Tag: mexico

‘Alien corpses’ unveiled at Mexico’s Congress as UFO speculation intensifies

An “alien” discovery was on the docket in Mexico’s Congress on Tuesday, as “non-human” corpses were unveiled to politicians at a public hearing.

Prominent Mexican UFO expert and journalist Jaime Maussan presented two small mummified corpses he testified under oath were not part of “our terrestrial evolution.”

The hearing discussed alleged evidence of extraterrestrial life, including the unearthing of three-fingered humanoid corpses with elongated heads as well as various UFO sightings.

The purported alien cadavers were retrieved from Cusco, Peru. “These aren’t beings that were found after a UFO wreckage,” Maussan said. “They were found in diatom mines and were later fossilized.”

Maussan claimed that the bodies were examined by scientists at the National Autonomous University of Mexico who used radiocarbon dating to conclude that the corpses were approximately 1,000 years old. Radiocarbon dating is not a perfect science, however, as results can be skewed by several factors including contamination.

It was also found that 30% of the specimens’ DNA was “unknown,” while both corpses were said to have implants of rare metals like osmium, with one body containing eggs inside, according to the experts who testified.

Maussan has made similar claims in the past. In 2017, the UFO expert was involved in a hoax surrounding five mummified corpses found in Peru. Similar to the recent Peruvian discovery, these corpses were three-fingered and humanoid with elongated heads and turned out to be human children.

This prompted professor Konstantin Korotkov from the Russian National Research University to remark, “Those involved in ‘scientifically’ examining the mummies seem to believe they are ancient aliens, but they are suffering from the wish to believe.”

Maussan has worked at some of Mexico’s most recognized news outlets, including 60 Minutes and TV Azteca, and is the subject of the documentary Maussan’s UFO Files.

Keep reading

‘Cannibal’ Mexican husband ‘killed his wife, ate her brains in tacos and used her skull as an ashtray’

A ‘devil worshipper’ dubbed the ‘Cannibal of Puebla’ who allegedly killed his wife, ate her brain in tacos, and used her skull as an ashtray has been arrested in Mexico.

The suspect, identified only as Alvaro, was seized at the couple’s home in Puebla on July 2 and taken into custody.

The police accuse the 32-year-old of murdering his wife – a mother of five – on June 29 while under the influence of a prohibited substance.

During questioning, he allegedly told officers that Santa Muerte (Our Lady of Holy Death) and the devil had ordered him to commit the crime.

Following the killing, Alvaro allegedly dismembered victim Maria Montserrat Animas Montiel’s body and placed her remains in plastic bags.

He allegedly threw some of them into a ravine behind the home and kept the rest inside the property.

According to sources close to the case, he confessed to eating part of his wife’s brain in tacos and using part of her shattered skull as an ashtray.

Two days after the killing, he allegedly called one of his stepdaughters to confess his crime.

The victim’s mother, Maria Alicia Montiel Serran, told local media: ‘He told one of her daughters to come and collect her mum because “I already killed her and put her in bags”.’

Grieving Maria Alicia added that Alvaro chopped up the 38-year-old victim’s body ‘with a machete, a chisel, and a hammer’. She went on: ‘I called him crying, asking why he did that to her if she wasn’t a bad person.’

According to Maria Alicia, the suspect confessed: ‘I killed her, I cut her into pieces, and I threw her into the ravine in bags.’

She added that he claimed: ‘She didn’t suffer.’

Keep reading

Radioactive Material Reported Missing Near Southern U.S. Border — U.S. Officials Remained Silent While Mexican Officials Issued Alert

A container of Iridium-192 reportedly went missing in the southern border state of New Mexico, prompting Mexican officials to issue a warning and speak out to a local news station in El Paso. While concern was raised south of the U.S. border, American officials remained silent.

Now, questions remain after a recent report that the radioactive material was recovered on July 3.

KVIA El-Paso reported on July 2nd:

“The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission radioactive equipment disappeared in southern New Mexico, according to Mexico’s federal government.”

ICR further reported:

“The missing equipment is described as a container with Iridium-192, which is used for medical treatments and also in the oil industry, according to the commission.”

According to KVIA, Juarez Civil Protection Director Roberto Briones said this isn’t the first time his department has issued an alert for missing radioactive materials.

Although it is now reported the materials were recovered, a cursory overview of news reports on Google suggests Iridium-192 goes missing all the time.

As reported by Discover on March 1, “it’s scary to think how often these dangerous materials” disappear.

“Potentially dangerous radioactive material “goes missing” about 100 times a year worldwide,” Discover explained while citing a February report from The Guardian.

Less than two weeks after the story from Discover, Nuclear Newswire reported that a radiographic camera, including it’s “iridium-192 radioactive sealed source” went missing in Houston, Texas, on March 11.

A 2004 Department of Homeland Security report details the risks associated with a “dirty bomb” made from stolen radioactive materials including Iridium-192.

Keep reading

Bombing Mexican Cartels Won’t Stop Fentanyl

Americans continue to overdose on illicit fentanyl despite increased seizures of the drug coming north from Mexico. Several prominent Republicans are suggesting that the U.S. respond with wartime tools such as airstrikes and troop deployments. But combining the war on drugs with the war on terror is a surefire recipe for costly engagement abroad and little progress in reducing fentanyl-related harm at home.

During his presidency, The New York Times reported last year, Donald Trump expressed interest in using missiles to attack Mexican drug cartels and destroy their labs. Reps. Mike Waltz (R–Fla.) and Dan Crenshaw (R–Texas) helped revive that idea in January, when they introduced a joint resolution that would authorize the president to “use all necessary and appropriate force” against “foreign nations, foreign organizations, or foreign persons” involved in fentanyl production or trafficking.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) argues that the military should “go after these organizations wherever they exist.” Several GOP presidential hopefuls, including former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, have echoed that sentiment.

There is little reason to believe these strikes would be as precise or effective as proponents claim. “Even a campaign of air strikes against cartels could easily escalate,” says Benjamin H. Friedman, policy director at Defense Priorities. “Cartels could retaliate,” he notes, and “strikes are bound to fail to affect fentanyl shipments, let alone meaningfully damage cartels.”

Mexico hawks like Waltz say the U.S. has “done this before,” citing Plan Colombia, a Clinton-era counternarcotics and counterterrorism initiative. But “claiming that Plan Colombia was a success is just plain false,” says Javier Osorio, a professor of political science at the University of Arizona whose research focuses on criminal violence in Latin America.

When the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) “demobilized after the peace agreement in 2016,” Osorio says, coca cultivation “skyrocketed.” He notes that “it’s even higher than before the U.S. started conducting aerial eradications” of coca fields. A similar counternarcotics program in Mexico, the Mérida Initiative, has been “a total disaster,” Osorio says: It has not stopped drug trafficking, and years after the initiative began, Mexico’s top law enforcement official was still “in bed” with the Sinaloa cartel.

The war on drugs has helped turn Latin America into the most violent region in the world, leading to increased black market activity and corruption. “If airstrikes miraculously kill off a cartel, another will fill the gap,” Friedman says, “likely with considerable violence between criminals as the market shifts.” According to Osorio, “There’s always going to be someone willing to kill and die for supplying drugs when there’s such a huge market.”

Keep reading

Huge Lost Maya City Has Emerged From the Jungle in Mexico

Mexican archaeologists harnessed the potential of LiDAR drones to undertake an extensive survey of the Yucatan Peninsula, yielding the remarkable discovery of a once-forgotten city. This extraordinary find includes pyramids, a ball court and sacred spaces distinguished by the presence of meticulously crafted stone columns.

Mexico’s National Institute for Anthropology and History ( INAH) has just announced that a team of archaeologists have identified a jungle-locked, ancient Maya city. Discovered deep in southern Mexico, the previously unknown city comprises large pyramids, stone columns, three plazas with “imposing buildings” and other sacred stone structures arranged in concentric circles.

INAH said the city is located in the state of Campeche, in the Balamku Ecological Reserve on the country’s Yucatan Peninsula . Archaeologists have named this lost Maya city in Mexico Ocomtun, which in the Yucatec Maya language means “stone column.” Speculatively, INAH said the city would have been an important Maya center for the entirety of the peninsula’s central lowland region, between 250 and 1000 AD.

Keep reading

Case against ex-CIA officer accused of abusing women may collapse because of how federal agents searched his phones

The prosecution’s case against a former CIA officer accused of sexually abusing more than 20 incapacitated women in Mexico City is at risk of collapsing because the Justice and State departments may have botched the execution of a warrant to seize the officer’s iPhones, court records show.

A federal judge is set to hear arguments Thursday about whether nearly 600 photos of the defendant allegedly abusing incapacitated women should be thrown out, in a dispute that could make new law on the question of what constitutes an improper search in the digital age.

The former CIA officer, Brian Jeffrey Raymond, has been held without bail in a Washington, D.C., jail for nearly three years. He made a deal to plead guilty to two counts of sexual abuse in July 2021, admitting in court to preying upon women he met in and outside the U.S. through dating sites even as he carried out his clandestine duties.

But the one-time spy withdrew his plea last year after members of his legal team realized there were significant problems with how the evidence in the case was obtained. In allowing Raymond to change his plea, the federal judge ruled that one of his former defense lawyers had been ineffective in noting major concerns about the manner in which investigators gained access to Raymond’s iPhones. The judge ruled that law enforcement agents may have violated Raymond’s rights under the Fourth Amendment, which guards against unreasonable search and seizure, and under the Fifth, which says a person can’t be forced to testify against himself.

Keep reading

The Republican Primary Consensus for Sending the Military Into Mexico

When Sen. Tim Scott (R–S.C.), a comparatively affable chap in the context of contemporary GOP politics, announced his 2024 presidential bid on Monday, the speech was predictably full of the upbeat, anecdotal, ain’t-America-grand stuff that Scott, like generations of Republicans before him, has made central to his political career.

Then things suddenly turned dark.

“When I am president, the drug cartels using Chinese labs and Mexican factories to kill Americans will cease to exist,” Scott vowed. “I will freeze their assets, I will build the wall, and I will allow the world’s greatest military to fight these terrorists. Because that’s exactly what they are.”

Scott’s bellicosity was no mere bolt from the blue. As Reason has been documenting for six years now, Republicans, even while otherwise souring on U.S interventionism abroad, have increasingly concluded that the alarming spike in domestic fentanyl overdoses would best be treated by sending the military into Mexico.

Donald Trump first floated the idea, while he was president, of designating drug cartels as terrorist organizations—thereby allowing for extraterritorial prosecutions, enhanced investigative powers, and increased penalties for domestic drug-related crimes—in March 2019, but held off after the government of Mexico repeatedly objected on grounds of sovereignty while making uncooperative noises about transnational migration policy.

But the appetite for corralling cartels into the otherwise-unpopular war on terror was only beginning to rumble in the conservative belly. Trump himself in the summer of 2020 twice asked then–Defense Secretary Mark Esper whether “we could just shoot some Patriot missiles and take out the labs, quietly,” according to Esper’s 2022 memoir. Notable MAGA politicians Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R–Ga.) have both suggested violent interdiction south of the border, as have a bevy of more traditional hawks. There are a handful of escalatory bills bouncing around Congress.

Keep reading

Former Mexican president worked for CIA

Former Mexican president Jose Lopez Portillo, who led the country from 1976 to 1982, was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) asset, according to a new batch of declassified documents published by the US National Archives.

Among the papers, relating to a CIA probe into the murder of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, was a memo from a meeting of CIA agents on November 29, 1976.

In the discussions, US intelligence official Bill Sturbitts informed his colleagues that “Mexico will soon have a new president, a man who has had control of Liaison for a number of years.”

Lopez Portillo was not mentioned by name in the memo, but the meeting took place just a few days before he officially assumed the presidency.

He had run for office earlier that year as the sole candidate from the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ruled the country from 1929 to 2000. Lopez Portillo died in 2004 at the age of 83.

Keep reading

GOP embraces a new foreign policy: Bomb Mexico to stop fentanyl

A growing number of prominent Republicans are rallying around the idea that to solve the fentanyl crisis, America must bomb it away.

In recent weeks, Donald Trump has discussed sending “special forces” and using “cyber warfare” to target cartel leaders if he’s reelected president and, per Rolling Stone, asked for “battle plans” to strike Mexico. Reps. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) and Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) introduced a bill seeking authorization for the use of military force to “put us at war with the cartels.” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said he is open to sending U.S. troops into Mexico to target drug lords even without that nation’s permission. And lawmakers in both chambers have filed legislation to label some cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, a move supported by GOP presidential aspirants.

“We need to start thinking about these groups more like ISIS than we do the mafia,” Waltz, a former Green Beret, said in a short interview.

Not all Republican leaders are behind this approach. John Bolton, Trump’s third national security adviser who’s weighing his own presidential run, said unilateral military operations “are not going to solve the problem.” And House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Mike McCaul (R-Texas), for example, is “still evaluating” the AUMF proposal “but has concerns about the immigration implications and the bilateral relationship with Mexico,” per a Republican staff member on the panel.

But the eagerness of some Republicans to openly legislate or embrace the use of the military in Mexico suggests that the idea is taking firmer root inside the party. And it illustrates the ways in which frustration with immigration, drug overdose deaths and antipathy towards China are defining the GOP’s larger foreign policy.

Keep reading

The growing Chinese investment in illegal American weed

A few days before Christmas, a joint law enforcement task force found nearly 9,000 pounds of cannabis worth almost $15 million during a raid in a suburban neighborhood in Antioch, Calif.

The California Department of Cannabis Control believes that the four houses searched in the bedroom community 45 minutes outside San Francisco were linked to China.

Mexican cartels have a long history of importing, growing and redistributing illicit cannabis in the United States. But Chinese investors, owners and workers have emerged in recent years as a new source of funding and labor for illegal marijuana production.

What is known — from interviews with state law enforcement officials, experts on the international drug trade, economists and lawmakers — is that the number of farms funded by sources traceable back to Chinese investors or owners has skyrocketed. Chinese owners and workers have become a larger presence at illegal grows in Oklahoma, California and Oregon, they say.

In Oklahoma, close to 3,000 of the state’s nearly 7,000 licensed marijuana farms have been flagged for suspicious activity by law enforcement over the last year. Those operations are now being investigated for obtaining their licenses fraudulently and/or for selling into the illicit market, according to Mark Woodward, spokesperson for the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics.

Keep reading