Antonio Vázquez Secum, named by Mexico's Prosecutor General of the Republic (PGR) as the author of the December 1997 Acteal massacre, died Nov. 17 at his home in the village of Quextic, Chiapas. Secum, who was over 70 years old, was freed from Cerro Hueco prison last year when he contracted pneumonia. The PGR's "white book" on the affair said he led a group of eight men from Miguel Utrilla Los Chorros hamlet in the attack on nearby Acteal (both in Chenahló municipality) in retaliation for the slaying of his son, Agustín Vázquez. He was among the first arrested for the massacre early in 1998. (La Jornada, Nov. 20)

Militarization and the "Mérida Initiative"

by Laura Carlsen, Foreign Policy in Focus

After months of talks, President George W. Bush finally announced the "security cooperation" plan for Mexico. On Oct. 22, he sent a request for $500 million in supplemental aid for 2008 as part of a $1.4 billion dollar multi-year package.

Mario Zavala Navarrete, a leader of alumni of the Raul Isidro Burgos de Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, reported that he was assaulted by armed, masked assailants the night of Nov. 22. He said they followed him in a white van as he was heading home to Tixtia on a public bus after leaving the college. They caught him when he left the bus and beat him unconscious.

Some 800 students from Mexican teachers colleges occupied the state legislature building in Chilpancingo, capital of the southern state of Guerrero, at about 3 PM on Nov. 14. The students—largely young women from 16 teachers colleges, chiefly those in Saucillo, Chihuahua, and Tamazulapan, Oaxaca—held the sit-in to support demands by students and alumni of Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College in Guerrero for 75 teaching positions for alumni and for retention of the degree in primary education, which the state government has decided to abolish. The students said they had tried for months to arrange a meeting with Gov. Zeferino Torreblanca Galindo, of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), to discuss their demands. The president of the legislature's governing committee, Carlos Reyes Torres, also of the PRD, called for the police to remove the protesters. At about 5 PM some 500 agents of the State Preventive Police (PPE), with air support from a helicopter, marched into the building and tried to remove the protesters. The confrontation lasted about two hours, with police hurling tear gas canisters and clubbing students, while the students hurled firecrackers at the agents.

A statement by Las Abejas, the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Center and other civil organizations in conflicted Chiapas state finds that the Mexican national state "is responsible for the Acteal massacre" of Dec. 22, 1997. The statement says the terror campaign in the highland municipality of Chenalhó really began Aug. 19, 1996, with the assassination of six youths who were part of the support base of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN). The statement says "the massacre was the product of a deliberate and directed State policy to exterminate the EZLN, its support base and any organization of civil society whose demands were uncomfortable for the government." (La Jornada, Nov. 4)

State and municipal police arrested some 20 people on Nov. 2 in Oaxaca city, the capital of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, during protests marking one year since federal security forces ended militant strikes and occupations there. In 2006 strikers from Section 22 of the National Education Workers Union (SNTE) and community activists in the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) occupied most of downtown Oaxaca and paralyzed the state government for five months. Thousands of Federal Preventive Police (PFP) agents took control of the city on Oct. 29, 2006, two days after an outbreak of violence that left three people dead, including US independent journalist Brad Will.

With 70% of southern Mexico's Gulf Coast state of Tabasco under water following weeks of heavy rains, Gov. Andrés Granier has compared capital Villahermosa (pop. 500,000) to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The Rio Grijalva, which flows through Villahermosa, has surged six feet above its normal height. Television shows images of Mexican Navy helicopters scooping up children from rooftops and rescuers lowering elderly people into boats. Many thousands more waded or swam though chest-high water out of the stricken city. The state's critical oil infrastructure is in ruins, and up to a million have been displaced. (NYT, Nov. 4; NYT, Nov. 3; eFluxMedia, Nov. 2) Gov. Granier is demanding that the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) shut down the Peñitas hydro-dam upstream from Villahermosa on the Grijalva, in the foothills of the Chiapas Highlands. The CFE has reduced the flow through the dam by two-thirds to 800 cubic meters per second, but refuses to shut it completely. Said Granier: "The game is over; they must completely stop the pumping through Peñitas, because I demand respect for the people... Energy generation is now secondary, today the most important thing...is to lower the level of the river." (La Jornada, Nov. 4)

Sam Spade Meets Emiliano Zapata in Mexico's Twilight Zone

by Chesley Hicks, WW4 REPORT

Book Review:
The Uncomfortable Dead (What's Missing is Missing):
A Novel of Four Hands
by Paco Ignacio Taibo II and Subcomandante Marcos
Akashic Books, New York, 2006

The search for the "Evil and the Bad" is the quest that underlies The Uncomfortable Dead, an epistolary mystery, leftist political primer, and love letter to Mexico's eternal soul.