Uncovering Mexico
Jeremy Schwartz is the Mexico correspondent for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Mexico City.What's on this page?
All the entries posted on October 01, 2007.
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Home > Uncovering Mexico > Archives > 2007 > October > 01
Monday, October 1, 2007
Dog lovers: stay away from the narcos
A disturbing new trend is popping up along Mexico’s narco battlefields: Dogs are being kidnapped and slain, their bodies dumped with threatening messages.
The trend appears strongest in Culiacan, Sinaloa (home to many powerful drug lords including “El Chapo” Guzman). A month ago, dead dogs were left near a military base, a park and the Red Cross offices, bearing threatening notes. “You’re next, Eddi,” reportedly read one note directed at Gen. Rolando Eugenio Hidalgo Eddi. The dogs also were crowned with headdresses made of flowers.
A grisly hallmark of the ongoing drug war in Mexico are so-called “narco-messages” left with bodies of the executed. Drug gangs have also taken to videotaping executions and distributing them on the Internet.
A fourth dead dog turned up last week in Culiacan with an X-rated message. In April, a man was found tortured and executed along with his murdered dog in Michoacan, at the height of the drug war in that rural state.
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Clock is ticking for street vendors
It looks like Mexico City might be serious about cracking down on street vendors after all.
Many months after he pledged to rid the historic downtown of the illegal sellers, Mayor Marcelo Ebrard last week removed the first of an estimated 20,000 vendors from blocks west of the Zocalo. The plan is to move the street vendors to indoor markets inside buildings expropriated by the government by Oct. 12.
Vendors have bitterly fought their removal from the streets, arguing their sales will plummet if they are cloistered inside a market. However, the powerful leaders of the vendor associations have cut deals with the city government and it appears their removal from the rest of downtown is inevitable. Whether the street vendors return to their posts after the furor dies down is an altogether different story.
Here’s a picture of Eje Central, Mexico City’s Central Boulevard, a few days after the first removal.
And here’s the same street back in the spring when all manner of computer software and bootleg DVDs were available. Ironically, the other side of the street is still filled with vendors who have yet to be removed.
