Los Zetas dump 49 bodies in Nuevo Léon

The Zs' latest act of terror, only a few miles south of U.S. border

*Update below*
The bodies of 49 presumed drug war victims were discovered about 4:00 a.m. today in Mexico's northeastern Nuevo Léon state. The remains of 43 men and six women were decapitated and dismembered, most with their hands cut off.

The victims were discovered on a remote stretch of highway between Reynosa and Monterrey, the latter of which is one of the most dangerous cities in Mexico. Reynosa, in Tamaulipas state, is a border town directly across the Rio Grande from Hidalgo Tx.

Barack Obama should free Alan Gross

MGR Opinion - the President's prisoner, stuck in Havana on Mother's Day weekend

This Friday evening, May 11, 2012, two days before the United States of America honors its mothers, 63 year old Alan Gross must be thinking of his own. Today the cell door slammed shut on his very faint hope, however unrealistic it may have been, of seeing her one more time before she leaves this world, which may be within days according to family members.

Tonight Alan Gross remains in a Havana jail, a mere 30 months into a 15 year sentence for state security crimes. But Gross is neither a prisoner of Cuba nor of the Castro regime. Alan Gross is held captive by an archaic American policy towards the island, crafted by politicians, Republicans and Democrats alike, who are determined to keep the Cold War alive 100 miles south of Miami, though it long ago fizzled out everywhere else.

The current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue will be thinking of his mother, too, this weekend. And in the final analysis, Alan Gross is his prisoner.

U.S. refuses to to swap Miami Five for convicted American smuggler Alan Gross

U.S. intransigence guarantees an indefinite stay in Havana jail cell for Alan Gross, who likely will not again see his dying mother

The U.S. State Dept. today announced that there will be no exchange of five convicted Cuban spies for American contractor Alan Gross, who was found guilty of state security crimes by a Havana court in March 2011 and sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Gross, 63, and his supporters had asked the Castro regime in March to grant him a two-week furlough to visit his elderly mother in the United States, who is said to be in the final stages of cancer. On Thursday (May 10) an official of the Cuban Foreign Ministry told CNN that because Gross has served only 30 months of his 15 year sentence, and there would be no way to insure that he would return to the island to complete his term, the request for a furlough had been denied. The Cuban government countered with an offer to allow Gross' mother to visit him in Havana, or to engage in a reciprocal exchange of all the prisoners. The State Dept. today said that Gross' mother was too ill to travel to Cuba, and flatly ruled out any possibility of a swap.

"Naive" Canadian gangsters pay heavily doing business with Mexican drug cartels

British Columbia gangs go "direct to the supplier," often with deadly consequences

Early this year I reported on the strange case of Salih Abulazis Sahbaz, a naturalized Canadian citizen who was murdered on the streets of Culiacán, in Mexico's northwestern Sinaloa state, on Jan. 15, 2012. Both the city and the state are well known for deadly drug violence. The Iraqi-born Sahbaz was shot nine times in the head at close range with a .45 caliber handgun, without any clear motive. Cash and travel documents were unconcealed on his person, but the assailant(s) plainly had no interest. Mexican authorities, noting that the execution had all the signs of a classic gangland hit, said that Sahbaz was not a tourist and solicited Canadian assistance.

López Obrador again in 2nd place in post-debate survey; is Peña Nieto sweating?

Today's spot poll from Milenio GEA-ISA is more bad news for PAN and leaves little doubt that PRD candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador is the real second-place contender in Mexico's 2012 presidential race. This was always supposed to be a race just between PRI and PAN, but if Vázquez Mota was going to burst out of the pack she would have done so by now. The campaign is almost half over, and Josefina has failed to move the masses.

Twenty percentage points is still a huge distance to close, but can Enrique Peña Nieto be sleeping well? About that persistent nightmare he has . . . it's Sunday, July 2, 2006 . . . the votes are finally tallied, and the photo-finish result shows Felipe Calderón with 35.89% of the ballots cast and López Obrador, 35.31% (with most of that difference hotly disputed). Millions of voters are yet undecided, and "leftist" AMLO has the attention of many of them.

Attack on Cancún sports bar leaves young waitress dead, several others injured

Refusal to pay "derecho de piso" may have been the motive - or a hit on a Zeta boss

*Updates below*
Cancún, Quintana Roo --
A brutal early morning attack on a sports bar yesterday has killed a 26 year old waitress and left several employees and patrons seriously wounded.

Witnesses say that a heavily armed commando squad arrived at the Sports Bar Harem 95 about 2:30 a.m. and began firing indiscriminately with AK-47s, a machine gun commonly carried by Mexican drug cartels and organized crime. The bar is near 107th and Andrés Quintana Roo Avenue, a few miles west of the city's hotel zone. A Wal-Mart is located across the broad multi-lane avenue, in a neighborhood which is light commercial.

Five arrested in murder of University of British Columbia student, boyfriend

Mexican authorities say they "take the security of Canadian travelers seriously"

Five persons have been arrested in the Mexican state of Oaxaca and charged with the robbery and murder of a Canadian national and her boyfriend late last year. Three women and two men were taken into custody, and police say three other accomplices remain at large.

Ximena Osegueda Magana, 39, and her boyfriend Alejandro Honorio Santamaria, 38, went missing on December 14, 2011. Their bodies were found on a remote beach in Huatulco, Oaxaca later that month. Osegueda Magana, a Mexico City native, was a UBC doctoral candidate in the department of French, Spanish and Italian studies at the time of her death, focused on colonial Latin American literature. Osegueda Magana had earned undergraduate and master's degrees at McGill University in Montreal.

Mexico's presidential candidates debate

Josefina drags a family tragedy out of the closet, but to what political end?

Mexico, D.F. --
The first presidential debate between Mexico's four presidential candidates was held this evening. The two hour affair was hard-hitting at times, with PRD candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador relentlessly striking out at PRI nominee Enrique Peña Nieto, who remains in easy first place five weeks after the campaign opened (March 30). Reduced to basics, López Obrador accused Peña Nieto of being the front man for a corrupt political regime which ran Mexico for more than 70 years and is now desperately trying to recapture the country's highest office, which it lost in 2000. He also argued that PRI has paid millions to the media to protect its candidate's image. It's López Obrador's standard campaign theme, but his delivery was far less polished and less emotive than I've heard from him before.

Cancún hotel exec offers gloomy prognosis for local industry with 20% occupancy rate

Meanwhile, Grand Oasis Cancún discloses its losses in last weekend's robbery, and assistant cashier allegedly is prime suspect

*Update below*
Cancún, Quintana Roo --
In statements to the Q.R. press last week, the president of a national trade association delivered a dire prognosis on local tourism generally and the hotel industry specifically.

Juan Carrillo Padilla, himself a Cancún hotel owner, said many establishments these days average 20% occupancy. At that rate, owners can't meet wages, utilities and taxes, he said.

Padilla responded to some larger hostelries which report they're averaging 45-50% daily occupancy, "Those claims have nothing to do with reality. The truth is, even business in the city center (the hotel zone) is very poor, and I don't see any increase for at least two months."

Bloody narco violence strikes Rio Grande border town of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas

On the eve of Mexico's Cinco de Mayo, 14 decapitations, 9 hangings in brutal display of drug cartel "adjustment of accounts"

"México ha tenido el gran coraje de enfrentar un problema que no es mexicano, sino latinoamericano y en buena parte mundial - el problema de narcotráfico. México ha sacado a la bestia de la cueva donde se ocultaba, y ahora sabemos qué el narcotráfico es una bestia monstruosamente poderosa, enormemente rica y sin ninguna clase de escrúpulos.
Mexico has had the great courage to confront a problem which is not just Mexican, but Latin American; really, a problem which is facing the entire world - drug trafficking. Mexico has dragged the beast out of the cave where it's been hiding. Now we know that the beast is a monstrosity, powerful, enormously rich and without the slightest scruples."
Mario Vargas Llosa, 2010 Nobel Prize winner (Literature), Nov. 24, 2011.

Today Cinco de Mayo was observed in Mexico, as it was in the United States. This year's anniversary was of particular significance since it was the 150th anniversary of Mexico's defeat of an occupying French army at the Battle of Puebla (May 5, 1862). On the eve of the festivities there was an ugly reminder that drug traffickers never take a day off, even to celebrate a day of national pride.

Gay marriages will be recognized in Quintana Roo

*Updated Apr. 21, 2014*
Cancún, Quintana Roo --
It appears that same-sex unions have been given the green light by officials in this southeastern state along Mexico's Caribbean coast. The announcement was made yesterday (May 3) during a government press conference in Cancún.

In November 2011, two gay couples applied for and received marriage licenses in the town of Lázaro Cárdenas. Local officials in the Q.R. community concluded there was nothing in state law limiting marriage to persons of the opposite sex. But the state marriage registrar later refused to recognize the unions or record the documents. Higher state officials have reversed that determination. Some in Quintana Roo have lobbied to make the state a center for same-sex weddings and gay tourism (Can Quintana Roo save itself by promoting gay marriage?)

Three more journalists killed in Veracruz

Twelve year death toll in Mexico hits 83, says Reporters Without Borders

The bodies of three more journalists were discovered in Verzacruz today. They are Guillermo Luna Varela, a photographer for Veracruz News, Gabriel Huge Córdoba, who had worked for the daily newspaper Notiver until 2011, and Esteban Rodríguez.

A fourth body found at the scene is thought to be Irasema Becerra, Luna Varela's girlfriend and an administrative employee at another Veracruz newspaper, El Dictamen. All four victims had been tortured, dismembered and were buried in black plastic bags. They were last seen alive Wednesday (May 2). Their remains were discovered on World Freedom of the Press Day.

Cancún, no longer an oasis for most

News analysis - On May Day, mayor admits the party's over in renowned resort

*Updates below*
Cancún, Quintana Roo --
Yesterday much of the world celebrated May Day, or International Workers' Day, which is observed in dozens of countries with parades and speeches extolling the value of human labor to society throughout history. May 1 is known as El Día del Trabajo in Mexico.

There was such a parade in Cancún, one of dozens across the country here. After the event mayor Julián Ricalde Magaña made some startling admissions during a press conference, candidly offering a bleak assessment of the region's economy. The mayor noted that struggling workers in his city "scarcely have enough to eat."

"We haven't seen the growth in the hotel industry that we did in the 1980s and 90s, and we have to adjust ourselves to new (economic) realities. We're having problems sustaining jobs, which is going to cause us difficulties in other areas of public life," he said, in a clear reference to Cancún's rapidly deteriorating security.

Oasis Cancún slow in cooperating with police - and hasn't met the last payroll

Cancún mayor says poor local economy, security issues are city's major challenges - "The dogs are no longer leashed with sausage here"

Cancún, Quintana Roo --
Authorities in Cancún complain that the Spanish hotel chain Oasis has not furnished critical details in the wake of Sunday's execution of a head cashier, who apparently was interrupted by robbers as she prepared the payroll for hundreds of employees over the weekend. The woman was found dead Monday morning in the company's administrative offices, her head enveloped in tightly sealed industrial tape. A post-mortem examination yesterday confirmed that the former Oaxaca resident died from asphyxia.

Brutal execution at Grand Oasis Cancún

Head cashier cruelly asphyxiated by payroll bandits, but no one discovers her body for almost a day; police don't discount possibility of an inside job; Spanish owners try to zip the lips of prosecutors, alleges Quintana Roo press

*Updates below*
Cancún, Quintana Roo -
This has been a difficult spring for the mega hotel chain Oasis, which operates multiple establishments along Cancún's magnificent white beaches. Security challenges in what is still alleged by the local government to be a completely safe "green zone" for foreign and domestic tourists continue to mount. The latest horrific crime surely won't help business.

Yesterday morning (Apr. 30) about 10:00 a.m. the body of María del Rosario Ramis Carrasco, 54, the head cashier for Oasis, was found by co-workers in the corporate administrative offices. She had been bound and gagged, and her entire head was wrapped mummy-like in industrial tape, which produced death by suffocation within a few minutes. The clear motive of the crime was robbery. Ramis Carrasco was preparing the cash payroll, authorities said, which was due employees on the last day of the month.