Saltillo, Mexico Deaths

Two Found Dead, One a Newspaper photographer, another young man found dead, mutilated in northern Mexico.

The hacked-up bodies of a photojournalist and another young man have been found in the northern Mexico city of Saltillo, authorities said Thursday.

Photographer Daniel Martinez Bazaldua, 22, had recently been hired to cover social events for Vanguardia, the paper said in a story in its online edition. Officials identified the other man as Julian Zamora, 23.

Saltillo is in northern Coahuila state, an area where the Zetas drug cartel is active. Another Coahuila newspaper recently announced it would no longer publish stories about drug gangs, after receiving threats apparently signed by a Zetas leader.

State prosecutors said the bodies were found Wednesday in a jumbled pile of severed parts on a street, next to a hand-lettered message that appeared to indicate the Zetas were responsible for the killings.

The state government said the sign suggested the two young men had deserted from a drug gang.

Coahuila state Attorney General Homero Ramos told reporters later that investigators had testimony indicating both men "were participating in illegal activities."

Vanguardia criticized that accusation, noting that the message left at the scene also contained threats to police.

"We think it is sad and alarming that Coahuila has become a state in which the authorities condemn murdered people, converting them into criminals, without offering the least evidence," the newspaper wrote.

"Only a serious, professional investigation can find out the truth that society deserves," Vanguardia said.

Vanguardia Editorial Director Ricardo Mendoza told The Associated Press that Martinez Bazaldua was "very calm," ''friendly" and "enthusiastic," and said he did not know whether the killing was related to his work as a photographer.

In some cartel-plagued cities in Mexico, covering even the society section can be dangerous, because cartel leaders may hang out at prominent social events and get angry if they are included in photos. In some cases, if they want the attention, they can be angered if they are left out.

The Inter-American Press Association condemned the photographer's killing and demanded authorities do a thorough investigation. It also said it was regretful that state authorities almost immediately linked him to organized crime.

"It's irresponsible that without doing a minimal investigation, authorities immediately linked the killings a vengeance by members of organized crime," it said.

Four journalists have been killed in Coahuila and two more have gone missing since 1989. None of the cases have been solved, the association said.

Press advocates have long called Mexico one of the most dangerous nations for reporters. But there isn't a single, agreed-upon figure on crimes against journalists.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says in its latest report published in February that 12 Mexican journalists went missing in 2006-2012 and that in the same period 14 were killed because of their work. Mexico's human rights commission lists 81 journalists who it says have been killed since 2000.

In 2012, Mexico's special prosecutor for crimes against freedom of expression said 67 journalists had been killed and 14 had disappeared in the country since 2006.

On Thursday, the lower house of congress approved a bill that would allow journalists to request that federal prosecutors and federal judges investigate attacks on them, and to establish cases in which such federal intervention would be obligatory. The bill was previously approved by the senate and has now been sent to the president for his signature.

Court limits deportations over marijuana crimes

The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday immigrants cannot be automatically deported if they are convicted of relatively minor crimes involving marijuana.

In a 7-2 decision, the justices sided with Adrian Moncrieffe, a longtime resident of the United States from Jamaica who was deported from the United States over possession of a small amount of marijuana. The court said Moncrieffe should have had the opportunity to contest his deportation.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in her opinion for the court that marijuana offenses must involve either the sale of the drug or possession of more than a small amount to count as serious enough to warrant automatic deportation.

Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented.

The decision means that Moncrieffe will be able to return to the United States so that he can make the case that he should be allowed to remain in the country where he has lived since the age of 3, said Thomas Goldstein, his Washington-based lawyer. Goldstein said he believes that the government often drops the deportation effort in minor cases like Moncrieffe's.

The case stems from Moncrieffe's 2008 arrest in Georgia. Police pulled him over and found 1.3 grams of marijuana in his car, the equivalent of two or three marijuana cigarettes, Sotomayor said. He faced the charge of possession of marijuana with an intent to distribute, which under Georgia law encompasses a range of conduct from social sharing to distribution of larger amounts.

Moncrieffe accepted a plea with no jail time in which the charge would be expunged if he complied with his probation. Two years later, immigration agents jailed him and began deportation proceedings, citing the marijuana arrest. For deportation purposes, it was as if Moncrieffe had been a major drug dealer.

In the government's eyes, Moncrieffe's crime was serious enough to count as an "aggravated felony" and that it fell into a category that made his deportation automatic and deprived even the attorney general of the ability to step in and cancel it.

But Sotomayor said that under immigration law, a conviction that "fails to establish that the offense involved either remuneration or more than a small amount of marijuana" is not an aggravated felony.

She also dismissed the concern raised by Alito in his dissent that, because about half the states have statutes similar to the one in Georgia, many people convicted of marijuana crimes will avoid deportation because the state laws are not specific enough.

"Escaping aggravated felony treatment does not mean escaping deportation," she said. It just means that the deportation is not automatic, Sotomayor said.

Thomas wrote that the Georgia law defines the crime as a drug trafficking offense, which should have resolved the case in the government's favor.

The case is Moncrieffe v. Holder, 11-702.

Bomber, Use Weapon of Mass Destruction

http://www.valleycentral.com/uploadedfiles/kgbt/news/stories/dzhokartsarnaevcomplaint.pdf


Officials have said Tsarnaev, 19, and his older brother set off the two pressure-cooker bombs at last week's race that sprayed shrapnel into the crowds, killing three people and wounding more than 180. His brother, Tamerlan, 26, died Friday after a fierce gunbattle with police.
Tsarnaev was listed in serious but stable condition at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, unable to speak because of a gunshot wound to the throat.
In a criminal complaint outlining the evidence, the FBI said Tsarnaev was seen on surveillance cameras putting a knapsack on the ground near the site of the second blast and then manipulating a cellphone and lifting it to his ear.
After the first explosion ripped through the crowd, a calm-looking Tsarnaev quickly walked away, and about 10 seconds later, the second blast occurred where he left the knapsack, the FBI said.
The FBI did not make it clear whether authorities believe he used his cellphone to detonate one or both of the bombs or whether he was talking to someone.
The court papers also said that during the long night of crime Thursday and Friday that led to the older brother's death and the younger one's capture, one of them told a carjacking victim: "Did you hear about the Boston explosion? I did that."
Tsarnaev was charged with using and conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction against persons and property, resulting in death. He is also likely to face state charges in connection with the shooting death of an MIT police officer.
The Obama administration said it had no choice but to prosecute Tsarnaev in the federal court system. Some politicians had suggested he be tried as an enemy combatant in front of a military tribunal, where he would be denied some of the usual U.S. constitutional protections.
But Tsarnaev, an ethnic Chechen from Russia who has lived in the United States for about a decade, is a naturalized U.S. citizen, and under U.S. law, American citizens cannot be tried by military tribunals, White House spokesman Jay Carney said.
Carney said that since the Sept. 11 attacks, the federal court system has been used to convict and incarcerate hundreds of terrorists.
In its criminal complaint, the FBI said it searched Tsarnaev's dorm room at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth on Sunday and found BBs as well as a white hat and dark jacket that look like those worn by one of one of the suspected bombers in the surveillance photos the FBI released a few days after the attack.
Seven days after the bombings, meanwhile, Boston was bustling Monday, with runners hitting the pavement, children walking to school and enough cars clogging the streets to make the morning commute feel almost back to normal.
Residents to observe a moment of silence at 2:50 p.m., the time the first of the two bombs exploded near the finish line. Bells were expected to toll across the city and state after the minute-long tribute to the victims.
Also, hundreds of family and friends packed a church in Medford for the funeral of bombing victim Krystle Campbell, a 29-year-old restaurant worker. A memorial service was scheduled for Monday night at Boston University for 23-year-old Lu Lingzi, a graduate student from China.
Fifty-one victims remained hospitalized Monday, three of them in critical condition.
At the Snowden International School on Newbury Street, a high school set just a block from the bombing site, jittery parents dropped off children as teachers -- some of whom had run in the race -- greeted each other with hugs.
Carlotta Martin of Boston said that leaving her kids at school has been the hardest part of getting back to normal.
"We're right in the middle of things," Martin said outside the school as her children, 17-year-old twins and a 15-year-old, walked in, glancing at the police barricades a few yards from the school's front door.
"I'm nervous. Hopefully, this stuff is over," she continued. "I told my daughter to text me so I know everything's OK."
Tsarnaev was captured Friday night after an intense all-day manhunt that brought the Boston area to a near-standstill. He was cornered and seized, wounded and bloody, after he was discovered hiding in a tarp-covered boat in a Watertown backyard.
He had apparent gunshot wounds to the head, neck, legs and hand, the FBI said in court papers.
Sen. Dan Coats of Indiana, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Sunday that Tsarnaev's throat wound raised questions about when he will be able to talk again, if ever. It was not clear whether the wound was inflicted by police or was self-inflicted.

 

Do You Remember B 24 Liberator Bomber

A Bomber An Hour Lean Manufacturing circa 1944

Production Miracle At Willow Run In January of 1940, America was being drawn into the growing war and our military was woefully unprepared. The Roosevelt administration asked Ford Motor Company to manufacture components for the B-24 Liberator bomber. Charles Sorensen, Vice-President of Production for Ford traveled to San Diego to observe Consolidated Aircraft's operations. Here is his description of the visit and how he conceived the Willow Run bomber plant that eventually manufactured 8,800 of these aircraft. Willow Run was the physical embodiment of the Ford Production system which was later transformed by Toyota into "Just In Time" and Lean manufacturing. This is where it all started. Charlie Sorensen's Story Inside the (Consolidated) plant I watched men putting together wing sections and portions of the fuselage. The work of putting together a four-engine bomber was many times more complicated than assembling a four-cylinder automobile, but what I saw reminded me of nearly thirty-five years previously when we were making Model N Fords at the Piquette Avenue plant. This was before Walter Flanders rearranged our machines and eight years before we achieved the orderly sequence of the assembly line and mass production. The nearer a B-24 came to its final assembly the fewer principles of mass production there were as we at Ford had developed and applied over the years. Here was a custom-made plane, put together as a tailor would cut and fit a suit of clothes. I really did have something in mind. To compare a Ford V-8 with a four-engine Liberator bomber was like matching a garage with a skyscraper, but despite their great differences I knew the same fundamentals applied to high-volume production of both, the same as they would to an electric egg beater or to a wrist watch. First, break the plane's design into essential units and make a separate production layout for each unit. Next, build as many units as are required, then deliver each unit in its proper sequence to the assembly line to make one whole unit~ finished plane. To house all this and provide for efficient operation there should be a new plant specially designed to accommodate the progressive layout. I saw no impossibility in such an idea even though mass production of anything approaching the size and complexity of a B-24 never had been attempted before. But who would accept such a wild notion? And instead of one bomber a day by the prevailing method I saw the possibility of one B-24 an hour by mass production assembly lines. How could the aviation people take that estimate seriously? As soon as I returned to my room at the Coronado Hotel, I began figuring how to adapt Ford assembly methods to airplane construction and turn out one four-engine bomber an hour. Throughout the day I had made copious notes. I listed all major units of the plane and the subunits and fractional units required for their assembly, and I had gathered figures on Consolidated's labor force and job performance. From these I computed each unit operation, its timing, and required floor space as I saw them, and paper began to fly. Figures for each unit I kept together in a separate pile, and soon there were little stacks of paper all over the floor of my room. I was back at my old game of sketching a series of manufacturing and subassembly operations and their orderly progression toward becoming major units-- a game I had played many times since that morning in 1908 at the Piquette Avenue plant when we first experimented with a moving assembly line. Now, in one night, I was applying thirty-five years of production experience to planning the layout for building not only something I had never put together before, but the largest and most complicated of all air transport and in numbers and at a rate never before thought possible. Again I was practicing my production planning philosophy, which stemmed from my patternmaking days when I fashioned wooden models of Henry Ford's half-thought-out designs: "Unless you see a thing, you cannot simplify it. And unless you can simplify it, it's a good sign you can't make it.? Wing Assembly Two parallel assembly lines converge after the outer wing is attached. As I look back now upon that night, this was the biggest challenge of my production career-bigger than any Model T assembly line sequence for Highland Park, more momentous than the layout and construction of the great River Rouge plant in which I'd had a part. It took eight years to develop Ford's mass production system, and eight more years before we worked up to a production of 10,000 cars a day. Once again I was going on the principle I had enunciated many times at Ford: "The only thing we can't make is something we can't think about." Through most of the night I set down figures and revised them. I arranged and rearranged the stacks of paper, as it became plainer to me which unit came after the other in moving to final assembly and how much floor space was involved. Landing Gear Inspection At length the whole picture became clear and simple. I knew I had the solution, and I was elated by the certainty that the Germans had neither the facilities nor the conception for greater bomber mass production. Towards four o'clock, I was satisfied that my piles of paper were arranged in proper order and represented the most logical progress of units to the main assembly line; and I knew I could prove a construction rate of one big bomber an hour. Now I had something to talk about. Charles Sorensen's Original Sketches Standing over the papers, I roughed out on Coronado Hotel notepaper a pencil sketch of the floor plan of a bomber plant. It would be a mile long and a quarter mile wide, the biggest single industrial building ever. I still have that sketch, initialed by Edsel Ford, his two sons and others, and I still get a kick out of it.  The result of one night's hard work, it is the true outline of Willow Run, which took two years to build and came through on schedule with one four-engine Liberator an hour, 18 bombers a day, and by the end of the war a total of 8,800 big planes off the assembly lines and into the air. When I finished my sketch I went to bed, but was so carried away by enthusiasm for the project that I couldn't sleep. I was building planes the rest of the night. B-24 Test Flight Over Michigan At breakfast with Edsel (Ford) the next morning I was somewhat woozy as I showed him the sketch and outlined the bomber-an-hour proposition. He was in complete accord and assured me that Ford Motor Company would build such a plant. My high respect for him went higher than ever. We spent an hour together, getting set for a meeting in Major Fleet's office to shoot the works on a $200,000,000 proposition backed only by a penciled sketch. Willow Run Bomber Plant Albert Kahn, a prominent industrial architect translated Sorensens sketches into bricks and mortar. The final design was L-shaped because of some problems with easements for adjacent property. Willow Run Airport is in the background. Willow Run Plant Layout circa 1944 The B-24's final assembly was made out of doors under the bright California sun and on a structural steel fixture. The heat and temperature changes so distorted this fixture that it was impossible to turn out two planes alike without further adjustment. The Consolidated and the Air Force people talked about an order from Ford Motor Company for center and outer wing sections; but it was obvious that if the wing sections had uniform measurements, the way we made parts for automobiles, they would not fit properly under out-of-doors assembly conditions. All this was pretty discouraging, and I said so. Naturally, and quite properly, the reply was "How would you do it?" I had to put up or shut up. "I'll have something for you tomorrow morning," I said.

Six men Found Dead in Ahome in Sinaloa

The bodies of six men were found inside an SUV near the industrial zone in Ahome, a city in the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa, police said.

The grisly discovery was made Saturday by municipal police.

The vehicle was taken in an armed robbery on April 8 in the town of Juan Jose Rios, officials said.

Army troops cordoned off the area while crime scene investigators from the prosecutor’s office gathered evidence.

The SUV was towed to a funeral home with the bodies still inside so they could be examnined by specialists, officials said.

Sinaloa Attorney General Marco Antonio Higuera Gomez went to the funeral home to oversee the investigation.

The victims were stripped to the waist and wore only pants and sandals, police said.

“It is believed that the victims are farmworkers who were reported missing on Friday night after drinking at an agricultural camp,” a police spokesman said.

The motive for the massacre is not known, but Sinaloa has been plagued by drug-related violence for years.

Sinaloa is home to the powerful drug cartel led by Joaquin “El Chapo” (Shorty) Guzman.

The Sinaloa cartel, sometimes referred to by officials as the Pacific cartel, is the oldest drug cartel in Mexico and Guzman, considered extremely violent, is one of the most-wanted criminals in Mexico and the United States, where the Drug Enforcement Administration has offered a reward of $5 million for him.

The rival Los Zetas cartel has been trying to grab control of some areas in the state from the Sinaloa organization.

The war on drugs launched by former President Felipe Calderon, who was in office from 2006 to 2012, left about 70,000 people dead, or an average of 32 per day, in Mexico, officials say.

Calderon, of the conservative National Action Party, or PAN, deployed thousands of soldiers and Federal Police officers across the country to fight drug cartels.

Foreigners provoke divisions education

While nearly a third of Mexicans say that foreigners provoke divisions in society, one local community center is offering refugees and immigrants in Mexico City a platform to address stigma against them and to educate the community about their own cultures.

Ana Lucas Álvarez, 53, fled civil war in Guatemala 29 years ago and resettled as a refugee in Mexico City, Mexico’s capital. A member of the Quiché people, a Mayan ethnic group, she still speaks Spanish with difficulty after growing up speaking Quiché.
Language has been just one barrier Lucas has faced since she was forced to leave her country during its civil war from 1960 to 1996.
“I feel happier, more content, to make public where you are from. Before, you fear whether people listen to you. Now, there is the right to express your feeling that you have lived.”

Ana Lucas Álvarez, a 53-year-old Mayan Quiché refugee from Guatemala

“It is very difficult,” Lucas says in her non-native Spanish. “You leave your place of origin. You leave your family. You left many things.”
Lucas remembers the exact date she arrived in Mexico – Feb. 10, 1984. She says she was fleeing state repression in Guatemala, which intensified in the 1980s against indigenous communities during the civil war between the government and leftist guerrilla insurgents.
“In the 1980s, the repression became stronger,” Lucas says. “If you want to save your life, we have to leave.”
She says she used to have to hide in the mountains by day, returning home only at night.
More than 200,000 people died or were forcibly disappeared during Guatemala’s civil war, mostly by state and related paramilitary forces, according to estimates by the Commission for Historical Clarification set up by the United Nations. The commission itself documented more than 42,000 victims, of which 83 percent were poor Mayans.
Former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt has been on trial facing charges of crimes against humanity and the genocide of more than 1,770 Mayans during his military rule from 1982 to 1983, one of the most violent periods of the war. A Guatemalan judge who was recently reinstated to the case suspended the trial on Thursday to revisit actions taken while she was asked to step down.
Lucas, her husband and their 3-year-old daughter fled to Mexico City, where they knew other Guatemalans with whom they could stay. She says Mexican authorities at the border gave her an insight into the cultural divide they would face for the next three decades.
“We wore our dress,” Lucas says, “and arriving at the border, already in Mexico, they told us that we could not wear our outfits, we cannot speak our native tongue anymore. You do not forget. It is a wound that stays with you, very difficult to remove it.”
She continued to face discrimination in Mexico because of her indigenous origins and difficulty speaking Spanish, she says.
But then she found a place where people empathized with her struggles: Casa Refugiados. In 2006, she met José Luis Loera, who three years earlier had created a local center for refugees sponsored by Amnesty International and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In 2012, it became a civil association that collaborates with the U.N. refugee agency.
Lucas now speaks at local schools about her experience and her culture as one of the center’s intercultural promoters.
Casa Refugiados promotes the cultural integration of refugees and immigrants of various origins who reside in Mexico City. Located in the middle of a park in a central neighborhood, it aims to raise public awareness among the Mexican population of how to socially and culturally include people of different origins. It also gives members a platform to share their cultures with Mexicans.

Various accents fill a tiny room at Casa Refugiados. Daniel Otero, the association’s education coordinator, leads a conversation among attendees who fled violence and other circumstances in their native countries. Today, they work together to combat stigma against them locally through the center’s intercultural advocacy project.
As intercultural promoters, they go to elementary, middle and high schools to share their life experiences and cultures to raise awareness among children and adolescents in Mexico. Their message is that being a foreigner does not make anyone less worthy.
“I feel happier, more content, to make public where you are from,” Lucas says. “Before, you fear whether people listen to you. Now, there is the right to express your feeling that you have lived.”
There were nearly 263,000 foreigners residing in Mexico as of 2009, with nearly one-third living in Mexico City, according to the latest data from the Secretaría de Gobernación, Mexico’s interior ministry. As of 2010, there were 1,390 refugees in the country, according to Comisión Mexicana de Ayuda a Refugiados, established under the ministry to attend to the influx of refugees from Central American countries starting in 1980.
Between 70 and 80 refugees and immigrants currently participate in Casa Refugiados’ programs, Otero says. Many of the immigrants the center works with fled violence in their countries but did not know they had a right to seek refugee status or immigrated to Mexico regardless of whether the government had granted it to them.
“We appeal to humanity,” Otero says. “Here, all people are welcome regardless of their migratory status.”
When Lucas learned of the “Casita,” as regulars call it, it was a place for refugees and immigrants to find solidarity and information.
“Sometimes, they used to go just to talk,” Otero says. “Many times, it is what they need: to be heard, to be attended to. To understand and to accompany – that is the spirit of the Casita.”
The center’s objective has evolved throughout the years to become a platform for refugees and immigrants to educate the community. The intercultural promotion project at schools began in 2011. The center also organizes a literary club and cultural activities that are open to the public to promote integration.
Although some of the center’s participants come from Angola, Egypt, Eritrea, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo and Indonesia, the majority are from Latin America. Otero stresses the number from El Salvador and Honduras, two Central American countries engulfed in violence and poverty.
In 2011, El Salvador had the second-highest murder rate in the world: 71 murders per 100,000 people, according to the U.S. Department of State. More than 42 percent of the population was living at the national poverty line as of 2010, according to the World Bank.
Julio Antonio Lemus, 50, says he immigrated to Mexico from El Salvador in 1985 because of “political situations.” The country’s civil war lasted from 1980 to 1992 as the military and right-wing paramilitary death squads clashed with leftist guerrilla organizations united under the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional. More than 75,000 civilians died, according to the Center for Justice and Accountability, an international human rights organization.
Lemus, like other intercultural activists, is an artisan. He says the painted wooden objects he makes promote his culture in Mexico. They display their crafts at schools and also in exhibitions that the center organizes in parks and plazas. Their livelihoods have become an opportunity to express who they are.
Lucas is no longer afraid people will reject her thanks to her advocacy at schools, but she still says it is safer to not say where she is from. Although she became a naturalized citizen and four of her children were born in Mexico, students sometimes tell her that she is not from Mexico and that people like her only come to steal jobs from Mexicans.
A 54-year-old Colombian woman who is also an intercultural promotor for Casa Refugiados says Mexico is a “supportive and friendly” country. But she recognizes how she has had to confront the stigma that prevails against foreigners.
She immigrated from Colombia 13 years ago after receiving a death threat during the prolonged armed conlict among government forces, paramilitary groups and guerrilla insurgents, mainly the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia and Ejército de Liberación Nacional. Beginning in the 1960s and continuing today, the civil strife has killed hundreds of thousands and has displaced millions. Because the woman still fears for her life, she declined to publish her name.
Through her work with Casa Refugiados, she says she aims to teach the local community.
“We are people who come not to compete or take your space, ” she says.  “We simply bring the culture of our countries and our experiences – because no one wants to be threatened, no one wants to flee their country, no one travels from their country of origin to relocate in another for pleasure.”
Otero summarizes the problems imimmigrants and refugees face upon arriving in Mexico in one word: incomprehension. The Encuesta Nacional sobre Discriminación 2010, the national discrimination survey, found that nearly 50 percent of immigrants said that society did not help them because they did not understand their problems.
Although 73 percent of Mexican respondents considered it positive to have people of different cultures and origins living in their country, 27 percent said foreigners provoked divisions in society.
That's why Casa Refugiados’ projects promote “education for integration,” Otero says.
"I imagine two islands where each project is building a bridge,” he says, “and that bridge is this: the encounter.”
The solution is encouraging Mexicans and foreigners to get to know each other, he says.
“We have to realize our violence, our prejudices, what prevents us from getting to know others,” he says. “The only thing that makes it so there is no chemistry between Mexicans and people of a different origin are prejudices, the lack of getting to know others.”

Mexicans cautiously welcome US immigration Reform

          

 Mexicans reacted with cautious optimism to the immigration reform bill submitted to the U.S. Senate Wednesday, saying that while it proposes a long wait for migrants to gain U.S. citizenship, it at least gives them a stable path to do so. "There are some people who would like to become citizens right away," said Ismael Mota Ortega, 48, who heads the Illinois federation of clubs of migrants from the central Mexico state of Zacatecas. "But there are others who see things sensibly, that you have to demonstrate that you can truly be a good citizen, step by step."
But Marco Antonio Castillo, who leads an advocacy group called the Popular Assembly of Migrant Families, complained about the numerous conditions the measure would impose on applicants, saying, "The immigration reform doesn't appear to be as just as possible."
"We don't want to be pessimistic, because this is an unusual step" to get a reform bill at least presented, Castillo said. "But it is fundamentally important that the demands of society be met."
Mexico's Foreign Relations Department welcomed the proposed reform, calling it "a positive step."
"The commitment expressed by President Barack Obama and members of both parties in Congress on this issue is very encouraging," it said. "As the U.S. legislative process proceeds, it will be fundamentally important that the contributions of migrants are taken into account, and that their rights are respected. "
The bill would allow migrants in the country before 2012 to apply for "registered provisional immigrant status." That would not allow them to collect federal benefits, but they could at least work safely in the United States and visit their homelands.
That is a big issue for many of the millions of Mexican migrants who entered the U.S. illegally and who have been unable to visit relatives in Mexico, in some cases for years, because of fear they would not be able to return to U.S. jobs.
"I think that the big concern for the nearly 1.6 million households who have family members living without documents in the United States is regularizing their situation so that they can come and go, something they haven't been able to do since the crackdown in immigration policies," said Rodolfo Garcia Zamora, an immigration expert at the state university in Zacatecas, a Mexican state that is home to many migrants.
But he noted that, even after paying fines and fees, migrants will have to demonstrate proficiency in English and civics, something that could represent yet another barrier.
"There are a considerable number who might not qualify to start the process ... And then there is the question of English," Garcia Zamora said. "We have thousands of Mexican migrants who have spent their whole lives working in the United States, and because they have always lived in a Latino or Mexican community, they don't speak English."
But the requirement could encourage some migrants to become more integrated in U.S. society.
"There are a lot of people who aren't prepared, and I think this could stimulate them to get ready in some way," Mota Ortega said. "People need to get motivated and make their own effort."
One group that could benefit if the bill is passed includes some of the most tragic cases of the current situation: adult migrants deported after decades living in the United States, who often left behind - or brought with them - children born in the United States.
The bill allows such people to apply for re-entry if they were deported for non-criminal reasons and have children, parents or spouses who are U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents.
"This makes me enormously happy," said Margarita Torres, 45, was deported in 2010 after living for 20 years in Washington state, where she worked picking apples. Her 10-year-old daughter, Angelica, who was born in the U.S., is now living with her in a poor Mexico City neighborhood. She hopes to return to the United States and reunite with her husband and four other children in Washington.
"God willing, they will at least give me a visa. What I most want in this world is to see my children," Torres said. "The saddest thing is to have a family broken up."
Like many of her compatriots, Torres said she had learned relatively little English during her years in the United States, just enough to read a bit and answer basic questions. But now she said she's willing to learn. "When I set out to do something, I do it, and I can do this."
Another stumbling block might be the requirement that, in order to apply for provisional immigrant status, migrants cannot have any felony conviction or more than 2 misdemeanors. Rules make it hard for migrants to get drivers' licenses in many states, so it is not unusual for some to have been cited for violations such as driving without a license. "There are a significant number of cases where migrants have had small legal incidents," Garcia Zamora said. "They have some legal record that could prevent them from effectively moving forward."
The many requirements, and the current relatively low level of migration to the United States, may also help to calm concerns in the United States that the bill could spark a mass flood of migrants to the United States.
The current lack of jobs in the United States appears to be a much more important factor than the reform bill, Garcia Zamora said.
"The fundamental variable is the American economy," he noted. "People on social networks in Mexico don't know much about the details of the immigration reform, but what the social networks in the United States and the communities of origin in Mexico are very clear about, is that right now there aren't any jobs in the United States."

Mexico City Trying to get Salt off Tables

Salt and lime with tequila. Salt with your iced "michelada" beer. Salt and chili on fruit and even candy. Mexicans love salt, so much so that some estimates show them eating nearly three times the recommended amount and significantly more than what Americans put down.

Add this to rising obesity and a hypertension epidemic, and you have a potential health nightmare that has spurred Mexico's massive capital city to try to get residents to shun the salt shaker.

Mexico City Health Secretary Armando Ahued launched a campaign, dubbed "Less Salt, More Health," late last week to get restaurants to take salt shakers off their tables. Officials and the city's restaurant chamber signed an agreement to encourage eateries to provide shakers only if guests ask for them. The program is voluntary but the chamber is urging its members to comply.

The anti-salt campaign is part of a growing wave of activism by mayors such as New York City's Michael Bloomberg , whose administration has nudged food manufacturers to reduce salt and promulgated voluntary salt guidelines in 2010 for various restaurant and store-bought foods. Bloomberg has also tried to cap the size of non-diet sodas and other sugary drinks, but a court struck down the beverage rule just before it was to take effect last month. The city is appealing.

In Mexico City, only a minority of restaurants appear to have joined the campaign in its first few days, but some are complying, including El Estragon restaurant in the touristy Juarez neighborhood, where manager Isabel Santiago said it has taken shakers off the tables.

"It is for the good of the customers. We have to look after them," Santiago said. "It's in our own best interest" to keep customers alive and eating as long as possible.

At a street stand in downtown Mexico City, lanky law student Alejandro Alfaro paused before diving into a plate of cecina tacos, a chili-laden dish of salted meat, to sprinkle on more salt from a shaker.

"This is a normal thing," Alfaro said a little guiltily as he tucked into the tacos. "Your body needs all sorts of nutrients."

That is precisely the sort of salt-on-top-of-salt that the campaign is targeting in Mexico City, where people often sprinkle salt-and-chili powder onto already salted potato chips. Bags of apples sometimes contain plastic packages of salty vinegar-and-chili salsa.

"Salt is such an ingrained part of the Mexican food experience," said Lesley Tellez, who leads street food and market tours in Mexico City with her company, Eat Mexico. "Salsas don't taste the same without it, and neither does mole or even a fresh corn tortilla, let alone fruit with salt and chili powder!"

While the battle may appear uphill, Mexico City's top health official says it is worthwhile since excess salt consumption is believed to raise blood pressure and cause hypertension. Two-thirds of two-thirds of Mexican adults are overweight or obese, and diabetes and hypertension are reaching epidemic proportions.

Ahued says many Mexicans regularly consume as much as 11,000 milligrams of salt per day, which would translate to 4,400 milligrams of sodium. Carlos Hoyo Vadillo, a researcher at Mexico's Center for Advanced Studies and Research, places Mexico's salt intake at 10,000. That's still well above the 3,436 milligrams of sodium the Center for Disease Control estimates as the U.S. daily intake, which in turn is still far above the recommended 1,500 to 2,300 milligram maximum per day.

Why so much salt?

Mexico is a big salt producer, and is also being hit by a double whammy: salt coming from American-style processed foods that have grown in popularity and the country's own longstanding, home-grown love affair with the combination of lime, chili and salt - Mexico's "umami" if you will.

Mexicans' taste for salt begins at a young age, with children savoring tamarind or dried mango candy coated with chili powder and salt. Vendors hover outside schools selling potato and banana chips, offering to sprinkle a salt-and-chili mixture on top. Chamoyada paste and Valentina sauce are put on fruits and snacks almost by habit.

Among adults, a well-prepared margarita must have a rim of salt on the glass, and on a hot summer day, nothing goes down smoother than a "michelada" beer with ice, lime and a thick coating of salt around the lip of the glass.

"Mexicans like strong flavors and that's why it's very common to combine lime and salt, but all the foods like pizza and ham already have a big dose of salt," Hoyo Vadillo wrote.

At least a few countries top Mexico in salt consumption, notably in Asian nations with a taste for miso broths, pickled vegetables and salt-laden soy sauces.

But Julian Alcala, a professor of public health at Mexico's National Autonomous University, says that while it is a world problem, salt hits Mexico particularly hard. "It is an ancestral problem. In Mexico, there are even beautiful stories about the (pre-Hispanic) salt goddess."

Alcala said the problem is aggravated by the processed, industrialized foods Mexicans began consuming in recent decades. "It is much more complicated than just saying: 'take the salt off the table.'"

"They have to stop selling us the garbage they're selling us," he said of food companies.

Back in Juarez neighborhood, Rocio Perez, the manager of Antojitos Mexicanos restaurant, chatted with customers and watched as waiters dispatched endless tacos de guisado at tables still laden with salt shakers.

"You have to give the customers what they want," Perez said. "There are a lot of people who, before they even try the food, they're already sprinkling salt on it. These tastes aren't going to change."

Consumer activist Alejandro Calvillo said the Mexico City campaign is a worthy effort, but falls short by not confronting the major snack vendors.

It's an issue that Mexico, which now holds the dubious distinction of being the world's biggest per-capita consumer of soft drinks, has faced before. Repeated campaigns to wean Mexicans off soft drinks and junk food have failed.

Calvillo and others hope the anti-salt campaign doesn't go the same way.

"We think it's good, but it doesn't address the main cause of high salt consumption, which is the processed foods," Calvillo said. "In the cases both of salt consumption and obesity, public policies have been designed with conflicts of interest, because of the participation of companies that caused the problem in the first place."

A Mexican Point of View

US Mexico Border Wall Forces Risky Detours         

A tall barrier separates two worlds. To the south, a crowded Mexican border town. To the north, beyond a heavily patrolled no-man's land, the lure of work and a better life in America.
The 2.5 meter (eight-foot) tall metal barrier has dramatically reduced the number of illegal immigrants crossing the border in the busy San Diego area, in the far southwestern United States.
Critics, however, say this has just forced the migrants to walk miles into the open desert to get around the wall, resulting in thousands of deaths.
Security along the 3,200 kilometer (2,000 mile) border with Mexico is a key factor in the debate over overhauling US immigration policy and figuring out what do with the 11 million people already living in the country illegally.
From a border hilltop near San Diego, the impact of the barrier is clear.
"Generations and generations of smugglers have lived in this area," said Border Patrol agent Timothy Hamill as he gestures south to a working-class neighborhood in Tijuana, Mexico.
From the hilltop one can see the waves of the Pacific Ocean to the west. To the east, the fence crawls over rugged hills into the horizon.

The crow of roosters can be heard from the Mexican side. In one poor Tijuana neighborhood, La Libertad, frugal residents use the barrier as a wall for their humble homes.
Armed US Border Patrol agents in pine-green uniforms patrol the open strip of desert between the wall and a secondary chain link fence on the US side.
Giant banks of stadium lights illuminate the border strip at night. Agents monitor the area around the clock using 59 cameras on 14 observation towers.
As recently as 20 years ago migrants would cross the border in large groups.
But, starting in the 1990s, agents began to raise a barrier of welded steel panels along the busiest parts of the border.
In the San Diego area, the steel fence runs some 90 meters (300 feet) into the Pacific Ocean, then east for 45 miles. A secondary chain link fence topped with razor wire runs for 13 miles.
Detentions dropped from around 400,000 a year before the wall to 28,000 last year in the San Diego area alone, Hamill said, while authorities have increased their haul of captured illegal drugs nearly 65 percent since 2005.
Along the route Hamill points to signs of tunnels under the border that have been dug, and sealed, over the years, as well as various holes in the wall.
"The border is more secure than it has been in the past," Hamill said. "But we definitely still have challenges to face. Protecting America is a very challenging mission and is very important to remain vigilant."
-- A deadly detour? --
Arrests may be down, but the undocumented migrants are still coming, says Enrique Morones, an activist with the group Border Angels.
The barrier and the increased security has meant a rising death toll among migrants who now make a wide detour into the desert to avoid detection.
Morones estimates there have been some 10,000 deaths along the whole border.
"Before they built the wall, one or two people would die every month. Since the wall was built, one or two people die every day," Morones told AFP. "The wall doesn't stop them, it just delays them."
The official Border Patrol figures are lower but still stark: 5,570 have died crossing into the United States illegally between 1998 and 2012.
Morones and his volunteers leave bottled water in parts of the desert where illegal migrants are known to cross.
The majority of the illegal border crossers are peaceful migrants in search of an honest job, according to Morones.
"Most of them are like the great-great-grandparents of those Border Patrol agents when they came. They're not criminals, they're just looking for opportunities," he said.
Unlike years past, when it was a free-for-all, migrants today usually pay smugglers known locally as "coyotes" a handsome sum to get around the agents and across the border.
One 38 year-old undocumented Mexican mechanic told AFP he often saw human remains on his frequent journeys across the desert into the United States.
"I know that wall very well," he boasts.
But, with the increased security, he said he has chosen to stay north of the border, and even bought false identification papers in case agents stop him as he travels north to Los Angeles to visit his young son.
Tomas, another one of the 11 million undocumented migrants living in the United States, scoffs at the idea that the wall would stop people like him.
"As long as there is demand for labor from Latinos in the United States, there will always be a way to get around that wall," the 35-year-old Mexican told AFP.

How America tallies its 11.1 million undocumented immigrants

The debate over how to deal with the approximately 11 million individuals living in the United States without authorization - including the argument over whether to call them “illegal” or “undocumented” - is perhaps the most politically tricky aspect of the sprawling immigration policy overhaul effort.
So who are the 11 million? And how do we know how many there are?
It’s difficult to count people who by definition are unlikely to disclose their actual immigration status to the government, so demographers use what’s called the “residual method” to determine about how many undocumented individuals are in the country.

Starting with Census Bureau data, the Pew Hispanic Center examines the total number of foreign-born individuals in the United States and subtracts those whose records or characteristics indicate they are here legally as naturalized citizens, Green Card holders, residents on temporary visas, or refugees.

Immigration Nation

An in–depth look at immigration in America

“For those who say they are not a U.S. citizen and that they are foreign-born, we can, by looking at other characteristics -- like how long they have lived in the country and what job they hold -- determine whether the person is in the country legally or not,” says Mark Lopez, the associate director at the Pew Hispanic Center.

The “residual” means those who are left over.
Census data tends to under-represent certain groups, so Pew and others also try to fill in the gaps by adjusting for Census under-counts. Demographers also factor in departure data like the number of deportations and apprehensions at the border.
Based on those demographic calculations, Pew estimated in 2011 that there are 11.1 million undocumented immigrants currently in the United States.
That number is statistically unchanged from estimates in 2010 and 2009, but has dropped significantly since 2007, when it spiked at 12 million.
Also in 2011, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Immigration Statistics placed the number at 11.5 million, slightly higher than the Pew study.
Another study by former U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service demographer Robert Warren and University of Minnesota professor John Robert Warren pegged the total at around 11.7 million in January 2010. But all three data sets found a significant reduction in the population over the past decade.

Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., a member of the Gang of Eight immigration reform group, joins The Daily Rundown to talk about immigration reform talks, the budget battle taking place on The Hill, North Korea and touches on the investigation regarding Dr. Salomon Melgen.

The Warren study concluded that, between 1990 and 2009, an estimated 7.5 million unauthorized immigrants left that population, either because they gained legal status, were removed by DHS, left voluntarily, or died.
Analysts attribute much of the decline since 2007 to the recession, particularly the burst of the U.S. housing bubble. 
“The Great Recession had a big impact, particularly on unauthorized immigrant workers, many of whom were in construction,” Lopez notes. “So, many of them may have returned home.”
Advocates for undocumented immigrants emphasize that, while the stereotype of the “illegal Mexican construction worker” has some basis in reality, that’s hardly the whole picture of the population.
According to DHS, while younger undocumented immigrants are more likely to be male, women make up 47 percent of the total undocumented population and a majority of those older than 45.
And, while about 1.6 million undocumented immigrants have arrived in the United States since 2005, a majority of them -- 56 percent -- first came to the country before 2000.
(While it is difficult to calculate how many of those undocumented immigrants entered the country via illegal border crossing versus how many came on a visa that expired, Pew estimated in 2006 that about 45 percent of new undocumented immigrants were in the latter category.)
Pew hasn’t done a deep data dive on the 2011 data, but its in-depth analysis of 2010 numbers showed that Mexicans made up 58 percent of the undocumented population. Individuals from other Latin American nations account for another 23 percent, and Asians for 11 percent.
Those numbers are similar to the findings from DHS, which found that individuals born in Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador made up a combined 70 percent of the undocumented population in 2011.
While each data set uses slightly different methodology and yields slightly different estimates, analysts say the most important data point for public policy isn’t the overall number of undocumented immigrants, but the trends that show a decrease in the population overall.
"There may be some fluctuation in the numbers but what’s most important are the trends,” says Jeanne Batalova, a demographer at the Migration Policy Institute. “The number definitely is not growing as fast as it used to be.”

Santa Barbara Murder Suspect in 1988 Arrested in Mexico

Santa Barbara police announced Tuesday that a fugitive wanted in connection with a 1988 murder that took place on the South Coast has been arrested in Mexico City.

Pedro Alonso Bravo is suspected of killing 24-year-old Bernardo Santos Sierra on Sept. 30, 1988, in front of Bravo’s residence at 1305 Punta Gorda St. in Santa Barbara, according to Sgt. Riley Harwood.

Sierra was shot six times outside the home, and Bravo fled the country for Mexico, where he is a citizen, Harwood said.

Bravo was arrested March 8 in a collaborative effort of Santa Barbara police, the California Department of Justice and the Mexican Procuraduria General de la Republica. He remains in custody in Mexico, Harwood said.

Sierra still has relatives in the Santa Maria area, and they plan to attend a news conference on Thursday, where Police Chief Cam Sanchez will provide an update on details of the case.

Mexico City 12,000 Year-old Mammoth

12,000 Year-old Intact Giant Mammoth Uncovered Near Mexico City

Mexican archaeologists associated with the country’s National Institute of Anthrolopology and History have uncovered the intact skeleton remains of a giant mammoth.

The discovery was made near Mexico City in the town of Santa Ana Tlacotenco.  The giant mammoth, which is nearly uncovered, is thought to have existed some 10,000-to-14,000 thousand years ago.  This mammoth is estimated to have weighted 10 tons and be 17 feet tall. 

The skeleton was found in what was once a ditch; it is believed the mammoth fell in after experiencing a volcanic eruption.  Mexican experts do not believe their find is the fabled woolly mammoth but rather a ‘Mammuthus columbi’.  The ‘mammuthus’ is an extinct species of elephants that lived in Texas and Mexico where they were very common thousands of years ago.

The skeletal remains have stayed in tact in great part to the mammoth being buried in hot ash until its discovery in March. 

Last year the well-preserved skeletal remains of a mammoth that lived between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago were discovered in the central Mexican state of Queretaro.

OnCore Manufacturing in Tijuana, B.C

 

OnCore Manufacturing, LLC, a leading provider of electronic manufacturing services (EMS) to the aerospace and defense, medical device and industrial markets, will expand its Mexico presence with the addition of a new facility in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico. Located in the Otay-Caliente Industrial Park, the new 88,000 square-foot facility, with the ability to expand to 175,000 square-feet, is scheduled for volume production in April 2013.

Ribbon Cutting Opening Ceremony at OnCore Tijuana (Photo: Business Wire)

"We are increasing our existing Tijuana capacity in response to customer demand for a robust, low-cost supply-base that has a short and flexible supply-chain able to service the U-market," said Sajjad Malik, President and CEO of OnCore. "By leveraging the proximity of OnCore's San Diego facility the new Tijuana facility provides our customers with a range of highly flexible manufacturing and near-shore fulfillment options. The new site is capable of fulfilling customers' product manufacturing requirements from board assembly to finished product and includes lean "focused factory" production cells for assembly of finished medical devices and industrial instruments."

OnCore celebrated the opening of the Tijuana site with an open-house event and ribbon cutting ceremony. The event was attended by OnCore customers, suppliers, and various media and government officials, including Lic. Renato Sandoval - Secretary of Labor State of Baja California and Lic. Miguel Velasco Bustamante - EDC City of Tijuana.

About OnCore

OnCore Manufacturing Services, LLC is a leading provider of product commercialization services for low-medium volume, high-complexity products to international blue-chip aerospace and defense, industrial, and medical companies. With manufacturing facilities in Springfield and Wilmington, MA, Longmont, CO, San Marcos, Fremont and San Jose, CA, Suzhou, China and Tijuana, Mexico, OnCore manages customers' high-complexity products while providing them maximum flexibility to manage their business in a close, collaborative relationship. More information is available at www.oncorems.com. OnCore is an equal opportunity employer.

Criminal Suspect Burnt and Lynched By Mob in Chiapas, Mexico

A man was beaten and set on fire by a mob for allegedly robbing a taxi outside San Juan Chamula, a city in southeastern Mexico, prosecutors said.

The incident occurred Sunday night in the Tzotzil Indian community of Bechijtic, located about five kilometers (3.1 miles) from San Cristobal de Las Casas, the Chiapas state Attorney General’s Office said.

The suspected criminal “lost his life as a result of the wounds caused by blunt objects and burns all over his body,” the AG’s office said in a statement.

Three subjects robbed and beat a taxi driver in Bechijtic around 8:45 p.m. Sunday and fled the scene, investigators said.

The taxi driver asked residents for help and a mob chased the three men, capturing one of the subjects.

The man was taken to the community, where the mob attacked him and set him on fire, the AG’s office said.

Investigators are trying to identify the assailants, the AG’s office said.

Made in Mexico’ increasingly means high-tech motors,

 Made in Mexico is increasingly more likely to mean cars than clothes as the country’s manufacturing sector moves away from the low-skill, high-volume production lines of the past toward more sophisticated products.
Times are tough for the assembly-for-export plants known as maquiladoras clustered along the U.S. border, a region that has lost economic muscle in the face of competition from China, successive U.S. recessions and drug war violence.

But there are signs of a turnaround elsewhere. Mexico is winning back U.S. import market share and an energetic new government promises deep economic reforms in pursuit of 6-per-cent annual growth.
Key to the revival is a shift in activity from the border toward more high-tech manufacturing in central states far from the drug gang turf wars and smuggling routes.
New foreign investment, especially in the auto industry, heads increasingly to Guanajuato and Aguascalientes states, northwest of Mexico City. Together with neighbouring Queretaro – home to a small but booming aerospace cluster – and San Luis Potosi, they are shaping up as Mexico’s next-generation manufacturing hub.
Boosting productivity and adding local content is crucial to Mexico’s goal of breaking out of the emerging market B-list and narrowing the income gap with advanced economies, as countries such as China and car making competitor South Korea have done.
Bucking an overall trend of falling productivity, the central states already have a similar manufacturing output to the four border states of Baja California, Coahuila, Chihuahua and Tamaulipas with about one-third of the work force.
On Guanajuato’s Federal Highway 45, heavily travelled by trucks heading north to the U.S. border, a gleaming new factory stands where corn and beans used to grow.
German car maker Volkswagen AG will employ 700 skilled workers and produce 330,000 engines a year at its $550-million (U.S.) plant, joining foreign companies such as Japan’s Nissan Motor Co. Ltd., Honda Motor Co. Ltd. and Mazda Motor Corp. which are also building new factories on Mexico’s fertile central plains.
The new operations, drawn to the region by cheap wages and living costs, abundant land, good highways and incentives from local governments, are helping to transform an area once known as the nation’s breadbasket into a hive of factory activity.
“We are having a real boom here now with the automotive industry,” said Vanessa Cordero, commercial director of the Castro del Rio industrial park, which was built on a former asparagus farm some 20 minutes’ drive from the new VW plant.
“(Japanese car makers) tell all their suppliers to set up in Guanajuato by such-and-such a date. That’s why we have a tsunami of Japanese companies arriving in the state.”
Volkswagen occupies 70 hectares of the 1,000-hectare industrial park Puerto Interior, flanked by cornfields on one side and a new airport on the other. The site also houses a new Pirelli SpA plant mainly making tires for the U.S. market.
“We’re not looking for clients, they come to us,” said Oswaldo Antillon, logistics manager at Puerto Interior, where on-site facilities include: a customs house, health-care centre, two electricity substations, three wells, a polytechnic with 2,000 students and a railway station.
Although the average murder rate in the central states was high at 16 murders per 100,000 people in 2012, compared to one in China and 2.6 in South Korea, it is half that of the four border states.
Executives from aerospace giant Bombardier Inc. say they have had no security problems at their glistening white plant in Queretaro, where the Canadian company is building roughly 85 per cent of the composite skeleton for the Learjet 85.
“From a strategic point of view, Mexico is a very important operation,” said Bombardier plant quality manager Norman Thompson. Bombardier can truck the parts made in Queretaro to Wichita, Kan. for final assembly in two days and the roads are well policed, he said.
In years past, many young people in the region could aspire only to a minimum wage job earning 60 pesos ($4.87) per day.
Now factories needing skilled workers have spawned specialized training centres like Queretaro’s aerospace university and Puerto Interior’s National Polytechnical Institute campus.
The polytech helped establish a senior high school to bridge the gap between local secondary schooling and the rigours of an engineering degree. Students, 95 per cent from nearby towns, then spend five years at the polytech, where tuition is free.
“Before, most of the local population did not even have a medium-level education, only primary school, and they worked in agriculture or migrated to the U.S.,” said campus director Aldelmo Emmanuel Reyes. He says a new engineering graduate can earn five times the minimum wage, rising to 10 to 20 times more after five years.
Sergio Hernandez, 20, is about to finish a two-year program blending senior high school with on-the-job-training at auto part maker Schaeffler AG to become a production line supervisor.
Before that, he worked for two years at a machinery workshop after secondary school. He says his employment chances have improved “incredibly” since he started the course: “I have work experience that can be documented, and my high school diploma.”
New auto plants under construction, including an Audi AG plant in nearby Puebla, will employ more than 13,000 people. Officials say five times more jobs will be created down the track as factories source parts from Mexican-based suppliers, such as Honeywell International Inc., which hired 10 per cent to 15 per cent more staff at its Mexicali plant after winning a turbocharger contract for VW.
Auto parts makers such as Japan’s Jatco and Germany’s Hella are also setting up shop and manufacturing services provider North American Product Sharing Inc. expects up to 200 auto suppliers to flock to the region in the next three years.
With the “Made in Mexico” component in value-added exports currently less than 70 per cent, experts say more local content is essential to a permanent break with the reassembly model.
“It’s very, very important for Mexico to make that shift,” said veteran investor Mark Mobius, who oversees $51-billion in emerging market assets at investment manager Franklin Templeton Investments and is looking to increase investment in the country.
“You could add another one or two percentage points to (annual) economic growth because increasing productivity and a move to higher value-added means higher exports, more income and higher foreign reserves.”
The new auto plants should boost vehicle production by almost a quarter by 2017, when IHS Global Insight predicts Mexico will become the top U.S. light vehicle importer.
In the last three years, manufacturing jobs in the four central states have risen 30 per cent and the region posted faster growth than Mexico as a whole between 2009 and 2011.
Although transport, especially autos, is the main industry, L’Oréal SA opened its biggest ever hair colour factory in San Luis Potosi in December, employing 400 people, and Beiersdorf AG is investing $130-million in Silao to make Nivea and Labello products such as body lotion, lip balm and shower gel.
The world’s largest yogurt maker, Groupe Danone SA, is extending its facilities in Irapuato, near Silao, where new villas overlook an 18-hole golf course.
But the central region faces growing pains as the flood of new operations puts pressure on labour supply and infrastructure and states will need to lift investment to support big new factories as well as the housing and services needed by workers.
Investment banker Carlos Sales, whose Cuasar Capital helped Aguascalientes secure $55-million to build extra gas pipelines and highway connections for a Nissan plant to open in late 2013, said investment would be easily recouped in extra tax revenue.
But more needs to be done. Australian investment bank Macquarie Group Ltd., which specializes in infrastructure, said Mexico needed to accelerate plans to bring in gas from the United States and replace expensive, inefficient and dirty oil-fired electricity production.
“(Mexico has to) put in place the right structural parameters to let private investors come in and invest in those pipelines and make sure there is enough gas there to generate electricity and for industry that wants gas directly,” said Mark Ramsey, head of Latin America for Macquarie Capital.
“There’s not enough electricity generated for the growth that’s expected.”

 

 

Mexican People scramble for free beer

Locals in Gomez Palacio got an unexpected surprise after a truck carrying beer cans collided with a train and spilled its contents onto the streets.

Click on location to see Viedo

 

http://youtu.be/7cfVLFquuNc 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cfVLFquuNc&feature=player_embedded

 

Absolut Vodka Mexico Limited Edition Bottle

Absolut Vodka announced its highly anticipated limited edition bottle design, Absolut Mexico, available in the U.S. for the first time after its debut in Mexico last year. The release of Absolut Mexico is the latest limited edition offering from the world’s most iconic vodka brand and pays homage to Mexican culture and multicultural heritage.

Absolut has a long history of creative collaborations, and this limited edition was developed in partnership with Dr. Lakra, one of Mexico’s most renowned contemporary artists and tattooists, from Oaxaca, Mexico.

The work of Dr. Lakra, also known as Jeronimo Lopez Ramirez, has been featured in exhibitions and museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Hammer Museum and the Walker Art Center.

Absolut Mexico features original Absolut Vodka in a specially designed bottle that celebrates the spirit of Mexico. Dr. Lakra combines three legendary icons from ancient Mayan culture – Hurakan (Hurricane), Kukulkan (Serpent) and Balam (Jaguar) – and brings them to life on the Absolut bottle through a modern artistic lens that represents Mexico today. 

My Two Cents Worth

If you can get arrested for hunting or fishing without a license, but not for being in the country illegally ...you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If you have to get your parents' permission to go on a field trip or take an aspirin in school, but not to get an abortion ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If the only school curriculum allowed to explain how we got here is evolution, but the government stops a $15 million construction project to keep a rare spider from evolving to extinction ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If you have to show identification to board an airplane, cash a check, buy liquor or check out a library book, but not to vote who runs the government ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If the government wants to ban stable, law-abiding citizens from owning gun magazines with more than ten rounds, but gives 20 F-16 fighter jets to the crazy new leaders in Egypt ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If, in the largest city, you can buy two 16-ounce sodas, but not a 24-ounce soda because 24-ounces of a sugary drink might make you fat ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If an 80-year-old woman can be stripped searched by the TSA but a woman in a hijab is only subject to having her neck and head searched ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If a seven year old boy can be thrown out of school for saying his teacher is "cute," but hosting a sexual exploration or diversity class in grade school is perfectly acceptable ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If your government believes that the best way to eradicate trillions of dollars of debt is to spend trillions more ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If children are forcibly removed from parents who discipline them with spankings while children of addicts are left in filth and drug infested "homes"... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If hard work and success are met with higher taxes and more government intrusion, while not working is rewarded with EBT cards, WIC checks, Medicaid, subsidized housing and free cell phones ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If the government's plan for getting people back to work is to incentivize NOT working with 99 weeks of unemployment checks and no requirement to prove they applied but can't find work ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If being stripped of the ability to defend yourself makes you more "safe" according to the government ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

AMEN ! ! !   (AMEN is the same in English or Spanish).

Foreign wind farms cause uproar in Mexican villages

Foreign energy firms have flocked to a narrow region of southern Mexico, known as one of the world’s windiest places, to build towering wind turbines, but some projects have angered and torn indigenous villages.

The construction of wind farms has soared across Mexico, with the gusty Isthmus of Tehuantepec in the state of Oaxaca attracting investors from as far as Europe, Japan and Australia.

The projects are a key part of Mexico’s efforts to combat climate change, one of the priorities of former president Felipe Calderon that has been picked up by his successor, Enrique Pena Nieto, who took office in December.

This renewable energy had a capacity of just two megawatts nationwide in 2006, according to Mexican Wind Energy Association (Amdee). Today, it has grown to 1,400 megawatts, with a goal of 12,000 megawatts by 2020, representing 15% of the nation’s energy.

But some indigenous groups have blocked two projects in Oaxaca, including one that would become Latin America’s biggest wind farm, fearing that they would wreck fishing and farming while dividing people over the rent payments.

“They have upended the life of the villagers in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec by interfering with their daily work,” Carlos Beas Torres, head of the Union of Northern Zone Isthmus Communities, told AFP.

“Women and men have been pitted against each other, because the Mexican and multinational companies that have invested here have taken advantage of a lack of information among natives of the area to lease their land for 1,000 pesos ($82) a hectare per year,” he said.

There are 18 wind farms in operation in Mexico, with another nine under construction and a dozen more in development, according to Amdee president Adrian Escofet.

The great majority are in Oaxaca, with its isthmus, flanked by the Pacific Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, providing powerful winds for the turbines to churn out energy.

But their presence has angered some of the Ikoots and Zapoetcos indigenous populations, with some protests turning violent.

Last week, more than 20 people were injured when police clashed with a group of protesters who have been blocking a road leading to the projects.

The blockade, which began on February 25, has been opposed by shopkeepers on a beach that cars can no longer reach, saying it has hurt their sales.

The shop owners back the wind farms, arguing it would benefit the community, including a 117-turbine, 234-megawatt wind farm funded by Spain’s Gas Natural Fenosa.

In December, villagers in San Dionisio del Mar clashed with sticks and stones, leaving five injured, over a mega-project by Marena Renovables, a consortium of Mexican, Australian and Japanese investors, including Mitsubishi.

With 132 turbines producing 396 megawatts of energy, it would become the biggest wind farm in Latin America.

But its construction has been delayed by opponents concerned about the impact of giant turbines popping up on a strip of beach between the Pacific and a lagoon full of fish.

A community assembly voted to back the project in February, but opponents believe the meeting “was manipulated,” Beas Torres said.

Fenosa and Marena both deny that their projects would harm fishing or the environment, noting that the environment ministry approved them and that they would plant new trees.

The firms say landowners are being paid to use their land and that they remain open to dialogue, while the projects would help all the communities by producing clean energy and creating jobs.

“We believe that this is an incredible project that will benefit everybody,” said Jonathan Davis Arzac, head of the Macquarie Mexican Infrastructure Fund, an arm of the Australian financial firm Macquarie Group, which is part of the Marena project.

“There are no losers in this cases, there can only be winners,” he said in a video posted on the company’s website, adding that the consortium had done a bad job of explaining the project to the local population.

In a February statement, Marena Renovables said energy production would bring San Dionisio del Mar between $1.2mn and $1.4mn per year in addition to lease payments of 1,000 pesos ($82) per hectare of land.

The secretary general of the Oaxaca state government, Javier Martinez Alvarez, said discussions were under way to resume construction.

Search LA kidnap suspect moves to Mexico

Police in Los Angeles and Mexico are working together to find a man suspected of kidnapping and sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl before releasing her and fleeing across the border.
Los Angeles police spokesman Kevin Maiberger said Friday that a video recording shows Tobias Summers crossing over a pedestrian bridge into the Mexican city of Tecate at a point just east of San Diego. Police have declined to reveal exactly when the video was made.
The girl vanished from her Northridge home in the early morning hours of March 27. She was found about 12 hours later wandering near a Starbucks several miles away.
Summers, 30, is charged with kidnapping, burglary and nearly three dozen counts of sexual assault.
He's described as a transient with a criminal record including convictions for burglary and grand theft.
The commander of Mexico's Baja California state police fugitive squad told the Los Angeles Times that Mexican authorities are in daily contact with Los Angeles police.
"We're thinking that he did cross the border and he is on our side of the fence, but we don't know exactly where," said Cmdr. Alfredo Arenas.
Mexican authorities have distributed "wanted" posters with Summers' picture and have put police in the cities of Tecate, Ensenada and Rosarito Beach on alert.
An alleged accomplice in the girl's abduction is in custody.
Daniel Martinez, 29, has pleaded not guilty to kidnapping and burglary.    
Authorities believe Summers broke into the girl's home planning to burglarize it but instead abducted her at knifepoint. They believe Martinez was waiting outside in a car the two used to flee with the girl.
Martinez soon abandoned the car and vanished, police have said, while Summers took the girl to a vacant home where he assaulted her.
Summers has a criminal record dating to 2002 that includes arrests for robbery, battery and grand theft auto. Court records show Martinez has been convicted of burglary and grand theft.

Mexico breaks teachers blockade of hwy

Hundreds of federal police forced protesting teachers off the main highway between Mexico City and Acapulco Friday after the demonstrators blocked the roadway for hours, causing a huge traffic backup.
The teachers were protesting an educational reform that will submit them to evaluation and loosen union control over hiring and firing. Teachers had blocked the four-lane highway at least twice for before, starting in March.
A photographer on the scene said helmeted police with shields pushed into the crowd of teachers, who fought back with pointed staves  (stave is a pointed Spear like rod weapon). Police responded with tear gas.
Deputy Interior Secretary Manuel Mondragon told local media that four police officers had been injured, none seriously.
Mondragon told the Milenio television station that the police did not used guns during the operation, but that protesters had gasoline bombs, sticks and staves.
The government of Guerrero state, where Acapulco is located, said in a statement that traffic was flowing freely on the highway by late Friday.
Gov. Angel Aguirre had previously held talks with the protesters, and asked them to stop blocking highways because of the damage it was doing to the tourist resort.
During previous blockades, some Acapulco-bound tourists had cancelled hotel rooms and vacation plans because of the highway blockades. Hotel owners and business groups had filed legal complaints against the teachers because of the lost income.

Undocumented immigrants

The federal government wants everybody earning money in the country to file their taxes — whether they're in the country legally or not.

For undocumented immigrants who don't have legitimate Social Security numbers with which to file, the best alternative has been to use an option called "Individual Tax Identification Number," or ITIN, issued by the Internal Revenue Service.

But recent anti-fraud changes in law have made it harder for them to obtain ITINs. The issue could have potential national repercussions since current talks on a possible amnesty program include undocumented immigrants showing they've paid taxes.

Applicants are now required to submit original documents, such as a passport, national identification card, or driver’s license along with their return.

By requiring immigrants to submit original identification documents or certified copies, the IRS hopes to deter fraud and improve the tax refund process. And while the application and renewal process for ITINs remains unchanged, the new numbers issued now will only be good for a five-year period rather than indefinitely.

According to some experts, this move by the IRS has created a general level of nervousness among the immigrant community about what these documents will be used for and who will be seeing them.

In general, fearing deportation, undocumented immigrants tend to steer away from interacting with the federal government.

“The changes in the application process, I think, will drive the application numbers down,” Michael Petrucelli, former acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, told Fox News Latino. “They are trying to make sure ITINS are used only for the specific purpose they’re authorized.”

Tax and finance expert Mike Periu said the changes are a “point of contention.”

“It’s likely that it will drive down the application numbers,” said Periu. “The minute you tell them 'original documents,' that's when the hesitation sets in.”

One of the many misconceptions surrounding undocumented immigrants is that they do not file taxes. But according to the IRS, in 2011, over 1.7 million immigrants filed taxes using ITINs.

Issued regardless of immigration status, ITINs allow immigrants to record the economic contributions they are making in the country.

But even as some immigrants are leery of the changes, tax experts say undocumented immigrants should be more inclined to file their taxes this year. As the push to pass immigration reform steps into high gear, those immigrants who have filed taxes using ITINS will likely be in a better position when they apply for citizenship in the future.

The proposed immigration reform bill by the “Gang of Eight” includes stipulations that in order for any immigrant to earn a “probationary legal status,” which will allow them to live and work legally in the United States, they will have to pay any back taxes they may owe to the U.S.

“There is some prospective future benefit [for immigrants] if you’ve been paying taxes now,” Petrucelli said. “Someone who isn’t paying now and immigration reform becomes a reality, they could have to file returns to cover years before.”

He said once immigration reform passes, a lot of people will be asking more about ITINs.

“There’s an interesting correlation between immigration practice and immigration reform,” said Petrucelli.

While the federal tax law does not allow for the IRS to share any information with another organization like the Department of Homeland security, those opposed to the ITINs program argue that this information should be shared.

Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration reform, an immigration- restriction group, said that while he feels this information should be made known to other government agencies, immigrants who do pay their taxes should not be looked on with more favor.

“Having an ITIN or filing taxes should not entitle” immigrants to the privilege of having U.S. citizenship, said Mehlman.

But those in favor of ITIN said it pours millions into the economy, and prevents immigrants from running afoul of tax laws. In 2010, the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy estimated the undocumented immigrants paid over $1.2 billion in state and local taxes.

According to the report, the number represents the 50 percent of unauthorized immigrant in the country who pay taxes.

“I think it’s sort of a prevailing myth that undocumented immigrants don’t pay taxes,” Wendy Feliz, the communications director at the American immigration council, told Fox News Latino. “Having everyone pay taxes is a positive thing.”