If there is a sacred cow grazing in the fertile pasture of Mexican writing about the drug war, Los Señores del Narco is it. Written by investigative journalist Anabel Hernández and published in Mexico in 2010, it will come out this fall in English as Narcoland.
On May 25th, 2013, people in over 400 cities on 6 continents participated in the International Day against Monsanto. Over the past six months people all across Mexico have been mobilizing to urge new president Peña-Nieto to not allow the introduction of GMO Crops to the country. In Mexico City, thousands of activists, farmers, academics and ordinary people participated in a Carnival against Monsanto. Marching from the National Palace of Fine Arts to the Monument of the Revolution they celebrated the importance of native corn, the basic sustenance of the Mexican Diet and rejected the new GMO permissions granted to transnational agro-business companies.
Concerned for their health and that of their children, Mexican activists in favor of healthy food and in defense of maize and the environment responded to the global call for a day against Monsanto. They organized the “Carnival of Corn” in Mexico City on May 25 and demanded that President Enrique Peña Nieto refuse to be bought or pressured by the agrochemical giant and protect the well-being of the population.
Since 2007, HIV and AIDS rates have gone up throughout rural Mexican states, partly as a result of returning migrants who have engaged in high-risk behaviors in the United States and not been able to receive diagnosis or treatment. Medical experts are shifting their attention to the particular dangers faced by Central American migrants—human trafficking, sexual abuse, prostitution, isolation, depression, and drug use—as vectors driving these numbers, especially in the southernmost state of Chiapas, where 40,000 to 60,000 migrants cross through in the hope of finding a better life in Mexico or the United States.
A Mexican Observation Mission investigates abuses of Central American migrants traveling through Veracruz state.
Salaries of less than $300 a month leave little for Mexican workers to live on. An investigation by Mexican newspaper El Financiero digs up the dirt on how employees at the biggest corporations, including Walmart, McDonalds, and KFC, often receive low pay and experience barely legal working conditions.
Mother’s Day in Mexico is considered one of the most important family holidays of the year. However, for many mothers throughout the country, the past several years of Mother’s Day have been “celebrated” with loss, grief, and a dignified rage that has manifested into a tradition of street protests. They are the mothers of victims of forced disappearances.
Saul Reyes Salazar is a man who understands loss. In January 2010, his sister Josefina was shot in the head, following a botched kidnapping in their hometown of Guadalupe los Bravos, across the border bridge from Tornillo, Texas. She was, at the time, one of the best-known activists in the Juarez Valley, the agricultural region that follows the Rio Grande river east of Ciudad Juarez.
On April 28, 2012 journalist Regina Martínez was found strangled in the bathroom of her home in Xalapa, the capital of the southern Mexican state of Veracruz. Martínez was a renowned journalist with the Mexican weekly magazine Proceso, which for the past 36 years has been publishing articles about narco-trafficking, the war on drugs, and government corruption, among other topics.
Atenco became recognized worldwide in 2001-2002 for its struggle to defend and protect its land. Armed with sticks and machetes – their primary farm tool and icon of struggle – the ejidatarios had gone to the streets to protest and express their rage for not being consulted about the land procurements. The ejidatario’s accomplishment in stopping the international airport was celebrated by many as a victory against the encroachment of foreign capital that sought to eradicate the farmworker’s way of life.
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