Vice-president faced with colossal task as migrants live with brutal reality of arduous journey and border restrictions
The sun beat down on the 30ft border fence that separates El Paso, Texas from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, as temperatures headed towards 100F on the southern border that stands as a symbol for so much in American politics.
Related: Kamala Harris says US-Mexico border situation is ‘tough’ but claims progress
Continue reading...The victims appear to members of the Sinaloa and Jalisco gangs fighting for control of the narcotics trade in Zacatecas state
The bullet-ridden bodies of 18 people were discovered after what appeared to have been a shootout between members of rival drug cartels in northern Mexico.
The bodies were found in a remote, rural area of the north-central state of Zacatecas, state security department spokeswoman Rocío Aguilar said on Friday.
Continue reading...Fear has invaded the Mexican border city of Reynosa after a weekend of violence in which 19 people were killed, including taxis drivers, workers and a nursing student, and security forces responded with operations that left four suspects dead.
This city across the border from McAllen, Texas, is a key trafficking point, and has long been accustomed to cartel violence. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said on Monday that evidence indicated that 15 of the victims were innocent bystanders. The other four dead were suspected gunmen from a group that drove into the northern border city of Reynosa and opened fire indiscriminately.
Continue reading...Georgia Laurie gives interview about attack that left her sister Melissa recovering in hospital
A British woman has described beating a crocodile on its snout while it grabbed her other hand as she fought to save her twin sister from the reptile.
Georgia Laurie, 28, said she feared her sister, Melissa, was dead when she saw the crocodile drag her underwater after they went for a swim in a lagoon in Mexico.
Continue reading...Gustavo Sánchez Cabrera shot dead Thursday, and Enrique Garcia killed Wednesday, apparently during work as ride-hail driver
Prosecutors in southern Mexico said reporter Gustavo Sánchez Cabrera was shot to death Thursday, and another journalist was killed just west of Mexico City, bring to three the number killed so far this year in the country. Two other reporters have disappeared.
The prosecutor’s office in the southern state of Oaxaca said Sánchez Cabrera was riding a motorcycle with another person on a rural road when gunmen opened fire on them.
Continue reading...Investigators have found 3,787 fragments as items in house from people who disappeared suggest killings may go back years
Investigators digging under the house of a suspected serial killer on the outskirts of Mexico City have found 3,787 bone fragments so far, apparently belonging to 17 different victims.
Prosecutors in the state of Mexico, which borders Mexico City, suggested the grisly finds may not end there. In excavations carried out since 17 May, authorities have dug up the floors of the house where the suspect lived. They now plan to extend the search to the soil beneath several other rooms he rented out on the same property.
Continue reading...The wife of the Mexican drug kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán has pleaded guilty to charges in the US and admitted that she helped her husband run his multibillion-dollar criminal empire.
Emma Coronel Aispuro, wearing a green jail uniform, appeared in federal court in Washington on Thursday and pleaded guilty to three counts of conspiring to distribute illegal drugs, conspiring to launder money and conspiring to assist the Sinaloa drug cartel.
Continue reading...US vice-president Kamala Harris has brushed off questions about her decision not to go to the US-Mexico border as part of her work to address the spike in migration. Harris, who was asked about the issue during visits to Mexico and Guatemala, said: ‘I’ve been to the border before and I will go again, but when I’m in Guatemala dealing with root causes, I think we should have a conversation about what is going on in Guatemala’, Harris said. Republican lawmakers have criticised her for not prioritising the shared frontier
Sister punched crocodile in head after it attacked in a lagoon where they had been swimming
A British woman is in a medically induced coma in Mexico after she was attacked by a crocodile in a lagoon where she and her twin sister had been taken by a tour guide.
Melissa and Georgia Laurie, 28, from Berkshire, had been swimming in the lagoon, about 10 miles from Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, on the south-east coast of the country, when Melissa was attacked.
Continue reading...The US vice-president, Kamala Harris, said she had held 'robust' talks with the Guatemalan president, Alejandro Giammattei, as she sought to find ways of deterring undocumented immigration from Central America to the United States. Speaking during a news conference with Giammattei, Harris delivered a blunt message to people thinking of making the dangerous journey north: 'Do not come'
But president’s Morena party keeps its majority in the lower house of congress
Mexican voters have denied President Andrés Manuel López Obrador a mega-majority in midterm elections, though his Morena party kept its majority in the lower house of congress with the support of a controversial ally.
Voters also showed little enthusiasm for Mexico’s rightwing opposition, which remains reviled after its decisive 2018 defeat by López Obrador, who swept to power promising to curb corruption and put the poor first.
Continue reading...From Brazil to Myanmar, five doctors and nurses treating coronavirus patients share their experiences
Since the pandemic began, healthcare workers have been venerated for treating patients with Covid-19, but they have also been attacked for doing their job.
Five doctors and nurses treating coronavirus patients, some of whom asked to be kept anonymous, recount their experiences.
Continue reading...President Andrés Manuel López Obrador remains popular but midterm elections may reflect judgments of his handling of the pandemic and endemic violence
Nearly three years have passed since Andrés Manuel López Obrador was elected president of Mexico and, before a sea of euphoric supporters, promised: “I will not fail you. You will not be disappointed.”
Related: ‘Huge incentives to kill’: Mexico crime groups target election candidates
Continue reading...Ministry of culture claims Zara used a pattern distinctive to the indigenous Mixteca community
Mexico has accused the international fashion brands Zara, Anthropologie and Patowl of cultural appropriation, claiming they used patterns from indigenous groups in their designs without any benefit to the communities.
The culture ministry said in a statement that it had sent letters signed by the culture minister, Alejandra Frausto, to the three companies, asking each for a “public explanation on what basis it could privatise collective property”.
Continue reading...At least 34 candidates have been murdered since campaigning began in April, with the assassination clear-up rate close to zero
Tuesday started off like any other day on the campaign trail for José Alberto Alonso, a union leader running for mayor in the Mexican beach resort of Acapulco: he kissed his family goodbye, boarded his Nissan Extreme SUV and headed off to start knocking on doors.
But barely 200m from his home, a motorcycle closed in and the pillion passenger pulled a handgun, peppering the car with bullets. Alonso’s bodyguard returned fire, and the attackers fled. The candidate had escaped injury, but was later sent to hospital suffering from stress.
Continue reading...The great British artist’s home in Mexico has been turned into a wonderful museum, full of her sculptures, books, diaries and unsmoked cigarettes. Our writer, Carrington’s cousin, takes an emotional tour
In October 2010, a few months before her death, I said my last goodbye to my cousin Leonora Carrington. As I left her home in Mexico City, she stood waving on the doorstep. Today, I’m back for the first time – to see Leonora’s house recreated as a visitor attraction. It feels surreal, but the surreal has become the everyday since I set off to find Leonora in 2006, almost 70 years after she checked out of our family and Britain. She travelled first to Paris to be with her lover, the German artist Max Ernst, before moving on to Mexico with a diplomat she met after she and Ernst were separated by the second world war.
This house, 194 Calle Chihuahua, is where she was anchored for more than 60 years. Here, she painted some of her best-known works, including The Juggler, which sold at auction in 2005 for £436,000; And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur, now at MoMA in New York; and her mural The Magical World of the Mayans, now at the National Anthropological Museum in Mexico City.
Continue reading...Doctors’ pleas receive little sympathy from government as critics say President Amlo favoring teachers – for political reasons
Ana Sofía is radiologist at a state-run hospital in the Mexican city of Monterrey, not far from the Texas border. Her work often brings her into close contact with patients, but says she was denied a coronavirus vaccination as her superiors did not consider her to be a frontline worker.
In despair, she attended a rural vaccination event for the elderly and asked for a leftover dose of the Sinovac jab – but she was again rebuffed, this time by political operatives who told her: “Wait your turn.”
Continue reading...This contemporary western about a young Texan fugitive who flees south of the border is handsomely shot but didactic
Just north of the border between the United States and Mexico, the Greer family – patriarch Bill (Frank Grillo), mom Monica (Andie MacDowell), and grown sons Lucas (Alex MacNicoll) and Jackson (Jake Allyn) – work the land as ranchers. They raise cattle, ride horses and, being red-blooded Texan types, play sports – in Jackson’s case well enough that he’s got a chance to go pro as a baseball player. They also spend the odd evening riding the range with a vigilante militia group, rounding up immigrants who may have crossed the border illegally, to “help” the border patrols. On one such night, Jackson joins his dad and big brother, even though they try to keep him out of this sort of thing so he can get out of Dodge and become a sports hero – and what do you know, the dumb lug ends up shooting and killing a boy (Alessio Valentini) just a little younger than himself. In the back no less.
Ashamed, distraught and worried that his father will try to take the rap for him, Jackson confesses to local Texas Ranger Ramirez (venerable character actor George Lopez), but then bolts across the border to Mexico on his trusty horse Sundance. Soon, the fugitive is learning some life lessons and about what Mexico is really like, and he becomes a hired hand for a nice middle-class family. A flirtatious friendship blooms between him and the family’s pretty daughter, Victoria (Esmeralda Pimentel), while he tries not to get caught by the dead kid’s dad Gustavo (Jorge A Jimenez) and a skeevy people-trafficking “coyote” (Andres Delgado), who are out to get him.
Continue reading...Novel, which weaves together the stories of Mexican migrants with those of a US family on a road trip south, was picked for the prize by a Barcelona library
Earlier this year, a library in Barcelona submitted a nomination for its favourite book of the year: Mexican author Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive. On Thursday, thanks to Biblioteca Vila De Gràcia, Luiselli was named winner of the world’s richest prize for a novel published in English, the €100,000 (£86,000) Dublin literary award.
“It’s a beautiful, relatively small library in Barcelona who nominated me,” said Luiselli. “I’m going to kiss its rocks one day, because I probably won’t be able to kiss its librarians because of Covid.”
Continue reading...Mystical realism conveys real-life stories of brutal cartel violence in Fernanda Valadez’s chilling directorial debut
Two teenage boys wave goodbye to their mothers across a field in rural Mexico, leaving home in search of the American dream. The opening moments of the Mexican film-maker Fernanda Valadez’s Identifying Features, available to stream from this week, reflects scenes played out every day across Mexico and Central America, as men, women and children journey north in search of safety and job opportunities.
Valadez, 39, starts her directorial debut film in her home state of Guanajuato – a picturesque, once tranquil state in the centre of the country. In recent years Guanajuato has fallen victim to the evolving geography and relentless nature of Mexico’s humanitarian crisis; it is now one of the most dangerous places in the country for those who live there and for people travelling through on the migrant trail.
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