Thousands of laid-off Mexico City electrical workers suffered a major setback on Jan. 30 when a panel of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) overturned a lower court decision supporting the workers' claim to jobs at the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE). Lawyers for the workers' union, the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME), had argued that the workers were entitled to replacement jobs at the CFE because the decision by former president Felipe Calderón Hinojosa (2006-2012) in October 2009 to close down their employer--the Central Light and Power Company (LFC), which serviced the Mexico City metropolitan area—was unjustified. The federal government owned LFC before its closing, and the government continues to own and operate the CFE.

Francisco Sántiz López, a civilian supporter of Mexico's rebel Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), was released from prison in San Cristóbal de las Casas, in the highlands of the southeastern state of Chiapas, on Jan. 25, more than 13 months after his arrest. Over the past year a movement has formed in some 30 countries to demand the release of Sántiz López and another prisoner, the schoolteacher Alberto Patishtán Gómez, a supporter of the ELZN-initiated Other Campaign.

Hundreds of campesinos in municipalities of Mexico's southern Guerrero state, including Ayutla de los Libres, Tecoanapa, Florencio Villarreal, Cuautepec and San Marcos, have taken up arms to defend themselves from a drug-trafficking gang that has been terrorizing residents and demanding protection payments. Armed with pistols and shotguns, the "Community Police" self-defense patrols have been setting up checkpoints at the entrances to their villages, and in one case secured the release of a Tecoanapa resident who had been kidnapped. A total of some 40 suspected narco-gunmen have been detained by the self-defense patrols, and await trial by community assemblies. Residents claim legitimacy for the system of justice under the principle of "uses and customs," by which traditional self-government of indigenous territories is permitted in Mexico's constitution.

On Jan. 14 Mexican poet and human rights activist Javier Sicilia and Mexican political scientist Sergio Aguayo Quezada brought the US embassy in Mexico City a letter signed by 54,558 people calling on US president Barack Obama and other officials to stop the flow of smuggled firearms from the US to Mexico. "Our country is bleeding to death," the letter read, referring to the violence that followed the militarization of the "war on drugs" by former president Felipe Calderón  Hinojosa (2006-2012). "More than 60,000 Mexicans were murdered during the Calderón administration. In the first month of [current president] Enrique Peña Nieto, December 2012, 755 people were executed. The majority of them died from wounds caused by weapons obtained in the US."

Citing documents and interviews with several US officials, Kimberly Dozier of the Associated Press wire service reported on Jan. 17 that the US military's Northern Command (Northcom) has a new special operations headquarters in Colorado, to be used "to teach Mexican security forces how to hunt drug cartels the same way special operations teams hunt al-Qaida." A Dec. 31 memo signed by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta transformed the Northcom special operations group into the new command headquarters, which will be led by a general rather than a colonel. The staff will increase from 30 to 150.

Drug-related violent deaths reached 12,394 in Mexico last year, according to a count released by the daily Milenio on Jan. 2. The account said this was an increase of 110 over 2011, but 264 less than in 2010, the most violent year of the Felipe Calderón presidency. (However, by the government's own figures, the total for 2012 was 12,903, and 15,273 for 2010.)  For a fifth consecutive year, Chihuahua was the most violent state in the country, accounting for 18% of total deaths. Yet a Dec. 30 report on El Paso Inc notes the official number of murders in the violence-torn border city of Juárez dropped to about 800, down from a peak of 3,622 in 2010 that won the sobriquet "Murder City." The government of course takes credit, pointing to the jailing of gang leaders and social programs for at-risk youth. A Jan. 11 report on National Public Radio admits that may be part of the explanation, but says "word on the street" is that the long, bloody turf war is winding down because one side won: the interloping Sinaloa Cartel defeated the local and now heavily factionalized Juárez Cartel.

Israeli news portal YNet on Dec. 29 ran an incredibly irresponsible story entitled "Hezbollah's cocaine Jihad," the introdek reading: "Faced with dwindling Iranian funding, Shiite terror group partners with Mexican drug cartels; uses millions of dollars in drug money to support weapon acquisition habit." Now, this is a quesitonable claim at best, but before the story even gets to the rather sketchy evidence for this assertion it spends a full six paragraphs talking about Chiapas and the Zapatista rebels—complete with a prominent photo of masked Zapatistas marching with their red-and-black flag! The message sent to the uninitiated is that the Zapatistas are mixed up with both drug cartels and Hezbollah. What is the basis for this Hez-bollocks? There is none. The article notes that an Islamic micro-sect called the Murabitun has been converting Indians in Chiapas in recent years, but aside from the fact that they are both in Chiapas, there is no link between the Murabitun and the Zapatistas, and no link between either and the drug cartels. Furthermore, the Murabitun are Sunni not Shi'ite, and based in Spain not Lebanon—so not even remotely linked to Hezbollah.

On Dec. 23, an encampment of indigenous Copala Triqui in front of the Government Palace in Oaxaca City was evicted by municipal and state police in full riot gear, just ahead of the Noche de Rábanos (Night of the Radish) festival in the main square—an annual tradition now marketed as a tourist spectacle. The evicted claimed that an expectant mother among their ranks received several blows from the police. She prematurely gave birth to a baby boy the next day, but he died four days later. The infant was buried on Dec. 29, following a vigil at the scene of the evicted camp. "As the coffin was carried to a nearby church, state police blocked the path of the funeral procession, forcing mourners to take a different route," wrote reporter Jen Wilton of the blog Revolution Is Eternal.