Mexico's newly sworn-in president sent more than 6,500 soldiers, sailors and federal police to violence-plagued Michoacan state to crack down on drug turf wars that have left hundreds dead in a wave of execution-style killings and beheadings.
Felipe Calderon took office on Dec. 1 pledging a "battle" against crime, promising more funds for law enforcement and appointing hardline Interior Minister Francisco Ramirez Acuna to oversee the fight against organized crime.
"The battle against organized crime has just begun," Ramirez Acuna said on Monday, as he announced the administration's first offensive against drug gangs. "We are looking to take back the spaces that organized crime has seized."
Security officials said police and soldiers will arrest traffickers, mount checkpoints and burn crops of marijuana and opium poppies grown in Michoacan's rugged mountains. Navy ships will seal off the state's small Pacific coast, along which smugglers carry drugs on their way to the US. The force will operate 19 planes, 38 helicopters, and four ships.
Hilly, largely rural Michoacan is Calderon's home state and a major drug transshipment point north; police here have reported more than 500 killings this year, about half of which investigators say are linked to a turf war between two rival drug gangs.
Calderon has come under criticism for his proposed budget cuts in other areas, and the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, the PRD, still refuses to recognize Calderon's narrow July 2 electoral victory over the PRD candidate.
But Michoacan Governor Lazaro Cardenas Batel, a PRD member, welcomed Monday's announcement and said he hoped the federal forces would stay.
"We hope it won't be a fleeting presence, that it will be a presence that will seriously reduce the level of violence in Michoacan," Cardenas Batel told local media.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema