News stories by Daniela Pastrana, page 7

'The moral reserve of this country is low. People have let too many things happen without taking to the streets…and they continue to let them go by,' peace activist Pietro Ameglio told IPS in this Mexican border city.

'And what about after 2012?', when the Kyoto Protocol climate change treaty’s first period of commitments ends, was the question floating around an international meeting of legislators held over the weekend in the Mexican capital.

'A dark chapter has come to a close in the history of Oaxaca. A chapter that must never again be repeated,' said lawmaker Flavio Sosa, the head of the social movement that brought this southern Mexican state to its knees for several months in 2006 and was brutally repressed.

They were not looking for war, but it found them anyway: Yosmireli and Griselda, two and four years old, died by bullets to their heads from soldiers' guns. Their mother, aunt and seven-year-old brother Joniel were also killed, on a rural road in northwest Mexico.

'It's painful to build an altar of offerings to your dead child,' Abraham Fraijo, one of the leading activists in a citizens' movement against violence and impunity in Mexico, wrote in his Twitter account while taking part in a series of protests during the celebrations of the Day of the Dead.

The setting sun creates long shadows on the pavement in the crowded Del Safari neighbourhood in the southwest of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Casting the shadows are young people playing percussion instruments or children breakdancing or performing daring skateboard jumps.

At 30, Mexican activist América del Valle knows loneliness all too well: she spent four years in hiding, out of contact with friends and family, her only goal being to 'endure' the government's persecution of her family.

Mexico has suffered a setback in terms of government transparency and access to public information, according to Thomas Blanton and Kate Doyle, experts with the Washington-based National Security Archive (NSA).

'I don't understand why we should celebrate [Independence]. There will be no freedom in Mexico until repression against indigenous peoples is eliminated,' says Sadhana, whose name means 'moon' in the indigenous Mazahua language.

Tamaulipas state has become the black hole of organised crime in Mexico. But there are few accounts of the rapid social breakdown that the northeastern border state has experienced since the start of the year, because the local press is silenced.