Word: coahuila
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Federal bureaucrats call it the "border fence." The residents along the Texas-Mexico border say it's a wall echoing the Cold War. And south of the Rio Grande, Governor Humberto Moreira of the Mexican state of Coahuila has dubbed it a "wall of hate." But no matter what the controversial barrier being constructed between Mexico and the U.S. is called, the $1.6 billion, 670-mile-long first phase is close to completion as President Barack Obama enters office...
There are two kinds of kidnappings in Mexico: those meant for ransom and those meant as a warning. This month's abduction of Felix Batista in the northern state of Coahuila was most likely the latter - and it's one of the more chilling messages that Mexico's ubiquitous police-linked kidnapping industry has ever sent...
...citizen who works for ASI Global, a Houston-based security company, is a prominent expert on how to avert kidnapping. Ironically, he was nabbed in the industrial city of Saltillo after giving antiabduction seminars to businessmen last week - classes that few others but local cops knew about. A Coahuila source familiar with the investigation tells TIME that one of the executives with Batista was also kidnapped but was returned, badly beaten, earlier this week. The abductors' unspoken warning to Mexican and U.S. officials alike: We will no longer tolerate anyone who makes our work more difficult. "Sometimes a kidnapping group...
...little surprise that Batista, who has worked as an antikidnapping instructor and kidnapping-release negotiator all over Mexico, was taken in Coahuila. Just as Mexico's powerful drug cartels have lashed out with an insurgency against President Felipe Calderón's anti-narco offensive - Mexico has had more than 5,000 drug-related murders this year, double last year's record - kidnapping bosses in Coahuila, on the border with Texas, are fighting back against the state government's antiabduction crusade. Batista was a consultant to Enrique Martinez, who was Coahuila's governor from 1999 to 2005, and he greatly...
Last May the López Portillo government began a well-publicized series of crackdowns on corrupt officials. The federal attorney general, Oscar Florez Sanchez, declared that he would investigate "everybody from the governor of Coahuila on down" after $6.6 million worth of denim dyes were smuggled into Mexico aboard a plane owned by the state government; the digging finally focused on the pilot and an associate. The Mexican information agency announced last spring that 900 investigations into public corruption had begun. So far none of those investigations has produced even an indictment, much less a conviction. Charges Hero Rodriguez Toro...