Title: Mcgowanjm Wire 2013 Source:
[None] URL Source:[None] Published:Jan 1, 2013 Author:Mcgowinjm Wire Service Post Date:2013-01-01 17:18:57 by A K A Stone Keywords:None Views:136319 Comments:236
"Pemex Director Juan Jose Suarez said that there was "no evidence that it was a deliberate incident, or some kind of attack".
Company officials said that maintenance work had been carried out on the plant just minutes prior to the explosion.
President Calderon praised the emergency workers, who he said had managed to contain the fire before it could spread to the massive tanks of a neighbouring gas processing plant.
There have been several fires at Mexican refineries over the past month.
While investigations into those blazes have not yet concluded, preliminary evidence suggests they could have been caused by thieves tapping the lines to steal petrol."
" Company officials said that maintenance work had been carried out on the plant just minutes prior to the explosion."
Trying to maintain the plant how?....;}
Another report stated that the ZETAS were taking 45% of PEMEX production out of Tamaulipas Province....;}
You know, once you're over 10%, you're really not stealing. You're part of the Business......;}
As an economist, Suárez Coppel has served as Director of Finance in Pemex, chief advisor to former Mexican Secretary of Finance Francisco Gil Díaz,
as Adjunct-Director for Derivatives in Banamex,
as Treasurer of Televisa,
and as Vice President of Finance in Grupo Modelo; the largest Mexican brewery.[1]
Sweet Baby Jesus. Everyone of those up to their necks in Plutarchy.
DOJ sues to block Anheuser Busch merger with Mexico's Grupo Modelo ABA Journal - 16 hours ago - 1105 related articles » The Justice Department on Thursday sued to stop a planned merger of Belgium-based Anheuser-Busch InBev with Mexico's largest beer
# Televisa, Telemundo ink cross-border content deal | News | C21Media www.c21media.net/archives/36567 - Cached The channel, which will feature branded Telemundo entertainment and news content, will be available on Televisa-owned satellite and cable networks, Sky and ...
What the Televisa, Univision Deal Means | Adweek www.adweek.com/news/.../w...ivision-deal-means-103473 - Cached Oct 6, 2010 ... Rife with betrayal, relationships gone bad and court battles, the decades-long relationship between Mexican broadcaster Grupo Televisa and ...
# Banamex loses bid to censor Narco News By Chuck Armsbury ... www.november.org/razorwire/rzold/27/page12.html - Cached David slew Goliath with a stone, and similarly on December 5, 2001 in a New York courtroom, tiny NarcoNews.com cut down the giant Banamex, humbling ... # Dubious Lawsuit Forces Narco News To Shut Down www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01/n1448/a07.html?2051 - Cached Aug 20, 2001 ... The Banamex lawsuit, which began hearings on July 20, is raising eyebrows in media-watchdog circles. Narco News, which is written in ...
I covered that presidential summit eight years ago, investigated the charges for three months, and published the first of many reports that May (see “Clinton and His Mexican Narco-Pals,” Boston Phoenix, May 17, 1999). Follow-up reports and translations of Por Esto!’s investigations appeared on Narco News after we began publishing in April 2000. By July of that year, Narco News, the Por Esto! publisher Mario Menéndez Rodríguez and I found ourselves as defendants in the New York Supreme Court from a lawsuit filed by Banamex. The bank had hired the mega-lobbying and law firm Akin Gump, of Washington DC, to harass us with that nuisance suit. More than a year of our lives was dominated by the painstaking presentation of all the evidence to the Court. In December 2001, the New York Supreme Court delivered a thunderous blow to Banamex (by then part of Citigroup, the world’s wealthiest financial institution): it dismissed Banamex’s case, and established, for the first time, First Amendment protections for Internet journalists in the United States. "
"Journalist Ed Vulliamy informed us that the authors of that report provide compelling evidence that "financial regulators in the west are reluctant to go after western banks in pursuit of the massive amount of drug money being laundered through their systems."
Indeed, at the height of the global financial crisis Antonio Maria Costa, then the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime told The Observer "he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were 'the only liquid investment capital' available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result."
"In many instances," Costa said, "the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system's main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor."
A third-generation drug trafficker, Ávila is the niece of of Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, onetime godfather of the Guadalajara Cartel now serving a 40-year prison term for the 1984 murder of DEA agent Enrique Camarena. Camarena was kidnapped and tortured to death after he uncovered evidence linking the CIA and Oliver North's sordid "Enterprise" to drug trafficking Nicaraguan Contras during the Reagan administration.
The document went on to assert that before becoming a key U.S. "partner in the drug war," and rewarded with some $3 billion under Plan Colombia to "fight drugs," Uribe "was linked to a business involved in narcotics activities in the United States" and "has worked for the Medellín cartel."
Although the U.S. government disavowed that report, for purely political reasons I might add, several members of Uribe's family, including the president's cousin, Mario Uribe Escobar, the former President of the Colombian Congress, was convicted and removed from office over his close ties to the far-right, drug trafficking paramilitary death squad, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, or AUC.
By Anahi Rama and Mica Rosenberg MEXICO CITY, June 14 (Reuters) - Mexico's presidential frontrunner Enrique Pena Nieto said on Thursday he would name Colombia's top crime fighter, known for tackling drug cartels and guerrillas, as his government's chief security advisor if he wins. Retired general Oscar Naranjo served as head of Colombia's national police from 2007 until he resigned on Tuesday.
Colombia: Ex-Security Chief Accused In Drug Trafficking ... latindispatch.com/.../col...king-wiretapping-schemes/ - Cached Jun 19, 2012 ... Colombia: Ex-Security Chief Accused In Drug Trafficking, Wiretapping ... Santoyo Velasco, who served under former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe from ... Mexico Protests: Rumors Of Deaths During Anti-Peña Nieto ...
Citing findings by two Colombian academics, Alejandro Gaviria and Daniel Mejía in their study, Anti-Drugs Policies In Colombia: Successes, Failures And Wrong Turns, Ed Vulliamy disclosed "that 2.6% of the total street value of cocaine produced remains within the country, while a staggering 97.4% of profits are reaped by criminal syndicates, and laundered by banks, in first-world consuming countries."
Zambada Niebla, extradited to the US in February 2010 and now facing narco-trafficking charges in federal court in Chicago, claims in pleadings in his case that the US government entered into a pact with the leadership of the Mexican Sinaloa narco-trafficking organization that supposedly provide its chief narcos with immunity in exchange for them providing US authorities with information that could be used to target other narco-trafficking organizations.
The US government, in pleadings filed in the case this past July and again this past Friday, denies that Zambada Niebla was granted immunity by any law enforcement agency for the narco-trafficking crimes spelled out in the indictment against him. Those same pleadings do not broach the topic of whether he, or his Sinaloa organization associates, might have had a cooperative relationship with US intelligence agencies, such as the CIA.
Former deep undercover DEA agent Mike Levine describes the scenario apparently playing out in the Zambada Niebla case this way:
This is very typical of DEA infighting with CIA involvement, especially the, well, clumsy stupidity of the whole thing. Of course [Loya Castro] would be meeting with the Sinaloa guys even though he was a known snitch, simply because it is now a respected sport among big bad guys to "play" the US government for their (the cartel's) own advantage. If you are killing the opposition, why not rat on them? [Boston organized crime leader] Whitey Bulger did it successfully for the FBI for decades….
Playing the informant game with our government is now a win-win gambit for every bad guy on the globe. … Don't miss the trees for the forest. If it's weird, sounds like a grade Z movie and is handled in a clumsy, obvious way, it's CIA [behind the curtain pulling the levers]....
Jesus Fucking Christ, are you reading this? And ever since Cantarell started collapsing. Drugs, Oil, Banks, money laundering, military.... Mexico's in the Middle of a Civil War. And it just took a step to the next level.
"The former federal agent who spoke with Narco News about the Zambada Niebla case, and who asked not to be named, says that in CIPA cases, individuals are often brought in by the government who have “particular specialties, like defending CIA interests.”
“Find out what other similar cases they have handled,” the source adds. “Sometimes these answer can be very telling.”
In the CIPA filing made by the US government in the Zambada Niebla case, prosecutors ask that the judge appoint “Daniel Hartenstine, Security Specialist, to serve in the position of classified information security officer in this matter.”
(An alert reader pointed out when my piece appeared in 2010, that Herb Sandler, who sold Golden West at the top of the market saying he wanted to devote himself to "philanthropy," "now owns ProPublica, a Left gatekeeper that goes after easy targets like racist cops ... but which will not examine Sandler's wing of the power elite. Michael Barker wrote a great series on this outfit and its Establishment handlers called "Investigating the Investigators--A Critical Look at ProPublica.")
However, unless Suárez Coppel obtained an iron-clad promise from President Felipe Calderón that he can work without interference, there's little reason to believe he'll enjoy any more success than his predecessor, experts say. In his annual State of the Union address last week, Calderón pledged to push through a fresh set of reforms aimed at strengthening Pemex, the government's largest single source of tax revenue. "We must take profound [reforms] and move quickly," he said.
Reyes Heroles, 57, a politically savvy economist who served as ambassador to the U.S. in the late 1990s, officially "resigned" to make way for Suárez Coppel, 50, a University of Chicago-trained economist. He is expected to take dramatic steps in an effort to stem losses at Petroleos Mexicanos, where production dropped 7.3% in the first half of the year and revenues plummeted 30%. On Sept. 7, Calderon praised Reyes Heroles for helping to win passage of the "historic" reforms Congress approved in 2008, measures which the President said would put Pemex "on the path to once again becoming … one of the most important oil companies in the world." He also said that Suárez Coppel's task would be to "transform Pemex profoundly, to its roots."
Having served as Pemex's chief financial officer from 2001 to 2006, Suárez Coppel knows the company's numbers well. But he also knows that his ability to turn Pemex's fortunes around will be limited by the fact that the company doesn't operate autonomously; it is subject to budgetary and spending decisions dictated by the finance and energy ministries and by Congress. Even Pemex's divisional chiefs of exploration and refining are named not by the CEO, but by President Calderón, notes George Baker, an energy analyst in Houston. "The head of Pemex really has very little authority, so it's not clear how much this change in CEOs will mean," Baker says.
