Mexico's military and police have committed widespread human rights violations in efforts to combat organized crime, virtually none of which are being adequately investigated, Human Rights Watch said in a report released Nov. 9. The 212-page report "Neither Rights Nor Security: Killings, Torture, and Disappearances in Mexico's 'War on Drugs'," examines the human rights consequences of President Felipe Calderón’s approach to confronting Mexico's powerful drug cartels. The report finds evidence that strongly suggests the participation of security forces in more than 170 cases of torture, 39 "disappearances," and 24 extrajudicial killings since Calderón took office in December 2006. "Instead of reducing violence, Mexico's 'war on drugs' has resulted in a dramatic increase in killings, torture, and other appalling abuses by security forces, which only make the climate of lawlessness and fear worse in many parts of the country," said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch.

Residents of San José del Progreso, a municipality in the Ocotlán district of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, say they are continuing their three-year struggle against a mine operated by Toronto-based Fortuna Silver Mines Inc. They blocked the entrance to the company's San José mine for 40 days in the spring of 2009, charging that there had already been environmental damage even though the mine wasn't yet in operation; they also said the authorities had licensed the project without community consultation. The protest was ended abruptly when some 700 police agents, armed with assault rifles and backed up by a helicopter, stormed the community on May 6 of that year.

A scandal involving US law enforcement programs to let guns "walk" into Mexico has now widened to include the 2001-2008 administration of former president George W. Bush, a Republican, as well as the administration of current Democratic president Barack Obama. The latest revelations concern a program codenamed Operation Wide Receiver, in which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) reportedly allowed some 350 or 400 guns to enter Mexico illegally during 2006 and 2007.

On Oct. 26 Mexican officials emphatically denied that US agencies were violating Mexican sovereignty by carrying out undercover operations aimed at Mexican drug cartels. The presence of agents from the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in Mexico "isn't something new, it's been happening since a long time ago," Foreign Relations Secretary Patricia Espinosa Cantellano said at a press conference in Mexico City that was meant to be about Mexico's participation in a Group of 20 meeting in Cannes, France, and in the Iberian-American Summit in Asunción, Paraguay. Espinosa Cantellano said she couldn't reveal the number and location of the agents for security reasons, "but of course the government knows about this presence and we are very strict in watching out that the legal framework is applied."

Mexico's former President Vicente Fox again spoke out for drug legalization this month, telling a Washington DC meeting of the right-libertarian Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity that prohibition bears responsibility for the horrific toll in his country's cartel wars: "Fifty thousand kids from 15 to 25 years old have been killed in the last five years. Violence does not defeat violence." He asked rhetorically: "Do we really expect that the government will eradicate the drugs from the face of the earth?"

The clandestine online activist network Anonymous has released an Internet video demanding that Los Zetas, Mexico's bloodiest drug cartel, release one of its members who was kidnapped from a street protest in Veracruz. The Anonymous spokesman—in tie, jacket and Guy Fawkes mask—says if the Zetas don't release their comrade, it will publish the identities and addresses of the syndicate's associates. Speaking in Spanish with fluent use of Mexican slang, the masked spokesman says: "You made a huge mistake by taking one of us. Release him." Otherwise it threatens to reveal the Zetas' "cars, homes, bars, brothels and everything else in their possession. It won't be difficult; we all know who they are and where they are located."

At least 20 inmates were killed and 12 injured in rioting Oct. 15 at a prison in the violence-torn Mexican border city of Matamoros. The Tamaulipas state Public Security Secretariat said fighting broke out between two inmates at the Execution and Sanction Center (CEDES),* and soon dozens more from rival gangs piled on. Federal and state police as well as army troops were brought in to help guards restore control of the facility. News footage showed helicopters hovering over the prison's gray watchtower. (LAT, El Universal, Oct. 16)

More than 20 displaced indigenous Triqui members of the Autonomous Municipality of San Juan Copala and followers of the organization Oaxacan Voices Constructing Autonomy and Freedom (VOCAL) were arrested by local police in the "official" municipality of Oaxaca de Juárez Oct. 3 for attempting to occupy a predio (land holding) at the community of San Martín Mexicapan. The occupation was the latest confrontation in an ongoing dispute in southern Mexico's Oaxaca state between the self-declared autonomous municipality and supporters of the "official" authorities. (La Jornada, Oct. 3)