Some 800 students from Mexican teachers colleges occupied the state legislature building in Chilpancingo, capital of the southern state of Guerrero, at about 3 PM on Nov. 14. The students—largely young women from 16 teachers colleges, chiefly those in Saucillo, Chihuahua, and Tamazulapan, Oaxaca—held the sit-in to support demands by students and alumni of Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College in Guerrero for 75 teaching positions for alumni and for retention of the degree in primary education, which the state government has decided to abolish. The students said they had tried for months to arrange a meeting with Gov. Zeferino Torreblanca Galindo, of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), to discuss their demands. The president of the legislature's governing committee, Carlos Reyes Torres, also of the PRD, called for the police to remove the protesters. At about 5 PM some 500 agents of the State Preventive Police (PPE), with air support from a helicopter, marched into the building and tried to remove the protesters. The confrontation lasted about two hours, with police hurling tear gas canisters and clubbing students, while the students hurled firecrackers at the agents.

A statement by Las Abejas, the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Center and other civil organizations in conflicted Chiapas state finds that the Mexican national state "is responsible for the Acteal massacre" of Dec. 22, 1997. The statement says the terror campaign in the highland municipality of Chenalhó really began Aug. 19, 1996, with the assassination of six youths who were part of the support base of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN). The statement says "the massacre was the product of a deliberate and directed State policy to exterminate the EZLN, its support base and any organization of civil society whose demands were uncomfortable for the government." (La Jornada, Nov. 4)

State and municipal police arrested some 20 people on Nov. 2 in Oaxaca city, the capital of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, during protests marking one year since federal security forces ended militant strikes and occupations there. In 2006 strikers from Section 22 of the National Education Workers Union (SNTE) and community activists in the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) occupied most of downtown Oaxaca and paralyzed the state government for five months. Thousands of Federal Preventive Police (PFP) agents took control of the city on Oct. 29, 2006, two days after an outbreak of violence that left three people dead, including US independent journalist Brad Will.

With 70% of southern Mexico's Gulf Coast state of Tabasco under water following weeks of heavy rains, Gov. Andrés Granier has compared capital Villahermosa (pop. 500,000) to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The Rio Grijalva, which flows through Villahermosa, has surged six feet above its normal height. Television shows images of Mexican Navy helicopters scooping up children from rooftops and rescuers lowering elderly people into boats. Many thousands more waded or swam though chest-high water out of the stricken city. The state's critical oil infrastructure is in ruins, and up to a million have been displaced. (NYT, Nov. 4; NYT, Nov. 3; eFluxMedia, Nov. 2) Gov. Granier is demanding that the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) shut down the Peñitas hydro-dam upstream from Villahermosa on the Grijalva, in the foothills of the Chiapas Highlands. The CFE has reduced the flow through the dam by two-thirds to 800 cubic meters per second, but refuses to shut it completely. Said Granier: "The game is over; they must completely stop the pumping through Peñitas, because I demand respect for the people... Energy generation is now secondary, today the most important thing...is to lower the level of the river." (La Jornada, Nov. 4)

Sam Spade Meets Emiliano Zapata in Mexico's Twilight Zone

by Chesley Hicks, WW4 REPORT

Book Review:
The Uncomfortable Dead (What's Missing is Missing):
A Novel of Four Hands
by Paco Ignacio Taibo II and Subcomandante Marcos
Akashic Books, New York, 2006

The search for the "Evil and the Bad" is the quest that underlies The Uncomfortable Dead, an epistolary mystery, leftist political primer, and love letter to Mexico's eternal soul.

One day ahead of the one-year anniversary of the death of New York IMC journalist Brad Will in Oaxaca, two primitive homemade explosive devices were thrown at New York's Mexican consulate in an apparent pre-dawn bicycle-by attack Oct. 26, shattering windows but causing no injuries. Police are drawing parallels to a similar incident at the British consulate in the early morning hours of May 5, 2005. In both cases, the devices were fake grenades sold as novelty items, but packed with black powder and detonated with fuses. In the 2005 case, video surveillance indicated two devices were thrown from a passing bicycle. In the Oct. 26 case, a witness reported seeing a hooded figure on a bicycle pass by the consulate. (NYT, AP, Oct. 27)

The town of Vicam in the northwestern Mexico state of Sonora was the site of the Meeting of Indigenous Peoples of America, which brought together some 1,500 representatives of indigenous groups from the US, Canada, Mexico, Central America and South America starting on Oct. 11 and continuing through Oct. 12. Organizers said misinformation from the government and media had put obstacles in the way of the meeting; they had been afraid it might have to be moved.

Mexico's Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), now convening an international forum on indigenous rights at Vicam, Sonora, are protesting comments by Supreme Court Justice Aguirre Anguiano dismissing the rebel movement as "folklore." The statement came in a case brought by 44 indigenous-majority municipalities, led by Coxcatlán, San Luis Potosí, challenging several articles of the federal telecommunications laws as failing to comply with constitutional changes on indigenous rights approved in 2001. Justice Aguirre argued for cutting off the debate, finding the claim without merit. When Justice Genaro Góngora Pimentel stated that the constitutional changes were part of the San Andrés Accords, which emerged from the government's peace dialogue with the Zapatistas, Aguirre responded: "For me... this is an ideological group and part of the national folklore...whose leaders...13 years ago declared war on the Mexican Army and have not fired one shot." (Proceso, Oct. 9)