I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
Businesses in the Mexican border city of Juarez not only are closing and cutting back hours because of a steep drop in tourism, but say they are also being forced out of businesses because they are paying extortion money to drug cartels, Reuters is reporting.
Reuters said in a story Wednesday that more than 400 small- and medium-sized business professionals protested outside the Finance Ministry building in Cuidad Juarez this week saying they will withhold paying taxes until the government controls the drug war that is killing business in addition to the human death toll.
The story quoted an auto parts chain dealership owner as saying:
“We are not paying anything to the finance ministry. We’ve already seen 4,500 businesses close down this year because they can’t pay the narcos. It’s terrorism.”
Drug-related violence has left more than 1,100 people in Ciudad Juarez dead this year, with an estimated 3,725 killed nationwide.
Reuters distilled the Juarez struggle as a fight between two men:
Local drug baron Vicente Carrillo Fuentes is fighting Mexico’s most-wanted man, Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman, head of the Pacific-coast Sinaloa cartel, for control of the city’s smuggling routes into the United States.
Last week, the Associated Press declared tourism in the once-popular border town as dead because of fears about the violence, which has repeatedly caught civilians in the crossfire.
