On Jan. 22, followers of the Rural Reactivation Movement (Movimiento por la Reactivación del Campo) occupied the offices of Mexico's Agriculture Secretariat in five municipalities and blocked six roads in northern Chihuahua state, pledging to maintain the protest campaign until the government reduces the price of diesel fuel, raises the price of maize and wheat, addresses outstanding land claim disputes, and approves early release of pledged resources from the Procampo rural aid program.

A man arrested by Mexican federal police in Tijuana Jan. 22 says he disposed of 300 bodies for a narco gang over the past decade by dissolving them in chemicals. Santiago Meza López said he was paid $600 a week to dissolve victims' bodies in caustic soda. He went by the moniker "El Pozolero del Teo" (Teo's Stew-Maker), an evident reference to Teodoro García Simental, a former kingpin of the Tijuana Cartel who defected last year to the rival Sinaloa Cartel, sparking a bloody turf war. Over 700 were killed in Tijuana in 2008. "They brought me the bodies and I just got rid of them," Meza, named as 20 on the US FBI's "Most Wanted" list, told journalists at a construction site where he disposed of the bodies over a 10-year period. "I didn't feel anything."

Oaxaca activist Rubén Valencia Núñez was harassed and violently attacked on the night of Jan. 10, and it is believed that his life remains under threat. He is a member of Oaxacan Voices Building Autonomy and Liberty (VOCAL), which is part of umbrella organization Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO). APPO led widespread protests in Oaxaca state in 2006 and 2007, calling for the resignation of the state's governor.

A small indigenous community in Mexico's northern Chihuahua state finds little glitter in the "magic town" planned for their ancestral lands. Instead of good fortune, leaders of the Raramuri (Tarahumara) community of Bacajipare allege they've been the target of death threats and bullets because of an escalating land conflict related to the planned Divisadero-Barrancas Adventure Park.

Mexican Exterior Secretary Patricia Espinosa reacted Jan. 15 to the recent US Joint Forces Command report describing Mexico and Pakistan as "weak and failing states," telling reporters that most of the murders in the escalating narco wars have been between drug traffickers, and half have been concentrated in the cities of Juárez, Tijuana, Culiacán and Chihuahua. "Mexico is not a failed state," she said. (NYT, Jan. 16) Similar points were made by Enrique Hubbard Urrea, Mexico's consul general in Dallas, in a meeting with the Dallas Morning News editorial board, where he actually boasted improvement, asserting that the Mexican government "has won" the war against the drug cartels in certain areas, including Nuevo Laredo. (DMN, Jan. 16)

In a Jan. 9 meeting with ambassadors and consuls in Mexico City, President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa denied that there was chaos in Mexico and that "the civilian population was being massacred in the streets." He was apparently referring to fighting among drug cartels and between drug traffickers and the government. (La Jornada, Jan. 10) More than 8,000 people have been killed in Mexico's drug wars over the past two years. A study by the US Joint Forces Command, a US military planning group, warns that the Mexican state may "bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse" because of "sustained assault and pressure by criminal gangs and drug cartels... Any descent by Mexico into chaos would demand an American response based on the serious implications for homeland security alone." (International Herald Tribune, Jan. 9 from Reuters)

Three undocumented immigrants were killed and eight others injured when state preventive police fired on a truck near San Cristóbal de las Casas in the southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas on the morning of Jan. 9. Police agents opened fire after the driver refused to stop the truck, which was carrying some 30 Chinese, Ecuadoran and Guatemalan immigrants entering from Guatemala in transit to the US. The agents continued to shoot during a 20-minute chase that ended with the truck crashing. All the injured and at least one of the dead had received bullet wounds; the driver and an immigrant smuggler escaped. Two of the agents were reportedly detained. (La Jornada, Jan. 10)

Thousands of fishermen in Mexico went on strike last week to protest the rise in the cost of diesel fuel, which they say has reduced their profit margin to zero. The strike, dubbed "Zero Fishing 2009," was declared in the northern state of Sinaloa by fishermen operating a fleet of around 100. In less than a week, the number of vessels involved in the strike had climbed to over 2,500.