"Violence and crime. Who's next?"
Read the newspaper reports from south of the border
Posted by PHX - NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF FORMER BORDER PATROL on Sunday May 11, 2008 at 10:36 am MDT

Link to story: http://www.nafbpo.org

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.

"Violence and crime. Who's next?"
Milenio (Mexico City) 5/10/08 (The first four paragraphs of an op/column by Carlos Puig with the above title follow): He said it from the start: it will cost lives, but it's necessary, there will be no impunity. It's been 526 days since President Calderon put the army out on the streets to do police work,
This week, violence, now merciless against police chiefs. seems to be at its best moment.
The murder of Edgar Millan, the takeover of Villa de Cos, Zacatecas, first by criminals and then by the army, the murder in Ciudad Juarez of one more city policy captain, a shootout in Sinaloa between hired killers and police, four agents dead, blocks after blocks of gunfire pursuits in Tijuana as in the Old West...... Friday, a commander of the Distrito Federal Judicial Police.
Who's next ? Putting the army out as the President decided has a problem without solution: if this fails, what's next ? Who do we put out after them ? White Flags ? State of siege ? ----------------

El Debate (Culiacan, Sinaloa) 5/10/08 The bodies of seven executed persons were found around Villa Juarez, Navolato, Sinaloa. All showed evidence of having been tortured and all had been repeatedly shot.
One was that of Guadalupe Felix Munguia, a police officer who'd been kidnapped by an armed group eleven days before. He was still in his uniform.
Though the bodies were found in three different locations they appear to be victims of the same killers because of the similarity of the items used to tie and blindfold them and also the nature of their wounds. -----------------

El Diario (Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua) 5/10/08 There were six more homicides in Ciudad Juarez from Thursday night until Friday afternoon, which brings the death tally up to 29 for the first nine days of May in this city and the Juarez Valley. There have been 291 homicides so far in 2008 not counting the 45 human remains found in two "narcocemeteries". During all of 2007 the homicide count reached 316. (Note: subsequent to this, we found that Norte - another Juarez paper - was today reporting two additional murders and their total reached 31 for the first nine days in May and 293 for the year to date)
On a national scale violence related to organized crime reached 102 executions in seven days. (But the lines of these papers' report are now obsolete. The following. from a separate article): At 2 a.m. today (Sat.) yet another man was riddled by gunfire in one more car-to-car assault. The victim was Juan Antonio Roman Garcia, the director of the police in Juarez and one of the persons whose name appeared on that death-threat tag board list left at the Monument to the Police in Juarez on January 26th.
Roman's death reinforces the terror within the ranks of the police agency. In Chihuahua, the state capital, Mexico's Secretary of Defense, Guillermo Galvan Galvan, said that all the resources of the Mexican army were utilized in carrying out the Joint Chihuahua Operation begun six weeks ago and that it has always done so within the law, adding "Mexican army personnel will remain in the state as long as the President so determines." He then went on to enumerate the operation's arrest and drug seizure statistics.
In Palomas, Chihuahua (just across from Columbus, New Mexico) Arnoldo Carreon Renteria, a prosperous cattleman and his 23 year old son were both executed in broad daylight Friday afternoon downtown and in front of a number of other persons. The killers fired "hundreds" of high caliber rounds. ---------------

La Cronica (Mexicali, Baja Calif.) 5/10/08 Among the police officers being dismissed in Baja California is Jose Fernando Funes Lopez, the chief of police of the Mexicali Valley, who has been linked to illegal activities including loading police patrol units with drugs. ---------------

El Universal (Mexico City) 5/10/08 The constant and growing flow of illegal Central Americans through the town of Candelaria in the state of Campeche has become a millionaire business for the gangs of smugglers due to the lack of vigilance along hundreds of kilometers along the border between Mexico and Guatemala. Candelaria is, after Chiapas, now the route most used by undocumented migrants.
But the "INM" (Mex. immigr.) refuses to act in the region and the "polleros" take advantage of this to take hundreds of illegals across the border to Candelaria, just 40 kms. north of Guatemala. In Candelaria, the undocumented get aboard the freight train that crosses the country's southeast toward the north, to approach the American dream. "How long do you think before you reach the United States?" "Fifteen days at the most, I'll cross the border.
Once inside the U.S., that's another story. I want dollars. I want to know what it's like, even at the cost of my life" says young Nicaraguan Miguel Canas.
The "INM" only comes around every fifteen days, while the undocumented come in human waves. But those undocumented must in some cases also deal with a web of "Mara salvatrucha" gangsters who want total control of the area for their narcotics and firearms smuggling activities on behalf of the Gulf Cartel.
(Note: this leading paper's main editorial today again deals with Mexico's current situation.
The first and last two paragraphs follow): "Apart from the discontent by a great many Mexicans due to the country's situation - the lack of expertise of our political class, a tight economy, lack of employment, poverty, lack of opportunities - the scenario of violence in which we live obligates us to work together to confront organized crime.
Of this, we think, there ought not to be the least doubt. Likewise, besides striving to reestablish security, Calderon's government will have to remember the pending work in all the facets which translate into the structural causes of criminality: poverty, unemployment, injustice. The essence of what we express was condensed in a commentary by a reader: "We all owe ourselves to our country and it has to be rescued from this war." --------------

Entorno a Tamaulipas (5/10/08 1,572 kilos 600 grams of weed were found when a search warrant was carried out at a house at #412 Santos Salinas St., Colonia Ampliacion Rancho Grande, in Reynosa, Tamaulipas. The article gave no date of the event. ---------------

La Jornada (Mexico City) 5/10/08 At the recent National Security Cabinet meeting which took place in Tijuana, the mayor of that city asked Juan Mourino, Mexico's Sec. of Government, for special anti-kidnapping groups to combat the high number of those events which take place in Tijuana; the mayor of Mexicali asked for an increased intelligence effort. ---------------

Noroeste (Culiacan, Sinaloa) 5/10/08 Fear of violence is affecting the tourist industry in Sinaloa. Two conventions scheduled for Mazatlan have been cancelled including one of all Kenworth dealers in Mexico. ---------------

La Prensa Grafica (San Salvador, El Salvador) 5/10/08 In Costa Rica, police seized 85 kilos of cocaine from a truck with Salvadoran license plates as the driver was attempting to cross over into Nicaragua from Costa Rica. ---------------

El Tiempo (Bogota, Colombia) 5/10/08 2,500 Chinese whose final destination was the United States entered Colombia between February and April of last year.
The abnormal flow of allegedly invited visitors brought about an investigation which led to the thirty persons involved in this smuggling ring.
The operatives had contacts on both Pacific and Atlantic coast ports in Colombia and they would use these to transport the Chinese in small vessels toward Central American countries from which they would be taken to the U.S.
Four recently convicted ring members are now appealing their eight year jail sentences. The article describes only a couple of hundred arrests of the Chinese in Colombia.

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