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)

Forty of the firearms that Mexican police seized on April 30 at the home of an alleged drug trafficker in Ciudad Juárez in the northern state of Chihuahua turn out to be among the 2,000 weapons that reached Mexico as a result of the US government's bungled Operation Fast and Furious. The house, which was empty when police arrived, belonged to José Antonio Torres Marrufo, considered by US authorities a top enforcer for the Sinaloa drug cartel of Joaquín Guzmán Loera ("El Chapo"). The weapons were bought legally in Phoenix, Ariz., then taken to El Paso, Tex., and smuggled across the border to Ciudad Juárez.

Another 32 bodies were found in three houses in the Mexican port city of Veracruz Oct. 7, the latest in a series of attacks on presumed members of Los Zetas narco-network by a rival group calling itself the Mata Zetas, or Zeta Killers. The Mata Zetas announced their existence in July, but made their presence known dramatically two weeks ago, leaving 35 bodies on a busy Veracruz highway during rush hour traffic. They later claimed responsibility for the massacre in a video posted to the Internet, in which hooded men presenting themselves as if at a press conference urged Veracruz residents to say 'no' to extortion and intimidation by the Zetas. But authorities say they believe the Mata Zetas are an arm of the New Generation cartel, which is resisting Zeta control of smuggling routes. "The phenomenon in Veracruz is a result of a rivalry between two criminal groups," said President Felipe Calderón's national security spokesperson Alejandra Sota. "Therefore, they must be taken on." (CSM, Oct. 7; LAT's World Now blog, Sept. 30)

Noel Salgueiro Nevarez AKA "El Flaco" (Skinny), the Sinaloa Cartel's top boss in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, was captured by army troops Oct. 5 in Culiacán, Sinaloa, in what authorities called a precise operation with no shots fired. El Flaco's arrest "affects the leadership structure, as well as the operational capabilities," of the Sinaloa network in Chihuahua, the Defense Secretariat and Prosecutor General's office said in a joint statement. He is said to be the leader of a criminal gang called the Gente Nueva (New People), which serves as a local enforcement arm of the Sinaloa Cartel (also known as the Pacific Cartel) in Chihuahua. However, the cartel's maximum boss, Joaquín Guzmán AKA "El Chapo" (Shorty), still remains at large. (EFE, Borderland Beat, Oct. 5)