Subcommander Marcos of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), speaking in Mexico City's historic Tlatelolco Plaza May 3, stated that the Zapatistas are officially going on "red alert" in response to violence in San Salvador Atenco, a village in the state of Mexico which has declared as a Zapatista-style "autonomous municipality." (Notimex, May 3) Later that night, six of 14 state and federal police officers detained by Atenco's rebel authorities, the Frente de Pueblos Unidos en Defensa de la Tierra, were released. News reports said they had been severely beaten. (APRO, May 4)

The Zapatista "Other Campaign" continues to advance through central Mexico, with recent stops emphasizing peasant ecological struggles. In Campos, Colima state, Delegate Zero (Subcommander Marcos) and other Zapatista leaders met with fishermen at Cuyutlán lagoon, whose livelihood is falling victim to environmental damage caused by the port’s thermoelectric plant. (La Jornada, April 1) In Michoacan, they met with Purepecha indigenous campesinos defending the local Lake Zirahuen from the real estate and tourism development that is encroaching from the nearby bigger Lake Patzcuaro. (La Jornada, April 5) Emulating the Zapatista rebel zones in Chiapas, the Purepecha have established a "Caracol in Rebellion of Lake Zirahuen." (Narco News, April 4) In Morelia, Michoacan's capital, Marcos called for a new "national force" to combat the neoliberal capitalist program, and affirmed that indigenous peoples are critical to "the possibility to build a different reality for our nation" because they have "another relation with nature." (La Jornada, April 3) The Other Campaign has just arrived in Ocotepec, Morelos, heartland of the original Zapatista insurgency (La Jornada, April 8)

Some 15,000 people marched along Mexico City's Reforma avenue on March 16 to protest water privatization plans as the representatives of 140 countries met nearby for the opening of the 4th World Water Forum. "Water isn't for sale and won't be sold," the marchers chanted, denouncing all three major Mexican political parties for water policies that "degrade and profit from the suffering of the people." In 1993 the then-ruling centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) awarded a 30-year water concession in Cancun, Quintana Roo, to the French multinational now known as SUEZ, while the Federal District, governed by the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), recently signed a contract with the Mexican water bottler Bonafont, owned by the French multinational Groupe Danone. Mexican president Vicente Fox Quesada, of the center- right National Action Party (PAN), is the former head of Coca- Cola Mexico, which sells Agua Ciel brand bottled water. (Adital, March 17; Minga Informativa de Movimientos Sociales, March 22)

The Zapatista "Other Campaign" continues to advance through central Mexico. On March 20 in the Jalisco city of El Salto, Subcommander Marcos convened the first National Worker Encuentro, attended by dissidents from Mexico's official labor unions and what they called "neocharrismo"—including leaders of a recent strike at the local Euzkadi tire plant. (Charro is popular slang for Mexico's corrupt labor bosses.) Marcos called for a new labor opposition to Mexico's government, and to whichever party is elected in July's presidential race. (APRO, March 20)

Tens of thousands of Mexican miners went on strike from March 1 to March 3 at 70 companies in at least eight states--Hidalgo, Coahuila, Guerrero, Chihuahua, Queretaro, Michoacan, Guanajuato and Mexico state--in a wildcat action protesting local conditions and government intervention in the National Union of Mine and Metal Workers of the Mexican Republic (SNTMMRM).

Ginger Thompson writes for the New York Times, Feb. 27:

MEXICO CITY, Feb. 26 A secret report prepared by a special prosecutor's office says the Mexican military carried out a "genocide plan" of kidnapping, torturing and killing hundreds of suspected subversives in the southern state of Guerrero during the so-called dirty war, from the late 1960's to the early 1980's.

Feb. 16 marked a full decade since the signing of the San Andres Accords, negotiated by rebel Zapatista commanders and Mexican federal legislators in the restive southern state of Chiapas. The Accords called for changes to the Mexican constitution as a minimum peace demand for the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), but have languished for ten years as the federal bureaucracy has refused to implement them. As the anniversary passed, Zapatista leaders on a national tour dubbed "The Other Campaign" (a reference to the presidential campaigns now underway in Mexico) arrived in the city of Puebla. (La Jornada, Feb. 17)

From Mexico's El Universal, Feb. 16, via the Miami Herald:

Fox calls for probe in Lydia Cacho case
The governor of Puebla is under fire after he is allegedly heard discussing the jailing of a journalist on a tape released to the media
The federal government on Wednesday condemned an alleged plot by a state governor and a prominent businessman to jail a journalist for libel after she wrote a book about networks of pedophiles and child pornographers.