Sunday 30 September 2012

Mexican activist "fled for his life" after protest

Aleph Jiménez Domínguez, a spokesman for the protest group Yo Soy 132 in north-western Mexico who disappeared for five days in late September, said in Mexico City on 28 September that he "had to flee" the city of Ensenada in Baja California where he believed unspecified elements might kill him. He told the press "this was an urgent action" and there was good cause for his flight to nearby La Paz; "believe me my life was in danger. You mustn't wait for someone to turn up dismembered or dead for these actions to be valid," CNNMéxico reported him as saying. Jiménez hid from 20 to 25 September; on 15 September he was one of 20 activists detained in Ensenada after a protest, and publicly criticized on 17 September the Ensenada mayor Enrique Pelayo. Jiménez said he then felt he was being followed; he said a black car with glazed windows stopped outside his house and its driver phoned as he stepped out, to say he was "in front of the house, I found him." Jiménez lodged a complaint with the National Commission for Human Rights (CNDH) after travelling to its offices in Mexico City. Yo Soy 132 repeatedly protested against alleged manipulation and fraud in the July general elections, officially won by the Institutional Revolutionary Party and its presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto.

Twenty shot, found dead around Mexico

Twenty people were killed in criminal incidents or found dead around Mexico on 29 September, including three policemen and a civil servant's nephew, El Universal and CNN reported that day. In Torreón in the northern state of Coahuila, five suspected criminals died in a shootout with security forces, a state government spokesman declared. "At least" six were killed around Monterrey in the state of Nuevo León, two of them reportedly shot in their car by assassins driving behind them. The nephew of the Health Secretary of the north-western state of Sonora was gunned down late on 28 September in Hermosillo. Three policemen were shot dead on 29 September in San Miguel Teloloapán in the western state of Guerrero, the state prosecutor's office declared. In the north-western city of Aguascalientes, a woman was gunned down as she left the hairdressers. On 30 September, the bodies of three men and a woman who had been shot dead were found in pairs in the districts of Tototlán and Tequila, in the western state of Jalisco. Authorities separately arrested at an unspecified time and place, José Inés Medina Rodríguez, described as a senior operative of the Gulf Cartel in Juárez on the US frontier, El Universal reported on 29 September, citing the Nuevo León Public Security authority.