Mexico Government

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.

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.

The Clinton Administration on Thursday officially recognized Ernesto Zedillo as Mexico's next president, as Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen delivered a congratulatory letter to the "President-Elect of the United Mexican States" along with an invitation for Zedillo to visit the White House in the fall. Zedillo won the most votes in Mexico's hard-fought presidential election Aug. 21, but he will not be named president-elect until after the new Mexican Congress meets Nov. 1. to ratify the results.

Six months before a presidential election that his party is widely expected to lose, President Felipe Calderon is on the defensive about the government's blood-soaked drug war, with new revelations that it sought to conceal death toll statistics from the public. By unofficial count, at least 50,000 people are believed to have been killed since Calderon deployed the military in the first days of his presidency in December 2006. A year ago, the government released an official death toll up to that point - 34,612 - and pledged to periodically update a database and make it public.

President Ernesto Zedillo's government labored Wednesday to complete its second emergency economic plan in two months, after the lack of a clear strategy and continuing political upheaval in the ruling class combined to drive the peso to its lowest closing price ever against the U.S. dollar. A day after Mexico's Congress approved a $20-billion U.S.

A menacing pamphlet containing photographs of armed peasants that has been mailed anonymously to newspapers, embassies and the foreign press portrays Mexico's leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party as a band of violent, out-of-control anarchists. A pro-government columnist for the newspaper El Universal accused leaders of the right-wing National Action Party of accepting illegal funds from the U.S. Republican Party and other foreign sources.

When he wants to worship, farmer Gustavo Hernandez sneaks out the back of a local grocery store and ducks into a dim storage room, where the Virgin Mary shares space with hundreds of ears of corn and a few scrabbling chickens. The makeshift altar to the Virgin is only a short walk from this village's imposing Spanish-colonial Roman Catholic church. But Hernandez won't go near that structure. "If we go to the church, they'll surround it and kill us," the 46-year-old peasant says softly.

The Mexican government Friday appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the disappearances of hundreds of leftist rebels in the 1970s and early 1980s, another step toward realizing President Vicente Fox's vow to punish those who committed human rights abuses. The appointment of Ignacio Carrillo Prieto, a lawyer and academic who lost a cousin in the so-called dirty war, comes nearly six weeks after the National Human Rights Commission issued a 2,846-page report on the disappearances.

It started as a simple protest. Reading about yet another peso devaluation in December 1994 and watching his money nearly evaporate overnight, film director Luis Estrada had an idea: What about a movie that featured the folly and corruption of Mexico's long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party? So the seed was planted for "La Ley de Herodes" (Herod's Law), a movie that was, ironically, financed in part by the government's film institute.

Arguably the most powerful man in Mexico after President Carlos Salinas de Gortari is a slight, bespectacled economist with a French accent and a deliberately low profile. Jose Cordoba Montoya is the president's closest adviser. The press and political pundits alternately refer to him as "a virtual vice president," "a prime minister" and "a combined secretary of state and presidential chief of staff." Or, the Henry A. Kissinger of Mexico.

More than half of the "breathtaking" sums of money earned by Mexican drug cartels in the U.S. and smuggled into this country dissolves into Mexico's cash-based economy, eluding detection and funding vast criminal operations, according to a new U.S.-Mexican government study released Wednesday. The study, described by a senior U.S. official as the first of its kind, attempts to explore the ways illicit drug-trafficking profits make their way from the United States to Mexico or Colombia and how to stem the tide.

Mexico this month will become the first foreign nation to sell small-denomination government bonds in the United States aimed at mom-and-pop investors, the Mexican Finance Ministry said Friday. Starting Feb. 13, investors in the U.S. will be able to purchase the Mexican bonds in denominations of $1,000 from a network of brokerage firms including Charles Schwab, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley. The bonds will be available in various maturities, ranging from about three years to 10 years.

They start gathering at dawn. Men in sweat-stained cowboy hats and mud-caked boots stand next to women in Indian skirts and smocks hand-woven in subtle mixes of blue, red, green and yellow. Most arrive with sharp if rust-dotted machetes hooked to their belts. But Antonia Perez faces the daily crowd armed only with a spiral notebook and a navy-blue backpack crammed with folders and complaint forms.

President Vicente Fox may have caught the first big fish of his anti-corruption campaign--although this catch could prove to be a shark that bites back. Auditor General Francisco Barrio said over the weekend that his office is investigating charges that executives of Pemex, the state-owned oil company, siphoned off at least $120 million and channeled it to the oil workers union in 2000.

The Mexican government Friday appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the disappearances of hundreds of leftist rebels in the 1970s and early 1980s, another step toward realizing President Vicente Fox's vow to punish those who committed human rights abuses. The appointment of Ignacio Carrillo Prieto, a lawyer and academic who lost a cousin in the so-called dirty war, comes nearly six weeks after the National Human Rights Commission issued a 2,846-page report on the disappearances.

The first time Martha Camacho saw her newborn son, he had a machine gun to his head. The boy was just seconds old. Camacho was one of Mexico's desaparecidos, or "disappeared ones," when she gave birth, bound and blindfolded, in a secret government safe house 24 years ago. Her husband, the father whom her son has never known, remains a desaparecido.

Ending a three-day gathering marked by rare open rebellion and debate, Mexico's ruling party passed hundreds of sweeping regulations Sunday to combat internal corruption, compete in fairer elections and open itself to democracy as never before.

For more than two years, expectant mothers in this community where the Rio Grande meets the Gulf of Mexico have worried that their babies will be born missing part of their brains or spinal cords. Such birth defects are occurring here at three times the national rate. And no one knows why. The most ominous explanation, however, is proposed by a lawsuit making its way through Texas courts. Nineteen families are blaming their children's deaths and disabilities on pollution from U.S.

Back in the 1970s, just bearing the name Cabanas invited torture, disappearance and death in the villages of the blood-splashed Sierra Madre of Guerrero state. Lucio Cabanas Barrientos, a Mexican version of Che Guevara, was a country teacher-turned-revolutionary leader who built up a small rebel army in the mountains that loom above his hometown here. He was killed Dec. 2, 1974, in an army ambush soon after kidnapping the governor-elect of the southern state.

Case by anguished case, family by tortured family, the truth is starting to surface: The Mexican army and a shadowy force of secret police systematically kidnapped, brutalized and "disappeared" hundreds of people in the 1970s as it crushed an array of leftist guerrilla movements.