Matamoros Becomes Ground Zero As Drug War Shifts On Mexican Border

NPR: Matamoros, which sits across the bridge from Brownsville, Texas, used to be a laid-back border town famed for margaritas and manufacturing.

But for at least the past five years, it's grown more and more violent: first, when the Zetas broke away from the Gulf Cartel, and more recently as a new feud has broken out between two factions within the Gulf. Read more.

Suspected smuggler fatally shot in gunfight near Texas-Mexico border

Reuters: A suspected smuggler in a group allegedly bringing drugs over the border from Mexico was fatally shot on Wednesday in an exchange of gunfire with a U.S. Border Patrol agent near the Texas town of Chapeno, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said.

"As agents secured the narcotics load, one agent searching the area for smugglers came under fire," the office said, adding the agent returned fire and struck the suspected smuggler. Read more. 

Armed Border Militia Apprehends Bat-Counting Scientists

Note: Heavily armed militia in Arizona and Texas are threatening people. Here near Sonoita, Arizona scientific researchers were held at gunpoint. Local officials say they don't appreciate the presence of the armed groups. Then why don't they do something? Is this really legal or desirable behavior? You know that if these groups were Latino citizens they'd be behind bars. While it is legal to bear arms, it is not legal to hunt human beings and threaten them at gunpoint. - Laura Carlsen 

Huffington Post: An armed border militia group confronted three researchers in Arizona last month, mistaking them for undocumented immigrants or drug traffickers in an incident that drew criticism from local law enforcement officials.

Border militias, or "untrained, utterly anonymous gunmen with no accountability to anyone" who prowl the border on their own time and look for illegal activity, have become an increasing concern for law enforcement officials, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The recent incident with the researchers is the second time in the last few weeks the militias have caused an issue for U.S. border authorities.  Read more. 

Tijuana gets help from federal cops

San Diego Reader: Members of a newly created and specially trained federal police force began arriving in Tijuana last week to help local officers combat a growing wave of violent crime.

According to press reports, about 100 members of the Gendarmería Nacional arrived in Tijuana on Thursday, September 4, the second contingent to be dispatched to the city; on September 1, 300 members of the elite federal police force arrived.  Read more. 

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…

Mexico, U.S. Examine Use of Force on Border

Hispanic Business: Mexican and U.S. officials met to discuss the use of force by U.S. federal agents on the border in an effort to reduce violent incidents during the apprehension of migrants, the Foreign Relations Secretariat said.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner R. Gil Kerlikowske, U.S. Border Patrol officials and U.S. Embassy personnel participated in the meeting, the secretariat said.  Read more. 

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. 

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.

Mexico's San Fernando Massacres: A Declassified History

National Security Archive 
Electronic Briefing Book No. 445
Edited by Michael Evans and Jesse Franzblau
November 6, 2013

Four months before the feared Zetas drug cartel kidnapped and murdered 72 migrants in northeastern Mexico, the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City said that narcotrafficking organizations in that region operated with "near total impunity in the face of compromised local security forces." As the date of the massacre drew nearer, another U.S. agency, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), reported new evidence linking the Zetas to soldiers from the Kaibiles, an elite Guatemalan special forces known for spectacular acts of cruelty and brutality during that country's civil war.

These records are among a set of U.S. documents declassified under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and published today by the National Security Archive, providing a glimpse of what U.S. diplomats and intelligence analysts were saying about the extreme violence that has engulfed Mexico's northern border state of Tamaulipas in recent years and the apparent complicity of Mexican officials. Just this week, a new round of violence in Tamaulipas took the lives of 13 more people, as drug-related violence flared yet again.

Some of these documents are featured in this week's edition of Proceso magazine, in an article by award-winning investigative journalist Marcela Turati. Her report highlights the unchecked power of the Zetas in the region and the inability or unwillingness of federal, state and local officials in Mexico to provide security for citizens and migrants traveling in the region.  Read more.

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.  

Mexico arrests 12 in prostitution ring in connection with women’s border slayings

Washington Post

Associated Press, Published: June 12

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — Mexican prosecutors have arrested 12 people in connection with the slayings 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 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 Tuesday.  Read more. 

Attack on train in Mexico injures at least 10 Honduran migrants; activists put toll higher

Washington Post
May 2, 2013

VERACRUZ, Mexico — An assault on mainly Honduran migrants traveling on a freight train through Mexico left at least 10 of them injured, authorities said Thursday. Activists and paramedics said dozens of the U.S.-bound migrants were hurt, many badly.

The migrants had hopped on the train in southern Mexico and were traveling north through the Gulf Coast state of Veracruz when armed men demanding money attacked them with machetes and guns. Some jumped from the train to escape and others were thrown off, said migrant rights activist Tomas Gonzalez Castillo.

Gonzalez Castillo said he received reports of dozens of migrants seriously injured in the attack. Red Cross worker Daniel Fernandez said at least 200 migrants were treated for contusions and cuts at a migrant shelter in the town of Acayucan.

Veracruz’s government, however, only confirmed that 10 people were injured in Wednesday’s attack near the town of Cosoleacaque. It said nine of the injured had been treated at local hospitals and released, and that one remained hospitalized.  Read more. 

Border Patrol account of deadly Nogales shooting is disputed

I was in Nogales last November. We had a long, tearful talk with José Antonio's grandmother and aunt and saw the place where the boy was shot. There is a small altar there on the sidewalk where the Border Patrol fired some 13 bullets into his body. To do so, they pretty much had to poke the rifle through chinks in the fence and aim at the boy's body. Now a witness says he wasn't even throwing rocks toward the border (not as if that would justify the crime even if he were). The FBI says it's investigation is "on-going". I wrote about José Antonio's death in "A Killing Spree on the Border" and about a similar case earlier in "Lethal Force on the Border."

It's important to maintain attention on the issue so that the question of the use of excessive force by BP agents is finally dealt with and those responsible for these murders are brought to justice.

Arizona Daily Star

by Perla Trevizo

March 30, 2013

NOGALES, Sonora - A Nogales teenager was simply walking down the street and not throwing rocks at U.S. Border Patrol agents the night he was shot and killed, a new witness says, contradicting the agency's initial statement.

Isidro Alvarado, 36, said he was walking less than 20 feet behind José Antonio Elena Rodríguez when two other young men suddenly ran past him and into a side street. He then heard gunshots come from different directions and he saw José fall to the ground.

Alvarado ran south in the same direction as the two men to take cover and call the police, he said earlier this week as he retraced his steps near the DeConcini Port of Entry.

On Oct. 10, 2012, Nogales, Ariz., police and the Border Patrol responded to a 911 call about 11:30 p.m. Officers reported seeing two people with marijuana bundles wrapped around their body on International Street, according to police reports.

They were trying to climb back into Mexico, the report said, when a group started to throw rocks at the officers over the border fence.

When they refused to stop, a Border Patrol agent who was near it opened fire into Mexico, hitting one of them.

Another witness interviewed by Mexican law enforcement said he saw four people running with rocks but didn't specify if José was one of them. Alvarado said he didn't see anyone else running, besides the two young men who apparently had just jumped the border fence, nor did he see José throwing rocks. 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. 

More Mexicans seek asylum in U.S. as drug violence rises

A Texas lawyer is among those trying to broaden the definition of asylum, dismaying conservative critics and some Mexican officials.

By Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Los Angeles Times
October 28, 2012

EL PASO — One of his clients, a Mexican waitress and widowed mother of three, says she played dead under a pile of bodies to survive a massacre in Ciudad Juarez led by men she recognized as federal police.

Another client says Chihuahua state police hacked off his feet after he refused to pay them bribes.

They came to El Paso seeking Carlos Spector, 58, a burly, hard-charging immigration attorney who has developed a strange specialty in this Texas border city. His clients, instead of crossing into the United States illegally and hiding out, are seeking asylum.

To the dismay of conservative critics in the U.S. who call asylum seekers "narco refugees" and some officials in Mexico who call them "traitors," Spector has been trying to broaden the definition of asylum, a status granted to those fleeing persecution in their home countries. He calls them "exiles."

Compared with those fleeing other countries, relatively few Mexicans have been granted asylum. Still, the number of applications has risen rapidly and reflects, Spector says, the collapse of order in parts of Mexico. Read more. 

U.S. uses excessive force along Mexican border: U.N.

Reuters: By Stephanie Nebehay, Oct. 18, 2012.

GENEVA (Reuters) - The United States has used excessive force against immigrants along the Mexican border and should cooperate in investigating border killings, including those of many young people, the top United Nations human rights official said on Thursday.

"There have been very many young people, teenagers, who have been killed at the border," Navi Pillay, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, told a news conference.

"The reports reaching me are that there has been excessive use of force by the U.S. border patrols while they are enforcing the immigration laws," she added.

The family of a Mexican teen shot dead when the U.S. Border Patrol opened fire on a group of rock throwers in Mexico last week is planning to bring a lawsuit alleging excessive use of force, Mexican authorities said on Monday.

The Border Patrol said an agent in Nogales, Arizona, opened fire across the border into Mexico on Oct 10. Mexican authorities said 16-year-old Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez was shot dead in the incident. Read more. 

Violent Mexico border state is snapshot of nation

Associated Press, R. Olga Rodriguez. October 18, 2012.

ROGRESO, Mexico (AP) — Every Sunday, some 100 people gather for pick-up baseball games in a dusty open field marked only by a dirt mound and rusted bleachers. It's the event of the week for this small northern Mexico town of 800 people where there is just one gas station and no supermarket, bank or high school.

Despite the crowd, nobody is willing to admit they were there the afternoon of Oct. 7 or saw the shootout just outside the ball field in the heart of Coahuila state. Mexican marines gunned down Heriberto Lazcano, a founder and top leader of the Zetas drug cartel and the biggest kingpin netted so far in President Felipe Calderon's six-year assault on organized crime.

Days later, no one would even admit to playing in the game. "We don't like sports," said one teenager waiting for his school bus last week when an Associated Press reporter asked him and his friends if they had played that Sunday. The players in the weekly games are largely in their teens.

Some townspeople do say they heard the explosions from grenades that Lazcano reportedly tossed as he ran for his life, but insist that they were home at the time and that they thought it was fireworks.

The reluctance to speak isn't surprising. Read more. 

Time to End Impunity in Mexico

Huffington Post, The Blog: October 17, 2012

Valentina Rosendo was just 17 years old when she was raped by members of the Mexican Army in February 2002 near her home in the Mexican state of Guerrero. A month later, Inés Fernández was raped by soldiers in a nearby community in the same state. Although the women reported the rapes, civilian and military authorities never carried out a full and transparent investigation of the crimes. Ten years later, Valentina and Inés are still waiting for justice.

In December 2009, Shohn Huckabee and Carlos Quijos were arrested by members of the Mexican army in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua state, near the border Mexico shares with the United States. According to Shohn Huckabee, soldiers reportedly planted drugs in their vehicle and took them to a military barracks where they were beaten, given electric shocks and subjected to mock executions in order to obtain information on their supposed links to drug gangs. But the Mexican government never held anyone accountable for the alleged mistreatment of Shohn and Carlos.

These separate incidents are illustrative of a human rights and public security crisis that continues to plague many regions of Mexico. While this situation predates President Felipe Calderón's administration, it has grown more acute on his watch. The next president, Enrique Peña Nieto, will inherit an unenviable security challenge. He has pledged to address it, but he should do so in a way consistent with rule of law and while respecting the basic human dignity of every person in Mexico.  Read more.