Eight family members decapitated in north Mexico

AFP: Eight people from the same family, including two minors, were kidnapped by masked gunmen and their decapitated bodies were found days later in northern Mexico, authorities said Wednesday.

The bodies were found after a ninth member of the Martinez family escaped Sunday's abduction near Casa Quemada, in the state of Chihuahua, and alerted the authorities, prosecutors said. Read more. 

Mexico arrests many over slaying of 11 women

Aljazeera
June 13, 2013

Mexican prosecutors have arrested 12 people in connection with the killings of 11 young women whose skeletal remains were found near the northern border city of Ciudad Juarez early last year.

The suspects include alleged drug dealers, pimps and small store owners.

They allegedly belonged to a gang that forced young women into prostitution and drug dealing and then killed them when they were "no longer of use," the prosecutors' office for the northern state of Chihuahua, said in a statement late on Tuesday.

The 10 men and two women face charges of human trafficking and homicide.

Six were already in local jails for other offenses, and six other were detained early on Tuesday.

Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, was the scene of a series of killings of more than 100 women beginning in 1993. Read more.

Juarez Pronouncement

Original Americas Program Translation 

Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, December 1st 2012

To the citizens of Juarez,
To the social organizations of Juarez,
To the social organizations of Mexico,
To the free citizens,

On the eve of the end of his term - one of the darkest in the history of the country and particularly fatal for our city – the social organizations signatories testify the social, political, and moral debt with which Felipe Calderon ends his term.

Over the past six years, as organizations, we supported various community processes and found the trail of terror, death and impunity that this regime planted in every corner of our city. The dimensions of the devastation, product of the "war on drugs", are only comparable with the pain of loosing our loved ones.

In the context of barbarism, the numbers do not quite capture the magnitude of the horror in which Felipe Calderon plunged the country with the pretext of eradicating the drug cartels, whose operations and structures - by the way - remains untouched. The "collateral damage", as he euphemistically called the country's thousands dead, the missing, orphaned, and displaced have names. For each of them we will seek justice.

From working daily with people on the streets, in neighborhoods, in schools, in churches, in universities, in community spaces we have witnessed how each of those lives taken away - a corollary of militarization and the establishment of a unprecedented police state - represent an irretrievable part of our present and future. The damage done has shut down a part of our dreams and has broken our future.

OAS Human Rights Commission Demands Protection for Activists

Frontera NorteSur NM State Published: November 12, 2012

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) has requested that the Mexican government protect seven Chihuahua rural activists who are spearheading  movements against water over-exploitation and mining. The request was issued in favor of leaders of El Barzon, an organization of small farmers founded in the 1990s, and followed the murder of El Barzon activist Ismael Solorio Urrutia and his wife Manuela Martha Solis Contreras in the Chihuahua countryside on October 22.

An El Barzon leader in the north-central region of Chihuahua,  Solorio was physically assaulted along with a son last October 13 by men allegedly connected to a Mexican division of the Canadian-owned MAG Silver Corporation, which operates a controversial mine on land belonging to the Benito Juarez Ejido in the municipality of Buenaventura.

Shortly after the attack on Solorio and his son, El Barzon leaders met with Chihuahua Government Secretary Raymundo Romero and demanded action in halting violence and threats against their organization’s members.

Only days later, however,  Solorio and his wife were found shot to death in a pick-up after reportedly driving from their home for a medical appointment in the state capital of Chihuahua City. Denouncing the murders as a “state crime,” enraged El Barzon leaders displayed the bodies of Solorio and Solis in the state capital building before burying the couple in a funeral attended by hundreds. Read more. 

End police abuse in Juarez

El Diario de Juarez November 11, 2012
Translated by Borderland Beat 

[Translator's note: There have been numerous news reports of police abuse in Juarez this past year, to the point that Police Chief Leyzaola recently pulled some surprise inspections in several police districts and ordered the release of dozens of detainees who had been arrested because of their physical appearance or because they did not have official identification on them when stopped by a cop.  Although the number of homicides has declined measurably in Juarez, extortion, robbery and kidnapping appear to have increased. A big problem is that the police agencies have not earned the public's trust. --un vato] .

Trust in police agencies, an essential element if one wants to talk about consolidating advances in the area of public safety, will never be possible so long as its agents -- especially municipal police in their current phase-- abuse the citizen they were supposed to protect and become the criminals they are supposed to fight.

Any statistical gain from a decrease in criminal matters will be of little use if in the collective imagination an intervention by police generates fear instead of security.

It's no longer a matter of isolated cases. The complaints, the stories that have developed with police officers as antagonists of law-abiding citizens are a constant that does not allow any minimizing or dissimulation. Read more. 

Mexico moves away from secret military tribunals

The Washington Post, By William Booth
Published: November 12

OJINAGA, Mexico — This rough little border town in the middle of nowhere has seen its share of lawless men, the cocaine cowboys whose wild rides end out in the desert with a shovel of dirt tossed into their shallow graves.

Then the General came to town, and the place went to hell.

Brig. Gen. Manuel de Jesus Moreno Avina, commander of the Third Infantry Company, arrived in the spring of 2008 in Ojinaga, across the Rio Grande from tiny Presidio in Texas’s Big Bend country.

The General, as he is known by all here, quickly began what his own officers described in court testimony as a “reign of terror.”

Instead of confronting organized crime, the Mexican soldiers here quickly became outlaws themselves. Then people began to disappear, according to the charges filed against them.

Now, four years after Moreno’s 18-month tenure in Ojinaga, the landmark case against Moreno and his men may finally change the way Mexico prosecutes soldiers tied to the alleged abuses during the country’s bloody drug war. Read more. 

Chihuahua campaign begins to find 118 missing Juárez women

By Lorena Figueroa \ El Paso Times
November 04, 2012

JUAREZ -- Chihuahua authorities last week launched a statewide campaign to locate 118 women from Juárez who have disappeared since 1995.

The campaign offers an $8,000 reward to anyone whose information helps find the women, dead or alive, said officials with the Chihuahua Attorney General's Office.

Silvia Nájera, spokeswoman for the state's Special Prosecution Office for Crimes Against Women, said the strategy attempts to get the public involved in solving some of these cases.

Since the early 1990s, hundreds of women, mostly teenage girls -- some as young as 13 -- from poor and middle-class families, have disappeared in Juárez. Many have been found dead.

Nájera said that the special prosecution office lists 118 cases involving women who disappeared from 1995 to the present. The agency was established in 1995.

"This doesn't mean that we won't be taking any leads on older cases. If we receive information, we will investigate," she said.

The campaign began Tuesday with the publication in various print media outlets in Juárez of the photographs and biographies of six women who were reported missing between 1995 and 1998. Read more. 

Murder of Anti-Mining Activists in Mexico a State Crime

Upside Down World

Source: Vancouver Media Co-op

Barzón leader and his partner shot to death in Chihuahua after harassment from people paid by Vancouver based company

CHIHUAHUA, MEXICO-The double murder of the leader of the Barzón, Ismael Solorio Urrutia, and his wife, Manuela Martha Solís Contreras, on Monday, October 22 at 2:30pm, has caused anger and indignation among the people of Chihuahua, Mexico.

The couple was shot while they were driving in Ismael's truck, at kilometre 26.5 of the highway between Ciudad Cuautémoc and Colonia Obregón. Faced with this state crime, activists from Chihuahua gathered in protest at the government buildings in Chihuahua City for an indefinite amount of time, demanding a face to face meeting with governor César Duarte, and demanding justice.

The double murder is the culmination of a multiple-week campaign against the diverse organizations that make up El Barzón. This campaign was denounced to the Secretary of Government one week ago by El Barzón and other community groups in Chihuahua. In the meeting with government representatives, activists told the Secretary of Government about the ongoing attacks on Ismael Solorio and his son, along with other Barzonistas who are opposing the installation of the El Cascabel mine in the ejído of Benito Juárez, in the municipality of Buenaventura, Chihuahua. El Cascabel is a subsidiary of Vancouver based mining company Mag Silver.  Read more. 

Doubts Raised About the Alleged Assassin of Marisela Escobedo

As readers of the Americas MexicoBlog and the Americas Updater know, we have been closely following the case of Marisela Escobedo. Mother of Rubí, who was brutally murdered in 2008, Marisela became a human rights defender, seeking justice for her daughter's murder, tirelessly knocking on government doors and even investigating (and resolving) the case herself. The assassin escaped after confessing. Protesting in front of the Chihuahua state offices, Marisela herself was shot dead.

On October 8, the Chihuahua government announced that it had captured the assassin of Marisela, who confessed to authorities. José Enrique Jiménez, ("El Wicked")  told the press that he shot Escobedo on orders from the Zetas. He said Sergio Barraza, who murdered Rubí, was a member of the Zetas and Escobedo's very public mission to bring him to justice upset the nation's most ruthless organized crime group.

But human rights organizations have their doubts regarding the resolution of the crime. Luz Esthela Castro, Escobedo's attorney noted in Reforma (Oct. 9, 2012) that the government already "solved" the case, announcing in December 2011 it stated that investigations had established the guilt of Hector Flores, a decesased crime figure. But videos of the crime show only one shooter.

Castro also noted that the latest alleged assassin used unusual legal terms in his confession, implying he had been coached. The governor of Chihuahua, Cesar Duarte, reacted angrily to the doubts raised by human rights organizations.

"Whoever doubts, is simply adding elements to try to make sure that things are not resolved," he told Reforma.

The murders of Marisela Escobedo and her daughter Rubí are on a short list of crimes against women presented to the Federal Attorney General's Office (PGR) by an international delegation of women human rights defenders and journalists led by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Jody Williams. These crimes were identified as priorities for the gravity of the crimes and as a signal that the Mexican government was serious about investigating and prosecuting crimes of violence against women.

Everyone wants to see this brutal assassin behind bars--that's why as the Mexico host committee and the delegation we included the case on the list of priorities. But there has been a recent spate of captures and cases being closed in the final days of the Calderón government that are surrounded

For more information on Marisela Escobedo's case and the demand to the PGR, see the report from the delegation organized by Just Associates and the Nobel Women's Initiative that I had the privilege of being part of here.

After talking with colleagues in JASS and others about the recent developments in this important case, the concern is, first, that we could be seeing another case of scapegoats presented to deflect public pressure and criticism.

Second, if this is the assassin, the problem remains that the men who hired him and Sergio Barraza who killed Rubí are still at large. The justice system that repeatedly failed to prosecute and then imprison the guilty is still deeply flawed. And the public safety system that stood by as a woman human rights defender was shot practically on the steps of the state building still cannot guarantee women's safety.

Mexico, before and after Calderon's drug war

Los Angeles Times: Christopher Reynolds. 

We all know that Mexico’s drug war has taken a horrific toll – an estimated 50,000 deaths since President Felipe Calderón launched the effort in late 2006. But how much did Calderón’s declaration change the crime rate? And now that president-elect Enrique Peña Nieto is set to take over in December, how much is likely to change?

Travelers might want to dip into “Drug Violence in Mexico,” a recent report by The Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego. Though good statistics are often hard to come by in Mexico, authors Cory Molzahn, Viridiana Ríos and David A. Shirk have gathered a boatload of numbers, and they raise the idea that drug-related killings accelerated before Calderón declared war.

As the report notes, the Mexican government counted 12,903 drug-war killings (a.k.a. organized-crime homicides) in the first nine months of 2011, which brought the official total to 47,515 since Dec. 1, 2006. Read more. 

Violence in Mexico 2012: A Halfway Report

Although outgoing president Felipe Calderon claimed a week ago that cartel-related violence is down "15 to 20 percent" in the first half of 2012, data from a nonpartisan report suggests that violence is on the rise this year. While Ciudad Juarez and Monterrey have seen violence decrease, other cities in the north have seen a significant uptick.

InSight Crime: Patrick Corcoran. Some of the most dangerous parts of Mexico have grown far safer in the last six months, though the gangland rivalries driving much of the violence have intensified and spread to regions that had been relatively untouched by organized crime.

According to a report from Lantia Consultores, a Mexico City firm founded by analyst Eduardo Guerrero Gutierrez, Mexico witnessed 7,022 murders linked to organized crime (often labeled “executions”) from January through June 2012. (See graph, below, from the report.) According to the report, which is based on the monitoring of dozens of media outlets, this represents an increase of roughly 10 percent from the final six months of 2011, and a high proportion of the 10,500 or so total murders in the country during that period. (Mexico’s National Public Security System, or SNSP, for its initials in Spanish, tallied 8,662 murders nationwide through May, though the June figures have not yet been released.) Read more.

Posted by Ryan Gentzler.  

Lawyer: Accused border agent won't go to Mexico

Fox News: The lawyer for a U.S. Border Patrol agent charged in Mexico in the shooting death of a teenager along the Rio Grande is rebuffing calls from a Mexican government official that he be sent to there for trial.

Gov. Cesar Duarte of the Mexican state of Chihuahua demanded Thursday that Jesus Mesa be extradited to face murder charges in the June 2010 killing of 15-year-old Sergio Adrian Guereca. Mesa was on a bicycle patrol alongside the river that divides Texas and Mexico when the boy — among some youths tossing rocks at the officer — was fatally shot. read more

Gunmen burst into Mexico bar, kill 14

ContraCostaTimes: " Authorities say masked gunmen burst into a bar in the northern city of Chihuahua and opened fire, killing 14 people.

Chihuahua state prosecutors' spokesman Carlos Gonzalez says at least seven assailants in police-like uniforms arrived at the bar called El Colorado in several cars late Friday, barged into the building and opened fire.

Gonzalez says two people were wounded. He says investigators are still trying to determine who was behind the attack.

Chihuahua state is across the border from Texas and has seen a spike in violence since 2008, when the Sinaloa and Juarez drug cartels began fighting for control of lucrative smuggling routes." read more

Forced North by Mexican Drug Wars, but United in Exile

NYTimes: "Juan Fraire Escobedo’s mother was gunned down in 2010 while protesting outside the state government offices in Chihuahua, Mexico, two years after his teenage sister was killed in Ciudad Juárez. Saul Reyes Salazar, a former city secretary in the nearby town of Guadalupe, buried six members of his activist family in three years. His nephew Jorge Luis Reyes, who was orphaned by the time he was 19, takes comfort in knowing where his mother is buried so he can leave flowers at her grave — if he ever steps foot in his native Mexico again."

“The Mexican government paints a picture that everyone dying in Mexico is because they’re related to the cartels,” Mr. Fraire said of the murders stemming from the government’s battle against drug trafficking. “That’s a lie.” read more

State in northern Mexico files terrorism charges against 2 motorcyclists- for noisy exhausts

The Washington Post: "Prosecutors in northern Mexico have brought terrorism charges against two motorcyclists because their loud exhaust pipes backfired and caused a sound like gunshots that sent a crowd into a panicked stampede, officials said Wednesday.

It was the second time in less than a year that people have been charged in Mexico under terrorism statutes for spooking the populace in areas of the country hit by drug violence. Officials say state criminal codes often lack lesser but more appropriate charges to handle situations involving acts that may be irresponsible but are hardly criminal." read more

Farmers in Chihuahua Protest Lack of Government Aid

La Jornada: (Americas Program Original Translation)

Hundreds of farmers from 18 of the 67 municipalities in the state protested in the capital, complaining about a lack of government aid to rural areas, while the governor, César Duarte Jáques, reported in Ciudad Juárez that the state had recorded losses of more than 4 billion pesos due to drought and frost, to the detriment of agricultural and livestock production.


At noon on Wednesday, about 600 laborers and producers affiliated with the Democratic Peasant Front marched through the streets of the city; they left the delegations of the Ministries of Social Development (SEDESO) and Livestock, Rural Development, Fisheries and Food (SAGARPA) toward the seat of state government.

There, they demanded that the federal and state governments deliver aid like corn seed and beans, as well as fertilizers to rural areas in order to prepare for the agricultural cycle which will begin next month in the time zone.

Annoyed, farmers claimed that despite numerous promises made by the governor and President Felipe Calderón, proper relief is not being provided to the producers, or if it is delivered, it is done so selectively with electoral purposes in mind.

Shouting and carrying banners, the inhabitants of towns like Cuauhtémoc, Santa Isabel, Namiquipa, Riva Palacio, and Guerrero, demanded equal treatment and timely delivery of aid by the state and federal agencies.

In the local Congress, members of the PRI claimed SAGARPA has also cut more than 200 million pesos of rural investment programs from its budget and the delay of state aid was due to bureaucracy or political motivations.

On a trip to Ciudad Juárez, Duarte Jaquez gave an account of the damage to the agricultural sector: more than 300,000 cattle dead, over 250,000 hectares were not harvested due to a lack of rain, and production of beans and corn dropped by 125,000 and 500,000 tons respectively.

The PRI governor said that over a million residents of the state depended on agriculture and livestock and are members of lower income families.

He complained that despite the crisis in rural Chihuahua, SAGARPA has not responded with a timely delivery of aid, nor the funds allocated by the regular budget or emergency funds promised by Felipe Calderón.

In this context, Chihuahua farmers resumed the export of cattle, which had been suspended a few days earlier, said Octavio Legarreta, the Secretary of State for Rural Development.

He explained that exports were resumed when it was shown that the cattle were healthy and the problem of mouth sores were due to drought. See Spanish original

(With information from Rubén Villalpando)

Translation by Michael Kane, Americas Program

Drug War and the Arts: Mexican city bans Tigres del Norte for drug songs

The Huffington Post: "The capital of Mexico's Chihuahua state has indefinitely banned the famous norteno group Los Tigres del Norte from playing in the city after the band sang ballads glorifying drug traffickers during a weekend concert.

There have been other attempts in Mexico to ban the ballads known as "narcocorridos," but seldom have they affected a mainstream group as popular as Los Tigres.

The band has been a mainstay of norteno music for decades, with hits like "Contrabando y Traicion" (Contraband and Betrayal) and "Jefe de Jefes" (Boss of Bosses).

"The musical group will not get permits for future shows in the city limits, until such time as authorities decide otherwise," the city said in a statement.
The Chihuahua city government said the band violated a three-month-old city ordinance prohibiting songs that glorify traffickers, and that the concert's organizers would be fined "at least 20,000 pesos" ($1,585)." read more

Mexico's Indigenous: How to Pay a Debt Past Due

CIP Americas: "The famine in the Sierra Tarahumara reveals a problem that goes beyond the current crisis— it demonstrates the structural exploitation of the Rarámuri, O’odam, Warixó and Odame peoples. Facied with an outpouring of solidarity and concern in the local, national and international public, the Governor of Chihuahua, Cesar Duarte, has said recently that both the government and society owe a “historical debt” to the Indian people of Mexico’s largest state.

No one would debate the fact that the state of Chihuahua, and all of Mexico, owes a tremendous debt to the original peoples of this country. For half a millennium, indigenous people have been ransacked and the looting only stops when there is nothing left to take and no one left to drive out. What should be debated today is how those historical debts will be paid." read more

Drug War: Mexico arrests Sinaloa drug cartel's reputed enforcer

latimes.com: "Mexican authorities have arrested a reputed enforcer for the country's most powerful drug cartel, a man also alleged to have amassed weapons from the U.S. government's failed Fast and Furious gun smuggling operation.

Jose Antonio Torres Marrufo, 33, is also wanted on drug trafficking charges by U.S. officials in El Paso. Mexican and U.S. authorities say he served as a top lieutenant to fugitive drug billionaire Joaquin "Chapo" Guzman and the Sinaloa cartel and was in charge of operations in the border state of Chihuahua." read more

Mexico Climate Politics Heats Up

CIP Americas: "History has not been kind to the indigenous Raramuri people of the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua. Pushed to remote mountains of a harsh land by Spanish and mestizo colonists, the Raramuri managed to hang on to their culture while eking out an existence based on rain-fed farming and small herd grazing. In recent decades their lands have been invaded again, this time by cattlemen, loggers, miners, dope growers, tourism developers, and soldiers." read more