Police in the Mexican Gulf Coast city of Villahermosa rescued at least 23 Honduran undocumented immigrants, including six children, who were kidnapped for ransom, the Tabasco state prosecutor's office said Oct. 28. Two Mexico citizens were also arrested and charged in the kidnapping. The migrants were reportedly intercepted in the town of Palenque in in neighboring Chiapas state, near the Guatemalan border. At the time of their abduction, the hostages were forced to hand over information about their relatives in Honduras so that they can be forced to deliver ransom money, authorities said. (AFP, Oct. 28)

In Mexico's third mass shooting in less than a week, gunmen who arrived in SUVs opened fire Oct. 27 at a carwash in Tepic, capital of the Pacific coast state of Nayarit, killing at least 15. All but two of the victims worked at the carwash, and most were clients of the same drug treatment center, Alcance Victoria (Victory Outreach). Three victims wore matching T-shirts emblazoned with "Fe y Esperanza," or "Faith and Hope." (LAT, Oct. 28)

Two unidentified men shot and killed Catarino Torres Pereda, general secretary of the Citizen Defense Committee (Codeci), at the indigenous rights group's office in Tuxtepec in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca on the afternoon of Oct. 22. The murderers escaped in a car waiting for them nearby. In the evening members of Codeci and other organizations protested the assassination with a demonstration at the Alameda de León plaza in the city of Oaxaca, the state capital.

At least 13 young people were shot dead and 15 wounded in an attack on a house party in Ciudad Juárez—the second such massacre in less than a week in the violence-torn Mexican city bordering Texas. Gunmen in three cars drove up to the home around 11 PM on Oct. 22 and began shooting, the Chihuahua state prosecutor's office said. The dead were 14 to 20 years old, and a 9-year-old was gravely wounded. On Oct. 17, gunmen similarly stormed two homes in Ciudad Juárez, killing nine young people. (AP, Oct. 23)

The severed head of Rolando Flores, a Mexican investigator looking into the disappearance of Texas reporter David Hartley, was delivered to authorities in northern Mexico's Tamaulipas state, according to Sheriff Sigifredo González of Zapata County, who is leading the investigation on the US side. Hartley was attacked by gunmen in speedboats while using Jet Skis on Sept. 30 with his wife on Falcon Lake, which stretches into Mexico. His body has still not been found. Flores, commander of state investigators in Ciudad Miguel Aleman, was part of a group assigned to the Hartley case. A spokesman for the Tamaulipas prosecutor's office confirmed that Flores had been killed, but said the death was unrelated to the Hartley investigation. (AP, Oct. 14; MSNBC, Oct. 13)

In the village of Ascensión, in northern Mexico's Chihuahua state, some 300 residents beat to death two 17-year-old boys who reportedly had kidnapped a 17-year-old girl on Sept. 21. Federal police were sent to the area to respond to the incident and to calm the angry mob. The incident began when the girl was abducted from a local restaurant. The girl's father alerted the authorities. In a car chase with police and army troops, the vehicle in which the kidnappers and the girl were in rolled over. The girl was released ans the two abductors arrested. But two others apparently involved in the kidnapping were seized and beaten by residents when their vehicle fell into a canal. The mob also blocked paramedics and emergency personnel from the scene. Two other suspects in the kidnapping remain at large. (El Paso Times, Sept. 22)

On Sept. 21, Ciudad Juárez municipal police destroyed a house that had been occupied for 40 years by Refugio Tagle Valdez and his family at Lomas de Poleo, a community on the outskirts of the border city. Tagle, who built the house four decades ago, said that neither he nor his attorney had been informed that the demolition was imminent. The lands at Lomas de Poleo are claimed by local businessman Pedro Zaragoza. Local residents assert that the lands were found to be national property by a 1975 ruling of the Agrarian Reform Secretariat. (La Jornada, Sept. 23)

Priciliano Rodríguez Salinas, mayor of Doctor González, a town outside Monterrey, Nuevo León, was shot to death Sept. 23. A group of armed men intercepted the PRI-affiliated mayor as he was arriving at his home near city hall. A companion who was with him in the vehicle was also killed. (Poder 360, Sept. 24)