More than a month after his disappearance following a police attack on campesino protesters at Ixhuatlán de Madero, in the eastern Mexican state of Veracruz, Nahua indigenous leader Gabino Flores Cruz has released a video statement saying he has not been detained but has gone into hiding for "reasons of security." Flores Cruz is a director of "Los Dorados de Villa," the organization that led the occupation of contested lands at Ixhuatlán. (Proceso, July 25) Meanwhile, ten campesinos who had been arrested in the police attack were released July 4 following a mobilization on their behalf by the "Other Campaign" activist network. "Los Dorados de Villa" say the Nahuas had been forced from the disputed lands by the hired gunmen of land baron Faisal Nader, despite having a legal title dating to 1938. (La Jornada, July 5)

Representatives of peasant organizations from across the globe have gathered in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas for the "Encuentro with the Peoples of the World," hosted by the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN). Participating groups include Brazil's Movement of the Landless, Thailand's Assembly of the Poor and the international NGO Via Campesina. Meetings are being held in the Zapatista "autonomous municipalities" of Oventic, Morelia and La Garrucha, where Comandanta Delia articulated the conditions that led the Zapatistas to take up arms in 1994: "Our grandparents lived in slavery, without salaries. We asked for land, but we were always denied by the evil government. Persecutions, imprisonments, houses burned. There has never been good justice." (La Jornada, July 25)

A group of ex-guerillas from the now-dissolved Clandestine Revolutionary Worker's Party-Union of the People (PROCUP), re-organized as the above-ground Democratic Popular Left (IDP), led by David Cabañas Barrientos and Italo Ricardo Díaz, charged in a statement that there are "clear indications" that the government of Felipe Calderón seeks to "open a new chapter in the dirty war" that gripped Mexico in the '70s, when hundreds of dissidents were "disappeared." The statement said the "detention-disappearance" of two supposed members of the EPR guerilla organization is a "signal that a hunting season has opened against activists and militants of legal and legitimate organizations with the pretext that they are front organizations."

Police fired tear gas to prevent hundreds of protesters from reaching the venue of an international Guelaguetza folk festival in Oaxaca July 16, in the worst outbreak of violence in the conflicted southern Mexican city since November. Protesters hurled rocks and burned vehicles as they marched towards the stadium where the festival is slated to open July 23.

Grupo Mexico SAB, the world's seventh-largest copper producer, said 30% of employees at the San Martin copper and gold mine (Zacatecas state) didn't report to work July 5 because of a national one-day protest. The strike also halted work at Grupo Mexico's Taxco zinc and silver mine. The National Mining and Metal Workers Union said about 80% of workers at mining and steel companies across Mexico joined the strike to support Grupo Mexico workers. Miners want the company to improve safety conditions. (Bloomberg, July 5)

After two decades of silence, architect Rosa María Alvarado Martínez come forward July 9 to say that at least three bodies—likely the remains of student protesters killed by the army at Mexico City's Tlatelolco Plaza in 1968—are buried under a hospital near the massacre site. Alvarado said the bodies were discovered in 1981 when the hospital was being renovated, but plainclothes men identifying themselves as police officers threatened to kidnap and kill her son if she went public. The site had previously been a vocational school where student occupiers confronted soldiers during the October 1968 protests. While official reports claim only 25 were killed at Tlatelolco later that month, human rights advocates have claimed up to 350 dead.

Honda, Nissan, Hershey's, Kellogg, Grupo Modelo and other multinational companies temporarily shut their plants in western Mexico after rebels attacked a key natural gas pipeline. The Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR) guerrillas claimed responsibility for the explosions. The government ordered an increase in security at "strategic installations" across Mexico. The state monopoly Pemex said an explosion July 10 and two more last week affected different sections of the same pipeline linking Mexico City to Guadalajara. The explosions forced the evacuation of some communities but caused no injuries. In a statement July 10, the EPR said it was waging a "prolonged people's war" against "the anti-popular government."

More than 100,000 people filled the giant Zocalo plaza in downtown Mexico City on July 1 for the third National Democratic Convention (CND) called by former mayor and center-left 2006 presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Current president Felipe Calderon Hinojosa was officially declared the winner in the July 2, 2006 elections by a narrow margin in a victory not accepted by Lopez Obrador or his followers. In the July 1 gathering Lopez Obrador called on his followers not to compromise with Calderon, not to accept his program for "fiscal reform" and not to accept "reform" of the Law of State Workers Social Security and Services Institute (ISSSTE). (La Jornada, July 2)