The drone pilot and alleged thief arrested in Mexico City.
For both cops and robbers, drones can be useful tools. Mexico City police arrested a man this week who used the devices to monitor his targets’ homes and plan his robberies.
But it was a miscalculation that put Francisco Alejandro Martínez Segovia, 42, in the hands of the authorities. He was found yesterday inside an apartment in the southern borough of Coyoacán by a very surprised homeowner.
The woman’s screams alerted neighbors, who called police.
After his arrest, Martínez admitted that he had broken into at least 20 other homes and apartments throughout Mexico City.
He was found carrying a pistol, Cartier jewelry valued at over 600,000 pesos (US $32,000), special lock-picking equipment and two drones.
He told authorities that he used the drones to make sure the coast was clear before breaking in.
Police chief Raymundo Collins Flores told a press conference that the case was the first in which a thief had employed a drone.
But organized crime has been using the unmanned aerial devices for years. A study entitled Drones: Technology at the Service of Transnational Criminal Organizations, reported there was widespread use of drones by organized crime on both sides of the Mexico-United States border.
It cited Mexican estimates that drug-carrying drones operated by Mexican cartels made 850 flights into the U.S. between 2012 and 2017, outflanking efforts by authorities to stop them.
The author in the shark tank: they were not vegan sharks, but they were not hungry either.
The year I settled in Mazatlán, 2006, was the same year I began my questionable avocation as a writer. Prior to my move to Mexico, the longest thing I had ever written was a detailed shopping list for a home improvement project. I began writing about my new life when I was prompted by a friend to send emails back to Idaho detailing my romp through Mexico, and I complied.
I would also post my musings on a Mazatlán forum, which is where my future editor found samples of my writings and recruited me to write a column for her monthly arts and entertainment magazine.
The following is from notes I made after a publicity stunt my editor cooked up in October of 2011 to bring attention to a new addition at our local aquarium.
It was a balmy afternoon in October when my editor contacted me and inquired as to my swimming abilities. My response was to quickly ask her why she wanted to know.
The years which have given me wisdom have taught me that answering a question with a question will buy time without automatically committing to something stupid or expensive. I am actually a skilled swimmer and very at home in the water, but was thankful to have kept that detail to myself when she voiced her request.
Hitching a ride on a shark.
She was planning a feature story about the new expansion of our local aquarium, and needed my help to add some color to the article. She then eagerly admitted she wanted to put me into a shark-infested aquarium tank to further the cause of gonzo journalism in Mazatlán. In my mind the only color I could see was red — blood red.
So I suddenly made loud hissing and crackling noises, while holding the phone at arm’s length, telling her she was breaking up. I then closed the phone and returned it to my pocket. After about five seconds, I retrieved the phone and switched the damn thing off, thus giving myself ample time for several Pacificos and a bit of contemplation.
Actually I thought it would be interesting to see a shark up close sometime. I just didn’t want it to be the last thing I ever saw.
It was during that contemplation portion of my afternoon, while I was sharing a few beers with friends at a beachfront watering hole, that the editor appeared at our table and elaborated on her plan. When my drinking buddies caught the drift of what I was being asked to do, they howled with laughter.
I suddenly realized if I declined this swim in front of my buddies, my manhood would be irreparably damaged. Ah-ha. I had just been set up by my clever editor.
My dip in the tank was scheduled to take place on a Wednesday morning, while the place thronged with visitors. Walking around the huge glass-walled tank the week before, I counted 10 sharks ranging between four and eight feet in length. Viewing a large tank of predatory fish is one thing; joining them in their own environment is quite another.
Bodie Kellogg with a ‘harmless’ shark.
I scanned the viewing area for the banner announcing that a gringo would be fed to the fishes the following Wednesday; nothing like blood and body parts to draw a crowd.
However, my reputation for death-defying acts being of value to me, I did not back out. On the fateful day I was met by Paulina, the aquarium media person. She handed me a clipboard with a sheet, asking me to fill out some type of legal consent form. It absolved the aquarium from any liability resulting from my dip in the tank.
First off, I never expected such a document existed here in the land of zero liability; consent to potential dismemberment? This was just great, even the aquarium was admitting this thing could go horribly wrong.
I took the clipboard and began to fill in the little boxes. When I came to the question which asked me who to contact in case of an emergency, I naturally wrote DOCTOR . . . . I am no fool; my significant other knows nothing about attending to massive flesh wounds.
My editor was stationed in the viewing area, camera in hand. If I lived through this I wanted proof. If the attempt proved fatal, the coroner would appreciate a visual record of the mishap. If there are coroners here.
All the while Paulina was doing her best to assure me that the 10 sharks circling in the tank were quite harmless. Ya, right, vegan sharks — I don’t think so. But she did assure me they’d just been fed large amounts of food and wouldn’t care about me.
After changing in the staff locker room, with fins and mask in hand I walked to the roof ladder and ascended to the entry point of the tank. There was a ladder in the center of the roof, and it dropped about six feet to a small metal platform several inches above the water.
When I reached the platform I encountered the aquarium’s resident shark handler; this was a very encouraging sight. Not because of the company I would have in the tank, but because he looked to be devoid of any serious scar tissue. The fact that this kid was undamaged meant it was either his first day on the job, or I would actually survive this thing with my major body parts intact. I chose to cling to the latter scenario.
I dropped into the 85-degree water, dove down about six feet and began swimming in the same counterclockwise direction as the tank’s inhabitants. I was hoping that my bright red swim trunks would distinguish me from any type of common food source.
The shark handler was quite adept at gently restraining one of these large creatures so I could stroke it and get a real up close and personal look. The mouth of a nurse shark, even a six-footer, is rather small with only a single row of teeth. It was, however, big enough to consume a hand or foot. For the next 40 minutes I intermingled with these docile but fearsome looking creatures, while I was actively transcending my galeophobia.
The handler would swim alongside the fish and place one hand on the belly, the other gripping the main dorsal fin. Those actions allowed the shark to pull him along. It took me several attempts to hitchhike a short ride on a passing shark, but the eventually successful result was deeply satisfying.
While the shark was loosely in my grasp I could feel the tremendous muscularity that rippled through its body; I was riding along with 250 pounds of very solid fish.
The skin on the back and sides of a shark is slightly rough, like a 200-grit sandpaper laid over a pliable leather substrate, while the belly is as soft and smooth as a baby’s bottom. When I released the fin and let my hands run along the length of the shark’s body, it would give a powerful flick of the tail to rid itself of the unnatural encumbrance.
With burning lungs, I would resurface, gulp some precious air and return to the carousel of cruising sharks; this turned out to be a truly top-notch experience.
Since that time I have returned to the shark tank on several other dubious occasions. The last dip in the tank was with the Mazatlán representative for the Sinaloa Tourism Board. The male bonding that occurs while swimming with carnivorous fish has forged a lifelong connection; we have become los hermanos del tiburón — the brothers of the shark.
The writer describes himself as a very middle-aged man who lives full-time in Mazatlán with a captured tourist woman and the ghost of a half wild dog. He can be reached at [email protected].
Trudeau, left, and AMLO: Canadian prime minister asked Mexico to intervene.
Whether the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) will remain a trilateral pact will be known within 48 hours, Mexico’s economy secretary said yesterday.
Ildefonso Guajardo had been scheduled to present the text of the bilateral agreement reached last month between Mexico and the United States to the Senate yesterday, but said his U.S. and Canadian counterparts “specifically requested” that he hold off to give them more time to reach an agreement.
Negotiations over the past month between the United States and Canada failed to yield a trilateral deal but the two countries are making a renewed push to keep NAFTA a three-way accord. The U.S. has set a Sunday deadline to reach an agreement.
The future of a dispute resolution system and access to Canada’s dairy market are among the key issues that still need to be resolved.
“At this moment, there is a very serious attempt to continue advancing in the process of finalizing the differences in bilateral issues between the United States and Canada,” Guajardo said in a meeting with senators.
“In the next 48 hours, we will know if we can go ahead with a trilateral text or will need to find ourselves with a need to put up a text of bilateral understanding and then define the legal actions that can maintain the possibility of a trilateral format.”
Under United States trade law, the text of a new pact has to be published for 60 days before the president can sign it and send it to Congress for approval.
Mexico and the U.S. are hoping that a deal can be reached this weekend in order to give President Peña Nieto the opportunity to sign a new pact before Andrés Manuel López Obrador is sworn in on December 1.
The president-elect said yesterday that he had spoken to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and that there is still enough time for Canada to join the revised agreement reached between Mexico and the United States.
López Obrador told reporters that Trudeau asked him during a phone call Thursday “to intervene and call on the U.S. government to reach an agreement” with Canada. “We agreed to that,” he added.
López Obrador said that there are no final deadlines for the negotiation but ruled out any possibility of amendments to the agreement already reached between Mexico and the United States, which sets new auto sector rules and modernizes chapters on digital trade and labor and environment standards.
“We are not going to re-open the negotiation. That you can be sure of. We’re just waiting for the understanding between the United States and Canada . . . We want the agreement to be trilateral,” he said.
López Obrador also said that he “had information” that Washington had made a counterproposal to Ottawa but didn’t offer further details.
Some United States Democratic Party lawmakers said after a meeting with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer Thursday that they couldn’t support a new NAFTA deal that didn’t include Canada.
“Canada is exceptionally important. I think it would be malpractice, both for economic and political reasons, not to have a major agreement with Canada,” said Ron Wyden, a senator for Oregon and the leading Democrat on the tax and trade Senate Finance Committee.
“I think leaving Canada out of a new deal amounts to the Trump administration surrendering on fixing NAFTA.”
A Federal Police officer and a paramedic are among the five people who were wounded.
According to information from the state’s security cabinet, personnel of an elite division of the Federal Police were conducting a patrol in several vehicles in the community of Purísima del Zapote when they were shot at by armed men in a pickup truck.
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The police pursued the vehicle for several kilometers before arriving at a point where, according to authorities, around 40 armed men wearing vests and other clothing emblazoned with the CJNG initials were waiting inside several vehicles.
The suspected cartel members shot at police who deployed a strategy that forced them to retreat towards a ravine as the gunfire continued.
At the same time, military police were involved in another confrontation, the newspaper El Universal reported.
Another group of Federal Police officers was later attacked, reportedly in retaliation for the previous clashes, as was a state police unit.
The unidentified suspects then set a pickup truck and a trailer on fire on the highway to Querétaro, reportedly to hinder the pursuit of fleeing cartel members.
Federal Police commissioner Manelich Castilla Craviotto later attended the scene of the confrontation along with other officers.
Police seized seven pickup trucks, of which four had been reported stolen, as well as seven firearms, improvised explosive devices and a makeshift grenade launcher.
Guanajuato was the most violent state in Mexico in the first eight months of 2018, according to sheer homicide numbers, with 1,671 victims. A large percentage of the deaths are believed to be linked to the crime of petroleum theft.
The CJNG is involved in a turf war in the state with the crime gang known as Santa Rosa de Lima over the illicit fuel trade and to control extortion and kidnapping rackets, El Universal said.
Spanish hotelier Palladium Hotel Group will open the first stage of a new US $750-million all-inclusive mega resort located in Costa Mujeres to the north of the city of Cancún on November 1.
The resort will have 1,500 hotel rooms in two luxury properties, the adults-only TRS Coral and the family-friendly Grand Palladium.
The construction of the first stage of Palladium’s ambitious project entailed the investment of $280 million, the firm’s chief sales and marketing officer told a press conference.
“Mexico continues to be an important and strategic destination for us,” said Sergio Zertuche Valdés, explaining that the chain’s Mexico footprint represents 44% of its presence in the Caribbean and 25% of its 13,000 available rooms worldwide.
He said Mexico is also a preferred destination for international tourists, especially those from the United States and Canada. This is coupled with the advantages presented by Mexican hospitality, kindness and quality of service.
Costa Mujeres is located some 30 kilometers from the Cancún international airport, in a zone that Zertuche asserted is just beginning its growth spurt.
Once finished, Palladium’s new resort will have five hotels and a total of 3,500 rooms. Following the November opening of the first two hotels, the firm plans to open two more Grand Palladium properties and another TRS.
President-elect López Obrador yesterday assured private energy executives that their contracts will not be canceled if they meet existing terms, the head of Mexico’s largest oil producers’ association said.
López Obrador, who has been a vocal critic of private investment in the oil sector, met with gas and oil executives in a closed-door meeting in Mexico City and reportedly struck a diplomatic tone.
“The president-elect told us on various occasions that they will respect contracts so long as we obviously comply with all of the contracts’ commitments,” said Alberto de la Fuente, president of the AMEXHI producers’ group.
“We left feeling at ease that our contracts will be honored,” added de la Fuente, who is also the CEO of Royal Dutch Shell in Mexico.
The president-elect, who will take office on December 1, has said previously that all contracts awarded to private and foreign companies will be reviewed for corruption although incoming finance secretary Carlos Urzúa said in July that if no irregularities are detected, the contracts will be honored.
López Obrador didn’t offer comments to reporters after the meeting but prospective energy secretary Rocio Nahle confirmed that the incoming government will honor contracts already signed.
“We will respect the rule of law and the agreements that have been made with the outgoing government,” she said, adding that the incoming administration would also help companies deal with regulatory delays.
“We made a commitment that we will talk to the regulators, or more to the point that we will review the regulators because there is a constant complaint that they take too much time,” Nahle said.
Later yesterday, López Obrador told a press conference that he didn’t use the meeting as a platform to criticize the 2014 energy reform that allowed private and foreign companies to enter the oil sector formerly monopolized by the state, nor did he blame it for declining levels of oil production.
“It’s not about blaming anybody or saying what a failure the energy reform is. We’re not going to generate that controversy, that debate. It’s about looking forward and rescuing, strengthening the petroleum industry . . .” he said.
López Obrador did, however, present the executives with documents showing that oil production has declined by 44.8% since 2004.
“I’ll give you a fact: when the energy reform was about to be approved they said that for that year they were going to be producing 3 million barrels a day and that prediction failed because 1.8 million barrels a day are being extracted,” he told reporters outside his transition headquarters.
“In other words, 1.2 million [barrels] less than what was estimated, that’s why we have to hurry up and stop the decline, invest in exploration and drilling of wells in order to have enough production of crude and to be able to carry out the refining program to produce gasoline in Mexico and not buy it abroad . . .” López Obrador added.
“That issue was brought up with the business people and a call was made for all of us to work together to strengthen the energy sector.”
Nahle added that the incoming government still plans to review all contracts before any further oil auctions go ahead.
The president of the National Hydrocarbons Commission said earlier this month that there are no plans to suspend oil auctions scheduled for February, providing an early sign that López Obrador is retreating from plans to wind back the 2014 energy reform.
The attorney general of Quintana Roo resigned yesterday a day after the state’s secretary of public security also quit his post.
The resignation of the former, Miguel Ángel Pech, had been expected since his last appearance in state Congress when he said the Attorney General’s office (FGE) was incapable of confronting organized crime and investigating homicides.
Violent crime has plagued parts of Quintana Roo in recent years, especially the state’s largest tourism destination, Cancún.
The newspaper Reforma revealed in August that in a private meeting with state lawmakers, Pech said the FGE lacked qualified police, specialized equipment and resources to tackle crime in the state.
“Every prosecutor has to attend to up to 800 cases. We have 60 positions available for state police but there are no trained personnel to occupy the positions,” Pech said, according to sources who spoke to Reforma.
Even if those positions were filled, the state still wouldn’t have enough police, he reportedly added. “It’s a complex situation.”
Quintana Roo Governor Carlos Joaquín González has named Gustavo Salas Salgado as interim attorney general until a permanent replacement is found.
It’s been a busy week for Joaquín, who confirmed Wednesday that public security secretary Rodolfo del Ángel Campos had resigned.
In his place, the governor appointed Alberto Capella Ibarra, a former police chief of Tijuana and until September 14, security commissioner in the state of Morelos.
Joaquín praised the work of del Ángel, stating that after receiving a “dismantled and demoralized police force” from former governor Roberto Borge, he is leaving his successor a “trustworthy” force with better-paid and better-equipped officers.
Capella, nicknamed “el rambo tijuanense” (Rambo from Tijuana) has been a controversial figure, with critics questioning the security strategies he has adopted and pointing out that when he was in charge of security in Tijuana, homicide rates went up.
The mayor of Acapulco has called the federal takeover of policing duties in the resort city a publicity stunt, echoing the words of a local business leader.
Evodio Velázquez Aguirre told broadcaster Milenio Televisión that the navy-led operation was carried out to execute arrest warrants against two municipal police commanders sought on homicide charges dating back to 2009, which he said he was unaware of.
He declared that executing the warrants was the sole motive for the operation but federal and state authorities seized the opportunity to disarm the entire municipal force and review all its weapons.
“It’s been a big show for the media, of intervention, and we have been supporting and coordinating at all times with the federal and state authorities,” Velázquez said.
He said he was unaware why the two commanders had not been dismissed by his predecessors.
The Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) mayor, whose three-year term ends today, said that governing Acapulco has been difficult, “mainly on security issues,” but defended his record in office.
“. . . I received a broken police force that at that time [2015] was coming out of a work stoppage and wasn’t patrolling the streets,” Velázquez said.
“The municipal police that I hand over today . . . of 1,300 officers, 85% are accredited . . . they passed their confidence tests and their state exams . . . We’ve reduced intentional homicides by 20% and we’ve come out of the 10 cities in Mexico with the highest rates of violence, according to [statistics institute] Inegi. They are hard facts,” he added.
The mayor also said that tourist security protocols adopted in Acapulco have been replicated in other resort cities including Los Cabos, Baja California, and Mazatlán, Sinaloa, and that cruise ship arrivals in the port city have increased from eight per year when he took office to 80.
Meanwhile, the city’s police chief, Max Sedano, who was also detained during Tuesday’s operation, announced yesterday that he had resigned.
He said he had been pressured into making the decision by Guerrero Attorney General Jorge Zuriel de los Santos Barilla and ministerial police chief Esteban Maldonado Palacios.
Sedano also said his office was turned upside down during the disarmament operation and that his gun, two credit cards and a bottle of perfume, among other items, were stolen.
A former federal lawmaker and high-ranking official of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was released from prison today after a judge rejected an appeal that challenged his acquittal on corruption charges.
Alejandro Gutiérrez, who served as assistant secretary general of the party’s National Executive Committee between 2015 and 2016 and has also served in both houses of Congress, was placed in preventative custody nine months, accused of embezzlement.
He is alleged to have operated an embezzlement scheme that diverted 250 million pesos (US $13.4 million) to the administration of former Chihuahua governor César Duarte.
The funds were allegedly used to fund PRI candidates in the 2016 state elections.
But the federal Attorney General’s office (PGR) withdrew the charges against Gutiérrez last month, stating it didn’t have sufficient evidence.
A federal judge subsequently ruled that Gutiérrez had no case to answer to.
The government of Chihuahua, now led by National Action Party (PAN) Governor Javier Corral, challenged Gutiérrez’s absolution but Judge Isabel Porras Odriozola ruled that the appeal was inadmissible.
Gutiérrez’s defense said in a statement that the judge determined that the Chihuahua government’s legal counsel is not legally entitled to file such a challenge.
“This ruling confirms that any legal recourse filed by the Chihuahua government will not be successful and consequently once exonerated, [Gutiérrez] must be immediately released,” lawyer Antonio Collado Mocelo wrote.
“This means that the federal judicial power once again confirmed that there was not enough evidence to prove the alleged guilt of Alejandro Gutiérrez.”
Gutiérrez’s release at 4:00am today was confirmed to the newspaper Reforma by Chihuahua Attorney General César Augusto Peniche, who was highly critical of the process and the rulings that allowed it.
“It’s confirmation that federal justice is selective and favors political power. It’s one page more in the history of political corruption that has the country mired in violence and inequality,” he said.
Gutiérrez still faces embezzlement charges in Chihuahua for 1.7 million pesos (US $90,900). He must wear an ankle monitor and is prohibited from leaving the state, Peniche said.
The Chihuahua government has repeatedly clashed with federal authorities over its investigation into corruption during César Duarte’s governorship.
In January, Corral accused the federal government of withholding funds promised to the state in retaliation for its investigation and he had also warned that it would seek to protect Gutiérrez and other former PRI officials from prosecution.
The failure of federal authorities to extradite César Duarte from the United States to face corruption charges has also been a source of tension between the Chihuahua and Mexican governments.
Two days of protests in the indigenous town of Capácuaro, Michoacán, in which more than a dozen vehicles were hijacked and some set on fire, concluded this morning.
Citizens of the town in the municipality of Uruapan took to the streets on Wednesday to demand that municipal authorities complete various public works projects.
Protesters blocked traffic on the Uruapan-Paracho highway and set fire to two cars and a semi-truck.
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Protests continued yesterday with the hijacking of 12 more vehicles and the occupation of the town’s main square. Late yesterday afternoon, government representatives met with the protesters to negotiate.
Talks between citizens and municipal and state officials concluded early this morning with an agreement that the protesters’ demands would be met. Among them were finishing a sports center, providing security, obtaining a garbage truck and concluding street paving work.
In exchange, the latter released the dozen hijacked vehicles they had been holding.
