MEXICO | Drubbings on the human rights front. The Mexican government has come in for strong criticism for its shortcomings in the area of human rights from two international bodies, as well as what amounted to a sanction from the US. On 2 October the president of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (CIDH in the Spanish acronym), Rose-Marie Belle Antoine, presented the initial findings of the 20-strong delegation that had spent five days meeting representatives of government, civil society and academia, as well as journalists and victims of human rights violations and their families, notably the relatives of the…

In the year to the end of last June the authorities seized 413 firearms from suspected members of organised crime. Just under two-thirds of them were picked up in three states ― Tamaulipas, Guerrero and Jalisco ― and 74 of them were long-barrelled weapons of a military-issue kind. The new data comes from the annual report of the federal procurator-general’s office (PGR), submitted last month to congress. Tamaulipas accounted for 34% of all seizures, Guerrero and Jalisco for just under 14% each. Next among the top five sources were Sinaloa (10%) and Sonora (8%). Attempts have been made to correlate…

Ninety-seven days after Joaquín Guzmán (‘el Chapo’) broke out of the Altiplano high-security prison, the government’s security cabinet announced that he had evaded recapture somewhere in the northeast of the country and in his flight had suffered injuries to a leg and his face ― not, the official communiqué said, as a result of a ‘direct confrontation’. To date, the authorities have not added any precision to this account, save to deny some claims in the media. Though a full, accurate account is yet to emerge, the information that has become available suggests that the government may have had good…