A former Mexican presidential candidate who has remained a power broker in the ruling party was missing amid signs of violence, the federal Attorney General’s Office said on Saturday.
Prosecutors said that the car of Diego Fernandez de Cevallos was found near his ranch in the central state of Queretaro. It said some of his belongings were found inside the car as well as unspecified “signs of violence.”
The Mexican newspaper El Universal reported that federal sources said Fernandez de Cevallos had been kidnapped, but a federal prosecutor’s spokeswoman said she could not confirm that.
Queretaro state Attorney General Arsenio Duran told the radio station Formato 21 that investigators found some of Fernandez de Cevallos’ belongings inside the car and a small pair of scissors with traces of blood on the ground near the car.
Duran said a night watchman told police Fernandez de Cevallos was supposed to arrive to his ranch in the town of Pedro Escobedo on Friday night, but that he never made it.
Relatives who had planned to have breakfast with him Saturday morning reported him missing, Duran said. Relatives told authorities no one had contacted them to ask for a ransom.
Fernandez de Cevallos, 69, was the 1994 presidential candidate of the National Action Party (PAN) that now governs Mexico and he has continued to be an influential figure, as well as one of Mexico’s most successful attorneys.
The bearded, cigar-chomping candidate emerged from relative obscurity during Mexico’s first televised debate by presidential candidates in 1994, striking a chord with the middle class with his calls to topple the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which had held power since 1929.
He finished second to Ernesto Zedillo that year, but his party finally won the presidency six years later when Vicente Fox was elected.
Mexican President Felipe Calderon said in a statement he has ordered federal authorities to help Querataro state investigators in the search for Fernandez de Cevallos, calling him “a key politician in the Mexican transition to democracy.”
Fernandez de Cevallos became an elder statesman for the party, a power broker who split his time between Mexico’s Senate and his practice as an attorney for some of Mexico’s richest businesses.
He shrugged off critics’ allegations that there was a conflict of interest in representing companies that won lucrative lawsuits against the government while serving in Congress.
Fernandez de Cevallos’ father helped found the PAN in 1939.
One of 15 children, Fernandez de Cevallos grew up in the central state of Queretaro and eventually joined law firms linked to some of the PAN’s founders, creating ties that continued throughout his life. He was a close friend of several senior Cabinet ministers, including Mexican Interior Secretary Fernando Gomez-Mont.
Kidnappers often target the wealthy in Mexico but rarely go after such senior politicians or public officials.
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
RSS