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, 11/28/09
Prensa Libre (Guatemala City, Guatemala) 11/27/09
Smile, you’re on candid camera….
When the owners of a business establishment arrived at their locale in Antigua, Guatemala, they found that someone had made an opening in the wall and that six National Police officers were already inside; the six stated they were investigating a robbery there. However, they were unaware that a security camera had recorded them as they broke into the place and as they began to steal cellular phones and searched for a safe. The six have now been arrested by federal officials.
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La Cronica de Hoy (Mexico City) , La Voz de la Frontera (Mexicali, Baja Calif.) 11/27/09
A report on insecurity in Mexico
Luis de la Barreda, Director of Mexico’s Institute of Insecurity Studies, presented the results of a national survey that names the states with the highest rates of crime. Leading the list is the state of Chihuahua, followed by Sinaloa, Baja California, the Distrito Federal [the area surrounding Mexico City, within the State of Mexico] and Guerrero. He added that the persons objecting to these results are irritated by reality. 65% of Mexicans feel that their state of residence is insecure. The study also pointed out that 85% of all crimes do not get reported to the police, since victims consider that doing so is a waste of time due to difficult and prolonged procedures and also their lack of trust in officialdom. House burglary and robbery of pedestrians account for 80% of crimes.
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Norte (Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua) 11/27/09
Tragic routine in Juarez
An off-duty Juarez police officer was out on the street yesterday when he was gunned down by unknown killers. He was the seventh law enforcement person murdered in Juarez during the month of November, and the sixtieth of the year. Twelve shell casings were found at this latest event.
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El Universal (Mexico City) 11/27/09
A quick tour of the country
There were twenty-three victims of execution-style homicides in the state of Chihuahua yesterday: eight in the capital city, Chihuahua, where one of the victims was an eight year-old boy, twelve in Ciudad Juarez, two in Delicias and one in Meoqui. And in Navolato, Sinaloa, the remains of two men, stuffed in plastic bags, were dumped in front of a school.
The article continues by mentioning other homicides in the states of Sinaloa, Guerrero and Michoacán. It then ends with this terse item: “Another individual was assassinated in Colima.”
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Sunday, 11/29/09
Prensa Libre (Guatemala City, Guatemala) 11/28/09
Bypassing the criminal justice system
When three individuals killed a bus driver and wounded a passenger, a mob of local residents in Solola, Guatemala, went to the local police station and jail and set it on fire while capturing the three criminals, one of whom was only 16 years of age. The locals then took the three assailants to a local park and set all three on fire.
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Diario de Yucatan (Merida, Yucatan) 11/28/09
Ebrard: the border fence will fall
Marcelo Ebrard, head of the government of the Distrito Federal [the area surrounding and including Mexico City], said that totalitarian measures taken against peoples fail, and the fence being built on the U.S. border with Mexico will also fail peacefully, as all have in history. At the opening of an exposition commemorating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, he pointed out that the largest wall that remains is on the country’s northern border, to keep Mexicans from crossing, and said “That wall is also going to fall peacefully, like all walls in history.”
http://www.yucatan.com.mx/noticia.asp?cx=9$0539010000$4198938&f=20091128
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La Cronica de Hoy (Mexico City) 11/28/09
A sizeable marihuana haul
Around 9 p.m. Friday evening, Mexican military personnel on patrol came upon four men who “acted suspiciously” and who attempted to flee. The four were detained. Inside their two vehicles and in the nearby brush, the soldiers found 6,100 kilos (13,420 lbs.) of marihuana. This took place just outside Reynosa, Tamaulipas, on the highway linking that city with Nuevo Laredo. Both vehicles at the scene had been reported stolen in Texas; one bore TX lic. 9TF-N46.
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La Hora (Guatemala City, Guatemala) 11/28/09
Catholic bishops concerned about migration
Forty-eight Catholic bishops from Central America held their annual reunion in Guatemala City. One of the main themes dealt with was migration. The head of the Episcopal Conference said that the most affected countries are Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, and that the Church is worried due to the lack of well paid, local employment opportunities, and also because of the high degree of violence which is causing 17 to 18 deaths daily in the countries of the region. Some 75,000 Guatemalans have so far been repatriated from the U.S.
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La Patria (Manizales, Colombia), Tiempo (Bogota, Colombia) 11/28/09
Another cocaine shipment foiled
Two nautical miles off from Puerto Estrella, Colombia’s northernmost mainland point on the Caribbean, helicopters spotted a “go fast” launch. Narcotics agents arrested three men on the launch and found 1,500 kilos (3,300 lbs.) of cocaine. The drug was destined to Central America and the U.S. The haul was valued at around 52 million dollars.
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El Debate (Culiacan, Sinaloa) 11/28/09
Black November in Sinaloa
The month of November still has a couple of days to go, but the state of Sinaloa has already had 150 execution-style homicides. The year’s tally has reached 1,003. A local editorial ends thus: “Pretense and talk must end. The citizenry demands results.”
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Monday, 11/30/09
Two separate reports on the trip to Mexico by the mayor of Los Angeles
Correo (Guanajuato, Gto.) 11/29/09
Antonio Villaraigosa, Mayor of Los Angeles, said yesterday, Saturday, that American politicians who currently talk about fences between the United States and Latin America ought to talk about bridges and doors to resolve the problems of both sides of the border.
At the opening of the International Book Fair in Guadalajara, whose special guest is the city of Los Angeles, Villaraigosa pointed out, “In these times when so many North American politicians speak about walls we ought to be talking about bridges, doors, communication, cultural interchange to try to resolve the problems that we have on both sides of the border.” Villaraigosa, first Hispanic to occupy that position in a city where there are millions of Latin Americans, broke protocol, stopped reading his speech and spoke in fractured Spanish. “Pochito is going to talk”, warned the mayor, referring to the nickname Pocho, given to Mexican-Americans because of the way they talk and dress. Villaraigosa added, “We come from Mexico (to the United States) with nothing, that country gave us much and we are truly very grateful to be in the United States, but at the same time we never deny our roots, we are also very proud of being Mexicans,” two values that contradict each other.
http://correo-gto.com.mx/notas.asp?id=139194
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Diario de Yucatan (Merida, Yucatan) 11/29/09
The President of Mexico, Felipe Calderón, and the Mayor of Los Angeles, California, met today in Mexico’s capital and talked about various issues, among them the migratory reform boosted by Barack Obama. At the meeting, Calderón acknowledged “the posture of the mayor of Los Angeles” in favor of an integral migratory reform. They both chatted “about the efforts made by President Obama’s administration to promote the approval of an integral migratory reform in the Congress of the United States,” a plan thought to be dealt with in 2010.
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Prensa Libre (Guatemala City, Guatemala) 11/29/09
Violence permeates Guatemala
Poverty, overpopulation, increase in drug traffic and organized crime, as well as the weakness of the security agencies, have resulted in an increase of violent acts mainly in the metropolitan zone, the southern coast, the east and the country’s border areas, according to reports and analyses by experts consulted about the matter. Statistics evidence the weakness and inefficiency of officialdom to arrest and punish criminals. The number of arrests for homicide barely reached up to 340 by September, while there had been 5,116 homicides in the country as of Oct. 14.
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Excelsior (Mexico City) 11/29/09
Re the war against drugs
More than 60,000 persons have been arrested for crimes regarding drug traffic, but only some 3,000 have ended up in jail. That’s to say, around 5% of them were found guilty of being linked to organized crime or to have committed an illicit act. What happened to the rest of them? The head-on war that has taken place in this country against narco-traffic everyday for the last three years gives no sign of doing away with organized crime via the police or the military. What has been accomplished, in turn, without meaning to have done so, is to bring out in the open, harshly, the limitations and inefficiencies of the institutions of justice and public security. The various security apparatuses, the courts, the justice agencies are “oxidized” to come out ahead in a combat which, paradoxically, can also not be lost without the final result being the agencies themselves. This is the crossroads in which President Felipe Calderón’s “war” against drugs has placed us.
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El Diario (Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua) 11/29/09
Headline: “Killers shoot baby in the head. He is grave”
[The first paragraph of the latest account of daily homicides in Ciudad Juarez:] “An eleven month old baby was wounded on the head by gunfire, and his father was assassinated during one of the executions which took place yesterday afternoon and whose violence claimed the death of ten persons. The first hours of the day produced the death of six persons in different points of the city.”
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La Voz de la Frontera (Mexicali, Baja Calif.) 11/29/09
Marihuana by the carload
Mex. military personnel found three abandoned vehicles on side dirt roads between the “Cucapah” and “El Doctor” checkpoints. They were loaded with 223 packages of marihuana with a total weight of 1,700 kilos. [The area in question is near San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonora, south of Yuma, AZ.]
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Novedades de Quintana Roo (Cancun, Q.R.) 11/29/09
A grisly find
The decapitated body of a woman was found by a park in Cancun just before midnight Saturday. A threatening message mentioning criminal organizations was left with the headless remains.
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