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Tag: mexico news

  • US border brokers briefly detain 14 Mexican troopers in El Paso

    Fourteen Mexican troopers have been detained early Saturday morning for a number of hours by US border brokers after they crossed into El Paso, Texas, from Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez, the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP)stated.
    “Just after midnight today CBP officers working at the Bridge of the America’s international crossing in El Paso noted two Mexican military vehicles crossing the boundary and entering the US,” the CBP instructed Reuters in an emailed assertion.
    The 14 Mexican troopers stated they didn’t understand that they had entered the United States and US border brokers secured their weapons and gear for “safety and processing,” stated the CBP, including that Mexican navy management was contacted and arrived on the port shortly thereafter.
    Thirteen of the 14 Mexican troopers have been processed with out incident, however one soldier was assessed a civil penalty after CBP officers found a private use quantity of marijuana in his possession.
    All 14 troopers, their gear and autos have been returned to Mexico earlier than 5 a.m, stated the CBP.Mexico’s Defense Ministry didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark.

    Due to the incident, the border crossing was closed for about two hours, a witness to the occasions stated.”The CBP (brokers) yelled on the troopers to place their palms up and drop their weapons instantly,” stated the witness, whoasked to not be named.
    The CBP brokers searched the autos after which escorted away the troopers, which seemed to be handcuffed, based on the witness and pictures of the state of affairs that Reuters noticed.

  • Years of unheeded warnings. Then the subway crash Mexico City had feared.

    The capital had been bracing for the catastrophe for years.
    Ever because it opened practically a decade in the past, the latest Mexico City subway line — a heralded growth of the second largest subway system within the Americas — had been plagued with structural weaknesses that led engineers to warn of potential accidents. Yet aside from a quick, partial shutdown of the road in 2014, the warnings went unheeded by successive governments.
    On Monday evening, the mounting issues turned deadly: A subway prepare on the Golden Line plunged about 50 toes after an overpass collapsed beneath it, killing not less than 24 folks and injuring dozens extra.
    The accident — and the federal government’s failure to behave sooner to repair recognized issues with the road — instantly set off a political firestorm for 3 of essentially the most highly effective folks in Mexico: the president and the 2 folks extensively believed to be front-runners to succeed him as leaders of the governing celebration and presumably, the nation.
    The crash occurred at 10.22 pm on one of many latest stretches of observe within the subway system, the Golden Line, additionally known as Line 12, which was inaugurated in 2012. Nearly 1 / 4 of one million passengers journey Line 12 on daily basis, officers mentioned.
    Local residents had expressed concern concerning the structural integrity of the overpass, together with cracks within the concrete, after a strong earthquake devastated elements of the town in September 2017.
    Workers employed to function and keep the subway system issued over a dozen complaints to move authorities through the years, which they mentioned have been all ignored.
    “This could have been avoided,” mentioned Homero Zavala, a consultant of a union of Mexico City’s subway staff. “If us workers were really listened to by this administration, a lot of problems would be avoided.”
    But authorities ignored the employees’ calls for correct upkeep, he added, and a few of those that spoke out — together with Zavala — have been fired.
    Harrowing video of the accident confirmed the overpass out of the blue collapsing in a bathe of sparks, sending up a cloud of particles as one of many prepare automobiles smashed right into a car on the highway beneath.
    Emergency staff scrambled to entry the tilted prepare automobiles mendacity amid tangled wires and twisted metallic, finally pulling dozens of individuals from the wreckage and transporting greater than 70 folks to hospitals with accidents. Most of the 24 individuals who have been killed within the crash have been discovered useless on website by rescue crews, officers mentioned.
    Desperate relations flocked to the scene for information of their family members, whereas others scoured metropolis hospitals and looked for any scrap of stories on social media in hopes of discovering their relations.
    “I’m looking for my son,” Marisol Tapia instructed reporters via sobs. “I can’t find him anywhere.”
    Hours later, her 13-year-old son, Brandon Giovani Hernández Tapia, was nonetheless lacking.
    “I went to all the hospitals and they say he’s not there,” she instructed reporters gathered on the crash website Tuesday. “The metro wasn’t built on its own — this flaw has been there for a long time and no one did anything.”
    A complete of 79 injured folks had been taken to hospitals, three of whom later died, in line with Claudia Sheinbaum, the mayor of Mexico City. Among these hospitalized have been three minors.
    President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico has been criticized for imposing strict fiscal austerity measures which have starved the capital of the cash it must rebuild the troubled subway system whereas splurging on pet initiatives, together with practically 1,000 miles of railway stretching throughout southern Mexico.
    Soon after taking workplace, he additionally stopped the development of a half-built airport {that a} rival celebration had began to construct for Mexico City. Even although the federal government had already spent billions of {dollars} on the airport, López Obrador scrapped it to start out constructing one other airport at a special location, reimagining the challenge in his title.
    Those investments have come on the expense of Mexico’s extra pressing infrastructure wants, together with fixing Mexico City’s water issues and its subway system, a key mode of transportation for the sprawling capital’s inhabitants of practically 22 million.
    In the aftermath of Monday’s catastrophe, two of López Obrador’s closest allies got here beneath fast scrutiny: Sheinbaum, the capital’s mayor, and Marcelo Ebrard, the overseas minister who was mayor when the brand new subway line opened. Both are presumed to be prime contenders to run for the presidency when López Obrador, restricted to 1 time period, steps down in 2024.
    The new line, which serves the working class neighborhoods within the capital’s southeast, was constructed by Ebrard, who was mayor of Mexico from 2006 to 2012. He was accused by critics of speeding to complete building earlier than his time period concluded in an effort to bolster his political legacy. Troubles emerged instantly.
    In simply the primary month after the road was inaugurated, there have been 60 mechanical failures on trains or on tracks, in line with native media. Trains needed to decelerate over elevated stretches of observe, as a result of engineers feared derailments. About a yr later, the town was pressured to quickly shut down a part of the $2 billion line for repairs.
    Then after a strong earthquake struck in 2017, Mexico City transport authorities reported “a structural fault” in one of many metro line’s supporting columns, which had affected its means to assist heavy weight.
    In 2018, senators from the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party known as for Mexico City authorities to tell Congress about irregularities within the funding of the subway line’s growth. In an official celebration doc, the opposition lawmakers known as the Golden Line a “symbol of corruption and the misuse of public resources that prevailed during that administration.”
    The lawmakers cited a congressional inquiry into the defective line which discovered that “the modifications to the basic engineering, to the original layout with the change of underground stations to elevated stations, severely affected the technical operating conditions” of the subway line.
    Residents dwelling close to the scene of the accident mentioned authorities staff had mounted the column shortly after the earthquake. But they expressed doubt concerning the high quality of the reconstruction, after seeing what number of shutdowns and upkeep points the road had through the years.
    Hernando Manon, 42, was strolling residence from work Monday evening when he felt a tremor and heard a loud crash a number of hundred yards up the road.
    “There was a rumbling and then sparks. The lights went out, and we didn’t know what happened. Then we heard the sirens,” Manon mentioned, standing just some hundred yards from the positioning of the accident. “As we approached, we realized that the subway had collapsed.”
    Families rushed to the scene, he mentioned, hoping to search out their family members and yelling on the police demanding to be let via the cordon they’d erected across the wreckage.
    Floodlights illuminated the positioning of the collapse as search and rescue groups tried to search out survivors within the rubble. Ambulances, firefighters, the army and Mexico’s forensic division labored to search out survivors and establish the our bodies till daybreak.
    A 2018-2030 Master Plan for the subway system detailed main backlogs to the upkeep of tracks and trains and warned that trains might be derailed on the Golden Line except main repairs have been undertaken. It is unclear whether or not these wanted repairs have been ever carried out.
    Since turning into mayor of the capital in 2018, Sheinbaum, who’s carefully aligned with the president’s pursuit of austerity, has presided over cuts to spending on the subway system.
    For a yr, the town didn’t appoint a director of infrastructure upkeep for the subway system. Sheinbaum solely stuffed the position final week.
    The metro has been inflicting troubles for Sheinbaum for years. In 2019, a number of folks have been injured in accidents attributable to mechanical issues on subway escalators, prompting the town to research greater than 400 escalators in stations throughout the capital.
    In March 2020, one particular person was killed and not less than 41 others have been injured when two subway trains collided in Mexico City. Then in January, a fireplace ripped via the subway’s headquarters in downtown Mexico City, killing a police officer and sending 30 others to hospital.
    At a information convention Tuesday, each Sheinbaum and Ebrard confronted harsh questioning from reporters. Publicly, not less than, the 2 political heavyweights introduced a united entrance.
    “We are in agreement to get to the bottom of this and work together to find the truth and know what caused this incident,” Sheinbaum mentioned.
    “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear,” Ebrard mentioned. “Like anyone else, I am subject to whatever the authorities determine, but even more so as a high-level official, as someone who promoted the construction of the line.”
    1969: The subway system in Mexico City was inaugurated. It was the delight of a nation, however lately it has grow to be an emblem of city decay.
    1975: A prepare collision on the Viaducto station killed 31 folks and left greater than 70 injured.
    2012: Line 12, referred to as the Golden Line, opened. Still the latest within the system, the road has at all times had issues. Trains operating over elevated elements of the observe needed to decelerate for concern they could derail. The metropolis finally suspended service on a big a part of it.
    2015: A collision between two trains left 12 folks useless. After that crash, the German-based firm TÜV Rheinland was employed to look at the circumstances that may have brought on it and counsel enhancements to know-how.
    2017: A robust earthquake hit Mexico in September. There was concern concerning the integrity of the elevated tracks and assist columns on the Golden Line.
    2020: In March one particular person was killed and not less than 41 others have been injured when two subway trains collided. The subsequent month on the Misterios station, a railway coupler — a mechanism used for becoming a member of prepare automobiles — fractured.
    2021: In January, a fireplace ripped via the metro’s downtown headquarters, killing a police officer and sending 30 others to hospitals with smoke inhalation. Six subway traces have been quickly knocked out of service. Last month, one other of the capital’s 12 subway traces shut down after a observe hearth.

  • Hit arduous by the pandemic, Mexico’s drug cartels tweaked their playbook

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    Written by Steve Fisher and Kirk Semple
    Like lots of companies, the Sinaloa Cartel was knocked again on its heels because the coronavirus swept the globe and journey floor to a close to halt.
    Government measures to comprise the virus had fouled up its operations, interrupting the provision of chemical compounds for manufacturing artificial medicine like fentanyl and methamphetamine and reducing off trafficking routes throughout worldwide borders.
    But the cartel is not only any enterprise. It established itself as one of many world’s strongest drug trafficking teams with a trademark mixture of enterprise acumen, ingenuity and lawlessness.
    And so whereas many respectable industries stay staggered by the pandemic, the cartel has shortly tailored, as produce other organizations that dominate trafficking all through the Americas, the supply of almost the entire world’s cocaine and many of the heroin consumed within the United States.
    “The cartels have long demonstrated their resiliency,” stated Scott Brown, the top of the Homeland Security Investigations workplace in Arizona. “They are going to continue to find new and innovative ways to try to move their product.”
    The drug trafficking organizations have slashed payrolls and devised workarounds to site visitors medicine and get them into the fingers of customers, based on interviews with sources near the Sinaloa Cartel, legislation enforcement officers within the United States and Latin America and safety analysts.
    During the yr, some traffickers have more and more relied on newer instruments like drones and cryptocurrency and on artistic makes use of of older approaches like underground tunnels and sea routes.
    American officers have additionally detected a rising emphasis on the recruitment of impoverished or drug-addicted Americans to smuggle medicine of their physique cavities.
    The adjustments, sources stated, have allowed the Sinaloa Cartel and the area’s different main drug trafficking teams to rebound shortly even because the pandemic continues to devastate economies.
    The nimbleness of the trafficking teams has compelled officers all through the area to regulate their ways accordingly, whilst some legislation enforcement companies in Latin America and elsewhere have been stretched skinny by pandemic-related duties, which have drawn assets that may in any other case have been dedicated to combating drug trafficking.
    Even earlier than the pandemic, officers stated, the cat-and-mouse contest between drug traffickers and legislation enforcement brokers was something however static.
    “It’s fluid,” stated Matthew Donahue, deputy chief of operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration. “You can’t have one answer and live by it. It could change tomorrow.”
    As the primary wave of the pandemic swept from continent to continent within the late winter and early spring, authorities measures to answer the emergency prompted disruptions all through the drug commerce.
    In the Americas, the shutdowns hit drug traffickers arduous, in some locations bringing operations to a close to halt.
    “When it first hit,” Donahue stated of the pandemic, “it kind of put everything at a standstill.”
    Facing journey restrictions, operatives from Mexican trafficking organizations had bother attending to Central America to coordinate maritime shipments of medication. As operations slowed, some prison teams have been compelled to stockpile their product in Latin America, Donahue stated.
    The slowdown was felt all through the sprawling networks of the Sinaloa Cartel, from the coca fields of South America to drug-packing amenities in Mexico and all alongside its worldwide trafficking routes, stated a bookkeeper for the group who screens its drug shipments all through the area.
    Like many authorized companies making an attempt to counter the impacts of the pandemic, the group reorganized, furloughing many low-level workers, together with truck drivers, warehouse employees and safety personnel, stated the bookkeeper and two different cartel associates in interviews. The sources requested anonymity as a result of they have been talking with out authorization, and have been afraid for his or her security.
    When the movement of medication regained momentum, the transportation hurdles resulted in a pointy drop within the frequency of shipments, with cocaine from the Andean nations of South America arriving in Mexico as soon as each two weeks, as an alternative of some instances per week, as had been the case earlier than the pandemic, Sinaloa Cartel associates and a Mexican navy official stated.
    The slowdown prompted the wholesale value of cocaine in Mexico to double, the cartel bookkeeper stated in an interview in Culiacán, a metropolis in northwestern Mexico the place the group is predicated.
    Disruptions to the drug commerce have been significantly notable throughout the southwest border of the United States.
    The overwhelming majority of unlawful medicine that enter the United States from Mexico arrive by way of authorized ports of entry alongside that border — hidden in passenger automobiles and business automobiles or smuggled by vacationers arriving on foot, typically masquerading as vacationers or as day trippers on a procuring expedition.
    But pandemic-related limits imposed by the Trump administration on all “nonessential travel” have meant that fewer passenger automobiles and non-American pedestrians cross by way of the ports of entry, which has elevated the publicity of smugglers.
    “Having less traffic coming through the checkpoints, then it would make sense that agents have more time to focus on what’s going on at the checkpoints,” stated John R. Modlin, interim chief patrol agent for the U.S. Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector.
    The drug cartels shortly adjusted to the evolving panorama.
    Amid the extreme discount in air journey and the hindrances to land border crossings, drug traffickers in Latin America have been relying extra on sea routes, together with utilizing extra semi-submersible vessels and go-fast boats, that are low-profile craft outfitted with high-powered outboard motors, based on stories from the Colombian navy in addition to American and Mexican legislation enforcement officers and Sinaloa Cartel associates.
    The trafficking teams have additionally more and more hidden medicine amongst authorized merchandise packed in delivery containers and transported on freighters, significantly on routes connecting South America with Mexico and Latin America with Europe, based on American, Mexican and Colombian officers.
    In one other obvious shift in methodology, officers and analysts stated, some traffickers have been sending fewer masses, although in bigger quantities than prior to now — maybe as a lot a method to scale back threat as a mirrored image of extra restricted transportation choices.
    Along the southwest border of the United States this yr, the drug trafficking organizations seem to have made larger use of tunnels to smuggle their items from Mexico, typically reactivating dormant ones, based on Donahue of the DEA, and to associates of the Sinaloa Cartel.
    The Sinaloa Cartel bookkeeper estimated that the group’s use of tunnels had elevated by about 40% throughout the pandemic.
    Traffickers, in some locations, have additionally elevated their use of drones to get medicine over the border, American officers stated.
    “We are detecting drone smuggling attempts and interrupting drone smuggling attempts with regularity, and that certainly wasn’t the case a year ago,” stated Brown, particular agent in cost for the Homeland Security Investigations workplace in Arizona. “Across the southwest border, rare is the day that there isn’t a drone smuggling attempt.”
    “And I’m sure we’re not picking up on all of them,” he stated.
    While traffickers have additionally continued to attempt to push medicine by way of ports of entry, the American authorities have detected not less than one significantly dramatic shift in ways within the profile of smugglers caught at these border crossings.
    Before the pandemic, the cartels would continuously rent foreign-born smugglers who would cross the border from Mexico into the United States beneath the pretense of tourism or a procuring journey.
    But as a result of the pandemic-related border restrictions have blocked entry to many overseas guests, the trafficking teams have been recruiting a larger variety of American residents and inexperienced card holders, who aren’t certain by the restrictions, to smuggle medicine into the United States, American officers stated. These smugglers are most frequently found with the narcotics hidden inside their our bodies, officers stated.
    Guadalupe Ramírez Jr., director of subject operations for Customs and Border Protection in Arizona, recalled that when he was director of the ports of entry in Nogales from 2009 to 2016, “internal carriers,” as such smugglers are identified by border officers, have been uncommon.
    “Now it seems like almost on a daily basis we’re getting internal carriers,” and most are American residents or everlasting residents, Ramírez stated.
    The challenges of getting medicine into the United States additionally seems to have spurred the event of clandestine laboratories within the United States for the manufacturing of artificial medicine, stated Celina Realuyo, professor on the William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies on the National Defense University in Washington.
    And legislation enforcement companies all over the world have additionally detected an acceleration in the usage of cryptocurrency and the so-called darkish net for drug transactions and cash laundering throughout the pandemic, she stated.
    “They’re adjusting,” Realuyo stated of the drug trafficking teams. “They already had kind of a wherewithal, and what they’re doing is they’re just adapting quicker to their context.”

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