Posts Tagged ‘Mexico’
Written by admin on 17 October 2011
Mexico City, Oct 17 (IANS) At least 89 people have been killed and some 350,000 affected as a week of devastating torrential rain continued in Central America.
Days of non-stop rains provoked a wave of mudslides in the region. Presidents of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala have called a state of emergency, reported Xinhua.
El Salvador President Mauricio Funes put the death toll at 32, adding that more than 20,000 people had been evacuated to shelters.
Honduras President Porfirio Lobo appealed for ‘solidarity’ among all Hondurans to extend a helping hand to those suffering.
Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom said: ‘We have decided to declare a state of public calamity for the entire country before the magnitude of the disaster happens.’
Latest figures showed the toll in Guatemala rose to 28 after five more bodies were retrieved from mudslides.
Meanwhile, according to the Universal paper, the toll in Mexico rose to nine. Three more deaths in Honduras took the death toll there to 13, while Nicaragua’s death toll remained unchanged at seven.
Official figures show at least 350,000 people have been affected across the region, including 132,700 in Mexico, 65,000 in El Salvador, 30,000 in Honduras, 12,000 in Nicaragua, 10,000 in Costa Rica and 800 in Panama.
According to weather forecasts, intense rain is expected to continue for at least a day across southern Mexico and Central America and could extend to as far as Cuba, Jamaica and nearby islands in the Caribbean.
Tags: Mexico, Mexico City
Posted in America | No Comments »
Written by admin on 17 October 2011
Mexico City, Oct 17 (IANS) Twenty people were killed Sunday in a mudslide triggered by torrential rains in El Salvador, Xinhua reported.
Rain-related deaths in the country increased to 27 after Sunday’s mudslide, said civil protection director Jorge Mendez. Weather officials forecast heavy rains to continue in Central America.
Tags: Mexico, Mexico City
Posted in America | No Comments »
Written by admin on 16 October 2011
Mexico City, Oct 16 (IANS/EFE) Mexico’s migration agency said it has fired 121 officials for failing to adhere to the principles of ‘legality, honour, fairness, impartiality and efficiency’.
Battered by scandals, the agency, INM, recently embarked on a housecleaning aimed at ferreting out corrupt, abusive and incompetent agents and supervisors.
The dismissals affected personnel at regional offices in the capital and in the states of Chiapas, Tabasco, Quintana Roo, Sonora, Tamaulipas and Veracruz, the INM said.
All of the positions left vacant by the purge will be quickly filled, the agency said.
The INM’s Friday announcement came the same day that President Felipe Calderon met with leaders of groups devoted to protecting the rights of Mexican and Central American migrants.
‘Of course we have defended migrants, of course we are cleaning up the INM, we have put immigration officials in prison,’ the president told the activists.
An estimated 150,000 undocumented Central Americans a year cross Mexico with hopes of slipping across the border into the US.
The harsh journey is made more dangerous by predatory Mexican immigration officials and drug-cartel gunmen.
Mexico’s independent National Human Rights Commission said that at least 11,333 migrants were kidnapped during the period April-September 2010.
Tags: Mexico, Mexico City
Posted in America | No Comments »
Written by admin on 16 October 2011
Puebla (Mexico), Oct 16 (IANS/EFE) The domestic labour done by women in Mexico is equal to 23 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, more than the value of oil exports or manufactured goods, said the president of the National Women’s Institute, or Inmujeres, Rocio Garcia Gaytan.
At the inauguration of the seventh National Meeting of Rural, Indigenous and Peasant Women held in the central city of Puebla as part of the International Day of Rural Women, Garcia expressed her regret about the lack of remuneration for the work of cleaning and looking after family members that women do in the home.
Mexico, she said, is the first country in the region to make a study to determine the approximate cost of the unpaid work done in the family, a research project that was completed last month with the aid of the National Institute of Statistics and Geography, or Inegi.
The head of the state agency Inmujeres said that domestic labor includes ‘the care of senior adults and sick children who are not hospitalised, attending people with some disability, washing, going to get firewood, cleaning and in general taking care of the family’.
By far the greatest part of this domestic labor is done by women, she said.
The official believes that the results obtained by researching the value of domestic labor in Mexico (23 percent of GDP) should reflect the situation in other Latin American countries ‘from Mexico to Chile and Argentina’.
Garcia said that she will soon formally present the conclusions of the Inegi study.
On his part, the secretary of agrarian reform in Mexico, Abelardo Escobar Prieto, said that 80 percent of the 37,000 productive projects in the country supported by that state agency are headed by women.
Promoting the work of women in the most marginalised communities is the only way to achieve a ‘break with the cycles of poverty that oppress us’, he said.
Escobar also stressed how vital it is for thousands of peasant women in the country to regularise with the authorities the ownership of land they occupy through deeds.
Tags: Mexico, Puebla
Posted in America | No Comments »
Written by admin on 16 October 2011
Mexico City, Oct 16 (IANS/EFE) A fight among inmates at a prison in the northeastern Mexican state of Tamaulipas Saturday left 20 dead and 12 injured, officials said.
The state’s Public Safety Secretariat said in a communique that the incident occurred early Saturday when a fight broke out between two inmates and soon other convicts jumped into the fray.
The officials gave no further details in their two-paragraph communique.
The jail in Matamoros, a city located across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas, was March 25, 2010 the scene of a jailbreak by 40 prisoners.
Brawls in Mexican jails are particularly frequent in northern Mexico.
On Thursday a fight between two groups of drug traffickers left seven dead and three seriously injured in the prison at Cadereyta, Nuevo Leon state, near Tamauilipas.
Both states have been racked by drug-related violence pitting the Gulf cartel against former allies Los Zetas.
Tags: Mexico, Mexico City
Posted in America | No Comments »
Written by admin on 14 October 2011
Villahermosa (Mexico), Oct 14 (IANS/EFE) Roughly 75,000 people have been affected by torrential rains and swollen rivers in recent days in the Mexican state of Tabasco, officials said Thursday.
Ten of the 17 municipalities in that southeastern state have suffered flooding due to the overflowing of four rivers, said Roberto Lopez, the spokesman for the state’s emergency management office.
The majority of the flood victims – roughly 55,000 residents of five municipalities near the border with Guatemala: Balancan, Centla, Emiliano Zapata, Jonuta and Tenosique – were affected by the flooding of the Usumacinta River.
Tabasco state is crisscrossed by nine rivers whose water volume accounts for about a quarter of Mexico’s fresh water resources.
Tags: Mexico, Villahermosa
Posted in America | No Comments »
