Mexican Mayor Among 9 Killed Near US Border

www,thenews.com 10/9/09 - CIUDAD JUAREZ: Crime syndicate hitmen killed a Mexican town mayor, and eight other people were murdered in and around this violent city across the border from the United States, Chihuahua state officials said Thursday. Full Story

“Lawless hordes” and the U.S.-Mexico border

By: Bernd Debusmann Reuters News Agency 10/9/09 -
On the first Sunday of October, the Texan city of El Paso recorded its 10th murder of the year. On the same day, El Paso’s Mexican sister city, Ciudad Juarez, recorded its 1,809th murder of 2009. Mayhem on one side of the border, relative peace on the other. Full Story

Mexican troops seize 2.6 tons
of marijuana in bananas

AFP (French News Agency) 10/9/09 - MEXICO CITY — First bricks of cocaine were found stashed in statues of the Virgin Mary, then in a frozen shark. Now, Mexican authorities have seized a load of "over-ripe" bananas bearing 2.6 tonnes of marijuana. Full Story

Mexico's drug war: priests speak out

In Mexico, traffickers have targeted the Catholic church with extortion and deadly threats.
Christaian Science Monitor 10/8/09 - MEXICO CITY - The Rev. Habacuc Hernandez Beni­tez, a Roman Catholic priest in Guerrero, Mexico, knew the mountain towns of the southwestern state like the back of his hand. He made it his mission to seek young men for the priesthood, driving far and wide to find them. Full Story

Cartels Face an Economic Battle -- U.S. Marijuana Growers Cutting Into Profits of Mexican Traffickers

By Steve Fainaru and William Booth

Washington Post Foreign Service 10/7/07

ARCATA, Calif. -- Stiff competition from thousands of mom-and-pop marijuana farmers in the United States threatens the bottom line for powerful Mexican drug organizations in a way that decades of arrests and seizures have not, according to law enforcement officials and pot growers in the United States and Mexico. Full Window

Manufacturing in the El Paso/Juarez Region

By Bob Cook, President, El Paso Regional Economic Development Corp. 10/7/09 www.industryweek.com/

The electronics and medical device sectors are growing quickly in this region despite safety concern from drug wars.
Full Story

Mexico Turns Part of Drug War's
Focus to Treating Addicts

BY DUDLEY ALTHAUS Houston Chronicle 10/5/09

CIUDAD NEZAHUALCOYOTL, Mexico — Tangled in the front-line trenches of Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s anti-narcotics campaign are the country’s growing legions of addicts, who find themselves sought by gangsters as customers and sometime targets of their violence.

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The Border: Texas Steps Up
Where Washington Falls Down

By Texas Governor Rick Perry

During a time when Washington seems more determined than ever to inject itself into the day-to-day lives of everyone in the country, border security is one area - a legitimate federal responsibility - where the federal government has demonstrated a decided lack of urgency. Full Story

Sheriff's office on new
organized crime task force

Phoenix Business Journal - by Mike Sunnucks 10/1/09 --
The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office is part of a new organized crime, drug trafficking task force aimed at drug cartels and smuggling rings — after all.

Full Story

Visas for Canada won't stop flood of phoney refugee claimants from Mexicans fleeing violence

Canada.com - How many of the 5,500 Mexican asylum seekers -- many of them doctors, lawyers and business people -- who swamped Canada's immigration system in the first six months of 2009 would fit this internationally accepted definition of refugee? Full StoryL
LINK TO CANADIAN STORY IF PDF DOESN'T WORK

Gunmen Storm Mexican Hospital
to Finish Off Wounded Enemies

Latin American Herald Tribune 10/7/09: MEXICO CITY – Assailants armed with assault rifles burst into a hospital in the northern Mexican state of Durango and killed three men being treated for gunshot wounds, the state Attorney General’s Office said Tuesday. Full Story

Mexican Rights Defender Flees to U.S.

Latin America Herald Tribune 10/7/09: CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico – A Chihuahua state human rights commissioner investigating accusations against police and soldiers in this violent border city revealed that he fled several weeks ago to El Paso, Texas, in the face of death threats.
Full Story

SPECIAL SECTION ON KIDNAPPING IN MEXICO

Read both latest news and advice on kidnappings.

CLICK HERE

Dissecting a Drug War

By Kent Patersonwww.mexidata.info -Part One:

El Paso was the scene last month as academics, students, journalists, community members, and a smattering of government officials from the United States, Mexico and other parts of the world gathered to analyze and debate the 40-year war on drugs. Located next door to blood-soaked Ciudad Juarez, the event took place at a time when a sense of urgency literally prevailed just outside the conference doors. Second story on this drug conference:

Full Story
 

Deindustrialization, drugs and recovery

By Kent Paterson, Part Two
newspapertree.com El Paso online 10/5/09

A careful reading shows how much of the underworld activity moved from north to south, especially but not exclusively during the Prohibition Era, in contrast to the contemporary media stories of violence and mayhem threatening to spill across the US border from Mexico.

Editor’s Note: The following story is the second and last report on the US War on Drugs conference held in El Paso, Texas, on September 21 and 22 of this year. The event was initiated by faculty from the University of Texas at El Paso and supported by a host of local organizations and agencies.

Full story

WATCHING MEXICO has been created to focus on the latest up-to-date news on Mexico's drug cartel, crime and corruption events, espeically kidnapping and narcotic-realated violence against Mexicans and foreigners. The site also carries frequent analysese of these events and their relationship to Mexico at large, i.e. politics and the economy, and towards its closest neightbors and global ramificaons.

Inside are pages that concentrate on.the special problems of taxi crime and kidnapping, car driving, street crime, con games aimed at foreigners and specific, current situatons to major cities and resorts, as well as rural doings.

Our audience includes Mexicos from all classes, when even farmers have laptops to download latest news that could affect crops, as well as foreigners in Mexico for busienss or pleasure, and those who married Mexicans or just fell love with the country, not a hard thing to do at all.

We recognize that Mexican culture is far more subtle and sophisticated than 99% of Americans have even a clue. Also, those of us who do have that clue still have little hope of penetrating the strong and supple veneer most Mexicans present to the outside world. Our Mexican associates can assist with that.

Mexicans themselves are the most vulnerable victims of the confluence of forces that has brought the drug and corruption wars to their homeland, and only they can win the struggle.

We want to make www.watchingmexico.com partially a kind of Mexican-focused Drudge Report, bringing links to the latest news articles from Spanish and English language media on Mexico, and the Mexican drug war, border problems, narcotics mafia, the kidnapping gangs often led by active duty police officers, but also the business successes and opportunities of living and working in Mexico. The second part will consist of analyses of major news, as well as in-depth looks at parts of Mexico and how it relates to current events, and advice from insiders on how to succeed in Mexico, not only in business and just living there, but avoiding kidnapping gangs, even the petty ones who use taxis to find victims to empty their ATM accounts over a period of days.

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Mexico's small but
vibrant Jewish community

Mexico's Jewish community, small but vibrant, begins reaching out to its fellow citizens.

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Mexico's Real War

Joel Kotkin, Forbes Magazine 10.06.09

It's not drugs.

"The middle class in Mexico is going down," private school owner Arendondo told me in his office by the courtyard of the brightly painted school in the largely lower-middle-class Iztacalco, one of Mexico City's 16 diverse delegaciones, or boroughs. "The middle class is predated by both the super-rich and the criminal poor. We are squeezed in the middle of the sandwich." Full Story

U.S. Anti-gunrunning to Mexico
Effort lauded, questioned

By Jerry Seper Washington Times !0/6/09

Just days after the Justice Department said its anti-gunrunning project on the U.S.-Mexico border had made "enormous inroads into stemming firearms-related violent crime" and touted a planned expansion of the program, the department's Office of Inspector General on Monday said some funding for the $22 million project was not being properly used.

Full Story