NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF FORMER BORDER PATROL OFFICERS
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Foreign News Report
The National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers (NAFBPO) extracts and condenses the material that follows from Mexican and Central and South American on-line media sources on a daily basis. You are free to disseminate this information, but we request that you credit NAFBPO as being the provider.
Saturday, Nov. 22nd
El Diario (Ciudad Juarez ed., Chihuahua) 11/21/08
(The following item was logged in by this paper at 5:46 p.m. . The entire account could easily have been labeled: “A few moments in the life of Ciudad Juarez”) Abstracts follow:
Title : “7 hit by gunfire in different events”
” A few minutes ago two persons were shot aboard a parked car………In another happening, a man was murdered about five in the afternoon on the side of the La Piedad funeral home………… Meanwhile, just minutes ago there was a report of the finding of three executed persons at Villas Coloniales……….. Elsewhere, a man and a woman were volleyed with gunfire on Manuel Talamas Ave……” (And so the evening news continues to be recorded in Ciudad Juarez. But the day began like this, logged in at 7:53 a.m.): “Officials reported the finding of a lifeless man at (such and such) intersection. He has three bullet impacts on his back and two on his head. The man was dumped from a vehicle.”
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El Siglo de Torreon (Torreon, Coahuila) 11/21/08
– A confrontation linked to groups associated with narcotraffic left five people dead and four wounded from gunfire near Pueblo Nuevo, Durango.
– The lifeless bodies of two other men were found around the November 20th Commune, near the city of Durango. Their hands and feet had been tied, but their severed heads were some meters away, wrapped with tape. There have been 22 beheadings in the state of Durago this year to date.
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El Universal (Mexico City) 11/22/08
– “The purchase of information about federal operations against narcotraffic meant distributing up to 720 thousand dollars monthly by the Beltran Leyva cartel among high level personnel of SIEDO ( the Mex. Dep’t. of Justice’s Organized Crime Special Investigative Agency)…but they are not the only group who routinely does so.”
“According to a witness under protection, cartels such as the Tijuana, the Gulf, the Milenio or the Juarez, have a payroll in the Dep’t. of Justice. He stated that any investigation against them was assigned to an agent in the payroll of organized crime.”
– On tour in Santiago, Chile, President Calderon expressed the hope that Operation Clean-Up (the program aimed at purging corrupt personnel from the Mexican federal government.) will extend to the states, cities and even to the Judiciary Power.
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Frontera (Tijuana, Baja Calif.) 11/22/08
– In Tijuana, a group of armed men burst into a private hospital around midnight. They went to the intensive care unit and assassinated a patient who was there due to gunshot wounds.
– On Friday night, a group of armed and hooded men entered a bar in the Otay area of Tijuana. They lined up their human targets and shot them with assault rifles. The result was three dead and eleven wounded. (An update report in another paper raised the dead total to five; two of the wounded died shortly after at a hospital). This happened at the “Utopia Bar”; a week ago Saturday five men were killed and five others wounded at the “Banana Loca.”
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La Jornada (Mexico City) 11/22/08
– In the town of Canada Morelos, state of Puebla, a “Judicial Police” agent was killed and three coworkers wounded when a group of armed men hurled a fragmentation grenade and also shot at the police facility.
– Twenty-six assassinations linked to organized crime took place yesterday (Fri.) in Chihuahua, Guanajuato, Tabasco, Baja Calif. & Sinaloa; a light plane transporting drugs also crashed in Durango, killing the pilot and wounding the passenger. Twelve of the homicides took place in Chihuahua, half of them in Ciudad Juarez.
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Norte (Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua) 11/22/08
(All this drug related violence and corruption must eventually be made to produce a profit for the perpetrators, though their attempts don’t always succeed. The following is typical of accounts regularly reported along the length of our southern border):
At El Paso, Texas, Customs and Border Protection officers were busy the last seven days because of illegal drug seizures, including a case where the trafficker was a sixty year old man. There were 35 seizures of marihuana weighing a total of 3,249 pounds, besides varying amounts of cocaine, heroin, meth and even hallucinogenic mushrooms. (Also seen in other Mexican papers were reports of sizeable marihuana load seizures by the US Border Patrol in Arizona: 27,111 lbs. of marihuana have been seized in the week between Nov.14-20, mainly on the highway between Nogales and Tucson, AZ)
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Sunday, Nov. 23rd
Frontera (Tijuana, Baja Calif.) 11/23/08
– At 7 a.m., Sunday morning, inside a station wagon left on Benito Juarez Blvd. in Rosarito (just south of Tijuana): a black plastic bag inside of which was a dead man. His arms, his legs and his head had all been cut off.
– At 8 a.m., Sunday morning, in a ball field behind the Bugambillas Hotel in Tijuana: three plastic bags, each with a dead body inside. One hundred meters away (110 yds.), just behind Carl’s Jr., three other bags, each with the head from those three bodies.
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La Cronica de Hoy (Mexico City) 11/23/08
The Beltran-Leyva brothers, one of the five groups which integrate the drug “Cartel of the Pacific”, paid out some 30 million dollars between Feb. 2007 and July 2008. The (ex) head of “SIEDO” received 450 thousand per month, two other high ranking officers 300 thousand each and four other agents each received 150 thousand. Mexico’s A.G. confirmed these amounts in a press conference on Nov. 21st.
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Vanguardia (Saltillo, Coahuila) 11/23/08 (from a report in “El Universal”, Mexico City)
– full transl. –
“Corruption entrenched in justice”
“SIEDO” and its preceding agencies have been infiltrated by organized crime groups through money, power or threats. Here’s a look back.
Each and every one of the efforts set in motion by the “PGR” (Mex. Dep’t. of Justice) to combat drug traffic has failed spectacularly due to the corruption of its agents and commanding officials at all levels.
In March 1993 the then Attorney General Jorge Capizo MacGregor creates the National Institute for Combatting Drugs (“INCD”). The INCD was created to replace the Special Sub-Justice Department to Combat Drug Traffic.
Four years later, the new Attorney General, Jorge Madrazo Cuellar dissolved “INCD” upon the discovery that its head, General Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, was furnishing protection to the Juarez cartel.
The Federal Law Against Organized Crime became effective in 1996. In 1997 Jorge Madrazo set in motion “FEADS”, the Specialized Prosecutorial Agency about Crimes against Health.
In January of 2003, the new Attorney general, General Rafael Macedo de la Concha, describes “FEADS” as a “garbage dump” plagued with corruption, with duplicity in functions and one in which at least 200 of its agents had to be investigated due to their links with organized crime.
In June of 2003, A.G. Macedo announces the reorganization of the “PGR” and points out that one of the substantial changes is the creation of “SIEDO.” (The Mexican Department of Justice Organized Crime Special Investigation Agency, now shaken to its core by the revelations of high level briberies.)
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Excelsior (Mexico City) 11/23/08
Forty-five journalists have been assassinated in Mexico since the year 2000. The state of Tamaulipas (N.E. corner of the country) heads the list with nine, then Chihuahua with six and four each in Veracruz, Oaxaca and Michoacán. The other 18 were not specified. The newspaper “El Debate”, in Culiacan, Sinaloa, was the target of a hand grenade attack recently.
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El Universal (Mexico City) 11/23/08
(The following is a commentary by Sara Sefchovich, an academician and researcher at the “Autonomous University of Mexico”, Mexico City, on the occasion of the publication of her book
“Country of Lies. The distance between discourse and the reality in Mexican culture.”) – Full translation. –
“In it I maintain that Mexico enters the XXI Century hand in hand with falsehood and with simulation, which have been loyal companions throughout our history, but which today have become the only way to govern.
They have told us that ours is a solid economy, that we live in a democracy and that we have advanced in the struggle to achieve the objectives deemed correct by the international community, such as social justice and respect for human rights, the environment and diversity (religious, sexual, ethnic, ideological, cultural.) But none if that is true. Our democracy is purely electoral and has not passed the test of accords and negotiations, there is no participation by the citizenry, and the much mentioned transparency and accountability are non-existent. The economy, which according to the government’s discourse ought to place us among the planet’s largest, did not pass the test of competitiveness and NAFTA did not turn into the engine for development that they told us it was going to be, half of the population lives in poverty today, the same as half, one, and two centuries ago, racism against the indians is brutal, the rendering of justice has not learned that it must honor its own name, schooled education is a disaster and violence reigns even in the sacrosanct family. We no longer even know if we are a country and if we have an identity, something about which there was no doubt up to a short time ago.
Every day laws are proclaimed which do not become effective and which are not obeyed, (and) agencies, offices and commissions which do not carry out their work are created, be it for lack of resources or political will, for inefficiency or for corruption, and accords that later become a dead letter are signed about all the good causes. Our persons in power lie to hide these truths and to make us believe that they do their work and that they do it well.
The lie is the essence of our public life: unkept promises, in completed projects, manipulated numbers, false reports. They have invented a marvelous country which speaks of achievements and advancements, respect and care, support and solidarity, gesture and action, but we citizens do not see clearly where we are going and insecurity, fear, distrust and lack of interest dominate our daily life.”
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Norte (Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua) 11/23/08
Cinthia Sagredo was found lifeless outside the Posada San Nicolas Hotel i Juarez last Thursday. Her funeral cortege yesterday was interrupted when one of the vehicles in it became the target of a car-to-car gunfire assault. Its two occupants, a man and a woman, were killed.
(A news update Sunday from a different source stated that the two were El Paso residents who worked at the Thomason Hospital/Texas Tech Univ. Health Sciences Center. The vehicle in which they were riding had New Mexico plates; it ended up with twenty bullet holes. The woman killed was the sister of the woman for whom the funeral was being held)
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Monday, Nov. 24th
El Universo (Guayaquil, Ecuador)
There has been a 500% increase in the arrival of Chinese into Ecuador since Ecuador dropped its entry visa requirement for citizens of many countries. Now not all Chinese who enter Ecuador do so for the purpose of tourism. Their main intent is to reach the United States. Colombia had a similar “no visa” policy but suspended it after four months in 2007 due to Chinese mafia abuses.
In 2007 the daily arrival rate of Chinese into Ecuador was 17, while now it is 78.
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El Debate (Culiacan, Sinaloa) 11/23/08
The bodies of four men executed by gunfire were found near Concordia, Sinaloa, on Saturday. One hundred ninety-seven spent cartridges from AR15 and AK47 rifles were located at the place. “They destroyed the craniums of the four men with gunshots.”
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El Universal (Mexico City) 11/24/08
Forty-four persons were executed in Mexico in the last 24 hours; six were city police officers.
(The article the goes on to describe details)
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– end of report –
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