Two armed men gunned down Mexican activists Isabel Ayala Nava and her sister, Reyna Ayala Nava, as they were leaving a church in Xaltianguis, near Acapulco. Ayala was the widow of famed guerilla leader Lucio Cabañas Barrientos.
Key state elections in Mexico returned the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to power, in what commentators are calling a signal that the once-discredited party could regain the presidency next year.
At least five Central American immigrants were forcibly removed from a freight train by about 10 armed men wearing hoods in Veracruz state, according to two immigrants who managed to escape.
The Mexican military has taken responsibility for 44 cases of human rights violations since December 2006, when President Calderón ordered soldiers into the fight against drug trafficking.
Mexican poet Javier Sicilia, who has led a national protest movement against the militarization of the “drug war” since losing his son to narco-violence, met at the Federal District’s Chapultepec Castle with President Felipe Calderón.
More than 65 women have been murdered so far this year in the northern Mexican state of Nuevo León. The victims included pregnant women and nine underage girls; the majority were sexually abused.
Paramilitaries linked to organized crime have used death threats and violence to cause a general exodus of several campesino communities in the Sierra del Sur of southern Mexico’s Guerrero state.
Prominent Mexican journalist and commentator Miguel Angel López Velasco, who covered narco trafficking for the Veracruz daily Notiver, was shot dead along with his wife and son by gunmen who broke into the family’s home.
Statistic from the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives indicate that a total of 70% of nearly 30,000 illegal guns the Mexican government seized in 2009 and 2010 came from the US.
A “peace caravan,” which has spent a week travelling through Mexico to protest against drug-related violence and the “war on drugs,” crossed into the US at El Paso, where protest leader Javier Sicilia called for a halt to the Merida Initiative.
Soldiers patroling the Mexican border town of Ciudad Camargo discovered a warehouse where two armor-plated “tanks” were being constructed. Authorities have intercepted 100 such “narco-tanks,” which the press has dubbed “The Monsters.”
Mexican soldiers raided the home of casino magnate and centrist politician Jorge Hank Rhon and claimed to find a large arsenal, possibly intended for the drug cartels.
