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.
Sat., Nov. 29
El Universo (Guayaquil, Ecuador) 11/28/08 (Main editorial; full transl.)
“Millionaire traffic”
If the numbers reported by the immigration authorities are correct, it means that the illegal traffic of Chinese citizens who pass through Ecuador with the United States as their destination will reach 750 million dollars this year thanks to the Government (of Ecuador) decision not to require visas for them to enter the country.
Perhaps there’s an exaggeration. Let us say that the correct number is half, or even less, even a third; it’s still 250 million dollars annually. Who are the ones who profit?
The Chinese government has asked ours to reconsider its decision, since in reality there is no massive Chinese tourism to Ecuador, as much as the (tourism) Secretary keeps alleging otherwise. How could there be if there aren’t even scheduled flights to nearby points between both countries? In reality, it’s a mafia business.
We hope that if the Ecuadoran warnings are not heeded, at least this time the voice of Beijing will be heard. (An article dated Nov. 24th in this same paper stated that the daily rate of Chinese entrants into Ecuador is now 78)
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El Comercio (Lima, Peru) 11/28/08
The number of poppy fields in Peru is growing because the kilo of heroin is valued at ten times that of cocaine. Peru is the world’s second largest source of cocaine but now poppy acreage is beginning to grow and concentrate in the north-central areas of the country. The U.N. reports that worldwide there has been a 17% increase in the areas used for growing poppies.
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El Informador (Guadalajara, Jalisco) 11/28/08
President Felipe Calderon admitted on Friday that police corruption is the largest obstacle in the combat against organized crime and insecurity in Mexico, where more than 4,500 have been executed by organized crime and where there have been a thousand kidnappings so far this year.
At the closing of a National Security Council meeting that evaluated the commitments undertaken 100 days ago by the government, Congress and the Judiciary against crime, Calderon said “To stop crime we must first get it out of our own house.”
Mexico is shaken by the detention of an ex-anti-drug czar and police accused of furnishing information to narco traffickers, for which they presumably received between 150 thousand and 450 thousand dollars a month.
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El Siglo de Torreon (Torreon, Coahuila) 11/28/08
Another nine persons were murdered in Chihuahua “in the last hours”, most of them in the border area. The monthly tally has risen to 170 there and to 1,427 for the year. (But see below in “La Jornada” for 11/29/08. These numbers are already obsolete.)
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El Sur (Acapulco, Guerrero) 11/28/08
Around 9:21 p.m. Thursday, Ricardo Figueroa, Commander of the Guerrero State Police Investigation Agency, answered the doorbell to his house in Chilpancingo, Guerrero. The men at the door shot him dead before he could un-holster the pistol at his side. A 70 year old neighbor who happened to witness the event was forcibly abducted. The killers fled in three “dark vehicles.”
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Zocalo (Saltillo, Coahuila) 11/29/08
On Friday, immigration officials found and detained eighteen Chinese working at the Golden Dragon factory in Monclova, Coahuila; all the Chinese had tourist visas, which do not allow them to work in Mexico.
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El Universal (Mexico City) 11/29/08
President Calderon labeled the rate of kidnappings in Mexico as “alarming, unacceptable and outrageous.” In the last 100 days there have been 237 kidnappings, and 114 police officers have been killed – 20 federal, 53 state and 41 city – while most of the kidnappings took place in the state of Mexico, the Distrito Federal and in Michoacán. Robberies are the most common criminal events, with a rate of 521 per 100 thousand population.
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El Diario (Ciudad Juarez ed., Chihuahua) 11/29/08
On Friday evening a group of some half dozen armed men entered the “Villa Del Mar Mariscos” restaurant in “an exclusive” area of Juarez. They ordered everyone to the floor and then turned to table # 10, where they opened fire with AK 47 rifles and killed all eight persons there. The killers disappeared in the ensuing panic.
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La Jornada (Mexico City) 11/29/08
The headline reads: “23 of the 44 executions yesterday, in Chihuahua”
Besides the eight in the seafood restaurant, fourteen other persons lost their lives in the Juarez area on Friday, plus one other in Delicias (Chih.); Juarez now has 184 executions during this month and 1,441 so far this year.
Five other persons were murdered in the state of Guerrero (other than the police commander reported by “El Sur”, above). There were two others in Puebla – one of them a police officer – and “narco violence” claimed thirteen other victims , seven in Baja California, two in Zacatecas, two in Sonora and one each in Nuevo Leon & the state of Mexico.
Sunday, Nov. 30
El Universo (Guayaquil, Ecuador) 11/29/08
Another seventy-seven Ecuadorans who had been illegally in the U.S. were deported and arrived in Guayaquil Friday evening on a special flight.
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El Heraldo (Tegucigalpa, Honduras) 11/29/08
The Honduran Vice-Chancellor (Deputy Sec. of State) reported that so far this year 29,000 Hondurans have been returned from the United States. The total for 2007 was 29,272 and the average monthly number of deportees this year is 2,636 persons. Honduras has had more than 400 thousand of its citizens returned as deportees during the last ten years.
Jorge Rivera, of the Hondurans’ Unity in Dallas, Texas, said that “tens of Hondurans” will take part in the march against deportations and round-ups to be held in Washington in January.
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El Imparcial (Hermosillo, Sonora) 11/29/08
The “Minister of the Supreme Court” of Mexico, Sergio Valls, acknowledged that it cannot be denied that there could be some members of the Judicial Branch who might get involved in illicit conduct, including collusion with organized crime.
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Sunday, Dec. 1
Diario 21 (Iguala, Guerrero) 11/30/08
The chief of police in Iguala, Guerrero, and two members of his “elite” group were all executed Saturday evening, all three were shot repeatedly in the head and face after some area residents advised them they had heard some shots fired at a certain house.
(we’ll spare you the bloody close-up photos)
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La Frontera (Tijuana, Baja California) 11/30/08
– In the La Presa area of TJ, in an empty lot: nine dead men. All nine had their heads cut off. Access to the place was restricted while investigators examined the area and the bodies were removed. No other information was available.
– At dawn in Rosarito (18 mi. so. of TJ): a car was left parked in front of a taco shop and had a “narco message” on the front passenger seat. In the trunk: four bags with the dismembered parts of one human body. Three vehicles with the dismembered remains of five persons have been left at this site this month.
– Late Saturday evening in TJ: Three men found in an alley which parallels the Tijuana-Rosarito highway. All three had their hands tied and had been shot in the head more than once.
– At dawn Sunday in the Colonia Libertad area of TJ: another homicide victim. Wrapped in a blanket and tied with adhesive tape and cord.
(And so it goes; the attachment to this report is the front page of this newspaper. It shouts: “19 murdered in ten hours; three are children”)
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La Cronica (Mexicali, Baja Calif.) , La Cronica de Hoy (Mexico City) 11/30/08
For the third time this month in Culiacan, Sinaloa, Mex. federal police seized weapons, ammo and tactical gear from a safe house. The take this time was four firearms, 1,881 rounds of ammo, 39 clips, bandoleers and radios. In a separate action, “AFI” agents seized 180 kilos of explosives (unspecified type) which had been left abandoned on a street on the north side of town.
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El Financiero (Mexico City) 11/30/08
headline: 1.3 million Mexicans emigrated to the U.S. in two years – (extracts follow)
A study produced by the Chamber of Deputies (read: House of Representatives) pointed out that between 2007 and 2008 one million 300 thousand Mexicans have emigrated to the United States, who must confront an atmosphere ever more hostile of racism, harassment and hate crimes.
The report by the Chamber of Deputies Migratory Issues Work Group of the PRI (“PRI”: the political party which controlled Mexico for some seven decades until Vicente Fox was elected president eight years ago) pointed out that this means that in the last two years “on average one Mexican emigrated to the United States each minute and abandoned his family in search of employment.”
During an interview, the report’s author stated that, beyond the numbers, the information reveals the absence of employment opportunities for millions of adults and young men in the country. More than half – 52 percent – of the young men who emigrated in 2007 and 2008 have a “medium, medium superior or professional” education.
The legislative analysis added that one out of every nine Mexicans already lives in the United States, and in less than 20 years one out of five persons of Mexican origin will live in the United States.
The author, who is also Chairman of the Committee on Population, Borders and Migratory Issues, also pointed out that at least 350 thousand adults and 100 thousand minors have been deported (sic) from the United States from January to October.
(The balance of the article concentrated on reporting racial hostility)
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Excelsior (Mexico City) 11/30/08
The first four paragraphs of an op/column by Vianey Esquinca regularly titled “The Immaculate Perception” follow:
Without a doubt, the Mexican people are the race chosen by the gods. How else can it be explained that, despite that fact that every week the citizenry puts to a test its mental balance due to the information and the surprises it receives, it can still articulate words, control the slobber and even keep on walking using only their two lower extremities?
The tests to which Mexicans are subjected would drive to insanity the most efficient secret agent trained to withstand hair raising and terrible tortures, but not in Mexico, here the citizenry had a high efficiency training for 70 years with PRI ( “PRI”: see 2nd. par. of “El Universo” article immediately above) which allowed it to be trained in useful disciplines for survival in today’s Mexico, such as : “tighten your belt”, “the strategic mordida”, “insecurity is democratic”, “the excesses are intolerable if they aren’t my own”, “I neither see them nor hear them”, “corruption is power”, among others.
For instance, when a foreign visitor arrives in Mexico City, he immediately asks “When was the war?”, “Who won?” Is the devastation the result of an air attack or was it by land, with tanks that destroyed the streets? Is the unheard of traffic because the people are fleeing to other states because of the danger of a new offensive by the enemy?”
“Nnaaahhh”, answers the local to whoever asks him, ” It’s jes’ road work”, but if in that same moment that same tourist arrives in any state of the north of the country and sees the beheaded ones, the dead ones, the deserted cities because the people don’t go out any more, then he really doesn’t know if he arrived in Bombay or Chihuahua.”
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– end of report –
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