Salvador Garcia Soto has an amusingly titled column ("Adios, Pascualito, adios!") in El Universal about the resignation of Carlos Pascual Lus, the US ambassador to Mexico.
Pascual, whom Soto tweaks for calling Mexico a "failed state," was a casualty of his indiscreet comments revealed by WikiLeaks. Soto seems happy to see him go, tying him to such demonstrations of US power as the drone aircraft it has sent into Mexico. The "Snakes and Ladders" columnist also describes the resignation as a "caramel" to Mexican President Felipe Calderon from US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Yet he also describes the resignation as something brought about not only by "Pascualito's" loose tongue ... but also by the White House perception that he did not do enough to combat the threat of the Mexican drug cartels.
Meanwhile, El Diario de Juarez has cited a report that blames the Mexican crime-fighting forces for making things worse in what it describes as the battleground that Ciudad Juarez has become in the narco wars.
Covering a period that began in 2008, the report makes for grim reading as it details instances of corrupt police, army and law-enforcement agency officials committing crimes that include homicide, drug trafficking, kidnapping and extortion.
The lawyer Salvador Urbina Quiroz calls such corruption one of the fundamental factors causing the current crisis in Ciudad Juarez, and Leticia Chavarria of the city's Medical Committee says that rogue government officials have led to minimized results over the last three years.
Among the highest-level instances of alleged corruption is the case of Saulo Reyes Gamboa, a former top-ranking official of the Municipal Public Security Secretariat from 2004-07. He was arrested in the US city of El Paso, Texas, and accused of drug trafficking.
The list of those arrested also includes two officials -- a ministry agent and a technician from the office of the state of Juarez' former Procurator General of Justice -- who were arrested by soldiers who found them with a stash of marijuana and weapons in a residential area. The list also includes the two federal policemen accused of
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