World Briefs March 27, 2011
Report: 230,000 displaced by Mexico's drug war
MEXICO CITY - About 230,000 people have been displaced in Mexico because of drug violence, and about half of them may have taken refuge in the United States, according to a new study.
The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre based this week's report on studies by local researchers, saying that the Mexican government does not compile figures on people who have had to leave their homes because of turf battles between drug gangs.
"Independent surveys put their number at around 230,000," according to the global report's section on Mexico. "An estimated half of those displaced crossed the border into the United States, which would leave about 115,000 people internally displaced, most likely in the States of Chihuahua, Durango, Coahuila and Veracruz."
While that number is far below the estimated 3.6 to 5.2 million displaced by decades of drug- and guerrilla-war violence in Colombia, the report suggested that people who had to flee drug violence in Mexico have received little support.
Government census figures released this month support the idea of an exodus, at least in some areas.
The census, carried out in mid-2010, listed as uninhabited 61 percent of the 3,616 homes in Praxedis G. Guerrero, a border township in the Rio Grande Valley east of Ciudad Juarez. The area has suffered turf battles between the Juarez and Sinaloa cartels, and people in the town said gunmen have them to leave.
A striking 111,103 of the 488,785 homes in violence-wracked Ciudad Juarez were abandoned, or about 23 percent, and almost one-third of the 160,171 houses in Reynosa were unoccupied. The figure for Mexico as a whole was 14 percent, and many of those, especially in southern states, may belong to migrants who went to the United States seeking work.
Simmons undeterred by Jerusalem bombing
JERUSALEM - The legendary Kiss bassist Gene Simmons says that watching Jerusalem go through a deadly bombing this week has not changed his belief that Jews and Arabs can live in peace. The Israeli-born entertainer, on his first visit to his homeland since leaving as a child 52 years ago, said he was visiting Yad Vashem, the country's national Holocaust memorial, at the time of Wednesday's blast. The memorial is about two miles away from the site.
Simmons said the attack, which killed a female British tourist, was the work of extremists who can't cope with the move toward freedom and democracy sweeping through the Arab world.
Simmons said that he has already begun arrangements for multiple Kiss concerts in Israel, and that the band would also love to perform in the Arab world as well.
- The Associated Press