In a small-town jail in the upper Midwest sits a once highly-paid informant the U.S. government would probably rather you not know about. Guillermo Ramirez-Peyro, AKA Lalo, sits in prison without being charged. He's a former Mexican Highway Police Officer that found himself incahoots with the drug trade on the Juarez-El Paso border, but then received more than $200K from the U.S. Federal Government for information. The same U.S. agency that paid him, however, now wants to deport him back to Mexico and an almost certain death.
posted on Aug 24, 2006 - View this thread

Federal officials in Mexico have officially dropped the investigation into the murders of hundreds of young women in Juarez since 1993. [previously]
posted on Jul 26, 2006 - View this thread

"The make him into something he wasn't." Today, on the 200th anniversary of his birth, a national holiday, Mexico both honors and reconsiders Benito Juarez (Wikipedia: Eng/Span): "Mexico's Lincoln," the nation's first indigenous president, who served two terms in the 1860s and 1870s. The capital city's airport, a border city of 1.1M, universities, and streets and monuments in just about every town are named after Juarez, widely considered a national hero. Politicians left and right invoke his name, especially this year as Mexico prepares to elect a new president in July. For many in the Latin American left, he's a regional icon in the vein of Simon Bolivar and Ernesto "Che" Guevara; Havana unveiled a bust (Span) of him last year. He's held up as a defender of the poor and the indigenous and an opponent to free trade. Today, however, some historians say he was neither. For those who read Spanish, a leading Mexican (right-of-center) newspaper, El Universal, also touches on the topic in "Juarez, a controversial icon."
posted on Mar 21, 2006 - View this thread

lacitedesmortes - documentary on women murdered in ciudad juarez -- lacitedesmontes.net is not in English, but through its flash presentation and navigation, it should explain enough about the brutality of the unfortunate events that took place in Ciudad Juarez. Since 1993, almost 400 women and girls have been murdered and more than 70 remain missing in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua, Mexico. While the region's law enforcement as well as state's attorney general were either incompetent or corrupt, more than a dozen women's rights groups were created to solve the murder as well as to stop the violence in the region. Thanks to international organizations such as Amnesty, UNIFEM, and IACHR, the number of violent murder on women in the region has degreased for a while, however, the battle still continues. More resources here.
posted on Oct 13, 2005 - View this thread