José Enrique Morales Montaño, of the Center of Support for Workers (CAT) in Puebla was kidnapped and physically tortured on May 15 as he was headed to the local labor board to accompany a group of textile workers, according to the international labor news aggregator, LabourStart. His captors kept a gun pressed to his head for extended periods and threatened to kill him and the other members of the CAT. In the evening of the same day, they left him on an abandoned highway to Veracruz, and stole his cell phone and backpack; he suffered serious injuries. The next morning, CAT Director Blanca Velázquez received a message from Montaño’s stolen cell phone stating: “You will die, bitch.”

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Exiled Mexican mine workers union leader Napoleón Gómez Urrutia will be honored with the AFL-CIO’s 2011 George Meany-Lane Kirkland Human Rights Award tonight at a ceremony at the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C.

Brenda Loya in AFL-CIO Media Affairs sends us this report.

Mexican independent union leaders traveled to Washington, D.C., to brief, educate and express urgency to congressional leaders on the labor struggles and issues they’re currently facing in Mexico. Members of the Mexican Electrical Workers’ Union (SME) have remained in Mexico City’s main square (Zocalo) for the past six months, demanding justice over the administration’s war on unions. The government fired the SME’s 44,000 members in October 2009 and over the past two years, the fight over the privatization of electricity and the repression of one of Mexico’s oldest and most democratic unions has escalated. The briefing shed light on this ongoing struggle and the need for U.S. solidarity.

The United Steelworkers (USW) is filing a formal protest with the U.S. State Department after USW Sub-District Director Manny Armenta was arrested this week by Mexican border guards while on his way to meet with lawyers for the Los Mineros Mexican miners union.