Thousands marched in cities across Mexico April 6 to call for an end to drug-related violence after the slaying of the son of poet Javier Sicilia. Juan Francisco Sicilia, 24, five other men and a woman were found dead March 28 in a car in Cuernavaca, Morelos. They had been missing for a day. The bodies bore signs of torture and were accompanied by a note signed by the Gulf Cartel, authorities said. Press reports said the message accused the victims of having called in tips to a government hot line. Several thousand joined the demonstration in downtown Mexico City, chanting "No More Blood!" and "Not One More!" A similar number marched through Cuernavaca.

Members of local organization Movimiento por Justicia del Barrio on April 4 staged a brief occupation of the Mexican consulate in New York City as part of a global action campaign in solidarity with the Chiapas community of San Sebastián Bachajón, fellow members of the "Other Campaign" network launched by the Zapatista rebels. The "Bachajón Five" are among over 100 Tzeltal Maya Zapatista supporters from the community arrested in recent months in what the community calls a campaign of harassment. One is accused of murder, another is accused of attempted murder, and all five are accused of "crimes against the peace." The government portrays the conflict as a dispute between rival indigenous factions over control of a tollbooth that charges a fee to enter the Agua Azul waterfalls, one of Chiapas' most popular tourist attractions. The Bachajón adherents charge that the government orchestrated the confrontation at the tollbooth "as a pretext to take over the Agua Azul Waterfalls Ecotourism Center for its transnational interests and projects. (Radio Zapatista, April 4; Upside Down World, March 29)

Thousands of workers, many of them affiliated with the National Workers Union (UNT), Mexico's largest independent labor federation, marched from the Zócalo plaza in Mexico City to the Chamber of Deputies on the afternoon of March 31 to protest a proposed reform of the labor code. Union leaders said the legislation "intends to finish off collective contracts and make the workers modern slaves." Martín Esparza, general secretary of the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME), called on workers to stay alert, because the politicians plan "to sacrifice us during Holy Week"—a reference to the possibility that Congress will try to pass the law the week of April 18, when many people are taking Easter vacation. The head of the telephone workers' union, Francisco Hernández Juárez, called for a nationwide mobilization on April 7 to step up the pressure on the legislators. (El Sol de México, April 1)

Mexico's National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) issued a report finding that 5,397 have been reported missing across the country since President Felipe Calderón launched his war on the drug cartels in 2006. The CNDH analyzed data provided by relatives and by state authorities on cases of those "reported missing or absent." The commission said 3,457 of those disappeared were men and 1,885 women, while this data was unavailable in the remaining 55 cases. The figure includes ransom kidnappings, as well as migrants whose whereabouts are unknown. (BBC News, EFE, April 2)

Some 115,000 Mexicans fled their homes last year because of drug-related crime, according to a report released on March 23 by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC). The Geneva-based group, which was established by the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) in 1998 at the United Nations' request, estimated that the total number of people displaced by drug violence in Mexico since 2007 has reached about 230,000. Some 35,000 people have died in fighting among drug gangs and between the gangs and the authorities in the four years since President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa militarized the fight against drug traffickers shortly after taking office in December 2006.

Mexico-US border police chiefs were at the top of the news in recent weeks. In a bitter twist to an almost fairytale story that captured the imagination of the US and Mexican press, the 20-year-old police chief of a small town in the blood-soaked Juárez Valley, Marisol Valles, fled to the US seeking political asylum in early March.
 Only days later, on March 10, US federal agents swept into the border town of Columbus, New Mexico, arresting Police Chief Angelo Vega along with the town's mayor and other suspects. Jailed in southern New Mexico on gun-running charges, the defendants are accused of engaging in the type of cross-border commerce that has reaped death and destruction in the Juárez Valley and other parts of Mexico during the past few years.

US secretary of state Hillary Clinton announced on March 19 that the US ambassador to Mexico, Carlos Pascual, had resigned. Pascual, who has only been at the post for a year and five months, will remain in Mexico to organize an "orderly transition," Clinton said. Pascual's resignation came after a number of embarrassing revelations about US-Mexican relations, starting with the WikiLeaks group's publication of diplomatic cables from the US embassy in Mexico. Some cables showed US diplomats losing confidence in the militarized "war on drugs" that President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa ordered shortly after taking office in December 2006. Calderón made it clear during a visit to Washington on March 3 this year that he wanted Pascual replaced, but State Department officials said at the time that they had no plans to remove the ambassador. (La Jornada, Mexico, March 20)

Mexican social organizations and human rights groups carried out actions in at least eight states on March 8, International Women's Day, to demand that the authorities end the murders of women, categorize femicide as a special crime, and pay attention to women's demands.