Category Archives: Mexico

Ninth journalist killed in Mexico this year as violence against media soars

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Murder of veteran Luis Enrique Ramírez – found in bag beside road – brings estimated death toll of journalists in president’s term to 34

A Mexican journalist has been found dead in Sinaloa state, authorities say, marking the ninth death of a media worker in a unprecedentedly bloody year for the country which has drawn international scrutiny.

Luis Enrique Ramírez, a veteran journalist and columnist at El Debate, was found dead on the side of a highway, the state’s attorney general said on Twitter.

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Esper book details Trump rage at Pence and proposal to hit Mexico with missiles

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Memoir from ex-defense chief Mark Esper details extraordinary outbursts he says he helped to defuse

In the heated summer of 2020, thwarted in his desire for a violent crackdown on protesters for racial justice, Donald Trump included his vice-president in a complaint that senior advisers were “losers”.

Trump’s second defense secretary, Mark Esper, details the Oval Office outburst in a new book. A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Defense Secretary in Extraordinary Times, will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.

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Vaquita porpoise could survive … but only if illegal fishing stops immediately

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DNA study finds rarest cetacean, only found in Gulf of California, has enough genetic diversity to recover – if gillnet ban is enforced


Scientists studying the DNA of the world’s smallest cetacean and rarest marine mammal, the vaquita porpoise, have made a surprising and bittersweet discovery.

With a tiny population of fewer than 10 individuals left, the mammal was assumed by conservationists to be at a similar risk of harmful mutations and inbreeding as other species with small gene pools.

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Ukrainian refugees waiting at Mexico camp urge US to open doors

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Fifty to 100 people arriving at camp every day as some told at US border in Tijuana they would no longer be admitted

On a dusty field on the east side of Mexico’s sprawling capital, about 500 Ukrainian refugees are waiting in large tents under a searing sun for the United States government to tell them they can come.

The camp has only been open a week and 50 to 100 people are arriving every day. Some have already been to the US border in Tijuana where they were told they would no longer be admitted. Others arrived at airports in Mexico City or Cancún, anywhere they could find a ticket from Europe.

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‘They left her hanging’: details emerge of woman’s death at US-Mexico border

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Griselda Verduzco Armenta was trying to get over the barrier with the help of coyotes to find a more secure future for her daughters


As she’d done before, Griselda Verduzco Armenta tried to cross Mexico’s border with the US earlier this week with dreams of being able to better provide for her two young daughters.

But the 32-year-old’s journey ended in tragedy when authorities say she fell from atop the US border wall in Arizona, accidentally became entangled in a climbing harness that she had used to scale the barrier, and was choked to death while upside down.

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‘A senseless tragedy’: woman dies after bid to climb US border wall

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Border patrol officials and the Cochise county sheriff’s office investigating cause of death of the 32-year-old woman

A Mexican woman attempting to climb the US border wall in eastern Arizona died after her leg became trapped in a climbing harness and she was left hanging upside down, authorities said.

Border patrol officials and the Cochise county sheriff’s office said they were investigating the cause of death of the 32-year-old on a section of the wall near Douglas, Arizona. The sheriff’s office said her foot and leg became entangled as she tried to maneuver down the US side of the wall and that she hung upside down “a significant amount of time”.

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Mexican truckers blockade border crossings over Texas inspection delays

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Business groups warn of supply chain disruptions after Governor Greg Abbott orders checks for people and contraband smuggling

Mexican truck drivers have blockaded bridges at the border with the United States for a second day to protest against an order by the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, to increase safety inspections that has snarled traffic at ports of entry and led business groups to warn of supply chain disruptions.

“Yesterday it took me 17 hours to cross into the United States and return,” said Raymundo Galicia, a Mexican driver participating in a protest at the Santa Teresa bridge connecting San Jerónimo, Chihuahua, to Santa Teresa, New Mexico.

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Organized crime and corrupt officials responsible for Mexico’s disappearances, UN says

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Number of young people disappeared is increasing as total number of cases exceeds 95,000, very few of which are solved

Corrupt state officials and organized crime factions are to blame for Mexico’s soaring number of enforced disappearances, whose victims increasingly include children – some as young as 12, according to a new UN investigation.

Just over 95,000 people were registered as disappeared at the end of November 2021. Of those, 40,000 were added in the past five years, according to the new report by the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances.

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Mexico president López Obrador wins recall referendum amid low turnout

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Nine in 10 voters back leader to stay in office in poll viewed as foregone conclusion by critics and supporters

Nine in 10 Mexicans voting in an unprecedented recall election engineered by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador have backed him to stay in office, underlining his domination of a polarised political agenda.

Critics and supporters had viewed his victory as a foregone conclusion in a ballot that had fed speculation it could open the door to extending presidential term limits, now limited to a single six-year period.

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Stay or go? Mexicans vote on Amlo’s performance in historic recall election

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Despite Covid deaths and enduring drug violence, voters look poised to keep president in office in referendum he supports

Maria de Lourdes loves her leader and is desperate for him to stay.

“He’s the best president we’ve had in 70 years,” the retiree enthused this week as she prepared to bombard her phone contacts with calls urging them to back him on Sunday, when Mexico goes to the polls.

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Attacks on press in Mexico hit record level during López Obrador’s presidency

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Report paints bleak picture of journalist safety under leader who often criticises media and downplays violence against reporters

Attacks against the press in Mexico have increased by 85% since President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office, making it the most deadly period for journalists since records began, according to a new report.

Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists with 1,945 attacks – including 33 murders – between 2019 and 2021, according to the press freedom group Article 19. Another eight have been killed so far this year.

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Mexico armed forces knew fate of 43 disappeared students from day one

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Military hid evidence that student teachers who went missing in 2014 were kidnapped by criminals, independent report finds

Mexico’s armed forces knew that 43 student teachers who disappeared in 2014 were being kidnapped by criminals, then hid evidence that could have helped locate them, according to a report released on Monday by a special investigation.

A former Colombian prosecutor, Angela Buitrago, said the group of independent experts found evidence that authorities withheld or falsified evidence from the start of the search.

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Massacre at cockfight in Mexico leaves 20 dead

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Gunmen with assault rifles burst into event in western state of Michoacán long plagued by violence between drug cartels

Mexican authorities have confirmed that 20 people were killed when a group of gunmen stormed a cockfight, in a small town in the western state of Michoacán.

Officials and witnesses described a choreographed massacre in which assailants in military uniforms arrived just after 10.30pm on Sunday night and opened fire with assault rifles at the crowds of primarily middle-aged men.

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Violence in Mexico and Central America driving large waves of migration

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Biden administration will institute expedited processing – and sometimes removal – of asylum seekers to clear backlog

Waves of migration through Mexico and Central America, and people who go missing, will increase in 2022 due to high levels of violence in the region, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said.

“In many countries, violence is wreaking more and more havoc, and that’s why there are more and more migrants,” ICRC representative Jordi Raich told Reuters in an interview Wednesday. “And it’s not a situation that is going to improve or slow down, not even in the years to come.“

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Equality was key to ancient Mexican city’s success, study suggests

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At its peak Monte Albán was home to 17,000 people, despite a lack of water supplies or fertile land

Greater equality than that experienced in other Mesoamerican cities may have been key to the successes of an ancient Zapotec community in Mexico which survived far longer than any contemporaneous metropolis, a new study suggests.

The ruins of Monte Albán – which include pyramids, canals and a ballgame court – sit on a semi-arid hilltop above the city of Oaxaca. At its peak the city, founded in 500BC, was the administrative and religious capital for the Zapotec people, and home to 17,000 people, despite a lack of water supplies or fertile land.

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Eighth Mexican journalist to be killed in 2022 is shot outside his home

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Armando Linares López gunned down six weeks after mourning the murder of a colleague in the same city in Michoacán state

The murder crisis gripping Mexican journalism has claimed another life after a journalist was gunned down in the conflict-stricken state of Michoacán just six weeks after he announced the murder of a colleague.

Armando Linares López, the director of a news website called Michoacán Monitor, was reportedly shot at least eight times on Tuesday afternoon outside his home in the city of Zitácuro. He is the eighth Mexican journalist to be killed in 2022, compared with nine in the whole of last year.

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Mexican president lashes out at EU ‘lies’ over his media-bashing rhetoric

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Andrés Manuel López Obrador was urged to tone down his rhetoric by MEPs after a spate of journalist murders – he did the opposite

Mexico’s government has lashed out at the “corruption, lies and hypocrisy” of the European parliament after its members urged its populist president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to rein in his media-bashing rhetoric after the murders of at least six Mexican journalists.

Mexico’s press corps has been plunged into mourning this year by a succession of killings targeting media workers in what was already one of the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists.

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‘Traumatised and terrified, with nowhere else to go’: huge numbers of people stuck at US border

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Title 42, enacted under Trump and kept in place by Biden, has led to hundreds of thousands being denied their right to asylum since the start of the pandemic

When Henry Ruiz* and Raquel Hernandez boarded a bus heading north to America with their two young children, they knew there would be no going back.

It was June 2021, and a few weeks earlier Ruiz, a 28-year-old banana farmer from central Mexico, had been abducted by a group of armed men and taken to an isolated ranch where 15 others – 13 men and two women – were being held.

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‘We fight, therefore we exist’: what lay behind Mexico’s brutal football riot?

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Three people were left critically injured after violence at Querétaro v Atlas. But many observers said the scenes could have been prevented

The scenes that shocked Mexico and horrified the world of soccer on Saturday were caught on shaky cell phone videos: men wearing the red and black jerseys of the Liga MX champions, Atlas, lay prone while others in the blue and black of Gallos del Querétaro beat and stripped them. Hundreds of raging fans descended on the pitch in Querétaro’s Corregidora Stadium, chasing their rivals, who sought refuge in the Atlas players’ locker room. Many Atlas fans ripped off their shirts to avoid being attacked.

The riot that broke out during the match between the two teams from central Mexico left 26 injured, three in a critical condition, the governor of the state of Querétaro, Mauricio Kuri, told reporters at a press conference on Sunday. Kuri also denied reports that there had been fatalities.

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Liga MX suspended as Fifa condemns ‘barbaric’ riot that leaves dozens injured in Mexico

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  • Three confirmed as critically injured after riot
  • Players were forced to flee from pitch during violence

At least 26 people were injured, including three critically, on Saturday when fans brawled during a football game in central Mexico.

The Liga MX match between the hosts Queretaro and Atlas from Guadalajara was suspended in the 62nd minute when fights broke out in the stands. Security personnel opened the gates to the field so that fans, including women and children, could escape the stands.

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