News Summary for May 6th, 2008

A looming Divorce?

++ The PRD celebrated its 19th anniversary… The New Left Movement, to which Jesús Ortega belongs, carried out an event at the Monument to the Revolution… Interim president Guadalupe Acosta Naranjo was at the event. Jesús Ortega called for a new PRD to be founded, by forming a national council to evaluate points that must be changed. Meanwhile, in a separate event, at the Expo Reforma, Alejandro Encinas, who was declared winner of the PRD election, said that the greatest threats to the party lie within… What ever that means…And former PRD leader, Leonel Cota, warned that whoever criticizes the movement in defense of petroleum led by Andrés Manuel López Obrador is a traitor to the country.

Why would they care?

++ The PAN filed a complaint with the IFE to investigate whether there is full certainty about the legality and legitimacy of interim PRD leaders.

Violence in Mexico? What else is new...

++ President Felipe Calderón, who headed the ceremony to mark the 146^th anniversary of the Cinco de Mayo Battle called for the defeat of the enemies of Mexico which are poverty and crime… He said he will not budge in his fight for legality and security.

++ State police in Guerrero, applied a special operation in Petatlán to protect cattle breeders leader Rogaciano Alba, who was the alleged target of attacks over the weekend that killed 17 people.

++ And in continuing violence in Tamaulipas, gunmen executed special judiciary police agent assigned to the command center there, Jesús Servando Zúñiga de los Reyes.

++ Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, who was recently re-elected as leader of the Miners Union for another six years, urged the government to solve his case as well as strikes by miners. (This guy has an indictment against him for absconding more then 50 millon dollars from the Union coffers…He now lives in Canada, since if he returns to Mexico he will be arrested. All this and he was re elected?… Wow…)