Probe will examine roles of army and Federal Police in the night of violence in Iguala, Guerrero, in 2014

by Mexico News Daily

Mexico’s new government will investigate “everyone” involved in the disappearance of 43 teaching students four years ago today in Iguala, Guerrero.

President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador met today with the families of the students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College and assured them that the truth will come out through an investigation that will go as far as to examine the roles of the army and the Federal Police.

The current federal government claims that corrupt municipal officials turned the students over to a criminal gang that killed them and incinerated their bodies.

At a press conference after their two-hour meeting, López Obrador said it was agreed that judicial authorities be called on to reaffirm a court order to implement a truth commission, a move the current government has resisted.

If a commission has not been established by December 1, when the president-elect takes office, he will create one by decree, López Obrador vowed.

The government’s investigation into the case has been widely criticized by international experts, human rights organizations, Mexican journalists and the students’ families. Many people suspect that the army may have played a role in the students’ disappearance.

In June, a federal court ordered the creation of a truth and justice commission to undertake a new investigation, ruling that the one carried out by the federal Attorney General’s office (PGR) “was not prompt, effective, independent or impartial.”

However, the government has launched legal action against the court’s order to create the commission, arguing that it is impossible to do so.

There is “a real, legal and material impossibility” to create the commission, the PGR said in June.

Alejandro Encinas, who will be an Interior Secretariat human rights undersecretary in the new government, offered his own pledge yesterday that a truth commission will be created.

“If the current government doesn’t comply [with the court order], we will implement it. It’s a matter of political will and an act of justice,” he said in a radio interview.

Meanwhile, current students of the Ayotzinapa college attacked military installations in Chilpancingo, Guerrero, yesterday as they renewed protests against the authorities’ failure to solve the case.

The students arrived in the state capital at around 5:00pm and participated in a march and rally before making their way to the army barracks where they threw Molotov cocktails, fireworks and stones that damaged the building’s façade.

The attack lasted less than 10 minutes before the students boarded buses and left, according to the newspaper Reforma.

Parents of the 43 students will take part in a march in Mexico City today with students and members of social and human rights organizations.

The father of one of the missing students said yesterday that he saw “a little hope” that the case will be solved during López Obrador’s presidency.

“Yes, there is a little hope with this government, there’s a new power, we’re going to raise everything . . .” Maximino Hernández told the television program La Nota Dura.

Vidulfo Rosales, a lawyer for the disappeared students’ parents, said the incoming administration has a chance to right the wrongs of the current government.

“The government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador has the opportunity to give results in a very concrete way . . . [The case] could serve as an element that helps to resolve other cases of disappeared people,” he said.

The notorious Ayotzinapa-Iguala case and its subsequent investigation is considered by many as the biggest failure of the current administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto. But the president said last month that he stands by the “historical truth” declared by investigators.

According to the official version of events, the students’ bodies were burned in the Cocula municipal dump before their remains were disposed of in a nearby river. Then attorney general Jesús Murillo Karam declared in early 2015 that the investigation had produced the “historical truth,” a phrase that has been widely ridiculed since by critics of the probe.

Earlier this year, the United Nations released a report that said that 34 people were tortured in connection with the investigation and that suspects had been arbitrarily detained.

The National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) also said in June that it has “undoubted evidence” that one man was wrongfully arrested in connection with the crime in a case of mistaken identity.

Source: Reforma (sp), El Financiero (sp)

In other news in Mexico:

No plastic straws will be allowed in Querétaro by next March
Restaurants say use of straws is down 95 percent

The municipal council of Querétaro agreed yesterday to start phasing out the free distribution of plastic straws in restaurants.

Acting mayor Enrique Correa Sada explained that the technical aspects of the new regulations have yet to be worked out, and that a full prohibition won’t go into effect until March.

In the interim, the municipality will launch an information campaign about the new regulation, and give restaurateurs time to exhaust their supplies of straws.

The president of the Querétaro chapter of the restaurant industry association Canirac told the newspaper Milenio that its 185 members have reduced their plastic straw use by 95% over the last six months.

Current practice is only to provide a straw when a customer asks for one, said Sergio Salmón Franz.

He also said he supports the idea of biodegradable straws, but their use is up to each restaurateur.

The decision by council to phase out straws comes after its August decision to restrict the use of plastic bags.

Source: Milenio (sp).

Joaquín Guzmán Loera’s defense team complain that their client is being systematically denied due process

Edward Helmore

On the face of it, criminal complaint 1:09-cr-00466-BMC is a straightforward drug-conspiracy case based on 300,000 pages of seized documents, including drug ledgers and shipping manifests, wire-tap recordings and potentially dozens of cooperating witnesses.

But the sheer abundance of discovery material alone is an indication that little about United States v Joaquín Guzmán Loera will be straightforward when jury selection begins in Brooklyn federal Judge Brian Cogan’s court room on Nov. 5.

For the government, it’s a banner prosecution; a rare opportunity to serve justice on a notorious trafficking kingpin known variously as El Shorty (for his diminutive stature), El Rapido (for the efficiency of his trafficking operation), or El Chapo to followers of narco folklore everywhere.

But the passage from extradition on Barack Obama’s final night in office in 2017 to trial in Brooklyn has been fraught with delays caused by defense complaints that Guzmán, for two decades the head of Mexico’s dominant Sinaloa crime cartel, is being systematically denied due process.

“I’ve defended some difficult cases and some notorious clients but I’ve never had both arms tied behind my back like this,” says Jeffrey Lichtman, a heavy hitting New York criminal defence lawyer who formally joined Guzmán’s defence team last month. “This is literally an inquisition. Constitutional fairness has gone out of the window because the government wants a show trial with a quickie conviction.”

The addition of Lichtman, who is best known for winning an acquittal for John Gotti Jr on mob related racketeering charges, has amplified a sense of anticipation before the trial. Guzmán’s wife, the former beauty queen Emma Coronel Aispuro, now attends pretrial hearings with the couple’s two young daughters, who wave and coo excitedly to their father from the gallery. That space is now crammed with increasing numbers of media from Mexico and Central America, where Guzmán remains both reviled and revered.

The vast amount of evidence prosecutors have assembled to back up their story of Guzmán’s two decades at the top has now landed with the defense, a “dump” in their opinion, and assembled “with no rhyme or reason”.

If the government’s evidence against Guzmán is as good as it claims it is, Lichtman argued, why are they treating El Chapo in this fashion? “It’s making me think that maybe the evidence is not so good and they’re going to rely on the evidence of people who’ve spent their entire lives selling drugs and lying,” he said.

Exacerbating the problem of sifting through that material, the defence claims, is being denied sufficient access to a client who does not speak English and whose ability to participate in his defence is hampered by the harsh conditions of his 17-month confinement at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan.

“He’s in isolation 24 hours a day and his condition is deteriorating,” said Lichtman. “He has no contact with other prisoners and very little contact with jailers, who don’t speak Spanish. He has no ability to speak to his family and gets two calls from his sister totaling half-an-hour a month.”

Though the judge, Cogan, has indicated he’s not inclined to allow testimony about dozens of assassinations Guzmán allegedly ordered between 1989 and 2014, jurors will likely hear the story of a lowly marijuana farmer who rose to create a smuggling empire with annual revenues of $3bn and which, at its peak, was responsible for 25 percent of all illegal drugs entering the US from Mexico. Guzmán’s own fortune, prosecutors estimate, is in excess of $1bn.

After he was hauled from a drainage ditch in the coastal city of Mochis by Mexican federal authorities in January 2016, Guzmán told Mexican prosecutors that he was “just a farmer” who earns 20,000 pesos a year ($1,500) growing corn, sorghum and safflower. He did not, he claimed, “belong to any cartel or have any cartel”.

Part of the government’s rationale for keeping Guzmán under conditions of maximum detention, his legal team concedes, may be rooted in Guzmán’s proven ability to escape from maximum-security prisons in Mexico – once, according to his lore, secreted in a laundry cart and, in a second successful bid for freedom, via a mile-long tunnel that connected to the shower of his cell.
“We have to be realistic,” A Eduardo Balarezo argued. “We’re in a secure facility in downtown Manhattan. Does the government have so little faith it its own security that they think something like that could happen again?”

As the government lays out Guzman’s rise and fall at trial, much of the evidence will come in direct testimony from as many as 40 witnesses, among them Colombian drug lords, couriers, enforcers and accountants – some of who may be allowed to testify under aliases.

One likely prosecution witness is Dámaso López, Guzmán’s former right-hand man who was extradited to the US in July. One figure who might be called by the defence is actor Sean Penn.

Months ago, prosecutors petitioned the judge to exclude any mention of Guzmán’s sit-down interview with Penn for Rolling Stone magazine in 2015, which came shortly before the arrest that led to Guzmán’s extradition. Penn has denied his contact with Guzmán could have tipped off US or Mexican authorities to his whereabouts.

Asked if he believed Penn’s involvement led to his client’s arrest, Balarezo said simply: “I have no doubts about that.”

by Mark Hedin

U.S. citizens across the country soon will vote on all 435 seats in the House of Representatives, for 35 U.S. senators and three-dozen governorships. The House of Representatives and possibly the Senate are up for grabs.

Given the high stakes, voters would do well to check at least a month ahead of time with their local board of elections to see if they’re still registered to vote. This is especially true for people of color.

The reason is that millions could find their right to vote challenged or taken away under suspicion that they’re trying to vote more than once, largely due to 26 states using the Interstate Voter Crosscheck system, which compares lists of voters in different states and challenges the registration of those whose names come up more than once.

For the 1,166,000 people in the country who share the surname Garcia, this could be a problem. Likewise for the Rodriguezes (1,094,924), Jacksons (708,099), Washingtons (177,386), Kims (262,352), Patels (229,973), Lees (693,023) and Parks (106,696).

Crosscheck, developed in 2005 by Kansas Secretary of State Ron Thornburgh as a free service for participating states, promised to detect voter fraud by comparing people’s names, social security numbers and birthdates. Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri first implemented it in 2006.

During his tenure as Kansas’ secretary of state, current GOP gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach expanded Crosscheck to 15 states by 2012 and 29 by 2014 and in 2017 was appointed to a leading role in the White House’s short-lived Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.

In 2017, of 98 million voting records Crosscheck analyzed, it deemed 7.2 million potential duplicates, although Crosscheck has yet to produce its first voter fraud conviction. Eight states that originally signed on have since dropped out, citing unreliable data. Nonetheless, it’s still in use in dozens more. Eight of those state have Senate seats up for a vote this year in contests that are expected to be close: Arizona, Nevada, Indiana, Missouri, West Virginia, Tennessee, Ohio and Michigan. And 19 Crosscheck-using states are voting on their governor for the next four years.

In a 2015 named “The Health of State Democracies,” the Center for American Progress, a nonprofit funded in part by the Gates Foundation, Wal-Mart, Ford Foundation and many others, concluded that the voters Crosscheck tagged for review are disproportionately non-white.

“States participating in the Interstate Crosscheck system risk purging legally registered voters with a significant oversampling from communities of color,” it said, citing the work of journalist Greg Palast, who’s been studying the U.S. voting system since 2000, for the BBC, al-Jazeera America, Rolling Stone magazine and others and produced a film about it, “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.”

Working with data analyst Mark Swedlund, Palast found that among states using Crosscheck, one in six Hispanics, one in seven Asian Americans and one in nine African Americans landed on its list of suspect voters.

“The outcome is discriminatory against minorities,” Swedlund says.

The chief explanation for the racial inequity is that ethnic communities are more likely to share a surname, such as Washington, Lee, Patel or Kim, Palast told Ethnic Media Services.

Swedlund and Palast found that the Crosscheck system seems satisfied that if two people share a common first and last name, they’re suspect. Differences in their birthdate, middle initial, Social Security numbers or suffixes such as “Jr.” and “Sr.” don’t keep registered voters off Crosscheck’s lists.

Not all 7 million people whose names appear on Crosscheck’s lists will be denied a vote, though. For one thing, only 36.4 percent of the people who were registered to vote even showed up at the polls in 2014. In one survey of elections between 1960 and 1995, the United States ranks dead last in the democracies of the world, with an average turnout of 48 percent.

Would-be voters whose names are missing from the lists of registered voters will be given what’s called a “provisional ballot,” to be tallied if the voter is ultimately found to have been wrongly left off the lists. Palast, however, skeptical that many provisional ballots are ever counted, refers to them as “placebo ballots.”

Voters eager to cast genuine ballots, then, might want to call their local board of elections well in advance of Nov. 6 to be sure that they’ll be allowed to vote.

In 2018’s highly charged political environment, individual votes may count more than ever. Take, for example, the recent special election for the vacant seat representing Ohio’s 12th congressional district.

In that still undecided Aug. 7 race, 1,200 votes separate Republican Troy Balderson and Democrat Danny O’Connor at press time.

Ohio has removed almost 200,000 voters from the rolls because they appeared on the Crosscheck lists.

The margin of victory in the state’s 12th District race may ultimately be found among the 5,048 absentee ballots not yet tallied and the still uncounted 3,435 provisional ballots.

No matter which of the candidates is awarded Ohio’s vacant 12th District Congressional seat based on the August election, voters will get another chance to decide between Balderson and O’Connor in November.

That’s why voters who want to have their voices heard Nov. 6, in Ohio and elsewhere, should call local officials ahead of time to see if any problems have come up with their registration.