Mexico rescues 275 workers from ‘slavery’

AFP, 6/12/2013

Mexican authorities have rescued at least 275 people who were being held in slave-like conditions at a camp where tomatoes are sorted and packed for export, officials said. Thirty-nine teenagers were among those being held against their will at the Bioparques de Occidente camp in Toliman, in the western state of Jalisco, regional prosecutor Salvador Gonzalez said late Tuesday. Five foremen were arrested for “grave violations and crimes, including the illegal privation of liberty and human trafficking,” Gonzalez told AFP.

The victims were rescued when a worker escaped and made it to the state capital Jalisco to file a complaint. Gonzalez said the contractors ran ads on the radio seeking workers, and offered room and board. But when the workers arrived they found themselves in overcrowded housing and were paid half of what had been offered, much of it delivered in vouchers redeemable at the company store, where items were sold at a high markup.

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61% of femicides concentrate in 8 states (Spanish)

La Jornada, 3/8/2013

61% of femicides concentrate in the State of Mexico, Chihuahua, DF, Guerrero, Baja California, Jalisco, Michoacan, and Veracruz. Records also indicate that some municipalities in these states have femicide rates above the national level.

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Thirteen killed in Mexico ‘gang shootout’

Al-Jazeera, 12/24/2012

Thirteen people have been killed and six others gravely wounded following numerous shootouts in the Mexican state of Jalisco, officials said. Bullet riddled vehicles and buildings showed the amount of firepower used by unnamed assailants who battled with
police on Sunday. Police information points to two groups who may be responsible for the violence, the Templar Gentlemen and the
New Generation Cartel of Jalisco. In total, more than 60,000 people have died in drug-related violence and more than 5,000 disappeared in Mexico since December 2006.

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Mexico destroys 8 mn chickens amid bird flu outbreak

AFP, 8/8/12

Eight million chickens have so far been slaughtered in Mexico and 66 million more were vaccinated in a bid to contain a bird flu outbreak in the west of the country, authorities said.

The agriculture ministry said in a statement that during the vaccination process in the Los Altos region of Jalisco state, diseased chickens were identified, leading to the destruction of the flu-carrying fowl…

A national animal health emergency was declared at the beginning of July, and the prices of both eggs and chickens have skyrocketed.

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Mexico to Vaccinate 1M Chickens Against Bird Flu

Fox News Latino, 07/10/2012

A shipment of 1 million doses of vaccine from China will be used to inoculate chickens over the next few days to contain a bird-flu outbreak, Mexico’s National Union of Poultry Farmers, or UNA, said.

According to UNA, the number of farms with a confirmed presence of the flu virus has increased to 29, five more than indicated in the previous report, so that the epidemic has now affected close to 2.5 million barnyard fowl in the western state of Jalisco.

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The Kingpins

The New Yorker, William Finnegan, 6/2/12

Guadalajarans sometimes offer it [their yearly book fair] up as Exhibit A for the case that the city is a civilized place where life goes on unmarked by the violence that disfigures large parts of Mexico.

By late 2011, that argument was hard to make. Two days before the fair opened, twenty-six corpses were dumped under the Millennium Arches, a downtown landmark. Near the bodies, which bore signs of torture, was a message—what is known as a narcomanta—signed by the Zetas, the most feared organized-crime group in Mexico. The message taunted the Sinaloa cartel, the country’s biggest crime group, and its leader, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as El Chapo (Shorty). Sinaloa has controlled Guadalajara, which is the capital of the western state of Jalisco, for decades. “We’re in Jalisco and we are not leaving,” the Zetas announced. “This is proof that we are deep inside the kitchen.” Most narcomantas (which appear virtually every day somewhere in Mexico) are disinformation, their assertions dubious, their true authorship unknowable. But the Zetas have been pushing westward from their strongholds on the Gulf Coast, and they had already taken the neighboring state of Zacatecas, so there was no reason to doubt that they coveted Jalisco, a rich prize, or that this was indeed their atrocity and their message to Guadalajara.

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Found in Mexico: 15 tons of meth, 15 more bodies

Houston Chronicle, 2/9/12

Mexican troops have made an historic seizure of 15 tons of pure methamphetamine in the western state of Jalisco, the Mexican army said in a statement released late Wednesday.

Soldiers discovered the huge cache in the town of Tlajomulco de Zuniga, a suburb of Mexico’s second-largest city, Guadalajara.The statement had no other details but said it would publicly present the seizure on Thursday. Spokesmen answering the phone at the army’s base in Guadalajara refused to comment further.

No one could say late Wednesday what the largest seizure was previously in Mexico.The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said total meth seizures worldwide were 31 metric tons in 2009, the most recent figures available. The find outside Guadalajra is more than four times the size of a major seizure last summer of 3.4 tons (3.1 metric tons) and more than twice the total amount of meth seized in Mexico in 2009, according to the U.N. report.

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Zetas-Milenio Cartel Alliance Heralds Danger for Jalisco

In Sight – Organized Crime in the Americas, 9/14/11

The latest shift in Mexico’s perpetually changing criminal landscape is an alliance between the Zetas and the Milenio Cartel, which could be an ominous sign for the Pacific state of Jalisco.

According to Luis Carlos Najera Gutierrez, Jalisco secretary of public security, an alliance between the Zetas and Milenio Cartel (also known as the Valencia Cartel) has been suspected for months, and new evidence confirms the theory. Following a September 11 clash between police and cartel gunmen in Guadalajara that resulted in the death of two suspects and a policeman, Najera claimed that authorities found a message announcing the union of the two groups. Officials have not released the contents of the message, which was allegedly found in a vehicle seized in the aftermath of the shooting.

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Gunmen kill 9 police officers in western Mexico

CNN International, 10/29/2010

A group of gunmen ambushed a state police convoy in western Mexico and killed nine officers, state media reported.

Ten officers survived the attack, which occurred in the state of Jalisco on Thursday, state police said, according to the state-run Notimex news agency. One more officer is missing.

The officers were patrolling the southeastern part of the state when gunmen — armed with assault rifles and grenade launchers — attacked, the agency said.

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Another Mexico

The Chronicle of Higher Education, 1/15/2009

A Mexican saying holds that Como Mexico no hay dos — There is only one Mexico. American media these days interpret that notion with a vengeance. Story after story depicts a country overrun by out-of-control drug wars and murder, where corrupt police officers trip over beheaded victims more often than they nab perpetrators.

And then, somewhere below the radar, is Feria Internacional del Libro de Guadalajara, the foremost book fair in the Spanish-speaking world. It drew an astonishing 600,000 visitors over nine days in late November and early December. Over the years, a fabulous parade of internationally acclaimed writers from inside and outside the Spanish-speaking world — Margaret Atwood, William Golding, Martin Amis, André Brink, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison — have come. FIL’s aim, according to Raúl Padilla López, its chairman, is “to broaden the horizons of the book in Spanish,” to “aid in its continuing to be modern society’s primary cultural and educational vehicle.”

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