By RICARDO CASTILLO 69 New Barracks for National Guardsmen Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) spent the weekend inaugurating new barracks for the National Guard in the states of Jalisco, Michoacán and Guanajuato, the latter two known for a high presence of organized criminal gangs. Mexican Defense Secretary Luis Cresencio Sandoval said each barrack will house somewhere between 120 and
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By RICARDO CASTILLO First Coronavirus Case in Mexico Mexico’s Health Secretariat was notified on Saturday, Feb. 1, by the Los Angeles International Airport medical authorities of the confirmed case of a 37-year-old Chinese national and Wuhan native who had visited Mexico as of Jan. 21. Taxi service company Uber acknowledged that the infected person used at least two of its
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By RICARDO CASTILLO Zero Coronavirus Cases Regardless of the initial alarm in Mexico about potential coronavirus cases, on Thursday, Jan. 23, Health Secretary Jorge Alcocer Varela emphatically denied “any confirmed cases” of the disease. There were, however, two confirmed reports of persons “under observation,” who were finally declared to be ill with “common colds.” One was a doctor in Reynosa,
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By RICARDO CASTILLO Let’s not misinterpret facts: For Mexicans, the man who will be on trial in the United States for providing legal protection to the Sinaloa Drug Cartel will not be former Mexican Public Security Secretary Genaro García Luna, but rather his boss, the man who appointed him and protected him in that post from 2006 to 2012, former
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By RICARDO CASTILLO AMLO Throws Himself a Party Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) attracted over 70,000 cheering fans at Mexico City’s main square, El Zócalo, on Sunday, Dec. 1. They all came to hear him review his first year in office, as well as see how he has managed to comply with 89 of his 100 electoral campaign
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By RICARDO CASTILLO One of several reasons why Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) won the 2018 Mexican presidential elections was his protest against former President Enrique Peña Nieto’s energy reform. Back in 2013, AMLO demanded that a referendum be held during the 2015 mid-term election to seek voters’ approval of the reform. Peña Nieto refused to carry out that
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By RICARDO CASTILLO The investigation into the disappearance and execution of 43 rural Mexican normal school students on the night of Sept. 26, 2014, is getting more tangled up as the days go by, nearly five years after the fact. Over the past week, judges have been releasing the confessed culprits, not because they are innocent, but because their cases were
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By RICARDO CASTILLO Everyone in Mexico knows that drugs and violence go hand-in-hand. For the most part, the general public either hears about the latest “record” drug seizure (they get bigger all the time) or the surging number of gory gang-versus-gang executions, including beheadings, dismemberments and similar atrocities that would make the United States’ National Enquirer look like a Pollyanna
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By RICARDO CASTILLO Just how the Mexican National Guard is going to operate as of Monday, June 10, along the 11-municipalities in the state of Chiapas – along the Guatemalan border – is anybody’s guess. Most likely, the promoter of the move, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), does not know either. And there are many reasons for
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By RICARDO CASTILLO The candidates of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s (AMLO)National Regeneration Movement (Morena) for the states of Baja California and Puebla, Jaime Bonilla Valdez and Miguel Barbosa Huerta, respectively, walked away with resounding victories over their competitors for the gubernatorial races on Sunday, June 2. In Baja California, a state that had been governed by the conservative
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