News stories by Diego Cevallos, page 2

Two years ago, Eufrosina Cruz was kept from running for mayor of her home village by the 'traditions and customs' of her indigenous community in southern Mexico, just because she is a woman.

For decades, prosecutors, historians, activists and the families of victims of the political violence of the late 1960s and the 1970s in Mexico have blamed former president Luis Echeverría for the 1968 massacre of student protesters in Tlatelolco square in the capital and the disappearance of hundreds of people in the country’s 'dirty war' on leftists and other dissidents.

Mexico has lifted the ban on experimental cultivation of transgenic maize imposed in 1999 in this country where the crop was first domesticated and shaped human culture. Biotech giants have put forward two dozen projects for approval and have announced investments of 382 million dollars up to 2012.

Ana Celaya from El Salvador has been desperately searching for her son Rafael since he went missing in Mexico in May 2002, as he was trying to make it to the United States.

Antonio and Héctor Cerezo, whose parents have been accused by the Mexican authorities of founding a guerrilla group, walked free out of prison this week after serving seven-and-a-half year sentences. According to human rights organisations, they were victims of state revenge.

Prominent Mexico-based German political analyst Heinz Dieterich said he believes the World Social Forum, which is meeting this week in the northern Brazilian Amazon jungle city of Belem, falls short in the innovation department and fails to generate real change.

Members of the black community in Latin America and the Caribbean hope the rise to power of Barack Obama, the first U.S. president of African descent, will help raise awareness about the discrimination and other problems they face.

A supposed new paramilitary group’s threat to kill a criminal every 24 hours in Ciudad Juárez has further fanned the flames of the violence in that border city, which gained notoriety over the past decade and a half for the hundreds of unsolved murders of young women and has more recently seen an increase in drug-related murders.

The social diversity and broad range of thinking among Catholics is conspicuously absent from the Sixth World Meeting of Families taking place in the Mexican capital this week, say observers.

The Mexican government announced a 54 billion dollar economic recovery plan Wednesday aimed at helping the local economy weather the global financial crisis, with measures like freezing gasoline prices and boosting spending on public works.