A study released late last month by the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness, an elite think-tank based in Mexico City, asserted that proposals to legalize cannabis in Colorado, Washington and Oregon could cut Mexican drug cartels' earnings from traffic to the US by as much as 30%. The study, entitled "If Our Neighbors Legalize," drawing on previous research by the RAND Corporation, predicts that legalization in any US state would help drive down the price of high-quality domestic cannabis, undercutting the cheaper and less potent cartel imports. It calculated a loss of $1.425 billion to the cartels if Colorado legalized, $1.372 billion if Washington legalized, and $1.839 billion if Oregon voted yes. (AP, Nov. 1) In the Nov. 6 vote, initiatives calling for legalization of cannabis under regimes of state control were approved by voters in Colorado and Washington, but rejected in Oregon.

The Mexican Senate voted 96-28 on Nov. 13 to approve changes to the 1970 Federal Labor Law (LFT) that will legalize the use of part-time and contract employees, allow the hiring of workers for trial periods, and limit the amount of back pay businesses are required to give laid-off workers. The controversial "labor reform," which had been approved by the Chamber of Deputies the week before, was sent on to President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, who was expected to sign it into law.

After more than two months of investigation, on Nov. 9 Mexico's federal Attorney General's Office (PGR) confirmed that it was formally charging 14 federal police agents for an Aug. 24 attack on a US embassy van on a road near the Tres Marías community, south of Mexico City in the state of Morelos. The agents claimed they mistook the van's occupants—two agents of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and a Mexican marine—for members of a gang connected to a local kidnapping. The two CIA agents were wounded in the incident.

Mexico's Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center (PRODH) held a press conference in Mexico City on Oct. 23 to announce the release of a report on the alleged torture of Israel Arzate Meléndez, a resident of Ciudad Juárez in the northern state of Chihuahua, by state police and the military. According to the report, Tortured, Imprisoned and Innocent, two soldiers arrested Arzate on Feb. 3, 2010, charging him with participation in the massacre of 15 youths in Ciudad Juárez's Villas de Salvárcar neighborhood the previous Jan. 30. The report says the soldiers took Arzate to a military installation, stripped him naked, tied up his hands and feet, placed a plastic bag over his head and tortured him with electric shocks to get him to confess to involvement in the killings.

Hundreds of campeisnos staged a protest outside the Governor's Palace in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua last week, following the Oct. 22 double murder of two leading members of the activist organization El Barzón. Ismael Solorio Urrutia and his wife Manuela Martha Solís Contreras were shot while driving in in thier truck on the highway near Ciudad Cuautémoc, west of the state capital, Chihuahua City. Supporters are demanding a face-to-face meeting with Chihuahua's Gov. César Duarte to demand justice in the case, asserting that Solorio had faced numerous threats and attacks in recent weeks. On Oct. 13, Solorio and his son Eric were beaten by men that activists claim were in the pay of Vancouver-based mining company MAG Silver. Solorio and fellow Barzonistas had been opposing the installation of the company's El Cascabel mine in the municipality of Buenaventura. The Barzonistas say the mine is illegally slated for Ejído Benito Juárez, a collective campesino agricultural holding. The site is belived to hold a rich vein of the rare element molybdenum.

Using tear gas and water cannons, hundreds of federal and state police ended student occupations at three teachers' colleges in the southwestern Mexican state of Michoacán in the early morning of Oct. 15. Protesters and other students were beaten in the raids, which resulted in the arrests of 176 students—168 in the town of Tiripetío, two in the town of Arteaga and six in the autonomous indigenous municipality of Cherán. The students reportedly threw rocks at the police and set fire to 13 of the 90 vehicles, including buses and patrols cars, that they had seized during the weeklong protest. Michoacán officials said 10 police agents were injured, three of them seriously.

For the second time in less than two years, an indigenous community in the southwestern Mexican state of Michoacán has erected barricades and seized control of security matters. Located in the Purépecha highlands of the Pacific coast state, the small community of Urapicho in Paracho municipality has been under the self-declared control of the people for about a month now. The news was publicized last week with the posting of a video on YouTube that shows armed and masked men, some clothed in military-style camouflage clothing, attending a sand-bagged checkpoint, where motorists are searched. Two masked spokespersons explain the reasons for the uprising and the goals of their movement.

The ongoing struggle in Oaxaca percolated into local New York City news as grainy video footage taken by slain alterno-journalist Bradley Will has emerged as evidence in ongoing litigation over arrests at the 2004 Republican National Convention protests. On Oct. 1, the Wall Street Journal reports, US Judge Richard Sullivan in Manhattan ruled hundreds of arrests by the NY Police Department during the protests were illegal, potentially opening the city to costly civil suits. Reporter Colin Moynihan in the New York Times Oct. 8 informs us that Will's footage of the arrests was cited by the judge, and could figure in future suits. He also notes new developments in Will's slaying during the 2006 popular uprising in Oaxaca: