State police arrested six indigenous Mexicans on May 17 in connection with the killing on May 2 of an activist in La Realidad, a village in the official municipality of Las Margaritas in the southeastern state of Chiapas. La Realidad is one of a number of indigenous communities that supporters of the rebel Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) have considered autonomous municipalities since December 1994. The victim, José Luis Solís López ("Galeano"), taught at a "little school" (escuelita) that since last year has provided international activists with an introduction to the Zapatistas' experiment with autonomous communities. Another 15 EZLN supporters were wounded in the May 2 violence, and a school and a clinic were destroyed.

A delegation of 15 Hondurans traveled to Mexico City in mid-April to seek a meeting with Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto and ask for his government to provide Central American migrants with a "humanitarian visa" allowing them to travel safely through Mexico on their way to the US. The delegation represented the 432 members of the Association of Migrants Returning with Disabilities (Amiredis), an organization of Hondurans injured while trying to cross Mexico; the vice president, Norman Saúl Varela, lost a leg while riding north through the southern state of Tabasco on a freight train that migrants call "The Beast." The group failed to get an interview with President Peña Nieto, but they managed to meet with Governance Undersecretary Paloma Guillén on April 11. (El País, Madrid, April 13 from correspondent)

Mexican authorities on May 1 announced the seizure of a ship carrying 68,000 tons of illegal iron ore bound for China—hailed as the latest blow in a crackdown on the contraband mineral sideline by the Knights Templar drug cartel. Federal police were apparently tipped off by an anonymous phone call after the ship left Lazaro Cárdenas, the Pacific port in conflicted Michoacán state. Authorities detained the ship, the Jian Hua, off Manzanillo, the next major port up the coast, in neighboring Colima state. The ship's crew produced documents showing it had authorization to transport the iron ore. But authoriites said the paperwork listed a legal mine that was not the actual source of the contraband ore. The company operating the ship, China's Fujian Huarong Marine, has been given one month to prove to authorities that the ore was extracted legally. Mexican authorities say they have seized more than 200,000 tons of illegal iron ore so far this year, most of it headed for China.

One supporter of Mexico's rebel Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) was killed and several were wounded on May 2 in violence involving rival indigenous groups in La Realidad, Las Margaritas municipality,* in the southeastern state of Chiapas. EZLN sources say La Realidad resident José Luis Solís López died after being shot three times; he also suffered machete wounds. The mostly indigenous Chiapas highlands and Lacandón forest, where La Realidad is located, have experienced several fights between rival groups recently.

Thousands of protesters formed a human chain in Mexico City on April 26 in a demonstration against a telecommunications law proposed by President Enrique Peña Nieto and now under consideration in the Senate. The protesters included former Mexico City mayor Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano (1997-2000), one of the founders of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD); youths from #YoSoy132 ("I'm number 132"), a student movement that formed in 2012 in opposition to the election campaign of then-candidate Peña Nieto, of the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI); and some members of the center-right National Action Party (PAN). The organizers estimated participation at 7,000, while the Federal District (DF, Mexico City) police put the number at 3,000.

On April 9 the California-based technology company Hewlett-Packard (HP) announced that it was paying a $108 million fine to the US Justice Department and the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to end an investigation into subsidiaries in Poland, Russia and Mexico that allegedly paid bribes to officials. The HP subsidiaries "created a slush fund for bribe payments, set up an intricate web of shell companies and bank accounts to launder money, employed two sets of books to track bribe recipients, and used anonymous email accounts and prepaid mobile telephones to arrange covert meetings to hand over bags of cash," according to a statement by the Justice Department. HP said the corruption "was limited to a small number of people who are no longer employed by the company."

Popular organizations in the Mexican states of Puebla, Tlaxcala and Morelos announced protests to demand the liberation of three campesinos detained in connection with opposition to a planned gas pipeline through their communities. Juan Carlos Flores Solís of the Puebla and Tlaxcala Front of Pueblos in Defense of Water and Land (FPDATPT) was arrested April 8 with Enedina Rosas Vélez, the comisariada ejidal (administrator of communal lands) at the village of San Felipe Xonacayucan, Atlixco municipality, Puebla. Later that day, Abraham Cordero Calderón, president of the Campesino Front of Ejidatarios and Small Property Owners of the Valley of Texmelucan and the Sierra Nevada, was arrested at Atlixco. The three have apparently been charged with threatening public officials and "illegal privation of liberty" in connection with protests against the Gasoducto Morelos.

Just weeks after the Mexican government signed an accord with the "community police" vigilante network in Michoacán, ostensibly bringing the anti-narco militias under control of the armed forces, it is looking more and more like they have been transformed into a lawless paramilitary force—even acting against Mexico''s federal authorities. On March 19, "community police" forces at La Placita, on Michoacán's Pacific coast, launched a blockade of the entrance of a Mexican naval outpost, apparently in protest of the disarming of 14 of their gunmen by Mexican marines stationed there. The blockade escalated in the following days, with hundreds of armed vigilantes from neighboring towns converging at the base. (El Sol de Leon, March 21)