CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
September 8, 2012 | By Richard Marosi, Los Angeles Times
MATAMOROS, MEXICO - They stuck together, walking slowly on busted sidewalks, approaching corners warily. They hurried past smoky taco stands and fleabag hotels. Nobody strayed. Deported from Southern California the night before, the 20 men had gotten a few hours of fitful sleep at the bus station of this lawless border city. Now they just wanted to get out of town. "We were moving as one, like a ball," said Rodrigo Barragon, 35, formerly a construction worker in Los Angeles. "But when I looked back, the ball had a tail.
WORLD
June 18, 2011 | By Ken Ellingwood, Los Angeles Times
Mexican authorities on Friday announced the arrest of the man they say directed the kidnappings of 72 Central and South American migrants found slain in northern Mexico last year. Federal police said Edgar Huerta Montiel, 22, told them he led the capture of two freight trucks packed with undocumented migrants in the state of Tamaulipas, then killed 10 of the victims. Huerta, described as an army deserter who works for the Zetas drug gang, allegedly told police he also ordered the kidnappings of six busloads of passengers in the rural town of San Fernando.
NEWS
April 25, 2011 | By Catharine Hamm, Los Angeles Times Travel Editor
The U.S. State Department last week reissued its travel warning on Mexico , just ahead of news on Monday that at least 177 bodies have been found over the last few weeks around San Fernando, about 80 miles south of the U.S.-Mexico border in the state of Tamaulipas. The department’s warning, issued Friday, says, “Due to ongoing violence and persistent security concerns, you are urged to defer non-essential travel to the states of Tamaulipas and Michoacán, and to parts of the states of Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Sinaloa, Durango, Zacatecas, San Luis Potosi and Jalisco.” The action updated a warning last issued in September.
WORLD
April 25, 2011 | By Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times
Suitcases started piling up, unclaimed, at the depot where buses crossing northern Tamaulipas state ended their route. That should have been an early clue. Then the bodies started piling up, pulled by forensic workers from two dozen hidden graves in the scruffy brush-covered ravines around the town of San Fernando, 80 miles south of this city that borders Brownsville, Texas. At least 177 corpses have been recovered in the last few weeks, most of them, officials now say, passengers snatched from interstate buses, tortured and slaughtered.
WORLD
April 14, 2011 | By Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times
Sixteen police officers have been arrested for allegedly providing cover to drug-cartel gangsters suspected in the grisly slaying of more than 120 people whose bodies are being pulled from mass graves in northeastern Mexico. The federal attorney general's office, in a statement, identified the 16 as members of the municipal police force in the town of San Fernando, near where the bodies were found. On Thursday, officials in the border state of Tamaulipas said the number of dead who have been extracted from several pits about 90 miles south of Brownsville, Texas, had risen to 126. Digging continued in search of additional victims, the officials said.
WORLD
April 13, 2011 | By Ken Ellingwood, Los Angeles Times
Mexican authorities Tuesday reported the discovery of 28 more bodies in a northeastern state, bringing to 116 the number of dead unearthed since officials began investigating mass kidnappings of bus passengers. As horror mounts over the savagery in Tamaulipas, federal officials said they had sent in more troops and would carry out "constant monitoring" of highways in the violence-ravaged border state. The government of President Felipe Calderon has poured troops into Tamaulipas after previous episodes of grisly violence.