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Foreign News Report

The National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers (NAFBPO) extracts and condenses the material that follows from Mexican and Central and South American on-line media sources on a daily basis. You are free to disseminate this information, but we request that you credit NAFBPO as being the provider.

Diario (Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua) 3/15/08

1. Three thousand eight executions related to organized crime have taken place in Mexico since President Calderon took office on Dec. 1, 2006. The states with the highest such statistics are Sinaloa (395), Michoacan (330) and Chihuahua (311). Three hundred thirty-four police officers and thirty-nine military have been murdered.

Specialists maintain that the country's violence continues because the federal government does not attack the source of the problem nor are the authors of the murders detained. Ernesto Mendieta - a security expert - pointed out that crime must be attacked from political and social fronts within an integral program and not just with police and military actions. "There is no intelligence which may lead me to detain the groups that are doing the killing. When you want to kill someone, you just kill him."

2. The bodies of sixty-four execution victims have been found in and around Ciudad Juarez in the last eight years. Thirty-three of them were located in the Colonia Cuesta, Juarez, residence within the last few days.

3. Mario Dominguez, commander of the state of Chihuahua's state attorney's "Ministerial Police" office in Ciudad Juarez, was executed yesterday while on vacation in Chihuahua City. The agency now has no command level officers left in that part of the state.

And in Juarez shortly after 10 p.m. last night (Fri.) Mario Moraz, a lieutenant with the Juarez Police Department, was executed by a group of armed men. Minutes before in the same area two men were murdered and their bodies dumped out on the street. Both were carrying hypodermic needles.

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Cuarto Poder (Tuxtla, Chiapas) 3/15/08

(headline): "The illegal entry in the country's southern border must be stopped"

"COAPI ("Confederacion de Asociaciones Agropecuarias Populares Independiente" (Independent Farm & Ranch Federation)) asserted that the insecurity that the southern border porosity can generate is worrisome and demanded from the government the presence of the Mexican Army to prevent illegal entry."

"Angelino Espinosa Mata, leader of COAPI, pointed out that although various police agencies are in the border region between Mexico and Guatemala the presence of the armed forces is necessary because there are more than a hundred places where everything comes over; this situation converts the zone into a no-man's land." "He explained that although the level of criminality has gone down in the area of Soconusco, nevertheless the danger is because organized crime operates with drug traffic, weapons and undocumented persons. As an organization, this worries him,"We have members in the area and we see only the presence of the state police" he said."

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El Imparcial (Hermosillo, Sonora) 3/15/08

In Caborca, Sonora (some 80 mi. SW of Nogales as the crow flies), an arrest of an armed man led also to finding 2 shotguns, 2 rifles, 3 "semi-automatic weapons", 31 clips, 6 grenades, 1.314 rounds of ammo, state police and military uniforms and a package of weed. This, in the rural area "Y Griega"

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Notiver (Veracruz, Ver.) 3/15/08

Fourteeen men walking after dark alongside a highway by Tuxpan, Veracruz, aroused local police curiosity. A dozen turned out to be Hondurans and the others were Guatemalans. All "sin papeles", so they were turned over to Mex. immigration.

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La Hora (Guatemala City, Guatemala) 3/15/08

Four senior citizen Belgian tourists and their guide have been taken hostage by a peasants' group near Livingston, Guatemala, just south of Belize. The Belgians are being used as bargaining chips in a conflict involving a land dispute.

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