Showing posts with label Ciudad Juarez. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ciudad Juarez. Show all posts

Nov 3, 2015

Behind Ciudad Juarez’s New Labor Movement

FNS News: In a virtually unprecedented development, labor protest is widening in the maquiladora industry of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. While worker dissatisfaction or protest is nothing new in the foreign-owned border factories that produce goods for export to the United States, previous manifestations of discontent in the generally union-free industry have usually been confined to one company at a time.

But recently, movements for better pay and working conditions- and union representation- have emerged at four different companies-Foxconn, Lexmark, ADC/Commscope and Eaton. Hundreds of workers have participated in street protests, hunger strikes and leafleting. Read more.

Sep 16, 2015

Old Cartels Never Really Die…

FSN News: Despite recurrent pronouncements of death by some U.S. and Mexican officials, high-profile organized crime groups continue operating and shedding blood south of the border. Tijuana, where control of both the local and export drug business is the prize of contention, figures once again as a significant flashpoint of violence.

Violent rivalries were on public display this past week as at least five so-called narcomantas, or narco banners, were placed in highly visible spots in the Baja California border city of an estimated 1.6 million people.

Jan 28, 2015

More Femicide Victims Identified from Border Graveyard

Frontera NorteSur: The parents of Esmeralda Castillo Rincon recently heard sad news about their long-disappeared daughter. The 14-year-old had been missing from her Ciudad Juarez home since 2009, and the parents had waged a long campaign demanding her safe return.

On January 16, however, the Chihuahua state prosecutor's office (FGECH) notified Jose Luis Castillo and his wife, Martha Rincon, that Esmeralda's remains were among those of other female murder victims recovered from the Navajo Arroyo in the Juarez Valley bordering the United States in 2012 and 2013.

Oct 10, 2014

Mexico captures Juarez Cartel boss -government source

Reuters: Mexico captured the leader of the once-feared Juarez Cartel in the country's restive north on Thursday, the second drug kingpin to fall in just over a week, a government source said.

Vicente Carrillo, 51, long-time head of the Juarez Cartel, was a fierce rival of Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel and the world's most wanted drug boss until his capture in February. Read more. 

Aug 23, 2014

Reclaiming Life from Streets of Death

FSN News: On a recent afternoon, dozens of pretty white handkerchiefs fluttered in the breeze from the fence of the Benito Juarez Monument in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Embroidered in beautiful blue, green and red letters, the words spelled out very ugly messages:

October 13, 2013 Juarez, Chihuahua
A man known as Lucky was executed in Lomas de Poleo…

Jul 10, 2014

Controlling violence, not drugs, becomes key strategy in Juarez

Newspaper Tree: In Puerto Anapra, a neglected Ciudad Juárez neighborhood just across Sunland Park, things look very different than they did two years ago.

“It is very quiet now; the violence has calmed down,” said Lourdes Contreras, a 48-year-old woman who runs a local soup kitchen/community center for children and mothers who are victims of violence. “That doesn’t mean that the risk has disappeared…It is like when you extinguish a fire; the ashes remain burning.” Read more. 

May 30, 2014

A Bad Day or a New Bloodbath?

Frontera NorteSur: on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news
Center for Latin American and Border Studies
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

Ciudad Juarez News
May 28, 2014

In one of the bloodiest days in the last year or more, nine people were murdered Monday, May 26, in the northern Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez.  In separate incidents, guns, knives, hammers and possibly bare hands were the instruments of homicide.

A prominent lawyer, Salvador Urbina Quiroz, along with Judge Cesar Cordero, was gunned down by assassins as the two men were meeting in Urbina’s office on Monday afternoon.  The state prosecutor’s office (FGE), which is offering a $20,000 reward for the information leading to the arrests of the killers, said two suspects were captured on videotape at the crime scene.

Urbina was well-known in Ciudad Juarez for his leadership in professional associations, as well as his critical, published commentaries on legal affairs and the so-called drug war.

The 52-year-old criminal defense attorney handled controversial cases including the 2011 defenses of teacher Ana Isela Martinez, a young woman popularly known as “Miss Ana” who was imprisoned and falsely accused of trying to transport drugs to the United States, as well as four members of the Jaguars unit of the municipal police accused of killing four men.

Nov 4, 2013

Juarez: The sequel

GlobalPost
Dudley Althaus
November 1, 2013

Young daughter in hand, Isabel Aguilera recounts the mayhem that stalked these streets.

Here they dragged a father from the breakfast table, shooting him dead outside in front of his family. There they came for a shopkeeper, gunning him down behind the counter. Yonder they snuffed two brothers after pulling them from their beds before sunrise.

“They were people from outside,” Aguilera, 38, said of the killings that recently swept like cholera through Riveras del Bravo, a teeming sprawl of Mexico’s working poor. “They wanted to inject power, fear.”

These thousands of matchbox houses once ranked among Earth's deadliest patches through years of criminal war in Ciudad Juarez, an industrial and narcotics corridor bordering America’s safest large city El Paso, Texas.

More than 10,000 people were murdered across the Mexican city of 1.3 million in less than five years. Many were young men gunned down on streets like these.  Read more.  

Jun 20, 2013

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.

Dec 3, 2012

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.

Nov 15, 2012

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. 

Aug 29, 2012

American Community In Mexico Disappointed By American Drug Policies

Huffington Post: Andrew Burmon.


This post is part of the HuffPost Shadow Conventions 2012, a series spotlighting three issues that are not being discussed at the national GOP and Democratic conventions: The Drug War, Poverty in America, and Money in Politics.

Michael Haskett has been busier since Mexican police discovered two vans full of dismembered bodies sitting near Lake Chapala in May. According to Haskett, who runs the Vida Alarms safety and emergency response service, that horrific discovery frightened many of the American expats living nearby, who had long worried about the incursion of narco-violence on their sunny idyll.

"Some of them were just deciding that they'd thought about this for a long time and there was finally catalyst," says Haskett. "Some of them were afraid to see their own shadow."

American retirees and tourists had historically flooded into the lakeside communities of Chapala and Ajijic, which boast affordable housing and excellent medical services, as well as perpetual spring temperatures, but locals say that flow has begun to slow. Though these idyllic communities -- all colorful main streets and aging monasteries -- sit well away from the drug corridor, Jalisco's expats are beginning to feel the effects of U.S. drug and gun policies. Read more. 

Aug 20, 2012

In Mexico’s murder city, the war appears over

Washington Post: By William Booth. CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — When this city was among the most murderous in the world, the morgue ran out of room, the corpses stacked to the ceiling in the wheezing walk-in freezers.

Medical examiners, in plastic boots, performed a dozen autopsies a day as families of victims waited outside in numbers sufficient to require a line.

For all this, Mexico has not made much sense of one of the most sensational killing sprees in recent history, which has left 10,500 dead in the streets of Juarez as two powerful drug and crime mafias went to war. In 2010, the peak, there were at least 3,115 aggravated homicides, with many months posting more than 300 deaths, according to the newspaper El Diario. Read more.

Jul 23, 2012

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.  

Jul 12, 2012

Amnesty reports: Mexico failing to stem femicide

Trust Law: BOGOTA – Killings of women are spreading across Mexico, and the government must do more to protect women from growing violence and discrimination, rights group Amnesty International said on Thursday.

At least 34,000 women were murdered in Mexico between 1985 and 2009. In 2010 alone, 2,418 women were killed, Amnesty said, citing figures from the United Nations and local rights groups in a briefing for a U.N. committe on eliminating discrimination against women.

“The state of women’s rights in Mexico is alarming,” Rupert Knox, Amnesty’s Mexico researcher told TrustLaw. “In recent years there’s been not only an escalation in killings of women but a continuing routine lack of effective investigations and justice.”

Since 2007 Mexico has approved a number of laws and set up institutions to safeguard women from discrimination and violence, but they are not being used effectively, Knox added. Read more.

Jul 11, 2012

Violence Against Women Worse Than Ever in Juarez, Experts Say

Ciudad Juárez was formerly the focus of international attention for its murders of women, and now while the murder rate is being debated, many deaths and violence against women have not been investigated or punished.  

Fox News Latino: Ciudad Juárez, Mexico – The body of the 16-year old girl was found last month lying face down in a park near the U.S.-Mexico border.

Perla Cristal Garcia Ponte was released to her mother after being arrested the day before for public intoxication. Shortly after being returned to her family at 3:30 p.m., June 17, the teen ran away.

Next morning, her body was found in Chamizal Park, a well-traveled oasis in this city of brown and gray shades. Officials said she was strangled to death and found beneath a sign that said access to the area was for municipal use only. Read more

Jul 1, 2012

In Texas, Caution, Optimism Greet Mexican Election

Texas Tribune: With a mix of trepidation and optimism, Texas lawmakers are closely watching Mexico’s election on Sunday. The expected outcome would return the Institutional Revolutionary Party to power.

Polls show that Enrique Peña Nieto, a P.R.I. member and former governor of the state of Mexico, is in line to become the country’s next president. That would swing power back to the center-left party after 12 years of rule by the more moderate National Action Party, whose legacy has been stained by six years of grueling war against drug traffickers.

But Texas lawmakers are concerned that the PRI would revive its tainted past, which included reports of corruption and deal-making with criminal elements. Read more.

Jun 24, 2012

Wave of Violence Swallows More Women in Juárez

NY Times: CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico — First, there were just a few bones and body parts, found in a valley beyond the sprawl of this wild city. At least four women had been killed and dumped, the authorities said. Then, in the same area, investigators made another discovery early this year: a dozen more dead women and girls.

Most disappeared in 2009 and 2010, and when last seen alive many were teenagers, good students with bright smiles of possibility. In death, however, they have become apparitions. Read more.

Jun 21, 2012

López Obrador promises peace in Juárez if elected

El Paso Times: JUAREZ -- Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the left-wing candidate for president of Mexico, on Wednesday promised to return to the border after being elected to begin the restoration of the city.

"I'm going to make a promise. I'm going to return to Juárez and here's where we will begin with the restoration of our country," he said. "In July, when I'm elected, I will return to create a plan to guarantee social peace in Juárez and all the border cities."

López Obrador was in Juárez on Wednesday to close his campaign in the region. After meeting with reporters in the morning, López Obrador led a rally around noon on 16 de Septiembre street between Francisco Villa and Benito Juárez streets. Hundreds of people holding yellow, white, red and orange flags -- the colors of the parties he represents -- were present. Read more.

May 25, 2012

Ciudad Juarez Mayor Says US Drug War Aid Package Failed His City

Fox News LatinoCIUDAD JUÁREZ, MEXICO - Hector Murguía, the outspoken mayor of this border city besieged by a five-year drug war, says the Merida Initiative, the $1.4 billion U.S. aid package intended to support Mexico's war on drugs, has failed to make an impact at the local level.  

"We don't see any benefit of Merida," Murguía said from his third floor office, two blocks from the U.S. border with El Paso, Texas, one of the safest cities in the U.S. 

The Merida Initiative, signed by Congress in 2008, stipulated that no money would be sent directly to Mexico, coming instead in the form of training and equipment.

The package also calls for Mexico to enact judicial reform, strengthen government institutions, respect human rights and the rule of law -- reforms that many argue have yet to occur. 

"The U.S. is the biggest consumer of drugs and their aid package is not enough for us to do what they expect us to do, yet the American media is so critical of Juárez,” said a frustrated Murguía. “These people need to be more responsible and not criticize what they don’t know.” Read more