Mexico City

MEXICO CITY - Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto has been busy telling the world about the economic miracle the country will experience after lawmakers approve the package of reforms he calls the Pact for Mexico. Nobody said the reforms would come easily. In recent weeks, hundreds of teachers who are opposed to the pact's education component have taken to the streets in the southern state of Guerrero - many of them wearing masks to conceal their identities - blocking a major federal freeway, smashing windows with brickbats and setting fires.

MEXICO CITY - A massive early-morning prison brawl Saturday in the central Mexican state of San Luis Potosi left 11 inmates dead and more than 65 wounded, officials said, the latest in a string of violent episodes that have plagued this country's corrupt, porous and unsafe penal institutions. The melee began at 4:15 a.m. in a penitentiary called La Pila, according to a state attorney general's office statement, with inmates wielding homemade knives. State and federal police officers and some military personnel had the prison under control as of late Saturday morning, the statement said.

MEXICO CITY - Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto on Tuesday faced the most serious political crisis of his young government, an explosive dispute with rival parties over electoral dirty tricks that could imperil his ambitious reform plans. Peña Nieto's highly touted Pact for Mexico, a kind of blueprint for his administration's agenda that had seemed to have won consensus from most major political groups, was on the verge of collapse after fresh reports of vote-buying by the president's Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. The government was forced to cancel a series of public events under the auspices of the Pact for Mexico to avoid the embarrassment of a boycott by the main opposition factions.

MEXICO CITY -- Mexico's top law enforcement agencies said Tuesday that they were poised to order the removal of a group of masked individuals who have occupied the main administrative building of the national university since Friday. The occupation of the university's rectory tower is linked to a relatively minor political dispute at one of the campus' public feeder high schools, yet the incident has struck a nerve at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, or UNAM by its Spanish acronym, which has an enrollment of more than 330,000 students this year.

Pedro Ramirez Vazquez, an architect who changed the face of Mexico City by designing a number of landmark modernist structures, died on Tuesday, his 94th birthday. The cause was pneumonia, according to Mexico's National Council for Culture and the Arts. Ramirez Vazquez was known for stunningly original designs that blended a European modernist sensibility with pre-Columbia aesthetics. His most famous modernist buildings, all in Mexico City, include the Basilica of Guadalupe, one of the country's holiest shrines; the National Museum of Anthropology, distinguished by a vast, square concrete umbrella; and Azteca Stadium, open since the mid-1960s and home to Mexico's national soccer team.

MEXICO CITY -- Mexico's leading newsmagazine says one of its investigative reporters has been threatened with kidnapping and possible death by government officials in the coastal state of Veracruz. Proceso magazine, in a statement posted on its website, said journalist Jorge Carrasco was in Veracruz this week reporting on the killing of another Proceso reporter there when he learned of the threats. (link in Spanish) “We have received information over the presumed intention of officials and former officials of the Veracruz state government to attack the physical integrity of the journalist,” the magazine said.

When Patricia McCormick realized she didn't have a future in music, she chose a career as filled with drama, passion and death as any of the operas she longed to sing. She became a matadora, breaking long-standing barriers against women and Americans in machismo-saturated Mexican bullrings and performing before enthusiastic crowds in more than 300 fights. In 1963, Sports Illustrated wrote that McCormick "may well be the greatest woman bullfighter who ever lived. " Over more than 10 years, she was gored six times, once so brutally that a priest administered last rites over her mangled body.

MEXICO CITY -- Skull motifs. Dollar bills pasted on a wall. Phrases written in neon lights. Figures cut out of photographs. Or, if you like, a bunch of lines on paper. It's hardly surprising that the offerings at Zona Maco , the Mexico City contemporary art bazaar that opened its 10th edition Wednesday, tend to look and feel like the art for sale at any other big fair. Many of the galleries with showcases at the glitzy five-day event are visiting from established art centers like New York or Milan.

  MEXICO CITY - Mexican drug cartels are striving to become “key players in the European drugs market,”  Europol officials said Friday. Their statement , issued from Europol headquarters in the Hague, said that Mexican criminals have become “global market coordinators” in trafficking cocaine and synthetic drugs to Europe. Police officials also alleged that Mexicans were moving firearms from southeast Europe and trading them with cocaine dealers in the Americas. They also specifically cited the Zetas cartel--perhaps the most ruthless of the Mexican gangs - for reportedly trafficking human beings “for sexual exploitation” from northeast Europe to Mexico.

MEXICO CITY - The new government of Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto has sought to downplay the deadly violence that has long haunted much of Mexico and that he repeatedly pledged to reduce. But the country's killers aren't cooperating. Newly released statistics indicate the number of homicides related to drug trafficking and other organized crime are only marginally changed from the same period last year, a blow to the government's attempts to recast Mexico's image. On Wednesday, Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong said 1,101 people were killed in March.