Ask any local resident in Amecameca de Juárez, Mexico and they will tell you about La Voladora, the radio station that won a major legal battle for freedom of expression when it challenged the government in a case in which the Supreme Court handed down a ruling in its favor in 2011.
Around two thousand indigenous Zapotec people live in the community of Santiago Xanica in the mountain range ‘Madre del Sur’ in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. It takes two hours to travel here via a dusty dirt track that cuts through fresh tropical vegetation on the dry mountain sides. The tranquillity that resonates in Xanica and the warm welcome from the habitants hides a violent and tense past.
The mine, known locally by the name of its subsidiary Minera Cuzcatlán, went into production in late September 2011. Its opponents maintain that Fortuna Silver’s mine is the root of the social problems that plague the once peaceful region. In a press conference following the police shooting of Méndez Vásquez, mine opponents made it clear that they see a direct link between Fortuna Silver and the violence.
For seventeen months more than 300 Triqui people from the region of Copala, as it is known, have been displaced due to intense paramilitary violence in their community. Unable to return under fear of harm, the displaced camped out in Oaxaca City, demanding a government response to their situation.
In the midst of Mexico’s senseless “Drug War” and the erroneous belief that drug-trafficking is the root of the country’s evils, Mexicans were given a powerful reminder last week of the deeper crisis affecting their fellow citizens. […]
The current hype over an alleged Latin America-based alliance against the U.S. between Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Hezbollah and Hamas militants, drug cartels, leftists, and any other potentially unsavory regional outfit or trend has produced such ludicrous assessments as that, given similarities between Mexican and Lebanese terrain, Hezbollah is instructing drug smugglers in the art of tunnel construction.
María Elizabeth Macías Castro had a great fondness for the internet. It gave her comfort and hope, and was an indispensable element of her work as moderator of a website where organized crime is reported. This everyday tool would also be the cause of her death.
Surrounding the November 13 elections in Michoacán, one mayor was shot dead, fifty candidates from several parties stepped down due to threats, an indigenous community boycotted the election and instituted their own electoral processes, and an entire city’s police force resigned. In the last five years, Michoacán has seen some of the worst gang violence in the country outside of the border region and has been heavily militarized. Both institutionalized political pressure and “narco-influence” have continue to call in to question the possibility of free and fair elections in Mexico.
Trampling out the Vintage explains better than any other book how the UFW under Chavez’s leadership became in the 1960s and 1970s one of the most remarkable and successful unions in U.S. history but then crashed and burned so breathtakingly fast that by the end of the 1980s it had pretty much disappeared from the fields.
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