• Mexico seeks to pivot relationship with US as new president takes office

    Jacquelyn Martin / AP

    President Barack Obama shakes hands with Mexico's President-elect Enrique Pena Nieto prior to their meeting in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, Nov. 27, 2012.

    Maria Camila Bernal, Telemundo

    News analysis

    Mexico's new president Enrique Peña Nieto is surely hoping his inauguration on Saturday will help his country turn a new page in the relationship with its huge northern neighbor.

    After all, Mexico is dogged by a six-year drug war that has claimed about 60,000 lives, pervasive corruption and an image problem around the world. So Peña Nieto will want to emphasize what the violence and the negative headlines obscure: Mexico's growing economy, swelling middle class and deepening economic and social ties with the U.S.

    A recent editorial by Peña Nieto, who is returning to power the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional), the authoritarian party that ruled Mexico for more than 70 years, shed light on the new president's pivot.

    "It is a mistake to limit our bilateral relationship to drugs and security concerns," he wrote in The Washington Post ahead of Tuesday's meeting with President Barack Obama. "Our mutual interests are too vast and complex to be restricted in this short-sighted way."

    Peña Nieto hopes to reframe US-Mexico relations in meeting with Obama

    Indeed, the fact that Peña Nieto was the first foreign leader to visit the White House since Obama's reelection highlights the importance both countries place on their ties.

    "This is a longstanding tradition where … we meet early with the president-elect of Mexico because it symbolizes the extraordinary relationship between the two countries," Obama told reporters at a joint press conference.

    De-emphasize drug war?
    Peña Nieto's predecessor Felipe Calderon made the war on drugs his most important domestic issue, former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castañeda told NBC Latino.

    "What I think Peña Nieto wants to do is emphasize reducing violence and violent crime in Mexico -- kidnapping, extortion, homicide, holdups -- and not so much the drug trade," he said.

    Latin America expert: US-Mexico relations to focus on trade, not drug war


    While Mexico's new president has promised to expand the federal police by at least 35,000 in order to deal with crime, Peña Nieto and the PRI will have a brief period to show the United States and the world that they are truly tackling lawlessness and corruption.

    "The honeymoon will end when the United States realizes that he will continue to allow corruption," Mexican economist Rogelio Ramirez de la O, who advised left-wing challenger in the presidential race, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

    But there is no denying that significant ties bind the two countries. Already, Mexico and the United States are part of NAFTA, the world's biggest trading bloc, with Canada.

    Mexico's president wants to change country's name to the one 'we sing'

    "Perhaps the most important issue is finding new ways to bolster our economic and trade relationship to attain common prosperity in our nations," Peña Nieto wrote in the Washington Post article.

    Mexico markets itself as a manufacturing base for foreign companies, and already Coca-Cola, GM, DuPont and Nissan, among others, have operations in the country. Peña Nieto has also promised to open the country's sizable energy sector to private investment, although he has said that energy resources and the country's state-run oil company PEMEX will not be privatized.

    The country's economy is also expected to continue growing faster than the United States. Mexico's GPD is projected to have grown by 3.9 percent in 2012, compared to 2.1 percent in the United States during the same period, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit.

    Slideshow: Narco culture permeates Mexico, leaks across border

    Mexico's drug war is also part of a drug culture with roots in music, movies and even religion.

    Launch slideshow

    Immigration reform
    Both presidents acknowledged another major issue facing both countries during Tuesday's meeting: immigration.

    Despite constant bloodshed, Mexico is ignored during White House race

    "I know (Peña Nieto is) interested in what we do as well on issues like comprehensive immigration reform," Obama said.

    At an estimated 12 million, Mexicans are by far the largest immigrant group in the United States. And around 7 million, or 59 percent of undocumented immigrants, are thought to have come from Mexico.

    While Obama decreed earlier this year that hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants who went to the United States illegally as young children would be entitled to remain, the promise he made in 2008 to reform immigration has not been fulfilled. On the flip side of the migration coin are the estimated 1 million Americans living in Mexico, and the estimated 10 million who visit every year.

    Read more on NBCLatino.com

    Barbara Franco, executive director of The American Benevolent Society, a 140-year-old aid organization for Americans living in Mexico, acknowledged the many issues facing the new president, and said solutions did not lie only with Peña Nieto or the PRI alone.

    "There is an economic concern, the need of transparency and the overall legal system in the application of law starting form traffic violation to everything else," said Franco. "But the problems are so huge that it's not about political party or a specific person, it's about a general attitude in solving these problems."

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  • Slain Mexican Zetas kingpin deserted army, led deadly drug gang

    Reuters

    A building housing the funeral parlor, from which local media reported the dead body of the leader of the brutal Zetas drug gang Heriberto Lazcano had been snatched by armed men, is seen in Sabinas, Oct. 9, 2012. Mexico says it has killed Lazcano, the most powerful kingpin to fall in a six-year battle against cartels, but in a surreal twist his body was snatched from a funeral home by armed men.

    By Reuters

    MEXICO CITY - Heriberto Lazcano, the slain boss of the Zetas drug cartel, was once an elite special forces soldier before switching sides to join the criminals he was charged to fight, eventually becoming one of Mexico's most feared and brutal kingpins. 

    Known as "The Executioner" and "Z-3," Lazcano was killed on Sunday in a gun battle with Marines in northern Coahuila state, Mexico's Navy said. If confirmed, it would be the biggest coup yet for outgoing President Felipe Calderon in his war on drug cartels.

    In a bizarre twist, however, Lazcano's body was snatched by armed men from a funeral home just hours later, shrouding the incident in mystery. While Calderon said "all available evidence" indicated the cartel chief had been killed, including finger prints, he did not say he knew for sure that Lazcano was dead.

    Lazcano was mistakenly reported killed in 2007 after a clash with the military.


    The Zetas boss was one of Mexico's most wanted men, and U.S. authorities had offered a reward of up to $5 million for his capture. Only Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, boss of the Sinaloa Cartel, would represent a bigger prize to the government.

    Lazcano deserted a Mexican army unit formed to combat the drug gangs in 1998 and joined the Gulf Cartel's vicious enforcement wing, the Zetas, where he quickly won power thanks to his merciless slaying of rivals.

    The Mexican Attorney General's office has said Lazcano was believed to own a ranch with a pit containing lions and tigers, into which he used to hurl his victims. 

    Mexico nabs high-ranking Zetas drug gang member 'El Taliban'

    The Zetas, named after a military call sign, split from the Gulf Cartel in 2010, and have continued to expand even as rival cartels joined forces against them.

    Under Lazcano's leadership, the Zetas grew into a feared organization of more than 10,000 gunmen with operations stretching from the Rio Grande, on the border with Texas, to deep into Central America.

    SEMAR via EPA

    A handout picture provided on Oct. 9, 2012 by the Mexican Secretary Office of the Navy shows the alleged body of leader of Zetas Heriberto Lazcano, who was killed on Oct. 7 during a confrontation in the town of Progreso, in the Mexican state of Coahuila.

    Armed with a huge arsenal of automatic weapons, dynamite, grenades and even rocket launchers, the Zetas have waged a gruesome battle for supremacy with a coalition of rival drug gangs from Mexico's Pacific state of Sinaloa since 2004.

    The gang's expansion has pushed out Mexico's older cartels in many areas, giving them a dominant position in the multi-billion-dollar cross-border drug trade, as well as extortion, kidnapping and other criminal businesses.

    132 inmates tunnel out of Mexico prison near US border

    They were blamed for the brutal massacre of 72 foreign migrant workers headed to the United States and the burning of a casino in the affluent city of Monterrey, which claimed 52 lives. 

    Hundreds of bodies found in mass graves may have been their kidnapping victims.

    Rivals, snatched from safe houses and off the streets, were tortured and mutilated by the Zetas, who are believed to have pioneered decapitating rivals, now a grim hallmark of Mexican organized crime. 

    A video "mockumentary" that shows children as kidnappers, corrupt cops and drug traffickers sparked a fierce debate in violence-torn Mexico. Msnbc.com's Dara Brown reports.

    In May, the Zetas were blamed for killing 49 people and dumping their headless and limbless bodies on a highway near Monterrey. 

    Lazcano's recruitment drive extended to former elite Guatemalan soldiers known as Kaibiles, who committed human rights atrocities during that country's long civil war, Mexican officials say. 

    President: Mexico gang-related deaths fall by 15 percent in 2012

    But little else was known about the kingpin, who turned his back on opulent displays of wealth and power common among other Mexican drug lords, and kept a low profile. 

    "He is the most secretive of the bosses because he's trained in intelligence," George Grayson, a U.S.-based Mexico expert at the College of William and Mary said of Lazcano at the height of his power. 

    "He's not out there throwing birthday parties or getting musicians to compose songs for him, he's out there to make money," he said, referring to the more flamboyant habits of other drug traffickers. 

    Under Lazcano's command, the Zetas were organized in a cellular structure and low-ranking members know little about overall operations. 

    Army deserters targeted
    The group became a key target of Calderon, who made crushing the Gulf Cartel and its former enforcers one of his main goals in a military-led offensive involving tens of thousands of troops launched after he took office in 2006.

    Slideshow: Narco culture permeates Mexico, leaks across border

    Mexico's drug war is also part of a drug culture with roots in music, movies and even religion

    Launch slideshow

    About 60,000 people have been killed in drugs violence since then. 

    Despite the government assault, Lazcano appeared undaunted, openly advertising for soldiers to desert and join the Zetas. 

    Debate rages over Mexico 'spillover violence' in US

    The group strung banners from bridges over main roads in the towns of Reynosa and Nuevo Laredo on the U.S. border offering attractive pay to recruit other deserters like Lazcano, who receive measly salaries in the army. 

    In the working class neighborhood in Pachuca, in central Mexico, where Lazcano grew up, he built a vast Roman Catholic brick chapel in 2009. 

    Fronted by a towering cross in light steel, a plaque says openly, "Donated by Heriberto Lazcano. Lord, hear my prayer, attend my petitions, you that are faithful and just." In anticipation of his own death, the kingpin had also built a brick mausoleum nearby, police said. 

    In recent months, the Zetas appeared to be rupturing, with a longstanding rivalry between Lazcano and his deputy Miguel Trevino, alias "Z-40," exploding into violence. 

    Analysts said Lazcano's death could trigger further blood letting as cartel lieutenants battle to fill a power vacuum within his faction of the cartel.

    "As they don't have a strong leader ... second- or third-tier leaders could take over the organization... It could lead to greater violence," said Vicente Sanchez, a researcher with the Colegio de la Frontera Norte.

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  • Car bomb explodes outside newspaper offices in northern Mexico

    Daniel Becerrill / Reuters

    Resident look on after six men were shot dead in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, on Monday. While four of the dead were suspected drug gang members, a fifth worked at a nearby car dealership and a sixth was offering to clean the windows of passing cars, according to local media. The graffiti on the wall reads "Cartels united."

    By msnbc.com and news services

    A car bomb exploded outside the offices of a newspaper in the capital of Mexico's northern state of Tamaulipas on Monday night, according to the state government, the latest in a spate of violent incidents to rock the country.

    Earlier on Monday, six men were shot dead in Monterrey, in the neighboring state of Nuevo Leon. Four were suspected drug gang members and two innocent bystanders, Reuters reported, quoting local media.

    On Sunday, 12 police were killed in a mountain highway ambush hours after the severed heads of 10 people were dumped in a small town in a key illegal-drug-growing region in the southern state of Guerrero. Armed assailants opened fire on a police convoy, killing the dozen officers and wounding 11 more, said Arturo Martinez, spokesman for the state government, according to Reuters.

    The ambush took place on a rural highway near the town of Teloloapan, located between the beach resort of Acapulco and Mexico City. Earlier Sunday, the severed heads of 10 people were lined along a street outside a slaughterhouse in the center of Teloloapan.

    The La Familia cartel and its offshoot, Los Caballeros Templarios (The Knights Templar), are among the gangs fighting for territory in the region. The heads had been left with a message threatening the La Familia gang, local media reported.

    Debate rages over Mexico 'spillover violence'

    More than 50,000 people, including more than 2,500 police and soldiers, have died in drug-related violence since President Felipe Calderon launched an army-led crackdown on the cartels after taking office five years ago.

    Car bomb
    The car bomb in Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas, exploded at around 8:15 p.m. (9:15 p.m. ET) outside the offices of Expreso newspaper, according to a statement by state government (Link to statement in Spanish). Nobody was hurt in the explosion, which hit during the busiest time of day in the newsroom, but it did damage at least five cars and caused a fire, according to Blog del Narco, a site that documents the rising drug violence. (Link to website in Spanish)

    Mexican journalist on drug lords: "If they're going to kill you, they're going to kill you'

    According to Blog del Narco the newspaper posted a notice on its site shortly after the bombing but msnbc.com was unable to access the posting.

    It would not be the first time that journalists were apparently targeted in Mexico, one of the most dangerous countries in which to be a reporter or photographer. Many news organizations are wary of reporting on drug-related violence as a consequence.

    Deadly gunbattle erupts near Mexico baseball game

    Blog del Narco has become one of the few sources of information about the ongoing violence. Comments on posts indicated that it is followed by those involved in the drug trade.

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    Msnbc.com staff and Reuters contributed to this report.

  • Mexican journalist on drug lords: "If they're going to kill you, they're going to kill you'

    Thousands of guns lie on the ground before their destruction in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua State, Mexico on February 16, 2012. At least 6000 rifles and pistols seized to drugs cartels were destroyed by members of the Mexican Army.

    By Erika Angulo and Wilma Hernandez, NBC News

    MIAMI – "If they're going to kill you, they're going to kill you," said Luz del Carmen Sosa, a reporter in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and mother of two, who spends most of her day running from one murder scene to another. "Even if you arrive surrounded by police, security escorts, whoever wants to hurt you will hurt you."

    Just 20 miles from Ciudad Juarez, photojournalist Alejandro Hernández Pacheco did get hurt. On July 26, 2010, Hernandez was part of a TV news crew videotaping at a prison in the city of Gomez Palacio when he was kidnapped at gunpoint, along with two colleagues.

    "They took us to a place that was covered with dried blood, with teeth and hair stuck to the walls," said Hernandez. He stopped himself from describing the room any further, saying it brings back terrifying memories.

    "They hit us until they tired," he said, adding that the gunmen also threatened to burn him alive. "They hit me in the head with a piece of wood, on my back, my knees, my ankles."  The men were released five days later.  Authorities believe the kidnappers were members of the notorious Sinaloa cartel.

    Stringer/Mexico / Reuters

    Galia Rodriguez, 8, daughter of reporter Armando Rodriguez who was killed in Ciudad Juarez, takes part in an anniversary in the journalists's park in the border city of Ciudad Juarez on Nov. 13, 2010. Suspected drug gangs shot dead Rodriguez, a Mexican crime reporter who worked for El Diario de Ciudad Juarez on Nov. 13, 2008 in Ciudad Juarez.

    Mexico has become a killing field for reporters, according to a study released this week by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. The organization’s "Attacks on the Press in 2011" study shows 48 Mexican journalists have disappeared or have been killed in the last five years across the country.

    CPJ's survey found the increase in crimes against media workers began with the start of Mexican President Felipe Calderon's escalated war against narcotics traffickers, a crusade which has led rival cartels to fight for control of the profitable drug routes into the United States. 

    ‘Nothing has changed’
    Pressure from international press organizations like CPJ prompted the Calderon administration to launch an initiative to protect the country's journalists. London-based writers group PEN has called for "immediate and definitive action" to end the killings of journalists in Mexico. 

    But the killings and kidnappings continue.

    "Nothing has changed," Hernandez said.  "No one is going to protect them [journalists], they have no one to turn to for protection, but themselves."

    In Ciudad Juarez, a city that sees an average of eight murders a day, Sosa says journalists put competition for exclusive stories aside and call each other when news breaks, so they can travel to cover developments as a group. A 23-year veteran crime reporter of the award-winning El Diario, Sosa and other experienced journalists have also gotten used to giving up their byline for a simple "staff" byline  when they write a story that may infuriate a cartel leader or government official.  

    Slideshow: Narco culture permeates Mexico, leaks across border

    Mexico's drug war is also part of a drug culture with roots in music, movies and even religion

    Launch slideshow

    Self-censorship
    Journalists complain the threats have led to the spread of self-censorship.  Mexico City-based correspondent Ana Arana said much of the country is suffering from what she calls "news black holes."

    Arana runs Fundacion MEPI, an independent investigative nonprofit. In an effort to determine how pervasive self-censorship has become, the group studied the coverage of drug-related crimes by 11 regional newspapers, as well as the national edition of Milenio and El Universal in 2010 and then again in 2011.

    MEPI found that in Nuevo Laredo and other crime-ridden cities, the press was barely covering gangland executions and other drug-related crimes. And if they published stories on those types of crimes, they did so without mentioning suspects.

    "We don't know how bad things are in some regions of the country because of self-censorship," said Dallas Morning News reporter Alfredo Corchado, who has been covering Mexico for many years. "Who can blame Mexican journalists for self-censoring themselves when the government is incapable of protecting them, or even solving one case of colleagues killed," he added.

    Some Mexican authorities seem to be censoring their information too, according to many reporters. "What we are seeing is that the government forces are slow to respond, or against sharing statistics or details about specific drug violence," said Arana.

    That increasingly leaves the public depending on social media for information. Many turn to Facebook and Twitter for the latest on crime hot spots. But even that source of information is being curtailed, especially after the murder of Marisol Macias Castro.

    The 39-year-old Twitter user posted notes on the criminal activities of local cartel members last September. She was found decapitated shortly after. Two other murders have also been linked to the use of social media to denounce a drug cartel.

    The NBC station in El Paso, Texas reports on the Mexican photojournalist Alejandro Hernandez's efforts to seek asylum in the U.S. after he was kidnapped and tortured by a drug cartel.

    ‘Not going to retire because I'm scared’
    While the risk of reporting worsens, many won't give up their dangerous profession.  Sosa has told her children, now 17 and 20 years old, she does not want a funeral when she dies, because she has seen so many she has developed an aversion to them.

    But she says the drug war violence won't force her to quit. "I'm not going to retire because I'm scared or because I'm tired," she said. "This is what I know how to do and this is what I love doing." 

    Hernandez also refused to give up being a journalist, but 19 months after being kidnapped he now practices his profession in the U.S.  He was granted political asylum and now works as a photojournalist for a TV network in Texas, where he lives with his wife and three sons.

    But those still reporting from Mexico have to continue to brave the dangers.

    Culiacan reporter Javier Valdez Cardenas survived a grenade attack in the course of his work. Last year, he was the awarded the CPJ's International Press Freedom award. In his acceptance speech last September, he spoke about the grim tragedy continuing to unfold in his country.

    "Mexico is living a tragedy that should shame us,” said Cardenas.  “The youth will remember this as a time of war. Their DNA is tattooed with bullets and guns and blood, and this is a form of killing tomorrow."

  • 4 shot dead in ambulance in Mexican border city

    Raymundo Ruiz / AP

    Forensic experts work on the scene after gunmen opened fire on an ambulance, killing the driver, two patients and a relative of one of the patients in Ciudad Juarez on Wednesday. According to authorities and witnesses, gunmen riding on a pick-up crashed into the ambulance and opened fire. The patients in the ambulance were being transferred from one hospital to another for dialysis treatment.

     

    By Msnbc.com staff and wire services

    CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - Gunmen attacked an ambulance in this border city Wednesday, killing the driver, two patients and a fourth person in the vehicle, officials said.

    The Chihuahua state Attorney General's Office said the ambulance driver was shot in the head and appeared to be the target of the attack. It did not provide theories about a motive.

    Two of the victims were patients being taken to a Ciudad Juarez facility for kidney treatment, officials said. A woman accompanying the patients was also killed.

     

     

    Rosendo Gaytan, a spokesman for the Mexican Social Security Institute in Ciudad Juarez said a pickup truck carrying the gunmen intentionally crashed into the ambulance, forcing it to stop. The attackers then got out of the truck and opened fire on the ambulance, Gaytan said.

    Ciudad Juarez, which is across the border from El Paso, Texas, is in the midst of a war between the Juarez and Sinaloa drug cartels and saw some 3,100 homicides last year. Killings have gradually decreased but violence remains high.

    Authorities reported six other slayings Wednesday in addition to the ambulance attack.

    Growing rivalry
    Elsewhere, three members of a criminal gang allied with the Zetas drug cartel have been detained in connection with the slayings of 26 people last month in the western Mexican city of Guadalajara, prosecutors said Wednesday.

    Jalisco state Attorney General Tomas Coronado said the arrested men belonged to the Milenio gang and had told police that the slain men were members of a rival group that refused to join with Milenio.

    Analysts have described the Guadalajara slayings as the result of a growing rivalry between the Zetas and the powerful Sinaloa cartel. The Sinaloa cartel is based in Sinaloa state, to the north of Jalisco.

    Meanwhile, TIME magazine on Wednesday highlighted Mexico's "spreading drug war" as one of its 10 "underreported stories" of 2011.

    A list compiled by Reuters of the country's worst atrocities of 2011 includes:

    • In April, officials unearthed the first of what turned out to be more than 450 bodies buried in mass graves in the northern states of Durango and Tamaulipas.
    • August 20: Five headless bodies were found in Acapulco, taking the number of people killed in the popular Pacific resort to at least 25 in that one week.
    • August 25: Masked gunmen torch a casino in Monterrey, killing 52 people, most of them women. The attack takes less than three minutes.
    • September 20: Thirty-five bodies are found abandoned in two trucks on an underpass in the eastern Gulf city of Veracruz, which had been largely untouched by the violence.
    • October 6: Mexican security forces find 32 bodies at several locations around Veracruz, just two days after the government unveiled a plan to bolster security in Veracruz state.
    • November 24: More than 20 bodies are found in cars in Mexico's second city, Guadalajara, a day after the burned bodies of 16 people are found in the home state of the country's powerful drug lord, Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman.

    The Associated Press, Reuters and msnbc.com staff contributed to this report.

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