Gunmen burst into a party and killed 14 high school students Jan. 31 in Ciudad Juárez. The assailants jumped out of sport utility vehicles, entered the house near the US border, where the students were celebrating a birthday and victory in a local American Football championship, and began killing them one by one. (Reuters, KVIA, El Paso, NM, Jan. 31)

A riot at the notoriously harsh Durango prison known as Social Readaption Center (CERESEO) No. 1 left 23 inmates dead and another 20 injured Jan. 20. Army troops were sent in to put down the violence, which supposedly involved members of the rival Gulf Cartel and Sinaloa Cartel. (El Universal, AHN, Jan. 21)

Mexico's National Defense Secretariat announced the mobilization of 860 army troops to Tijuana in anticipation of reprisals following the capture of Tijuana Cartel kingpin Teodoro García Simental AKA "El Teo". Baja California state officials say 76 people have been killed in the city so far this year. The toll for 2009 was over 700 murders.

The body of abducted Mexican journalist José Luis Romero was found on a roadside in Sinaloa Jan. 16. State authorities said he had been dead for two weeks. Romero, abducted Dec. 30 while vacationing in Los Mochis, covered police and crime issues for the radio station Línea Directa de Sinaloa, which said he was kidnapped "for carrying out his work."

Police found two severed heads and the bullet-ridden bodies of two women and a disabled man in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juárez Jan. 9. The body of the man, whose legs had earlier been surgically removed, was mutilated and left with a "narco-message." (AP, Jan. 9) On Jan. 8 in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, the body of Hugo Hernández, 36, was left on the street in seven pieces with a note addressed to the Juárez Cartel reading: "Happy New Year, because this will be your last." Hernandez's face was skinned and stitched onto a soccer ball. (AP, Jan. 8) On Jan. 7, a shoot-out at a military check-point in La Piedad, Michoacán, left one soldier and three presumed narco-gunmen dead. (Cambio de Michoacán, Jan. 7)

Mexico's semi-governmental National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) has issued a recommendation to Zeferino Torreblanca, center-left governor of the southern state of Guerrero, in the unsolved case of two indigenous leaders kidnapped by three armed men on Feb. 13, 2009 in Ayutla de los Libres municipality, Guerrero, and found dead on Feb. 20 in Tecoanapa municipality. The CNDH noted irregularities in the state's investigation, and asked Torreblanca to correct them and to offer protection to witnesses and to the families of the victims, who were leaders in the Organization for the Development of the Mixteco Méphaa Peoples. (La Jornada, Jan. 3)

Mexican district judge Rosa Ileana Ortega Pérez in Oaxaca city issued an order on Dec. 30 giving the federal government 10 days to release activist Juan Manuel Martínez Moreno, who has been held since Oct. 16, 2008 for the murder of New York-based independent journalist Brad Will. Martínez Moreno, a member of the leftist Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO), had already been cleared of the murder charges on Nov. 9 by magistrate judge Javier Leonel Santiago Martínez, who asked Judge Ortega Pérez to release the prisoner within 48 hours. However, the federal Attorney General's Office (PGR) appealed, as it is expected to do again with Judge Ortega Pérez’s decision.

On Dec. 21 Mexico City's legislature, the Federal District Legislative Assembly (ALDF), voted 39-20 to permit same-sex marriage; another 39-20 vote later in the session gave same-sex couples the legal right to adopt children. Deputies from the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and the small leftist Workers Party (PT) voted for the measure, while the center-right National Action Party (PAN) and the small Ecological Green Party of Mexico (PVEM) opposed it. Two deputies from the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) voted with the opposition, and five abstained. PAN coordinator Mariana Gómez del Campo and PRI coordinator Israel Betanzos said they would challenge the law's constitutionality before the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN).