Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard said on Thursday he should be fired if he does not rein in kidnappings, shootings and other violent crime in the capital of 20 million people.
Public anger is growing over an ineffective police response to rampant crime in one of the largest cities in the world.
The recent kidnapping and murder of Fernando Marti, 14, the son of a well-known Mexico City businessman, sparked an outcry in a country already hardened to shootings, muggings and widespread violence by drug cartels. Several police officers have been arrested over the kidnapping.
At a meeting of politicians to discuss security problems, the boy’s father challenged Ebrard and others to step down if they cannot make streets safer. Ebrard, a leftist considered a possible candidate for the 2012 presidential contest, said he accepted the challenge.
“We must improve security in our city and if we don’t, there are established procedures in the capital for revoking a mandate, which is what should happen,” said Ebrard, who is mayor of about half of the greater Mexico City area.
High crime rates are not exclusive to the capital.
Mexican President Felipe Calderon, also under pressure to stamp out violent crime, hosted the meeting of state governors, lawmakers and security chiefs. The central government pledged to establish anti-kidnapping measures in cooperation with local authorities.
After meeting with provincial governors, top judges, mayors and lawmakers, Calderon signed an agreement to coordinate crime fighting across the nation on a day in which seven police officers were killed countrywide.
He pledged to pass legislation against money laundering and provisions to locate the mobile phones of kidnapping suspects. He also promised to keep the public better informed about anti-crime measures and scour police ranks for renegade officers.
Kidnappings in particular have been on the rise in Mexico, Mexican Security Minister Genaro Garcia Luna said. In 2002, 504 cases where registered, but the number jumped to 785 last year. Unofficial estimates indicate that the number is actually significantly higher. Kidnappings jumped almost 40 percent nationwide between 2004 and last year. Mexico ranks with Iraq and Colombia among the worst countries for abductions.
Kidnappings and blackmail are often organized out of prisons, Garcia Luna said. There have also been a number of reports of police involvement.
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