“On Wednesday, authorities discovered a headless corpse nailed to a tree near his home.”
MEXICANS ARE THE MOST VIOLENT PEOPLE IN THE HEMISPHERE!
IN MEX OCCUPIED LOS ANGELES, 95% OF ALL ARRESTS FOR MURDER ARE FOR MEXICAN ILLEGALS! THERE ARE 500-1,000 SUCH MURDERS YEARLY! MORE THAN THE ENTIRE EUROPEAN UNION.
MEXICAN GANGS HAVE SPREAD ALL OVER THE COUNTRY. THEY MURDER IN COLD BLOOD DAILY! THE CITY OF SALINAS, CA, WITH A POPULATION OF ONLY 150,000 HAS HAD DOZENS OF GANG RELATED MURDERS.
THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTEL HAS ASSAULT THE PEOPLE OF ARIZONA, AS OBAMA HAS ASSAULT THE PEOPLE OF ARIZONA TO DEFEAT THEIR ATTEMPTS TO PROTECT THEMSELVES FROM NARCOmex!
WE CAN’T SAVE OUR NATION UNTIL WE RID OURSELVES OF ILLEGALS, LA RAZA, AND THE LA RAZA DEMS, INCLUDING HISPANDERING BARACK OBAMA, HILLARY CLINTON, BARBARA BOXER, DIANNE FEINSTEIN, NANCY PELSOI AND HARRY REID…. aka JUDICIAL WATCH’ TEN MOST CORRUPT!
Elections highlight challenges facing drug-scarred Mexico
By William Booth
Sunday, July 4, 2010; A01
CIUDAD JUAREZ, MEXICO -- To meet with Héctor "Teto" Murguía, the leading candidate for mayor of the city dubbed the deadliest in the world, a visitor parks at Murguía's paint factory, watched over by bodyguards with automatic rifles, then passes through three sets of steel vault doors into a windowless office.
"Welcome to the bunker," his press secretary says.
Elections in 12 Mexican states Sunday are taking place across a tense landscape of escalating violence and widespread fear that drug cartels are burrowing ever deeper into Mexico's politics, using corruption, intimidation and murder.
Murguía said, "I fear only God." But he also said he's not an idiot. "The security is for my family." He declined to reveal how many children he has.
On Wednesday, authorities discovered a headless corpse nailed to a tree near his home.
The 57-year-old candidate is a tough old-school politician, pugnacious with the press and popular among the city's poor, who likes to kiss babies and give away bags of cement. He is a wealthy businessman -- a land developer and factory owner -- from a prominent family. He served as mayor from 2004 to 2007.
His chief of police, who was a friend and business partner, was arrested shortly after Murguía's term ended for smuggling more than 900 pounds of marijuana across a bridge into neighboring El Paso.
Voters in Sunday's election are being asked: Is Murguía linked to the drug-smuggling mafias that have turned Ciudad Juarez into "Murder City," where warring gangs of street-corner thugs and professional contract killers routinely execute a dozen people a day?
Murguía's main opponent, César Jáuregui, a baby-faced 43-year-old lawyer and lifelong political operative, said the former mayor is dirty and, at the very least, has ties to organized crime.
Billboards put up across the city by the Jáuregui campaign shout: "Reject the criminals -- no more narco-politicians!"
On Monday morning, as Jáuregui was stumping in downtown Juarez, shaking hands with drivers stopped at traffic lights, his cellphone rang with the news that Rodolfo Torre Cantu, the front-runner for governor of the border state of Tamaulipas, had been assassinated minutes earlier by armed commandos. Cantu's brother is now running in his place.
"We are competing against people with a very bad history," said Jáuregui's wife, Angelica Morena, who was passing out campaign fliers. "They are people who associate with very bad people. So I'm afraid for him because I don't want anything to happen to him."
Jáuregui said he does not surround himself with bodyguards because he is an honest man with no criminal ties. "Look at what just happened in Tamaulipas," he said. "If they want my head, they will get it."
Constant targets
Across Mexico, small-town politicians and big city mayors are increasingly targeted, for assassination or arrest.
In May, Gregorio Sanchez, the mayor of Cancun, who is running for governor of the Caribbean state of Quintana Roo, was arrested and charged with assisting two drug-smuggling organizations, including the Zetas, who authorities say killed the mayor's own security chief last year. Sanchez is continuing his campaign from his prison cell.
Two weeks ago, Manuel Lara Rodríguez, the popular mayor of a farm town near Ciudad Juarez who had denounced the cartels and the violence, was gunned down in front of his family. No one is running in his place.
The outgoing mayor of Ciudad Juarez, Jose Reyes Ferriz, recently told The Washington Post that he has received at least four credible death threats. He sleeps each night at a second home he maintains in El Paso.
In Ciudad Juarez, Murguía is running under the banner of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which governed Mexico for most of the 20th century with a gloved fist of crony capitalism, political patronage and rigged elections until it was successfully challenged -- first here in Juarez and the state of Chihuahua -- by the National Action Party (PAN), which nominated Jáuregui to run.
The challenges facing the new mayor of Ciudad Juarez are known to many, including the U.S. State Department, which plans to pour money into the city as part of an anti-drug program called the Merida Initiative. Last month, 303 people were killed in this city, which earned the title of most dangerous for its murders and other violent crimes, according to the Mexican advocacy group Citizen's Council for Public Security and Penal Justice. More than 5,300 have died since President Felipe Calderón sent 10,000 federal police and army soldiers to control the city in 2008.
Fight or flight
Juarez is falling apart. Years of neglect have left streets mined with potholes. The parks are ruins, the playing fields nothing but weeds, the once lively cantinas shuttered. There are few schools on the poor side of town, where barrios of cement-block houses have been abandoned by fleeing residents, who went home to their villages or crossed illegally into the United States. The city's business elite have moved to El Paso. Although the poor have always struggled here, they are now hungry.
Jáuregui said that if elected, he would rid the city of federal police and the military. He accused the federal police of being incompetent and corrupt, saying they favor one cartel over the others. Though he is a member of Calderón's PAN party, he called the president's strategy a failure.
As he campaigned downtown, a pickup filled with masked federal police drove by.
"There go Chapo's guys," he said, referring to Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, head of the Sinaloa cartel, which is fighting the resident Juarez cartel and its associates, known as La Linea, whose ranks are filled with former city police -- many recruited during Murguía's tenure as mayor.
"I cannot assure you that Héctor Murguía is a drug trafficker," Jáuregui said in an interview. "But some people think that Murguía's candidacy is a good thing because if he is linked to drug traffickers, maybe he can negotiate and end the problem."
Interviewed in his bunker, Murguía said of his opponent: "I wish there was a law that would permit that bigmouth to be put in jail immediately. Because he doesn't present evidence. He just talks. I don't have a single link with organized crime. I've never had one and I never will. Because I've always believed that he who has links with organized crime will sooner or later pay."
When his former chief of police, Saulo Reyes Gamboa, was sentenced to eight years in U.S. federal prison for drug trafficking, Murguía said, "Who would have thought, in what crystal ball, that three months after my administration left office that Saulo Reyes would be caught trying to pass a load of marijuana into El Paso, Texas?"
Polls suggest that Murguía will win the election and return to city hall. "You can't choose the time -- you can't say when you want to serve or not," he said. "I think that those of us who love our city cannot neglect our service to Juarez under the current circumstances."
Researcher Monica Ortiz Uribe contributed to this report.
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