News stories by Daniela Pastrana, page 6

Carlos Sánchez knows a lot about the fear faced by Mexican society today, because he crisscrosses the country in his job as a bus driver. But he feels that now he has begun to help fight it, driving one of the vehicles in the Peace and Justice Caravan headed by Mexican poet Javier Sicilia.

'We didn't expect support from so many people in the capital. The authorities have to answer for this, and they must understand that we will not give up until justice is done,' Manuel Rodríguez Amaya told IPS, his eyes still wet from bursting into tears at the end of the citizen's trial.

'I want to request the resignation of the Secretary (Minister) of Public Security. We want a message today from the president, showing that he did hear us,' said poet Javier Sicilia before a crowded square overflowing with demonstrators who participated in a four-day-long March for Peace with Justice and Dignity in Mexico.

In Mexico, the country in the Americas facing the worst wave of violence against reporters, different journalistic initiatives are combating this dynamic, which fuels a tendency towards self-censorship.

The military offensive waged by the conservative government of President Felipe Calderón against drug cartels in northern Mexico has resulted in an appalling death toll and grief-stricken relatives mourning the victims, many of them civilians caught in the crossfire. Now the drug war is beginning to affect the capital, which had so far escaped the worst of the violence.

For the first time, Mexico has a female attorney general - the highest post ever reached by a woman in this country. But elation at this achievement is overshadowed by grief over the brutal murders of women police chiefs and activists, and the persecution endured by the family of another woman who was killed in 2010.

Thousands of people took to the streets in 20 cities across Mexico Wednesday to protest the wave of drug-related killings, in demonstrations triggered by the murder of the son of poet Javier Sicilia, in another show of the power of social networking sites in channelling public outrage.

In the U.S. city of El Paso, Texas the media sounded the alarm: six murders committed in just two months, more than the 2010 total of five. Just across the Mexican border, in the sprawling border city of Ciudad Juárez, no one doubts that this year's homicide rate will surpass last year's record: 3,111.

They live in a town with an apt name, Soledad (Solitude) de Guadalupe, of just 50 houses, most of which are inhabited by women on their own, in the Sierra Madre mountains in the small state of Querétaro in central Mexico.

The people of three towns that would be flooded by the El Zapotillo dam to be built in the western Mexican state of Jalisco have refused to be relocated and are fighting to save their homes.