Official: Mexico nabs 6 drug snitches in AG office

ALEXANDRA OLSON

Published: 08.14.2008

MEXICO CITY - Six federal agents have been arrested on suspicion of passing information to a group of powerful drug lords, a spokesman for the Attorney General's Office said Wednesday.

The agents worked for the anti-drug-trafficking intelligence unit of the Attorney General's office, the spokesman told reporters on condition of anonymity because his office prohibits him from being named. None were prosecutors, but all had various coordination responsibilities during arrests, interrogations and the transfer of prisoners.

The infiltration of drug gangs into the ranks of police and federal agencies has long been endemic in Mexico. It stands as a major obstacle in President Felipe Calderon's fight to destroy the cartels, using thousands of soldiers and federal police deployed across the country.

The six agents are suspected of leaking information to the Beltran Leyva brothers, who head one of the most feared drug-trafficking organizations in Mexico.

Mexican police, migrant smugglers open fire: 2 die

ASSOCIATED PRESS

5:01 p.m. August 4, 2008

VERACRUZ, Mexico – Two people are dead after a shootout between Mexican police and smugglers driving a truck carrying illegal immigrants.

Police caught up with the truck near the town of Agua Dulce in southeast Mexico. The town's police chief, Jose Atenedoro, says the smugglers then opened fire on officers, starting a shootout and car chase. The chase ended when the truck crashed into a ditch.

Gunfire killed two people, while about 30 of the 42 immigrants hidden in the truck were injured in the crash Monday. Both of the men killed were migrants.

Now if this were in the US, the families of the killed smugglers would be filing law suits against the officers, who would have been arrested. -mm

Mexican cop killed by colleague working as hit man

Thu Jul 31, 2008 2:28 AM BST

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (Reuters) - A Mexican police officer working as a hit man for drug gangs killed one of his police colleagues on Wednesday in the violent border city of Ciudad Juarez, police said.

Francisco Ventura was shot and killed by gunmen in two sport utility vehicles as he drove home early on Wednesday in Ciudad Juarez across from El Paso, Texas. Federal police arrested three men following the shootout, including the police officer accused of leading the gunmen.

City police declined to give more details, but Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes said the discovery of a police officer working as a hit man showed the urgent need for a "total cleansing" of the city's police force.

"We know there are officers who are in the pay of organized crime and that is why we need to flush out bad police," Reyes told reporters.

Despite the deployment of 3,000 troops and federal police in Ciudad Juarez this year, more than 550 people have been killed in drug violence in the city, Mexico's most lethal front in a drug war that has killed 1,900 people nationwide in 2008.

Daylight gun battles have erupted on city streets and buildings set on fire as Mexico's most-wanted man, Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, fights drug baron Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, boss of the Juarez cartel, for control of Ciudad Juarez and its lucrative smuggling corridor into the United States.

11-year-old El Paso boy slain in Mexico

By Daniel Borunda / El Paso Times

Article Launched: 07/31/2008 12:00:00 AM MDT

EL PASO -- An 11-year-old El Paso boy was killed Monday during a highway robbery on the Durango-Mazatlan road in Mexico.

The boy, Rico Armando Bañuelas, was on a family trip to Mazatlan when robbers tried to stop the Volkswagen Jetta he was riding in near a section of mountain road known as "El Espinazo del Diablo," (the devil's spine), El Siglo De Durango newspaper reported on its Web site.

The robbers opened fire, killing Rico, when the Jetta sped past a roadblock the bandits had set up and used to rob bus passengers and another vehicle. The suspects were captured.

Bañuelas was a student at St. Pius X School and is the nephew of Monsignor Arturo Bañuelas, pastor of St. Pius X Catholic Community.

"It's a real tragedy," church Deacon Jim Szostek said. "Rico was kind of unique. Like the Spanish word 'travieso' (mischievious). He was a whole lot of fun. ... We are family here, that's why it's so difficult."

The Jetta's driver, Rey del Valle, and Rico's mother, Norma Patricia Chairez, were wounded.

Police 'torture' videos cause uproar in Mexico

TRACI CARL

Published: 07.01.2008

MEXICO CITY - Videos showing city police practicing torture techniques on a fellow officer, dragging another through vomit and jumping on a suspect created an uproar Tuesday in Mexico, which has struggled to eliminate torture by lawmen.

Two of the videos — broadcast by national television networks and displayed on newspaper Internet sites — showed what Leon city Police Chief Carlos Tornero described as training for an elite unit that must face "real life, high-stress situations."

But many Mexicans saw a sinister side, especially at a moment when other police and soldiers across the country are struggling with scandals over alleged abuses.

"They are teaching police ... to torture!" read the headline in the Mexico City newspaper Reforma.

The Guanajuato state human rights commission said it had opened an investigation.

One of the videos, first obtained by the newspaper El Heraldo de Leon, shows police appearing to squirt water up a man's nose - a technique once notorious among Mexican police. Then they dunk his head in a hole said to be full of excrement and rats. The man gasps for air and moans repeatedly.

4 decapitated bodies found on Mexican city street

The Associated Press

Published: 07.03.2008

MEXICO CITY - Four decapitated bodies were found on a street in the Mexican city of Culiacan, blocks away from their severed heads.

Three of the beheaded bodies were found inside black, plastic bags on Wednesday, while the fourth was wrapped in a blanket, according to the prosecutor's office in Sinaloa state, where Culiacan is located. Authorities said they believe the killings were drug gang-related.

Police found the heads inside separate white bags on a nearby street in Culiacan, a center for the powerful Sinaloa drug cartel.

"You're next Chapo. You ungrateful traitor," read a note found on a piece of cardboard nearby.

Joaquin "Chapo" Guzman is head of the Sinaloa cartel. He escaped from a Mexican prison in 2001 and is among the most wanted drug lords in the United States and Mexico.

Four gunmen were killed hours later, after opening fire on federal police patrolling Culiacan. Under attack, police shot back at the home where the gunmen were holed up, killing the four assailants and capturing two others. Police said they seized 16 assault rifles and ammunition in the house after the confrontation.

Returning migrants remaking Mexico through politics

Migrants are coming home from U.S. with dollars, ideas and little patience for the old way of doing things.

By Jeremy Schwartz
MEXICO CITY BUREAU
Sunday, June 22, 2008

LUVIANOS, Mexico — Seir Benítez left this remote town high in the Sierra Madre mountains 12 years ago in hopes of escaping a harsh life in its dusty fields.

He traded dramatic mountain views and grinding poverty for an apartment in Austin and a job in a tool factory. He spent eight years in the United States, venturing as far as Florida and Nebraska, before returning home with enough money to build a house.

Benítez, 28, also came back filled with new ideas of how Luvianos, in the state of Mexico, should be governed. He is considering a run for mayor, joining a wave of politically active migrants who many in Mexico believe have the potential to reshape the countryside.

"I want to create jobs so that other young people don't have to migrate," said Benítez, who works for Luvianos' city government and peppers his conversation with references to Austin's flea markets and Riverside Drive restaurants.

Mexican “Family Values” Won’t Improve America?

Memo From Mexico, By Allan Wall

Old stereotypes die hard. How many times have we heard that Mexican and Hispanic immigration is good for the U.S., because Mexican and other Hispanic immigrants (including illegal aliens) have "family values"?

Our own president is particularly fond of this argument. For example, at a National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast in 2006, Bush proclaimed (to applause) that

"The daily example of our Hispanic communities reminds us that strong faith and strong families can build a better future for all. We are more—we're a more hopeful society because men and women of Hispanic descent have put their faith and values into action."

Some go so far as to say that Hispanics are just better people than Americans and are going to improve the moral fiber of our country.

In fact, as long ago as 1993, Francis "End of History" Fukuyama said that

“But it would also seem a priori likely that third-world immigrants should have stronger family values than white, middle-class, suburban Americans, while their work ethic and willingness to defer to traditional sources of authority should be greater as well.” [Immigrants and Family Values, Commentary, May 1993]

In 2003, former Mexican political operative Fredo Arias-King described interviewing pro-immigration social conservative U.S. congressmen on behalf of the PAN Party and Vicente Fox. Here's his impression of why they supported immigration:

"Congressmen in this group mentioned that the immigrants ‘bring family values’ that compensate for the perceived deterioration in the morality of Americans. Their preoccupation seemed to be a return to an America they feel is slipping away."

That argument is downright un-patriotic, I don't care who makes it.

If you believe that the moral fiber of American society has declined, and I do, then the solution is to work to improve it, not to replace Americans with foreigners.

Any social conservative who wants to replace Americans with foreigners is an unpatriotic social conservative.

But, as it turns out, the argument is bogus even on its own terms. Mass immigration is definitely not improving the moral fiber of American society.

6 killed in shootout with cartel

The Associated Press

Published: 05.28.2008

MEXICO CITY - Five federal police and a suspected hit man were killed in a shootout Tuesday as authorities surrounded a house in Culiacan, home to the Sinaloa drug cartel.

Four other federal police were hospitalized. Police took several suspected cartel members into custody, according to a federal police official who wasn't authorized to give his name.

At least three banners threatening 21 local police officers by name were hung in Chihuahua over the weekend.

Out of Mexico—A British Journalist Survives The Lawless Mountains Of Mexico

By Bellamy London

The British have always been an adventuring people. Since they are a literary people also, it is not surprising that they should excel at the art of travel writing. In modern times, George Borrow, Richard Francis Burton, Charles Doughty, T.E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene spring to mind as exemplars of that art. And now there is Richard Grant, a British citizen residing in Tucson, Arizona, who came to the United States as the British correspondent for an American magazine and stayed on to write books about the kind of nomadic misfits in which America has always abounded.

Fifteen years ago, Mr. Grant developed a fascination also for misfits south of the border who, by the success they have achieved in the northwestern states of the People’s Republic of Mexico, are misfits no longer but rather the dominant majority.

These are the denizens of the Sierra Madre Occidental who grow the fabulously lucrative drug crops raised in the sierra, smuggle them within Mexico and into El Norte, defend these growers and smugglers against their rival narcotraficantes, and battle that portion of the police and the federal army that remains unbought by them. Together, they have created the drug culture that has become the mainstream culture of Chihuahua, Sonora, Sinaloa, and Durango states.

Rashly—almost insanely—Richard Grant decided that he must and would travel the length of the Sierra de la Madre to experience the reality of this surreal region for himself.[Watch a clip in Youtube.]

Mexican town's police force resigns

The Associated Press

Published: 05.23.2008

ACAPULCO, Mexico - A southern Mexican town's 15-member police force has quit for fear of being assassinated in retaliation for a shootout with gunmen, a security official said Thursday.

Zirandaro was the second town in less than two weeks to be left without its police force as Mexico's drug cartels wage increasingly bold attacks against security forces. On Monday, the military took over a town near Texas after all 20 of its police officers were either killed, run out of town or quit.

Eight members of Zirandaro's police never returned to work after a May 13 shootout with gunmen that left a 32-year-old man dead, said Juan Heriberto Salinas Altes, the public safety secretary of the southern state of Guerrero.

The other seven officers - including the police chief - quit days later.

"The Zirandaro police quit the service because they feared the criminals would return to seek revenge," Salinas Altes said.

Officials: Mexico killings way up

The Associated Press

Published: 05.24.2008

MEXICO CITY - Homicides related to organized crime jumped 47 percent in 2008, Mexico's attorney general said Friday in a rare confirmation of how bad violence has become.

Police later made two gruesome discoveries in northern Mexico. Five bodies - two of them decapitated - were found wrapped in blankets in a city on the border with Texas, along with two heads in sacks. In another state, police found four severed heads in ice chests along a highway.

Relatives of man who dies after shootout reportedly threaten doctor

By Angelica Martinez

UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

5:24 p.m. May 21, 2008

TIJUANA – Relatives of a man wounded in a fierce April shootout threatened a doctor Wednesday after they learned the man had died in a hospital, officials said.

Luis Humberto Moreno Rodriguez died at 10:40 p.m. Tuesday when several of his organs stopped functioning because of an infection, a spokesman for Tijuana's General Hospital said.

Later Wednesday, doctors and others gathered at a busy traffic circle in the city to call attention to the threats.

Moreno was among nine injured April 26 in a gunbattle between rival criminal gangs that left 13 people dead.

Two policemen shot, bodies dumped on Mexico highway

By Cyntia Barrera Diaz

REUTERS

12:24 p.m. May 21, 2008

MEXICO CITY – Two Mexican policemen were shot and their bodies dumped in a car on a busy Mexico City-bound highway, police said Wednesday, the latest in a spurt of brutal drug gang murders near the capital.

The bodies, which showed torture marks, were left with death threats directed at anyone backing powerful drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” (Shorty) Guzman, Mexico's most wanted man.

They were found late Tuesday in the trunk of a car abandoned on the Cuernavaca-Mexico City highway, a route used by commuters between the capital and the small colonial city where many have weekend homes.

“This is what will happen to those hanging out with El Chapo and El Mayo Zambada,” one of the messages left with the bodies read, according to the daily Reforma. The newspaper said the victims' hands and feet were bound.

Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada is a key aide of Guzman's Sinaloa cartel that controls smuggling turf in northwestern Mexico.

Thousands protest drug violence in Mexican border city after police director killed

ASSOCIATED PRESS

4:26 p.m. May 11, 2008

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico – Thousands of white-clad people marched silently Sunday to protest a surge of drug-related violence in a Mexican city across from Texas where the No. 2 police officer was shot dead.

The crowd of several thousand students, church leaders, businessmen and politicians walked for about four miles (six kilometers) across Ciudad Juarez to a park near a border crossing, breaking the silence in a burst of speeches, dancing and singing.

More than 200 people have been killed so far this year in Ciudad Juarez. The city of 1.3 million across the border from El Paso, Texas, is home base for the powerful Juarez drug cartel.

The assassination of police director Juan Antonio Roman Garcia on Saturday came despite the deployment of more than 2,500 soldiers and federal police to the city and surrounding Chihuahua state in March.

Hispanic growth tied to fertility rates

By Suzanne Gamboa

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON — Hispanic women born in the United States are more likely to have children out of wedlock than women who are immigrant Hispanics or non-Hispanics, according to an analysis released Thursday by Pew Hispanic Center.

Hispanic women, both U.S.-born and immigrants, have higher fertility rates than non-Hispanics — 84 births per 1,000 Hispanic women, compared with 63 per 1,000 non-Hispanic women.

The differences can also be found between Hispanic women born in this country — 73 births per 1,000 women — and immigrant Hispanic women — 96 births per 1,000 women.

Hispanics are now 15.1 percent of the U.S. population, according to census data released last week. Their numbers are growing more because of births than immigration.

One in four children under age 5 in the United States is Hispanic, the Census Bureau said.

Among the more surprising findings in the Pew study was the difference in out-of-wedlock births when comparing Hispanic women born in this country and Hispanic women who are immigrants.

Half of all births to Hispanic women born in this country were to single mothers, according to Pew research. About 35 percent of immigrant Hispanic women who gave birth were unmarried, nearly equal to the rate for non-Hispanic women. The study provided no reasons for the differences in out-of-wedlock rates.

In other words, 1 out of every 8 children under the age of five was born to an unwed Hispanic. -mm

Children work illegally in Mexico's farm fields

CHRIS HAWLEY

Published: 05.09.2008

MEXICO CITY - Adriana Salgado, 10, spends her days in a field in northwestern Mexico, picking spinach, cabbage and other vegetables that fill American salad bowls.

Salgado attends school for one hour a day, and she doesn't know how to read. Her 15-year-old sister, who works with her, can't read either. Salgado had an 8-year-old brother, too, until he was crushed by a tractor while working in a tomato field last year in a case that garnered nationwide attention.

About 300,000 youngsters such as Salgado work illegally in Mexico's fields, the United Nations Children's Fund says. In some cases, child farm labor is used to produce goods that are exported to the United States. The practice persists despite harsh criticism from international groups, rules imposed by U.S. distributors and increasingly strident warnings from the Mexican government.

Mexico ex-official: Health care should have no boundaries

SHERYL KORNMAN

Published: 05.08.2008

Health care is a human right, not a "commodity or a privilege," Dr. Julio Frenk, a former health secretary of Mexico, said Wednesday at the University of Arizona Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health.

"It is unethical to limit health care on the basis of migratory activity," he said.

People without health insurance - among them Mexican immigrants in Arizona - should not be denied medical care, he said.

Border regions such as Arizona's with Mexico "are areas of cultural conflict," just as they are along geographic borders everywhere, as globalization pushes people into closer contact.

"The forces of globalization can be turned into a public good," Frenk said.

He also spoke about the spread of communicable disease across borders throughout the centuries and of the value of preventing disease with the access to health care.

Study: Mexico immigrants slower to assimilate in U.S.

USA TODAY

Published: 05.13.2008

The nation's immigrants are adopting American ways just as quickly as they were in 1990 despite a doubling in their numbers, research out Tuesday showed.

The findings show, however, that Mexicans, the largest immigrant group, are making slower progress than others.

Calculations by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a libertarian think tank, are among the most detailed to measure how well immigrants fit in with native-born Americans on three fronts: economic, cultural and civic. The index used census data from 1890 to 2006 to measure current and historical similarities between natives and the foreign-born.

"Mexicans and other Latin Americans are assimilating slowly."

Baja police commander, bodyguards held on suspicion of extortion

UNION-TRIBUNE

7:37 p.m. April 22, 2008

TIJUANA – A top state police commander and his five bodyguards were being held on suspicion of extortion after a woman they detained outside their regular working hours accused them of demanding that her family pay $5,000 for her release.

Jose Angel Meza Valdez, commander of the Baja California Preventive Police in Tijuana, and five fellow agents were taken into custody in eastern Tijuana by members of the Mexican military Monday night.

A military communique said the six agents were arrested when soldiers responded to a complaint that a woman had been abducted by members of the State Preventive Police.

Meza, interviewed by reporters at a Tijuana military base, proclaimed his innocence Tuesday morning. He said the agents had detained a woman with packets of suspected cocaine, and they were taking her to an office of the Baja California Attorney General to confirm the content.

“It's not right that we risk our lives and then we don't receive even the least bit of support,” he said.

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Six Mexican agents held on suspicion of extortion