Mexico City Archive

Mexico City, Nov 4 (EFE) A crime reporter kidnapped outside his home in the northwestern Mexican city of Durango was found dead 10 hours later, authorities said.

The body of Vladimir Antuna, 39, who worked for El Tiempo de Durango newspaper, was found behind a diabetes clinic and a sports centre, sources at the Durango state Attorney General’s Office said Tuesday.

The reporter showed signs of having died ‘by strangulation’ and no bullet wounds were noticed on his body, the sources said.

Antuna was kidnapped Monday morning while driving to work, when his SUV was intercepted.

In mid-May, crime reporter Eliseo Barron Hernandez was kidnapped by seven masked men who burst into his home in the city of Torreon, Coahuila, when he was there with his wife and their two daughters.

His body was found the next day in an irrigation canal in Durango state.

Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based watchdog group, said that 55 journalists have been slain in Mexico since the year 2000.

Fifty-nine Mexican journalists have been attacked, and three of them were killed, during the third quarter of this year, according to a report by the organisation’s Article19 and the National Social Communication Centre.

Mexico City, Nov 3 (DPA) A group of about 20 armed attackers stole 5,000 children’s bicycles from a manufacturing company in Mexico City, after threatening and locking up company workers.

The National Association of Bicycle Manufacturers (Anafabi) told the daily Reform in a report published Monday that the attack happened to weeks ago.

Attackers reportedly stormed the premises of the firm Grupo Oriental and took – within two-and-a-half hours – the bikes, which were all set for distribution for the Christmas season.

‘I can guarantee you that the 5,000 bicycles they stole from this man are now around there, hidden in some storage place, because the strong sales season for a bike is the Christmas season,’ said Anafabi spokesman Gunter Maerker.

Mexico City, Oct 26 (EFE) Members of an animal rights group staged a protest in Guanajuato, a city in central Mexico, against the inclusion of bullfights for the first time in the Festival Internacional Cervantino, the country’s largest cultural event.

A member of the Anima Naturalis organisation, with ‘banderillas’ attached to his body and covered in fake blood – simulating the condition of a bull during the course of a bullfight – protested on the Plaza de la Paz, in central Guanajuato, the city where the festival is celebrated every year.

Later the demonstrators moved to the portable El Pilar bullring set up on a local baseball field.

Anima Naturalis Mexico director Leonora Esquivel told EFE that the organisation will send letters to the governor of Guanajuato and festival organisers to demand that they omit the programme of bullfights from the agenda at the next celebration.

‘People in Guanajuato are ashamed that for the first time these shows are being included in a festival that was purely cultural,’ Esquivel said.

The organisation said in a communique that bullfighting is ‘common to societies that are ethically and morally backward’ and a ’sadistic’ spectacle.

The bulls are treated without ‘the minimum moral consideration for living beings’ and the bullrings are ‘centres of institutionalised torture’, Anima Naturalis said.

The 37th edition of the festival, which is one of the most important cultural events in the Americas, runs from Oct 14 to Nov 1, with the Canadian province of Quebec as this year’s specially invited guest.

The festival is rooted in a performance tradition that goes back to 1954, when the University of Guanajuato first produced the ‘entremeses’, or farcical works, of ‘Don Quixote’ creator Miguel de Cervantes.

This year’s festival will feature 2,300 artists from 25 countries and expects to attract at least 500,000 people.

Mexico City, Oct 25 (EFE) Oil output in Mexico has continued to decline in 2009, coming in at an average of 2.6 million barrels per day (bpd) for the first nine months of the year, or almost 190,000 barrels less than the average for all of 2008, state oil monopoly Petroleos Mexicanos reported.

On a more positive note, Pemex noted Friday in its latest petroleum statistics report that during the month of September crude production averaged 2.59 million bpd, the highest level since May.

Mexican oil output has been falling steadily in recent years because no new important finds have been made and the shallow offshore Cantarell mega-field has declined from its peak at mid-decade.

The fall has put a strain on public finances because oil revenues fund roughly 30 percent of the federal budget.

Pemex said that between January and September around 59 percent of nationwide production, or 1.53 million bpd, corresponded to Maya heavy crude; 31 percent to Istmo light crude (810,000 bpd); and the rest to extra-light Olmeca crude (261,000 bpd).

During the first nine months of the year, oil exports came in at an average volume of 1.21 million bpd, equivalent to almost 47 percent of total production, and export revenues totalled $17.6 billion.

Between January and September, the average price of the Mexican crude export mix was $52.90 per barrel.

President Felipe Calderon last year sought to push a controversial plan through Congress to overhaul Pemex, including allowing the cash-strapped company to take on private oil firms as full partners in the exploration and drilling of new deepwater deposits in the Gulf of Mexico.

But leftist lawmakers fiercely opposed the initial bill, claiming that the aim of the government was to privatize Pemex, created after President Lazaro Cardenas’ nationalization of the oil industry in 1938.