Global News Journal

Pop star freed but Mexican attitudes still on trial

Mexican pop star Kalimba, accused of raping a 17-year-old girl in December, walked free on Thursday after a judge ordered his release for lack of evidence. For fans of the dreadlocked singer and dj, it was a justice of sorts, given that 73 percent of Mexicans believe he was innocent, according to a poll in leading newspaper Reforma.

Guilty or not, the case gave Mexico a bit of homegrown celebrity gossip over the past few weeks in a country where relentless news of horrific drug killings is daily fare. Seeing the singer arrested in El Paso, Texas, where he was recording a new album, then dressed in a orange jump suit and imprisoned in a Mexican jail and then crying on his release, made top news and created plenty of  chat both in Mexican homes and on the Internet.

Did the voice behind local hits such as “Tocando Fondo” (Hitting Bottom) and Disney’s Spanish language version of “The Lion King” really sexually abuse the minor after hosting a show in the Caribbean coastal city of Chetumal in Quintana Roo state on Dec.19, or was the girl just creating a stink to get some attention?

What’s most revealing about the case is what it says about the dysfunctional Mexican justice and prison systems, partly responsible for feeding Mexico’s brutal drug war that has killed more than 34,000 people since December 2006, not to mention the racism against black Mexicans that remains deeply embedded in the country’s culture.

The judicial system’s strong presumption of guilt was on display even before Kalimba was arrested, with the Quintana Roo state prosecutor and a state judge both talking to the media and vowing to put the pop star behind bars.  Sadly, it also came as no surprise that prosecutors were unable to build their case, something that has let countless drug traffickers go free.

Meanwhile, the racist undercurrent was notable in Mexican media, with TV shows and newspapers including La Prensa, playing on the word “black” in headlines and stories to point to both a dark period in the singer’s life and his African heritage, while also needlessly inviting  readers to judge whether Kalimba was guilty or not in online polls.

And on being imprisoned, a fellow inmate jailed for drug trafficking offered to protect Kalimba while he was inside, a reminder that Mexican authorities do not control what goes on inside the country’s penitentiaries. No wonder he cried with relief on being set free.

The murky deaths of Mexico’s kingpins

Mexican drug baron Tony Tormenta died in a hail of grenades and gunfire on Nov.5 on the U.S. border, a victory for U.S.-Mexico efforts to clamp down on the illegal narcotics trade. Or did he?

Five days after the Gulf cartel leader’s death at the hands of Mexican marines in Matamoros, no photographs of his body have surfaced. At the navy’s only news conference, there was never any clarification about the whereabouts of his body. Mexico’s attorney general’s office did say on Wednesday that his body was handed over to his wife and daughter on Tuesday. The navy has declined to comment.

It was a similar story with the death of top Sinaloa cartel trafficker Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel in July. The only photograph of the body was leaked to a magazine days after his killing by the Mexican army in western Jalisco state.

In a country where few Mexicans believe in their government, President Felipe Calderon is asking people to take his word that these powerful, billionaire drug lords have, in fact, died.

Over the past five years, Tony Tormenta (Tony Storm) has been repeatedly reported killed and arrested, only to re-emerge weeks later.

Some Mexicans refuse to believe that drug baron Amado Carrillo Fuentes, who used fleets of jets to fly Colombian cocaine to the U.S. border, died during plastic surgery in a Mexico City hospital in 1997. He is still out there trafficking drugs, they say.

When marines killed kingpin Arturo Beltran Leyva in December, the navy did hand out photos of his bloodied, bullet-ridden body, but first they covered his body in wads of cash — a failure of basic human respect that brought widespread criticism.

“Collateral damage” grows in Mexico’s army-led drug war

I heard the bursts of gunfire near my house in Monterrey as I was showering this morning. Then the ambulance sirens started wailing, and as I drove my kids to school about 20 minutes later, a convoy of green-clad soldiers, their assault rifles at the ready, sped by us. In northern Mexico, where I cover the drug war, it has become a part of life to read about, hear and even witness shootouts, but today I shuddered at the thought: what if those soldiers accidentally ever shot at me?

It was in February 2007 that Amnesty International raised concerns over Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s decision, two months earlier, to send thousands of troops across the country to control Mexico’s spiraling drug violence. Echoing worries voiced by the United Nations, the rights group warned that sending the army onto Mexican streets to do the job of the police was a bad idea. Even individual soldiers have commented to Reuters, off the record of course, that they feel very uncomfortable about their new role.

Back then, when there was still plenty of optimism about winning the war against drug cartels, many Mexicans brushed off concerns of rights abuses and the possible deaths of innocent bystanders. Washington praised Calderon for his bold move.

But almost four years on, it would seem Amnesty, the U.N. and a host of other rights groups were right. For the family of slain architect Fernando Osorio, who was shot dead by soldiers who mistook him for a hitman late last month, they were certainly right. Fernando, 34, was killed on the outskirts of Monterrey, Mexico’s richest city, as he worked on a piece of land soon due to become a housing development. “The army is committing atrocities, they destroyed my family today,” Fernando’s father Oswaldo Osorio told reporters on Oct. 28.

In another tragedy a month before, four soldiers opened fire on a family traveling in their SUV along a highway outside of Monterrey, killing a 15-year-old boy and his father. Two students at Monterrey’s prestigious Tecnologico university were killed just outside the campus by soldiers earlier this year. Sadly, the list goes on.

The army occasionally apologizes. But for the Osorio family, little has been made clear. The army at first tried to justify their actions by saying Fernando was a drug hitman. The family found out what was going on from local media and from those working with Fernando on site. “It made the whole thing so much more painful,” his brother David told Reuters at the family home in suburban Monterrey. “If the army had come to us and said they were sorry and clarified things, well we might be able to understand that they are fighting a difficult battle. But right now, we don’t even know how to get Fernando’s belongings back (from the crime scene),” he said.

Numbed by Ciudad Juarez’s endless killings, Mexico shrugs off teen party deaths

The people of Ciudad Juarez are starting to lose all hope. When gunmen burst into a birthday party on Friday and killed 14 people, the horrific act should have at least shocked Mexican authorities into action. But even the sight of blood running out of a suburban patio, the broken chairs and the party-goers’ bodies slumped on the concrete have become all too familiar in the desert city across from El Paso, Texas.

It was at the start of 2010 that another, gruesomely similar shooting was warning enough that the city was spiraling toward criminal anarchy.

In January in a working class neighborhood just blocks away from Friday’s shooting, gunmen killed 15 people, again mainly teenagers, at a party. Back then, just like on Friday, a nearby federal police checkpoint seemed to turn a blind eye to what was going on and did nothing to stop the killers.

At the very least in January, the mother of one of the slain teenagers had the chance to vent her anger in person at Felipe Calderon, the conservative president who launched Mexico’s drug war four years ago. The Mexican leader was sufficiently moved by the January killings to fly to Ciudad Juarez and there, amid national outrage, he announced a plan to rebuild the broken, dirty mess of the city that was once lauded as a poster child for free trade, with its factories producing fridges and television for U.S. consumers.

Poverty, joblessness and a lack of a future for the young, it was rightly said, were the sources of much of the drug gang warfare that has broken out in Ciudad Juarez since 2008.

That reconstruction has included thousands of education grants, parks and community centers, hospital beds and giving almost 140,000 more people access to free medical care. There is even a sports field dedicated to the teenagers killed in January. But most of the streets of Ciudad Juarez are still folorn and many in the downtown that once catered to free-wheeling American tourists are filled with crumbling buildings. Childrens’ playgrounds lie abandoned, covered with graffiti. Killers are still at large.

Residents say that after eight months, a new federal police operation to fight drug gangs, and hundreds more murders, Calderon’s plan has failed. It’s hard to disagree.

Adios to Mexico’s marijuana haul

The black smoke could be seen across Tijuana as Mexico’s biggest-ever marijuana haul went up in flames.

The equivalent of more than 250 million joints were soaked in gasoline and set on fire, with the smell of the drug soon overpowering the acrid smell of the fuel.

It took soldiers 10 hours to assemble all the bales for incineration, 134 tonnes in all, wrapped in packets all marked for their respective U.S. dealers, including some with Homer Simpson logos. They were seized across the city in homes and trucks, a public relations victory of sorts for President Felipe Calderon and his drug war. 

The marijuana took two days to burn.

Still, private estimates put Mexico’s annual marijuana production at 7,000 tonnes, so there are either going to be a lot more bonfires, or, more likely, a lot smoke ups north of the border still to come.

In Mexico’s richest city, drug violence grows and candles burn in protest

The thousands of flickering candles run on and on along Monterrey’s main pedestrian thoroughfare, a spontaneous tribute to a 21-year-old university arts student shot dead by a drug hitmen who was chasing after an off-duty prison guard last week.

Even as busy shoppers bustle past, people are coming to Plaza Morelos to place the candles one after the other in the downtown of Mexico’s wealthy northern city in a rare public showing of anger, sadness and frustration at Lucila Quintanilla’s death and the spiraling drug violence across the city.

It was a Wednesday night like any other when hundreds of workers, shoppers, families and street vendors were wandering up and down Plaza Morelos in the warm autumn evening when a gunman pulled up in a black SUV and shot six times into the crowd. He missed his target, a guard at a Monterrey prison, and instead shot dead Quintanilla, who was chatting to her boyfriend on her cellular phone as she was out shopping. The boyfriend heard her die.

The hitman escaped, but the city, once lauded as a Latin American success story for its safe streets and growing middle class, cannot escape the trauma of the growing drug violence. Alongside many of the candles on the Plaza Morelos lie hand-written messages. “My son was kidnapped on June 23, 2010. We’ve been through three months of pain and desperation and the authorities don’t do anything,” read one. “How many more innocents have to die?” reads another.

Quintanilla’s blood stained the street for days before water from a nearby building’s dripping airconditioning unit washed it away. Monterrey seems determined not to forget this time, and mourners on the Plaza Morelos say they want the line of candles to reach the city’s cathedral and run on and on. “Silence is complicity with organized crime,” said one woman holding up a sign in protest.

In Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez, new police are charged with stopping the violence

It is difficult to imagine things getting much worse in Ciudad Juarez, the manufacturing city across from El Paso that has become one of the world’s most dangerous places. Extortions, beheadings, bombs in cars, daylight shootouts and kidnappings are all daily fare in the border town once better known as a NAFTA powerhouse and party zone for fun seeking Americans. Even the Mexican army stands accused of abusing the trust citizens once placed in it, carrying out possibly hundreds of wrongful arrests and illegal house raids.

Things are so bad that business leaders are calling for a state of emergency to be called in the city on the Rio Grande with nighttime curfews in a bid to control the violence.  Around 10,000 businesses have closed in Ciudad Juarez over the past two years. A military-enforced curfew doesn’t resound much with residents who want the thousands of troops sent in by President Felipe Calderon to leave town for good. More than 6,700 people have died in drug killings since the army arrived in early 2008 and locals say the army-led crackdown on gangs has only provoked more violence across the city and its surrounding Chihuahua state.  (Click here for full Mexico drug war coverage)

The latest initiative implemented by Chihuahua state Governor Cesar Duarte, who took office for a six-year term this week, is to create a new, state-wide police force dissolving notoriously corrupt local cops. It fits in with Calderon’s plan to send a constitutional reform to Congress soon to give governors more power over the police in cities and towns where local mayors run the municipal police. The thousands of disparate municipal police forces across Mexico are the most ineffective and corrupt, seen as an outdated model unfit to fight drug gangs.

But things don’t look promising. Many mayors across Mexico are against the reforms and in Chihuahua, where the reform is going ahead, many of the same corrupt officers are being absorbed into the new force, despite promises of tough checks on dishonest police. Several officers accused of allowing criminals to steal 69 weapons from Chihuahua police headquarters last week were included in the new Chihuahua force.

The federal police are hardly setting an example either. In August, some 450 federal agents held a public protest to denounce their superiors that they say force them on pain of death into the drug trade. “They sell as foot soldiers to the drug gangs. Why isn’t the violence stopping? Just take a look at our bosses,” an agent told Reuters who declined to be named.

Madeleine Albright pumps iron — and vouches for healthy lifestyle

We knew she was tough — but this tough?

“I can leg press 450 pounds,” the former U.S. Secretary of State modestly told a panel on health in Mexico City on Friday.

Albright, who also served in the 1990s as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, spoke of the importance of good nutrition at a panel sponsored by dietary supplement company Herbalife, which counts some 50,000 Mexicans among its global distributors.

The challenges of eating right have not been lost on the eminent Albright, who now sits on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations, chairs global strategy firm Albright Stonebridge, and is a professor of diplomacy at Georgetown University. “The only thing I can tell you is that as Secretary of State and before that as UN Ambassador I got very fat because I was eating for my country,” Albright said.

When seated at dinners next to global heads of state, Albright was inevitably presented with sumptuous — and caloric — national dishes, which took a measure of skilled diplomacy to decline. “I would try to diet and push it around the plate and the person would look at me and say ‘Why aren’t you eating our national whatever?’ It was a very fattening job.” But a healthy lifestyle has come easier in recent years, Albright said, who shared the following tidbit from her exercise regime. “One of the things that nobody ever believes about me that’s true is that I can leg press 450 pounds and I exercise three times a week,” she said.

Health is a crucial, yet under emphasized component of Mexico’s economic development, health experts said. The pressing problem of security in the midst of a brutal drug war that has cast a shadow over the country and slowed a recovery from recession. Whereas partnership between the United States and Mexico in the auto and high-tech sectors has already been established, to the benefit of both countries, the market in Mexico for health products has been “barely touched,” said the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, Carlos Pascual. “One area we have only just started to touch is health. Health and healthcare and the provision of health products,” said Pascual.

The stakes are high for Mexico, a country with some 45 million who live in poverty, according to the ambassador. And the link between poverty and insufficient nutrition is strong. The country has the highest percentage of overweight citizens, at 70 percent, according to a new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, followed by the United States at 68 percent. Mexico is No. 2 in obesity, with 30 percent of the population so affected, compared to 34 percent in the United States. “It undercuts what Mexico is trying to do in terms of developing a healthy, hard-working population that can change the economic picture in Mexico,” said Albright.

from Environment Forum:

The World Bank’s $6 billion man on climate change

As the special envoy on climate change for the World Bank, Andrew Steer might be thought of as the $6 billion man of environmental finance. He oversees more than that amount for projects to fight the effects of global warming.

"More funds flow through us to help adaptation and mitigation than anyone else," Steer said in a conversation at the bank's Washington headquarters. Named to the newly created position in June, Steer said one of his priorities is to marshall more than $6 billion in the organization's Climate Investment Funds to move from smaller pilot projects to large-scale efforts.

While the World Bank is not a party to global climate talks set for Cancun, Mexico, later this year, it is deeply engaged in this issue, Steer said. Acknowledging that an international agreement on climate change is a long shot this year, he said there are still opportunities to make changes to cut the greenhouse gas emissions that spur climate change.

"We do see there are opportunities," Steer said. "The mistake would be if it's sort of all or nothing." The bank is strongly supporting action to limit deforestation, offer quick financing to start climate projects and reform carbon markets to extend them to countries that have been left out so far.

Even though the World Bank won't be at the negotiating table in Cancun, its members will be there, and 80 percent of them want the bank to focus on climate change, Steer said. It's all part of a what he sees as a fundamental shift in the international attitude toward dealing with this problem.

"There is a new revolution that's going on now," he said . "It's not only driven by personal commitment, like it would have been 15 years ago ... Now it's driven by just the sheer logic ... If you care about long-term poverty reduction, you simply cannot avoid this issue."

Photo credits: REUTERS/Supri Supri (Andrew Steer (right) then the World Bank's Indonesia country director, with World Health Organization's Georg Peterson at a news conference in Jakarta, August 24, 2006)

7 circles of Juarez: teenage assassins

This article by Ioan Grillo originally appeared in GlobalPost.

Caption: A police man walks at a crime scene where three people were gunned down in a drive-by shooting in downtown Ciudad Juarez April 28, 2010. REUTERS/Claudia Daut

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — At less than 5 feet 6 inches with acne and a mop of curly hair, 17-year-old Jose Antonio doesn’t look particularly menacing.

But in his tender years, he has seen more firefights and murders than many soldiers serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Indeed, Jose Antonio has come of age in a war zone. And he has served as a soldier, siding squarely with the insurgent drug gangs of Juarez.

He said he first picked up a gun at 12 years old, when he joined the calaberas, or “skulls,” one of the gangs that rule the slums that climb up sun-baked hills on the west side of this sprawling border city.