Tag Archives: Mexico

Texas reports first case of Zika likely from local mosquitoes

(Reuters) – Texas officials on Monday reported the state’s first case of the Zika virus that was likely transmitted by a local mosquito, expanding the spread within the continental United States of a virus that has been linked to microcephaly, a rare birth defect.

The case involved a woman living in Cameron County near the Mexico border, the Texas Department of State Health Services said. The state said it currently has no other suspected cases of local transmission.

(Reporting by Letitia Stein; Editing by Andrew Hay)

Mexico boosts support for its migrants in the U.S.

A Mexican migrant talks to a family member through the border fence between Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, United States, after a bi-national Mass in support of migrants in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico,

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexico’s foreign ministry announced fresh steps on Wednesday to provide support to Mexican citizens living in the United States following the victory in last week’s U.S. presidential election by Donald Trump, who has promised to crack down on immigrants in the country illegally.

The ministry said it was acting to help Mexicans avoid fraud and abuses in the United States. It said it would expand the availability of mobile consulate services to reach more migrants in their communities, establish a 24-hour telephone line for questions about immigration, and provide more appointments for migrants to get passports, birth certificates and consular identification cards.

The ministry also said Mexico will “strengthen dialogue” with U.S. state and local authorities to protect its citizens, and added that migrants in the United States should “avoid any conflict situation” and stay out of trouble with the law.

Trump, who takes office on Jan. 20, said in an interview with the CBS program “60 Minutes” that aired on Sunday that his administration would focus on deporting immigrants with criminal records. Trump said during the campaign he would deport the estimated 11 million immigrants in the United States illegally.

During the campaign, Trump also promised to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border with Mexico paying for it, accused Mexico of sending rapists and drug runners into the United States and threatened to rip up the North American Free Trade Agreement between the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Trump’s surprise victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton on Nov. 8 has shaken Mexico, pushing the beleaguered peso to record lows and forcing the government into crisis mode as it seeks to protect bilateral trade.

(Reporting by Joanna Zuckerman Bernstein and Gabriel Stargardter; Editing by Will Dunham)

Slumscapes – How the world’s five biggest slums are shaping their future

Windows of various shanties in Dharavi, one of Asia's largest slums, are seen in Mumbai

By Paola Totaro

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – As the United Nations prepares a 20-year plan to cope with the challenges of booming urbanization, residents of the world’s five biggest slums are battling to carve out a place in the cities of the future.

Home to more than 900 million people worldwide – or nearly one in every seven people – the U.N. says slums are emerging spontaneously as a “dominant and distinct type of settlement” in the 21st century.

Today one quarter of the world’s city dwellers live in slums – and they are there to stay.

The U.N.’s 193 member states are set to adopt the first detailed road map to guide the growth of cities, towns and informal settlements, ensure they are sustainable, do not destroy the environment and protect the rights of the vulnerable.

Held once every 20 years, the U.N.’s Habitat III conference comes at a time when, for the first time in history, more people live in cities than rural areas.

In 2014, 54 percent of the global population lived in cities but by 2050, this is expected to rise to 66 percent.

“We live in the urban century … when planned, built, and governed well, cities can be massive agents of positive change,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a recent statement.

“They can be catalysts for inclusion and powerhouses of equitable economic growth. They can help us protect the environment and limit climate change. That is why we need a new vision for urbanization.”

People walk near open sewers in the Kibera slum of Kenya's capital Nairob

People walk near open sewers in the Kibera slum of Kenya’s capital Nairobi February 26, 2015.
REUTERS/Darrin Zammit Lupi

The U.N.’s policy document, titled the New Urban Agenda, says there has been “significant” improvement in the quality of life for millions of city residents over the past two decades, but the pressures of population growth and rural-to-city migration are increasing dramatically.

Billy Cobbett, director of the Cities Alliance partnership for poverty reduction and promoting sustainable cities, said urban growth in many parts of the world, particularly Africa, is not driven by rural migration alone but by population growth.

The U.N. plan stresses that providing transport, sanitation, hospitals and schools is imperative but city strategies must also “go beyond” physical improvements to integrate slums into the social, economic, cultural, and political life of cities.

Experts say this policy represents a significant shift in thinking among city planners and authorities who have historically seen bulldozers as the answer to slum settlements.

High-density communities geared to pedestrians along with properties that mix business with housing can offer lessons for management of future growth, they say.

Today, unchecked population growth and migration in many world cities – from Kenya to Mexico to India – mean slums and the informal economies and communities created around them must increasingly be seen as an important part of the wider city.

SECURITY FIRST

The U.N. roadmap highlights that a critical impediment to upgrading informal settlements and sustainable redevelopment is the lack of tenure or ownership of land or property.

In 2003, 924 million city dwellers were estimated to be without title to their homes or land and this number, according to the United Nations, is expected to have grown “exponentially”.

This is a particularly pressing problem in Africa where more than half the urban population – or 62 percent of people – live in shanty towns and 90 percent of rural land is undocumented.

Living without secure tenure means living under constant threat of eviction. Slum dwellers who have no way of proving ownership of assets also have no access to credit, further eroding any motivation to improve homes and neighborhoods.

For governments, particularly in poorer countries, slum areas without title are a particularly vexed problem as the great majority are not mapped, little is known about demographics or spatial use, and the way residents have settled is often so dense that housing and services are hard to fit in.

The lack of basic information also means they cannot use the most commonly used official land registration systems.

ROADS BATTLE IN KENYA

Nairobi’s vast Kibera settlement – coming from the Nubian for forest or jungle – is described as Africa’s largest slum and comprises more than a dozen villages from Soweto East to Kianda.

A mix of ethnic groups make their home there although nobody knows exact numbers. According to the last Kenyan census, the population was 170,070 in 2009 but other sources, including the UN, estimate the settlement is now home to anywhere between 400,000 and one million people.

Much of Kibera’s employment comes from the nearby industrial area of Nairobi but an estimated half of Kibera’s residents are jobless, surviving on less than $1 a day.

Only 27 percent of Kibera’s 50,000 students attend government schools, with most attending informal institutions set up by residents and churches, according to the charity Map Kibera. Violence, alcohol and drugs are rife and clean water scarce.

Kibera’s residents also struggle with no garbage services, free flowing sewage and the slum became infamous globally for the so–called ‘flying toilets’ – throw away plastic bags used by residents forced to relieve themselves outdoors.

Yet amidst the squalor there are many residents like Peter Nyagasera and his family who have worked tirelessly to improve their neighborhood.

Nyagasera and his wife Sarah Oisebe up part of a former dump site in Kibera to create a playground for the resident-run school and a children’s center for orphans. For these children, he says, school is the only place they receive a hot meal each day.

But despite all their hard work, the community has been forced to mount a court challenge to stop construction of a road planned to cut through the area and demolish the school – and this community is not alone.

A second group of residents from the marginalized Nubian group are also without formal titles and fighting for ownership to protect their homes, many recently marked with red crosses for demolition to make way for the highway.

Their case will be heard in Kenya’s High Court in November but residents are despondent.

“Children will suffer,” said Nyagasera.

WORKING SLUMS

One of the toughest and most vulnerable aspects of life in the slums is the battle to find regular work. Cities are job hubs and proximity to employment has long been a major driver of slum development and expansion.

Globally, according to the International Labour Organization, 200 million people in slums were without jobs in 2013 while UNESCO estimates that more than a quarter of the young, urban poor earn little more than $1.25 a day.

Despite this, in many developing economies, the engine room of job creation is found in the heart of informal economies like those in the favelas of Rio or the bustling hives of activity in big Indian cities like Mumbai.

Author Robert Neuwirth spent four years researching his book, ‘Shadow Cities’, which looked at informal economies in global shanty towns. He believes these unlicensed economic networks are vastly under appreciated in scope and power and estimates they account for some 1.8 billion jobs globally.

“It’s a huge number and if it were all together in a single political system, this economic system would be worth $10 trillion a year. That would make it the second largest economy in the world,” he said.

In Mumbai, where an estimated one million people live in the bustling Dharavi slum, resident-owned small businesses – from leather workers and potters to recycling networks – have created an informal economy with annual turnover of about $1 billion.

Residents live and work in the same place and are now campaigning actively to ensure that any redevelopment of their homes or construction of new housing takes into account the need for home-based ground floor workspaces.

“People think of slums as places of static despair as depicted in films such as ‘Slumdog Millionaire’,” said Sanjeev Sanyal, an economist and writer, referring to the Academy Award-winning movie that exposed the gritty underbelly of Dharavi.

“If one looks past the open drains and plastic sheets, one will see that slums are ecosystems buzzing with activity… Creating neat low-income housing estates will not work unless they allow for many of the messy economic and social activities that thrive in slums,” he said.

Rahul Srivastava, a founder of Mumbai’s Institute of Urbanology, said the biggest impediment to upgrading informal settlements is their “illegitimate” status due to the absence of title.

Settlements that are home to fifth-generation migrants cannot be classed as “informal”, he says, and it is high time the narrow perception of these neighborhoods is changed.

DYING FOR A PEE

In Cape Town, the shanty towns of Khayelitsha stretch for miles, a grim brown sea of ramshackle wood and iron shacks that confront visitors arriving at the airport but are out of view of the city’s glass towers or the leafy suburbs on nearby hills.

Khayelitsha’s population, according to the 2011 Census, is 99 percent black.

Jean Comaroff, a Harvard professor of anthropology and African Studies, said despite “valiant efforts” from city authorities and activists in recent years, Cape Town itself still offers little room for its slum residents beyond “servitude” – work as domestics or in the service industries.

“It is poised on a knife edge and the differences between the beauty of the city itself and what you see on the Cape flats is the starkest you will ever see in the world.” she said.

In Cape Town, city authorities are not only struggling with providing housing and sanitation for a burgeoning population but face the task of trying to reverse the apartheid era engineering that built the spatial segregations that still exist today.

Experts say that not only is there not enough new affordable housing but what has been built remains distant from employment, forcing long commutes for those who are lucky enough to work.

Inside, however, residents are struggling – and at times losing their lives – due the absence of the most basic service – toilets.

According to the Social Justice Coalition’s Axolile Notywala, using a toilet can be one of the most dangerous activities for residents and a major problem for women and children.

A Commission of Inquiry into Policing in the shanty towns in 2012 found that 12,000 households have no access to toilets and the link between violence, particularly against women and children, and the need to walk long distances at night was highlighted by researchers and activists.

A mathematical model built by Yale University researchers last year concluded that doubling the number of toilets to 11,300 in Khayelitsha would reduce sexual assaults by a third.

“Higher toilet installation and maintenance costs would be more than offset by lower sexual assault costs,” lead researcher Gregg Gonsalves told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

DIY SERVICES

Across the world in Pakistan, Orangi Town in the port city of Karachi is believed home to around 2.4 million people although nobody knows exactly as the last census was in 1998.

Widely cited as Asia’s largest slum, it sprawls over 8,000 acres – the equivalent of about 4,500 Wembley football pitches.

Known locally as “katchi abadis”, the first informal settlements emerged in the wake of the Indo-Pakistani war of 1947, which led to a huge influx of refugees. Unable to cope with the numbers – by 1950 the population had increased to 1 million from 400,000 – the government issued refugees “slips” giving them permission to settle on any vacant land.

The settlement’s population really exploded in the early 1970s when thousands of people migrated from East Pakistan after the 1971 war of independence, which led to the establishment of the Republic of Bangladesh.

Since then, land has also been traded informally, usually through a middleman who subdivided plots of both government and private land and sold them to the poor.

Unlike many other slums worldwide the lack of services – not housing – is the major problem.

Communities have built two and three-room houses out of concrete blocks manufactured locally, say activists. Each house is home to between eight and 10 people and an informal economy of micro businesses has emerged as people created livelihoods.

In the early 1980s, however, some residents within the enormous slum decided they’d had enough of waiting for governments unwilling or unable to fund sanitation and so embarked on building a sewerage project on a “self-help” basis.

Now globally renowned, the Orangi Pilot Project (OPP) has helped residents design, fund and build their own sewerage systems and pipelines and, since 1980, has brought latrines to more than 108,000 households in a project continuing today.

To date, say OPP statistics, 96 percent of the settlement’s 112,562 households have latrines with residents footing the bill of 132,026,807 Pakistani rupees ($1.26 million) – all DIY.

“In fact, people in the town now consider the streets as part of their homes because they have invested in them and that’s why they maintain and clean the sewers too,” said OPP’s director, Saleem Aleemuddin.

BOTTOM UP DEVELOPMENT

Jose Castillo, an urban planner and architect in Mexico City, says that Ciudad Neza, home to 1.2 million people, should serve as a model for other blighted urban areas and slums.

Short for Nezahualcóyotl, Neza sits on the bed of Lake Texcoco which was slowly drained in a bid to combat devastating flooding over a century and more.

However the dry land ended up being too salty for farming and was slowly picked up by developers who laid out a grid of streets and sold off boxy parcels, most without proper titles.

The settlement really grew in a burst of urban migration in the mid-20th century when new arrivals to Neza set up shacks of wood and cardboard, living without electricity, a sewage system or running water, schools or paved roads. Old timers remember in the early days they’d be lucky if a bus came every two hours.

Victoria Gomez Calderon, 82, moved to Neza from eastern Mexico as a young woman, and remembers clearly the putrid remains of the lake just a half block from her tiny home.

“It was a pure wasteland,” she said.

In the early 1970s, residents banded together to demand services and a government programme to formalize ownership and provide land titles.

Neza’s reputation as the world’s largest slum, coined when its population was combined with two other blighted areas decades ago, no longer applies, they said.

Today, despite its severe problems from continuing poor access to transport and schools to high crime rates, Neza’s development holds lessons in growth and resilience for others.

Planner Castillo says Neza is teeming with micro entrepreneurs working from home or sharing spaces in what would be called co-working in trendier places.

“My argument is let’s stop asking what urban planning can do to fix the city and let’s focus on understanding where we could also learn from those processes,” he said.

“There’s a strong sense of pride in place. It’s a community based on the notion that jointly these people transformed this territory.”

Priscilla Connolly Dietrichsen, a professor of urban sociology at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City, agrees.

“The story isn’t, ‘Oh dear, dear, what a terrible slum.’ In a way, it’s a success story, in spite of the present problems,” she said.

SLUMS ARE CITIES

The 23-page draft document up for adoption at Habitat III in Quito is the result of months of closed-door negotiations, held in several nations, including Indonesia and the United States.

Some critics are disappointed the policy framework contains no tangible targets and will be non-binding on member states.

“It’s easy for governments to sign something that is not enforceable,” said Michael Cohen, a former senior urban affairs official with the World Bank, who has advised U.N. Habitat.

“It doesn’t have much bite. It talks a lot about commitments but has no dates, places or numbers.”

Supporters, however, argue the New Urban Agenda will not only focus attention on the urgent need for holistic planning of cities but also work to fundamentally change the way urban growth is debated and discussed both nationally and globally.

Important drivers of planned growth are a well-oiled system of land ownership, title and tenure which then paves the way for governments to collect revenue to pay for new services.

Equally important is the need for concerted planning approaches so new hospitals, bus services, and schools are placed where they are needed with thought given to future growth and employment opportunities.

There has, however, also been some criticism of the U.N.’s shift from a traditionally rural focus to a city driven, urban one and its failure to link the New Urban Agenda to the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals and climate change benchmarks.

Shivani Chaudry, executive director of the Housing and Land Rights Network in India, said the bias away from rural interests in the New Urban Agenda will leave many people behind.

She said many countries had argued forcefully for the adoption of goals and targets, for example a reduction in numbers of the homeless, increases in housing for the poor or a drop in forced evictions, but nothing was agreed.

“Rural populations have not been adequately represented: farmers, forest dwellers, indigenous and coastal communities – all suffer the consequences of uncontrolled urbanization,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“There is so much exploitation of these people and our fear is that so many have been left out.”

(Reporting by Paola Totaro, Editing by Belinda Goldsmith; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, property rights and climate change. Visit news.trust.org)

Carnage and corruption: upstart Mexican cartel’s path to top

Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman (C) is escorted by soldiers during a presentation at the Navy's airstrip in Mexico City February 22, 2014.

By Dave Graham

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – In barely four years, a little-known criminal gang has grown to challenge the world’s most notorious drug lord, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, for domination of the Mexican underworld, unleashing a new tide of violence.

Once minions of Guzman’s Sinaloa Cartel, traffickers of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) have turned on their former masters, seizing territory and buying off thousands of corrupt police.

Led by former policeman Nemesio Oseguera, aka “El Mencho”, the gang soon carved out an empire at the expense of weaker rivals.

The speed of its ascent shows how quickly power can shift in Mexico’s multi-billion-dollar drugs trade.

Juggling interests from China to North Africa and eastern Europe, the CJNG’s bloody advance has pushed murders to their highest levels under President Enrique Pena Nieto, who vowed to restore law and order when he took office in late 2012.

Mexico's President Enrique Pena Nieto speaks during a news conference at the National Palace in Mexico City, Mexico

Mexico’s President Enrique Pena Nieto speaks during a news conference at the National Palace in Mexico City, Mexico January 8, 2016. REUTERS/Edgard Garrido

All but four in a 2009 list of Mexico’s 37 most wanted capos are now dead or in jail, and Pena Nieto did initially succeed in reducing violence.

But a resurgence that led to 3,800 murders between July and August highlights the government’s failure to beat down cartels without new ones springing up in their place.

Pena Nieto recently sought to allay security concerns by announcing a plan to step up crime prevention in the worst-hit areas. He did not set out the details of his plan, but urged states to speed up efforts to put local police under unified statewide command.

Intimidating, paying off or eliminating police, CJNG leaders have ruthlessly applied lessons learned during their apprenticeship under Guzman’s cartel to muscle in on battered rivals and snatch trafficking routes, security experts say.

Interviews by Reuters with over a dozen serving and former officials underlined how collusion between gang members and law enforcement in the CJNG’s stronghold, the western state of Jalisco, laid the foundation for the gang’s advance.

“People stopped trusting the police. People believed the police in the state were working for a criminal gang,” said Jalisco’s attorney general Eduardo Almaguer.

Bearing the brunt of the chaos are the ports, trafficking centers and border crossings that light up the multi-billion dollar trail of crystal methamphetamine from Mexico to the United States, the CJNG’s main source of revenue.

Both savage – one gang hitman videoed blowing up victims he had strapped with dynamite – and shrewd, the CJNG is flanked by a white collar financial arm known as “Los Cuinis”.

“They’re the entrepreneurs. They’ve made big investments in property, in restaurants, car leasing,” said Almaguer. “They’re the ones who know how to do business and corrupt authorities.”

Almaguer has fired dozens of state officials suspected of corruption since becoming attorney general in July 2015. But it is municipal police that pose the biggest liability in Jalisco, the home of Mexico’s second biggest city, Guadalajara.

Roughly one in five actively collaborate with gangs and about 70 percent “do not act” against them, Almaguer said.

As of September, 1,733 serving police in Jalisco, or nearly 16 percent of the municipal force, had failed evaluations known as “loyalty tests” aimed at rooting out corruption, according to data compiled by Causa en Comun, a transparency group.

The worst performer was Sinaloa, home state of the now captured Guzman, where half the active police flunked the test.

POLICE IN CARTEL’S POCKET

A captured CJNG gang member claimed it had over half of Jalisco’s municipal police on its payroll, said a former official from the state government who interviewed him.

Depending on their role, the police were paid between 1,000 pesos and 50,000 pesos a month or more by the CJNG, the official said, requesting anonymity: “Otherwise they would kill me.”

Mexican police earn as little as $500 a month in some areas, meaning many are tempted to take the traffickers’ money.

CJNG suspicions that local police were buckling to pressure from the Sinaloa Cartel to betray them and change sides was one of the reasons the gang lashed out against security forces in 2015, four current and former Jalisco officials said.

In six weeks, the CJNG killed over two dozen police in an onslaught culminating in the shooting down of an army helicopter on May 1, 2015 during a botched attempt to capture Oseguera.

Since October 2015, when the leftist opposition took control of the Guadalajara municipality, around 10 percent of its 2,600-strong police force have been or are in the process of being dismissed, said Salvador Caro, the police chief.

Most were suspected of having links to organized crime, and of those, most for ties to the CJNG, Caro said.

It is not the only gang with the law on its payroll.

Documents recovered by local officials and reviewed by Reuters showed the Knights Templar gang, once the main local rival of the CJNG, got copies of intelligence files to compile dossiers on suspected CJNG members, including police.

The dossiers included addresses, car license details, tax and social security data, voter registrations and phone numbers. The data could only have leaked from law enforcement sources, a federal security official said.

Police are not the only problem, said Jalisco attorney general Almaguer, who also wants to make judges in the state take loyalty tests to stop collusion with gangsters.

“We’ve had rulings where it’s obvious some bad members of the justice system tried to protect gang members,” he said.

A spokeswoman for Jalisco’s Supreme Court declined to comment.

CRYSTAL SUPERPOWER

The CJNG steadily became more independent from the Sinaloa Cartel after the 2010 death of Ignacio Coronel, Guzman’s top lieutenant in Jalisco. Still, a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) map in January 2012 showing the territorial influence of Mexico’s main cartels did not feature the gang at all.

It was not until after Guzman’s capture in February 2014 – he would break out of prison in July 2015 and was recaptured this January – that the split degenerated into war.

By April 2015, another DEA map showed the CJNG dominant in most or parts of 10 states, with a growing or significant presence in four others.

Since then, the CJNG surge has sparked record murder levels around the Pacific ports that feed the gang’s demand for precursor chemicals from China used to make crystal meth.

The gang’s power grab has also fueled violence in the port of Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico, the main gateway for crystal meth exports to Europe and North Africa, and Tijuana, a major border crossing into the lucrative U.S. market.

Some experts believe the CJNG is already the main supplier of crystal meth to the United States.

Mike Vigil, a former DEA chief of international operations, believes the split is still about 60-40 in favor of the Sinaloa Cartel in a market the two utterly dominate.

Estimating sales of the drug were worth about 25-30 percent of a $60 billion U.S. illegal narcotics trade, Vigil said the CJNG’s power base and absorption of local expertise meant it had the potential to become the new “superpower” in crystal meth.

“They have a PhD in drug trafficking thanks to the education provided by the Sinaloa Cartel and other cartels,” he said.

(Editing by Simon Gardner and Kieran Murray)

Bloomberg: Trump and Netanyahu Discuss Border Fence, Status of Jerusalem

By Ben Brody

Donald Trump “discussed at length Israel’s successful experience with a security fence that helped secure its borders” during a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that lasted longer than an hour, according to a statement from the Republican presidential nominee’s campaign.

Trump’s proposal to build a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico as way to confront illegal immigration has become a cornerstone of his campaign, although the statement did not say whether he drew direct parallels with Israel’s border fence, which is meant to combat terrorism.

The real estate investor also “acknowledged that Jerusalem has been the eternal capital of the Jewish People for over 3000 years, and that the United States, under a Trump administration, will finally accept the long-standing Congressional mandate to recognize Jerusalem as the undivided capital of the State of Israel,” his campaign said after Sunday’s meeting.

Read the full article at Bloomberg.com

Texas to consider Mexican-American textbook critics decry as racist

School bus

By Jon Herskovitz

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) – The State Board of Education in Texas is expected to hear testimony next week from critics of a new textbook for Mexican-American studies who say the tome is riddled with mistakes and perpetrates demeaning stereotypes.

The book’s publisher, run by an evangelical Christian and self-described Republican patriot, argues it is academically sound and is being targeted by those advancing a liberal political agenda.

A decision by the Texas State Board of Education to approve the book could have wide ramifications. The conservative board is responsible for buying 48 million textbooks a year, and volumes that win its support often are marketed by publishers to school districts nationally.

The textbook being considered at a hearing on Tuesday in Austin, titled “Mexican American Heritage,” was the only one submitted after Texas put out a request for a book to be used in a proposed high school elective course on Mexican-American studies.

One of the few liberal members of the board, Ruben Cortez, said in a statement this week that the book “describes Mexicans as lazy, alleges that Mexican culture does not value hard work and that Mexicans bring drug and crime into the country.”

He commissioned a body of academics, mostly professors of history, to examine the book. They said in a report this week it was filled with errors and did not meet state standards.

“We have a web of racist assertions that are built in passages, that are built on multiple errors. This is a textbook that is a polemic against the Mexican-American community,” said Trinidad Gonzales, a history instructor at South Texas College who was on the book review team.

One passage regarded as biased concerned views employers have had of Mexican workers.

It reads: “Stereotypically, Mexicans were viewed as lazy compared to European or American workers … It was also traditional to skip work on Mondays, and drinking on the job could be a problem.”

Cynthia Dunbar, chief executive of Momentum Instruction which published the book, said in a phone interview the criticism is unfounded.

“There is absolutely no context, motivation and no agenda to in any way do anything negative or detrimental to Mexican-Americans or Mexican-American history,” said Dunbar, a former Texas state school board member from 2007 to 2011 who is now based in Virginia.

She is listed as a contributor to the book, which was written by two people whose credentials are not listed.

The state board likely will make a decision later this year whether to approve the book.

(Reporting by Jon Herskovitz; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Marguerita Choy)

Gunmen abduct suspected members of the Sinaloa drug cartel

A general view shows a restaurant where unknown assailants kidnapped a group of people in the Pacific tourist resort of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico,

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Eight armed men abducted “six or seven” suspected members of the Sinaloa drug cartel from a restaurant in the heart of Mexico’s Pacific tourist resort of Puerto Vallarta early on Monday morning, the state attorney general said.

Local authorities say the victims were seized around 1 a.m. CDT (0600 GMT) on Monday from a restaurant in the resort town.

Interviewed on local television, Jalisco Attorney General Eduardo Almaguer said the men who were abducted were believed to be members of the Sinaloa cartel, one of Mexico’s most feared drug smuggling gangs, which was led by Joaquin “Chapo” Guzman until his capture in January.

Almaguer said the suspected gang members were accompanied by nine women who were left behind, adding that the kidnappers had yet to make any contact with authorities.

Puerto Vallarta, in the state of Jalisco, is one of Mexico’s top vacation destinations, luring all-inclusive tourists and high-end sunseekers to its beaches.

Jalisco, which lies south along the Pacific coast from Sinaloa, is also home to the Jalisco New Generation cartel, which has become one of the country’s most powerful drug gangs in recent years.

In a statement, the prosecutor’s office said it was investigating the incident, while Almaguer said he was trying to fully identify the men who were abducted.

(Reporting by Anahi Rama and Lizbeth Diaz and Luis Rojas; Editing by Alan Crosby and Joseph Radford)

Mudslides triggered by storm claim 40 in Eastern Mexico

A view of the house where three members of a family died after a mudslide following heavy showers caused by the passing of Tropical Storm Earl in the town of Temazolapa

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mudslides triggered by intense rainfall in eastern Mexico killed 40 people at the weekend as saturated hillsides collapsed onto modest homes in the wake of now-dissipated Tropical Storm Earl.

The death toll rose late on Sunday after state governors in the two most affected states confirmed two more deaths from a series of mudslides that struck hillside communities.

The head of national emergency services previously put the death toll at 38, the vast majority of whom were found in Puebla state, while the remainder died in neighboring Veracruz.

Rafael Morena Valle, governor of Puebla state, said canine units were searching for the missing, but the number of unaccounted for residents was unclear.

Images of the damage from Earl, broadcast on Mexican television, showed massive mudslides burying entire hillsides, trees felled and buildings creaking under collapsed walls and roofs.

On the Pacific coast, Mexico’s Baja California peninsula braced for another major storm to strike as early as Monday.

Tropical Storm Javier was generating maximum sustained winds of 50 miles per hour (80 kph) on Sunday night and was forecast to become a hurricane late Monday, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said in a statement.

The center of the storm was expected to strike the southern tip of Baja, home to the beach resort of Los Cabos, by Monday night.

At least 25 of the deaths in Puebla state were confirmed on Sunday near the town of Huauchinango in the rugged Sierra Norte de Puebla mountains, site of the worst destruction so far.

Eleven people have died in Veracruz, buried in landslides after intense rainfall and flooding struck the Gulf coast state after Earl crossed the Yucatan peninsula.

“We continue to monitor rivers that are above critical levels,” Veracruz Governor Javier Duarte said in a post on Twitter on Sunday.

Before striking Mexico, Earl battered Belize last Thursday, smashing car windows and punching holes in the roofs of Belize City’s wooden houses. It also flooded parts of the coast.

(Reporting by Adriana Barrera and David Alire Garcia; Editing by David Gregorio, Bill Trott and Paul Tait)

Tropical storm Earl moves along Mexico’s Gulf coast

Bridge collapse because of Hurricane Earl

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Tropical storm Earl moved along Mexico’s Gulf coast on Friday, dumping large amounts of rain in southern states after battering Belize, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

The hurricane center, in its 7 a.m. CDT (1100 GMT) update, said Earl was about 175 miles (282 kilometers) east southeast of Veracruz, with maximum sustained winds of 40 miles per hour (64 km per hour).

The storm will produce 8 to 12 inches (20 to 30 cm) of rain in parts of the states of Chiapas, Oaxaca, Puebla, Tabasco and Veracruz, the hurricane center said. It said the rains could result in life-threatening flash floods and mudslides.

Earl, which briefly reached hurricane status on Wednesday but was downgraded on Thursday, was expected to start weakening on Saturday as it moves into mainland Mexico.

Before crossing Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, Earl battered Belize earlier this week, smashing car windows and punching holes in the roofs of Belize City’s wooden houses. It also downed trees and flooded parts of the coast.

State-owned oil company Pemex said late on Thursday it was monitoring Earl but that so far it had not needed to evacuate its offshore platforms.

(Reporting by Christine Murray; Editing by Bill Trott)

Storm Earl lashes Belize with wind, rain, heads for Mexico

A fallen palm tree is seen along the street after Hurricane Earl hits,

By Henry Romero and Manuel Carrillo

BELIZE CITY (Reuters) – Tropical storm Earl whipped Belize with wind and heavy rain as it weakened, moving into Guatemala toward southeastern Mexico on Thursday after hundreds of people took shelter overnight.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC) said at 1200 GMT that Earl had maximum sustained winds of 65 miles per hour (105 km per hour) as it churned about 90 miles (145 km) west of Belize City. Earl had been a hurricane overnight.

Late Wednesday, over 1,000 people were in shelters in Belize City, according to Philip Willoughby, who is in charge of the city’s emergency management. Dozens of people were also evacuated in Honduras on Wednesday, the government said.

As it moves west, Earl is expected to weaken to a tropical depression later Thursday or by Friday morning, the NHC said.

Mexican national oil company Pemex said Wednesday night it was monitoring Earl but had not evacuated workers at oil platforms that are concentrated in the southern Gulf of Mexico.

Earl, the fifth named storm of the 2016 season, was expected to bring 8 to 12 inches (20-30 cm) of rain in parts of Belize, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula through Friday morning, the Miami-based NHC said in a statement.

(Additional reporting by Swati Verma in Bengaluru; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe)