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."

Police fired tear gas to prevent hundreds of protesters from reaching the venue of an international Guelaguetza folk festival in Oaxaca July 16, in the worst outbreak of violence in the conflicted southern Mexican city since November. Protesters hurled rocks and burned vehicles as they marched towards the stadium where the festival is slated to open July 23.

Grupo Mexico SAB, the world's seventh-largest copper producer, said 30% of employees at the San Martin copper and gold mine (Zacatecas state) didn't report to work July 5 because of a national one-day protest. The strike also halted work at Grupo Mexico's Taxco zinc and silver mine. The National Mining and Metal Workers Union said about 80% of workers at mining and steel companies across Mexico joined the strike to support Grupo Mexico workers. Miners want the company to improve safety conditions. (Bloomberg, July 5)

After two decades of silence, architect Rosa María Alvarado Martínez come forward July 9 to say that at least three bodies—likely the remains of student protesters killed by the army at Mexico City's Tlatelolco Plaza in 1968—are buried under a hospital near the massacre site. Alvarado said the bodies were discovered in 1981 when the hospital was being renovated, but plainclothes men identifying themselves as police officers threatened to kidnap and kill her son if she went public. The site had previously been a vocational school where student occupiers confronted soldiers during the October 1968 protests. While official reports claim only 25 were killed at Tlatelolco later that month, human rights advocates have claimed up to 350 dead.