The official who opened the investigation into the massacre of 72 Central and South Americans in northern Mexico has been found dead. Mexican marines found the investigator’s body dumped along a highway in the northern border state of Tamaulipas. A second body encountered at the scene is thought to be that of a municipal police official linked to the same case. The state’s attorney general reported the two as missing late Thursday.
The investigator’s disappearance and death illustrates why many high-level crimes in Mexico go unpunished. Cartel-related violence in Tamaulipas also frequently goes unreported for fear of retaliation. Early this morning, a car bomb exploded outside of the Ciudad Victoria office of the national broadcaster, Televisa, which has been covering the massacre.
Testimony by the massacre’s sole survivor indicates the murdered migrants had been kidnapped en route to the US by organized criminals. An average of more than 1600 migrants are kidnapped in Mexico each month according to data published by the country’s National Human Rights Commission.
HOST INTRO: Journalists held marches across Mexico over the weekend to call attention to a rising tide of violence against the media and to protest the impunity surrounding the cases of dozens of murdered reporters. Shannon Young files this report from Mexico City.
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The Mexico City march began by reading the names of the 64 press workers murdered in the past decade. Ten journalists have been killed so far this year, putting 2010 on target to be the deadliest year ever for Mexican reporters. Eleven others are officially considered “missing persons”.
A column of around 1000 journalists and supporters participated in the silent march to Mexico’s Interior Ministry. Reporters held smaller demonstrations in 11 other Mexican cities.
Four journalists in the Lagunera region of northern Mexico have disappeared just days after the revelation of a major corruption story. According to a press release by the National Human Rights Commission, the missing journalists include a reporter from Multimedios, two cameramen from the Gómez Palacio Televisa affiliate who were “picked up” (or “levantado”) in broad daylight around noon on Monday the 26th. The fourth missing reporter works for the El Vespertino newspaper in Gómez Palacio and disappeared around 11pm or the same day.
This comes in the wake of a corruption scandal in which prison guards in Gómez Palacios, Durango allegedly released and armed convicts to carry out mass murder in Torreón, Chihuahua. The two sister cities are one metropolitan area separated by a river which marks the state line.
Federal police investigators dropped this bombshell in a weekend press conference after looking into the July 18th massacre of 17 people at a birthday in a hotel. Eighteen people were wounded in the same attack. This was the third such massacre this year thought to have been committed by inmates released from the state penitentiary in Gómez Palacios. Crime scene shell casings were traced to assault rifles used by guards at the prison.
The four missing journalists aren’t the only victims in the scandal’s immediate fall out. A prison guard has been killed and 8 human heads have been found around the city of Durango, capital of the state of the same name.
The ambush that killed a prominent Mexican human rights defender and a Finnish observer near San Juan Copala, Oaxaca may be the first time in Mexican history that paramilitaries have opened fire on an international humanitarian caravan, but it’s not an isolated act of violence. The fiercely independent Triqui nation has been steeped in years of bitter internal fighting which was itself preceded by decades of military occupation.
Francisco López Bárcenas, an academic who has written extensively about Triqui history, traces the current crisis back to the 1940s when the government withdrew recognition of San Juan Copala’s status as a county seat municipality – Mexico’s only political district with a distinctly Triqui identity. Continue reading “The Context of the Conflict in San Juan Copala”
Two Mexican reporters who survived a deadly ambush on an international aid caravan in Oaxaca were located alive last night and are receiving medical treatment. David Cilia and Érika Ramírez from Contralinea magazine were the last missing members of the caravan to be accounted for alive.
They had run into a canyon and hid with Oaxacan activists David Venegas and Noe Bautista. The two activists emerged Thursday afternoon with videotaped evidence that the reporters had not been killed in the hail of bullets that riddled both sides of their car.
An official search and rescue operation found the reporters not far from the crime scene. Both reporters are receiving treatment for dehydration. David Cilia also has two gunshot wounds.
Human rights organizations and pro-autonomy activists are marching this afternoon in Oaxaca City to call world attention to the situation in San Juan Copala, the town where the aid caravan was headed.
The indigenous town has been harassed by paramilitary forces since it declared autonomy more than 3 years ago. More recently the paramilitaries sealed the town off completely, blockading the only access road and severing communication and electrical lines. Paramilitaries who briefly held caravan survivors hostage expressed they were ready to move into the town and take it over with violence.
