AP – Authorities in Colombia said they seized over 1 metric ton of cocaine disguised as printer ink and bound for a company in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. There were no arrests and police wouldn’t say on which airline the illegal cargo shipment had been stashed.
NBC – Mexican authorities have seized 4,000 kilograms of marijuana that was discovered hidden under a circus truck. The drugs were discovered during a routine traffic stop on a road in the northern state of Sonora.
Berta Nava, mother of Julio Cesar Nava, one of the 43 missing students from the Ayotzinapa teachers’ training college, attends a report given by members of a team of international experts in Mexico City. (Claudia Daut / Reuters)
By Lizbeth Diaz / Reuters
Mexico’s official account of the abduction and apparent massacre of 43 students last year does not add up, a team of international experts said on Sunday, citing deep flaws in the government’s investigation and dismissing its claims that the victims were incinerated in a garbage dump.
The case provoked a global outcry after the missing students were abducted in the city of Iguala in southwest Mexico on Sept. 26, 2014.
The government’s failure to capture the killers or even persuade Mexicans that its investigation was serious has hit President Enrique Peña Nieto’s reputation, and the report on Sunday was certain to pile more pressure on.
Commissioned by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and conducted by respected investigators from Chile, Colombia, Guatemala and Spain, the report blasts holes in the Mexican government’s central claim that the students were burned to ashes in the nearby town of Cocula.
“That event never took place,” one of the investigators, Carlos Beristain, told reporters on Sunday, citing evidence from the site. “There should be a refocusing of the investigation based on these facts.”
AP – Drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman is believed to be back in his homeland after a suspected sighting last week. The world’s most wanted crime boss was allegedly spotted in Tabasco, near the border of Guatemala, last Wednesday when witnesses allegedly saw him being rushed to a hospital after being involved in a car crash in Macuspana, according to the Latin Times. Despite suffering a number of undisclosed injuries, Guzman escaped before federal troops arrived.
Telemundo – Sixty percent of child pornographic material consumed in the world is generated, in Mexico, said Maria Ampudia González, chief of the National Human Rights Commission. She said the largest network is in Michoacan’s capital of Morelia.
Business Insider – Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office (PGR) has identified seven new criminal organizations that it has identified as cartels for their range of criminal exploits. The new organizations are smaller, less entrenched, and are less powerful than the older generation of Mexican cartels which were massive sprawling criminal enterprises.
Macleans – When President Peña Nieto entered office in 2012, his administration compiled a list of 122 priority targets among the country’s crime lords. Only 30 remain at large now. According to both Mexican and U.S. authorities, most major crime groups in Mexico have now either collapsed or fractured. But with their demise, scores of smaller gangs have filled the vacuum, employing younger and far more violent gangsters than Chapo and his peers.
El Economista – The Executive Committee for Victims (CEAV) has recognized 373 fathers, mothers, brothers or widowed collateral victims of the attack and killing of 43 student teachers at Iguala.
AP – Mexican authorities have passed clothing that belonged to some of the 43 students missing from rural teachers’ college to a lab in Austria for genetic testing. The attorney general’s office sent some 53 items to the University of Innsbruck almost a year after the students’ disappearance.
La Voz de Houston – A new crop of criminal gangs have popped up on the radar of Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office, and Their names read like a laundry list of B-movie titles.
EFE – A clandestine laboratory used to make synthetic drugs was dismantled in Concepcion de Buenos Aires, a city in the western Mexican state of Jalisco, the Attorney General’s Office said.
Business Insider – Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto was en route to a state visit in France when he learned that Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán had escaped from a high-security prison for the second time. Guzmán’s brazen escape from Mexico’s Altiplano prison, however, reportedly held his attention only momentarily. He returned to his game dominoes.
IBTimes – A former police officer has been arrested in Mexico for torturing and killingphotojournalist Reuben Espinosa and four others. The suspect, Abraham Torres Tranquilino, was a police officer in Mexico City but had been arrested in 2011 and awarded a one year prison term in a separate torture case.
DW – German anti-weapons campaigner Jürgen Grässlin has filed charges against Sig Sauer after revelations that a Mexican drug cartel member used one of the company’s 9mm handguns to kill 12 people – including a prominent human rights campaigner.
Latino Fox News – Eleven suspects were arrested in three states on charges that they ran an international network that smuggled people from Central America into the United States via Mexico, the Mexican Attorney General’s Office said.
Televisa – Sonora’s attorney general confirmed the sale of nine babies by a criminal organization in which two officers were involved. He said a probe is underway to uncover more instances of selling babies.