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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | September 2005 
Fox Prepared to Send Troops to Gulf Coast
 Wire services
| | Mobile consulates are being set up to assist Mexicans living in the disaster area as the federal government offers to send in the military. |
President Vicente Fox on Sunday said Mexico was ready to send troops to the United States in order to help with the relief effort following Hurricane Katrina.
Pending an official acceptance by U.S. President George W. Bush, Fox said he would invoke plan DN-III, which is when the army is deployed for humanitarian crises.
Fox also said that Social Development Secretary Josefina Vázquez Mota and Defense Secretary Gerardo Clemente Vega have instructions to visit the disaster zone in the state of Louisana to oversee any rescue teams that are sent over. The president added that the governor of Guanajuato, Juan Carlos Romero Hicks, would also accompany the cabinet secretaries.
Four Mexicans Dead
U.S. rescue workers found the bodies of four Mexicans who died in a section of New Orleans battered by Hurricane Katrina, the Foreign Relations Secretariat said Sunday.
"The Foreign Relations Secretariat has received the first reports of the deaths of four citizens who were in an affected area of New Orleans, three of them from Chiapas and one from the state of Jalisco," the secretariat said in a communiqué.
Details about the four Mexicans' deaths are not known, but "once access is gained to the area," the secretariat said, "we will take steps for their repatriation, for which preparations are already being made."
Foreign Relations Secretary Luis Ernesto Derbez instructed personnel in Chiapas and Jalisco to "provide all the support needed by relatives of the victims."
The additional consular officials sent to the United States in the wake of the storm are already in Baton Rouge, the capital of Louisiana, and have an RV outfitted as a mobile consulate to provide services to Mexicans living in areas affected by the hurricane.
A second team "arrived in Atlanta, from which it traveled to the city of Mobile, Alabama, where it is setting up a second consular services center," the secretriat said in the statement.
The Mexican Embassy in Washington, DC, and consulates in Atlanta, Austin, Dallas and San Antonio have been instructed to open Monday despite the Labor Day holiday in the United States to provide services to Mexicans affected by the hurricane, which devastated New Orleans and the Gulf coast of Mississippi, killing thousands and leaving tens of thousands homeless.
The Foreign Relations Secretariat has set up two hotlines, 01800-703-6400 in Mexico and (866) 600-2570 in the United States, for those in need of assistance. |
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