Police discovered the tortured and burned bodies of six men in an empty lot in Tijuana July 7, bringing the total found over the weekend to 11—including the corpse of a woman found in a barrel. The three-day tally pushed the city's death toll this year to more than 260, compared with about 152 homicides at this time last year. Authorities are just beginning to identify the bodies, and so far confirm speculation the deceased were involved in the drug traffic. Some of the victims' heads were wrapped in plastic, and a body found July 7 in the Tijuana River bore signs of torture and was wrapped in a carpet.

The families of two girls from Matamoros who drowned in the Rio Grande held a protest in the Mexican border city last month after authorities across the river in Brownsville, TX, ruled the death of a third girl in the incident, Yadira Jazmine Hernández, 13, an accident. At the foot of the international bridge linking the two cities June 12, the parents of victims Nayeli Martínez and Marlene Pérez García, both 14, held placards calling for the Mexican consul in Brownsville to intervene in the case. Guadalupe Martínez Reyes, mother of Nayeli, demanded a timely autopsy on the two remaining victims, who were found on the Mexican side, and that Matamoros authorities take a clear stance in the case. "They close and open the case every minute, and we really don't know what's going on," she said.

On June 30 El Heraldo de León, a newspaper based in León in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, released two graphic videotapes showing police agents from León's Special Tactical Group (GET) torturing other agents during training sessions. The victims, who had reportedly volunteered, were subjected to a practice known as the tehuacanazo, in which mineral water is forced up the nose, and were threatened with the pocito, in which the subject's head is submerged in excrement. In one scene, a trainee collapses and throws up; another agent then pushes him into his own vomit.

According to a July 1 press release from the Authentic Labor Front (FAT), an independent Mexican labor group, one of its affiliates has won a settlement in a two-month struggle with the Central de Abasto, Mexico City's huge wholesale food market. The Union of Workers of Commercial Buildings, Offices and Stores, and the Like and Related (STRACC), which represents about 40 workers who clean bathrooms in the facility's flowers and vegetables area, signed an agreement in which management recognized the union and its contract and confirmed the rights and working conditions the workers had before the conflict started on April 29. STRACC also won full payment of wages lost due to the conflict, along with better working conditions and schedules. The employees returned to work on July 1.

Six local police officers were killed in Culiacán, Sinaloa, June 27 when two carloads of heavily armed men cut off their vehicle in an ambush. The attack came two hours after a shoot-out between armed men and federal army troops assigned to the Mixed Urban Operations Base, leaving one gunman dead and several wounded, including a solider. That same day, Mexican authorities applauded the US Senate's approval of a $400 million drug war aid package for Mexico.

State authorities in Guerrero, Mexico, have agreed to pay 490,000 pesos (US$48,000) in compensation to 14 indigenous men coerced into having vasectomies. The men will each be paid 35,000 pesos (US$3,400) and given water storage tanks and cement to build homes, said state health secretary Luis Barrera Rios. The men agreed to the deal, despite initial demands of 200,000 pesos (US$19,000) each.

A group of undocumented Cuban immigrants who were supposedly "snatched" from Mexican immigration authorities by an armed commando on June 11 in the southeastern state of Chiapas have been located in Hidalgo, Tex., Mexican authorities said on June 18. The Mexican Attorney General's Office (PRG) will investigate nine employees of the National Migration Institute (INM) in connection with the incident, according to officials.

Workers at the Mexmode garment factory in Atlixco municipality in the central Mexican state of Puebla report that the state and local governments are maneuvering to destroy the Independent Union of Mexmode Company Workers (SITEMEX), one of the few independent unions in Mexico's maquiladoras (tax-exempt assembly plants producing for export). The workers say Antorcha Campesina ("Campesino Torch")—an organization linked to the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which governs the state—has taken hold in the factory and is threatening and intimidating the union leadership. Atlixco director of culture Maritona Espejel has been photographed distributing fliers outside the plant; she reportedly called on workers to lynch a group of observers during a work stoppage.