Mexico & Nafta - April 2011 (ISSN 1741-444X)
Mayor escapes assassination again
On 28 March the mayor of the municipality of García in Nuevo León, survived a second attempt to assassinate him in little more than a month.
The mayor, Jaime Rodríguez, did lose another bodyguard, while four others were wounded. Rodríguez said that on the second occasion more than 40 gang members tried to kill him and take on his eight bodyguards.
Rodríguez habitually travels in an armour-plated vehicle, with another car transporting four of his eight-person bodyguard. The bodyguards' vehicle is not reinforced.
What makes the attacks on Rodríguez significant is that he hails from the main opposition Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) which, according to President Felipe Calderón, used to have 'an understanding' with the main gangs when in power (either at the state or federal level) to look the other way when the gangs wanted to move a consignment of drugs.
The municipality of García is a suburb of Monterrey, where gang violence has increased dramatically in the past 18 months.
On 25 Febuary Rodríguez reported that three gangsters had tried to kill him. Spookily, both assassination attempts came while he was driving along the Avenida Lincoln into Monterrey. In the first attack, the mayor's bodyguards killed three of the attackers.
Rodríguez assumed that the people trying to kill him worked for Los Zetas. This is one of the gangs which is fighting to keep the Sinaloa gang out of Monterrey. The Sinaloa gang, according to some security experts, is favoured, perhaps unwittingly, by the federal government, the fedral police and the army. The federal government denies this and argues that the bulk of the gang killing in Mexico is the result of turf battles between gangs.
Cassez: The supreme court has agreed to consider the case of Florence Cassez, a Frenchwoman who has been sentenced to 60 years in Mexican jails for kidnapping and gangsterism. Her conviction, and Mexico's refusal to allow her to serve her sentence in France, has led to a diplomatic row between France and Mexico.
Swine flu: On 24 March the state government of Chihuahua, on the border with the US, issued an alert after a police officer died after contracting the influenza H1N1influenza virus. Two other people have the disease and 15 others may also have it. The state governor, César Duarte, said that it was important that people realised that the state was not facing a pandemic, as the country did two years ago. He did say, however, that the state government was introducing security measures to prevent the spreading of the virus.
Duarte suggested that the 'flu originated in El Paso, Texas, where there have been 29 confirmed cases of influenza A, of which H1N1 is a variant, this year. He has ordered the vaccination of 250 border agents.
Separately, the same virus appears to have broken out in Caracas, Venezuela. There, the health minister, Eugenia Sader, said that 179 people may have the virus; two people died in Mérida, where schools have been closed.
Military service: César Duarte, the governor of Chihuahua, was slapped down by both federal and local politicians after suggesting that young men who were either unemployed or not studying (the so-called ni-nis) should be conscripted into the army. Chihuahua is by far the most violent state in Mexico. So far this year, 522 of the 2,866 people killed in gang-related violence in Mexico have been killed in the state.