Free Republic

A town near drug cartel capital Juarez, Mexico, had just one applicant for police chief after a spate of killings of public officials in drug-related violence. So now the new chief in Guadalupe, a town of 10,000 residents near the Texas border, is 20-year-old college criminology major Marisol Valles García. Public officials have increasingly become the targets of assassination as Mexican cartels try to tighten their grasp on the country. Just this year, 11 Mexican mayors have been slain, including the former mayor of Guadalupe, who was killed in June. In the small town, "police officers and security agents have...

EL PASO, Texas — Authorities say a 21-year-old Texas National Guard soldier was one of two men killed on a street in the violent border city of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Spokesman Arturo Sandoval of the Chihuahua state attorney general's office says family members identified the soldier as 21-year-old Jose Gil Hernandez of El Paso. The identity of the other man was not available, and details on the incident and the dead were few. A message left with FBI El Paso spokesman Michael Martinez by The Associated Press on Wednesday night was not immediately returned. However, he told the El Paso...

SNIPPET: "CIUDAD JUAREZ – A woman was found beheaded in this violent city on Mexico's northern border, the Chihuahua state Attorney General's Office said Wednesday. The body was discovered wrapped in a blanket, with the woman's severed head beside it, on the corner of Cañaveral and Centeno streets in Ciudad Juarez. Though beheadings are not rare in Mexico's increasingly bloody drug war, this is the first case of a decapitation of a woman in Chihuahua, the AG's office said. Women make up more than 10 percent of the more than 2,300 people slain so far this year in Juarez, Mexico's...

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — Gunmen have stormed two homes and killed nine people in a neighborhood of the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez. The Chihuahua state Attorney General's Office says gunmen burst into a home where a family was having a party. Three women and two men died at the scene Sunday night, and a man and a woman died at the hospital. The statement Monday says gunmen attacked a second home in the neighborhood minutes later, killing two men.

Two Others Hospitalized MEXICO -- Authorities investigated a crime scene along the U.S.-Mexico border Thursday morning after shots were fired on the embankment on Mexico's side, near Paisano by Asarco. According to our partners at the El Paso Times, a Juarez traffic officer was ambushed and killed by an unknown shooter near the U.S. border. Roxana Monroyl, 33, was shot about 10:30 a.m., said Juarez city spokesman Jaime Torres. After she was shot, she called for help. Two other traffic officers arrived at the scene to assist her and were also shot, he said. Those officers were taken to a...

(RTTNews) - A prominent newspaper in Mexico's border city of Ciudad Juarez has published an editorial requesting guidelines on media publishing from drug cartels operating in the city after one of its employees was shot dead by suspected drug operatives last week. The unprecedented editorial carried by the El Diario de Juarez newspaper on its front page on Sunday was prompted by the killing of Luis Carlos Santiago, 21-year-old photographer working for the paper, last week. Santiago and a co-worker was shot by unidentified gunmen in Ciudad Juarez on 17 September when they were sitting inside a parked car outside a...

EL PASO, Texas -- It's a grizzly Ciudad Juarez murder with a startling El Paso connection. Mexican authorities discovered a severed head on top of the trunk of an abandoned blue Hyundai Wednesday afternoon. That car, which was stolen two weeks ago in Juarez, has Texas license plates and is registered to two people who live in El Paso. ABC-7 spoke with the car owner's daughter at the family's home. They did not want to be identified. "They left us without a car just to kill somebody," she said. The daughter said she had gone to Juarez with her mother...

MEXICO CITY -- Mexican police carried out the controlled detonation of a car bomb Saturday in the troubled border city of Ciudad Juarez, across from Texas. A phone tip around midnight led authorities to a dead body in a car in a shopping center parking lot, the federal Public Safety Department said in a statement. In a second car, police found the bomb. Agents deactivated the device and removed most of the explosive material to analyze it before safely detonating the vehicle, the department said. There were no injuries. Juarez is the same city where drug traffickers staged the first...

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — Gunmen killed 25 people in a series of drug-gang attacks in Ciudad Juarez, marking the deadliest day in more than two years for the Mexican border city, authorities said Friday. Thursday's toll included 15 people killed when attackers stormed four homes in three hours, said Arturo Sandoval, a spokesman for the Attorney General's Office of Chihuahua state, where Ciudad Juarez is located. In the worst of those attacks, gunmen burst into a house and killed two young men — then killed four others for being witnesses. Sandoval said it was the highest single-day murder toll in...

JUAREZ- Here are a few stories we are following out of Juarez this morning. Three women were found dead, bringing Juarez police out to two different neighborhoods in the city. The first woman was found dead near an industrial park and the other two were found shot in the head not far away in a Central Juarez colonia. All three of the women were in their 20's. -- Meanwhile, one man was found shot to death in South Juarez . In this case, the victim had been shot at least 25 times. No word yet on why this man was...

Socialism: Quick, what's the murder capital of the world: Kabul? Juarez? Try Caracas, Venezuela, a city whose dictator, Hugo Chavez, has made murder a means of extending his control. The silent protest at Monday night's Miss Universe Pageant in Las Vegas was invisible to nearly everyone — except Venezuelans. On her final catwalk, the ranking Miss Universe, Stefania Fernandez, suddenly whipped out a Venezuelan flag in a patriotic but protocol-breaking gesture.

By Ben Swann - Main Anchor Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - 10:45pm The body of a federal police agent was found dismembered in Juarez, Tuesday. The agent was found just a few feet from the border between Juarez and El Paso. The man's body had been found dismembered with body parts spread out across street. His head was left on top of a Nissan Xterra.

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico – A gunbattle erupted between Mexican police and gunmen near the Rio Grande on Saturday, killing one person and prompting U.S. authorities to close a highway that runs along the border in El Paso, Texas. There were no reports of bullets crossing into the U.S. side, El Paso police Detective Mike Baranyay said. The gunmen attacked a municipal police patrol on a boulevard in Ciudad Juarez next to the border river, said Ramon Salinas, a spokesman for Mexico's federal police. The fighting escalated when federal police rushed to help, he said. One gunman was killed and three...

Thursday night the body of a woman was found inside the Colinas cemetery. The woman is said to be in her 30's and was discovered near a grave. A man and a woman were attacked while driving around in south Juarez. Gunmen shot them both. The male driver was killed and the female passenger was injured A body was found wrapped in a blanket with several gunshot wounds. The person's identity has not been released. Finally, the body of a man was found in the Rio Grande. According to Juarez police the man was kidnapped two days ago and his...

A Mexican drug gang is hiring pretty young women to carry out killings to surprise its enemies, a suspected member of the vicious La Linea gang said in a video released Tuesday. Around 30 women aged 18 to 30 have been trained by hitmen to carry out killings in recent months, and most of those have killed people, said Rogelio Amaya in a public security ministry video released by media. "They're pretty, good-looking, to help mislead opponents," said the suspected member of a gang of enforcers for the Juarez cartel in the country's most violent city, Ciudad Juarez. The women...

MEXICO CITY — Mexican authorities say that police in Ciudad Juarez have captured five alleged drug gang members suspected in the killings of two federal officers, including one whose body was hacked to pieces. One of the suspects is also believed to have acted as a lookout in the July 15 car-bomb attack on police that killed an officer and two other people, Luis Cardenas Palomino, regional security chief for the federal police, said Friday. He described the five men as members of the La Linea gang, which works for the Juarez drug cartel. He alleged they killed two federal...

Fourteen people were killed on Sunday in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico's murder capital located on the US border, including 10 party-goers shot dead at two homes, Chihuahua state authorities said. In one attack, gunmen opened fire on a pool party in central Ciudad Juarez "killing three women and a man and wounding five other women, all of whom were wearing swim suits," the chief prosecutor's office said in a statement. Two suspects in the attack were arrested later, it added. In another brazen, pre-dawn attack on a private house, a group of gunmen riddled party-goers with bullets killing six people -...

Police officers in Ciudad Juarez in northern Mexico detained their commander at gunpoint, accusing him of corruption and links to drug gangs. More than 200 federal police agents raided the hotel where their commander was staying and accused him of planting drugs on police officers to blackmail them into carrying out extortion. The commander has been suspended, pending an investigation. Ciudad Juarez is the most violent city in Mexico and corruption is rife. While some agents blocked off nearby streets to prevent their commander from escaping, others moved into the hotel where he was staying. They raided his room, where...

EL PASO, Texas -- Mexican federal police officers were attacked with a grenade on Sunday, nearly two weeks after Mexican federal police were attacked with a car bomb. According to El Diario, several journalists were present during the grenade attack on Sunday. It was not immediately clear what the extent of the injuries were from the grenade explosion. Before the grenade attack, the Mexican federal police officers were attacked by gunmen in an SUV in Northern Juarez. One officer was killed and another three were injured in the shooting. The gunmen got away, but the officers were later able to...

Juarez- The U.S. embassy announced that it will closes it's consulate in Juarez. In a statement, the embassy said the consulate will, " remain closed until a security review is completed." They did say they will reschedule appointments for those with visa applications pending. The embassy did not say what prompted the review and a spokesman declined any further comment beyond the statement. The U.S. State Department has taken several measures over the past few months to protect employees of the consulate and their families from the deadly violence in Juarez The close comes after the March shooting death of...