M3 Report
Mexico DOJ Releases Seizure Statistics from Organized Crime for 2008 to date
El Informador (Guadalajara, Jalisco) 8/14/08
The Dept. of Justice of Mexico released a report to foreign journalists on Wednesday with data of items seized from organized crime so far in 2008:
- 226 aircraft
- 276.9 million dollars (205 were those of Zhenli Ye Gon)
- 61 tons of cocaine
- 2,975 tons of marihuana
- 8,923 firearms (5,178 long barrel)
- 611 grenades & a million rounds of ammo.
A massacre took place in Ciudad Juarez yesterday evening when nine persons were killed and either five or fifteen (reports vary) others were wounded after an armed group of some eight uniformed, hooded men burst into a drug rehab center and began a wholesale attack with AK47 rifles. Added to five unrelated others elsewhere in town, these murders raise the tally of homicide victims in August to 94 and to 787 for the year for the city of Juarez.
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La Cronica de Hoy (Mexico City) 8/14/08
Half a dozen executions, among them that of a police officer and of a security supervisor, took place in the states of Michoacan, Sonora, Guerrero, Jalisco and Nuevo Leon. All of them were presumably carried out by organized crime. The Michoacan victim was a man who had just begun to supervise security functions at a business firm last Monday; he was shot at six times, four of them to his head, as he was getting into a vehicle on the way to work. The Sonora case involved a man who resisted being forcibly abducted. The Guerrero victim was a police officer who was shot from behind.
La Jornada (Mexico City) 8/14/08
This paper updates the item above by reporting eleven homicide victims, adding the states of Coahuila and Mexico to the list. It also mentions that two of the victims in Juarez (other than those in the rehab center) had their index fingers on the right hand cut off, meaning that they had been identified as informants.
Cuarto Poder (Tuxtla, Chiapas) 8/14/08
A semi truck stopped for refueling near Tapachula, Chiapas, was checked due to an anonymous report. Hidden in two secret portions of the sleeping compartment were eight Ecuadorans, five females and three males, all illegally in Mexico. The driver tried to bribe his way out of the deal by offering 1,800 pesos to the arresting officials. The Ecuadorans said they were attempting to go across Mexico and then enter the United States.
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Excelsior (Mexico City) 8/14/08
In Jacona, Michoacan, Mex. army personnel seized three vehicles which had been painted to look just like federal police patrol units, including the logo, and had been outfitted with radio communication equipment.
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Tamaulipas en linea (Matamoros, Tamps.) 8/14/08
The start of the border fence construction in the area across the Rio Grande from the state of Tamaulipas has caused a 230% increase in the tariffs charged by smugglers of aliens into the United States. This, according to the Center for Border Studies and Promotion of Human Rights. The organization added that one hundred persons arrive in that area daily with the intention of crossing into the United States.
Corruption by public servants costs Mexico 60 billion annually - 9% of the GDP
Posted: 14 Aug 2008 12:43 AM CDT
8/13/08
- Corruption by public servants represents an annual cost of 60 billion dollars to Mexico, an amount four time larger than the income from petroleum exports, and 9% of the GDP, according to World Bank figures. A Mexican congressman, Hugo Martinez, said that acts of corruption at the federal, state and local levels, as well as concessions and services by private parties, increased from 115 to 197 million, according to the National Corruption & Good Govt. index. Corruption engenders loss of credibility for the State, government and public administration, it inhibits citizens participation in public affairs, induces illegality and inadequate assignment of funds as well as their appropriation by political and economic groups, with high costs to society.
- Pedro Aragones, director of investigative services of the state of Chihuahuas AGs office, was shot to death and his ministerial police escort gravely wounded in a car-to-car gunfire assault in the states capital city, Chihuahua.
Excelsior (Mexico City) 8/13/08
(First paragraph of an op column by Armando Roman)
End of the social compact
The State has collapsed: Mexico is a jungle. The warnings, the claims, the demands, in the media, on the street, were many. Nevertheless, our authorities did not listen to the millions of Mexicans who shouted to them to be careful and not to allow us to arrive where we have. The same is true for those many other Mexicans who lack a civic conscience, who could care less about their fellow man and who, in the context of the institutional orphan status which characterizes us, choose to rob, kidnap, rape, murder and a very long etcetera! The lack of legality and conscience of those who opt for crime has resulted in that the Mexican social compact - which in itself had never been complete - may now have become totally dissolved.
a.m. (Leon, Guanajuato) 8/13/08
Juan Lopez, Social and Human Development Secretary, spoke before a local congress in Guanajuato and said that in that state there are 769,000 persons in extreme poverty, living in 149,000 dwellings. Of that number, 215 thousand live in nutritional poverty - not being able to pay for their food - because they earn 500 pesos or less per month. Guanajuato is also among Mexicos leaders in suicides, lack of access to health and expulsion (read: source of migrants) of workers. (Note: Guanajuato, with close to 5 million inhabitants, is slightly smaller than Maryland)
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Cuarto Poder (Tuxtla, Chiapas) , La Cronica de Hoy (Mexico City) 8/13/08
The president (read: Chief Justice) of Mexicos Supreme Court, Guillermo Ortiz, urged all sectors of government to act against insecurity and said that societys indignation is justified because its integrity is threatened. He called for more technical and professional expertise in crime case investigations and for adequate, complete, sensible and useful laws, with precise and severe punishment against crime. He added that the legislature must create laws which determine unavoidable procedures so that judges may legitimately impose punishment and sanctions.
Summed up : for the legislature: clear, useful and powerful laws. For the executive: professional investigations, as well as crime prevention and prosecution of criminals. For the judicial: just, impartial and objective sentences.
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Noroeste (Culiacan, Sinaloa) 8/13/08
Sinaloa State AGs office data show that of an average 2,022 crimes officially reported, only 331 cases result in sentences for the perpetrators. That 16% rises to 96% when cases not officially reported are taken into account. All this due to lack of resources, lack of training and personnel background clearances.
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Norte (Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua) 8/13/08
Of the approximately 760 homicides which have occurred so far this year only nine cases have been referred to criminal courts.
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Diario Xalapa (Xalapa, Veracruz; part of large o.e.m. paper group) 8/13/08
During the current year organized crime has assassinated 62 Mexican federal agents including high ranking personnel, an average of 7.7 a month. In the majority of cases the victims were ambushed or forcibly abducted by strongly armed commandos.
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El Debate (Culiacan, Sinaloa) 8/13/08
(the following report makes the number in the previous item already obsolete)
Two federal preventive police officers were murdered before dawn today (Wed.) in the Mazatlan, Sinaloa, area. Thugs armed with assault rifles fired on them as the two agents arrived at a locale.
El Diario de Coahuila (Saltillo, Coah.) 8/13/08
- A newspaper archive search from 2002 to date by El Universal reveals that active duty or ex-police officers were involved in half of the kidnapping cases reported. The cases involve federal, state and local police agents.
- The Public Security Secretary of the state of Sinaloa, Josefina Garcia, admitted the failure by all three levels of government regarding the Culiacan-Navolato Joint Operation, given that homicides (637 to date), auto theft and commercial establishment robberies do not cease.
El Informador (Guadalajara, Jalisco) 8/13/08
An average of one hundred prison inmates escape Mexican jails yearly, which reveals the inefficiency and corruption of prison officials, as well as the self-government by the inmates. 496 prisoners fled from 2003 to 2007, a figure which could reach higher if it is contrasted with press reports of each event. During the same period there were 207 homicides within the jails as well as 157 suicides.
El Porvenir (Monterrey, Nuevo Leon) 8/13/08
Besides impunity, the lack of economic growth and of generation of employment are the causes of crime due to the desperation by people in not being able to find jobs. This, according to Armando Paredes, president of Mexicos Enterprisal Coordinating Council, who added that those persons represent an easy target for narcotraffickers. Nevertheless, the main problem is impunity, since only one out of one hundred crimes is punished.
El Universal (Mexico City) 8/13/08
- SIEDO , a sub-agency of Mexicos Dept. of Justice (a unit specializing in the investigations about organized crime) has been found to have been infiltrated by the Beltran-Leyva brothers drug cartel. Two high level officials, one a coordinator of technical services, and the other a police personnel coordinator, plus a federal agent have been detained. (This figure was updated by another paper that said that six SIEDO personnel are now in preliminary detention.)
- There were thirteen homicides in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, in the last 24 hours; one of them was a police officer. These deaths bring up to 33 the number of victims in Juarez in the last 72 hours.
Ensenada (Ensenada, Baja Calif.) 8/13/08
About a dozen men managed to escape when Mex. naval personnel saw them unloading a launch at a dock in El Sauzal (quite close to Ensenada, B.C.) The load: 106 packages of weed weighing 1,522 kilos.
(The attachment is a bar graph showing the amounts, in billions of dollars, of individual monetary remittances sent by Mexicans abroad back into Mexico.)
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF FORMER BORDER PATROL OFFICERS
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Foreign News Report
The National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers (NAFBPO) extracts and condenses the material that follows from Mexican and Central and South American on-line media sources on a daily basis. You are free to disseminate this information, but we request that you credit NAFBPO as being the provider.
