As of Aug. 11, some 13 union leaders from the US and Canada had arrived in Cananea, in the northwestern Mexican state of Sonora, to show support for striking miners there. According to Sergio Tolano Lizarraga, general secretary of Section 65 of the National Union of Mine and Metal Workers of the Mexican Republic (SNTMMRM), the US delegation was headed by Manny Armenta, a United Steelworkers (USW) leader in Arizona, with unionists from New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Ohio. The strikers say they also have support from workers from nearby states and from both the conservative Congress of Labor (CT) and the more independent National Workers Union (UNT).

With 98.83% of the ballot boxes counted, Mexico's centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the allied Green Ecological Party of Mexico (PVEM) had won all 25 districts in Aug. 5 legislative elections in the southern state of Oaxaca. The Alliance That Builds [Alianza Que Construye], the PRI-PVEM coalition, got 412,798 votes to 238,292 for the center-left For the Good of All coalition [Por el Bien de Todos], which is made up of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), the Workers Party (PT) and the Convergence party. The center-right National Action Party (PAN) of Mexican president Felipe Calderon Hinojosa came in third with 113,646 votes. Just 36.42% of the state's 2.4 million voters turned out for the election.

Irene Khan, general secretary of the UK-based human rights organization Amnesty International (AI), is scheduled to visit Mexico July 30-Aug. 5 for what AI calls a "high-level working visit" to address its concerns about human rights violations in Mexico. The group's concerns include reports of sexual assaults on women prisoners by police agents during the repression of demonstrations in San Salvador Atenco, Mexico state in May 2006; the government's failure to solve the murders of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, over the last 15 years; and the repression of anti-globalization protesters in Guadalajara, Jalisco, in May 2004.

In the early morning of July 28 people thought to be members of the rebel Revolutionary Popular Army (EPR) assaulted a site in Chiapa de Corzo, in the southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas, where a federal prison is being built. No injuries were reported in the incident, during which an unknown number of attackers captured the three guards at the site and locked them in a guard booth. The attackers then shot up the site and painted slogans on the walls. Municipal police arrived when they heard the shooting; they found about 40 used cartridges on the scene.

Eleven adherents of the Popular People's Assembly of Oaxaca (APPO) arrested in last week's protests in the southern Mexican city have been ordered imprisoned on charges of arson, theft and property damage. Another 18 were ordered released for lack of evidence. (Proceso, July 25) APPO has announced new road blockades throughout the state as a part of its forced boycott of the Guelaguetza folk festival, a major tourist attraction. (El Sol de San Luis, July 26)

More than a month after his disappearance following a police attack on campesino protesters at Ixhuatlán de Madero, in the eastern Mexican state of Veracruz, Nahua indigenous leader Gabino Flores Cruz has released a video statement saying he has not been detained but has gone into hiding for "reasons of security." Flores Cruz is a director of "Los Dorados de Villa," the organization that led the occupation of contested lands at Ixhuatlán. (Proceso, July 25) Meanwhile, ten campesinos who had been arrested in the police attack were released July 4 following a mobilization on their behalf by the "Other Campaign" activist network. "Los Dorados de Villa" say the Nahuas had been forced from the disputed lands by the hired gunmen of land baron Faisal Nader, despite having a legal title dating to 1938. (La Jornada, July 5)

Representatives of peasant organizations from across the globe have gathered in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas for the "Encuentro with the Peoples of the World," hosted by the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN). Participating groups include Brazil's Movement of the Landless, Thailand's Assembly of the Poor and the international NGO Via Campesina. Meetings are being held in the Zapatista "autonomous municipalities" of Oventic, Morelia and La Garrucha, where Comandanta Delia articulated the conditions that led the Zapatistas to take up arms in 1994: "Our grandparents lived in slavery, without salaries. We asked for land, but we were always denied by the evil government. Persecutions, imprisonments, houses burned. There has never been good justice." (La Jornada, July 25)

A group of ex-guerillas from the now-dissolved Clandestine Revolutionary Worker's Party-Union of the People (PROCUP), re-organized as the above-ground Democratic Popular Left (IDP), led by David Cabañas Barrientos and Italo Ricardo Díaz, charged in a statement that there are "clear indications" that the government of Felipe Calderón seeks to "open a new chapter in the dirty war" that gripped Mexico in the '70s, when hundreds of dissidents were "disappeared." The statement said the "detention-disappearance" of two supposed members of the EPR guerilla organization is a "signal that a hunting season has opened against activists and militants of legal and legitimate organizations with the pretext that they are front organizations."