''The coca-colization of Mexico''

From Radio Netherlands

''It is a strange drink because it’s black. I like it more than other soft drinks”, says a teenager in a fast food restaurant in Mexico City, sipping from a cola drink. A girl next to him says: “The very first thing I do when I get up in the morning is take a soda from the fridge”.

Mexico is the world’s fattest country. Figures from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) show that more Mexicans are obese than in any other country. Consumption of soda and carbonated drinks, together with fast food, are a major contributing factor in this growing obesity epidemic.''

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''Why Mexico favours legalising marijuana in the US

From Voice of Russia

''The decision of two US states, Washington and Colorado, to legalise marijuana remains one of the key issues both on the national and international scale. The prospect of making that drug legal was discussed at the meeting of the leaders of four South American countries - Mexico, Honduras, Belize and Costa Rica.''

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''TPP Treaty Tolls Death Knell for Mexican Countryside''

From Upside Down World

''The Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement negotiations, which Mexico is to join in December, are threatening to eliminate the last defences of the country’s agricultural sector.

Farmers in the United States, one of the future partners in the treaty, have asked their government to negotiate flexibilisation of the phytosanitary measures applied by Mexico, which are the final barrier against free entrance of agricultural products that compete against local crops.''

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''American Plan To Divide and Multiply Mexico’s Drug Cartels''

From 'There are no Sunglasses'

''At the end of Vicente Fox’s term, Mexico had seven cartels, while President Felipe Calderon recognizes only 11 criminal organizations in 2011. Leaders of thugs converted into little bosses , divided and struggled for criminal control in the 32 states of Mexico. It is known, they are killing and denouncing one another. As are armed wings, are dedicated to all crimes: the movement of drugs, domestic sales in Mexican municipalities, kidnapping, extortion and trafficking in persons, without that the big mafias can not control them.''

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Stratfor Sources: ''U.S. Troops in Mexico as Feds Aid Cartels''

From The New American

''Federal authorities in the United States have been quietly supporting certain Mexican criminal empires, especially the Sinaloa drug cartel, in a bid to solidify the syndicates’ reign as dominant powerbrokers in particular territories, according to leaked e-mails from a U.S.-based Mexican diplomat to the private intelligence firm Stratfor. If cartel chiefs cooperate with authorities, “governments will allow controlled drug trades,” the diplomatic source wrote.

Other information unearthed so far in the leak, much of it coming from a variety of sources, was equally explosive. One 2011 e-mail from an individual described by Stratfor as “a US law enforcement officer with direct oversight of border investigations,” for example, indicated that American troops were already operating in Mexico under the guise of the drug war.''

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''Drug War Mexico: Politics, Neoliberalism and Violence in the New Narcoeconomy''

From Upside Down World

''A brief history of drug cultivation, use, and state power in Mexico opens the book, which then delves into anti-drugs initiatives in Mexico from the 1970s onwards. By the time of the presidency of Luis Echeverría (1970-1976), write Watt and Zepeda, the government of Mexico was already associating "all types of political activism with criminality and frequently with drug trafficking." Watt and Zepeda set up the national and international context at the time, painting in broad strokes the Mexico where the CIA and the DEA began to set up a "permanent drug war." 

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''Mexican Farmers Battle Canadian Mining Company for Control of Their Land''

From UpsideDownWorld

''Civil disobedience has halted production at Mexico’s “top grade producer of silver.” Farmers of the La Sierrita village, a close knit community of about 50 families, located 40 minutes north of the city of Gomez Palacio, Durango, have shut down the La Platosa mine owned by Canadian firm Excellon Resources for over a month.

This comes in response to the company’s refusal to negotiate with the community over its requests for the preferential hiring of local people on whose land the company operates, as well as pay the rental rates for its use.''

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''Mexican official: CIA ‘manages’ drug trade''

From "There are no Sunglasses'

''The US Central Intelligence Agency and other international security forces “don’t fight drug traffickers”, a spokesman for the Chihuahua state government in northern Mexico has told Al Jazeera, instead “they try to manage the drug trade”.

Allegations about official complicity in the drug business are nothing new when they come from activists, professors, campaigners or even former officials. However, an official spokesman for the authorities in one of Mexico’s most violent states – one which directly borders Texas – going on the record with such accusations is unique.''

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''The Drug Trade and GNP (Gross National Pain)''

From Rebecca Solnit and TomDispatch

Dear Mexico,
''I apologize. There are so many things I could apologize for, from the way the U.S. biotech corporation Monsanto has contaminated your corn to the way Arizona and Alabama are persecuting your citizens, but right now I’d like to apologize for the drug war, the 10,000 waking nightmares that make the news and the rest that don’t.

You've heard the stories about the five severed heads rolled onto the floor of a Michoacan nightclub in 2006, the 300 bodies dissolved in acid by a servant of one drug lord, the 49 mutilated bodies found in plastic bags by the side of the road in Monterrey in May, the nine bodies found hanging from an overpass in Nuevo Laredo just last month, the Zeta Cartel’s videotaped beheadings just two weeks ago, the carnage that has taken tens of thousands of Mexican lives in the last decade and has terrorized a whole nation.  I've read them and so many more.  I am sorry 50,000 times over.''

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''Mexican Spring: coming soon?''

From RT.com

''Ciudad Juárez, a photographic testimony of our pain''

''Professor Guillermo Cervantes, from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico discusses his project, “Ciudad Juárez, a photographic testimony of our pain.” The project, which consists of photographs taken by Cervantes’ journalist friends working in the Mexican press, aims to serve as a historical testament to the surge of narco violence and murder that has deeply affected the border city. He explains the dangerous positions that ordinary civilians and especially journalists have found themselves in amidst the extreme violence which threatens not only their safety, but also their freedom to speak out against the crimes they have grown accustomed to witnessing on a daily basis.''

http://www.reporteroproject.com/blog/ciudad-juarez-a-photographic-testimony-of-our-pain/

''For first time since Depression, more Mexicans leave U.S. than enter''

From Wapo

"A four-decade tidal wave of Mexican immigration to the United States has receded, causing a historic shift in migration patterns as more Mexicans appear to be leaving the United States for Mexico than the other way around, according to a report from the Pew Hispanic Center.

It looks to be the first reversal in the trend since the Depression, and experts say that a declining Mexican birthrate and other factors may make it permanent."

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''Feds Purposely Keeping U.S. Borders Wide Open, Experts Say''

"Under the guise of environmentalism, various federal agencies and departments are blocking Border Patrol agents’ access to critical areas while contributing to widespread lawlessness along the U.S. border, according to experts. Criminals, meanwhile, are taking full advantage of the rapidly deteriorating situation."  


from new american...

''Mexico prison riot was cover for jailbreak, officials say''

"Authorities on Monday revealed that 30 Zetas henchmen escaped from the maximum-security prison in Apodaca during the brawl — with the apparent complicity of guards and possibly other top officials."


from latimes...

'Unraveling Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel'

from latimes.......

"It was drilled into everybody who worked for Carlos “Charlie” Cuevas. His drivers, lookouts, stash house operators, dispatchers -- they all knew. When a shipment was on the move, a pair of eyes had to move with it.

Cuevas had just sent a crew of seven men to the border crossing at Calexico, Calif. The load they were tracking was cocaine, concealed in a custom-made compartment inside a blue 2003 Honda Accord.

The car was still on the Mexican side in a 10-lane crush of vehicles inching toward the U.S. Customs and Border Protection inspection station. Amputee beggars worked the queue, along with men in broad-brimmed hats peddling trinkets, tamales and churros.

A lookout watching from a car in a nearby lane reported on the load's progress. Cuevas, juggling cellphones, demanded constant updates. If something went wrong, his boss in Sinaloa, Mexico, would want answers.

The Accord reached the line of inspection booths, and a lookout on the U.S. side picked up the surveillance. He was Roberto Daniel Lopez, an Iraq War veteran, standing near the “Welcome to Calexico” sign.

It was the usual plan: After clearing customs, the driver would head for Los Angeles, shadowed by a third lookout waiting in a car on South Imperial Avenue.

But on this hot summer evening, things were not going according to plan. Lopez called his supervisor to report a complication: The Accord was being directed to a secondary inspection area for a closer look. Drug-sniffing dogs were circling"..............READ MORE

Mexican Drug Cartels have taken cruelty up a notch, says one drug trafficker: kidnapping bus passengers for gladiatorlike fights to the death'

from chron......

"The elderly are killed. Young women are raped. And able-bodied men are given hammers, machetes and sticks and forced to fight to the death.

In one of the most chilling revelations yet about the violence in Mexico, a drug cartel-connected trafficker claims fellow gangsters have kidnapped highway bus passengers and forced them into gladiatorlike fights to groom fresh assassins.

In an in-person interview arranged by intermediaries on the condition that neither his name nor the location of his Texas visit be published, the trafficker also admitted to helping push cocaine worth $5 million to $10 million a month into the United States"...............LINK

'Thousands across Mexico protest drug violence'

from latimes.com..........

"In what is becoming a familiar ritual, people in several cities demonstrated Wednesday to call for an end to violence inMexico — this time after the son of poet Javier Sicilia was found dead along with six other people.

Juan Francisco Sicilia, 24, and five other men and a woman were found dead March 28 in a car in Cuernavaca, 60 miles south of Mexico City. They had been missing for a day.

The bodies, which bore signs of torture, were accompanied by a note signed by the Gulf cartel, authorities said. Media reports said the message accused the victims of having called in tips about drug activity to a government hot line".............read more here