A little-known office of the US Defense Department is now taking bids from private security firms on a $3 billion contract for US-funded anti-narcotics operations in Mexico, Colombia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and other countries. According to a report in Wired News, the Pentagon's Counter Narco-Terrorism Program Office (CNTPO) announced a "mega-contract" on Nov. 9 for as much as $950 million for "operations, logistics and minor construction," up to $975 million for training foreign forces, $875 million for "Information" tasks, and $240 million for "program and program support." The cash will start flowing next August, and the contractors may be able to extend the jobs for three more years.

Mexican human rights attorney Netzaí Sandoval on Nov. 25 filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague asking the court to investigate human rights violations and possible crimes against humanity by the security forces under President Felipe Calderón's campaign against the drug cartels. The complaint, backed by 23,000 signatures, names 470 cases of human rights abuses by government forces since 2006, and estimates 40,000 dead in drug-related violence. The complaint also names Public Security Minister Genaro García Luna, Defense Secretary Guillermo Galván and fugitive Sinaloa Cartel kingpin Joaquin Guzmán AKA "El Chapo" (long held to be secretly collaborating with the Calderón administration).

On Nov. 16 the largest US labor federation, the AFL-CIO, presented its 2011 George Meany-Lane Kirkland Human Rights Award to Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, general secretary of the National Union of Mine and Metal Workers and the Like of the Mexican Republic (SNTMMSRM). AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka and United Steelworkers (USW) president Leo Gerard made the presentation at ceremony in the federation's Washington, DC headquarters; Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-CA) and Rep. Mike Machaud (D-ME) also attended. The two US labor leaders both have links to the Mexican miners' union: Trumka is the former head of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), and Gerard and the USW have been working closely with the SNTMMSRM, which represents steelworkers as well as miners.

The discovery of a drug tunnel linking San Diego and Tijuana warehouses led to the seizure of some 17 tons of cannabis as well as a large grow operation in the industrial area of Otay Mesa east of San Diego, US and Mexican authorities announced Nov. 16. The tunnel's opening in Tijuana was discovered by soldiers in an industrial construction site near the airport. Mexican authorities alerted their US counterparts, who found the opening in Otay Mesa, where several so-called narco-tunnels have been found in recent years. The seized marijuana bundles were labeled with pictures of Captain America, the symbol used by a major local operator for the Sinaloa Cartel, Mexican military authorities said.

In the predawn hours of Nov. 9, the decapitated and mutilated body of an unidentified man was found at the Christopher Colombus monument in an upscale neighborhood of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas. A message left under the decapitated head named the man as "El Rascatripas," a moderator for the website Nuevo Laredo en Vivo, where citizens anonymously report narco-violence. The note reads: "Hello! I'm Rascatripas and this happened to me for failing to understand that I should not report things on social media websites...With this last report I bid farewell to Nuevo Laredo en Vivo... Your moderator, Rascatripas." Nuevo Laredo en Vivo denied that the victim had anything to do with the site, Tweeting that the murder was an act to frighten off other members of its online community. Three users of the website have already been slain.

At a Nov. 10 session, the Mexican Senate called on the government of President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa to start criminal proceedings against US officials involved in two programs that let firearms enter Mexico illegally. The programs, Operation Wide Receiver in 2006 and 2007 and Operation Fast and Furious in 2009 and 2010, were supposed to help US agents trace illegal gun smuggling by monitoring suspect weapons purchases. But the agents lost track of some 2,300 firearms that were transported into Mexico, largely for the use of drug cartels.

Mexican Governance Secretary Francisco Blake Mora was killed when his helicopter crashed Nov. 11 near Chalco, México state. Four other Governance Secretariat and three Air Force personnel were also killed in the crash. President Felipe Calderón said it was probably an accident caused by bad weather, but public speculation points to a hit by one of Mexico's warring drug cartels. Skeptics noted that the government's most notorious Drug War hardliner is Public Security Secretary Genaro García Luna, and a more likely cartel target. However, the crash eerily comes one week after Blake Mora attended a memorial ceremony for Juan Camilo Mouriño, his predecessor who was killed in a plane crash three years earlier. (NYT, El Economista, Nov. 11)

At the point of completing 40 days without food, 10 prisoners in Mexico's southern state of Chiapas—plus one who had been transfered out of state—ended their hunger strike Nov. 7, citing the imminent threat to their health and the lack of any response to their demands from state or federal authorities. Their family members and supporters have taken up the struggle by launching an ongoing protest vigil (plantón) outside the State Center of Social Reinsertion (CERSS), and blockading the San Cristóbal-Ocosingo highway that passes by the facility.