Category Archives: Mexico/Central America

May 18, 2012

Sixth graders made porn video at Mexican school

State Education Department spokesman Omar Kantun said the teacher who uses the classroom did not appear to have been present when the video was made. He said no disciplinary action has been taken against any students or teachers as of yet. He said the students involved are being given psychological counseling.

Authorities in Mexico’s Gulf coast state of Campeche said Wednesday they are investigating how a porn video was made by sixth-graders inside their school.

State Education Department spokesman Omar Kantun said the video was apparently made in an empty classroom during recess in late April.

“It is real, the case is real, the video exists,” Kantun said. “The Education Department is very concerned.”

He said an investigation is being conducted by his department and the teachers union to determine whether any adults were involved.

Kantun said the teacher who uses the classroom did not appear to have been present when the video was made. He said no disciplinary action has been taken against any students or teachers as of yet. He said the students involved are being given psychological counseling.

The incident occurred in late April at a grade school in the town of Calkini, which is in a relatively conservative and heavily Indian area. Three boys are seen on the video engaging in oral and anal sex recorded on a cellphone by a fourth person, apparently another student.

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Original source.


May 14, 2012

Mexico violence: Monterrey police find 49 bodies

The grim discovery comes just days after police found the dismembered, decapitated bodies of 18 people in two abandoned vehicles in western Mexico.


The killings appear to be the latest in a string of brutal murders linked to a continuing conflict between rival drug gangs.

Forty-nine mutilated bodies have been found dumped by a roadside near the city of Monterrey in northern Mexico.

Security officials said the 43 men and six women had been decapitated and had their hands cut off, making identification difficult.

They blamed the killings on a conflict between rival drugs gangs – a note left with the bodies said they had been killed by the Zetas cartel.

It is the latest in a series of recent massacres in northern Mexico.

The Zetas have been fighting the Gulf and Sinaloa cartels for control of smuggling routes into the US.

Unidentified

The bodies were found at 04:00 local time (09:00 GMT) in Cadereyta municipality on the road from Monterrey to Reynosa on the US border.

Security officials said the bodies appeared to have been killed at another location up to two days ago and dumped from a truck.

“We know from the characteristics that this is the result of violence between criminal gangs, it is not an attack on the civilian population,” Nuevo Leon State security spokesman Jorge Domene said.

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Original source.


May 5, 2012

Drug War Slayings Snuffing Out News In Mexico

Late Friday, state prosecutors said in a statement police had found three oil drums containing human remains along a highway connecting the port city of Veracruz with Xalapa after receiving an anonymous tip. They offered no other details.


In this undated picture killed photojournalists Guillermo Luna Varela, left, and Gabriel Huge pose for pictures in Veracruz, Mexico.

Grieving, frightened journalists remembered three slain colleagues on Friday as young and energetic members of a press corps working under terrifying conditions in a state torn by a war between Mexico’s two most powerful drug cartels.

Traffic dwindled from the streets and shopping areas emptied hours after the discovery Thursday afternoon of Guillermo Luna Varela, Gabriel Huge, Esteban Rodriguez and Irasema Becerra, who had been slain, dismembered and stuffed into black plastic bags dumped into a waste canal.

It was a sense of dread familiar to Veracruz, where a cartel battle for control of one of Mexico’s largest ports has spawned horrors such as the slaughter of 35 people dumped on a main highway in rush-hour traffic in September.

The state is a common route for drugs and migrants coming from the south on the way up to the United States. Much of the area around its main port city on the Gulf of Mexico was controlled until last year by the Zetas, a brutal paramilitary-style cartel founded by defectors from the Mexican army special forces and known for its gruesome butchery of opponents.

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Original source.


April 22, 2012

Report: Wal-Mart hushed up bribe network in Mexico

The Times said its investigation uncovered a lengthy struggle at the highest levels of Wal-Mart, pitting the company’s commitment to high moral and ethical standards against its relentless pursuit of growth.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. hushed up a vast bribery campaign that top executives of its Mexican subsidiary carried out to build stores across that country, according to a published report.

The New York Times reported Saturday that Wal-Mart failed to notify law enforcement officials even after its own investigators found evidence of millions of dollars in bribes. The newspaper said the company shut down its internal probe despite a report by its lead investigator that Mexican and U.S. laws likely were violated.

The bribery campaign was reported to have first come to the attention of senior executives at Wal-Mart in 2005, when a former executive of its largest foreign subsidiary, Wal-Mart de Mexico, provided extensive details of a bribery campaign it had orchestrated to win market dominance.

The Mexican executive, previously the lawyer in charge of obtaining construction permits, said in emails and follow-up conversations that Wal-Mart de Mexico paid bribes to obtain permits throughout the country in its rush to build stores nationwide, the Times reported.

Wal-Mart’s growth in Mexico has been so rapid that one of every five Wal-Mart stores now is in that country. It is Mexico’s largest private employer, with 209,000 employees there.

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Original source.


April 14, 2012

Mexican Rights Body Urges Action to Overturn Death Sentences of 58 Mexicans in U.S. Prisons

Citing “official figures,” it stated that “from 2000 to 2011, 745 Mexicans have benefited from a reversal of the death penalty” in the U.S.

The National Human Rights Commission in Mexico is urging its government to “intensify actions” aimed at overturning the death sentence of 58 Mexican nationals held in U.S. prisons.

In a recent Spanish-language press release, the Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos mentioned that as of 2011, there were 58 Mexicans sentenced to death in U.S. prisons, most of whom come from the states of Baja California, Chihuahua, Jalisco, and Michoacán.

“The commission considers it necessary to intensify actions to avoid the death penalty in cases of Mexicans held in foreign prisons and to safeguard their rights to life, dignity and bodily integrity,” the group stated.

“This is the most severe penalty against people, its compliance is irreversible, and it is a measure that does not guarantee the delivery of justice,” it said.

The commission pointed out that the Mexican government has filed a lawsuit – the “Avena case” – before the International Court of Justice in The Hague on behalf of 39 of the 58 cases, arguing that procedural safeguards provided in the Vienna Convention for Consular Relations have been violated.

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Original source.


April 7, 2012

CIA and Pentagon Plan For Worse Case Should Mexico Implode – Listen to Newscast Here

The American CIA and Pentagon planners wonder if Mexico will implode and lose the country to drug cartels. We face the possibility of having the 11th largest country in the world being ruled by vicious drug cartels next door to our country. This will have catastrophic effects on the United States in terms of crime, massive US military commitment, millions of people fleeing the war and violence in Mexico and humanitarian aid of enormous proportions.

Click Here to Listen – Will Mexico Implode?

The American CIA and Pentagon planners wonder if Mexico will implode and lose the country to drug cartels. We face the possibility of having the 11th largest country in the world being ruled by vicious drug cartels next door to our country. This will have catastrophic effects on the United States in terms of crime, massive US military commitment, millions of people fleeing the war and violence in Mexico and humanitarian aid of enormous proportions.

Listen to this special newscast:

#1 Why is the American main stream media failing to report on this war in Mexico and its potential pending disaster for the US?

#2 What if anything should the US do?

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Original source.


April 5, 2012

Larson: Mexico Should Pay Texas for Services for Illegals

San Antonio State Rep. Lyle Larson says state of Texas is now spending one tenth of its entire annual budget on services for illegal immigrants.

The next time Mexico’s president visits the United States, he might want to bring his checkbook.

1200 WOAI news reports San Antonio State Rep. Lyle Larson has written a letter to Los Pinos, demanding that President Felipe Calderon reimburse the State of Texas for the $6 to $8 billion a year that the state spends providing education, health care, and other benefits to the estimated 1.6 million Mexican citizens who are living illegally in the state.

“We cannot sustain spending $6 billion to $8 billion a year when our total biennium budget is $172,” Larson told 1200 WOAI news. “That comes to nearly ten percent of our entire state budget.

Larson has been waging this battle for a while. Lat year, he filed the ‘Share the Bill’ resolution in the Legislature, which would require every state agency, individual, nonprofit organization, and public or private entity that receives state funding determine and report citizenship information before rendering services.

“It’s like somebody is in your house and you are buying products from them, yet they are eating at your table and they are eating rent free,” Larson said.

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Original source.


April 1, 2012

Officials: 3 killed as human sacrifices in Mexico

Details of the case were laid out in a statement from the Sonora State Investigative Police (PEI), which described the cult as a “Satanic sect.”


Santa Muerte

Authorities in the northern Mexican state of Sonora have arrested eight people accused of killing two boys and one woman as human sacrifices for Santa Muerte — the saint of death — officials said Friday.

The victims, two of whom were age 10, were killed and their blood was offered at an altar to the saint, according to Jose Larrinaga, spokesman for state prosecutors. The accused were asking the saint, who is generally portrayed as a skeleton dressed in a long robe and carrying a scythe, for protection, he said.

Santa Muerte is a favorite among criminals and the country’s drug traffickers. The saint, though not recognized by the Catholic Church, has taken off in popularity in recent years.

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Original source.


March 21, 2012

Report: Hezbollah Operatives Running Vast Drug Ring With Mexican Cartels

The conspiracy has run since at least 2004 and at times brought in as much as $200 million in a single month, according to court documents.

[Note: This article was originally posted on December 16th, 2011. The IFNM website was attacked by hackers and many articles are now gone from the archives. As a public service, IFNM is now reposting said articles.]

A Lebanese national who U.S. authorities say is the ringleader of a vast international drug smuggling ring with links to the militant group Hezbollah has been indicted on drug and money laundering charges after allegedly reaping more than $850 million in illicit profits.

The indictment was announced Tuesday in federal court in Alexandria against Ayman Joumaa, who is currently at large. It alleges he led a conspiracy that, among other activities, sold nearly 100 tons of Colombian cocaine to the Zetas drug cartel in Mexico between 2005 and 2007 that was ultimately smuggled into the United States.

The conspiracy has run since at least 2004 and at times brought in as much as $200 million in a single month, according to court documents.

Earlier this year, the Treasury Department designated Joumaa as a drug trafficker and said Hezbollah profited from his network.

Specifically, Treasury accused a major Lebanese bank, the Lebanese Canadian Bank, of being complicit in Joumaa’s money laundering and turning a blind eye to massive cash transactions. One of the members of Joumaa’s network is a suspected Hezbollah supporter, and bank managers had links to Hezbollah officials, according to the Treasury Department’s findings.

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Original source.


Remains of Missing Mexican Politician Found in Mass Grave

The bodies of Peña and 300 other people were discovered in several mass graves in various parts of Durango city, the state capital. Authorities have managed to identify only 13 of the victims, according to the state AG’s office.


Alfonso Peña, a former mayor of Tepehuanes

One of the victims in a mass grave discovered in May 2011 has been identified as a politician who went missing in July 2010, authorities in the Mexican state of Durango said.

Alfonso Peña, a former mayor of Tepehuanes who disappeared after winning election to the state legislature, was positively identified using DNA samples, said a spokesperson for the Durango Attorney General’s Office.

The bodies of Peña and 300 other people were discovered in several mass graves in various parts of Durango city, the state capital.

Authorities have managed to identify only 13 of the victims, according to the state AG’s office.

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Original source.