“Narco-banners” hung from Nuevo Laredo overpasses and signed in the name of Los Zetas declared: “We are not terrorists or guerrillas. We concentrate on our work and the last thing we want is to have problems with any government.”
Ayman Joumaa AKA “Junior,” a Lebanese drug kingpin with alleged connections to both Hezbollah and Mexico’s Zetas drug cartel, was charged with drug trafficking and money laundering, the Justice Department and DEA announced.
Norma Andrade, a critical voice demanding justice in the long string of “femicides” in Ciudad Juárez is stable condition after being shot twice Dec. 2, as she drove home from her job as a teacher in the violent Mexican border city.
Poverty decreased in most of Latin America—only Honduras and Mexico showed an increase in poverty rates, 1.7% for Honduras and 1.5% for Mexico.
Unknown assailants gunned down Mexican activist Nepomuceno Moreno in Hermosillo, Sonora. Moreno had opposed the government’s “war on drugs”; local officials suggested he was a criminal himself.
Private contractors are now bidding for US-funded “drug war” operations, including training for Mexican soldiers and police.
Mexican human rights activists filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court calling for an investigation into possible crimes against humanity by the security forces under President Felipe Calderón’s campaign against the drug cartels.
The AFL-CIO presented its 2011 George Meany-Lane Kirkland Human Rights Award to Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, general secretary of the Mexican mineworkers union, now living in exile in Vancouver.
The discovery of a drug tunnel linking San Diego and Tijuana warehouses led to the seizure of some 17 tons of cannabis as well as a large grow operation in the industrial area of Otay Mesa east of San Diego.
The decapitated and mutilated body of an unidentified man was found in Nuevo Laredo. A message left under the decapitated head named the man as “El Rascatripas”, a moderator for a website where citizens anonymously report narco-violence.
The Mexican Senate has called on the government of President Felipe Calderón to start criminal proceedings against US officials involved in two programs that let firearms enter Mexico illegally.
Mexican Governance Secretary Francisco Blake Mora was killed when his helicopter crashed near Chalco—one week after a memorial ceremony for Juan Camilo Mouriño, his predecessor who had been killed in a plane crash three years earlier.
