U.S. Embassy Denies Intervening in Mexico Cabinet Choice

The United States Embassy in Mexico on Friday issued a statement denying an article in The New York Times that reported that Ambassador Anthony Wayne had met with senior Mexican officials to discuss American concerns about the possible appointment of Gen. Moisés García Ochoa of Mexico as that country’s defense secretary.
“Despite significant reporting in the Mexican press during the presidential transition about the potential candidates to head Mexico’s military,” the statement read, “Ambassador Wayne did not discuss Gen. Moisés García Ochoa with Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, now secretary of government, or Jorge Carlos Ramírez Marín, now secretary for agrarian, territorial and urban development (SEDATU), as reported in the New York Times story.”

The embassy’s statement comes 11 days after the Times article about Washington’s exchanges with Mexico regarding General García Ochoa. It follows an avalanche of outrage in the Mexican news media, whose columnists and commentators have accused the United States of “vetoing” General García’s nomination and of infringing on Mexican sovereignty. Some in the news media have called on Mexico’s new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, to rethink the terms of his government’s cooperation with the Obama administration on security matters.

The embassy statement on Friday also came after an earlier statement by William Ostick, a State Department spokesman, that did not dispute the facts in the Times’ account.

On Feb. 4, The Times reported that some senior American officials suspected General García Ochoa of skimming money from multimillion-dollar defense contracts. It reported that the Drug Enforcement Administration suspected the general of having links to drug traffickers dating back to the late 1990s. And the newspaper reported that Ambassador Wayne discussed those concerns with Mexican officials.

In the end, General García Ochoa was passed over for his government’s top military job. The Times reported that it was unclear whether American concerns played a role in Mexico’s decision.

The Mexican government made no statement to The Times on the article. But Mr. Osorio Chong denied to Mexican newspapers that the United States had vetoed or made suggestions on any appointment, and Mr. Ramírez Marín has told Mexican reporters that while he and Mr. Chong were present at a meeting with the ambassador before the inauguration to discuss relations, the general’s possible appointment was not discussed.

Mexico arrests six suspects for rape of Spanish tourists

ACAPULCO (Reuters) - Mexico has arrested six men who confessed to the rape of six female Spanish tourists in Acapulco, a crime that drew global attention to the popular Mexican resort.
"We have six detainees who have confessed, totally confessed," Mexican Attorney General Jesus Murillo said on Wednesday at a news conference in Acapulco.
Early on February 4, hooded gunmen forced their way into a beach house the women rented, roughed up their seven male companions and raped the women.
Murillo said one of the suspects was apprehended on Tuesday, and the other five were detained overnight. Local officials said there was physical evidence that implicated the suspects.
Acapulco Mayor Luis Walton set off a media storm when he downplayed the seriousness of the attack, saying it could have happened "anywhere in the world," and that it hurt the image of the city, one of Mexico's most famous tourist destinations.
Acapulco is the biggest city in the state of Guerrero, which has been increasingly plagued by drug-related violence, prompting some exasperated residents in small towns to form "community police" forces.
The violence turned Acapulco into the murder capital of Mexico last year, with more than 1,000 murders reported by Mexican media in the city of approximately 800,000 people.
Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto has vowed to reduce the violence that soared after his predecessor Felipe Calderon launched an assault on drug cartels.
Pena Nieto, who launched a program to boost tourism on Wednesday, pledged to create a new militarized police force and increase spending on security to cut crime.
"We will keep working to improve public security conditions, which, without a doubt, is a fundamental and indispensable condition for the development and promotion of our country," Pena Nieto said in the beach resort of Bahia de Banderas in the state of Nayarit.

Mexico scrambles as violence threatens tourism zones

Mexican officials and trade executives look for ways to minimize damage to tourism, an industry that is a top income-earner and employer in Mexico.


MEXICO CITY — You might be hard-pressed to find the word "Mexico" in some of the advertising for tourist resorts in Mexico.

Brands like "Riviera Maya" often eclipse the name of the country where those lush beaches are located.

As deadly violence that has haunted Mexico for years threatens tourist zones, government officials and trade executives are scrambling for ways to minimize damage to an industry that is a top income-earner and employer.

The rapes last week of six Spanish women vacationing in Acapulco have heightened fear and called into question the government's ability to control crime and attract foreign visitors. It didn't help that about the same time, Mexico's minister of tourism was in, of all places, Spain, attempting to promote tourism. "This is Mexico's moment," was her theme.

Despite its many problems, including a flu epidemic in 2009, beach-ravaging storms and the global economic crisis — in addition to the violence that has claimed an estimated 70,000 lives since December 2006 — Mexico has managed to sustain a fairly robust tourism industry. The government that left office Dec. 1 said it had increased the number of international visitors during its six-year term by more than 20% from the previous six years.

But revenue has yet to rebound to the all-time high of nearly $13.4 billion reached in 2008, according to statistics published by the Tourism Ministry. Last year, the total was estimated at a little more than $11 billion, although final numbers were not available. Tourism is Mexico's third top source of income, after oil and remittances.

The number of tourists from the United States, by far the largest single source, has slipped slightly; but Mexico has attempted to make up for that by focusing on countries like Russia and China.

Perhaps most telling is that the Americans who still come are traveling to a shrinking vacationland.

Cruise lines eliminated Mazatlan as a port of call about two years ago, according to industry specialists. Long a cosmopolitan port with wide beaches and a picturesque historic center, and a resort favored by Ronald Reagan, Mazatlan is in the state of Sinaloa, home to Mexico's largest drug cartel. Rival gangs are now battling for control of the city, with shootouts and other violence escalating.

"We went from half a million visitors from cruise ships annually, to zero. Practically overnight," said Gabriel Tostado Bastidas, a Mazatlan native and director in Mexico of Hospitality Advance International, an industry consulting firm. "It has been devastating."

Similarly, Acapulco, once the crowning jewel of Mexico's Pacific coast, romping ground for the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and Elvis Presley, lost its international glory years ago. Local officials boasted 98% hotel occupancy over the Christmas holiday, but nearly all the visitors were Mexicans.

Ports still frequented by cruise ships include Cabo San Lucas, Puerto Vallarta and Cancun (aka the Riviera Maya), all still considered relatively safe. Same with the rest of the Yucatan Peninsula, which got a huge tourism boost last year thanks to rather hyped predictions of the end of the world according to the Maya calendar.

Mexico "is a very hard sell," said Chris DeRose, president of First Travel of California, an agency based in Villa Park. "The violence is scaring people. Unreasonably, in my opinion.... But you can't force them."

Even before the attacks last week, the U.S. State Department travel warning on Mexico cautioned visitors to Acapulco not to venture more than two blocks inland from the coastal Miguel Aleman highway; essentially: Avoid the city.

The rapes took place in a bungalow rented by six Spanish men, six Spanish women and a Mexican woman, in the area deemed safe, right on the beach, just a few miles south of the so-called Diamond Zone, Acapulco's newest and most luxurious enclave.

Authorities say that about 2 a.m. Monday, at least five hooded gunmen seized the men, who were sitting outside the bungalow, tied them up with phone cords and bathing suit straps and then entered the bedrooms and raped the Spanish women. The Mexican was spared. The ordeal lasted several hours. As of Saturday, no arrests had been made.

Violent aggression against foreign tourists in Mexico is not common, but industry analysts said it behooved Mexican authorities to get ahead of the story and, in publicity campaigns, confront the issue while reassuring potential visitors.

"The transparency approach is much more effective" than ignoring or hiding the reality, said Stephen Barth, professor of hospitality law at the University of Houston and founder of the website hospitalitylawyer.com.

It could be urgent. Spring break looms. Cesar Martinez, whose Texas-based MAS Consulting Group has worked with local Mexican governments on image issues, noted that the Texas Department of Public Safety would be issuing its annual travel advisory in the coming weeks. Last year, the department warned Texas college students not to travel south of the border for spring break. At all.

Experts cited the example of Colombia. For decades, it was a nation associated with vicious drug-war violence, an ingrained image that lasted even after a measure of peace was restored. Eventually, Colombian promoters hit upon a winning ad campaign, incorporating the word "danger" in spots, saying, "The only danger is you won't want to leave."

Hand of U.S. Is Seen in Halting General’s Rise in Mexico

As Mexico’s military staged its annual Independence Day parade in September, spectators filled the main square of Mexico City to cheer on the armed forces. Nearly 2,000 miles away in Washington, American officials were also paying attention.
But it was not the helicopters hovering overhead or the antiaircraft weapons or the soldiers in camouflage that caught their attention. It was the man chosen to march at the head of the parade, Gen. Moisés García Ochoa, who by tradition typically becomes the country’s next minister of defense.


The Obama administration had many concerns about the general, including the Drug Enforcement Administration’s suspicion that he had links to drug traffickers and the Pentagon’s anxiety that he had misused military supplies and skimmed money from multimillion-dollar defense contracts.

In the days leading up to Mexico’s presidential inauguration on Dec. 1, the United States ambassador to Mexico, Anthony Wayne, met with senior aides to President Enrique Peña Nieto to express alarm at the general’s possible promotion.

That back-channel communication provides a rare glimpse into the United States government’s deep involvement in Mexican security affairs — especially as Washington sizes up Mr. Peña Nieto, who is just two months into a six-year term. The American role in a Mexican cabinet pick also highlights the tensions and mistrust between the governments despite proclamations of cooperation and friendship.

“When it comes to Mexico, you have to accept that you’re going to dance with the devil,” said a former senior D.E.A. official, who requested anonymity because he works in the private sector in Mexico. “You can’t just fold your cards and go home because you can’t find people you completely trust. You play with the cards you’re dealt.”

A former senior Mexican intelligence official expressed similar misgivings about American officials. “The running complaint on the Mexican side is that the relationship with the United States is unequal and unbalanced,” said the former official, who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke anonymously to discuss diplomatic and security exchanges. “Mexico is open with its secrets. The United States is not. So there’s a lot of resentment. And there’s always an incentive to try to stick it to the Americans.”

Mexico: Six Tourists Are Raped in Home Invasion Near Acapulco

Five armed and masked men broke into a beach house near the port of Acapulco and raped six Spanish tourists, the authorities said. Eight other people in the same group, which included a Mexican woman who was not attacked, were bound during the assault, which began at 2 a.m. Monday. The city’s mayor, Luis Walton Aburto, acknowledged that the episode would affect the image of Acapulco, which officials have been trying to rehabilitate after years of skyrocketing cartel-related violence. But Mr. Aburto also played down the attack, saying such things happen all over the world. Shortly after, he issued an apology for his comments and offered to increase security in the city.

Mexico’s Toll Rises in Blast as Hunt Ends for Survivors

MEXICO CITY — Hundreds of rescue workers ended their search for survivors on Friday at the site of an explosion that tore through an office building of Mexico’s state-owned oil company a day earlier, as the death toll rose to 33. The head of the company said early indications about the cause suggested that it was an accident.

“All lines of investigation are open; we are not going to discount anything,” said Emilio Lozoya Austin, chief executive of the oil company, Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex. “But what it seems like, from what experts can observe, is that it was an accident.”

Mr. Lozoya, at a news conference Friday morning and in interviews throughout the day, emphasized that the investigation was continuing, and that no clear cause had been found. Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto, visiting a hospital where many of the 120 people who were injured by the explosion were being treated, asked the public to avoid speculating on the cause.

Nonetheless, in a country with little trust in its institutions, the pressure on the government to provide details is mounting as reporters and Twitter users ask pointed questions about why officials have not said what exploded or why. Rumors of bombs and of censored Twitter accounts of Pemex employees swirled online Friday, leading many to note that the blast revealed once again that when there is a lack of transparency, the void tends to be filled with imagined horrors.

“We are all into conspiracy theories,” said Gabriel Guerrero, a political analyst in Mexico City. While the government seems to have communicated relatively well so far, regularly updating the death toll, he said, “the real test will come over the next few days and weeks.”

Independent explosives experts said it often takes more than 48 hours to identify the cause of a large blast that, in this case, collapsed several floors and shattered windows across a wide area. Jimmie C. Oxley, a chemistry professor and explosives expert at the University of Rhode Island, said by telephone that while some forensic investigators may have an idea by now of what happened, it often takes more time to come to a conclusion with colleagues.

All of this is made more difficult by the amount of rubble at the site, Professor Oxley said, noting that photographs posted online showed a tangle of concrete, wires and collapsed floors.

Typically, she said, explosions at buildings are caused by one of two things: gas that is suddenly ignited, or a bomb. Bombs tend to create craters and cratered metal that point investigators to a specific location. If, for example, a basement garage was affected at the Pemex building, Professor Oxley said, investigators would look for signs of a car bomb.

“It’s hard to imagine a bomb carried by a person being very large,” she said.

Gas explosions, like the one that killed several hundred people in Guadalajara in 1992, can be harder to identify because there is not necessarily a single ignition point. Also, Professor Oxley said, since the explosion on Thursday occurred on the lower floors of a building (an administration building near the Pemex tower), “it’s important to know if you had the heating system of the building there, or how that was arranged.”

Government officials have said the blast happened in an area near the base of the building where workers checked their timecards. Before news of the explosion emerged, company officials said there was an electricity problem there, but Professor Oxley said electricity alone would lead to a fire, not an explosion, though if gas had been leaking, a small spark could have been enough to set off a colossal blast.

Still, not all investigations lead to answers. Recalling the case of an explosion at a mall in the Philippines that she was consulted on, Professor Oxley said she could not confirm that there were explosives present based on samples from the scene. “I don’t know there ever was a conclusion,” she said.

Economic Nudge for an Immigration Overhaul

The newfound urgency among Republicans to improve their standing among Hispanic voters is not the only reason that an immigration policy overhaul may have a better chance this year than in 2007, when Congress last tried to confront the issue and failed.

By some key measures, the problems underlying illegal immigration — the economic and demographic pressures that have drawn Mexicans north for decades in search of jobs and a better life, and the challenges for the United States of securing its borders — have diminished over the past six years.

The Mexican economy, while still riddled with inefficiency and inequality, is nonetheless humming along, providing many more job opportunities for Mexican workers. And in Mexico, the source of about 6 in 10 illegal immigrants in the United States, the birthrate has plummeted over the last few decades, shrinking the pool of potential emigrants.


“We are at a moment when the underlying drivers of what has been persistent, growing illegal immigration for 40 years have shifted,” said Doris Meissner, a commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service under President Bill Clinton and now a fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a research group. “There are some fundamental new realities.”
At the same time, one of the most contentious elements in previous battles over the issue — border security — has also become less of a partisan flash point. Even among border-state Republicans, there is optimism that the billions of dollars spent in recent years on fences, additional agents, surveillance drones and other measures is having a real effect.

“Yes, there’s been improvement in border security, and, yes, it helps a lot,” Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who is a leader of the bipartisan group seeking compromise legislation, said when asked whether the politics of getting a deal this time around would be easier because of stepped-up enforcement.

There is still debate about whether the changes are permanent or would be reversed in the event of another sharp economic downturn in Mexico or across Latin America — or a strong rebound in economic growth and demand for labor in the United States.

But for now the population of illegal immigrants in the United States shows little sign of growth. It fell to 11.1 million in 2011, the most recent year for which figures are available, from a peak of 12 million in 2007, the Pew Hispanic Center said in a report on Tuesday. By one new estimate, the number of people who managed to cross the Mexican border illegally into the United States fell to 85,000 in 2011, down from 600,000 five years earlier.

With the scale of the problem stabilizing for the moment, or even shrinking, some experts say, there is more room for political compromise than the last time around.

“The immigration debate in recent years, as it has played out in the last two presidential campaigns, has not kept pace with the facts on the ground,” said Paul Taylor, the director of the Pew Hispanic Center. “I do sense that the nature of the debate is changing and catching up with the reality.”

Mexico’s population growth has fallen to an annual rate of 1.1 percent in the first decade of this century from 3.2 percent in the 1960s, according to the Migration Policy Institute. The number of people under 15 years old is declining in Mexico, and the number of people ages 15 to 29 will start doing so in the coming years, an important shift given that most illegal immigrants arrive in the United States before age 30.

Children are staying in school longer, an indication of an intention not to emigrate in search of low-skill employment, and the development of a middle class has further depleted the numbers of Mexicans compelled to seek a livelihood in the United States.

The statistics at the border are also striking evidence of a diminished flow of people seeking to cross into the United States illegally. Reflecting in part the deterrent effect of tighter border patrols, as well as the economic and demographic shifts, the number of apprehensions along the border has fallen sharply. Those people who have gotten through are being caught and deported at record-high rates.

Some analysts say the drop in apprehensions reflects not so much greater control of the border as a recognition by potential immigrants that the chances of finding a job in the United States have fallen over the past few years. And in any case the decline does not alter the most compelling fact of the debate to both sides, which is that there are 11 million undocumented people already living in the United States whose status must be addressed in any comprehensive legislation.

But even though the economic and demographic changes have remained largely in the background of the debate, analysts say they could offer more reassurance to conservatives in particular that giving legal status to those immigrants would not simply produce another wave of them.

Still, some skepticism about changes to immigration policy remains. Mexico continues to suffer from social instability, and the prolonged weakness in the American labor market makes it harder to draw long-term conclusions about the relative attraction of coming to the United States. Many Republicans continue to view Mexico warily, seeing in the government’s difficulties in controlling the violence and general lawlessness created by drug cartels a dangerous instability that could create deeper cross-border troubles.

“Mexico is on fire and about to blow up,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, a supporter of the bipartisan package, expressing concern about whether the positive trends in illegal immigration were permanent.