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29 killed in arrest of Mexico drug kingpin’s son

Photo: Marcos Vizcarra / AFP

January 6th | By AFP |

Ten soldiers and 19 suspected criminals were killed in an operation to arrest a son of jailed drug trafficker Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, Mexico’s government said Friday, with a dramatic shootout sowing terror at an airport.

Thousands of soldiers retook control of the Sinaloa cartel stronghold of Culiacan, which resembled a war zone after furious gunmen went on the rampage to try to free their boss.

Ovidio Guzman was captured in the northwestern city on Thursday and flown to Mexico City before being transferred to the high-security Altiplano prison in central Mexico from which “El Chapo” escaped in 2015.

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The 32-year-old, nicknamed “El Raton” (The Mouse), had allegedly helped to run his father’s operations since the former Sinaloa cartel boss was extradited to the United States in 2017.

A colonel who commanded an infantry battalion was among those killed after his team came under attack following the arrest, Defense Minister Luis Cresencio Sandoval told reporters.

Another 35 soldiers sustained gunshot wounds and were taken to hospital, while 21 gunmen were arrested.

Sandoval said a civilian airliner that was about to take off from Culiacan International Airport, as well as two Mexican Air Force aircraft, were hit as cartel henchmen tried to free Ovidio Guzman.

The military planes “had to make an emergency landing” after receiving “a significant number of impacts,” said Sandoval.

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No injuries resulted from the plane attacks and Culiacan airport resumed operations on Friday.

Multimillion-dollar bounty

The United States had issued a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to Ovidio Guzman’s capture. It accuses him of being a key player in the Sinaloa cartel founded by his father.

The arrest came as Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador prepared to welcome his US counterpart Joe Biden for a North America leaders’ summit next week where security is expected to be high on the agenda.

Mexico denied that the United States had been involved in the operation to catch Ovidio Guzman.

“We act autonomously, independently. Yes there is cooperation and there will continue to be, but we make the decisions as a sovereign government,” Lopez Obrador told reporters.

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He said calm had returned to Culiacan, where security forces removed dozens of stolen and burnt out vehicles scattered throughout the city of 800,000 people.

Videos on social media Thursday showed passengers and Aeromexico airline employees ducking behind counters as gunfire rang out at Culiacan airport.

Cartel gunmen set cars and trucks ablaze at several intersections in the city, and authorities reported 19 roadblocks.

Cocaine, meth and fentanyl

El Chapo is serving a life sentence in the United States for trafficking hundreds of tons of drugs into the country over the course of 25 years.

However, his cartel remains one of the most powerful in Mexico, accused by Washington of exploiting an opioid epidemic by flooding communities in the United States with fentanyl, a synthetic drug about 50 times more potent than heroin.

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Ovidio Guzman and one of his brothers are accused of overseeing nearly a dozen methamphetamine labs in Sinaloa as well as conspiring to distribute cocaine and marijuana, according to the US State Department.

Ovidio Guzman also allegedly ordered the murders of informants, a drug trafficker and a Mexican singer who refused to perform at his wedding, it said.

He was captured briefly once before in 2019, but security forces freed him after his cartel waged an all-out war in response.

His release prompted sharp criticism of Lopez Obrador, who said the decision was made to protect civilians’ lives.

Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard has played down the prospects of a fast-track extradition, saying Ovidio Guzman was expected to face legal proceedings in Mexico.

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Mexico has registered more than 340,000 murders since the government controversially deployed the army to fight drug cartels in 2006, most of them blamed on criminal gangs.

International

A court orders the arrest of the Ukrainian Minister of Agriculture accused of corruption

The Supreme Anti-Corruption Court of Ukraine issued a preventive arrest warrant on Friday against the Minister of Agriculture, Mikola Solski, accused of being part of a plot that would have illegally appropriated about 2,500 hectares of land that belonged to the State before his arrival at the Ministry.

According to Ukrainian media, the court has issued a sixty-day arrest warrant, which Solski can avoid if he pays a bail of 75.7 million gryvnas (1.78 million euros at the current exchange rate).

Solski presented his resignation on Thursday – which must now be accepted by the Ukrainian Parliament – after being accused this week by the Anti-Corruption Office of Ukraine (NABU) of participating in a transfer of publicly owned land valued at 291 million gryvnas (about 7 million euros).

In addition, the organization investigates the still minister for trying to transfer another lot of land in an equally criminal way, valued at 190 million gryvnas (4.5 million euros).

The events occurred, according to the Anti-Corruption Office, between 2017 and 2021.

From 2019 to 2021, Solski was president of the Committee on Agriculture and Land Policy of the Ukrainian Parliament and in 2022 he was appointed minister.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has marked himself as one of his priorities to combat corruption at the highest level in time of war to modernize the country and meet the requirements for access to the European Union.

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International

The Chinese president tells the United States that he has to be “faithful” to his word to solve the “problems to be solved”

Chinese President Xi Jinping has told the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that the United States must “be faithful to its word” in order to solve the “problems still to be solved” in the bilateral relationship.

“China and the United States have gone through ups and downs but we must respect each other, cooperate and coexist. We must be partners and not harm each other, and for that we have to look for common ground, be faithful to the words and determined with the facts,” Xi said during the meeting.

According to a statement from the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Xi also warned that “you can’t say one thing and then do another,” after which he acknowledged that, “despite the consensus and progress made” in recent months there are still “many problems to solve and room to make an effort.”

“This year we celebrate the 45th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations. The important thing we have learned in this time is that we must be partners, not rivals. That we must achieve a mutual benefit instead of harming each other. The important thing is to look for the common points and put aside the differences,” Xi said during the meeting.

The Chinese president received Blinken this Friday in Beijing for an interview that was not part of the agenda of the official visit made to China by the American diplomat.

This is the second time Xi has received Blinken in Beijing, given that the Chinese president already met the American on his last visit to the Chinese capital in June 2023.

Before his meeting with Xi, Blinken also met today in Beijing with his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, who warned him of “growing problems” in bilateral relations, after the U.S. Senate approved a bill that will force the Chinese company ByteDance to sell the popular TikTok video application if he does not want the platform to be banned in the United States.

ByteDance, the parent company of the platform, has made it clear today that it has no intention of selling the application despite US legislation.

Earlier this week, TikTok – which, like Western services such as Google, Facebook, X or Instagram, is blocked in China, where ByteDance operates a similar application called Douyin – already anticipated that it would challenge the new US law, which it considers “unconstitutional” in court.

U.S. legislators justify their decision by arguing that the platform poses a threat to the national security of the United States due to the possibility that the Chinese government will access user data.

In March, China criticized the “repression” against the application by the United States for being “an intimidating tactic” that will eventually “turn against” the North American country.

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International

Israeli bombings in the north and south of Gaza cause fifty deaths

The latest Israeli attacks and bombings along the Gaza Strip have caused the death of at least 51 people, most of them civilians, both in Gaza City (north) and in the southern area of Rafah.

Israeli fighter planes bombed a house belonging to the Al Shawa family last night, in the Al Rimal neighborhood, in Gaza City, where rescue teams recovered the lifeless bodies of three people, including those of a child and a woman, under the rubble.

As Palestinian sources reported to the WAFA news agency today, the victims and several injuries were transferred to the Al Ahli Arab Hospital, the last hospital in operation in Gaza City after the Israeli military siege left the Al Shifa inoperative in March.

Other bombings in the neighborhoods of Zaytun, south of Gaza City, and against a residential building in the center of the city, caused the death of another Gazan, as well as an indeterminate number of injuries.

In Rafah, one fisherman died and another was injured, according to Palestinian medical sources, while in the center of the enclave several Gazans were injured in attacks against the refugee camps of Nuseirat and Bureij.

According to the latest figures provided on Thursday by the Ministry of Health of the Government of Hamas, more than 34,300 Palestinians have already died in Gaza, 75% women and children.

One of those little ones is a Gaza baby rescued from her mother’s womb, who died in an Israeli airstrike perpetrated in Rafah last weekend.

After five days of struggle to stay alive, he has finally died, as confirmed this Friday by a family member.

Over the weekend, 16 other children were killed in Rafah, where Israel is expected to start a ground offensive.

A member of the Hamas political bureau asked the 18 signatory countries yesterday on Friday of a joint statement demanding the Islamists the “immediate” release of the 133 hostages, to also pressure Israel to accept a truce in the Gaza Strip.

Your sons and daughters are no more valuable than our sons and daughters,” the head of political and international relations of the political bureau of Hamas, Basem Naim, to which EFE had access, said today in a message.

Today, a delegation of the Egyptian Intelligence service is scheduled to arrive in Israel, in an attempt to revive the stagnant truce negotiations mediated by Cairo, Qatar and the United States, Egyptian security sources told EFE last night.

From Geneva, UN rapporteurs demanded that Israel allow the arrival in Gaza of the Freedom Flotilla that it plans to sail this Friday from Istanbul with 5,500 tons of humanitarian aid.

Diplomats have warned that the safe transit guarantee of this initiative is part of Israeli international obligations to prevent genocide in Palestinian territory.

“Israel must comply with international law, including the recent orders of the International Court of Justice, to ensure the unhindered arrival of humanitarian aid,” they said in a statement.

Israel warned on Friday that any arrival of aid to Gaza other than by air, land border crossings or the port of Ashdod will constitute a “provocation,” after being asked by EFE about the administrative blockade that the Freedom Flotilla – a civilian initiative organized by human rights activists – says it is suffering in Istanbul.

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