After a decade of small-scale experimental planting, biotech multinationals are now free to start commercial development of transgenic corn in Mexico. On Dec. 31 the government's Secretariat of Agriculture, Cattle Raising, Rural Development, Fishing and Food (SAGARPA) quietly lifted the last barrier to the use of genetically modified organisms (GMO) for corn sold to consumers. The Missouri-based biotech giant Monsanto will lead the way by sowing 63 hectares in the northern state of Sinaloa, to be followed with genetically modified corn in other northern states: Chihuahua, Coahuila, Durango and Sonora.

At least 44 prisoners were killed in a clash between gangs at the Center for Social Readaptation (CERESO) in Apodaca, Nuevo León. Inmates erected barricades in corridors, and used improvised knives, stones and bars to fight guards and each other. Authorities said the clash pitted adherents of Los Zetas and the Gulf Cartel against each other. The uprising was quelled by the state police, who mobilized a helicopter to the scene. The CERESO's director and all guards on duty at the time of the revolt have been detained. The CERESO, with an official capacity of 1,500, was holding some 3,000.

Mexico's Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) issued an order on Feb. 1 for the release of seven indigenous Tzotziles who had been convicted of homicide and other crimes in the December 1997 massacre of 45 indigenous campesinos in Acteal, a village in Chenalhó municipality in the southeastern state of Chiapas. The court, which has overturned the convictions of 45 others in the case since August 2009, ruled that the federal Attorney General's Office (PGR) had violated the defendants' due process rights by influencing witnesses, who had been shown an album of photographs.

An unidentified man attacked Mexican human rights activist Norma Esther Andrade with a knife on the morning of Feb. 3 as she was leaving her current residence in the Coyoacán delegación (borough) of Mexico City. She was cut on one cheek by the attacker, who then fled without speaking. Andrade, a founder of the organization Our Daughters Return Home, has been a leader in denouncing the unsolved murders of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juárez in the northern state of Chihuahua. She has been staying in Mexico City since she was wounded by gunfire from unknown attackers in Ciudad Juárez on Dec. 2; local authorities claimed the attack might be a carjacking or robbery attempt.

For the past week, members of Ciudad Juárez's 2,000-strong police force have been staying in hotel and safe-houses supplied by the city government in response to threats from narco-gangs to kill a police officer every day. The officers have been ordered to stay away from their homes for three months, and supplying them with housing will cost the city some $2 million. Mayor Hector Murguia announced the move in response to a demand from the "New Generation" cartel that police chief Julian Leyzoala step down—and a pledge to murder a member of his force each day until he does so. A total of 11 officers have already been killed this year.

A dispute over a water pipeline in San José del Progreso, a municipality in the Ocotlán district of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, turned deadly on Jan. 18 when supporters of Mayor Alberto Mauro Sánchez Muñoz reportedly opened fire on demonstrators. Protesters Bernardo Méndez Vásquez and Abigail Vásquez Sánchez were wounded; Méndez Vásquez died the next day in a hospital in Oaxaca city, the state capital. Both were members of the United Peoples of the Ocotlán Valley Coordinating Committee (COPUVO), which has been engaged in a three-year struggle against the Trinidad silver mine owned by Compañia Minera Cuzcatlan S.A. de C.V., a subsidiary of Vancouver-based Fortuna Silver Mines Inc.

On Jan. 12 ballistics experts and investigators from Mexico's governmental National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) carried out a reconstruction of a confrontation last month between student protesters and police on a highway in the southwestern state of Guerrero. Two students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers' College in the nearby village of Ayotzinapa were killed on Dec. 12 when state and federal police tried to disperse some 500 protesters blocking the highway; a worker at a gas station near the road also died, in a fire reportedly caused by a Molotov cocktail thrown by a student.

Agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) worked with an informant and with Mexican enforcement agents in 2007 to launder millions of dollars for Mexico's Beltrán Leyva cartel, according to reports in the New York Times and the Mexican magazine emeequis. The information comes from the Mexican government's response to a US request for the extradition of Harold Mauricio Poveda-Ortega, a Colombian drug trafficker arrested in Mexico in November 2010.