McALLEN, Texas — Dozens of Mattel Inc. employees were on their way to another day of work making Power Wheels in Mexico’s industrial heartland when gunshots erupted around them and a grenade ripped into one of their buses, killing one worker and wounding five. The battle between drug traffickers and the army near the city of Monterrey last week was the sort of violence that is frightening U.S. companies away from new investments south of the border, where organized criminals are increasingly turning to kidnappings, extortion and cargo thefts despite a government offensive against drug cartels. “These acts of violence are not happening in a vacuum; they’re happening in the street that could be right out in front of your building. Bullets get shot and they have to stop somewhere,” said Dan Burges, a senior director at Freightwatch Inc., an Austin-based cargo security firm. As a result, only half of the U.S. firms surveyed recently by the U.S.-Mexico Chamber of Commerce said they would go ahead with new investment plans in Mexico and several companies, including Whirlpool Corp., have recently announced they would put new factories elsewhere citing concerns about safety. More than 35,000 people have died in drug-related violence since President Felipe Calderon deployed thousands of federal security forces four years ago to fight traffickers. In recent months, nearly 400 bodies have been pulled from mass graves in the northern states of Tamaulipas and Durango. There are near-daily reports of drug-gang executions, kidnappings and extortion. The army said the Mattel workers were apparently caught in crossfire on May 6 when attackers believed to be working for the Zetas cartel assaulted a military convoy with guns and a grenade launcher from a highway overpass on the outskirts of Monterrey. “The people of Mattel were shocked and incredibly saddened” by the attack, the company said in a statement released by spokesman Jules Andres. But battles between government and cartel forces are increasingly common, and companies and their workers are inevitably affected. One out of 10 companies reported kidnappings and 60 percent said their employees were beaten or threatened in 2010, according to the U.S.-Mexico Chamber of Commerce. And cargo thefts from trucks and trains are rampant and soaring. Cargo thefts cost businesses about $700 million last year, a 40 percent increase over the past three years, according to the National Multimodal Transport Alliance. http://www.bendbulletin.com/apps/pb...0110516/NEWS0107/105160345/1011&nav_category= It is rumored Mattel is stepping up production of it's action figures in preparation for a massive retaliatory strike. EDIT: Guatemalan cartel did the beheading this time. Give credit where credit is due.
More on the Guatemala City Massacre: Investigators are looking into ties between the ranch owner, Otto Salguero, and drug trafficking, Colom said. A message written in blood on one of the ranch building's walls said the killers were looking for Salguero, whose whereabouts is not known. Colom said he owns four ranches and hundreds of head of cattle. But none of the victims had ties to drug cartels, authorities said. Rather they were innocent ranch workers and their families caught up in an increasingly bloody war mirroring the Zetas quest for territory in Mexico. Two women and two children were among the dead. The injured survivor said he had been working at the ranch for about a month. The Zetas are blamed for two recent mass killings in Mexico as well, 183 bodies found in mass graves last month and a massacre of 72 migrants last August, both in the state of Tamaulipas bordering Texas. Mexican drug cartels now operate virtually uninhibited in Central America. U.S.-supported crackdowns in Mexico and Colombia have only pushed traffickers into a region where corruption is rampant, borders lack even minimal immigration control and local gangs provide a ready-made infrastructure for organized crime. The Guatemalan government recently ended a two-month siege near Peten in the neighboring mountainous state of Alta Verapaz, also a prime corridor for smuggling drugs from Honduras to Mexico, where Zetas roamed the streets with assault rifles and armored vehicles and even controlled when people could leave their homes. Colom said on Monday he would not call a state of siege in Peten, at least for the time being. Law enforcement officials have said that Zetas control at least three other provinces in Guatemala and as much as half of country's territory. http://hosted2.ap.org/txdam/633c954...Guatemala/id-0b34f3a2b9ab412a98f94e3f03d6ac89
The PRI used to be the ruling party, but the US got in Fox in 2000 and Calderon in 2006 in an election full of fraud that had to be decided by Mexico's Supreme Court. The manufacture of drugs used to be orderly and kill no one, but this new US war on drugs has killed 35,000 and will be much more. Why doesn't the US bomb Mexico for humanitarian reasons like it does Libya?
