A UN working group recently investigated abuses by private security firms recruiting and training hundreds of Peruvians to work as mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan. (UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Feb. 5) Mercenaries are currently the second largest military force in Iraq, with numbers estimated as great as 50,000. Britain is next in line with 10,000 troops. This marks a shift from the "coalition of the willing" to a "coalition of the billing" used to complement the 130,000-strong US occupying force in Iraq. (AFP, Feb. 3)

The Human Rights Defense Commission (CODDEHUM) of the southern Mexican state of Guerrero is investigating a Jan. 25 police operation that removed 60 workers and campesinos who were blocking the Los Filos gold mine near the community of Carrizalillo in Eduardo Neri municipality. CODDEHUM president Juan Alarcon noted that a commission representative went to the mine and asked the police to show their court order to remove the protesters; the agents admitted they didn't have one.

We have noted repteated claims and denials that veterans of the feared Guatemalan counter-insurgency troops known as the Kaibiles are active in Chiapas and collaborating with Mexico's narco-mafias. But these Kaibiles, caught in the new Chiapas immigration sweeps, seem to have fallen on hard times. From El Universal, Jan. 25, our translation:

Mexican President Felipe Calderón announced Feb. 18 that he is dispatching some 3,300 army troops and federal police to combat narco-traffickers in Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon, two states that border Texas. Nuevo Leon capital Monterrey and the Tamaulipas border town of Nuevo Laredo, both plagued by drug violence in recent months, are especially targeted, Defense Secretary Guillermo Galvan said. Soldiers have already set up roadside checkpoints in and around Monterrey to search vehicles for weapons and drugs. Since taking office Dec. 1, Calderón has already ordered 24,000 troops and federal police into Tijuana, Acapulco and Michoacan state in response to narco-violence that claimed over 2,000 lives last year. (San Antonio Express, Feb. 19)

The evangelical Journal Chretién features a commentary Feb. 12 on religious violence in Mexico's conflicted southern state of Chiapas which is rife with dangerous distortions, and smacks of a propaganda job against the Zapatista rebels. Although writer Aloys Evina begins by boasting of his "many years as a reporter," his garbled report reveals either deep ignorance or willful denial of the realities of Chiapas. The implausible account concerns a supposed Zapatista "lynch-mob" attack on a Maya evangelical preacher.

In a new communique, the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) denounces Mexican President Felipe Calderon's escalated campiagn against narco-trafficking as a "farce" and a "mere pretext to augment the already disproportionate militarization of rural Chiapas." The communique, signed by Subcommander Marcos, draws an analogy between the new crackdown and last year's contested elections, saying "the supposed campaigns against narcotrafficking carried out by the government are a farce. Just like that which brought Mr. Calderon Hinojosa to power."

Enrique Rueda Pacheco, leader of the Oaxaca teachers union Section 22, resigned Feb. 18, saying he was the victim of a dirty campaign against him. He charged the state government with betrayal in failing to follow through on agreements signed in October to end the teachers' strike in Oaxaca, instead setting up a new union local, Section 59, controlled by the state's ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). (Prensa Latina, Feb. 18)

Diego Cevallos writes for IPS, Feb. 2:

MEXICO CITY - One of the 12 community radio stations operating legally in Mexico has literally come under fire, and its journalists have received death threats and been arrested; another has received warnings for covering the activities of social movements; and a third was closed down at gunpoint by supporters of the local government.