Tag Archives: Mexico

Magnitude 5.7 quake shakes southern Mexico

Workers evacuate a building after an earthquake in Mexico City, Mexico, June 27, 2016

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – A 5.7 magnitude earthquake hit Mexico’s southern state of Oaxaca on Monday, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) said, shaking buildings as far away as Mexico City, but officials reported there were no immediate damages.

The quake struck 10 kilometers (6 miles) north of the town of Pinotepa de Don Luis at a depth of 10 km (6 miles), the USGS said.

“It felt horrible and very strong, and it felt like it lasted two or three minutes,” said a receptionist at the Hotel Las Gaviotas de Pinotepa in Oaxaca state, who declined to give her name.

The shaking was felt more than 360 km (225 miles) away in Mexico City, where some offices were evacuated.

Nonetheless, Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong said on Twitter there were no immediate reports of damage.

“Our representatives all over the state have reported to us that the preliminary situation is that there is no damage anywhere,” said Felipe Reyna, emergency services coordinator in Oaxaca.

Mexican national oil company Pemex said it had no immediate news on the state of its Salina Cruz refinery in Oaxaca, the company’s biggest with a crude processing capacity of 330,000 barrels per day.

But Oaxaca Governor Gabino Cue said on Twitter that there was no damage at industrial installations in the state.

(Reporting by Noe Torres, Ana Isabel Martinez and Alexandra Alper; Editing by Simon Gardner and Sandra Maler)

Mexico teacher protests buffet ruling party, eight killed in clashes

Protesting violence

By Lizbeth Diaz and Natalie Schachar

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – At least eight people were killed in clashes in southern Mexico over the weekend when police and members of a teachers’ union faced off in violent confrontations, a senior state official said, piling fresh pressure on the country’s embattled ruling party.

Violence erupted on Sunday when police dislodged protesters blocking a highway in the southern state of Oaxaca, a hotbed of dissent from radical teachers’ groups opposed to education reforms pushed through by the government three years ago.

Speaking on local radio early on Monday, Jorge Ruiz, Oaxaca’s state secretary for public safety, said eight people died in two separate confrontations, raising the death toll in the clashes from a previous tally of six.

He said six people died near the town of Nochixtlan, about 50 miles (80 km) northwest of the city of Oaxaca, while two others were killed in related protests in Juchitan, in the southeast of Oaxaca state.

The violence is the latest in a series of setbacks to President Enrique Pena Nieto’s government, which has faced widespread criticism for its failures to crack down on graft and impunity, contain drug gang violence or jumpstart the economy.

It also deals a fresh blow to the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), still smarting from a drubbing in regional elections earlier this month which put it on the back foot in the run-up to the next presidential election in 2018.

The violence has tarnished the reputations of two of the party’s leading contenders for the 2018 ticket: Education Minister Aurelio Nuno and Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong, whose brief includes domestic security.

Rocio Nahle, the leftist National Regeneration Movement (Morena) party’s parliamentary coordinator, said Nuno should resign over the violence, but blamed Osorio Chong as well.

“Pena Nieto will go down in history as one of the worst presidents in terms of violating human rights,” she told Reuters.

‘INSUFFICIENT’ ACCOUNTABILITY

The violence came as Christof Heyns, the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said on Monday that police accountability in Mexico was insufficient.

“Extrajudicial executions and excessive use of force by security agents persist,” Heyns said in a U.N. report.

The unrest has escalated since police arrested the leader of the local teachers’ union earlier this month. Ruben Nunez, head of one of the most combative factions of Mexico’s CNTE union, Oaxaca’s Section 22, was detained on suspicion of money laundering.

The CNTE has led efforts to resist federal education reforms, particularly its mandate to carry out teacher evaluations. Miguel Zurita, a CNTE representative in Oaxaca, said that when police arrived to dislodge Sunday’s protest near Nochixtlan, they were unwilling to enter into a dialogue.

“What we lived through yesterday was something brutal, something that has no name,” he said. “They arrived armed and they arrived shooting.”

The Mexican government, however, defended its handling of the protests.

In a statement, the National Security Commission denied federal forces had used firearms against protesters, saying images circulating online of police with rifles were faked.

Enrique Galindo, the head of Mexico’s federal police, said masked individuals who were not affiliated to the teachers’ union were behind much of the violence, lobbing Molotov cocktails and shooting at police and civilians.

(Additional reporting by Frank Jack Daniel and Stephanie Ulmer-Nebehay; editing by Simon Gardner and G Crosse)

Mexico, U.S. Canada to launch heroin fight at Three Amigos Summit

Paulo Carreno, Mexican deputy foreign minister in charge of North America, speaks during an interview in Mexico City

By Dave Graham and Ana Isabel Martinez

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexico, the United States and Canada will unveil a plan to combat increased opium poppy cultivation and heroin use across North America at a summit later this month, a senior Mexican official said on Thursday.

Leaders of the three nations are due to meet in Ottawa on June 29, amid growing concern about the rising North American death toll from opioids such as heroin and fentanyl, and a surge in poppy cultivation in Mexico by violent drug gangs.

In a phone call last month, U.S. President Barack Obama and his Mexican counterpart Enrique Pena Nieto agreed to intensify the fight against heroin production, and government officials say the problem has been under discussion for months.

Paulo Carreno, Mexican deputy foreign minister in charge of North America, said in an interview that Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was also committed to the plan due to be launched at the so-called Three Amigos summit later this month.

“This isn’t just about destroying (plantations), it’s about finding solutions for people forced to cultivate poppies, and there will be an important announcement in this context at the summit on a new cooperation plan between the three countries to deal with problems that obviously concerns us all,” he said.

Carreno declined to offer details but said additional resources would devoted to all parts of the problem.

“To combating it, to eradicating it, but also to reducing demand significantly and addressing the social aspect,” he said.

Pena Nieto took office in December 2012 pledging to bring Mexico’s drug cartels to heel, but sickening gang violence has been a blight on his administration and cultivation of opium poppies used to make heroin has surged.

Between 2012 and 2015, the area under poppy cultivation in Mexico, which officials say is the most important supplier of heroin to the United States, rose from 10,500 hectares to 28,000 hectares, according to figures published by the White House.

At the same time, fatal heroin overdoses in the United States have risen steeply, with some 10,574 deaths reported in 2014, a rise of 26 percent from the previous year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

That figure is six times higher than the total in 2001, the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse says.

“Right now there’s a lot of concern here in the United States because we are suffering from a major, major heroin epidemic,” said Mike Vigil, a former head of global operations for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

A large part of the Mexican increase in cultivation has been in the violent southwestern state of Guerrero, where 43 trainee teachers were abducted by a drug gang and corrupt police in September 2014, then murdered, according to the government.

To cut gang violence, Guerrero’s governor has floated the idea of regulating poppy production for medicinal purposes, an option which the Mexican government has studied.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, one senior Mexican official said the United States was prepared to offer Mexico more material support to tackle heroin production.

However, a U.S. official said the two sides were still discussing which measures to adopt. One subject under discussion is finding alternative crops for opium poppy farmers to grow.

(Reporting by Dave Graham; Editing by Bernard Orr)

Mexican security forces committed crimes against humanity

File photo of a police detective standing guard at a crime scene in Monterrey

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexican security forces have committed crimes against humanity, with mass disappearances and extrajudicial killings rife during the country’s decade-long drug war, according to a report released by rights groups on Monday.

The 232-page report, published by the Open Society Justice Initiative and five other human rights organizations, warned that the International Criminal Court could eventually take up a case against Mexico’s security forces unless crimes were prosecuted domestically.

“We have concluded that there are reasonable grounds to believe there are both state and non-state actors who have committed crimes against humanity in Mexico,” the report said.

Mexico’s drug war has resulted in the most violent period in the country’s modern history, with more than 150,000 people killed since 2006.

Consistent human rights abuses — including those committed by members of the Zetas drug cartel— satisfied the definition of crimes against humanity, the report said.

The authors recommended that Mexico accept an international commission to investigate human rights abuses.

A series of shootings of suspected drug cartel members by security forces, with unusually high and one-sided casualty rates, have tarnished Mexico’s human rights record.

“Resorting to criminal actions in the fight against crime continues to be a contradiction, one that tragically undermines the rule of law,” the report stated.

The unresolved 2014 kidnapping and apparent killing of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa teacher-training college was one of the most high-profile cases to have damaged Mexico’s reputation.

The report was based on documents and interviews over a nine-year period from 2006 to 2015.

It cited mass graves and thousands of disappearances, in addition to killings such as the shooting by the army of 22 suspected gang members in Tlatlaya in central Mexico, and similar incidents, as evidence of criminality in the government’s war against the country’s drug cartels.

Eric Witte, one of the report’s authors, recommended that the government look at the U.N. Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) as an example for inviting an international investigative commission to bring cases in Mexican courts.

Evidence gathered by CICIG against former Guatemalan President Otto Perez played a key role in his resignation and eventual arrest last year.

The report criticised Mexico’s weak justice system. If atrocities continued without measures being taken to end impunity, the International Criminal Court could step in, said Witte, a former advisor at the Hague-based court.

“Unfortunately, Mexico might be one atrocity away from an international commission becoming politically viable,” Witte, who leads national trials of grave crimes for the Open Society Justice Initiative, told Reuters.

(Reporting by Natalie Schachar, Lizbeth Diaz and Frank Jack Daniel; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)

Researchers find 39 unreported sources of pollution says NASA

Grey plumes of toxic dust from giant nickel smelters in the Siberian city of Norilsk are carried by arctic winds

(Reuters) – Researchers in the United States and Canada have located 39 unreported sources of major pollution using a new satellite-based method, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration said.

The unreported sources of toxic sulfur dioxide emissions are clusters of coal-burning power plants, smelters and oil and gas operations in the Middle East, Mexico and Russia that were found in an analysis of satellite data from 2005 to 2014, NASA said in a statement on Wednesday.

The analysis also found that the satellite-based estimates of the emissions were two or three times higher than those reported from known sources in those regions, NASA said.

Environment and Climate Change Canada atmospheric scientist Chris McLinden said in a statement that the unreported and underreported sources accounted for about 12 percent of all human-made emissions of sulfur dioxide.

The discrepancy could have “a large impact on regional air quality,” said McLinden, the lead author of the study published in Nature Geosciences.

A new computer program and improvements in processing raw satellite observations helped researchers at NASA; the University of Maryland, College Park; Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia; and Environment and Climate Change Canada detect the pollution, according to the U.S. space agency.

The researchers also located 75 natural sources of sulfur dioxide in the form of non-erupting volcanoes that are slowly leaking the toxic gas.

Although the sites are not necessarily unknown, many volcanoes are in remote locations and not monitored, so the satellite-based data is the first to provide regular annual information on these volcanic emissions, NASA said.

(Reporting by Brendan O’Brien in Milwaukee; Editing by Scott Malone and Lisa Von Ahn)

Mexican army accused of withholding evidence in Murders

Relatives hold up posters during a rally in support of missing students from Ayotzinapa Teacher Training College, at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexico’s army is withholding key evidence from international investigators in the case of 43 trainee teachers abducted and apparently massacred in late 2014, hampering their efforts to reach the truth, the experts told Reuters.

More than 18 months after the incident and just one week before the team of experts’ window to investigate closes, the army has still not handed over an undisclosed number of photographs and video taken by a military intelligence officer as police clashed with the students on Sept. 26, 2014, the five investigators said.

When Reuters requested the original photographs of police rounding up a group of the students from the military, via a freedom of information request, the army responded that the evidence was “inexistent.”

The investigators have also not been allowed to question the soldiers on duty that night at Battalion 27, based in Iguala in the restive southwestern state of Guerrero.

“Access to Battalion 27 and its members is fundamental to the investigation … The state needs to explain,” said James Cavallaro, president of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), which commissioned the panel of experts.

Testimony given by soldiers to the attorney general’s office shows the army was aware of the clashes and did not intervene.

“We have repeatedly asked the attorney general’s office to get (the military) to give us photographs, videos and documents which have been referred to in their own testimony,” said Francisco Cox, a Chilean member of the independent panel of five experts commissioned by the IACHR.

“We made a list of people who needed to testify. Some haven’t and there are others who ought to testify again,” he added. “They have made declarations and the fundamental issues still haven’t been answered.”

The panel members say the testimony the soldiers have given so far to the attorney general’s office is flawed and incomplete, because the questioning was too basic and they see some discrepancies.

Mexico’s defense ministry, which is in charge of the army, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Previously, the army has said there is no reason its soldiers should be interviewed by the team of international experts.

“I can’t permit them to treat soldiers as criminals or interrogate them and make it seem as though they had something to do with it,” Salvador Cienfuegos, who is Mexico’s defense minister and the head of the army, said in October.

The attorney general’s office declined to comment, but a source told Reuters the investigation would remain open and they have not called soldiers to give evidence again because they are preoccupied dealing with other parts of the case.

IMPUNITY

The case has drawn fresh attention to police abuses and impunity in Mexico. Drug cartels often have local security forces in their pockets, government purges of police ranks have shown.

The trainee teachers studied at a rural college in the restive state of Guerrero. About 100 were attacked in the town of Iguala on Sept 26, 2014 after they hijacked five buses to transport them to a march commemorating a massacre back in the 1960s.

Forty-three disappeared and are believed to have been murdered. But just one of them has been identified from a charred bone and the team of international experts rejected a government assertion that the 43 were burned in a pyre at a garbage dump.

The Mexican government said in January 2015 it believed that corrupt police working with a local drug gang murdered the students, citing testimony given by detained suspects. But relatives of the disappeared rejected that account, and accused the government of trying to close the case early.

No-one has yet stood trial over the case.

The government has said the gang mistook the youths for rival gang members, and that police handed them over to Guerreros Unidos henchmen, who then burned them to ashes at a garbage dump in the town of Cocula, in the hills near Iguala.

President Enrique Pena Nieto agreed with the IACHR in late 2014 to allow the international experts to investigate the case and promised them access to all the information they needed.

The experts, who examined the site, say the government’s garbage dump fire account is scientifically impossible given the heat needed to reduce human remains to ash and charred bone fragments. The fate of the students, who were long seen by local authorities as troublemakers, is still unclear.

Families and lawyers of the disappeared students believe the army was involved in their abduction, though no evidence has been presented to support this.

“The army pitched in to form a cordon so the aggressors could act,” said Vidulfo Rosales, one of the lawyers representing families of the victims.

Since 2007, the army has been tasked with ensuring public security in some of the most violent corners of Mexico. However, lawmakers say there is no specific law that requires the army to intervene in such cases of unrest.

One military intelligence operative, Eduardo Mota, testified to the attorney general’s office in December 2014 that he snapped an undisclosed number of photographs as police threw tear gas at a group of the students in front of the local courthouse in Iguala and detained them. That group of students, which investigators number at about 17, was never seen again.

The army has not handed over the original photographs he testified to taking to the experts, who say they believe Mota also filmed video, citing standard army operating procedures. Mota could not be reached for comment.

Instead, officials later gave them a presentation that included a power-point containing four photographs from the night in question, one of the investigators said, but not the original files.

(Editing by Simon Gardner and Kieran Murray)

Missing radioactive material found in Mexico, public not at risk

Authorities in Mexico have located the radioactive material that was stolen last month.

The country’s interior ministry announced the missing iridium-192 was discovered Tuesday afternoon in its container on a road in Acambay, some 87 miles northwest of Mexico City.

Because the material, which is used in industrial radiography, had not been removed from its protective container, the ministry said it posed no danger to public health.

After the iridium-192 was first reported stolen on February 27, the ministry warned the material “represents a major health risk” if it were to be removed from its container, adding anyone exposed to the material could have received “permanent or serious injury” in minutes or hours.

The ministry had said the material was being transported by a pickup truck, which was stolen in San Juan Del Rio. That’s about 37 miles north of where the container was ultimately discovered.

The vehicle was also located, the ministry said Tuesday.

Authorities placed six districts on notice after the disappearance, but have now lifted the alert.

The theft was at least the fourth time in the last four years that radioactive material went missing in Mexico, according to past news releases. Other thefts occurred in April 2015, July 2014 and December 2013, though the material was also recovered in all three prior instances.

Mexico sees spike in H1N1 swine flu cases, 68 people dead

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexico has seen a sharp jump in cases of the virus H1N1, popularly known as swine flu, killing 68 people so far this flu season, according to health ministry data.

The overall number of flu cases and deaths has also risen, but the H1N1 statistics are striking. The Mexican government has detected 945 cases of H1N1 this season, compared with just four cases and no deaths last season.

But the Mexican government emphasized schools should not shutter their doors due to the flu.

“We are not facing an epidemic that would justify closing schools,” Education Minister Aurelio Nuno said at a news conference this week.

While swine flu cases comprise only one-third of all flu infections this season, the virus has proven particularly deadly, with 69 percent of all flu deaths attributed to H1N1.

An increase in H1N1 cases has also been seen in the United States and Canada, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

In 2009, the WHO declared H1N1 a pandemic after the virus started in Mexico and spread around the globe.

Recent media reports have cited shortages of flu medication and 35 percent of pharmacies across the country do not currently have Roche Holding AG’s Tamiflu, a popular treatment, according to the national pharmacies’ association (Anafarmex).

Anafarmex said the government has sent thousands of Tamiflu units to pharmacies to boost supply.

Mexico’s flu season usually lasts from October to March.

(Reporting by Joanna Zuckerman Bernstein; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

Officials in Mexico investigating theft of radioactive material iridium-192

Mexican authorities are investigating the theft of a pickup truck that was transporting potentially dangerous radioactive material, the country’s interior ministry said Sunday.

Officials were notified of the vehicle’s theft on Saturday, according to a news release.

The ministry said the truck was transporting a container of iridium-192, a radioactive material used in industrial radiography. Officials say the material does not pose a threat to anyone if it remains in its container, but it “represents a major health risk” if it were to be removed.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), iridium-192 gives off strong gamma radiation, and exposure can be deadly. It could also cause burns or radiation sickness.

In its news release, Mexico’s interior ministry said anyone who does not handle the material properly could experience “permanent or serious injury” in a matter of minutes or hours.

It encouraged anyone who locates the material to stay at least 30 meters away from it.

The theft was reported by an industrial maintenance center in San Juan del Rio, according to the ministry, a city about 130 miles northwest of Mexico City in the country’s Queretaro district.

Authorities in Queretaro and five other nearby districts have been notified of its disappearance.

This is at least the fourth time that radioactive material has been stolen in Mexico in the past four years, according to past news releases. The material was found in all three prior cases.

In April 2015, the ministry announced that a container of iridium-192 was stolen out of a pickup truck in Cadenas. The container was located nine days later, unopened, on a pedestrian bridge.

The previous July, Mexico’s interior ministry announced that it had located stolen radioactive material in Tlalnepantla de Baz, and the recovered material did not pose a danger to the public.

The International Atomic Energy Agency announced in early December 2013 that a pickup truck carrying cobalt-60 was stolen near Mexico City, though the undamaged material was found two days later in a field close to where the theft occurred.