Tens of thousands of people participated in a silent "March for Peace With Justice and Dignity" in Mexico City on May 8 to call for an end to the US-backed militarization of Mexico's fight against drug trafficking. Protesters, most of them dressed in white, carried signs reading: "No more blood," "Justice," "Peace," "Let's stop the bullets," "Life isn't trash" and, above all, "We've had it up to here" (estamos hasta la madre). More than 35,000 Mexicans have died in drug-related violence since President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa sent troops into the streets soon after taking office in December 2006.

Rescue crews recovered the last of 14 bodies May 8 from the Pozo 3 coal mine hit by a gas explosion in Mexico's northern Coahuila state, while Labor Secretary Javier Lozano called for an overhaul of mine safety in Mexico and the federal Prosecutor General opened an investigation into the disaster. Mexican officials said the May 3 blast was caused by a buildup of gas. A teenage boy who was evidently employed illegally at the mine, Jesús Fernando Lara Ruiz, had his right arm blown off in the explosion. The National Union of Mine and Metal Workers and the Like of the Mexican Republic (SNTMMSRM) said the mine's work force was not unionized, and protested the "completely unsafe conditions under which coal mines operate in the country, and especially in this region known as the coal belt."

As momentum builds for the May 8 protest against violence and impunity in Mexico, the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) announced its support for the movement started by poet Javier Sicilia. In a communiqué dated April 28, the EZLN leadership declared it would wholeheartedly support the struggle by conducting a silent march of Zapatista base communities in the Chiapas highland city of San Cristóbal de Las Casas on May 7.

Mexican president Felipe Calderón Hinojosa's militarization of the fight against drug trafficking has increased the level of violence against women, a leading Mexican feminist, María Marcela Lagarde y de los Ríos, told the Spanish wire service EFE on April 29. "Everything that is happening favors violence against women," she said. Calderón's strategy "cultivates a very violent culture" and "establishes an ideology of violence, of defeat, of war… That's a very macho culture, very misogynist, and we women are left defenseless."

The number of bodies found in clandestine graves in the northern Mexican city of Durango reached 104 after the discovery of eight more corpses April 27. The total bodies pulled from two sets of clandestine graves this month is now approaching 300, after 183 were also found buried in the border state of Tamaulipas to the northwest. The prosecutor general's office for Durango state said the 104 bodies had been found in hidden graves around the city since April 11, and that they had been buried for at least one year.

About a third of the Mexicans surveyed in the federal government's National Poll on Discrimination in Mexico (Enadis) for 2010 said that what gives them the greatest anxiety is the fear of violent robbery. Another quarter told Enadis, a survey carried out each year since 2005, that they were most afraid of violence by drug traffickers, while for one out of five of those polled, the main worry is "being victims of abuse by the forces of public security."

The Mexican state of Tamaulipas has dismissed its security chief while federal police arrested 16 municipal police officers in the town of San Fernando following the discovery of more than 145 bodies in mass graves over the past weeks. Former army general Ubaldo Ayala Tinoco has been replaced as Tamaulipas public security secretary by another ex-military man, Capt Rafael Lomelí Martínez, who pledges to bring all those involved in the mass killings to justice. In addition to the police, some 20 have already been arrested in connection with the killings. Most of the victims are believed to have been abducted from long-distance buses travelling north to the US border; there is speculation they were killed by cartel gunmen after refusing to join their ranks. The bodies of 72 Central and South American migrants were found in the same area last year. On April 16, the Mexican navy announced the capture of Omar Martin Estrada Luna AKA "El Kilo"—suspected leader of Los Zetas in San Fernando and alleged mastermind of the recent killings. Federal authorities say he will likely be charged in last year's killings as well—for a total of 217 homicides. (BBC News, Hoy Tamaulipas, La Prensa, April 17; LAT, April 14)

US officials were wrong in 1979 when they thought that the struggle against drug trafficking was "a question that only had to do with complying with the law," one "that could be resolved quickly with an aggressive campaign" and with a "country by country" approach, William R. Brownfield, US assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs, told a press conference in Cancún, in the eastern Mexican state of Quintana Roo, on April 7. "Thirty-two years have passed, billions of dollars and many strategies later," he said, "and I could tell you that we weren't right, we didn't guess right."