Leaders of 71 unions in 18 countries have signed a letter to Mexican president Felipe Calderón Hinojosa expressing "grave concern for the lack of progress in the investigation" of the April 2007 murder of an organizer for the Ohio-based Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) in Monterrey, in the northern state of Nuevo León. After holding a press conference in Mexico City on Sept. 8, FLOC president Baldemar Velasquez delivered the letter to the Mexican president's official residence, Los Pinos.

Mexican marines shot and killed Gustavo Acosta Luján in the early morning of Sept. 1 in his home in Jardines de San Andrés, Apodaca municipality, in the northern state of Nuevo León. According to the Secretariat of the Navy, the marines, responding to an anonymous tip, were fired on from inside the house, and Gustavo Acosta, an "alleged criminal" with the alias "M-3," died in the operation. The marines said they found a 9 mm submachine gun, an AR-15 rifle and quantities of cocaine in the house. Mexican president Felipe Calderón Hinojosa has been using soldiers for police work in northern Mexico since militarizing the "war on drugs" shortly after he took office in December 2006.

The US Justice Department announced on Aug. 30 that Kenneth Melson, the acting head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), had been reassigned to another position in the department and that Dennis Burke, the US attorney for Arizona, was resigning from his post. The department didn't explain the reason for the changes, but they were clearly fallout from Operation Fast and Furious, a bungled ATF program that allowed some 2,000 weapons to go from the US to Mexico, where they were probably used in drug cartel violence.

A team of armed men who arrived in sport utility vehicles and a pickup truck entered the crowded Casino Royale in the northern Mexican city of Monterrey on Aug. 26, ordered the staff and patrons out—and set the building ablaze with a flammable liquid while people were still scrambling for the doors. At least 52 were killed. President Felipe Calderón said: "It is evident we are not facing common delinquents, we are facing true terrorists who have surpassed not only the limits of the law but...respect for life."

US agents have been posted in recent weeks at a Mexican military base to carry out intelligence and planning work with Mexican officials against drug cartels, according to an Aug. 7 article by New York Times reporter Ginger Thompson. The team includes "fewer than two dozen” agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials and "retired military personnel members from the Pentagon's Northern Command," Thompson wrote. They are working at a "compound modeled after "fusion intelligence centers' that the United States operates in Iraq and Afghanistan to monitor insurgent groups." The US is also "considering plans to deploy private security contractors” in a counter-narcotics unit of the Mexican police, according to the article.

Last month, Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla AKA "El Mayito"—the son of Sinaloa Cartel kingpin Ismael Zambada AKA "El Mayo"—filed pleadings in a Chicago federal court accusing the US Justice Department of giving the cartel "carte blanche to continue to smuggle tons of illicit drugs into Chicago and the rest of the United States." Zambada's pleadings claim that protection included promises to be kept apprised of US and Mexican government investigations close to the "home territories" of cartel leaders so they "could take appropriate actions to evade investigators"—even as the US had indictments, extradition requests, and rewards for the apprehension of the top Sinaloa Cartel leadership.

Police in Mexico City announced the arrest of Óscar Osvaldo García Montoya, AKA "El Compayito" on Aug. 11—purported leader of "La Mano con Ojos" (Hand with Eyes) criminal organization, who is accused in some 900 killings. The raid was carried out by police from the Federal District and México state, with intelligence provided by the Prosecutor General of the Republic (PGR). El Compayito, originally from Sinaloa, is said to have started his career as a sicario (hitman) for the Beltrán Leyva cartel before breaking off to form his own organization. His collaborators in the Beltran-Leyva cartel were named as Edgar Valdés AKA "La Barbie" and Gerardo Álvarez AKA "El Indio"—who was detained last year, and also said to be fighting his former Beltran-Leyva masters. El Compayito is a deserter from the Mexican navy, where he had achieved the rank of corporal and trained with Guatemala's elite military force, the Kaibiles.

Moisés Montero Álvarez AKA "El Coreano" (The Korean), alleged to be a top leader of the Independent Cartel of Acapulco (CIDA), was captured by Mexican federal police in the wee hours of Aug. 1 in a raid of a high-end restaurant in the resort city in southern state of Guerrero. Three others were arrested with him, including José Arturo Lareta Álvarez AKA "El Pulpo" (The Octopus) and a 16-year-old boy. Álvarez was wanted in the kidnapping and killing last year of 20 Mexican tourists who were vacationing in Acapulco. The victims worked in a mechanic shop in Michoacán state and traveled together annually to Acapulco. Last year, 22 of the men, driving cars with Michoacán plates, arrived in the city, where they were apparently assumed to be members of the Michoacán Family, a rival of the CIDA. Two of the 22 survived because they were not with the group at the time of the mass abduction. The disappearance of the rest provoked marches by their friends and relatives in Michoacán, who demanded justice. (CNN, Aug. 2; Milenio, Aug. 1)