in the Ciudad Juarez area since the 1990s; and Carlos Chavez Quevedo, a leader in the National Agrodynamic Organization (OAN), which has protested high electricity rates for pumping from the wells that area farmers use for irrigation. Both activists were released on bail the night of April 4 after some 50 people staged a sit-in in front of the federal judicial office in Ciudad Juarez.

Right-Wing Paranoia Misses the Real Threat of NAFTA's Militarization

by Laura Carlsen, IRC Americas Program

It's got millions of right-wing citizens calling Congress, sponsoring legislation, and writing manifestos in defense of US sovereignty. It comes up in presidential candidates' public appearances, has made it into primetime debates, and one presidential candidate—Ron Paul—used it as a central theme of his (short-lived) campaign.

Not bad for a plan that doesn't exist.

At around noon on March 14 a group of armed men killed farmer leader Armando Villarreal Martha with submachine gun blasts near his house in Nuevo Casas Grandes municipality, in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua. Villarreal Martha was the leader of the National Agrodynamic Organization (OAN). He was well-known for his campaigns for lower electricity rates for farmers and campesinos, and was imprisoned for a year and a half before being acquitted of charges in connection with the occupation of the Janos and Villa Ahumada customs station in 2002. Earlier this year he was involved in national protests calling for the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and in demands for the reactivation of the petrochemical industry to make fertilizers and other chemicals cheaper for farmers. He ran as a local candidate for the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in 1988 and for the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) in 1992. (La Jornada, March 15)

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)