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).

José Alberto Velázquez López, owner of the Mexican newspaper Expresiones de Tulum in the southeastern state of Quintana Roo, died this week after being shot in his car by a gunman aboard a motorcycle, according to local news reports. His death brings to 12 the number of reporters killed this year in the country.

On Dec. 22, gunmen burst into the home of the family of Mexican marine Melquisedet Angulo, who had been killed last week in the Cuernavaca gun-battle that also claimed the life of kingpin Arturo Beltrán Leyva, spraying it with bullets and killing his mother, brother, sister and aunt. Another sister was gravely wounded. The attack came hours after Angulo was honored as a national hero in a naval ceremony at his hometown of Paraíso in southern Tabasco state.

Special forces from the Mexican army and navy killed one of the country's top drug kingpins, Arturo Beltrán Leyva, in a firefight in Cuernavaca late Dec. 16. Beltrán Leyva, who was also wanted in the US, was the highest-level drug lord killed since President Felipe Calderón launched his offensive against the cartels in December 2006. Some 400 troops surrounded his apartment in a luxury complex, sparking a two-hour gun battle, in which Beltrán Leyva's henchmen—known as the "Fuerzas Armadas de Arturo"—responded with automatic weapons and grenades. Six of the the henchmen were killed, one as he jumped from a window, as well as one member of the navy's Special Forces.

On Dec. 9 the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an influential Washington, DC-based think tank, released "Rethinking Trade Policy for Development: Lessons From Mexico Under NAFTA," a study on the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement and related neoliberal economic policies on Mexico's economy. The study found that in the period since the agreement went into effect in 1994, Mexico's annual per capital growth rate has been slow (1.6% in 1992-2007, compared to 3.5% in 1960-1979) and job growth has been weak, with net losses in agriculture and manufacturing (except for the export-oriented maquiladora sector).

The Mexican authorities must protect residents of disputed land who have been intimidated and attacked by the security guards of local landowners who are contesting the ownership of the land, Amnesty International said Dec. 11. The call comes after a woman living in the Lomas de Poleo area in Chihuahua state was shot and injured at her home by two men in balaclavas.