Wednesday, December 26, 2018

IS ANDRES MANUEL LOPEZ-OBRADOR MURDERING HIS ENEMIES?




Sometimes, the coincidences get just too...coincidental.
Now we have, in Mexico, the sudden helicopter crash of a newly elected governor, after an apparently very bitter election.  Here's the Globe and Mail report:
A Mexican governor and her senator husband were killed on Monday in a helicopter crash near the city of Puebla in central Mexico, the government said, just days after she had taken office following a bitterly contested election.
Martha Erika Alonso, a senior opposition figure and governor of the state of Puebla, died with Rafael Moreno, a senator and former Puebla governor, when their Agusta helicopter came down on Monday afternoon shortly after take-off, the government said.
This seems to happen a lot in Mexico, quite unlike any comparable place in the region that I know of.
A number of Mexican politicians have died in aircraft accidents in recent years, including federal interior ministers in 2008 and 2011.  The latter two were also members of the PAN.
Maybe it was just the wildest of coincidences, but given the savage character of Mexican politics, I think it's natural to be a little suspicious.  In most of these incidents, the motive is suspected but not utterly obvious.  This one is different: it came after a bitterly contested election that the rabid left says was stolen.  It sounds like the sort of fury we saw from the left when Trump won – except that now we see Mexican politics at play, potentially a straight-up assassination, possibly by the embittered left.
Mexico sees a lot of these helicopter downings, and what's more, it sees a lot of full blown assassinations.  A presidential candidate from before Mexico got into multi-party politics, Luis Donaldo Colosio, was straight-out assassinated in 1994, and his wife died under murky circumstances shortly after that.  Other elected officials have been gunned down or else died in mysterious car crashes.  There was definitely one of those in Michoacán.  Yes, some probably were the work of drug-dealers.  But others were far more likely to be Mexico's toxic politics.  It does happen.
Yet the Mexican government can get real touchy when you bring up any suspicions about the helicopter crash phenomenon.  I remember how furious Mexico City's response was to an actually sympathetic editorial I wrote for Investor's Business Daily, I think in 2008, when a Mexican official was similarly killed in a helicopter crash.  At the time, they were obviously worried about the potential impact on foreign investment, but my thought was to praise the Mexicans for their resolve and sacrifice in fighting drug lords.  That's not the way they think over there.
Why does it matter?  Well, because the U.S. under President Trump is trying hard to get along with the new Mexican administration, run by the leftist Andrés Manuel López-Obrador.  His followers are the top suspects in this mysterious helicopter crash, which, if the investigation leads anywhere, is likely to cast a Putinesque pall over López-Obrador just as it gets its grounding.  Prepare for relations to deteriorate if that grows as a backstory. 
Perhaps even more, it matters because Mexico's politics seems to be the model for Democratic Party politics these days as rage over Trump dominates.  In California, ballot-harvesting has been adopted as a legal practice, in what's a straight-out cultural appropriation of Mexican politics.  If the Democrats are planning to make themselves the "perfect dictatorship" along the PRI model of one-party rule, starting in California and taking that style national, well, the unhappy question is, what else are they borrowing from Mexican politics as they (without saying so, of course) borrow from the Mexican Model?  Yes, it sounds far-fetched.  But we also know how implacably angry the Democrats still are at the election of Donald Trump and how they like to get away with things.
Image credit: Martha Erika Alonso de Moreno Valle, own work, via WikipediaCC BY-SA 4.0.




President Lopez-Obrador and the Wall



Over the last few years, I've had conversations with friends in Mexico.  We usually end up talking about the border.  For us, the border is illegal immigration.  For Mexicans, it's guns and cash corrupting a very fragile political system.
As a Mexican friend said recently, the cartels have the politicians in their pockets, especially in the small towns where many of these vans full of cash and guns drive through.
There are many reasons to build that border wall, as former Secretary of Education William Bennett said on Sunday:   
By weight, 86 percent of heroin that entered the United States in 2016 was of Mexican origin, according statistics from the Drug Enforcement Administration.
"After 9/11 we shut down the border. When we shut down the border, drugs didn't come in," Bennett said. "If you shut down that border, if you close it off, if you build a wall, it can have a real and profound difference."
There is another reason, as any rational Mexican will tell you.
On a weekly basis, lots of cash and guns go south.  They are the profits and rewards of the drugs going north.  According to unofficial estimates:  
Officials in Mexico believe the tide of laundered money could be as high as $50bn per year, a sum equal to about three per cent of Mexico's legitimate economy -- more than all its oil exports or spending on key social programmes. Internationally, money laundering represents between two and five per cent of global GDP, or between $800bn and $2tn annually, according to the UNODC.
It would be more difficult for money or guns to go south if you had a wall on the border.  
So President Trump should pick up the phone and call President Lopez-Obrador.  He should thank him for keeping the caravans in Mexico and discuss the benefits of the border wall.  Why wouldn't the Mexican president support the wall?  I'm sure that the Mexican army and police would love to see that wall go up.
The lack of a stable border hurts both sides.
PS: You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.

This will crack you up!

Mexican Presidents Deny They Took Bribes from El Chapo


  14 Nov 201898

Two former Mexican presidents publicly denied taking bribes from the Sinaloa Cartel. The statements came after the legal defense for Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera made contrary claims this week.

The drug lord is facing several money laundering and drug trafficking charges at a federal trial in New York. In his opening statement, defense attorney Jeffrey Lichtman spoke of bribes “including the very top, the current president of Mexico and the former.”
Soon after the statements became public, Mexico’s government issued a statement denying the allegations. Eduardo Sanchez, the spokesman for current Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto said the statements were false and “defamatory.”

El gobierno de @EPN persiguió, capturó y extraditó al criminal Joaquín Guzmán Loera. Las afirmaciones atribuidas a su abogado son completamente falsas y difamatorias
— Eduardo Sánchez H. (@ESanchezHdz) November 13, 2018
Former Mexican President Felipe Calderon took to social media to personally deny the allegations, claiming that neither El Chapo or the Sinaloa Cartel paid him bribes.

Son absolutamente falsas y temerarias las afirmaciones que se dice realizó el abogado de Joaquín “el Chapo” Guzmán. Ni él, ni el cártel de Sinaloa ni ningún otro realizó pagos a mi persona.
— Felipe Calderón (@FelipeCalderon) November 13, 2018
Under Guzman’s leadership, the Sinaloa Cartel became the largest drug trafficking organization in the world with influence in every major U.S. city.
The allegations against Pena Nieto are not new. In 2016, Breitbart News reported on an investigation by Mexican journalists which revealed how Juarez Cartel operators funneled money into the 2012 presidential campaign. The investigation was carried out by Mexican award-winning journalist Carmen Aristegui and her team. The subsequent scandal became known as “Monexgate” for the cash cards that were given out during Peña Nieto’s campaign. The allegations against Pena Nieto went largely unreported by U.S. news outlets.
Ildefonso Ortiz is an award-winning journalist with Breitbart Texas. He co-founded the Cartel Chronicles project with Brandon Darby and Stephen K. Bannon.  You can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook. He can be contacted at Iortiz@breitbart.com
Brandon Darby is the managing director and editor-in-chief of Breitbart Texas. He co-founded the Cartel Chronicles project with Ildefonso Ortiz and Stephen K. Bannon. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook. He can be contacted at bdarby@breitbart.com.



Mexico: Where Is Your Shame?
At a demonstration Wednesday in Mexico City against Arizona's law.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Immigration: Mexico's government gloated triumphantly after a federal judge's injunction blocked Arizona's immigration law. But it's no victory for Mexico. In fact, Mexico's leaders ought to be mortified.
As radical immigration activists crowed with glee and the Obama administration claimed victory, Mexico's government joined the applause. 
Calling Judge Susan Bolton's injunction Wednesday "a step in the right direction," Mexican Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa declared: "The government of Mexico would like to express its recognition for the determination demonstrated by the federal government of the United States and the actions of the civil organizations that organized lawsuits against the SB 1070 law."
In reality, it ought to be ashamed. Supposedly framed as an issue of federal power pre-empting state power, it's hardly Mexico's business. But Mexico made a big show of saying its interest was in protecting its nationals from the dreadful racism of Arizona that its own citizens, curiously enough, keep fleeing to.
Espinosa said her government was busy collecting data on civil rights violations and her department had issued an all-out travel warning to Mexican nationals about Arizona. 
That's where Mexico's hypocrisy is just too much.
First, Mexico encourages illegal immigration to the U.S. Oh, it says it doesn't, but it prints comic book guides for would-be illegal immigrants and provides ID cards for illegals once they get here. In Arizona alone, Mexico keeps five consulates busy.
 That's not out of love for its own citizens, but because Mexicans send cash back to Mexico that helps finance the government.
Instead of selling its wasteful state-owned oil company or getting rid of red tape to create jobs in Mexico, Mexico spends the hard currency from remittances. It fails to look at why its citizens leave.
According to the Heritage Foundation-Wall Street Journal 2010 Index of Economic Freedom, Mexico's big problem is — no shock — government corruption, where it ranks below the world average.
That's where Mexico's cartels come in.
Mexico's encouragement of illegal immigration undercuts its valiant war against its smuggling cartels. The cartels' prowess and firepower have made them the only ones who can smuggle effectively across the border. U.S. law enforcers say they now control human-smuggling on our southern border.
Feed them immigrants and they grow more cash-rich — and right now, immigrant smuggling is about a third of the cartels' income.
Mass graves and car bombings are signs of criminal organizations getting bigger, and more powerful. Juarez, which has lost 5,000 people this year, bleeds because cartels fight over not just who gets the drug routes, but who gets the illegal-immigrant smuggling routes, too.
Aside from the cartel mayhem in Mexico, the bodies are piling up in the Arizona desert and U.S. Border Patrol rescues of abandoned illegals left to die have risen. 
 It's not the desert's fault, and it's certainly not Uncle Sam's fault, as activists claim. No, it's the fact that Mexicans are encouraged to emigrate. Criminal cartels don't fear abandoning their human cargo in the desert, as long as Mexico does nothing and blames Uncle Sam.
Hearing Mexico's government now cheer the Arizona ruling, which will only encourage more illegal immigration, gives the country's regime a pretty inhuman face. 
If Mexico had any decency, it would do all it could to discourage illegal immigration and keep a respectful silence about Arizona.
It needs U.S. support for its war on cartels. Instead of insulting American citizens, Mexico should confront directly the reasons why its people are so desperate to leave, and do all in its power to destroy the cartels that are slowly killing the nation. That includes defunding the murderous gangs by halting illegal immigration.


 

Mexican Judge Denies Bond for Cartel Boss Wanted in Texas


Breitbart Border / Cartel Chronicles
18 Nov 201822
2:45

MONTERREY, Nuevo Leon – A Mexican federal judge has ruled against the release of a recently captured cartel boss. The man is wanted by U.S. authorities in connection to a high-profile cartel-execution near Dallas.

In a court hearing, a federal judge in Monterrey ruled against releasing Luis Lauro “La Mora or La China” Ramirez Bautista. He ordered that he be held without bond until further hearings. Officials removed the wanted drug boss to the Cadereyta state prison. As Breitbart News first reported in an exclusive article, detectives with the Nuevo Leon’s State Investigations Agency arrested Ramirez Bautista at a checkpoint after the wanted drug lord left a bar near the Barrio Antiguo neighborhood in Monterrey.
Prior to his arrest, Ramirez Bautista allegedly attempted to run over a law enforcement official at the checkpoint and then resisted the arrest. During the arrest, authorities seized a.38o caliber handgun carried by the wanted drug lord.
The man known as La Mora is a key boss with a criminal organization that once belonged to the Beltran Leyva Cartel but has since branched off and become independent and highly dangerous. Under orders from his boss Rodolfo “El Gato” Villarreal, Ramirez Bautista is believed to have played a role in helping mastermind the 2013 murder of Gulf Cartel attorney Juan Jesus Guerrero Chapa. As Breitbart News reported, Guerrero Chapa was gunned down in the ritzy Dallas suburb of Southlake after a long-term surveillance operation. The murder was personal in nature since Ramirez Bautista’s boss El Gato blamed Guerrero Chapa for the murder of his father.
Ramirez Bautista is wanted by U.S. authorities in the ongoing case against Villarreal and federal authorities had added him to a most wanted list of fugitive cartel bosses in the Texas border region.

The ruling by the judge denying bond for Ramirez Bautista comes as a surprise since in recent months, as Breitbart News has reported, 
federal judges in Mexico have been releasing an alarming number of cartel bosses by ruling their arrests as illegal or alleging some other bureaucratic error. The man known as La Mora had been arrested in 2017. However, a Mexican federal judge ruled at the time that the raid that led to his capture was illegal and ordered his release.
Soon after the most recent arrest, gunmen from El Gato’s criminal organization murdered 34-year-old Santiago Aaron Urbina Arellano. This man managed Bar Ambria, where Ramirez Bautista visited prior to his arrest. It is believed that the gunmen targeted the bar manager suspecting that he may have tipped off law enforcement.
Editor’s Note: Breitbart Texas traveled to the Mexican States of Tamaulipas, Coahuila, and Nuevo León to recruit citizen journalists willing to risk their lives and expose the cartels silencing their communities.  The writers would face certain death at the hands of the various cartels that operate in those areas including the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas if a pseudonym were not used. Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles are published in both English and in their original Spanish. This article was written by Tony Aranda from Nuevo Leon. 

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