InfoAnda - Mexican city battered by drug gangs feels lure of truce |

Pakistanis angry over detentions in Times Sq. case
Monday, May 24, 2010
ISLAMABAD – Relatives of three men detained by Pakistan for alleged links to the suspect in the attempted Times Square bombing say the men are innocent.
They

Taiwan denies boycotting Australian film festival
Thursday, August 6, 2009

AFP - Thursday, August 6TAIPEI (AFP) - - Taiwan's Beijing-friendly government on Wednesday denied boycotting an Australian film festival amid a row over the e

Merkel's support dips, regional ally resigns International
Thursday, September 3, 2009

By Sarah Marsh and Noah Barkin

BERLIN (Reuters) - Chancellor Angela Merkel suffered a double blow on Thursday as a senior party ally in east German

Minister seeks closure of anti-Berlusconi websites
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
ROME (AFP) - – The Italian government moved Tuesday to close down Internet sites encouraging further violence against Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who

Asian markets mixed after Wall Street rally
Wednesday, March 18, 2009

By ELAINE KURTENBACH,AP Business Writer AP - Wednesday, March 18SHANGHAI - Asia's stock market rally seemed to be running out of steam Wednesday, despite an

Irish PM leads biggest ever trade mission to Japan | 12 January 2009
Award winning artistes may not get re-contract with TVB | 3 December 2008
Seoul shares at 10-mth closing high;techs, banks up | 20 July 2009

Webb Simpson, Brendon de Jonge share lead at Greenbrier Classic | 30 July 2011

Forum Views () Forum Replies ()

Read more with google mobile : Mexican city battered by drug gangs feels lure of truce |

Edition: U.S. Africa Arabic Argentina Brazil Canada China France Germany India Italy Japan Latin America Mexico Russia Spain United Kingdom Home Business Business Home Economy Technology Media Small Business Legal Deals Earnings Social Pulse Business Video The Freeland File Aerospace & Defense Investing Simplified Markets Markets Home U.S. Markets European Markets Asian Markets Global Market Data Indices M&A Stocks Bonds Currencies Commodities Futures Funds peHUB World World Home U.S. Brazil China Euro Zone Japan Mexico Russia India Insight World Video Reuters Investigates Decoder Politics Politics Home Election 2012 Campaign Polling Supreme Court Politics Video Tech Technology Home MediaFile Science Tech Video Tech Tonic Social Pulse Opinion Opinion Home Chrystia Freeland John Lloyd Felix Salmon Jack Shafer David Rohde Nader Mousavizadeh Lucy P. Marcus Nicholas Wapshott Bethany McLean Anatole Kaletsky Edward Hadas Hugo Dixon Ian Bremmer Lawrence Summers Susan Glasser The Great Debate Steven Brill Reihan Salam Frederick Kempe Christopher Papagianis Mark Leonard Breakingviews Equities Credit Private Equity M&A Macro & Markets Politics Breakingviews Video Money Money Home Tax Break Lipper Awards 2012 Global Investing MuniLand Unstructured Finance Linda Stern Mark Miller John Wasik James Saft Analyst Research Alerts Watchlist Portfolio Stock Screener Fund Screener Personal Finance Video Money Clip Investing 201 Life Health Sports Arts Faithworld Business Traveler Entertainment Oddly Enough Lifestyle Video Pictures Pictures Home Reuters Photographers Full Focus Video Reuters TV Reuters News Article Comments (2) Full Focus Photos of the week Our best photos from the past week. Slideshow Download our Wider Image iPad app Images of September Follow Reuters Facebook Twitter RSS YouTube Read Sandy strengthens as nears coast; Wall Street shut | 11:26am EDT Iran has pictures of restricted Israeli areas: Iran MP 8:02am EDT Evacuations, shutdowns on East Coast before storm | 28 Oct 2012 Analysis: U.S. presidential race is all about Ohio - or is it? 1:21am EDT Massive Hurricane Sandy takes aim at East Coast | 27 Oct 2012 Discussed 539 White House told of militant claim two hours after Libya attack: emails 158 After final debate, Obama says election comes down to trust 130 Trump to give $5 million to charity if Obama releases records Sponsored Links Mexican city battered by drug gangs feels lure of truce Tweet Share this Email Print Related News U.S. targets violent Latin American street gang MS-13 Thu, Oct 11 2012 Mexico says it killed top Zetas drug lord but body snatched Tue, Oct 9 2012 Mexico says marines may have killed top Zetas drug lord Tue, Oct 9 2012 Son of ex-Mexican opposition party chief shot dead Thu, Oct 4 2012 Pablo Escobar T-shirts a hit in Mexico drug war states Tue, Oct 2 2012 Analysis & Opinion It’s time to eliminate anonymous shell companies Related Topics World » Mexico » Mexico Election » Relatives of disappeared people march after the arrival of Mexican poet Javier Sicilia in Torreon June 8, 2011. Credit: Reuters/Tomas Bravo By Dave Graham TORREON, Mexico | Mon Oct 29, 2012 7:24am EDT TORREON, Mexico (Reuters) - In a five-year struggle with Mexico's most notorious drug cartel, the city of Torreon has suffered a 16-fold increase in murders, fired its police department and lost control of its main prison to the gang. The Zetas cartel arrived in Torreon in mid-2007, and this center of manufacturing, mining and farming once seen as a model for progress has become one of Mexico's most dangerous cities. Massacres at drug rehab clinics, bags of severed heads and gunfights at the soccer stadium have charted the decline of a city that a decade ago stood at the forefront of Mexico's industrial advances after the nation joined the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States and Canada. Once enticing U.S. firms like Caterpillar and John Deere and Japanese auto parts maker Takata to open plants, Torreon has not attracted any other big names since the Zetas swept in. "It's a powder keg," said a former mayor, Guillermo Anaya, who ran the city from 2003 to 2005 and is now a federal lawmaker. Many people in the arid metropolis about 275 miles from the U.S. border believe if Torreon cannot defeat the Zetas soon it may need to reach some kind of agreement with their arch rivals, the Sinaloa Cartel, and let them do the job. Widely seen as the most brutal Mexican drug gang, the Zetas have so terrorized Torreon and the surrounding state of Coahuila that some officials make a clear distinction between them and the Sinaloa Cartel, for years the dominant outfit in the city. "They (the Zetas) act without any kind of principles," Torreon's police chief, Adelaido Flores, told Reuters. "The ones from Sinaloa don't mess ... with the population." Local politicians tacitly admit that deals with cartels, often unspoken, helped keep the peace in the past, before a surge in violence prompted President Felipe Calderon to mount a military-led crackdown against organized crime six years ago. Calderon's forces have captured or killed many top capos around Mexico, but the campaign triggered fresh turf wars and a sharp increase in bloodshed, spearheaded by a new generation of criminals like the Zetas. Over 60,000 people have been killed in Mexico in drug-related violence during Calderon's presidency. In Torreon, the Zetas took control of the local police, and in March 2010 they invaded city hall to demand that Mayor Eduardo Olmos sack the army general he had hired to clean up the force. "You can't say that the police was infiltrated by organized crime - the police was organized crime," Olmos said. Subsequently, all but one of the 1,000-strong force were fired or deserted, and for a week Villa and his bodyguards were the only police. At first, the city behaved "marvelously," said Olmos. Then the shootings, armed robberies and kidnappings took off as the gangs turned Torreon into a killing factory. According to local newspaper El Siglo de Torreon, there were 830 homicides in the first nine months of 2012 in the city's metropolitan area, home to just over 1 million people. HIGHER MURDER RATE Greater Torreon had 990 killings in 2011, up from 62 in 2006. It now has a higher homicide rate than Ciudad Juarez, long Mexico's murder capital. Only Acapulco's is worse. Flores insists that better days lie ahead, saying the Zetas have been weakened by security forces and by the Sinaloa Cartel, run by Mexico's most wanted man, Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman. More than 90 percent of the hundreds of suspected gang members killed or arrested in Torreon this year have been Zetas, according to estimates by city authorities. "They're nearly being finished off here," said the soft-spoken Police Chief Flores, standing on a hill above the city and gesturing at its impoverished western fringes. Towering above him, a 72-foot (22-meter) statue of Jesus Christ with outstretched arms gazes across the urban sprawl that is now the bloodiest battleground in the Zetas-Sinaloa conflict. Despite the setbacks this year, the Zetas still control Torreon's prison, police and the mayor's office say. Lying at the crossroads between Mexico's Pacific states and Ciudad Juarez and Monterrey, and linking the south to the U.S. border, Torreon has long been a strategic hub for drug runners. Locals say traffickers co-existed peacefully with legitimate businesses when Guzman's gang dominated here. At the very least, senior politicians in Coahuila have looked the other way, while some actively colluded with gangs, local leaders say. "They're up to their necks in it, from the top down," one local business executive said of the politicians. "But don't put my name down or they'll be sending flowers to my grave." When Calderon took office in 2006, voters like 53-year-old Torreon housewife Rosaura Gomez supported his conservative National Action Party (PAN) for taking on drug traffickers. But as the violence intensified and got closer to home, she lost faith. In this year's presidential election, Gomez backed the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ruled for most of the 20th century, in the hope that it can restore order. The party won the election and will return to power in December. "Before, there was a pact, and things were calm. The drugs went to the United States and these groups didn't mess with the people. This is what we want so we can live in peace," she said. SUFFERING ECONOMY Today, the economy is suffering. Garbage blows down the streets of Torreon's old town, passing shuttered businesses. The construction industry estimates about half the building firms are out of work in a city that had near full employment in 2000. Private-sector investment is on track to drop by nearly a third from 2011. New job creation is heading for a 40-percent fall to about 4,800 - in a city growing by 12,000 people a year. Big foreign firms are tight-lipped about the violence. A Caterpillar official said the company's security costs had risen, but that its business had not been affected. One top business executive, who asked to remain anonymous, says many acquaintances have left to escape the violence. Wearing a pained expression, he tells how a kidnapped friend had to give the names of other suitable victims to his captors as part of the ransom. His name was among the five given. Despite that, the businessman argues that the crackdown on drug trafficking has been disastrous for his city, forcing gangs to resort to ever-more violent forms of money making. He and many other locals look back to the days when a "Don't ask, don't tell" attitude prevailed and business was good. President-elect Enrique Pena Nieto, who takes office on December 1, has rejected negotiating with the gangs, mindful of the PRI's past reputation for cutting deals. But he stresses his priority is reducing the violence, then taking on the drug traffickers. In private, some officials here say it may be impossible to avoid tacit deals with the cartels in certain areas unless the violence is curbed quickly. That means hammering the Zetas. DEALS WITH THE GANGS "I think the whole country wants the Zetas exterminated," said Raul Benitez, a security expert at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). "And if he's successful, Pena Nieto will have the support to do what he wants with his drug war." Polls show a large majority of Mexicans reject deals with the gangs, but a 2011 survey in the hard-hit state of Chihuahua next to Coahuila showed nearly 50 percent favored a pact. The survey did not include Coahuila, where the Zetas' blend of co-option and coercion has become a serious embarrassment. Several former state officials are under investigation by federal prosecutors on suspicion of working for the drug gang. On October 7, marines killed Zetas leader Heriberto Lazcano in the state. Then his body was stolen from a funeral home by armed men. When Torreon's Mayor Olmos began to root out the Zetas, the police went on strike. Calling a meeting in his office, he soon realized the officers who arrived were working for the enemy. He described how a policeman slouched in a chair and wearing sunglasses held up a phone so that the Zetas at the other end could hear every word the mayor said. When Olmos refused to sack the police chief, General Bibiano Villa, masked Zetas surrounded his office, lining the stairs and the streets outside. With the help of the media, Olmos broke the strike and forced all the police to take "loyalty tests." Only one, a woman, passed. He then rebuilt the force with recruits from outside Coahuila and the army, and bumped up pay by 50 percent or more. But infiltration is a "permanent problem," he says. Olmos, whose father was kidnapped by a gang in 1996, says the cartels are "equally bad" and opposes making deals. But he admits there is growing public pressure to end the violence. Even some politicians from Calderon's PAN wonder whether a review of the drugs policy is needed to pacify hard-hit areas. "I think a lot of people think negotiating with certain groups may resolve this problem," said Rodolfo Walss, a PAN city councilor in Torreon. "Frankly, I don't know." Back on the Cerro de las Noas hill, where the huge concrete statue of Christ looms above the city, the attitude of salesman Jose Angel Aguirre sums up the conundrum facing Torreon. Saying "I would rather bury my son today than discover he was out there killing" for a drug cartel, Aguirre conceded he would accept the presence of one gang if it improved security. "It would be better if one of the two sides won," the 58-year-old said. "Then there would be peace." (Editing by Kieran Murray and Philip Barbara) World Mexico Mexico Election Related Quotes and News Company Price Related News Tweet this Link this Share this Digg this Email Reprints We welcome comments that advance the story through relevant opinion, anecdotes, links and data. If you see a comment that you believe is irrelevant or inappropriate, you can flag it to our editors by using the report abuse links. Views expressed in the comments do not represent those of Reuters. For more information on our comment policy, see http://blogs.reuters.com/fulldisclosure/2010/09/27/toward-a-more-thoughtful-conversation-on-stories/ Comments (2) AZreb wrote: Edition: U.S. Africa Arabic Argentina Brazil Canada China France Germany India Italy Japan Latin America Mexico Russia Spain United Kingdom Back to top Reuters.com Business Markets World Politics Technology Opinion Money Pictures Videos Site Index Legal Bankruptcy Law California Legal New York Legal Securities Law Support & Contact Support Corrections Connect with Reuters Twitter Facebook LinkedIn RSS Podcast Newsletters Mobile About Privacy Policy Terms of Use AdChoices Copyright Our Flagship financial information platform incorporating Reuters Insider An ultra-low latency infrastructure for electronic trading and data distribution A connected approach to governance, risk and compliance Our next generation legal research platform Our global tax workstation Thomsonreuters.com About Thomson Reuters Investor Relations Careers Contact Us Thomson Reuters is the world's largest international multimedia news agency, providing investing news, world news, business news, technology news, headline news, small business news, news alerts, personal finance, stock market, and mutual funds information available on Reuters.com, video, mobile, and interactive television platforms. Thomson Reuters journalists are subject to an Editorial Handbook which requires fair presentation and disclosure of relevant interests. NYSE and AMEX quotes delayed by at least 20 minutes. Nasdaq delayed by at least 15 minutes. For a complete list of exchanges and delays, please click here.

Other News on Monday, 29 October 2012
Greece says EU/IMF lenders refuse to concede on reforms |
Governments to debate 50 billion euro cut to EU budget |
Ukraine's ruling party leads in election: exit polls |
Left in Lithuania eyes vote win after austerity pain |
Finnish eurosceptics gain local seats, keep pressure on PM |
Berlusconi threat to topple Monti shows party divisions |
Catalans want referendum on independence
Argo rises above Cloud Atlas as Sandy spooks |
Insight: China grassroots democracy challenge awaits new leaders |
Japan PM signals election can wait, defies opposition |
Iran has pictures of restricted Israeli areas: Iran MP |
Ukraine ruling party set for election win, nationalists gain |
Cyprus police say foil murder bid on island's top prosecutor |
Indian state's industrial dream mired in delays, protests |
Philippines' Arroyo enters no plea in plunder case, seeks bail |
Lithuania opposition talks on government after austerity backlash election |
Narendra Modi: the Indian leader who came in from the cold |
In San Francisco, tech investor leads a political makeover |
Analysis: E-readers grapple with a future on the shelf |
Rolling Stones memorabilia auctioned after divorce |
Air strikes in Damascus wreck last day of Syria truce |
Greek editor stands trial over Swiss accounts list |
Bulgaria nationalists rally in support of Muslims' trial |
Italy PM Monti says intends to serve until 2013 election |
Mexican city battered by drug gangs feels lure of truce |
Residents blocked from returning to captured Libyan town |
Opposition Labor increases pressure on Cameron before EU talks |
China snubs SE Asia push for South China Sea deal |
Dutch Liberal and Labor parties agree to coalition deal |
Verizon Wireless to sell Nokia's new Lumia smartphones |
Halloween apps for a spooky and safe night |
Skyfall breaks Bond's UK box office record |
Greece at new risk of being pushed off euro
Bodies of missing Tenn. mom, Jo Ann Bain, and daughter found
Female Breasts Are Bigger Than Ever
AMD Trinity Accelerated Processing Units Now in Volume Production
The Avengers (2012 film), made the second biggest opening- and single-day gross of all-time
AMD to Start Production of piledriver
Ivy Bridge Quad-Core, Four-Thread Desktop CPUs
Islamists Protest Lady Gaga's Concert in Indonesia
Japan Successfully Broadcasts an 8K Signal Over the Air
ECB boosts loans to 1 trillion Euro to stop credit crunch
Egypt : Mohammed Morsi won with 52 percent
What do you call 100,000 Frenchmen with their hands up
AMD Launches AMD Embedded R-Series APU Platform
Fed Should not Ignore Emerging Market Crisis
Fed casts shadow over India, emerging markets
Why are Chinese tourists so rude? A few insights

USD EUR - 1 year graph		BlogMeter 1.01