Noel Salgueiro Nevarez AKA “El Flaco” (Skinny), the Sinaloa Cartel’s top boss in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, was captured by army troops in Culiacán. But the cartel’s maximum boss, “Shorty” Guzmán, remains at large.
The UN High Commissioner of Human Rights voiced concerns regarding the growing number of journalists killed in Mexico, and called for Mexican authorities to investigate these crimes and bring those responsible to justice.
Police in Mexico’s resort city of Acapulco found five decomposing human heads left in a sack outside a primary school. The city’s schools have been closed since last month with teachers on strike in response to extortion threats from criminal gangs.
The US Treasury Department imposed sanctions on four Colombian nationals and 12 companies said to be linked to Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel. The move comes amid charges that US law enforcement is favoring the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico’s bloody narco wars.
The Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) agreed to end a sit-in the unionists had been holding in Mexico City’s main plaza since March; the government has agreed to find jobs for laid-off workers.
Two half-naked mutilated bodies left hanging from a bridge in the Mexican border town of Nuevo Laredo were accompanied by “narco-messages” scrawled on cardboard saying the killings were an example of the will happen to “Internet busybodies.”
Leaders of 71 unions in 18 countries have called for Mexico’s federal government to take over the stalled investigation of a US union activist’s murder in 2007. Santiago Rafael Cruz was organizing migrant laborers in Monterrey when he was beaten to death.
Mexican marines shot and killed Gustavo Acosta Luján at his home in Apodaca, Nuevo León, in what appeared to be a botched raid targeting a suspected criminal in a different house in the neighborhood.
Two high-ranking US officials have been removed from their posts in fallout from Operation Fast and Furious, a bungled ATF program that allowed some 2,000 weapons to go from the US to Mexico.
Mexican President Felipe Calderón said “terrorists” carried out the arson attack on Monterrey’s Casino Royale, which left 52 dead. The number of illegal gambling houses has swelled in Mexico as the cartels turn to them for money laundering.
Mexican senators said they planned to question officials about President Calderón’s agreement with Barack Obama allowing US agents on a Mexican military base to carry out intelligence work related to the “War on Drugs.”
Sinaloa Cartel kingpin Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla AKA “El Mayito” filed pleadings in US court accusing the DEA of giving the cartel “carte blanche to continue to smuggle tons of illicit drugs into Chicago and the rest of the United States.”
