At a Nov. 10 session, the Mexican Senate called on the government of President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa to start criminal proceedings against US officials involved in two programs that let firearms enter Mexico illegally. The programs, Operation Wide Receiver in 2006 and 2007 and Operation Fast and Furious in 2009 and 2010, were supposed to help US agents trace illegal gun smuggling by monitoring suspect weapons purchases. But the agents lost track of some 2,300 firearms that were transported into Mexico, largely for the use of drug cartels.

Mexican Governance Secretary Francisco Blake Mora was killed when his helicopter crashed Nov. 11 near Chalco, México state. Four other Governance Secretariat and three Air Force personnel were also killed in the crash. President Felipe Calderón said it was probably an accident caused by bad weather, but public speculation points to a hit by one of Mexico's warring drug cartels. Skeptics noted that the government's most notorious Drug War hardliner is Public Security Secretary Genaro García Luna, and a more likely cartel target. However, the crash eerily comes one week after Blake Mora attended a memorial ceremony for Juan Camilo Mouriño, his predecessor who was killed in a plane crash three years earlier. (NYT, El Economista, Nov. 11)

At the point of completing 40 days without food, 10 prisoners in Mexico's southern state of Chiapas—plus one who had been transfered out of state—ended their hunger strike Nov. 7, citing the imminent threat to their health and the lack of any response to their demands from state or federal authorities. Their family members and supporters have taken up the struggle by launching an ongoing protest vigil (plantón) outside the State Center of Social Reinsertion (CERSS), and blockading the San Cristóbal-Ocosingo highway that passes by the facility.

Mexico's military and police have committed widespread human rights violations in efforts to combat organized crime, virtually none of which are being adequately investigated, Human Rights Watch said in a report released Nov. 9. The 212-page report "Neither Rights Nor Security: Killings, Torture, and Disappearances in Mexico's 'War on Drugs'," examines the human rights consequences of President Felipe Calderón’s approach to confronting Mexico's powerful drug cartels. The report finds evidence that strongly suggests the participation of security forces in more than 170 cases of torture, 39 "disappearances," and 24 extrajudicial killings since Calderón took office in December 2006. "Instead of reducing violence, Mexico's 'war on drugs' has resulted in a dramatic increase in killings, torture, and other appalling abuses by security forces, which only make the climate of lawlessness and fear worse in many parts of the country," said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch.

Residents of San José del Progreso, a municipality in the Ocotlán district of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, say they are continuing their three-year struggle against a mine operated by Toronto-based Fortuna Silver Mines Inc. They blocked the entrance to the company's San José mine for 40 days in the spring of 2009, charging that there had already been environmental damage even though the mine wasn't yet in operation; they also said the authorities had licensed the project without community consultation. The protest was ended abruptly when some 700 police agents, armed with assault rifles and backed up by a helicopter, stormed the community on May 6 of that year.

A scandal involving US law enforcement programs to let guns "walk" into Mexico has now widened to include the 2001-2008 administration of former president George W. Bush, a Republican, as well as the administration of current Democratic president Barack Obama. The latest revelations concern a program codenamed Operation Wide Receiver, in which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) reportedly allowed some 350 or 400 guns to enter Mexico illegally during 2006 and 2007.

On Oct. 26 Mexican officials emphatically denied that US agencies were violating Mexican sovereignty by carrying out undercover operations aimed at Mexican drug cartels. The presence of agents from the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in Mexico "isn't something new, it's been happening since a long time ago," Foreign Relations Secretary Patricia Espinosa Cantellano said at a press conference in Mexico City that was meant to be about Mexico's participation in a Group of 20 meeting in Cannes, France, and in the Iberian-American Summit in Asunción, Paraguay. Espinosa Cantellano said she couldn't reveal the number and location of the agents for security reasons, "but of course the government knows about this presence and we are very strict in watching out that the legal framework is applied."

Mexico's former President Vicente Fox again spoke out for drug legalization this month, telling a Washington DC meeting of the right-libertarian Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity that prohibition bears responsibility for the horrific toll in his country's cartel wars: "Fifty thousand kids from 15 to 25 years old have been killed in the last five years. Violence does not defeat violence." He asked rhetorically: "Do we really expect that the government will eradicate the drugs from the face of the earth?"