Gruesome murders and threats of violence stalk Mexican activists
Two activists who had campaigned for justice and searched for the victims of forced disappearances were brutally murdered in Mexico’s troubled south this month.
Last Friday, 26-year-old Norma Angélica Bruno Román was shot dead in front of her three children at a cemetery in Iguala, the same city where 43 students were abducted by corrupt police officers last September.
She was a member of a citizen-led organization combing mass graves in this troubled area of Guerrero state in search of missing relatives.
Nine days earlier, Gustavo Salgado Delgado, a 32-year-old leader of the left-wing Popular Revolutionary Front (FPR), was decapitated in the neighboring state of Morelos.
He had campaigned on behalf of migrant farmers from southern Mexico and played an active role in local demonstrations demanding the safe return of the 43 students from the rural teacher training college in Ayotzinapa.
As the disappearance of the students has spurred a huge protest movement, the Mexican government has repeatedly sought to bury the case, while police officers have infiltrated marches and even threatened to rape, murder and incinerate demonstrators.
The culprits were not apprehended in either of the recent killings and it is not yet clear whether either victim was targeted because of their work. Still, the murders are further evidence of the dangers that activists face across Mexico, especially in the country’s lawless south…
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Football legend Cuauhtémoc Blanco moves into politics to take on Mexico’s most violent city
Mexican football legend Cuauhtémoc Blanco has announced his imminent retirement from the sport in order to run for mayor of Cuernavaca, which was named the most dangerous city in the country earlier this week.
Blanco, 42, who currently plays for Puebla in Mexico’s top division, the Liga MX, revealed on Wednesday that he will step down from professional football on April 20 ahead of the Cuernavaca elections on June 7.
The short, balding but iconic star, who made his name at Club América, has enjoyed a long and successful career including stints with over half a dozen Mexican clubs and brief spells in Spain and the United States.
He appeared at three World Cups for the Mexican national team, including the France 1998 tournament where he drew international acclaim for his acrobatic goals and his eye-catching trademark trick that became known as the “Cuauhtemiña” or “Blanco Bounce”.
Blanco, who will represent the little known Social Democratic Party (PSD) if, as expected, he wins the March 7 primary, has already begun positioning himself as an anti-establishment figure.
“I haven’t voted for a long time because we don’t believe in politicians anymore… I’m not a politician, I’m running for you,” he said, upon announcing his candidacy in Cuernavaca last month.
In a colorful press conference, Blanco denied that he was running for money or publicity, denounced the incumbent Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) administration as thieves, and vowed to “help the people” so that Cuernavaca could “move forward”…
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Was the CIA involved in the murder of DEA agent Kiki Camarena?
Thirty years ago, DEA agent Enrique Camarena was tortured and murdered at this house by leading members of the Guadalajara Cartel.
The modest, salmon-colored building at 881 Lope de Vega street looks much like any other home in Guadalajara’s middle-class Jardines del Bosque neighborhood.
But behind the whitewashed walls, electric fence and barred windows is the house where one of the most infamous crimes in Mexican history took place.
Having just left the U.S. Consulate building on February 7, 1985, DEA Agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena was on his way to meet his wife for lunch when he was apprehended by corrupt members of Mexico’s federal security agency.
The agents blindfolded Camarena, forced him into their black Grand Marquis and drove him to the safe house on Lope de Vega to be interrogated by the leaders of the Guadalajara Cartel, then Mexico’s dominant drug-trafficking organization.
Camarena’s captors beat him repeatedly, burned his chest with cigarette butts and gunpowder, pulled out his fingernails and violated him with a broom handle. They even brought in a doctor to administer shots to keep him alive long enough to continue the interrogation.
An eyewitness would later testify in a Los Angeles courtroom that the Jalisco state governor and two federal cabinet members were present throughout the interrogation in order to ascertain what Camarena knew about their own links to the cartel.
After 30 hours of torture, Camarena finally died from a crowbar blow to the head. His body was eventually discovered a month later and many of the culprits were subsequently rounded up and convicted after the DEA launched Operation Leyenda, the biggest investigation in its history.
Thirty years on, Camarena’s death remains the source of great debate on both sides of the border. The controversy was reignited last September when Jesús Esquivel, the Washington correspondent for Mexico’s respected Proceso magazine, released a book suggesting that the CIA was directly involved in his abduction, torture and murder.
Largely based on interviews with former DEA supervisor Hector Berrellez, who oversaw Operation Leyenda, the book posits that during the mid-1980s the CIA helped the Guadalajara Cartel smuggle tons of cocaine into the United States in order to fund a dirty war against Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government. In return, the cartel purportedly shipped arms and drug money to the Contras, right-wing rebels who were fighting the Sandinistas.
The CIA has strongly denied any involvement in Camarena’s death but Esquivel believes the DEA agent had uncovered evidence of this unholy alliance shortly before he was murdered…
Click here to read this feature in full at Latin Correspondent.
The Tequila Files 