Gunmen opened fire on a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center in Irapuato, Guanajuato, Saturday leaving 10 people dead, the state’s Ministry of Public Safety reported.
Witnesses say at least eight masked men wearing tactical gear and carrying high caliber rifles opened fire on residents at the “Empezando una Nueva Vida de Esperanza” (“Starting a New Life of Hope”). It was the fourth attack on a rehab center in that city in six months and the second against Empezando una Nueva Vida.
In the wee hours of December 4, 2019, a heavily-armed group of men arrived in a convoy at a rehab center and kidnapped 23 residents. The next day 13 were found alive, and a week later 10 bodies thought to be the remaining kidnapping victims were discovered in a mass grave.
On February 8, a band of gunmen kidnapped five people from Empezando una Nueva Vida before burning the building down. Four of those abducted were later found.
On March 26, armed men shot a 38-year-old man at a rehab center, gravely injuring him.
No one has been charged in any of the attacks.
According to a study by the Mexican non-profit Citizen’s Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice, Irapuato was the fourth most violent city in the world in 2019 with a homicide rate of 80.74 per 100,000 inhabitants. Tijuana, Baja California Sur, Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, and Uruapan, Michoacán, respectively, topped that same list.
The violence in Irapuato marked a particularly bloody milestone for Mexico as June 7 was the day with the highest number of murders so far this year, according to data published by the federal government on Monday.
On Sunday 117 people were murdered across the country, including 11 in Chihuahua, 11 in the state of México, 10 in Guanajuato, nine in Baja California and nine in Tabasco. The worst day of violence Mexico has ever seen was on December 1, 2019, when 127 people were killed in a single day.
Last year Mexico saw a total of 34,582 murders, the highest rate since 1997 which was the first year for which there is an official record.
Quick response by the Jalisco attorney general saved the lives of a group of people who were abducted by police in Guadalajara on Friday, claims Governor Enrique Alfaro.
The governor said in an interview that the state police officers involved had intended to kill a group of people they forced into unmarked vehicles near the state Attorney General’s Office. Those abducted were protesting the arbitrary arrests of people protesting against the alleged murder by police of Giovanni López Ramírez.
At least 29 people went missing after they were arrested at protests on Thursday and Friday. Alfaro announced on Twitter Saturday night that they had been released from police custody and that charges against them had been dropped.
He said in an interview that the quick actions of Attorney General Gerardo Octavio Solís on Friday had averted another Ayotzinapa. Alfaro’s claim refers to the 2014 case in which 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College were detained by municipal police in Iguala, Guerrero, and allegedly handed over to a crime gang who killed them.
The governor said that Solís intervened to ensure that there was no repeat of a similar tragedy.
An unknown number of people were forced into unmarked vehicles by police on Friday afternoon. One of the people abducted was an 18-year-old undergraduate student identified only as Fer by the newspaper El Universal.
Fer said that he and his friends were approaching the state Attorney General’s Office when they were warned that police officers in civilian clothes were forcing protesters into unmarked vehicles. He said that when they saw vehicles carrying hooded people wearing bulletproof vests they attempted to run away.
He was about to board a public bus when he was grabbed from behind and violently forced into a vehicle. He said that there were about 30 people in the back of the vehicle and that officers told them that more protesters had been forced into another paddy wagon.
Fer said that police took their cell phones and some other possessions from them and told them that they had been detained for being “troublemakers.”
While the vehicle remained stationary for approximately 20 minutes, the police interrogated the protesters about the identity of the man who set an officer on fire at the Thursday protest against López’s alleged murder, he said.
Fer said that the detained protesters were then ordered out of the vehicle and forced into one line for men and another for women. The men were ordered to walk toward an armored police bus with their heads down, while the women were told to proceed in the same manner toward another police vehicle, he said.
Governor Alfaro said Saturday night those who had been detained had been released.
Anyone who straightened up was struck by police, Fer said. He told El Universal that the male protesters traveled in the police bus for at least three hours before they were dumped “one by one in different places.”
He said that he was the last to be thrown out of the vehicle. With no idea where he was, the young man ran for his life. He ran into four other young men who had been in the bus with him and they discovered that they had been dumped on the highway between Guadalajara and Chapala.
The group subsequently caught a bus back to the state capital and Fer returned to his home. El Universal said that his version of events was consistent with those of other protesters who recounted what happened to them on social media.
Two police officers have been arrested in connection with the abduction of the young people protesting the arbitrary arrests and police brutality.
Alfaro apologized for the conduct of the police and said that the officers involved might have links to organized crime.
However, a lawyer for the two arrested officers said that they acted in the way they did because they received orders to do so from above. Oscar Aturo Díaz also said that Salvador Perea and Raúl Gómez are being pressured to admit that they were acting of their own accord when they and other officers abducted the protesters.
Perea’s wife, Cinthia Hernández, claimed that her husband was following orders given by either Attorney General Solís or Governor Alfaro, while Gómez’s wife and children made a similar accusation.
Alfaro rejected any suggestion that he or his attorney general had given such an order.
“I believe that it was an attack against Jalisco; I believe that whoever was behind this … was really looking for lives to be lost,” he said.
“There was not a single … disappearance but that had a lot to do with reacting on time.”
Police put their boots to a 16-year-girl in Mexico City.
Two Mexico City police officers accused of kicking a teenage girl in the head during a march against police brutality on Friday were jailed yesterday on charges of abuse of power.
A video of the attack, which occurred while the victim was lying on the ground, went viral, after which Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum denounced the act. “I gave a clear and precise instruction to avoid provocation,” she stated on social media and specified that her orders were not fully obeyed.
“For my government, this is unacceptable. For this reason, I am requesting the Attorney General’s Office and the Mexico City Human Rights Commission to open an investigation, identify and punish those responsible, as well as their chain of command, regardless of rank,” she said shortly after the protest concluded.
The clash between police and protesters on Friday came as a group of about 100 people, some armed with Molotov cocktails, sticks and other projectiles, left a protest in front of the U.S. Embassy and made their way through the streets of the capital to Casa Jalisco, the Mexico City office of that state’s government.
The crowd was protesting the case of Giovanni López, who died after being arrested by police in Jalisco on May 4, apparently for not wearing a face mask.
The protesters shattered windows and vandalized homes along the route. Some carried anarchist flags and a large banner emblazoned with “Antifa,” for anti-fascist.
The girl who was assaulted by police, identified only as Melanie, said she attended the protest because she was angered by reports of police brutality and admitted she threw rocks at police officers. She denied using any other weapon against the officers who she said were larger than she is and carried shields and wore helmets.
Over the weekend, the call “Justice for Melanie” was put out over Facebook and a march was planned in Mexico City Monday to protest the attack against her.
A woman surveys floodwaters in southeastern Mexico on the weekend.
After taking a beating from Tropical Storm Cristóbal, a state of emergency has been declared in four states due to the effects of wind and severe rains that hammered southeastern Mexico for days.
Across the southeast, communities reported flooding, landslides and washed out roads due to the intensity and duration of the storm.
Mexico’s National Meteorological Service reported that Cristóbal dumped a total of more than 50 centimeters of rain in some areas of Chiapas and Yucatán.
On Sunday, Mexico’s Civil Protection agency declared a state of emergency in 26 municipalities in Yucatán, nine in Chiapas, four in Quintana Roo and one in Tabasco. The declarations allow the affected states to receive federal relief funds as they struggle to meet the basic needs of thousands displaced by the storm.
The government has dispatched an additional 790 members of the army to join the thousands of soldiers and National Guard members and soldiers it sent last week to assist in the clean-up efforts in Campeche, Chiapas, Quintana Roo, Tabasco, Veracruz and Yucatán. The army, which will also be providing security patrols, has set up two community kitchens complete with tortilla machines to provide food for affected residents.
Continuación, Balancán, Tabasco después de la tormenta tropical Cristobal. Necesitan ayuda pic.twitter.com/W3EIoQ9meQ
— Maritza Avalos Castr (@ClaritzAvalos) June 6, 2020
Flooding in Balancán, Tabasco.
Yesterday, 275 evacuations and 11 airlifts were carried out by soldiers.
Through the course of the storm, more than 800 people in Campeche took refuge in shelters, as did more than 2,000 people in Yucatán.
One person was killed by a falling tree in Chiapas, where the communities of Chicoasén, Bochil, Copainalá, Tecpatán, Ixtapa and Unión Juárez saw landslides and wash-outs.
In southern Quintana Roo, the Mexican military used two helicopters to airlift an estimated 450 people out of danger zones. And in Cozumel, a “pirate ship” popular with tourists sank due to high waves and extreme rains.
The storm formed on June 2 from the remnants of Pacific Tropical Storm Amanda, which battered Central America leaving at least 22 dead in El Salvador and Guatemala, and was the earliest named storm in the Atlantic ever recorded. The previous record was set in 2016 when Tropical Storm Colin formed on June 5.
The storm had moved north into the United States as of Monday, when it was downgraded to a tropical depression.
A former Tijuana police official is under arrest and an arrest warrant has been issued for the city’s notorious ex-chief of police in a decade-old case of alleged torture against their own officers.
Former Minister of Public Security Gustavo Huerta Martínez was taken into custody Friday for allegedly torturing four police officers in 2010.
The accusations filed by officer José Luis Hernández Gálvez and three others and relate to an incident in which Korean athletes attending a Tae Kwon Do tournament in Tijuana say they were robbed by police during a traffic stop.
Huerta and then police chief Julián Leyzaola Pérez, whose whereabouts are currently unknown, are accused of torturing the officers involved until they confessed.
Officer Hernández claims he was brutally beaten, suffering 18 separate wounds on his body which included a broken pelvis.
Ex-Tijuana police chief Leyzaola is welcomed by the mayor of Cancún in 2017 after he was hired to clean up crime.
“They started punching me in the stomach, hard, Leyzaola on my right side, Huerta on my left,” Hernández told The New Yorker in 2010. “They started using rebar and an AR-15 rifle against my back, while still punching from the front.” The beatings lasted for four months, Hernández said.
Leyzaola was at one time viewed as a “supercop.” During his tenure as police chief in both Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, murders, extortions and kidnappings dropped dramatically.
He received accolades from the United States for his leadership and crackdown on crime in the two border cities.
Seven attempts were made on Leyzaola’s life, and one incident in May 2015 left him paralyzed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair.
Leyzaola ran twice for mayor of Tijuana, and in 2017 was named as a security advisor to police in Cancún as that city struggled with a wave of drug-related violence.
But accusations of torture and other crimes, not limited to the one for which he currently stands accused, have dogged him as well.
The Baja California Human Rights Office, Mexico’s Human Rights Commission, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Washington Office on Latin America and the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights have all denounced Leyzaola for abuses, including torture, committed in 2009 and 2010 in Tijuana.
Human rights organizations also denounced Huerta last month after the mayor appointed him official spokesman for Tijuana police.
Looking for the world’s best cabernet sauvignon? You’ll find it in Coahuila, Mexico, at Vinos Don Leo in Parras de La Fuente.
This year the winery’s 2013 Cabernet Sauvignon Gran Reserva took first place at France’s International Cabernet Competition, in which French sommeliers blind-tasted wines from 25 countries.
Don Leo’s 2016 Cabernet Sauvignon/Shiraz also took home the gold this year.
“Quality is the goal and vision of our company, and right now it is being reflected with this distinction,” said Don Leo owner David Mendel.
Tasting notes by Eduardo Dingler of the Napa Valley Register, who visited Don Leo earlier this year, describe the award-winning wine as “generous, wise and intelligent showing its age in the glass but displaying a unique eloquence in the nose with layers of cigar, dried potpourri and leather with a slight touch of aged balsamic.”
He called the experience the oeneological equivalent of “playing 18 holes of golf with Sean Connery.”
The mid-sized winery was founded 20 years ago by the Mendel family, who named the vineyard after their forefather, a German Jew who together with his wife emigrated to Mexico in 1936 to escape the war.
The winery opened in 2000 with just one hectare, and has grown to 60 hectares of vineyards planted with 12 varieties of grapes, including shiraz, merlot and malbec.
Located at an elevation of 2,100 meters, making it the 11th-highest vineyard in the world, Don Leo enjoys a micro-climate offering hot days and cool nights which is ideal for growing quality grapes.
Coahuila Tourism Minister Azucena Ramos said the award further solidifies the region — where grapes were first planted in the 1500s — as the cradle of wine in Latin America and worldwide.
Currently, sales of the wine are almost entirely limited to Mexico, but that may change in the future as Don Leo continues to garner international accolades. The trophy-winning vintage goes for 983 pesos or around US $45.
Efforts continue to eradicate corruption at Mexican customs.
The Financial Intelligence Unit (UIF) is investigating a network of Mexicali, Baja California, customs officials who are alleged to allow weapons and used vehicles to cross the country’s northern border, the newspaper Milenio reports.
At the center of their investigation is customs agent Roberto Ruiz Armas, who the UIF says granted hundreds, if not thousands, of irregular permits in exchange for money.
Complaints have been filed and agents suspected of corruption have had their bank accounts frozen due to suspicion of links to organized crime, said the head of UIF, Santiago Nieto.
Attempts to clean up corruption elsewhere have led to customs agents being fired for misconduct at the ports of Progreso, Tuxpan and Lázaro Cárdenas. Four other customs offices are also under scrutiny, Nieto said, although he declined to name them.
Last July the Federal Tax Administration agreed to the Ministry of Defense’s (Sedena) proposal to send 22 retired military personnel to manage half of the country’s customs offices, in the hopes that they would root out corruption. “The corruption problem at customs offices fosters organized crime activities such as the smuggling of arms, drugs, chemical precursors, cash and goods in general,” the proposal read.
Last year, Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard stated that 70% of crimes committed in Mexico are carried out with weapons brought into the country illegally from the United States.
And while illegal guns can lead to loss of life, illegally imported vehicles can lead to an important loss of revenue to both the Mexican government through taxes and importation fees, and the country’s auto industry, which claims that in the first trimester of 2019 alone 350,000 U.S. vehicles entered Mexico without the proper permits.
Often, in exchange for a bribe, corrupt customs agents will sign off on paperwork that severely undervalues a vehicle in order to lower the import tax.
Mexico’s customs chief resigned in April, less than a year after being appointed by President López Obrador to clean up corruption. Ricardo Ahued said he was leaving the post for personal reasons.
Active Covid-19 cases as of Sunday evening. milenio
Mexico has recorded a total of 117,103 confirmed coronavirus cases and 13,699 deaths since the start of the pandemic, the federal Health Ministry reported on Sunday.
The case tally increased by 3,593 on Saturday and 3,484 on Sunday while 529 Covid-19 deaths were registered over the weekend.
The Health Ministry reported 341 deaths on Saturday and 188 on Sunday, figures much lower than those registered between Wednesday and Friday last week.
However, the number of Covid-19 deaths reported on Saturdays and Sundays in recent weeks has been significantly lower than on preceding days, indicating that there is a delay in confirming and/or reporting fatalities over the weekend.
Health Ministry Director of Epidemiology José Luis Alomía told a press conference Sunday night that 19,629 confirmed Covid-19 cases – one in six of the total – are currently active.
Covid-19 deaths reported by the Health Ministry on Sunday. milenio
He also said that there are 45,317 suspected cases across the country and that 336,395 people have been tested.
Mexico City and México state rank first and second, respectively, for coronavirus deaths, cumulative cases and active cases but there are signs that the situation is improving.
Coronavirus infections declined at the end of May in the greater Mexico City metropolitan area, which includes the 16 boroughs of the capital and 59 México state municipalities.
In the week of May 25 to 31, 4,769 new cases were registered in Mexico City, a decline of 359 cases, or 7%, compared to the preceding seven days.
A data analysis conducted by the newspaper Milenio found that new cases also declined in the last week of May in the México state municipalities that are part of the Valley of México metropolitan area, albeit by just eight cases or 0.3%.
The decrease in the number of new cases was much more pronounced in the northern border cities of Tijuana, Baja California, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua.
Virus cases and deaths since May 21. Deaths are numbers reported and not necessarily those that occurred each day. milenio
New infections declined 44% in the former city from 222 in the penultimate week of May to 124 the following week, while they decreased from 194 to 109 in Juárez for a drop of the same percentage.
In contrast, Mexico’s second and third biggest cities recorded increases in case numbers in the during the same period.
New infections surged 117% in the eight municipalities of the metropolitan area of Guadalajara, Jalisco, to 579 compared to 267 the previous week.
And new cases increased 26% in the metropolitan area of Monterrey, Nuevo León, with 285 registered between May 25 and 31 compared to 226 in the preceding seven days.
Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas, recorded a 61% increase in new infections while Villahermosa, Tabasco, saw a 34% spike.
More than three months have passed since Covid-19 was first detected in Mexico and after just over two months of federally mandated social distancing, the country has now completed the first week of what the government is calling “the new normal.”
IMSS director Zoé Robedo was diagnosed with Covid-19 on Sunday.
Almost 30,000 Covid-19 cases and just under 4,000 deaths were reported in the week after the conclusion of the national social distancing initiative, figures far higher than in any other week since the beginning of the pandemic.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle predicts that the death toll will almost quadruple over the next two months. It projects that 51,912 people will have lost their lives to Covid-19 in Mexico by August 4, and that confirmed infections will reach 403,650 by the same date.
Meanwhile, the director of the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS), a large public health provider, said on Sunday that he had tested positive for Covid-19.
Zoé Robledo said in a Twitter post that he would continue working from home and follow the instructions of doctors.
IMSS said in a statement that Robledo developed symptoms of Covid-19 on Saturday but is nevertheless in good health.
“The people with whom he had contact were informed,” the institute said.
One of those people is President López Obrador, who appeared alongside Robledo at a press conference in Tabasco on Friday.
However, López Obrador said at his regular news conference on Monday morning that he hadn’t been tested for Covid-19 because he doesn’t have any symptoms.
“Fortunately I’m fine, … I look after myself and keep a [healthy] distance,” he said.
Governor Alfaro offers an apology in a video released Saturday.
Some 29 young people are still missing after two days of protests in Guadalajara against aggressive police behavior.
Ironically, police reacted with violence on both Thursday and Friday as hundreds turned out to protest the alleged murder by police of a 30-year-old man in Ixtlahuacán de los Membrillos on May 4.
On Friday, Jalisco Governor Enrique Alfaro referred to the behavior of some police as “irresponsible and brutal” and promised justice for those responsible.
On Saturday, he followed up with an apology for the behavior by police.
He also vowed that each one of the young people reported missing would be sought “one by one” until they were located.
The non-governmental organization Where Do the Disappeared Go (A dónde van los desaparecidos) said that as of early Saturday afternoon there were still 29 missing after they were forcefully removed from the protests and taken away in unmarked trucks.
Nineteen were detained during a second protest on Friday; the others were arrested the day before, according to the organization, which published their names on Twitter Saturday afternoon, and said their whereabouts remained unknown.
One of them is a 25-year-old law graduate whose family saw him last in a news video that showed him being violently arrested and taken away by five police officers during Thursday’s protest.
“It hurts me a great deal to see the abuse by police against citizens,” the governor said Saturday, but added that he was also hurt to see people attacking the police.
He repeated an accusation he made Thursday that the protest had been infiltrated by people whose intention was to destabilize state security. He blamed President López Obrador but later backed down on the accusation.
Police arrest Jesús Isaí Luna during the Guadalajara protest.
A 25-year-old law graduate and state judicial employee was arbitrarily arrested and beaten by police at a protest in Guadalajara, Jalisco, on Thursday, say the man’s mother and girlfriend.
Jesús Isaí Luna Martínez was arrested shortly after he arrived at the protest against the alleged murder of Giovanni López, who was supposedly beaten by police after he was arrested – apparently for not wearing a face mask – in the Jalisco municipality of Ixtlahuacán de los Membrillos on May 4.
Luna’s mother told the newspaper Milenio that video footage posted to social media shows that her son was not acting violently when he was arrested.
“He arrived and took out a Mexican flag to show that he was unhappy about the young man who was killed and that’s why they [the police] grabbed him,” Irma Araceli Martínez said.
“They arrested him without any reason,” she said, adding that videos posted to social media show her son being arrested by police who subsequently beat him, handcuffed him and put him into a police vehicle.
A video in which police arrest and beat Jesús Isaí Luna at Guadalajara protest.
“They kept beating him even when he was handcuffed. He fainted and they still kept beating him,” the man’s mother said.
“They completely violated the rights of the protesters. … He arrived 10 minutes earlier and this happened to him. He knew his rights and their limits and that he couldn’t be attacking anyone or spray-painting.”
Luna’s fiancée also said that he did nothing wrong. He joined the protest “peacefully” but was nevertheless attacked by state and municipal police, Laura Romo told the newspaper NTR.
“It was a very brutal attack, he was hurt very badly. At no time is he seen committing an act of vandalism. [In the video footage] he’s not spray-painting or shouting, he’s not doing anything like that. … The abuse of authority is undeniable,” she said.
Luna was hospitalized for injuries to his head, face and torso but was later discharged and returned to police custody.
Martínez said that she saw her son in the hospital but hasn’t had any contact with him since.
“He told me, ‘mom, I wasn’t doing anything, I took out my flag to protest and that was all I did until they [the police] grabbed me,’” she said.
Romo said that all of Luna’s family is worried about him as he remains in police custody. As of Saturday morning, no family members had been allowed to see him and it was unclear what charges, if any, he faces.
“We’re tremendously worried. We don’t know what’s going to happen to my fiancé,” Romo said, adding that the authorities haven’t provided any information to “calm us down.”
A total of 28 people were arrested at Thursday’s protest in the historic center of Guadalajara during which some demonstrators clashed with police, set police vehicles alight and broke into the state government palace.
Jalisco Governor Enrique Alfaro defended the conduct of the police, stating that they acted according to the circumstances and “didn’t commit any act of violence against the protesters.”
