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.
11/4/16 Al Jazeera
Heavy rain causes chaos in the north of the country, with the risk of storms set to persist. A trough of low pressure lying north-south through Mexico, and a cold weather front moving southwards across the United States, coincided to bring the severe weather conditions.
Tampico, a port city in the state of Tamaulipas, some 10km inland of the Gulf of Mexico, received 129mm of rain during the day. This compares with average monthly rainfall of around 40mm.
8/17/15 teleSUR
Tamaulipas state police arrested the leader of the region’s most violent cartel, Silvestre Haro Rodriguez aka El Chive, inside a private hospital in Tampico on Friday. The leader of the Gulf cartel was at the hospital visiting a relative who lost his hand in an accident with explosives when armed men guarding the entrance of the hospital drew the attention of police officers. A police communique explains they proceeded to arrest Haro Rodriguez along with eight other accomplices and relatives, including his nephew and right-hand man, Carlos Alberto Alvarez Diaz, known as R5.
The drug trafficker tried to bribe the police officers with three vehicles in a bid to avoid his arrest, the investigative journal Proceso reported, but he was transferred to Mexico City. The policemen also seized various weapons and four vehicles, with the help of the Marines, the military police, the federal police and the national army. The urban community of Reynosa, where the cartel operated along the U.S. border with Texas, has some 610,000 inhabitants and has been heavily affected by street confrontations between the cartel and other rival criminal groups or security forces.
06/25/14 Reuters
During Mexico’s first oil boom, Tampico was such a magnet for foreign capital that it became the biggest oil-exporting port in the Americas and home to grandiose architecture that inspired comparisons to Venice and New Orleans.
A century on, Tampico is the country’s kidnap capital, racked by fear, murder and extortion that threaten to choke off its bid to make a comeback as Mexico, the world’s No. 10 crude oil producer, opens up its oil and gas industry.
The Los Angeles Times, 11/11/2013
Joaquin Hernandez Galicia, the former Mexican oil union boss who rose to control a political empire built on patronage and intimidation but was eventually dethroned by a Mexican president wary of his vast power, died Monday. He was 91.
Hernandez, who went by the nickname “La Quina,” a play on his first name, died in the port city of Tampico, where he had been hospitalized with an abdominal ailment, according to the news agency Notimex.
Animal Politico, 2/20/2013
Según los reportes de incidencia delictiva difundidos por el Sistema Nacional de Seguridad Pública, durante 2012 entre los municipios con el mayor índice delictivo se colocó una delegación del Distrito Federal. En el rubro de “Robo” la delegación Cuauhtémoc tuvo la mayor incidencia del país, mientras que Tampico encabezó el rubro de secuestros, Acapulco el de asesinatos (en promedio por cada 100 mil habitantes); Yautepec, Morelos, posee el mayor promedio de violaciones; Oaxaca es la alcaldía con la media más elevada de lesiones dolosas y Cuautla, también en Morelos, es la que más extorsiones sufrió.
Incluidas por el Consejo Ciudadano para la Seguridad Pública y la Justicia Penal AC en el estudio “La violencia en los municipios de México en 2012″, presentado ayer, las cifras oficiales analizadas se concentraron en las 212 alcaldías del país con más de 100 mil habitantes, y en los que radican dos terceras partes de la población mexicana
Reuters, 9/13/12
The Mexican Navy said on Wednesday it had captured one of Mexico’s most wanted drug bosses, the head of the Gulf Cartel, in what would mark a major victory in President Felipe Calderon’s crackdown on organized crime…
Islas said he expected Costilla to be extradited to the United States, and that his testimony could prove damaging to officials in Tamaulipas and neighboring Veracruz state, which has also been dogged by allegations of corruption…
With Costilla’s apparent capture, the cartel is looking increasingly weak, and bloody turf wars for control of the northeastern border with Texas would now intensify. “There will be an increase in violence there,” Islas said.
The stage was now set for increased hostilities in the region between Mexico’s two most powerful gangs, Guzman’s Sinaloa Cartel and the Zetas, he noted.
This could prove a headache for Pena Nieto, who has vowed to quickly reduce the number of beheadings and mass executions. There have been more than 55,000 drug-related deaths in Calderon’s six-year offensive against cartels.
The Washington Post, 6/27/12
Tampico, Mexico…
Voters here have their lives on the line in Mexico’s presidential election Sunday, in a city a few hours’ drive south of Texas where the municipal police were so hopelessly corrupt that they had their weapons taken away and their duties transferred to convoys of masked soldiers deployed to stem outright panic after two former mayors were abducted…
“On the surface, things look normal, but they are not,” said Carlos Heredia, a scholar at Mexico City’s Center for Economic Research and Teaching who is from Tampico. “It’s a small city. Everybody in politics and business knows each other, and I can tell you people are scared.”
Heredia said voters in Tampico are responding to Peña Nieto’s promise to focus on the crimes that hurt ordinary Mexicans the most — kidnapping, extortion, robbery — rather than trying to stop the global narcotics trade. But Heredia and others ask: How can you confront these types of crimes without going after the large mafias that sponsor and profit from it?
BBC News, 6/20/2012
The PRI’s opponents say the party has not shaken off its authoritarian and corrupt past and has links to the drug cartels.
“I can say categorically that in my government, there won’t be any form of pact or agreement with organised crime,” he told the BBC.
Houston Chronicle, 11/13/2010
Tethered as they are to the scalding and hurricane-harried coastal marshes of the Gulf, people in this port and petroleum city long have taken pride in shrugging off whatever the world has thrown at them.
But for the past year, the 1 million residents of this metropolis, 300 miles south of the Rio Grande at Brownsville, have been slammed time and again by Mexico’s criminal tempest.
Scores of people from the city’s small and tightly-knit business community – including two former mayors – have been kidnapped. Extortion has reached even the most threadbare shops. Gun battles have erupted on the city’s main drag, raged in crowded neighborhoods and nearby ranchlands alike.
Many families who can afford to do so have moved to Texas for safety. Some 30 percent of small businesses have closed, business leaders say. And streets, restaurants and stores empty quickly just past nightfall.
There are bloodier choke points in Mexico’s gang wars: headline-grabbing killing fields like Ciudad Juarez and the cities bordering south Texas, or parts of the Pacific coast states of Sinaloa, Michoacan and Guerrero.
But only a little off the radar, in an untold number of villages, towns and cities across Mexico, there are communities like Tampico where the threat is just as tangible, the terror as real. They present this fatal reminder: No matter how prosperous or poor, no one can expect to be spared.
El Universal, 10/13/2010
President Felipe Calderón confirms the reappearance of students that had gone missing in Tampico. In his Twitter account last night, Calderón wrote: “I am aware of the terrible situation in Tampico. We have reinforced the federal presence. The tell me the students that disappeared are being rescued.”
Yesterday after, it was reported that at least five Tec de Monterrey students from the Tampico campus were kidnapped as they left the school grounds.
Mexico Institute 