Mexico charges three with 'terrorism' after cartel violence

AFP: A Mexican judge has charged three people with terrorism over their roles in a day of violence launched by a drug cartel in Jalisco state last week, authorities said.

Three other people were released because they were "arbitrarily" detained, the council said.T he suspects were accused of organized crime "with the goal of committing ... terrorism" by burning vehicles and using them to block roads around Mexico's second biggest city, Guadalajara, the Federal Judicial Council said. Read more. 

Mexico drug violence intensifies as elections approach

LA Times: A month before national elections, Mexico is witnessing a level of violence in which drug traffickers have directly confronted the army, raising questions about whether the government's progress in combating crime might be a hollow victory.

In an apparent first for the nation, a drug cartel in the prosperous state of Jalisco used rocket-propelled grenades to shoot down a military helicopter, killing at least six soldiers. Read more. 

Forgotten victims of Mexico drug war's stray bullets

AFP: The mechanic was working under a car when he turned his head and saw a dozen pick-up trucks creeping down the street in Mexico's western state of Jalisco.

"The devil is on the loose," Jorge Gerardo Herrera said ominously to his colleagues as he turned back to the car he was fixing in the town of Ocotlan. Read more. 

Soldiers killed in the war on drugs

News Week Español (Translated by Americas Program):  Since former President Felipe Calderon launched the war against drug cartels, 209 soldiers have died in armed clashes, and 1,760--from privates to corporals, second and first sergeants, lieutenants and colonels-- have been wounded in shootings. In some cases, they have been discharged from the the Mexican Army due to the severity of injuries.

From January 11, 2007-just 41 days after Calderon of the PAN  took control of the country from Vicente Fox--to October 2, 2014, there have been 3,520 clashes with members of criminal organizations involved in drug trafficking , extortion, kidnapping and exploitation for sexual and labor purposes.

In just the first 10 months of this year, according to information from the Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena), 234 battles left   15 military elements dead. The latest was a death in San Martín Hidalgo, Jalisco, on September 24, when a convoy of armed men opened fire and in the exchange of fire also killed four of the attackers. Another occurred in Mier, Tamaulipas, where there is dispute over control of the plaza (trafficking route) between the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas, Sept. 17. Two incidents took place in Tepehuanes, Durango, when an ambush and subsequent confrontation occurred between military and probable drug traffickers in the Guanaceví neighborhood.

"Drug Violence in Mexico: Data and Analysis Through 2013" Now Available

Justice in Mexico Project 
April 15, 2014

The Justice in Mexico Project (JMP) based at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of San Diego is pleased to announce the publication of “Drug Violence in Mexico: Data and Analysis Through 2013.” Thanks to the generous funding of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, this is the project’s fifth annual report providing a detailed analysis of the problem of crime and violence in Mexico, which has been a major preoccupation for both policymakers and ordinary people in Mexico, as well as a shared concern for the U.S. government and its citizens. Justice in Mexico’s annual reports have compiled the latest available data and analysis to evaluate problems of crime and violence related to drug trafficking and organized crime in Mexico. These reports are especially intended to inform a U.S. and English language audience, since international news media coverage of Mexico tends to be fleeting and gravitates toward sporadic, sensationalistic incidents rather than the analysis of broader issues and longer-term trends.  Read more. 

Advocates for Press Freedoms Take Action for Slain US Reporter Brad Will

For Immediate Release

(Houston, May 1) Advocates for press freedom and human rights are pressuring President Obama to remember murdered US journalist, Brad Will, who was slain in broad daylight by Mexican government-backed paramilitaries over six years ago. They issued an 'Action Alert' today, for people who shared their concern with the impunity with which the murder of a US journalist has been greeted in Mexico, to contact senior Senator Patrick Leahy from Vermont. The alert urged Senator Leahy to ask the President, on his trip to Mexico this week, to "raise to Mexican President Nieto publicly the lack of sound prosecution of the shooters who murdered Brad Will and . . .(to) insist that accountability for his murder, and the murder of other journalists, mostly Mexican, who had, before they were killed, been publishing stories of corruption and brutality by top Mexican government officials, be achieved promptly".

Senator Leahy was instrumental in inserting a requirement for an investigation into Brad Will's murder in earlier appropriations for Plan Mexico, a militarization package that has poured guns and other lethal aid into the Mexican military and police, forces that are widely seen as unaccountable, corrupt and which systematically abuse human rights. The resulting violence has contributed to the estimated 100,000 murders of civilians many of whom were innocent bystanders uninvolved in the drug trade.

As the Chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations, Senator Leahy has the power to influence President Obama's discussions with President Nieto of Mexico, a major recipient of US military aid.

Brad Will was murdered in broad daylight over six years ago. There were many witnesses. Mexican government officials, at least four of them, were identified as the shooters. Yet only two were questioned by the Mexican prosecutor's office and both let go without charge.

Mexican activists release blimp to urge US to stop arms from pouring into Mexico

The Washington Post 
By Associated Press
April 29, 2013

MEXICO CITY — Mexican anti-violence activists have released a blimp as part of a campaign to urge President Barack Obama to stop arms trafficking into Mexico.

Peace activist Javier Sicilia and the Mexico chapter of Amnesty International say the blimp is part of a “virtual” campaign to put attention on the problem of guns ahead of Obama’s visit to Mexico on Thursday.

Sicilia and other activists are urging Mexicans to tweet with the hashtag “Goodbye to weapons.” The slogan is printed on the blimp, which traveled from outside the Museum of Memory and Tolerance to the U.S. Embassy.

Sicilia said Monday that activists hope to collect 1 million signatures urging Obama and Mexican President Pena Nieto to discuss halting the flow of weapons into Mexico.

President Obama's Mexico visit comes with backdrop of uncertainty

Los Angeles Times
By Shashank Bengali and Tracy Wilkinson
April 28, 2013

WASHINGTON — President Obama travels to Mexico this week amid signs that the relationship between the United States and its southern neighbor's new government faces a new period of uncertainty after years of unprecedented closeness forged by the deadly war against Mexican drug cartels.

The government of Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto is said to be wary of the level of U.S. involvement in security affairs that characterized the administration of his predecessor, Felipe Calderon. As a result, the Mexican government is expected to narrow U.S. involvement in its attorney general's office and Interior Ministry, the agencies that oversee police and intelligence, current and former U.S. and Mexican officials say.

Instead, Peña Nieto and officials from his Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, want to concentrate U.S. participation in less sensitive but potentially profitable areas such as the economy.  Read more. 

Mexico: Government Says Murders Tied to Organized Crime Have Fallen

The NY Times
By Randal C. Archibold
April 10, 2013

Mexico City - The new government here, which has complained that Mexico’s image has been sullied by persistent reports of violent crime, presented data on Wednesday that it said showed that murders related to organized crime had dropped sharply.

Though analysts raised concerns about how the information was compiled, the government said that since Dec. 1, when President Enrique Peña Nieto took office, there had been 4,249 homicides that bore the markings of organized crime. That was down 685, or about 14 percent, from the 4,934 over the same period a year earlier.

The government said it also had seized more marijuana and cocaine in the more recent period and reported a drop in kidnappings, but it did not release data on extortion, another crime often associated with criminal gangs.

Analysts questioned the criminal data, particularly homicides classified as related to organized crime. Though vetted by the federal government, much of that data originally comes from the 31 states and federal district, with inconsistent or misreporting of cases and subjective criteria on what constitutes a cartel-related crime.

Body-snatchers in Mexico?

I've been hearing a lot of off-the-record reports from journalist friends about a editorial board pressures to stop reporting on deaths. The general line is that government wants to show some progress (although Peña Nieto has now asked for a year to decrease the violence) and so the easiest way to reduce the figures is to stop counting.

This article could be part of that new tendency. The disappearance of bodies, suppression of the press, local officials encouraged to under-count-all; this bodes ill for those of us trying to track the drug war.

Miami Herald 
By Christopher Sherman
Associated Press

Reynosa, Mexico -- Heavy gunfire echoed along the main thoroughfare and across several neighborhoods in a firefight that lasted for hours, leaving perforated and burned vehicles scattered across the border city.

Social media exploded with reports of dozens dead. Witnesses saw at least 12.

But the hours of intense gun battles in Reynosa on March 10 gave way to an official body count the next day of a head-scratching two.

The men who handle the city's dead insist the real figure is upward of 35, likely even more than 50. Ask where those bodies are and they avert their eyes and shift in their seats.

Cartel members, they say, are retrieving and burying their own casualties.

"Physically, there are no bodies," said Ramon Martinez, director of Funerales San Jose in Reynosa, who put the toll at between 40 and 50. "It's very delicate."

If Reynosa is an example, even the government can't count how many are dying from drug violence. The Felipe Calderon government stopped counting in September 2011. Since President Enrique Pena Nieto took office Dec. 1, the government has issued monthly statistics, saying that January killings were down slightly from December, and that February saw the lowest number of killings in 40 months - without providing numbers for the other 39 months.

Mexico counts 26,121 missing during Calderon era

The LA Times 
By Cecilia Sanchez, Daniel Hernandez and Richard Fausset
February 26, 2013

Mexico City - The number of people who went missing in Mexico during the six years of former President Felipe Calderon’s administration stands at 26,121, government officials said Tuesday, a figure that would rank among the worst episodes of "disappearances" in Latin American history.

The official statistic, which includes people reported missing between December 2006 and November 2012, was released at a news conference by Lia Limon, the subsecretary for legal affairs and human rights under new President Enrique Peña Nieto, who took office Dec. 1.

Her announcement came days after Human Rights Watch issued a scathing report that blamed Mexican security forces for many disappearances during the government’s crackdown on domestic drug cartels, which began in earnest in December 2006. The report also blamed the Calderon government for failing to adequately investigate the disappearances.  Read more. 

Mexico considers marijuana legalization after ballot wins in U.S.

Mexico, which has fought a long war against drug cartels that supply U.S. users, is rethinking its marijuana policy after Colorado and Washington approved legalization.

Los Angeles Times: By Richard Fausset, January 4, 2013.
MEXICO CITY

Forgive the Mexicans for trying to get this straight:

So now the United States, which has spent decades battling Mexican marijuana, is on a legalization bender?

The same United States that long viewed cannabis as a menace, funding crop-poisoning programs, tearing up auto bodies at the border, and deploying sniffer dogs, fiber-optic scopes and backscatter X-ray machines to detect the lowly weed?

The success of legalization initiatives in Colorado and Washington in November has sparked a new conversation in a nation that is one of the world's top marijuana growers: Should Mexico, which has suffered mightily in its war against the deadly drug cartels, follow the Western states' lead?

Mexico's new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, opposes legalization, but he also told CNN recently that the news from Washington and Colorado "could bring us to rethinking the strategy." Read more. 

Mexico Drug-Related Deaths Rose to 12,394 in 2012, Milenio Says

Bloomberg: Killings related to drug violence in Mexico climbed 0.9 percent in 2012 from the year before, newspaper Milenio reported today on its website.

Last year’s death toll of 12,394 pushed the number of killings in the past six years to more than 54,000, according to the Mexico City-based daily. The deadliest year was 2010 with 12,658 deaths.

There were 982 deaths in December, President Enrique Pena Nieto’s first month in office, 33 more than in the previous month, Milenio said. Two states bordering the U.S. had the highest death tolls in December: 122 in Chihuahua and 105 in Coahuila.

To contact the reporter on this story: Brendan Case in Mexico City at bcase4@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jose Enrique Arrioja at jarrioja@bloomberg.net.

Read Milenio article. 

Mexico murders at over 101,000 in past 6 years, report says

Fox News Latino 

A total of 101,199 murders were registered in Mexico during President Felipe Calderon's six-year administration, with about 50 percent of the killings drug-related, a report released Tuesday by the Mexico Evalua think tank says.

Homicides rose 37 percent from December 2006, when Calderon took office, to October 2012.
A total of 74,586 homicides were registered during the 2000-2006 administration of President Vicente Fox, the public policy research center said.

Mexico Evalua used National Institute of Statistics and Geography, or INEGI, and National Public Safety System Executive Secretariat, or SESNSP, data in preparing the report.

The increase in homicides, according to the report, is related to organized crime, with the proportion of murders linked to "criminal rivalries" at just 30 percent before 2008.

Today, that figure is around 50 percent, with some states, especially in northern Mexico, seeing 80 percent of murders linked to drug trafficking. Read more. 

Day of the Dead takes on new meaning for families of Mexico's disappeared

CSM: Mexicans traditionally visit the graves of dead relatives on the Day of the Dead, but it's a difficult time for the families of the thousands of Mexicans who have disappeared amid Mexico's drug violence.

By Associated Press / November 2, 2012

Maria Elena Salazar refuses to set out plates of her missing son's favorite foods or orange flowers as offerings for the deceased on Mexico's Day of the Dead, even though she hasn't seen him in three-and-a-half years.

The 50-year-old former teacher is convinced that Hugo Gonzalez Salazar, a university graduate in marketing who worked for a telephone company, is still alive and being forced to work for a drug cartel because of his skills.

"The government, the authorities, they know it, that the gangs took them away to use as forced labor," said Salazar of her then 24-year-old son, who disappeared in the northern city of Torreon in July 2009.

The Day of the Dead – when Mexicans traditionally visit the graves of dead relatives and leave offerings of flowers, food and candy skulls – is a difficult time for the families of the thousands of Mexicans who have disappeared amid a wave of drug-fueled violence. Read more. 

How the Militarized War on Drugs in Latin America Benefits Transnational Corporations and Undermines Democracy

Sunday, 05 August 2012 00:00
By Mark Karlin, Truthout | News Analysis

Is the So-Called War on Drugs in Mexico and Latin America Being Used to Advance US Military and Economic Interests?

In an article that explored myths about the war on illegal narcotics, "Drug War Capitalism," Canadian journalist Dawn Paley dispels the notion that nearly a trillion dollars spent on eradicating illegal drug trafficking (since Richard Nixon's administration) has shown any serious success.

Paley noted, "In the 11 years since Plan Colombia was launched [for example], the US government has spent over $3.6 billion on narcotics and law enforcement initiatives. Yet the US government reports that 'Colombia remains one of the world's largest producers and exporters of cocaine, as well as a source country for heroin and marijuana.'" Indeed, Paley cited a 2008 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that found the "estimated flow of cocaine towards the United States from South America rising from 2000-2006."

As Truthout pointed out in "The US War on Drug Cartels in Mexico Is a Deadly Failure," the attempt to curtail trafficking in narcotics "in many of the southern nations of the Western Hemisphere is basically a bloody game of whack-a-mole.... There is no measurable indicator that the supply of illicit drugs into the United States is decreasing as a result. So, there is no end game here."

Juan Gabriel Tokatlian, professor of international relations at the Universidad de Di Tella, Argentina, substantiated this failure in an article, "Beating the Drug-War Addiction": "Indeed, USSOUTHCOM [United States Southern Command, headquartered in Miami, which oversees the US military in Latin America] has controlled 75% of the more than $12 billion that the US government has allocated to anti-drug activities in Latin America and the Caribbean since 2000. But, despite this expensive military campaign, all evidence shows that the 'war on drugs' has been a fiasco." Read more. 

Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity marches to end failed war on drugs

New York Daily News

Their task is titanic, but so is their determination to end the war on drugs.

The Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity, a group originally composed of 110 Mexican fathers and mothers, wives and husbands, sons and daughters — 49 of whom lost loved ones to the violence of the drug war — arrives in our city tomorrow.

One of those mothers is Margarita López, whose daughter, Yahaira Guadalupe Baena López, 19, was taken from her home in Oaxaca by an armed group on April 13, 2011. She joined the caravan at its inception.

“My daughter was innocent but the authorities never took an interest in her disappearance, so I joined the caravan,” said López. “I don’t want any more mothers to suffer the way I am suffering.”

The group’s journey began August 12 in San Diego and when it ends on Sept. 12, it will have traveled over 5,000 miles and 25 cities including Los Angeles, Santa Fe, El Paso, Houston, Montgomery, New Orleans, Chicago, New York and, finally, Washington, D.C.

“Our goal is to become citizen-diplomats — to reach out to the people of the U.S.,” said Javier Sicilia, a distinguished Mexican poet, and the man who conceived the caravan idea. Read more. 

Transparency in Mexico: Information doesn't come easily

Christian Science Monitor: In Mexico it can be a long, frustrating pursuit for members of civil society or journalists to get even basic information from the government, despite an institution created to make it easier.

By Lauren Villagran. MEXICO CITY - A decade after Mexico created its Federal Institute for Access to Information (IFAI), civil society has more access to information on the federal government’s activities than ever before.

President-elect Enrique Peña Nieto – whose campaign was marred by accusations of vote buying and corruption – has proposed extending transparency requirements to state and local governments. He is pushing, too, for an anti-corruption panel and a citizen-led agency to oversee government spending.

On Thursday night, Mexico’s seven-member Federal Electoral Tribunal ruled unanimously to dismiss a complaint that this summer's election was marred by fraud, clearing the way for Mr. Peña Nieto to assume the presidency on Dec. 1. Read more.

Mexican drug war's innocent victims: 'They tried to kill me with my kids'

The Guardian: Claims that 90% of Mexican drug war victims are criminals is a statistic far removed from Cristina Roman's experience in a country where police and military have fallen into corruption.

Daniel Hernandez. Cristina Roman didn't know where to begin. When asked how the epic violence and criminal impunity in her native Ciudad Juarez invaded her own life, she paused, then asked: "How far should I go back?"

She decided to begin from May 2010. It was then at the height of the bloodletting there in Mexico's deadliest city when, one night at 4am, she, her husband and three sons awoke to a terrible pounding at their front door. "My husband went to see who they were. Then he said: 'Go hide with the kids. They have guns,'" she recalled.

"By the time I had my baby in my arms, the gunmen were already in the house." Read more.

Mexico journalists' killings solved? Critics doubt it.

LA Times: Veracruz state authorities say drug cartel members responsible for killing five news workers have been arrested or slain. An advocacy group doesn't buy it.

By Tracy Wilkinson. MEXICO CITY — With rare speed, authorities in the violence-plagued coastal state of Veracruz say they have solved the killings of five journalists and news media workers, pinning the slayings on two notorious drug cartels.

But press freedom advocates Thursday questioned what they considered a too facile resolution of one of the most alarming strings of journalism attacks in a country where such bloodshed has become all too familiar.

"The government of Veracruz is trying to shelve its worst-ever crisis of violence against the press," the advocacy group Article 19 said in a statement. It criticized Veracruz authorities for blaming all the slayings on a group of detainees who supposedly confessed but have yet to go before a court. Read more. Read more.