News (Noticias) Tagged ‘michoacan state’

The mayor of a small town in western Mexico was forced from his car and shot dead, officials said Monday.

Marcelo Ibarra was traveling with his wife and two children late Sunday when the men stopped their car, forced Ibarra to get out and shot him in the head, said Magdalena Guzman, the spokeswoman for the Michoacan state Attorney General’s Office.”*

A Mexican journalist was chased and gunned down at a hotel and media rights groups Monday called for an investigation into whether he was killed because of his reporting.

Gerardo Garcia, a 24-year-old reporter for the daily La Opinion in the western state of Michoacan, was shot to death Saturday at the hotel where he lived with his family, said Magdalena Guzman, a spokeswoman for Michoacan state prosecutors.

Investigators recovered more than 45 spent shells from the crime scene, Guzman said.”*

Investigators are still collecting evidence in the case, but so far have “nothing, nothing, nothing,” said Magdalena Guzman, who speaks for the Michoacan state prosecutors office. Local newspapers report that 90 percent of the state’s gangland-style killings this year remain unsolved and that no suspects have even been identified.

And so it goes here, amid the underworld struggles that now seem to bleed into nearly every facet of Mexican public life.

Authorities also appear to have no new leads, and have made no arrests, in the Saturday slaying of singer Zayda Peña in the border city of Matamoros, across the Rio Grande from Brownsville.”*

The tortured body of the lead singer of a popular Mexican band was found along a highway Monday and another singer was shot to death, police said, the latest Mexican musicians killed in a wave of violence over the past year.

Sergio Gomez, a singer with K-Paz de la Sierra, went missing Sunday after a concert in the Michoacan state capital of Morelia, according to the state attorney general’s office.”*

Mexico announced a plan Sunday to pump pesos into a monarch butterfly reserve to boost tourism and create jobs in an impoverished area where illegal logging threatens the monarch’s habitat.

The 50 million peso (US$4.6 million, €3.1 million) plan will buy equipment and advertising for the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, a 124,000-acre (50,180-hectare) wooded park in Mexico’s Michoacan state, where clouds of orange- and black-winged butterflies nest each winter after flying south from Canada and the U.S.

“It is possible to take care of the environment and at the same time promote development,” President Felipe Calderon said Sunday in a ceremony to celebrate the monarchs’ arrival.”*

“Mexicos newly sworn-in president sent more than 6,500 soldiers, sailors and federal police to violence-plagued Michoacan state to crack down on drug turf wars that have left hundreds dead in a wave of execution-style killings and beheadings.

Felipe Calderon took office on Dec. 1 pledging a battle against crime, promising more funds for law enforcement and appointing hardline Interior Minister Francisco Ramirez Acuna to oversee the fight against organized crime.”

“An armed gang of suspected drug traffickers wearing ski masks threw five human heads onto the dance floor of a bar in western Mexico on Wednesday in an apparent revenge killing, prosecutors said.

Wielding handguns and rifles, some 20 men dressed in black drove up to the Luz y Sombra (Light and Shade) club on the edge of the city of Uruapan, in Michoacan state, shortly after midnight, barged inside and fired shots in the air.”

“After a decade of suffering the blows of free trade, deregulation and competition, the small-plot corn farmers of the rolling hills of Mexico’s western Michoacan state have seen the future - and it often looks disturbingly like the past.

Free trade advocates gathered in Hong Kong for the World Trade Organization summit this week argue opening agricultural markets benefit poor producers by giving them access to foreign markets….”

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“Environmental officials said Tuesday they are hoping to see as many as 200 million Monarch butterflies migrate to Mexico this year - a nearly tenfold increase over 2004, when unfavorable weather, pollution and deforestation caused a drastic decline in the population.

Last year, less than 23 million butterflies survived long enough to leave habitats in the United States and Canada for sanctuaries in the state of Mexico and Michoacan state, both of which border Mexico City.”

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