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January 30, 2002
Cold Weather Endangers Migrants and Closes Roads in Baja California
Yesterday's below freezing temperatures and snow in the areas
around Tijuana and Tecate forced Mexican officials to close frozen
roads and rescue migrants that had become stranded while seeking
to enter the US.
A group of five young migrants from Michoacán and Jalisco
requested and received help at a toll booth in the mountains
near Tecate, a small city between Méxicali and Tijuana.
The five men and women then told the migrant-aid group Grupo
Beta Tecate where to go and look for fourteen more migrants that
were seeking shelter from the elements in a series of caves.
The five also told Grupo Beta that they had been lost since they
were abandoned by their guide.
The Policía Federal Preventiva (Federal Preventative
Police, PFP) also closed for one hour both the free and toll
Méxicali-Tijuana highways due to ice on the roads. There
was one accident on the free highway in which a tractor trailer
hit ice and ran into bus. There were no injuries.
Source: Frontera, January 30, 2002. Article by Angel Ruiz, Alondra
Vela and Aline Corpus.
January 24, 2002
Mexican Migrant Workers Beaten near San Diego in 2000 Receive
$1.4 Million
The Tijuana newspaper Frontera (no relationship to FNS) reports
that five Mexican migrant workers received US$1.4 million in
an out of court settlement for the attack they sustained on July
5, 2000.
In an attack described in more detail at http://www.nmsu.edu/~frontera/sep00/hmrt.html,
the men said they were hunted, beaten and shot for over an hour
by a group of young white men. One man received multiple, point-blank,
pellet gun shots to the face and another was shot in the back
five times.
While the settlement ends the civil side of the incident,
the criminal case continues. Accused of the attack are eight
young men that were between the ages of 14 and 16 at the time
of the event.
The victims will share the settlement according to the severity
of their wounds.
Source: Frontera (Tijuana), January 24, 2002.
January 14, 2002
Baja California Receives Free and Low-Cost Eye Care and Surgery
Marcela Deffis Ramos, executive director of the Fundación
Codet in Tijuana, said that last year the foundation performed
50 cataract operations per month and 24 retinopathy surgeries.
This year, the foundation hopes to double those numbers to 100
monthly operations on cataracts and 50 yearly retinopathy surgeries.
The Fundación Codet is dedicated to preventing blindness
in Baja California.
Since its beginnings in 1998, the Fundación Codet has
performed 5,500 free vision exams and 450 surgeries in Baja California.
Working in coordination with the state health system, Isesalud,
the foundation refers people with vision problems to the social
services office. This office then determines a patient's economic
status. If a person has no money, he or she is not charged anything
for the vision-saving surgeries, according to Deffis.
The leading cause of blindness in Tijuana is diabetic retinopathy,
says Deffis. This is caused by the growth and breaking of blood
vessels in the retina due to the advance of diabetes. Deffis
states that few retinopathy surgeries are done because of their
high cost of between US$1,000 and US$3,000.
The second-leading cause of blindness in Tijuana is cataracts,
according to Deffis.
The foundation may be reached at 682-83-70 (or from the US
011-52-664-682-83-70) or by going to their offices at Padre Kino
No. 10159, Zona Río, Tijuana.
Source: Frontera (Tijuana), January 9, 2002. Article by Luis
Adolfo San.
January 10, 2002
BC Law-Enforcement Accord to Create Greater Transparency
Tijuana's Frontera newspaper says that Baja California citizens
are the first in the country to be able to scrutinize the performance
of all levels of law enforcement in their state. This is due
to a multilateral agreement between local, state and federal
law-enforcement agencies that will provide the Consejo Ciudadano
de Seguridad Pública (Citizens' Council on Public Security,
CCSP) with detailed information on police forces and their investigations.
President Fox was the honorary witness at the signing of the
accord. In Tijuana, Fox stated that he is committed to advances
in public security and declared 2002 to be the Year of Security.
The CCSP will receive periodic reports from federal police (PGR),
state police (PGJE) and local police (Tijuana, Méxicali,
Ensenada, Tecate and Rosarito). The reports will detail such
things as:
1. Personnel information to include salary, education levels
and background;
2. Data on weapons and drug seizures,
3. Number of people arrested, processed, imprisoned, and released
on bail;
4. The state of investigations into crimes;
5. Information on police vehicles, weapons and other equipment;
6. Data on stolen cars and recoveries; and
7. Homicide and other crime statistics.
Source: Frontera (Tijuana), January 10, 2002. Article by Daniel
Salinas.
January 7, 2002
Tijuana NGOs Build Homes and Children's Emergency Room
Low-Income Housing
In 2001, Tijuana's Fundación Esperanza (the Hope Foundation)
supported the building of 40 homes for low-income families. The
construction of the 40 homes cost just 1,440,000 pesos (approximately
US$157,000) or 36,000 pesos (US$3,900) each, according to technical
director Apolonio Rodríguez Barba.
Families contributed financially to the construction of their
homes by participating in the foundation's savings program. Each
week, for an average of eight months, families would set aside
between 80 and 120 pesos (US$8.70-$13.04). The foundation then
provided up to 80% of the homes' construction costs.
Building expenses were also kept low because foundation volunteers
helped families make their own bricks used in the construction
of walls.
In early January, 2002, more home construction will be initiated
in Tijuana's Salvatierra neighborhood. The Fundación Esperanza
plans to build 48 low-income homes in 2002.
Last year, for the first time, the Baja California state government
contributed funds to the foundation's building projects. Through
its office of social development the state contributed more than
1,000,000 pesos last year.
Children's Emergency Room
The Rotary Club of Tijuana has invested US$100,000 to build
Tijuana's first children's emergency room. Genaro López
Moreno, president of the city's Rotary Club, said that construction
of the pediatric emergency room began three months ago. The structure
is 60% complete and construction should be finished in July,
2002.
Rotary decided to finance the project after learning that
the city of 1.2 million people had no emergency room dedicated
to children. López said that children currently go to
the general emergency room where they are surrounded by things
like adult gun-shot and auto-accident victims. This is too traumatic
an experience for children, according to López.
Rotary has said that it will help pay to equip the pediatric
emergency room and Tijuana's new mayor Jesús González
Reyes stated that he will match Rotary's contribution dollar
for dollar.
Source: Frontera (Tijuana), January 7, 2002. Articles by Luis
Adolfo San.
December 18, 2001
Tijuana: 1,600 Missing Persons Reports and 300 Burials in the
Common Grave per Year
Marco Calderón, director of the Centro de Atención
a Personas Extraviadas y Ausentes (Lost and Missing Persons Attention
Center, Capea), said that his office receives between 150 and
160 new reports of missing people per month. Capea, which is
part of the Baja California Attorney General's Office, resolves
90% of its cases, according to Calderón.
Calderón told the Tijuana newspaper Frontera (no relationship
to FNS) that 85% of its missing persons reports are for adolescents
between the ages of 13 and 17. Most of these young people, the
majority of whom are young women, leave their homes because of
problems in school, he said. Calderón added that the number
of reports tends to increase in summer when students want to
avoid doing make-up work for the classes they did not pass during
the regular school year.
When Capea believes that a missing person has been abducted
it gives the case to the Attorney General's Office's Anti-kidnapping
Group. Calderón described the process by saying, "When
we are dealing with forced disappearances, we establish the case
with testimony from witnesses and then we give the case to the
Anti-kidnapping Group."
Calderón said that forced disappearances in Tijuana
are carried out by organized crime. "Sometimes, two or three
people are disappeared at the same time, and many times they
know their abductors because there are no signs of violence .
. ." Capea says that it discovers about one case of forced
disappearance every month.
Regarding unsolved cases, Calderón stated that many
of these are due to people leaving Tijuana to return to the Mexican
interior state from which they originated. However, Calderón
attributes about 30% of the unresolved cases to forced disappearances.
Other missing people undoubtedly end up in Tijuana's common grave
which has received approximately 300 bodies this year, according
to Calderón. This means that those cases will not be resolved.
Open missing persons cases from 2001 (Source: Capea, December
6, 2001):
January 6
February 5
March 5
April 3
May 4
June 10
July 15
August 14
September 18
October 26
November 46
Source: Frontera (Tijuana), December 17, 2001. Article by Jorge
Morales.
December 13, 2001
Tijuana Kidnapping Ring Led by Universities Students
Hoping to get some extra money to offset graduation costs,
seven Tijuana-area university students kidnapped an unnamed twelve
or thirteen-year old girl (sources cited both ages). The four
women and three men were arrested after they went to pick up
a US$150,000 ransom at a drop site that was being monitored by
the Baja California state police anti-kidnapping unit.
Five of the seven students were finishing their last semester
of law school and were one week away from graduation when they
were arrested. Most of those arrested were described as good
or very good students and most of them had worked in the state
justice system to fulfill the service component of their university
programs. The ages of those involved in the alleged plot were
between 20 and 25.
Antonio Martínez, State Attorney General, said that none
of those arrested will receive special consideration due to the
fact that they were students. "We want to make it clear,"
Martínez said, "whoever commits a crime will be treated
according to the law without any sort of favoritism."
Those arrested could receive sentences of between 20 and 40
years plus an additional one third because the crime is aggravated
due to the fact that the victim was younger than 18, there were
more than two people involved in the plot and the victim was
treated violently at times.
Source: Frontera (Tijuana), December 13, 2001. Articles by Said
Betanzos & Ernesto Alvarez.
December 4, 2001
Lack of Solid Waste Removal Infrastructure in Tijuana
José Luis León Romero, the new head of the
Tijuana City Works and Public Services Office (Dirección
de Obras y Servicios Públicos), said that Tijuana's solid
waste management effort and budget are only half of what they
should be to assure the proper disposal of garbage. León
also stated that the city needs 6 million pesos (approximately
US$650,000) to keep its waste-collection system operating and
60 million pesos (approximately US$6.5 million) in investment
to clean up the citywide backlog of unremoved or illegally dumped
garbage.
One source of problems for León's office is that there
is a shortage of collection trucks, León said. Furthermore,
30% of the city's collection fleet is broken down and in need
of repair.
Another problem is that waste transfer stations lack a sufficient
number of waste compacting machines. This means that the stations
cannot receive all the waste they otherwise could, according
to León.
Due to the lack of waste-removal resources, León believes
that illegal dumps have sprung up around the city. In other parts
of Tijuana, garbage accumulates for a long time before it can
be removed, he said.
Source: Frontera (Tijuana), December 4, 2001. Article by Jaime
Velázquez.
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