October 17, 2008
M3Report

El Universal  (Mexico City)  10/16/08
The first fifteen days of October became the year's most violent in Mexico and broke the record of deaths linked to organized crime in any such period by reaching 387 victims, especially because of the increase in multiple homicides.  During those fifteen days violent deaths reached 178 in Chihuahua alone and in Baja California they totaled 90.

These figures surpass the number of victims in the second half of last August, when 287 homicides were reported in the country. That month, the most violent in the last five years, there were 547 homicides.
In Chihuahua, the year's most violent state this year, there were 46 victims in the 48 hours of the 10th and 11th of October, an average of almost one per hour. And in Tijuana there were 35 homicides linked to organized crime in the first four days of the month.
-    Security measures have been reinforced at the U.S. Consulates in Monterrey, Nuevo Laredo, Matamoros, Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez. The U.S. ambassador acknowledged that the attack against the consulate in Monterrey is a symptom of the drug violence being experienced in the country.

-    Mexican military activity against drug trafficking will be extended to the northern states of Sonora and Coahuila as well as to the the southeast portion of the country at the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and the state of Chiapas.
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Frontera  (Tijuana, Baja Calif.)  10/16/08 
Wednesday's homicide tally in Tijuana reached nine, including a beheaded victim.
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Norte  (Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua)  10/16/08 
Eight men were executed (sic) almost simultaneously in different parts of Juarez last night (Wednesday): around 7:30 p.m. two of them were shot to death on Simona Barba Ave. Minutes later, three cadavers were located in a dead end alley off Mariano Jimenez St.; the three were handcuffed and each had been shot in the back of the neck. Later, two men were shot in a bar; one died there and the other may or may not have survived. By 9:15 p.m., yet another man was shot dead at the intersection of two avenues.
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La Prensa Grafica  (San Salvador, El Salv.) , El Diario de Yucatan (Merida, Yucatan)  10/15/08
 
The Presidents of Mexico, Felipe Calderon, and of El Salvador, Elias Antonio Saca, met in Mexico City and endorsed programs against common national challenges including "the defense of the rights of immigrants."
Calderon emphasized that both countries "must fight against the measures which criminalize our migrants in our territories and particularly in the United States." The Salvadoran president  pointed out that both countries are "on the forefront of the defense" of the migrants.
He also thanked the "great support" by Mexico for the Salvadorans who cross Mexico "in search of a better life (in the U.S.)"
From January to June of this year Mexican officials repatriated 43,975 Central Americans who had entered illegally. In 2007 Mexico intercepted 120,000 undocumented immigrants along its southern border with Guatemala and Belize, of whom 114,000 were Central Americans.
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Armada Nacional de Colombia (the Colombian Navy's site) , Radio Caracol (Bogota, Colombia) 10/15/08
 
A joint operation by the Colombian Navy and Colombia's "DAS" (equiv. to the FBI) resulted in the seizure of 755 kilos of high purity cocaine, already packaged and loaded into two launches, ready to be exported. The event took place at an island of  the small San Bernardo archipelago, in the Caribbean Sea west of Cartagena.
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Prensa Libre  (Guatemala City, Guatemala) 10/15/08
 
114 Guatemalan deportees who had been originally arrested at the large round-up in May in Postville, Iowa, arrived on a flight from the U.S.  Some complained about being restrained during the return flight and also stated that their plans were to return to the United States.
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Critica (Sonora)  10/15/08
 
The house of a journalist in Nogales, Sonora, was hit by gunfire from assault weapons for five minutes early on Wednesday morning; the house ended up with at least 477 bullet impacts but no one inside was hurt. At least that many AK47 and AR15 shell casings were collected afterward. The report ends by saying: " The attack against Rivas Borquez (the journalist) crowned the climate of insecurity being experienced in Nogales, where the criminals have become lords and masters."
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El Debate  (Culiacan, Sinaloa)  10/15/08
 
Short takes from the front page:
-    Young man who'd been forcibly taken from his home is found murdered
-    Shootout inside (local) prison leaves two dead and seven wounded
-    11 persons executed (sic) at the end of the week in Sinaloa
-    Two state police are carried off by force
-    Three subjects riddled by gunfire in Culiacan
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El Diario (Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, ed.)  10/15/08
 
At about 7:30 a.m. Wednesday three Juarez prison guards were waiting at a business area street corner for their ride to work. But then armed subjects arrived in two vehicles  and opened fire on them; one of the killers  stepped out of his vehicle and gave each of the three fallen guards their final coup de grace.
And three other men were killed earlier by AK47 gunfire in Nuevo Casas Grande, a town to the S.W. of Juarez.
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El Imparcial  (Hermosillo, Sonora) 10/15/08
 
In Nogales, Sonora, within seven hours, two men were murdered, one of them tortured and later dumped with a "narcomessage" , while the other was riddled by gunfire . A third man was forcibly carried off right from the center of town.
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El Sur  (Acapulco, Guerrero)  10/15/08
 
Sixteen more Acapulco policemen are to be fired for flunking a drug test which showed they'd been using marihuana and cocaine. Thirty-nine more similar cases are pending final action. 
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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