Mexico News

A reality show producer charged with murdering his wife during a Mexican vacation is dropping his extradition fight and will stand trial in Cancun, his lawyer said Tuesday. More >

The United States will cut the number of National Guard troops patrolling the border with Mexico next year as it steps up other surveillance on the porous southern border, officials said Tuesday.

The effort reflects “a new strategic approach” that includes “a number of new multi-purpose aerial assets equipped with the latest surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities,” according to a statement from the departments of Homeland Security and Defense.

The suspected leader of the Los Zetas drug cartel in the eastern Mexican state of Veracruz was arrested following a long shootout with marines, the Navy Secretariat said.

Raul Lucio Hernandez Lechuga, considered one of the “37 most dangerous criminals” in Mexico, was arrested Monday in the city of Cordoba, the secretariat said.

The front-runner for Mexico’s presidential election next year found himself on the defensive Monday after a gaffe-filled weekend.

Enrique Peña Nieto, of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, had his first major stumble of the campaign season when he couldn’t name three books that he had read.

Mexico’s two most powerful criminal gangs are locked in a titanic battle for control of the country’s heartland in a struggle that’s redrawn Mexico’s map of violence.

Violence has dropped along the U.S. border, with Ciudad Juarez, once considered the most violent city in the world, seeing a 35 percent decline in homicides this year.

That good news is balanced by bad news in Guadalajara, Culiacan and Veracruz, where the Sinaloa cartel, whose bulwark has always been Mexico’s Pacific coast, and the Zetas, a violent gang that originally was created to protect the Gulf cartel along the Gulf of Mexico coast, are locked in a spiraling struggle that’s seen each gang invade the other’s territory.

Mexico’s economic growth quickened in the third quarter, beating estimates as services grew at the fastest pace in two years even as waning factory
activity could herald slower growth ahead.

More >

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador will represent the main leftist party in Mexico’s 2012 presidential election, after claiming for years he was robbed of the 2006 presidency.

The charismatic 58-year-old former mayor of Mexico City was selected in a polling process Tuesday by two analysis firms, using the opinions of 6,000 Mexicans on the best candidate for the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD).

An internet assault inspired by Anonymous, the hacking activist network that promised to expose collaborators with the Zeta drug cartel, has targeted a former senior law enforcement officer from the southern Mexican state of Tabasco.

Hackers blocked a website dedicated to promoting Gustavo Rosario, the former Tabasco attorney-general, with the words ”Gustavo Rosario is a Zeta” signed by Anonymous Mexico.

Grupo Mexico was ordered to pay $1.263 billion to Southern Copper Corp (SCCO.N), which it controlled when Southern Copper overpaid for another Grupo Mexico company in 2004.

Grupo Mexico proposed in 2004 that Southern Peru Copper Corp, as it was then known, buy another Grupo Mexico mining company, Minerva Mexico. A deal was completed in 2005 for $3.75 billion, paid in Southern Copper stock.

Southern Copper shareholders sued, and Delaware’s Chancery Court agreed that Minerva was vastly overvalued in the deal.