Óscar Osvaldo García Montoya, AKA “El Compayito,” a drug lord arrested by Mexican police in connection with 900 murders, is a deserted navy corporal who trained with Guatemala’s feared Kaibiles.
Moisés Montero Álvarez AKA “El Coreano,” alleged leader of the Independent Cartel of Acapulco (CIDA), was captured by Mexican federal police and charged in the massacre of 20 abducted vacationers from Michoacán who were mistaken for members of a rival cartel.
Mexican government and university researchers warn that some 200 species in the deserts and mountains of northern Chihuahua state are being pushed to extinction by droughts and other extreme weather events linked to climate change.
A memo leaked by the hacker group LulzSec from the Tucson police on a supposed emerging collaboration between Hezbollah and the Mexican drug cartels sparked hearings on Capitol Hill. But the memo itself was mostly empty speculation.
Frustrated by slow progress in determining the fates of missing loved ones, relatives of ten men from southern Mexico who vanished on the US border have embarked on a hunger strike and public protest.
Key state elections in Mexico returned the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to power, in what commentators are calling a signal that the once-discredited party could regain the presidency next year.
Mexican poet Javier Sicilia, who has led a national protest movement against the militarization of the “drug war” since losing his son to narco-violence, met at the Federal District’s Chapultepec Castle with President Felipe Calderón.
Paramilitaries linked to organized crime have used death threats and violence to cause a general exodus of several campesino communities in the Sierra del Sur of southern Mexico’s Guerrero state.
Prominent Mexican journalist and commentator Miguel Angel López Velasco, who covered narco trafficking for the Veracruz daily Notiver, was shot dead along with his wife and son by gunmen who broke into the family’s home.
A “peace caravan,” which has spent a week travelling through Mexico to protest against drug-related violence and the “war on drugs,” crossed into the US at El Paso, where protest leader Javier Sicilia called for a halt to the Merida Initiative.
Soldiers patroling the Mexican border town of Ciudad Camargo discovered a warehouse where two armor-plated “tanks” were being constructed. Authorities have intercepted 100 such “narco-tanks,” which the press has dubbed “The Monsters.”
Two undocumented migrants being held at a jail in the border town of Tapachula in Mexico’s southern Chiapas state were hospitalized after 21 days on hunger strike—despite a new law that supposedly protects migrants’ rights.
