Top leaders from the US and Mexico agreed to emphasize intelligence coordination in the next $331 million phase of the Merida Initiative following discussions in Mexico City on March 23. Mexican President Felipe Calderon and Government Secretary Fernando Francisco Gómez-Mont hosted the meeting with US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, and National Intelligence director Dennis C. Blair.

For a second consecutive day March 19, presumed narco-gunmen blocked highways in the area of Mexico's northern industrial hub of Monterrey, seizing private automobiles, buses and ambulances from motorists and using them to clog the lanes. The Nuevo Leon state Public Security Secretary reported more than 30 roadblocks using more than 60 vehicles in the metropolitan area on the second day of the action, which they said was apparently aimed at halting army operations on the northern border. A shoot-out with army troops was reported in the suburban municipality of China. (Reuters, La Jornada, March 19)

At least 15 people were killed March 13—four of them beheaded and left in public places—in and around Mexico's popular beach resort of Acapulco, just as foreign tourists start arriving for spring break. Among the dead were six municipal police and the brother of the city's ex-mayor. It was part of a wave of violence in which a total of 29 were killed in 24 hours around Guerrero state. The worst bloodshed was in Ajuchitlán del Progreso, where a confrontation between army troops and sicarios left 11 dead, including one soldier.

There were celebrations in Mexico City's downtown Alameda park on March 4 as 31 same-sex couples applied for marriage licenses at the Civil Registry on the nearby Arcos de Belén avenue under a new law that took effect that day in the Federal District (DF). The DF legislature passed the law on Dec. 21, making Mexico City the first city in Latin America to recognize same-sex marriages.

Municipal police in San Nicolás de los Garza, a suburb of Mexico's northern industrial hub of Monterrey, staged protests outside their precinct stations March 6 after three of their colleagues were shot to death and a fourth was gravely wounded in a dawn ambush on a patrol car. The protesting cops demanded better weapons, more bulletproof vests, and life insurance. "We want our rifles back," was a favored slogan. City officials said the police have agreed to continue working "under protest" while talks are underway.

The Latin America and Caribbean Unity Summit, a two-day meeting of 32 regional leaders in Cancún, Mexico, ended on Feb. 23 with an agreement that included the formation of a new hemispheric organization, provisionally named the "Community of Latin American and Caribbean States." The leaders made plans for further meetings, in Venezuela in July 2011 and in Chile in 2012, to continue discussing the mechanics of the new group and to establish its final name.

On Feb. 19 Fourth District judge Rodolfo Pedraza Longhi, in Querétaro, capital of the central Mexican state of Querétaro, upheld a 21-year prison sentence for two indigenous women charged with kidnapping six agents of the now-defunct Federal Investigation Agency (AFI). The two women—Teresa González Cornelio and Alberta Alcántara Juan—had been charged in connection with a March 26, 2006 incident in the market in Santiago Mexquititlán community, Amealco de Bonfil municipality, which the AFI agents raided in an unsuccessful search for pirated DVDs.

NGOs in Mexico's conflicted southern state of Chiapas are protesting the "forced displacement" by state and federal police of two peasant settlements in the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve. The operations took place Jan. 21 and 22 at the settlements of Laguna El Suspiro and Laguna San Pedro—the last one a base community of the Zapatista rebel movement. Homes were destroyed, and the inhabitants forcibly taken by helicopter to the nearby town of Palenque, where they were given temporary shelter in resettlement center—and interrogated by federal agents about supposed marijuana cultivation on their lands. Officials from the Federal Prosecutor for Environmental Protection and National Commission for Protected Areas were helicoptered in along with the police contingents to oversee the evictions.