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.
El Universal (Mexico City) 10/22/08
A confrontation between hired killers yesterday afternoon in Juarez resulted in three deaths. Nothing particularly newsworthy there. But the significant issue is that now Mexico’s toll of deaths linked to organized crime has reached four thousand so far this year, a historic record.
The last one thousand deaths have taken place in 48 days. The first one thousand deaths of the year took place in 114 days, the next one thousand in 72. But seventy days later, it reached 3 thousand.
Now, the states of Tlaxcala and Baja California Sur (the lower half of the Baja Peninsula) are the only two in the country where these deaths have not occurred.
Chihuahua has contributed 422 of the last 1,000 dead, and leads the nation with a total of 1,616, slightly over 40% of Mexico’s total. After that come Baja California, Sinaloa, the state of Mexico and Durango.
Forty-three police officers , including chiefs, and fifteen military have been assassinated during the period from Sep. 3rd to Oct. 21st. Violence maintains a profile of terror. For example, the recent four human heads delivered to the police facility at Ascencion, Chihuahua, in an ice cooler (Note: the attachment to this report is a photo of one of those heads)
Or the case of Juan Beltran, the cattleman murdered while he slept in a hospital bed recovering from a previous attack; a man dressed up as a doctor went into the hospital and fired a 9 mm. pistol at Beltran. Beltran’s wife was also sleeping alongside of him at the time.
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La Cronica de Hoy (Mexico City) 10/22/08
The Chancellor of the Univ. of Mexico, Jose Narro Robles, said that out of 35 million youths in Mexico – those between 12 and 29 years of age – some 22 percent “lack access to education and employment.” He warned that this is a matter “which ought to worry Mexican society enormously” and added that Mexico needs more and better education and that the educational system must be diversified, amplified and be more flexible. Further, that in the last decade only one out of every four high school age students attend school.
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El Sol de Mexico (Mexico City) 10/21/08 – also in other natn’l. chain “O.E.M.” papers –
Mexico’s Secretary of Foreign Relations Patricia Espinosa called upon the world’s governments not to fear the phenomenon of migration and asked them to take advantage of its benefits as well as to avoid penalizing it at all costs.
At the inauguration of the 2008 National Migration Week, she said that so far this year the Mexican consulates in the United States have handled almost one hundred thousand applications from migrants. She added that Mexico, as a country of transit and destination, must redouble its efforts to improve the treatment and attention given to undocumented migrants, and said that in the majority of Mexican families at least one of its members has emigrated.
Also speaking in a short interview was Cecilia Romero, Commissioner of Mexico’s National Migration Department; she said that at the end of each year some 500 thousand Mexican nationals are reported as returnees from the United States and that “this is something which is not yet seen as a repatriation or massive return of Mexicans.”
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Vanguardia (Saltillo, Coahuila) 10/22/08
Rival groups staged a violent, half-hour confrontation last night in Torreon, Coahuila, and turned a section of town into a bloody battlefield. Grenade explosions and gunfire punctuated the night, but the outcome is unknown at this time.
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Milenio (Mexico City) 10/22/08
State police and military were called to the prison at Reynosa, Tamaulipas, to help prevent the escape of inmates during a confrontation and riot in the jail which left 21 dead and 8 wounded, all of them prisoners. The facility’s chief, the head of security and others have been removed from their posts because presumably they allowed firearms and cutting weapons to enter the facility.
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El Financiero (Mexico City) 10/21/08
Mex. military seized 2,710 kilos of stored marihuana plus another 1,740 kilos of the weed in a drying facility as well as 50 kilos of weed seed. All this at some buildings in the Las Trancas hamlet, by Tamazula, Durango. No arrests were made but five rifles, two grenades, a handgun, rifle clips, some ammo, camouflage uniforms and communications equipment were also seized.
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La Cronica (Mexicali, Baja Calif.) 10/21/08
A newly arrived Mex. federal police officer assigned to Ensenada, Baja Calif., just two weeks ago was killed when a barrage of AK47 gunfire riddled him Monday morning as he left to go to work. Seventy-three shell casings were found at the scene.
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El Imparcial (Hermosillo, Sonora) 10/21/08
Ramses Arce, the “director of public security” (read: chief of police) at Hermosillo, said that he expects that the police officers will not do favors for their fellow workers who drive vehicles with expired license plates or with no plates at all.
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El Comercio (Lima, Peru) 10/21/08
According to a public opinion poll conducted by the University of Lima, 30.5% of the respondents wish to leave the country to search for work and a better future. Among those in the upper socio-economic class this figure drops to around 15%, but it rises to almost 40% among those in the lower classes.
The preferred destinations are Spain, the United States and Italy.
Emigration of South Americans to Spain has resulted in more than a quarter million Ecuadorans now being enrolled in Spain’s Social Security Agency. (This last item from “El Universo”, Guayaquil, Ecuador; same date)
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El Pulso (San Luis Potosi, SLP) 10/21/08
The bodies of three Mex. military personnel were found at dawn Monday morning in Santiago, Nuevo Leon. They had been stabbed, tortured and their throats had been slashed.
Eleven soldiers have now been murdered in (the state of) Nuevo Leon between Oct. 15 & 20.
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El Porvenir (Monterrey, Nuevo Leon) 10/21/08
Around forty Mex. military and federal agents surrounded the police facility at Apodaca (a satellite city of Monterrey) and arrested some 15 police officers including the chief of police. The arrests are believed linked to the kidnapping a week ago of two younger men who were found in a cell of the Apodaca police station. The arrested police were taken to the local prosecuting agency facility to be interrogated.
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