The Week in Mexico

-- July 5, 2009

Mexican elections today: Mexico holds midterm elections today amid growing frustration over drug cartel violence and a shrinking economy. President Felipe Calderón's National Action Party has been campaigning as the party tough on crime and drug trafficking for the elections that will decide 500 congressional seats, 565 mayors and six governors. But many Mexicans are fed up with the violence that has left decapitated bodies on the streets from Pacific resorts to small mountain villages. That frustration could lead to a comeback for the Institutional Revolutionary Party.

Mass grave found: Police said they had uncovered a mass grave in Guanajuato state with the burned remains of 14 or 15 people believed to have been executed by the Zetas drug gang. Guanajuato Attorney General Carlos Zamarripa said the bodies were found last weekend, a day after a shootout between police and suspected Zetas hit men in the town of Apaseo el Alto in which 12 gunmen were killed, 12 were captured and one police officer was wounded. The dead gunmen were not the bodies in the mass grave.

Torero, 11, in Tijuana: Michelito Lagravere, the 11-year-old Mexican bullfighting sensation, is scheduled to perform at Tijuana's Bullring by the Sea at 4 p.m. today.

"Profiles of Tijuana": The second edition of Aida Silva Hernandez's "Profiles of Tijuana" went on sale in Tijuana. The profiles of Tijuana residents from all walks of life are based on 225 interviews published in the weekly newspaper Zeta in the 1990s. In a recent presentation at Tijuana's Cultural Center, she thanked the late Zeta editor Jesús Blancornelas for giving her the opportunity to do the interviews.

Golden Mikes for Tijuana story: Telemundo Channel 52 in Los Angeles won two Golden Mike awards for a report in early 2008 about Tijuana violence. The KVEA story, called "Tijuana Rambo," won best serious feature reporting and best video editing of a hard news story, feature or special. The report was about Jesús Alberto Capella Ibarra, who defended his Playas de Tijuana home from attack in a gunbattle shortly before he became police chief in December 2007. Capella Ibarra was replaced in December 2008 after weeks of unprecedented violence in Tijuana.