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.
08/23/2021
Source: Mexico Daily News
A conservation area in the Bacalar region of southern Quintana Roo is under threat by a 950-home residential development, claim local citizens who have filed a complaint against the project.
Arrivée Lagon Bacalar will include condominiums, a commercial area and 400 lots for residential construction in Buenavista, a community on the shores of Lake Bacalar, also known as the lake of seven colors.
06/09/2021
Source: AP
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico announced Tuesday it has barred former Treasury and Foreign Relations Secretary Luis Videgaray from holding public office there for 10 years, after finding he failed to accurately report his holdings, income or properties between late 2012 and 2016.
The Department of Public Service said it was the maximum punishment allowed for the violation. Mexican government employees and elected officials above a certain level are required to file income disclosure forms.
04/25/2021
Source: The Associated Press
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico is suffering “critical” failures in law enforcement and some of the worst levels of journalist killings outside a war zone, the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights said in a report.
The Mexican government said Sunday that it is “strengthening its work” in the areas criticized by the commission, which is a body of the Organization of American States.
04/14/2021
Source: AP News
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Activists and opposition figures cried foul Wednesday after Mexico’s Senate passed legislation to require cellphone companies to gather customers’ identification and biometric data, like fingerprints or eye scans.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s Morena party supported the bill, saying it is needed to fight crimes like extortion and kidnapping that frequently involve the use of cellphones.
The legislation, which was already passed by the Chamber of Deputies, would give cell companies two years to collect the data and make it available to the government.
04/01/2021
Source: El País USA
Sometimes Mariano Rosales has just enough time to lower his grocery store’s metal shutters and lock himself in the cellar with his wife. But there are moments when the bullets start firing so close that the couple just hit the aisle floor, their eyes trained on packs of Doritos. In his 12 years running his store in Fresnillo, in Mexico’s Zacatecas state, Rosales has never been more afraid. “We are scared to death. We spend all day praying to Christ,” said the shopkeeper.
His fears are hardly unfounded. Fresnillo recently received the unwelcome accolade of being named the least safe place in the country according to its own residents, in a survey for Mexico’s national statistics agency. Inter-cartel violence is the top of the city’s concerns as elections loom on June 6.Three weeks ago in front of Rosales’ store, a group of sicarios – hired cartel assassins – killed the city’s deputy director of urban development while he was standing in the door of his own home. A few days earlier a lawyer was shot dead on the same street as he was leaving his office. And one week ago, three more neighbors were shot a couple of blocks down the street. The day the city official was shot dead, 14 other people were murdered in this city of 250,000 souls. Little surprise then that the survey found 95 percent of Fresnillo residents feel living in their city is unsafe.
3/9/2021
Source: The Washington Post
Femicide protests in Mexico City turned violent Monday after women clashed with riot police stationed outside the National Palace, the residence of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Activists say he’s failed to take rampant sexual violence seriously, even as it’s led to the deaths of 10 women a day.
López Obrador, also known by the acronym AMLO, dismissed the protests that coincided with International Women’s Day, arguing they were spurred by his conservative opponents. But the populist president with left-wing origins, who has long had tense relationships with feminist movements, has in recent weeks stoked the anger of many women for his support of a gubernatorial candidate accused of sexual assault, alongside continuing high cases of gender-based violence.
12/04/19 – Bloomberg
By Andrea Navarro
San Miguel de Allende oozes old Mexico charm. There are the cobblestone streets, the colonial-era buildings and wrought-iron balconies, the neo-Gothic steeples soaring high above the pink-sandstone church anchoring a corner of the main plaza. Travel and Leisure magazine has twice named it the best city in the world, a ratification of how beloved it is with tourists and retirees from the U.S., Canada and beyond.
But lately, San Miguel has been attracting a very different sort of crowd: the drug cartels. And the moment they arrived and began pushing cocaine and imposing their brutal brand of property tax, the murders began.
12/03/19 – NY Times
By Kirk Semple
The Mexican authorities on Sunday detained several suspects implicated in the massacre of nine members of a Mormon sect in northern Mexico in early November, according to the office of the nation’s attorney general.
The detentions came during a joint operation by members of the Mexican armed forces and intelligence agents and followed the detention last month of another suspect living in Mexico City, the attorney general’s office said in a statement, providing no further information about the suspects’ identities, their connection to the murders or the circumstances of their arrests.
12/03/19 – AP News
Mexican authorities say they have seized more than a ton of cocaine from a tanker truck in the Gulf coast state of Tabasco.
The army said Monday that a gamma ray scanner at a highway checkpoint spotted anomalies in the truck’s load.
12/03/19 – AP News
By Maria Verza
When dozens of pickup trucks crowded with armed men and mounted machine guns roared into Villa Union, residents of the small town near the U.S. border began to realize they were the target of a military-style invasion. What followed were hours-long gunbattles between a cartel force estimated to number 70 to 150 men and state police that left 23 people dead. At least 50 homes and buildings were riddled with bullet holes.
In the aftermath, authorities found about 20 abandoned vehicles, some with machine-gun turrets and welded armoring; the doors of many were professionally printed with the initials of a drug cartel. At least four had .50 caliber mounted machine guns. Residents claimed there were at least twice that many pickups, with some escaping.
