Seeking to improve understanding, communication, and cooperation between Mexico and the United States by promoting original research, encouraging public discussion, and proposing policy options for enhancing the bilateral relationship.
1/4/2023
Source: Reuters
Mexico’s defense ministry said on Tuesday it had flown 200 military personnel to the northern border city of Juarez to fight organized crime there, days after a deadly prison riot led to a manhunt for escaped convicts.
Authorities also sacked the director of the prison, from which at least 30 inmates escaped, they said Tuesday.
Source: The Guardian
Mexican gangsters used a convoy of vehicles – including a truck with homemade armour-plating – to ram their way into a prison before opening fire at guards and rescuing nine inmates.
Several other vehicles were also set on fire in the spectacular plot targeting the jail in the central city of Tula. The escapees include José Artemio Maldonado Mejía, alias “El Michoacano”, the leader of a local crime organisation known as Pueblos Unidos.
Source: Reuters
WASHINGTON, Nov 30 (Reuters) – A U.S. judge sentenced the wife of imprisoned Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman to three years in prison on Tuesday, after she pleaded guilty to helping the Sinaloa drug cartel.
Before her sentencing in a federal court in Washington, Emma Coronel Aispuro, 32, pleaded with U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras to show her mercy.
10/01/2021
Source: Mexico News Daily
According to official statistics, some 147,000 people apprehended by Mexican immigration authorities were held in a detention center between January and August this year. Earlier this month, Herbenson Elma, 38, of Haiti and Canadian Daniel Maté, 46, joined this unenviable club.
Both were apprehended by authorities while traveling by bus through Mexico, but this is where most similarities in their stories end.
“We were in prison together,” said Elma, who, with other Haitian migrants, was released shortly after Maté.
07/21/16 Vice News
The prisoner, who comes from the Rarámuri indigenous group, says the trouble began at a traditional festival that involved downing considerable amounts of the corn-based spirit called tesgüino.
“My cousin arrived at 4am with a caliber 22 gun and began walking towards me,” he recalled, asking that his name not be used. “When I felt the bullets inside my body and all the desperation, I turned around and placed a bullet in his forehead. My cousin fell down onto the flames and I pulled him away so he would not get burned. I told another cousin to give word to the sheriff.”
2/19/16 International Business Times
Mexican authorities have detained employees of the old and overcrowded Topo Chico prison in Monterrey, following the 11 February riot which resulted in the deaths of 52 people. Roberto Flores, the state prosecutor in Nuevo Leon has since accused prison director Gregoria Salazar, prison guard Jose Reyes Hernandez and the deputy superintendent Jesus Fernando Dominguez of homicide and abuse of authority and has placed them preventive custody.
The riot happened after fighting broke out between supporters of a gang leader Juan Pedro Saldivar-Farías known as Zeta 27, who have effectively taken control of the prison, and Jorge Iván Hernández, “El Credo”, a leader of another group, Gulf Cartel. It was not immediately clear how the victims died with reports stating that there was no gunfire.
The prison has long housed members of Zeta 27, who have spread fear across Mexico before being debilitated by arrests and the deaths of their founding members. The gang was also linked to another prison murder in Nuevo Leon in 2012, when 44 inmates died after Zeta members plotted with guards to stage an elaborate escape.
WHEN: TOMORROW, Friday, May 27, 9:00-10:30am
WHERE: 5th Floor Conference Room, Woodrow Wilson Center
Mexico’s lower courts are undergoing a dramatic transformation, abandoning its behind-closed-doors, written criminal trials, and embracing a new criminal justice system (NCJS) with oral, adversary procedures. This reform template has been adopted by at least fourteen nations in Latin America. In order to measure the effects these reforms have on the criminal justice system, this event will present two studies that examine the system from an inmate’s perspective.
Roberto Hernández, the creator of the movies Presunto Culpable and El Tunel, will present a study that quantifies how authorities use their investigative powers to conduct eyewitness identification procedures; and interview or interrogate suspects. Elena Azaola will discuss a study conducted in 2014 in youth detention centers for adolescents who committed serious crimes. The study analyzes the background of these adolescents and the factors that contributed to their criminal actions.
Roberto Hernández
Mexican Lawyer and Filmmaker
Elena Azaola
Psychoanalyst and Anthropologist
John Bailey
Professor, Georgetown University
WHEN: Friday, March 27, 9:00-10:30am
WHERE: 5th Floor Conference Room, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Mexico’s lower courts are undergoing a dramatic transformation, abandoning its behind-closed-doors, written criminal trials, and embracing a new criminal justice system (NCJS) with oral, adversary procedures. This reform template has been adopted by at least fourteen nations in Latin America. In order to measure the effects these reforms have on the criminal justice system, this event will present two studies that examine the system from an inmate’s perspective.
Roberto Hernández, the creator of the movies Presunto Culpable and El Tunel, will present a study that quantifies how authorities use their investigative powers to conduct eyewitness identification procedures; and interview or interrogate suspects. Elena Azaola will discuss a study conducted in 2014 in youth detention centers for adolescents who committed serious crimes. The study analyzes the background of these adolescents and the factors that contributed to their criminal actions.
Speakers
Roberto Hernández
Mexican Lawyer and Filmmaker
Elena Azaola
Psychoanalyst and Anthropologist
Moderator
John Bailey
Professor, Georgetown University
2/09/2015 via CNN
In Mexico’s male-dominated drug trade, her life story became a legend.
Now, after more than seven years behind bars, the woman known as “The Queen of the Pacific” is free. A judge ruled in favor of her appeal last week, Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office said in a statement Saturday.
Sandra Ávila Beltrán’s story is the subject of a best-selling book and a popular ballad.
Los Angeles Times, 6/9/2013
A group of armed men stormed a prison in the Mexican state of Guerrero early Sunday, freeing nine prisoners, killing two guards and injuring another guard and a prisoner, state officials said. The prison break was the latest disturbing news from the southwestern coastal state. Like neighboring Michoacan, a number of Guerrero’s rural regions have been overrun by a drug cartel called the Knights Templar. Vigilante groups have emerged, purportedly in an effort to take their communities back, but there is a concern that some groups are linked to rival criminal gangs.
The breakout is also the latest embarrassment for the notoriously porous Mexican prison system. A number of major escapes in recent years occurred after collusion with prison authorities. Although it remains unclear exactly what happened in the Guerrero prison, the state government said in a news release that the prison director left the scene after the men were freed, and could not be located. State officials said the armed men entered the prison in the city of La Union, north of the Pacific resort city of Zihuatanejo. They shot and killed the two guards and left a third guard and a prisoner injured by gunfire.
Mexico Institute 