Mexico’s National Defense Secretariat announced the mobilization of 860 army troops to Tijuana in anticipation of reprisals following the capture of kingpin Teodoro García Simental.
The body of José Luis Romero, a Mexican journalist kidnapped in December, was found on a roadside in Sinaloa state. Romero covered police and crime issues for a local radio station.
Severed heads and mutilated bodies with threatening “narco-massages” were found in Juárez and Los Mochis, as a shoot-out left one soldier and three narco-gunmen dead in Michoacán.
Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission issued a harsh “recommendation” to Guerrero Gov. Zeferino Torreblanca in the unsolved case of two indigenous leaders kidnapped last year.
A judge in Oaxaca issued an order giving the federal government 10 days to release activist Juan Manuel Martínez Moreno, held since October for the murder of journalist Brad Will.
In a first for a Latin American city, Mexico City’s legislature voted 39-20 to permit same-sex marriage. Mayor Marcelo Ebrard is expected to sign the bill.
José Alberto Velázquez López, owner of the Mexican newspaper Expresiones de Tulum, was shot by a gunman on a motorcycle, bringing to 12 the number of reporters killed this year in the country.
Gunmen attacked the home of the family of the Mexican marine killed in the gun-battle that also claimed the life of kingpin Arturo Beltrán Leyva, killing his mother, brother, sister and aunt.
Special forces from the Mexican military killed top kingpin Arturo Beltrán Leyva in a firefight in Cuernavaca. The local human rights commission reports one by-stander was also killed.
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace finds that Mexico’s annual per capital growth rate under NAFTA has been slow—1.6% in 1992-2007, compared to 3.5% in 1960-1979.
Amnesty International called on Mexican authorities to protect residents of disputed lands after a woman living in the Lomas de Poleo area of Chihuahua state was shot and injured.
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights delivered a sharp rebuke to Mexico, accusing it of inaction in investigating and prosecuting the murders of young women in the border city of Juárez.
