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.

The US has temporarily closed its consular office in the Mexican border city of Reynosa, Tamaulipas, after a wave of armed violence between narco gangs in the area. The office, located across from McAllen, Tex., will remain closed until further notice. The "Warden Message" was issued by the consulate in Matamoros "to advise US citizens of recent gun battles in Reynosa, Mexico, and cities surrounding Reynosa in the last week."

The man accused of killing New York independent journalist Brad Will was released from prison in Oaxaca, Mexico, on Feb. 18 after a federal appeals tribunal declared that there was no evidence against him. Juan Manuel Martínez Moreno, an activist with the Popular Assembly of the People's of Oaxaca (APPO) from an impoverished neighborhood of Oaxaca City, was freed after 16 months in the state's harsh Santa María Ixcotel Central Penitentiary. "It was easier to implicate somebody like me than the real killers," he told reporters.

Hooded gunmen stormed the pueblo of San Vicente Camalote in southern Mexico's Oaxaca state and killed 13 people Feb. 24. Among the dead were nine state police agents who were attacked at a checkpoint. The gunmen next burst into the ranch of Alfonso Maciel, killing him and his three sons, one of whom was a minor, state authorities said. The pueblo, in Acatlán de Pérez Figueroa municipality in a mountainous region near the Veracruz border, has been occupied by army troops and elite Federal Preventative Police. (AP, El Universal, Feb. 24)

Critics of Mexican President Felipe Calderón and his so-called Drug War charge that the government is favoring the Sinaloa Cartel. "There are no important detentions of Sinaloa cartel members," Diego Osorno, an investigative journalist and the author of a book on the Sinaloa Cartel (El Cártel de Sinaloa: Una historia del uso político del narco, Grijalbo, México 2009), told AlJazeera. "But the government is hunting down [Sinaloa's] adversary groups [and] new players in the world of drug trafficking."

On Feb. 14 a group of Mexican unions announced their intention to hold a general strike in 25 of the country's 32 states on March 16 if the government attempts to remove striking workers from the giant Cananea copper mine in Sonora state. Some 1,400 workers in Section 65 of the National Union of Mine and Metal Workers and the Like of the Mexican Republic (SNTMMSRM) have maintained a strike at the facility—which is owned by the powerful Grupo México—since July 30, 2007.