Mexico Travel Advisory Shines Light On Drug Cartel Violence

[Angelhair]

December is usually a busy time for Mexican migrants to drive home for the holidays, but the Mexican government is advising them to travel in convoys this year.

Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University says the new advisory sheds light on Mexico's continuing struggle to overcome drug cartels.

"In the past, a lot of people were able to drive down from the United States," Jones said. "People would come from Georgia, New York and certainly Texas, and drive to whatever (Mexican) state they were headed to. (It was) just like driving in the United States. You'd get in the car, pack up the luggage, pack up the kids, pack up the gifts, and drive on down. Now that trip is a lot more treacherous, and a lot more difficult. As a result, half of the people who used to go are no longer going."

When asked how that affected Texas and the United States, Jones said:

"One thing that’s happening is you lose out on a lot of big ticket items that people were taking back as holiday gifts. Washers, dryers, microwaves, a lot of durable goods that are much more expensive in Mexico will not be purchased and taken to their relatives. There's often a birthday gift, Christmas gift, and wedding gift all wrapped in one because this is the only time people travel. (Also), since it's much more difficult to cross now (and) they're much less likely to go home, we sorta bottled up a lot of undocumented immigrants who are here in the United States who in the past used to go home for three to four months."

Jones also said the warning to travel in packs indicates the Mexican government doesn't have control of the nation.

Mexico Travel Advisory Shines Light On Drug Cartel Violence - Fox News Latino

 

[Angelhair]

How about just advising them to stay home!!! The mexican government has not been able to protect the 30,000 people killed so far how in hell are they going to protect the traveler??? Sheer lunacy!

 

[waltky]

Latest body count in Mexican narco-war...

17 Killed In Mexico Drug Violence
6 Feb.`11 — At least 17 people were killed in drug-related violence in northern Mexico this weekend, nine of them in restive Ciudad Juarez, the state attorney general's office said.

In Mexico's crime capital Ciudad Juarez, which is just across the border from El Paso in the southern US state of Texas, gunmen opened fire on Saturday and killed three young students at a used car dealership. A teenager, a woman and a 40-year-old man died in a second attack by unidentified gunmen elsewhere in Juarez, a statement from the Chihuahua state attorney general's office said.

A third triple homicide at a garage left a 13-year-old boy among the dead. Another three people were killed in separate shooting incidents in Ciudad Juarez, which has a population of 1.3 million and saw 2,900 murders last year. Five men were also killed overnight in other parts of Chihuahua state, the official statement said.

Meanwhile, in the northern state of Nuevo Leon, the mutilated bodies of five men were found Sunday dumped on the side of a road. They were found in the town of Los Ramones. The day before, authorities recovered the dismembered body of Francisco Martinez Ramirez, the chief of guards at a Monterrey prison who was dragged out of his house by armed men Friday. His body was found in a car in Monterrey, Mexico's third largest city. Northern Mexico has suffered in the bloody war between feuding drug cartels that has left over 34,200 people dead since December 2006, when President Felipe Calderon launched a nationwide crackdown that has failed to stem the tide of violence.

Separately, Mexican soldiers have shot dead 13 suspected gang members in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas, including six gunmen who were killed in a town near the US border, military officials said. Three other suspected gang members were arrested during patrols over the past week. Tamaulipas has seen an escalation of violence recently between the rival Gulf and Zetas cartels as they vie for control of the lucrative trafficking routes to the United States.

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3 teens killed in Mexico, 2 of them US citizens
Feb 7,`11 -- Three teenage boys were shot to death in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez, at least two of them U.S. citizens and high school students in Texas, authorities said Monday.

The boys were killed at 4:22 p.m. Saturday while looking at cars in a dealership in the city across the border from El Paso, Texas, Chihuahua prosecutors' spokesman Arturo Sandoval said. One was found inside a white Jeep Cherokee and the other two in the courtyard. There were no leads on suspects or a motive, Sandoval said. Two managers were also in the dealership during the attack. One refused to give a statement, while the statement from the other manager was not released because of the pending investigation, Sandoval added. At least 60 bullet casings were found at the scene.

One of the boys, Carlos Mario Gonzalez Bermudez, 16, was a sophomore at Cathedral High School in El Paso, said Nick Gonzalez, the Roman Catholic brother who is the principal. Another victim, Juan Carlos Echeverri, 15, had been a freshman at the private all-boys Catholic school last year but left to study in Ciudad Juarez, Gonzalez said. Both were U.S. citizens, he said. The U.S. Embassy in Mexico City said it could provide no immediate information on the case. The third teenager was identified as Cesar Yalin Miramontes Jimenez, 17.

The school principal said Gonzalez Bermudez mainly lived in Ciudad Juarez and commuted each day across the border. He said 20 percent of the 485 students enrolled at Cathedral are from Ciudad Juarez. Gonzalez said the school's sophomore class had a prayer service Monday and officials planned a rosary service for the entire school later in the week. "It's a lot of pain, a lot of sorrow, a lot of tears, a lot of coming together as a community to try to hold each other up and to try and make sense today," Gonzalez said. "How do you make sense of this meaningless tragedy? Hopefully this can really empower us to make a positive change in the border community because their deaths will have no meaning otherwise."

Many Ciudad Juarez residents travel across the border on a daily basis for work or study. Some Mexicans live in El Paso for safety reasons and commute to Ciudad Juarez. Ciudad Juarez city has become one of the world's most dangerous cities amid a fierce turf war between the Sinaloa and Juarez drug cartels. More than 3,000 people were killed last year in the city of 1.3 million residents. Gonzalez said students at the school have had a number of relatives killed in the violence in Ciudad Juarez. A graduate of the school was killed last fall, he said. "Our Juarez kids knew all three" of the teenagers killed over the weekend, he said. "It's a very tight knit community. A lot of them car pool; that's how they know each other."

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