Free Republic

Foreign Relations: A veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan is chained to a jail bed for months after trying to register a souvenir rifle with Mexican authorities, and the Obama administration does nothing to correct this injustice. Since August, Jon Hammar, a former Marine who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been held in a notorious Mexican prison effectively run by the Zetas drug cartel. His crime: declaring to Mexican authorities that he was transporting an antique shotgun after registering the gun with U.S. Customs agents on his way to a surfing trip with buddies in Costa Rica. We can understand...

Is mass migration from Mexico to the United States a thing of the past? At least for the moment, it is. Last May, the Pew Hispanic Center, in a study based on U.S. and Mexican statistics, reported that net migration from Mexico to this country had fallen to zero from 2005 to 2010. Pew said 20,000 more people moved to Mexico from the United States than from there to here in those years. That’s a vivid contrast with the years 1995 to 2000, when net inflow from Mexico was 2.2 million people. Because there was net Mexican immigration until 2007,...

No end is in sight as the United Nations directs the U.S. to negotiate a peaceful settlement. Following years of demands by la Raza that the United States relinquish all occupied territories to Mexico, missiles began falling on El Paso, Texas and neighboring areas north of the border between Texas and Mexico during the early morning hours of December 6th. Under the previous administration, the United States had imperiously ignored all such demands and no significant progress toward returning the territories to Mexico had been made even under the current administration. Due to the persistent failure of the imperialist United...

As the bodies of her former law-enforcement colleagues pile up in Mexico’s violent drug wars, former small-town police chief Marisol Valles Garcia is fighting for asylum in the United States. “I thought I could make a difference,” Valles says of her decision at age 20 to become the top cop in Praxedis Guadalupe Guerrero, a dusty town of 9,000 in the Chihuahua region, just south of the US border. Two of her predecessors were executed, and the job was vacant for a year before Valles, a criminal-justice student, took it. But she, too, was vulnerable to the intense violence of...

A Penn State sorority has become the focus of an investigation after a racist Mexican-themed party picture was posted to the Web, according to the independent Penn State blog, Onward State. The picture, said to be taken around Halloween, shows the women dressed in sombreros and mustaches. Some of the women held signs that read "Will mow lawn for weed + beer" and "I don't cut grass I smoke it." The photo was posted on Tumblr and Facebook, where Onward State was able to identify the women tagged in the photo as members of the Chi Omega sorority on campus....

The Mexican drug cartels once again have taken deadly aim against U.S. law enforcement. This time the narco terrorists intentionally rammed their smuggling panga boat against an approaching Coast Guard inflatable which resulted in the death of Chief Petty Officer Terrell Horne III and the injury of another guardsman after they fell into the sea off the southern California coast as reported by the Los Angeles Times. Two suspects have been detained. The narco insurgents from Mexico increasingly are targeting U.S. officials on both sides of the border: last August two CIA officials were injured in a shooting ambush against...

President Obama met with the newly elected President of Mexico, Enrique Pena Nieto yesterday. While the press focused on the Administration’s talking points for discussions on a wide range of issues from energy to climate change, the real concern is that the Mexican economy is far out performing the U.S. and the new immigration concern is increasingly from Americans illegally moving to Mexico. Nowhere is this trend more challenging than in California, which was just awarded the booby-prize by 24/7 Wall Street survey, as the “Worst Run State” in the United States. The State has unemployment: 10.1% (2nd highest), Budget...

President Obama met with Mexican President-elect Enrique Peña Nieto at the White House on Tuesday; looks like the sit-down amounted to pretty much what you’d expect: In his first meeting in the Oval Office with Peña Nieto, which comes on the heels of the election in Mexico, Obama said he would be “sharing” ideas with his Mexican counterpart. Peña Nieto signaled that he would be in support of such a plan.“We fully support your proposal,” Peña Nieto said, speaking through a translator. “We want to contribute. We want to be part of this.”Obama, who was joined in the Oval Office...

The president-elect of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto, praised President Barack Obama's immigration plan in a meeting today at the White House. “We fully support your proposal,” said Peña Nieto in reference to Obama's immigration plan, according to the pool report. “We want to contribute. We want to be part of this.” Obama indicated his willingness to visit Mexico after the president-elect invited the American president to the 2013 North American Leaders Summit. “Any excuses to go to Mexico,” said Obama. “I’m always game.”

The woman mayor who was kidnapped and murdered by a Mexican drug gang pleaded with her attackers for her young daughter’s life, it emerged today. Maria Santos Gorrostieta, who had already survived two assassination attempts, was driving the child to school at around 8.30am when she was ambushed by a car in the city of Morelia. The 36-year-old was hauled from her vehicle and physically assaulted as horrified witnesses watched, according to newspaper El Universal. They described how she begged for her child to be left alone and then appeared to get into her abductors’ car willingly. The little girl...

(CNN) -- A Mexican beauty queen was killed during a weekend shootout in the restive northern state of Sinaloa, authorities said Monday. Maria Susana Flores Gamez , 20, was the 2012 Woman of Sinaloa. She was killed Saturday during clashes between criminals and military troops in the municipality of Mocorito. Two others, both men, also were killed in the shootout.

Brett David has been selling Lamborghinis in Miami since he was 14 years old. But never before has he sold so many super-cars to so many overseas buyers. “I haven’t sold a Lamborghini to somebody who spoke English as their primary language in months and months, ” said David, the CEO of Lamborghini Miami, founded by his father. “It’s been months and months.” The flood of overseas wealth pouring into the United States is remaking many corners of the economy, from the Manhattan condo market to the market for Abstract Expressionist paintings to wine, jewelry and fashion. But nowhere is...

BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich. — Manufacturer TriMas Corp. plans to shut its Goshen, Ind., plant and lay off all 450 workers there. The company said production at the Cequent Performance Product plant, which makes hitches, weight-distribution systems, fifth wheels and other items, will shift to its plant in Reynosa, Mexico. TriMas will also close a warehouse in Huntington, Ind., the company said. The moves will occur throughout 2013. The Bloomfield Hills, Mich.-based company has about 4,500 employees...

Father Pro: A Mexican HeroROBERT ROYALMiguel Pro and the other Mexican martyrs provided millions of people with inspiration to resist the most anti-Catholic government ever seen in the Americas. On Nov. 22, 1927, a man dressed in street clothes was led through a crowd of photographers and politicians on his way to a firing squad in Mexico City. The photographers were present for this illegal execution — there had been no trial or even formal charges — because the Mexican president, Plutarco Elias Calles, the most rabidly anti-Catholic leader in the world at the time, wanted them to record the...

It will be ironic but fitting if the rights to the Twinkie and other treats end up being bought by Mexican bakery El Grupo Bimbo through bankruptcy liquidation. Growing up in Pittsburgh, union people are the greediest,entitlement minded people I have known in my lifetime. The only EXCEPTIONS I have personally known just happen to HATE being in the union and despise the lazy idiots more than anyone... (video) The union people who are actually WORTH the money they are paid - resent - that they have to pick up the slack for the idiots!

The Department of State has issued this Travel Warning to inform U.S. citizens about the security situation in Mexico. General information on the overall security situation is provided immediately below. For information on security conditions in specific regions of Mexico, which can vary, travelers should reference the state-by-state assessments further below. This Travel Warning supersedes the Travel Warning for Mexico dated February 8, 2012 to consolidate and update information about the security situation and to advise the public of additional restrictions on the travel of U.S. government (USG) personnel. General Conditions: Millions of U.S. citizens safely visit Mexico each year...

SNIPPET: "They are: Soheil Omar Kabir, 34, a Pomona man who is an American citizen from Afghanistan; Ralph Deleon, 23, an Ontario man who was born in the Philippines; Miguel Alejandro Santana Vidriales, 21, an Upland man who was born in Mexico and whose was U.S. citizenship was pending; and Arifeen David Gojali, 21, of Riverside." SNIPPET: "The three men followed the essays of the now-deceased al-Qaida leader Anwar Al-Awlaqi, who led terrorist operations in the Arabian Peninsula." SNIPPET: "Santana and Deleon told the plot to a confidential informant working for the FBI, according to the complaint." SNIPPET: "In order...

A new congressional report from the House Homeland Security Committee Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations and Management ties Middle East terror organizations to Mexican drug cartels. The report, released Thursday, is titled “A Line in the Sand: Countering Crime, Violence and Terror at the Southwest Border.” It found that the “Southwest border has now become the greatest threat of terrorist infiltration into the United States.” It specifically cites a “growing influence” from Iranian and Hezbollah terror forces in Latin America. “The presence of Hezbollah in Latin America is partially explained by the large Lebanese diaspora in South America,” the report reads....

On January 25, 2009 Jose Antonio Robledo Fernandez, a Mexican engineer working for ICA Flour Daniel, a construction company, was kidnapped by three armed men in the northern Mexican town of Monclava in Coahuila. Fernandez, who is still missing, is one of at least 36 engineers and technicians to have vanished in the past four years -- kidnapped, not for ransom, but as slaves who run the high-tech systems of one of Mexico's infamous, violent drug cartels, the Los Zetas. The US government has called the Zetas "the most technologically advanced, sophisticated and dangerous cartel operating in Mexico". In December...

The Hostess brand is heading to the auction block, following an announcement that the company would be shutting down. But that may not mean an end to Twinkies. A Mexican company called Bimbo, which is credited as being the largest bread maker in the world, may have plans to buy the brand. Grupo Bimbo is no stranger to acquiring foreign companies. With other baking goods companies like Mrs. Baird's Bakeries and Sara Lee already under his belt, Daniel Servitje who runs Bimbo, has already shown interest in Hostess in the past. The Bimbo company attempted a deal in 2007 during...