In Mexico’s Murders, Fury Is Aimed at Officials
VÃctor Javier GarcÃa still has a dozen marks across his abdomen and genitals from the burning cigarettes the police used to torture him into falsely confessing to being a serial killer.
It made no difference to a lower court judge that the DNA tests on the bodies identified as his victims were not conclusive. Or that a forensics expert testified that he had been ordered by his superiors to plant false evidence. Or even that witnesses retracted their testimony, saying the police had threatened them into making false statements.
Mr. GarcÃa was sentenced to 50 years anyway.
The State Supreme Court of Chihuahua threw the case out in June and set Mr. GarcÃa free, but only after three and a half years in prison, during which he lost his business, his savings and his wife to another man.
“Imagine it,” he said in an interview, choking back tears. “Everywhere she went, people looked at her like she was married to a terrible criminal, when the real criminals were outside. They still are.”
Troubling as it is, Mr. GarcÃa’s case is not isolated. International observers, human rights workers and federal authorities say it illustrates a disturbing pattern of malfeasance by state law enforcement authorities responsible for investigating Mexico’s most gruesome murder mystery: the deaths of more than 350 women in this border area over the last decade, including at least 90 raped and killed in similar ways.
Whether through incompetence, corruption or a lurid connection to the killings, the bungling and cover-ups are so extensive, federal investigators say, that the police and other officials have themselves become suspected of links to the crimes.
“The question I and so many other people have,” said Guadalupe MorfÃn, President Vicente Fox’s special envoy to Ciudad Juárez, “is why did the authorities go to such lengths to fabricate cases? Maybe it was because of incompetence. Or maybe it was because they didn’t want to be exposed.”
More: nytimes.com
Locust plague encircles Mexicos Cancun resort
Clouds of locusts have descended around the Mexican beach resort of Cancun, destroying corn crops and worrying officials in a region still recovering from the devastating fury of last years Hurricane Wilma.
Traveling in dark fogs, locusts are grasshoppers that have entered a swarming phase, capable of covering large distances and rapidly stripping fields of vegetation.
Imagine, they fly in the form of a flock. Imagine the width of a street, government official Martin Rodriguez said on Tuesday, describing the fields around Cancun on the Yucatan Peninsula.
More : alertnet.org
Women's murders rise in city on U.S.-Mexico border
- The number of women murdered in this notorious city on the U.S. border has surged this year, despite a government effort to crack down on crime, prosecutors said on Thursday.
More than 340 women have been strangled, beaten and stabbed to death in Ciudad Juarez, south of El Paso, Texas, in a 12-year killing spree that has provoked outrage in Mexico and abroad and led to calls for decisive government action to end the crimes.
Chihuahua state prosecutors said 30 women and young girls were murdered in the industrial city from Jan. 1 to
No end to women murders in Mexico
This year has been one of the worst for the murder of women in Mexico's Ciudad Juarez since a wave of killings started there in 1993, an official says.
Mexico's human rights ombudsman, Jose Luis Soberanes, said that 28 women had been murdered so far in 2005.
He called for a co-ordinated and tough effort by all levels of government to prevent more deaths in the city.
More than 300 women have been murdered in Ciudad Juarez. There is no generally accepted motive for the killings.
They have been variously attributed to serial killers, drug
Mexico's problems now our own
When two Arizona Border Patrol agents were shot by suspected drug smugglers in June, the attack was widely believed to have been perpetrated by deserters from the Mexican military.
U.S. officials say highly trained former military servicemen calling themselves the Zetas have become deadly players in cross-border drug-trafficking, leaving a trail of bodies in their wake.
The Zetas are suspected in connection with numerous kidnappings and murders in both countries – including at least three deaths in Dallas and, in Mexico, the killing of former Nuevo Laredo police chief Alejandro Dominguez, who was shot to death just
Lopez joins Hollywood trail to Mexico's murder town
The plight of more than 400 women murdered in a Mexican city in the last 12 years is to get the Hollywood treatment in a new movie starring Jennifer Lopez.
Lopez and co-stars Antonio Banderas and Martin Sheen are currently filming in the Mexican border town of Nogales, where a set resembling the streets of Ciudad Juarez, where the murders took place, has been erected.
In Bordertown, Lopez plays a Chicago-based reporter whose crusading investigations in Juarez, just across the border from Texas, awaken her sense of identity as a Latin woman. Banderas plays a
Mexico police hunt serial killer
Mexico City police are hunting a serial killer thought to be behind the unusual murders of as many as 15 elderly women.
The suspect - nicknamed "Mataviejitas" or the "Little Old Lady Killer" - is thought to be a man dressed in women's clothes or a well-built woman.
The killer is said to have entered the victims' homes by winning their trust - possibly by posing as a health worker - before beating and strangling them.
The Mexican capital has one of the highest crime rates in the world.
Bizarre coincidence?
Witnesses in the case of
Fugitives from Mexico hide in the bustle of Los Angeles
The killers cross the U.S.-Mexico border, assume new identities, get jobs, blend in among Spanish speakers and sometimes enjoy freedom for years.
But these fugitives from the law aren't border-jumpers heading south. As the recent arrest of one of Mexico's most notorious fugitives at a modest home outside Los Angeles showed, some criminals escape justice by heading north.
In the last 10 months, federal immigration officials have helped locate 13 Mexican murder suspects, along with hundreds of other criminals, hiding in plain sight in the Los Angeles area.
Alfredo RÃos Galeana,
Mexico to Swap Bonds Today to Lower Foreign Debt
Mexico will swap foreign-currency bonds for domestic securities today, the first part of a planned $3.3 billion exchange aimed at making the countrys finances less vulnerable to declines in the peso.
In todays transaction, investors can turn in as much as $500 million of dollar bonds in exchange for peso debt. Investors in November bought warrants from the government that gave them the option to turn in their dollar bonds for peso bonds. In March, the government sold similar warrants to holders of some bonds denominated in European currencies.
The swaps
Mexico's Zapatista rebels to start 6-month campaign tour
Mexico's Zapatista rebels were to launch a six-month nationwide campaign tour on Sunday aimed at attracting more support from citizens.
The Zapatistas, who were emerging from their jungle hideouts, said they would carry out the tour in a peaceful way by rejecting rifles or wars.
The rebels launched a brief uprising on the New Year's Day 12 years ago, calling for more rights for Mexico's Indian minority.
During a visit to Mexico's 31 states, Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos promised to
Mexico's Caribbean tourism resurfacing
Even as Mexican tourism officials sound the all-clear for parts of its Caribbean playground ravaged by Hurricane Wilma last month, potential visitors may find the destination cumbersome and costly to access thanks to cutbacks in air service among U.S. carriers.
American Airlines, a major player in the market, won't resume normal schedules until February, though it has added flights in December to meet holiday demand. United, Delta and Continental also have reduced service until at least mid-December. US Airways resumes its full schedule Dec. 1.
In the meantime, officials hoping to salvage the lucrative winter season are trying to
