According to the online magazine Narco News, the company that taught torture methods to police agents in Leon in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato (see Update, July 6) is Risks Incorporated, a private security firm with offices in Miami and the United Kingdom. One of the two instructors involved in the training may be Risks Incorporated's Andrew "Orlando" Wilson, who served in the British military 1988-93, including 22 months in Northern Ireland. The other instructor appears to be Gerardo "Jerry" Arrechea, a Cuban-Mexican martial arts instructor; he seems to be the same "Jerry Arrechea" that the right-wing Miami-based Comandos F4 organization lists as its Mexican contact. In 2007 Risks Incorporated said its instructors used "psychological torture" in some courses "to show how easy it is to break a hostage and we're being nice!" (Narco News, July 7)

Mexico's National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) July 11 issued eight recommendations to the Secretary of National Defense (SEDENA) concerning grave violations of basic guarantees—including homicide and torture—in anti-crime operations in the states of Sinaloa, Sonora, Michoacán and Tamaulipas.

For the past two weeks, some 200 troops from Mexico's elite Federal Preventive Police (PFP) have occupied the village of Zimapán, Hidalgo, the scene of protests over a toxic waste site that the Spanish firm Befesa is scheduled to open this month. Heavily armed troops—some in ski masks and full riot gear—arrived in military-type trucks backed up by helicopters June 12, and continue to patrol the town's streets. The former bishops of the conflicted San Cristóbal diocese in Chiapas, Samuel Ruiz García and Raúl Vera López, have demanded the withdrawal of the PFP. (vaXtuxpan, June 30; La Jornada, June 17; Radio AMLO, June 15)

Police discovered the tortured and burned bodies of six men in an empty lot in Tijuana July 7, bringing the total found over the weekend to 11—including the corpse of a woman found in a barrel. The three-day tally pushed the city's death toll this year to more than 260, compared with about 152 homicides at this time last year. Authorities are just beginning to identify the bodies, and so far confirm speculation the deceased were involved in the drug traffic. Some of the victims' heads were wrapped in plastic, and a body found July 7 in the Tijuana River bore signs of torture and was wrapped in a carpet.

The families of two girls from Matamoros who drowned in the Rio Grande held a protest in the Mexican border city last month after authorities across the river in Brownsville, TX, ruled the death of a third girl in the incident, Yadira Jazmine Hernández, 13, an accident. At the foot of the international bridge linking the two cities June 12, the parents of victims Nayeli Martínez and Marlene Pérez García, both 14, held placards calling for the Mexican consul in Brownsville to intervene in the case. Guadalupe Martínez Reyes, mother of Nayeli, demanded a timely autopsy on the two remaining victims, who were found on the Mexican side, and that Matamoros authorities take a clear stance in the case. "They close and open the case every minute, and we really don't know what's going on," she said.

On June 30 El Heraldo de León, a newspaper based in León in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, released two graphic videotapes showing police agents from León's Special Tactical Group (GET) torturing other agents during training sessions. The victims, who had reportedly volunteered, were subjected to a practice known as the tehuacanazo, in which mineral water is forced up the nose, and were threatened with the pocito, in which the subject's head is submerged in excrement. In one scene, a trainee collapses and throws up; another agent then pushes him into his own vomit.

According to a July 1 press release from the Authentic Labor Front (FAT), an independent Mexican labor group, one of its affiliates has won a settlement in a two-month struggle with the Central de Abasto, Mexico City's huge wholesale food market. The Union of Workers of Commercial Buildings, Offices and Stores, and the Like and Related (STRACC), which represents about 40 workers who clean bathrooms in the facility's flowers and vegetables area, signed an agreement in which management recognized the union and its contract and confirmed the rights and working conditions the workers had before the conflict started on April 29. STRACC also won full payment of wages lost due to the conflict, along with better working conditions and schedules. The employees returned to work on July 1.

Six local police officers were killed in Culiacán, Sinaloa, June 27 when two carloads of heavily armed men cut off their vehicle in an ambush. The attack came two hours after a shoot-out between armed men and federal army troops assigned to the Mixed Urban Operations Base, leaving one gunman dead and several wounded, including a solider. That same day, Mexican authorities applauded the US Senate's approval of a $400 million drug war aid package for Mexico.