News (Noticias) Tagged ‘Ciudad Juarez’

U.S. law enforcement authorities helped facilitate a $32,000 ransom payment in Mexico for a relative of a U.S. congressman who was kidnapped last week by gunmen in Ciudad Juarez, a border city with rampant drug smuggling, gunfights and corruption. “*

Gunmen have killed the police administrative director in the violent Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez, the latest high-profile killing in Mexico’s drug war, police said on Wednesday.

Silvia Molina was shot outside her house on Monday night by suspected drug hitmen, the first public official in Ciudad Juarez’s city police force to be targeted.”*

Thousands of white-clad people marched silently Sunday to protest a surge of drug-related violence in a Mexican city across from Texas where the No. 2 police officer was shot dead.

The crowd of several thousand students, church leaders, businessmen and politicians walked for about four miles (six kilometers) across Ciudad Juarez to a park near a border crossing, breaking the silence in a burst of speeches, dancing and singing.

More than 200 people have been killed so far this year in Ciudad Juarez. The city of 1.3 million across the border from El Paso, Texas, is home base for the powerful Juarez drug cartel.”*

Fiction: In the film No Country for Old Men (Cohen Brothers, 2007), evil, as represented by Javier Bardem’s excellently portrayed drug trafficker-paid hitman, moves implacably through the Chihuahua desert’s dusty Texan towns, injuring, killing, destroying, getting what he wants. Good, personified by Tommy Lee Jones’ also excellent tired old Sheriff, is impotent against the triumphant march of evil, which he watches, resigned, on the verge of his retirement.

The reality: Holy Week, 2008. Paloma de Villa, with less than 2,000 inhabitants, set in the Chihuahua desert on the border with Columbus, New Mexico. The police commandant and six officers, between them making up the entire municipal police force, resign. They hand in their notice because of the wave of drug-related killings and kidnappings and they exile themselves on the U.S. side of the border. In just 81 days, from Jan. 1 to March 21, organized crime has beaten all records for killings in the state of Chihuahua: 175 people murdered plus 40 corpses found in a Ciudad Juarez mass grave ups the macabre homicide figure to 215 for the year. In March alone, 107 people have been killed in this border town.

The law is impotent against the advance of evil.”*

Mexican police have found the remains of nine bodies buried in makeshift graves in the back yard of a house in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, known for drug-related violence and rampant crime, the public security ministry said on Wednesday.

It said police recently seized 1.7 tonnes of marijuana and arrested two people at the house and first came across the bodies last Thursday. There was no immediate word on the identities of the victims or how they had died.”*

*From: http://www.reuters.com
Traducido: usando Google o Altavista/Babel Fish

Women are still being killed in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico’s top human rights official said on Tuesday, calling investigations into their deaths “terrible.”

An estimated 423 women have been murdered since 1993 in the city of 1.3 million, across the border from El Paso, Texas, said Jose Luis Soberanes, president of the government’s National Human Rights Commission. About 89 of the deaths have occurred since 2004.”*

*From: http://www.chron.com
Traducido: usando Google o Altavista/Babel Fish

What started out this weekend as a conflict between police and alleged drug traffickers has widened. With Mexican military now patrolling the streets of Juarez, many are more than concerned. “It scares you of course especially when you have little kids, yeah” said Crystal Sanchez who lives in Juarez.

The same Mexican military presence that was felt this weekend in Chihuahua city has now made its way to Ciudad Juarez. “It makes me feel scared, worried, if I had heard about it, maybe not have come this far” said Tina Morgan a Tourist from Washington State.”*

*From: http://www.kdbc.com
Traducido: usando Google o Altavista/Babel Fish

Authorities in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez said Wednesday that they plan to exhume the remains of more than 4,000 unidentified people buried in common graves and take DNA samples in an attempt to identify them.

Rene Medrano, a spokesman for the Chihuahua state attorney general’s office, said the bodies were being exhumed because state attorney general Patricia Gonzalez “wants to bring order and clarity to past police practices.”

Officials did not provide more exact reasons for the exhumations, which they called part of a statewide project that includes at least 180 exhumations in another city.”*

Female prostitutes in Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez who catered to American “johns” had a 50 percent higher rate of syphilis or another sexually transmitted disease than those who didn’t, according to a UCSD study.

The women paid by American customers were younger and more likely to speak English than their counterparts, and they were more apt to inject drugs and have unprotected sex, said Steffanie Strathdee, chief of the international health division at the University of California San Diego. She wrote the report, which appears in the current edition of the journal Sexually Transmitted Diseases.”*

Carlos Slim’s Grupo Carso will invest about $100 million dollars in the project and be in charge of its construction. In return, the company was awarded a10-year concession to sell water. In addition, one observer noted the proximity of the project to sections of Ciudad Juarez witnessing land speculation and highway construction connected to plans for the binational city of Jeronimo-Santa Teresa.”*

“This sprawling US Army base located at the edge of El Paso and skirting the border with Mexico is undergoing a major expansion that heavily relies on Mexicans for its construction.

Amid growing controversy in the United States over immigration — legal and illegal — the military is using foreign labor to build the base.

The expansion will also mean a population boom and a big infusion of cash for the poor city of El Paso, separated by the Rio Grande from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

But who will build the new barracks and offices at Fort Bliss, and the shopping malls and restaurants outside the base?”

“Business cards of two U.S. law enforcement officials were found taped to the head of a man whose bloody body was dumped in a Mexican park last month, federal officials said today.

Mexican authorities said the unidentified victims body was left in a popular park in Ciudad Juarez, across the Rio Grande, the afternoon of Nov. 23. He was found with a finger stuffed in his mouth, a traditional punishment dealt out by drug traffickers to informers.”

“The Most Rev. Ricardo Ramirez also celebrating 40 years as a priest.

Hundreds of people, including the Roman Catholic bishops of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, are expected to attend a celebration at 7 p.m. tonight at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Cathedral in Las Cruces to mark Bishop Ricardo Ramirez ’s 25th anniversary as bishop of the Diocese of Las Cruces and his 40th year as a priest, the Las Cruces Sun-News reported today on its Web site.”

“The Mexican town of Ciudad Juarez has been blighted by a grisly decade of unsolved rapes and murders of young women. As this grim drama is reprised in a new film starring Jennifer Lopez and Antonio Banderas, the BBC’s Duncan Kennedy visits this violent border town.

In the dusty settlement of Ciudad Juarez they play a grisly game of numbers: 90, 180, 399. You do not have to ask what the numbers refer to anymore. Everyone knows. It is the body count of young women.”

“A Mexican bishop has condemned the building of fence along the U.S.-Mexican border that would total 700 miles.

Bishop Renato Ascencio Leon of Ciudad Juarez said the law signed by U.S. President George W. Bush Oct. 26 was “a big mistake.”

“The only thing that building a wall will do … is divide and alienate our societies,” Bishop Ascencio said.”

“More than 900 people from 150 organizations gathered in Ciduad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, for the first Border Social Forum. The BSF took place on the Mexico-US border with the backdrop of millions of migrants mobilizing in the US for full rights and increasing militarization after President GW Bush Jr’s recent assignment of over 6,000 military troops of the National Guard to “secure” the border. Since the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, Ciudad Juarez has become the Mexican border city with the most maquiladora factories. The systemic violence of neoliberal globalization has manifested locally in an epidemic of femicide, as hundreds of poor young women have been brutally raped and murdered in Ciudad Juarez since 1993.”

“Mexico border is more than just a boundary that separates two countries. But what else it represents depends on who you are.

For U.S. politicians, the border represents an intoxicating brew of issues to use for political gain–“illegal aliens,” “drug dealers,” “a threat to our way of life” and, of course, “terrorists.””

“ONE BY one, they testified. Community activists from the Border Network for Human Rights approached the microphone to bear witness on behalf of El Paso’s migrant community.

We learn of a war that is taking place in the city’s working-class districts, where the local sheriff-turned-vigilante is waging his own personal crusade against immigrants. Sheriff Leo Samaniego decided he would set up roadblocks in Latino communities to shake out the “illegals,” meting out his own form of “frontier justice.””

“For years young women have been raped, mutilated, killed and dumped into shallow graves in Ciudad Juarez, the gritty Mexican city across the border from El Paso, Texas. For just as long, the perpetrators have gone unpunished, sparking international outrage at an inept Mexican justice system.

Now a possible break in the case raises questions not only about Mexican justice but also about U.S. policies that allowed a leading suspect in some of the killings to go in and out of American jails and to shuttle between Juarez and U.S. cities along the border.”

“CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - A Mexican state police commander who was appointed three months ago to replace allegedly corrupt authorities was slain by unidentified assailants who opened fire on his car, authorities said Monday.

Marcos Arturo Nazar Contreras, 45, was shot late Sunday, and was later found slumped over the wheel of his Jeep Liberty, said Claudia Banuelos, a spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office in Ciudad Juarez, a violence-wracked city of 1.3 million across from El Paso, Texas.”