News stories by Daniela Pastrana, page 4

MEXICO CITY, Nov 06 (IPS) - Miguel* is one of millions of Mexicans scraping by on a meagre income – he earns 60 dollars a week working 11 hours a day in an electronic products store in the northern city of Mexicali.

TUCSON, Arizona, Aug 18 (IPS) - Fear stalks the streets in the U.S. state of Arizona. Seven-year-old Matthew feels it when his mother crosses the line permitted by the guards of the Tent City - an extension of the Maricopa County Jail - to be photographed with a sign protesting the imprisonment of immigrants.

LOS ANGELES, California, Aug 14 (IPS) - "The war on drugs is endangering the best thing that the United States has given the world: democracy,” Javier Sicilia, the Mexican poet who heads the movement of victims of the violence unleashed by the war on drugs in his country, said upon reaching the United States this week.

TAPACHULA, Jul 03 (IPS) - "It's like the parties are competing with each other to see who spends the most money. In a state as poor as ours, that's indecent," Alex, a 30-year-old taxi driver in this city of the southern state of Chiapas, just 30 minutes from the Guatemalan border, told IPS.

Emma Veleta and Toribio Muñoz were married 40 years ago and had seven children, four boys and three girls. They lived in the town of Anáhuac, 100 km from the capital of the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua. But on Jun. 19, 2011, as they were celebrating Father’s Day, tragedy struck.

Agnes Torres, a transsexual psychologist and gay rights activist, left her home in the central Mexican state of Puebla on her way to a party. The next day, her body was found in a gully, naked from the waist down. Her throat had been slit.

'We need to be the ones to provide the answers to the questions of our times, because we are the main victims of the voracious policies of capitalism,' says Alexis Jiménez, a 23-year-old ethnologist who has spent the last two months camping out in front of the Mexico City Stock Exchange.

Gabriel Echeverría de Jesús, 20, and Jorge Alexis Herrera, 21, paid a high price for taking part in student protests in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero: they were killed when police tried to break up their roadblock.

Some 200 Wixáritari or Huichol men, women and children travelled 20 hours from western Mexico to the capital to defend their sacred ceremonial sites from silver mining.

'We have a duty to show what the reality is, and we will do so with complete independence,' said French judge Philippe Texier, a member of the Permanent People’s Tribunal, which has opened a chapter in Mexico.