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- PGR: has the elements needed to free Dr Mireles
- State Department Quietly Suspended Aid to Army Unit (102nd Battalion) Responsible for June 2014 Tlatlaya Massacre
- Former AD Leader: Having 90% support, mayoral candidate is murdered by armed commando
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PGR: has the elements needed to free Dr Mireles Posted: 15 May 2015 10:13 PM PDT Translated by Otis B Fly-Wheel for Borderland Beat from a Milenio article [ Subject Matter: PGR, detention of Dr Mireles Valverde Recommendation: Some prior knowledge of his arrest and detention would be useful] Reporter: Ruben Mosso The assistant Attorney General Gilberto Higuera announced that the have exposed to the State Prosecutor the elements that they have found, among them, violation of due process, said the State leader of the party. The President of the Citizens Movement in Michoacan, Daniel Moncada, said that the Prosecutor General of the Republic has been informed of the judicial elements in order to proceed with the liberation of the founder of the Autodefensas of Tepalcatepec, Jose Manuel Mireles Valverde. Moncado said that Higuera Bernal will wait until Monday to expose the judicial motions to the Prosecutor Arely Gomez, regarding what they have found to liberate Mireles, among them, violations of due process. Interviewed at the end of the meeting that I had with the Assisstant Attorney General of regional control, about Prison procedures and amperes of the PGR, Gilberto Higuera Bernal, Moncado signalled that the Federal functionary promised to revise today the state of health of Dr Mireles, who has received no medical attention for 30 days in prison in Hermosillo, Sonora, where he is imprisoned. The President of the Citizens Movement of Michoacan said, " I underline that despite the good news, they are not to be trusted, and that in the case he is not released, they will determine other measures. For her part, Virginia Mireles, sister of the ex autodefensa and candidate for Federal Deputy. She said she felt a great relief at the words spoken by Higuera Bernal, who was identified as the functionary that has revised the records of her brother. The resolution of the PGR this Monday does not immediately implicate the liberation of Dr Mireles, but the beginning of the process to achieve his liberation, for the members of the Citizens Movement have now petitioned to have Dr Mireles moved to a lower security prison while his liberation process proceeds. The health of Dr Mireles is in danger Virginia Mireles assure that the health of her brother is still in danger and he cannot feel his extremities, because he has stopped receiving any medical attention in the Federal Prison in Sonora, where he has been imprisoned for the last 10 months. During his call to the PGR, the candidate for deputy said that they will carry a case of International instances of maltreatment that her brother has suffered. Virginia mentioned that she was informed by the Lawyer of Dr Mireles, that in the last 30 days he has lacked medical attention because the diabetes has complications, and that he has started to lose the use of one of his feet, and he has an ulcer. The last thing he received was water and soap. For his part, Daniel Moncada, President of the Citizens Movement in Michoacan, said that they will petition the intervention of Amnesty International. He said that they will start other courses of actions in case the PGR do not desist in the imprisonment of Dr Mireles, and that he has been treated like the worst of criminals, while the true criminals remain free in Michoacan. At the meeting he could not be assisted by the leader and founder of the autodefensas in Michoacan, Hipplito Mora, because he was participating in the due diligence of the death of his son. Original article in Spanish at Milenio | ||||||
Posted: 15 May 2015 04:26 PM PDT Borderland Beat posted by DD republished from The National Security Archive and The Intercept
DD. Mark Twain once said, " If you don't read newspapers you are uninformed. If you do read newspapers you are ill-informed". Fortunately, for all its faults, today we have the internet and don't have to rely on MSM newspapers and TV. Borderland Beat tries to present factual accurate news stories that you likely won't find on MSM. To do that we research a wide array of sources such as the Security Archive. I invite to you to visit their site and read a little about who and what they are. From NSArchives US: Mexico Mass Graves Raise "Alarming Questions" about Government "Complicity" in September 2014 Cartel KillingsNational Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 515Posted May 12, 2015 Edited by Michael EvansWashington, DC, May 12, 2015 – A U.S. military "Human Rights Working Group" said that mass graves not related to the September 2014 disappearance of 43 students in Guerrero, Mexico—but nevertheless found during the investigation of that case—raised "alarming questions" about the "level of government complicity" in Mexican cartel killings. The student victims from a rural teachers college in Ayotzinapa were allegedly abducted by local police forces and turned over to members of a local drug gang to be executed. All but one of the students—whose remains were reportedly identified by an Austrian forensic group—are still missing seven months later.
The October 2014 report from U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) is one of several declassified records obtained by the nongovernmental National Security Archive and highlighted in a new report for The Intercept by former Archive staffer Jesse Franzblau and Cora Currier. The newly-declassified records, some posted here for the first time (links to actual documents follow this story) , shed light on how the U.S. has perceived and responded to allegations of serious human rights abuses committed by U.S.-funded security forces in Mexico, which have become disturbingly common in recent years. "None of the 28 bodies identified thus far are the remains of the students," reads a summary of the Working Group meeting circulated to senior officers at NORTHCOM on October 14, 2014, "raising alarming questions about the widespread nature of cartel violence in the region and the level of government complicity." NORTHCOM, based in Colorado, is the regional military command in charge of Defense Department programs in the United States, Canada and Mexico. Another item on the Working Group's agenda was the June 2014 slaying of 22 suspected drug gang members at Tlatlaya, in the state of Mexico, by the Mexican Army's 102nd Battalion. Four months later, and shortly after the arrests of a Mexican Army officer and seven soldiers from the 102nd for the killings and subsequent cover up, the Working Group "assesse[d] that as more facts come to light there is greater acceptance that the military was involved in wrongdoing," raising serious questions about the ability of the U.S. to provide aid to military forces in the region.
Another NORTHCOM document obtained by the Archive and highlighted in the report is the first public confirmation that the U.S. State Department last year did quietly suspend assistance to the 102nd Battalion following Tlatlaya, pending the outcome of official investigations. The NORTHCOM "Information Paper on San Pedro Limon, Tlatlaya Incident" indicates that the 102nd "is now ineligible to receive US assistance." Questioned about the reported suspension of aid by The Intercept, the State Department would only confirm that five members of the battalion had previously been trained by the U.S. but said that none of those five are implicated in the Tlatlaya case. A 1997 law introduced by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) bars U.S. support to foreign security forces credibly linked to human rights violations. Franzblau and Currier, the reporters from the Intercept story, call the suspension of aid in the Tlatlaya case "a rare confirmed example of the U.S. government actually cutting off funding for security forces" in Mexico. Even so, the State Department has not said whether any Mexican units tied to the Guerrero disappearances (the 43 students) have been declared ineligible for U.S. aid, as the Leahy law would seem to require in this case. The Intercept asked the State Department for a list of all Mexican units that have been cut off from U.S. funding because of human rights violations since the Mérida initiative began, but the spokesperson said it was not yet publicly available. "It's incomprehensible that they don't already have that list," said Laura Carlsen, Mexico City-based director of the Americas Program, in an email to The Intercept. Carlsen has worked for years with a coalition of human rights groups to bring attention to the consequences of U.S. support for the drug war in Mexico. According to the authors, "The State Department's piecemeal response to these events highlights the conundrum that Mexico now presents for the United States, as it seeks to help the Mexican government battle drug cartels." The U.S. has provided some $3 billion in security assistance to Mexican forces since 2008, in addition to billions more in direct military sales and other aid. Franzblau and Currier cite a diplomatic cable published by Wikileaks to "show how U.S.-Mexico security and intelligence relations have reached unparalleled levels of intimacy" in recent years. The 2010 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City stresses that U.S. "ties with the Military" at that time had "never been closer in terms of not only equipment transfers and training" but also "intelligence exchanges." As reported in the Intercept; In this context, U.S. cooperation with the Mexican government — which entails billions in American financial backing for its war on drugs — is receiving renewed scrutiny. U.S. government documents obtained by the National Security Archive through Freedom of Information Act requests demonstrate that the United States is well aware that its support is going to Mexican authorities connected to abuses. And yet, with few exceptions, the money keeps flowing. New evidence provides a rare glimpse of the way U.S. authorities have learned that the Mexican security apparatus has been implicated in specific abuses, and how they have responded. The Tlatlaya incident is a rare confirmed example of the U.S. government actually cutting off funding for security forces. Since 2008, the U.S. government has spent nearly $3 billion on security aid to Mexico, largely through the Mérida Initiative, a counter-drug strategy modeled on Plan Colombia, through which the United States funneled billions of dollars to that country's often-brutal drug war. This support comes in addition to direct sales of arms and other equipment, which totaled over $1.15 billion last year alone. Mexico recently surpassed Colombia to become the largest customer for U.S. weapons in Latin America. The U.S. State Department's own human rights reporting on Mexico highlights police and military involvement in serious abuses, including unlawful killings, physical abuse, torture and disappearances. One U.S. Embassy cable from 2011 reported on the discovery of 219 bodies unearthed in a series of mass graves that year around the northern city of Durango. Another cable, from 2010, discusses a mass grave in Acapulco, Guerrero containing the bodies of 18 men, and another near a ranch in the northern state of Chihuahua, filled with 19 men and one woman. "Clearly elements within the [Mexican] Army believed that they had nothing to fear by slaughtering innocent people execution-style, which indicates a pervasiveness of impunity," said Tim Rieser, foreign policy aide to Senator Leahy, who has been a longtime advocate for greater pressure on Mexico on human rights, in reference to the Tlatlaya case. "So clearly there's a long way to go." But the unprecedented level of U.S. influence on Mexico's armed forces came alongside an extraordinary increase in drug war abuses and in human rights violations connected to state and local security forces. The violence that has engulfed Mexico since then has produced a flurry of reports from U.S. diplomatic and intelligence officers expressing concern that America's drug war partners in the Mexican security forces were working hand-in-glove with cartel terrorists.
One of the key objectives of U.S. aid to Mexico during this time has been to beef up the country's security communications infrastructure by lending funds, expertise and equipment to the Plataforma Mexico project, which the U.S. State Department described in 2007 as a "billion-dollar scheme for establishing interconnections between all police and prosecutors." The U.S. poured millions of dollars into Plataforma Mexico, which was essentially a criminal database that connected state- and regional-level intelligence coordination centers known as "C-4s" ("command, control, communications and coordiation") to each other and to law enforcement officials through a centralized, U.S.-funded command and control facility known as "The Bunker." Franzblau and Currier point out that the "more sophisticated C-4s in Mexico's northern region communicate directly with U.S. agencies, such as Department of Homeland Security offices across the border," but there is good reason to question the overall effectiveness of the C-4s in combatting drug violence. A 2009 assessment said that neither Plataforma México nor the C-4 in San Pedro, in a suburban section of Monterrey, had been successful in hindering cartel operations. A declassified January 2010 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Mexico, for example, said that the C-4 facility in Tijuana was little more than a "glorified call center" for everyday emergencies that lacked "a strong analytical component." Two months prior, a separate cable from the Embassy described a range of competency at the various C-4s, from, "at the low end, glorified emergency call centers," to "[a]t the high end... more professional analytic cells that produce useful analysis and planning documents and also have a quick response time." The more complete C-4s include representatives from national and regional entities, and are the nerve centers for day-to-day information flow, intelligence, and directing operations in the state. They are often also the link to national databases, such as Plataforma Mexico. Huge disparities between state C-4s exist, but many states are working to move their units from merely housing emergency dispatchers to being functional hubs of operations and intelligence. The UNITOs [Tactical operational units, or Unidades Táctiva Oprerativo] often rely on information fed from good C-4s, in addition to federal databases and platforms. Most importantly, as Franzblau and Currier note in their piece, the U.S.-funded C-4s also appear to have played a role in the disappearance of the 43 students in Guerrero: C-4s certainly didn't help in the case of the forty-three missing Ayotzinapa students. As The Intercept detailed, internal records produced by Guerrero state investigators show that the regional C-4s near the site of the students' kidnapping transmitted information on the movement of the students the night that they were attacked. But neither federal law enforcement nor the military intervened to stop the violence. Reports in the Mexican magazine Proceso and elsewhere linking regional C-4s and other government entities to the events surrounding the Ayotzinapa case have led many to question what the government knew about the massacre and have galvanized calls in Mexico for greater openness about government efforts to bring cartel thugs and their collaborators in the security forces to justice. It remains unclear whether the U.S. will apply Leahy Law sanctions to the C-4 units that were apprently involved in the disappearance of the 43 students. Mexican authorities have promised transparency but have largely resisted the efforts of journalists and academics to gain access to records on the cases. This despite the fact that Mexican law requires the release of information pertaining to grave violations of human rights in all cases. (In one notable exception, Mexico's attorney general last year declassified a document from its case file on the 2011 San Fernando massacre showing that local police helped to round up hundreds of migrants later killed at the hands of the Zetas cartel.) Mexican government stonewalling about the case has some looking to the U.S.—Mexico's chief sponsor and partner in the anti-drug effort—for answers. A key part of the U.S. paper trail are records indicating how the U.S. government determines whether to suspend security assistance to members and units of the Mexican security forces involved in human rights abuses. One newly-declassified document shows that senior U.S. military officials from NORTHCOM reached out to counterparts from Mexico's Defense Ministry (SEDENA) about the Tlatlaya killings after receiving multiple questions about the case. "Since we've continued to get inquiries as to what we've specifically talked to SEDENA about ref. the Tlatlaya incident, I made a call to SEDENA Enlace," reads an October 2014 message from the Pentagon official in charge of U.S. military assistance programs in Mexico (the Office of Defense Cooperation – ODC). Among other things, the ODC chief said it was "good news" to hear from SEDENA that alleged human rights cases like Tlatlaya are "taken out of the military justice system" and transferred to civilian authorities. A 2014 law requires Mexico's attorney general to prosecute all cases in which Mexican security forces are accused of abusing civilians. But as Franzblau and Currier point out, it is not at all clear that the civil justice system has been any more effective at punishing human rights violators than military tribunals: A Mexican government database lists over 23,600 people who have been reported disappeared throughout the country; 2014 witnessed 5,133 disappearances, the highest number on record. Impunity remains the norm, with 98.3 [sic - should be 93.8] percent of crimes going unpunished in 2013, according to Mexican government statistics. The U.S. State Department's own human rights reporting on Mexico highlights police and military involvement in serious abuses, including unlawful killings, physical abuse, torture and disappearances... The U.S. government has also known about cases where the Mexican government has opened investigations into mass graves only to suppress them later. As the National Security Archive has documented, in 2011, when mass graves were discovered in Northeastern Mexico containing the remains of victims of the Zetas cartel, U.S. officials knew that Mexican authorities were downplaying the massacres and removing remains to make the body count appear less alarming, jeopardizing investigations in the process. (Mexican authorities later released files implicating local police in the crime.) There are no easy answers to the "alarming questions" raised by the shocking number of mass graves now being unearthed in Mexico. What seems clear is that a U.S. strategy that has poured billions of dollars into Mexico's drug war over the last decade—mostly aimed at taking down high-profile cartel kingpins—has done little to stem epidemic levels of violence or limit the criminal groups' ability to compromise government officials at all levels. "The bigger picture is that this aid does go to human rights violators. U.S. taxpayer dollars are supporting a drug war that emboldens abusive government forces that are executing and disappearing Mexican citizens. No amount of withholding or [human rights] conditioning will change that," said.Laura Carlson, Mexico City director of the Americas Program. DD. While the State Dept made a step (a baby step) in the right direction by suspending of assistance to the 102nd Battalion, the money is still flowing. THE DOCUMENTS (DD; these are summaries, the full documents may be seen at the National Security Archive at the link at the beginning of this post) Document 1In a briefing paper prepared for U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte's meeting with the head of Mexico's Public Security Secretariat (SSP), the State Department's bureau for the Western Hemisphere says SSP chief Genaro Garcia Luna is "creating a massive system of interconnectivity between all levels of law enforcement, Plataforma Mexico, a billion dollar project." Negroponte is instructed to ask, if time allows, about "how Mexican jurisprudence treats privacy issues in context of criminal databases." | ||||||
Former AD Leader: Having 90% support, mayoral candidate is murdered by armed commando Posted: 15 May 2015 07:41 PM PDT Lucio R. Borderland Beat-Facebook:Valor Michoacan, Yurécuaro, and Aristegui Another candidate gunned down; armed commando interrupts rally to assassinate candidate, former Autodefensa leader, he received serval bullet impacts by gunman Enrique Saucedo Hernandez, former leader of the Michoacán autodefensas and a Morena (political party)candidate running for mayor of Yurécuaro, was killed last night at a rally, confirmed the Municipal Public Security and Michoacán Atty General. According to local authorities, at 19:30 pm yesterday, a commando aboard a truck open fire on the candidate, wounding three people, including a minor. Saucedo Hernandez was a leader of the autodefensas of Yurécuaro, and a close friend of political prisoner Dr. Manuel Mireles. Five hours before his murder, he posted on face book a demand for the release of Dr. Mireles. Last year he was arrested for the murder of Gustavo Garibay, Tanhuato mayor, but was subsequently acquitted when prosecutors lacked evidence, a typical tactic to imprison a "nuisance". In this case as in Dr. Mireles case Alfredo Castillo was behind the incarcerations. Death and imprisonment are the tools used to eliminate those speaking out against organized crime and government corruption. While he was incarcerated he was in isolation, denied visitors and was tortured. In a video posted on YouTube, Hernandez had prophesized that he would be murdered, saying he was a "dead man" from the moment Alfredo Castillo ordered autodefensas to disarm. "My enemies are Templarios and the corrupt government officials of Michoacán, to disarm is to be defenseless to organized crime," (Enrique Hernandez) His daughter was with him at the time of his murder. It has not been clarified if she was the minor injured in the attack. (Later is was reported not to be his daughter that was injured, but a young boy who is in critical condition from gun shots, along with two others) Following the murder, Hernández' lifeless body was covered with a white sheet, and his trademark hat placed atop, in addition candles and a crucifix | ||||||
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