US renews warning on Mexican travel; Sonora not included

[Angelhair]

U.S. State Department has renewed its travel warning for Mexico.

The warning - a step up from travel alerts - urges U.S. citizens to defer unnecessary travel to the northern Mexican states of Michoacán and Tamaulipas and parts of Chihuahua, Sinaloa, Durango and Coahuila.

The state of Sonora is not included.

But the city of Nogales, Sonora, is again mentioned as one of the cities in northern Mexico where large gun battles have taken place and as one of the cities that have experienced daytime public shootouts. This wording has been included in the previous travel warning from March and the travel alerts from 2009.

The number of killings in Mexico's drug wars has spiked to unprecedented levels in Nogales over the past three years as drug cartels battle for the prized corridor and as Mexican law enforcement attempts to weaken them.

There were 130 homicides in 2009, up from 116 in 2008 and 52 in 2007, according to official figures from the Sonoran government. Through this June, there have been 120 homicides.

Due to this situation, the State Department has given family members of officials at the U.S. Consulates in Nogales, Sonora; Tijuana; Ciudad Juarez; Nuevo Laredo; Monterrey; and Matamoros permission to temporarily move to the U.S. This new warning extends the authorization that was first issued in March.

Unlike a mandatory evacuation, families aren't required to leave but are offered monetary assistance to move. The State Department does not divulge how many families have taken the offer.

The new warning also includes a warning about Mexican highways along the U.S.-Mexico border that echoes a "warden message" issued by the U.S. Consulate in Nogales in May. The warning says consulate employees and their families from interior Mexican posts are not allowed to travel by car across the U.S.-Mexico border.

US renews warning on Mexican travel; Sonora not included

 

[waltky]

Latest body count in Mexico's narco-war...

At least 30 killed in Mexican drug-related violence
13 Feb.`11 — At least 30 people died in a staggering surge in drug-related violent crime in Mexico rocking the cities of Monterrey and Guadalajara, and the northern state of Chihuahua, police said.

The attacks were the latest deadly violence gripping Mexico's war on drugs, as the country's various criminal cartels struggle over turf and the government uses police and soldiers in an attempt to crush them. In Chihuahua state, 11 people were slain in several separate murders in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico's deadliest city, across from the US city of El Paso, Texas between late Friday and Saturday, authorities said Saturday. And gunmen shot dead five men together in an additional group killing on a highway between Chihuahua city, the state capital, and Ciudad Juarez, police said. Separately, around 4:00 am (1000 GMT) a special unit of soldiers and police known as the Immediate Reaction Group stopped two suspicious vehicles in a suburb of the industrial city of Monterrey, the Secretariat of Defense said. The car occupants responded by pulling out weapons and opening fire. "Seven alleged aggressors lost their lives" in the shootout, the secretariat said in a statement, adding that the attackers "struck the side of a vehicle, resulting in a civilian death."

Monterrey, a prosperous city and home to the local operations of several multinational corporations, is at the intersection of several highways -- often used as drug smuggling routes -- heading north into the United States. Two rival drug organizations, the Gulf cartel and their former allies, the Zetas, are battling for control of the area. Meanwhile, at around the same time an unknown assailant threw a fragmentation grenade at the porch of a crowded bar in the western city of Guadalajara, police told reporters. Gunmen opened fire at the bar, which was packed with customers, then fled in several cars. Three women and three men were killed in the attack and more than 20 were wounded, police said. Drug gangs have escalated a violent turf war in the past weeks in Guadalajara, Mexico's second most populous city with 4.4 million residents.

This is the second grenade attack on a Guadalajara bar in less than a month: on January 16 an argument between gunmen and musicians ended in a blast that killed two people. More than 34,600 people have died in drug trafficking related violence since December 2006, when the government of President Felipe Calderon deployed soldiers and federal police in a widespread crackdown on the illegal cartels. As authorities stepped up their anti-drug operations, they discovered a secret tunnel used to smuggle drugs into the United States. The tunnel, located in the border town of Nogales, in Sonora state, was built as an addition to the local water drainage system, according to Mexican federal police. More than 300 kilograms (660 pounds) of marijuana and a handgun were discovered inside, the police said.

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