McDonalds claims a drunk customer planted the rat meat in an attempt to extort the burger chain.
McDonalds has strongly denied allegations that a customer was served a rat’s head in their burger at a branch in central Mexico on Sunday.
The attorney general’s office in the State of Mexico closed down the branch in the town of Tlalnepantla de Baz that night after receiving a complaint from the customer who claimed to have been sold the rodent meat.
Photos circulating on social networks appear to show the whiskered rat head splattered in ketchup beside a half eaten burger.
The news quickly made global headlines, leading McDonalds to go on the offensive…
Click here to read this article in full at Latin Correspondent.
Four tigers have escaped in three different incidents across Mexico in the last two months. Photo by Libero Santuario Silvestre
Police in Mexico are on the lookout for two tigers that escaped from a ranch in the western state of Michoacán on Sunday afternoon.
Backed by local zookeepers, police officers have been patrolling the surrounding area in car and on foot in a bid to capture the felines that are considered a risk to the population.
It is unclear who the owners are or whether they had the appropriate permits to keep the animals.
Such incidents are a regular occurrence in Mexico, where ownership of big cats is not uncommon.
Just two days earlier, another tiger escaped from a hotel where it was kept as an attraction in the neighboring state of Guerrero.
In September, authorities in Jalisco state captured yet another tiger that had escaped from a gated community in the city of Guadalajara…
Click here to read this article in full at Latin Correspondent.
Activist María García Domínguez has spent 12 years relocating mistreated animals. Photo by Libero Santuario Silvestre
Tequila is being distilled in the shadow of organized crime
Jalisco’s New Generation Cartel has been laundering money through its own tequila brand, Onze Black.
When the violence in Mexico’s tequila-producing region was nearing its peak, distillery owner Felipe Camarena awoke one night at his home in the town of Arandas to the sound of machine gun fire. It continued sporadically through the rest of the night.
“It was awful,” the distiller said, insisting he saw 15 bodies carried away as he peered through his bedroom window, though the local press later reported only two deaths. “I thought, ‘Is this a war or what?'”
Around the time of that incident in 2011, tequila producers in the highlands of Jalisco state in western Mexico faced a wave of threats, attempted kidnappings and extortion, Camarena told VICE News. He said criminal gangs would also charge them a quota for importing agave — the spiky blue cactus-like plant from which tequila is made — from neighboring Michoacán.
The violence, that was primarily blamed on the Zetas drug cartel, has faded in the last couple of years as the organization has lost influence in the region and the country after its main leaders were captured or killed by government forces, and it lost several key turf battles to rivals. But the shadow of organized crime still hangs over the emblematic industry in signs that smaller distillers are being pulled into networks laundering criminal profits for groups such as the New Generation Jalisco Cartel…
Click here to read this feature in full at VICE News.
The Tequila Files 