Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

March 5, 2018 By Fausta

Mexico: Police confess to handing 3 Italian men to the CJNG cartel

Raffaele Russo, 60, his 25-year-old son Antonio, and his nephew, Vincenzo Cimmino, 29, disappeared on January 31 in Tecalitlán, in the western state of Jalisco.

The state’s governor said the officers had confessed to handing the Italians over to a local criminal gang.

The police had allegedly arrested them at a petrol station beforehand.

What is alleged to have happened?
Raffaele Russo, 60, his 25-year-old son Antonio, and his nephew, Vincenzo Cimmino, 29, had stopped at a petrol station in Tecalitlán, an agricultural town.

The last relatives back in Italy heard from them was a Whatsapp message from Mr Russo saying they had been approached by police officers who arrived on cycles and in a van.

The police told them to follow them, according to the message.

The son of one of the disappeared earlier told Italian radio that the men had been “sold to a gang for €43” ($53; £38), but regional officials said they could not confirm that information.

And the police? (emphasis added)

Four police, including a female officer, have been detained and charged. The Mexican authorities say three more police are being sought in connection with the disappearance.

Following the trio’s disappearance, the town’s entire police force was sent for retraining, although some local media speculated that they were sent away so that they could not be intimidated by local cartel members into changing their story.

As you may recall, the state prosecutor in the 43 missing Iguala student teachers alleges that they were handed by local police to a criminal gang, who killed them and burned their bodies.

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Filed Under: Mexico Tagged With: #Ayotzinapa, CJNG Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación, Iguala

February 27, 2018 By Fausta

Immigration: The extracontinentales

Lauren Markham reports at The New Republic on the tidal wave of migrants, mostly young men in their twenties and thirties, from India, Pakistan, and other countries from Africa and the Middle East heading for the United States via the Mexican border:

How efforts to block refugees and asylum-seekers from Europe have only made the global migration crisis more complex and harrowing (emphasis added)

By 7 p.m., the sun had set and groups of young men had begun to gather inside a small, nameless restaurant on a narrow street in Tapachula, Mexico. Anywhere else in the city, a hub of transit and commerce about ten miles north of the Guatemalan border, there would be no mistaking that you were in Latin America: The open colonial plaza, with its splaying palms and marimba players, men with megaphones announcing Jesus, and women hawking woven trinkets and small bags of cut fruit suggested as much. But inside the restaurant, the atmosphere was markedly different. The patrons hailed not from Mexico or points due south but from other far-flung and unexpected corners of the globe—India, Pakistan, Eritrea, Cameroon, Sierra Leone, Congo. Men, and all of the diners were men, gathered around tables, eating not Mexican or Central American fare but steaming plates of beef curry, yellow lentils, and blistered rounds of chapati. The restaurant’s proprietor, a stern, stocky Bangladeshi man in his thirties named Sadek, circulated among the diners. He stopped at one table of South Asian men and spoke to them in Hindi about how much they owed him for the items he’d collected on their tab. The waitress, patiently taking orders and maneuvering among the crowds of men, was the only Spanish speaker in the room.

Outside, dozens of other such men, travelers from around the world, mingled on the avenue. They reclined against the walls of restaurants and smoked cigarettes on the street-side balconies of cheap hotels. They’d all recently crossed into the country from Guatemala, and most had, until recently, been held in Tapachula’s migrant detention center, Siglo XXI. Just released, they had congregated in this packed migrants’ quarter as they prepared to continue their journeys out of Mexico and into the United States. They had traveled a great distance already: a transatlantic journey by airplane or ship to Brazil; by car, bus, or on foot to Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia; through Panama, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua; on to Honduras, Guatemala, and into Mexico. Again and again, I heard their itinerary repeated in an almost metronomic cadence, each country a link in a daunting, dangerous chain. They’d crossed oceans and continents; slogged through jungles and city slums; braved detention centers and robberies; and they were now, after many months, or even longer, tantalizingly close to their final goal of the United States and refugee status.

“The largest groups tend to be from India, Pakistan, China, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Congo,” but also Iraq, Afghanistan, Eritrea, and Syria.

They usually arrive in Brazil, through Peru, up the Darién gap connecting Colombia and Panama, north through Central America – and Mexico has increasingly become a destination.

Read the full article.

Note: extracontinentales means “from outside the continent”

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Filed Under: Fausta's blog, illegal immigration, immigration, Mexico

February 26, 2018 By Fausta

Mexico: AMLO’s friend Romo gets richer

Today has become a very busy day, and I don’t have the time for a post, but I recommend that you read Mary O’Grady’s article on how Monterrey tycoon Alfonso Romo, whom AMLO has named chief of staff of his proposed cabinet, got richer quick through a 2004 IPO and buyback of sorts.

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Filed Under: Fausta's blog, Mexico Tagged With: Alfonso Romo, AMLO, Andrés Manuel López Obrador

February 19, 2018 By Fausta

Mexico: Hernandez and Martinez found dead

The two special agents kidnapped by the CJNG have been found,
Forensic experts in Mexico say human remains found last week are those of two special agents kidnapped by armed men earlier this month.

The two agents went missing on 5 February while they were on leave attending a christening in Nayarit state, western Mexico.

Mr Martínez, a 26-year-old lawyer, and Mr Hernández, a 28-year-old criminologist, had joined the agency less than a year ago.

Their bodies were found in a car in the city of Xalisco. So far no one has been arrested in connection with their killing.
. . .
The country experienced its most violent year in 2017 with more than 25,000 murders, official figures suggest.

It is the highest annual tally since modern records began. Organised crime accounted for nearly three-quarters of those murders.

in case you missed it, Jesús Pérez Caballero examines Mexico’s CJNG: Local Consolidation, Military Expansion and Vigilante Rhetoric

In each of the states where the group operates, it continues to successfully exploit its defining features: the flexibility to combine a military perspective with its historical criminal ties, a strategic commitment to become involved in pre-existing conflicts, and the promotion of vigilante rhetoric through propaganda.

Read the full article.

UPDATE

Is Mexico’s CJNG Following in the Footsteps of the Zetas?https://t.co/jqKonHPk1N pic.twitter.com/CjUVqTKvpO

— InSight Crime (@InSightCrime) February 19, 2018

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Filed Under: crime, Fausta's blog, Mexico Tagged With: Alfonso Hernández, CJNG Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación, Octavio Martínez

February 13, 2018 By Fausta

Mexico: CJNG kidnaps two special agents

Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (Jalisco New Generation Cartel) is on the move. Here are two articles:

Two members of a special investigative police force who disappeared in Mexico a week ago have been shown in a video posted on YouTube.

The two agents from the Criminal Investigation Agency appear sitting in front of five masked men who force them at gunpoint to read a statement.

The armed men are believed to be members of the Jalisco New Generation cartel.

The cartel has been expanded rapidly and aggressively across Mexico.

Mexico’s Attorney General Raul Cervantes recently declared it the nation’s largest criminal organisation and it has been blamed for a series of attacks on Mexican security forces and public officials.

Here’s the YouTube (in Spanish),

Jesús Pérez Caballero analyzes at InSight Crime, Mexico’s CJNG: Local Consolidation, Military Expansion and Vigilante Rhetoric

The CJNG is expanding its presence and influence throughout Mexico. In each of the states where the group operates, it continues to successfully exploit its defining features: the flexibility to combine a military perspective with its historical criminal ties, a strategic commitment to become involved in pre-existing conflicts, and the promotion of vigilante rhetoric through propaganda.

At the moment, the rewards of this strategy seem to outweigh the risks assumed by the Jalisco Cartel New Generation (Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación – CJNG) and its leader, Nemesio Oseguera, alias “El Mencho.”

Read the full report.

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Filed Under: crime, drugs, Fausta's blog, Mexico Tagged With: CJNG Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación, Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes aka “El Mencho"

February 7, 2018 By Fausta

Uruguay: The big watch robbery

Remarkable for the type of crime, and for the involvement of Mexican nationals.

Infobae reports that a gang of thirteen Mexican commandos broke into a jewelry store in the resort city of Punta del Este (link in Spanish), wearing hoods and carrying machine guns. the jewelry store is located at the Hotel Casino Enjoy Conrad de Punta del Este.

Among the 200 watches stolen during the three minutes they were at the store was a US$460,000 limited edition Jaeger Lecoultre watch.

The least expensive watch retails for $10,000.

Here’s the security video,

Nine people are under arrest, all Mexicans.

And,
After I wrote the post, I’m puzzled, why watches? All premium watches are registered by the manufacturers’ numbers and are traceable.

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Filed Under: crime, Mexico, Uruguay

January 30, 2018 By Fausta

El Chapo promises to not kill jurors

It’s jailbird Tuesday!

“That’s a great jury you put together“?

Notorious drug kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán promises he won’t kill any jurors seated in his upcoming federal court trial, arguing it’s therefore unnecessary to keep them anonymous and under armed guard as prosecutors have asked.

HOW WEST SIDE BUST LED THE FEDS TO ‘EL CHAPO’. STREET-LEVEL DEAL SPARKED PROBE OF WORLD’S NO. 1 DRUG KINGPIN, INTERVIEWS, RECORDS SHOW

Authorities have never revealed that the case against the man who some believe was the biggest drug kingpin in the world began with Baines, a mid-level dealer whose father owned a grocery store in Austin and also drove a bus for the CTA.

But a Sun-Times review of court records and interviews with Baines and others involved in the case, including a key former federal prosecutor, has found that a Drug Enforcement Administration task force used a web of informants and hundreds of wiretapped calls to trace a path that ultimately led from Baines to El Chapo.

“We went from the streets of Chicago to the mountaintops of Mexico,” says Thomas Shakeshaft, a former assistant U.S. attorney who supervised each phase of the investigation. “We started a case against the Traveling Vice Lords on the West Side of Chicago and went all the way up.

“Before Sean Penn flew down to Mexico with [actress] Kate del Castillo and recorded this thing where Chapo admitted he was the largest drug-trafficker in the world, we had the only legally admissible voice recording of Chapo in the world.”

Video,

There are even Breaking Bad-like identical twins*,  Pedro “Peter” Flores and Margarito “Junior” Flores.

The twins agreed to cooperate with U.S. investigators in late 2008, court records show, and Pedro Flores recorded a damning phone conversation with his supplier — El Chapo. The recording became the key evidence in the 2009 federal indictment filed in U.S. District Court in Chicago.

Read the whole thing.

————————————————-

*Breaking Bad twins,

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Filed Under: cocaine, crime, Fausta's blog, Mexico Tagged With: Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman, Junior Flores, Kate del Castillo, Peter Flores, Sean Penn

January 25, 2018 By Fausta

Mexico: Cartels cripple the country’s refineries

Nearly ten years ago, one of this blog’s readers was aware of this,
THE REFINERY RACKET: Mexico’s drug cartels, now hooked on fuel, cripple the country’s refineries

Drug gangs pressure refinery workers to tap the lifeblood of Mexico’s oil industry. One former worker fled the country. One former gang member helps authorities understand the racket.
. . .
Between 2011 and 2016, the number of unauthorized taps discovered on Mexico’s fuel lines nearly quintupled, according to a recent report by the federal auditor. Repair costs surged almost tenfold, to 1.77 billion pesos ($95 million).

A May 2017 study, commissioned by the national energy regulator and obtained by Reuters via a freedom of information request, found that thieves, between 2009 and 2016, had tapped pipelines roughly every 1.4 kms (0.86 mi) along Pemex’s approximately 14,000 km pipeline network.

After decades of poor upkeep, the refineries are bleeding money as well as fuel. In addition to unscheduled outages, which cause big operational losses, maintenance problems have led to fatal accidents, including fires and explosions.

https://faustasblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/204071_LONG_MEXICOFUELeb09204309_R21MP41500.mp4
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Filed Under: crime, Fausta's blog, Mexico, oil

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