| | |  News Around the Republic of Mexico | August 2008 
Crime-Weary Mexico Barely Focuses on US Execution
 Mark Stevenson - Associated Press
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| | Eleuteria Armendariz, grandmother of Jose Ernesto Medellin, shows a newspaper cutting with a note and picture of her grandson in June 2008 in Nuevo Laredo. (AFP/Raul Llamas) | | |
Mexico City - Mexicans struggling with increasingly gruesome crimes at home devoted the least attention in recent memory to the execution of one of their citizens in Texas.
With Mexico riveted on its own kidnap and killing of a 14-year-old boy, the normally anti-death penalty country expressed far less outrage at the death on Tuesday of Jose Medellin, a Mexican national convicted in the 1993 rape and murder of two Texas girls.
Some Mexicans on Wednesday even called for the death penalty at home.
"There is no reason for outrage. The man was a rapist," said lawyer Gustavo Sanchez, 40, as he got his shoes shined on a Mexico City street. "If we had the death penalty here, there wouldn't be so many crimes."
His sentiments echoed Emilio Gamboa, the congressional leader of Mexico's former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, who called for capital punishment earlier this week.
In contrast, the 1997 execution of Mexican Irineo Tristan Montoya for robbery and murder sparked angry demonstrations in Mexico. His body was given a hero's welcome.
But the domestic kidnapping case dominated almost all of the daily front pages Wednesday, while Medellin's execution merited small mentions lower down, if at all.
Fernando Marti, the son of a prominent businessman, was snatched on a Mexico City street in June and found dead last week, even though his family paid the ransom his captors demanded.
Several policemen have been detained for questioning in the death. Prosecutors believe they may have supplied kidnappers with information about the victim.
"The death of this boy reflects the depth of the social breakdown we have reached," businessman Alfredo Harp Helu — himself a kidnapping victim — wrote in an open letter published Wednesday. "A change is urgently needed."
Last week, thieves robbing a bus on a highway north of Mexico City got mad when passengers didn't hand over possessions quickly and shot and killed a 5-year-old boy.
Mexico's Foreign Relations Department issued its usual note of protest to the U.S. State Department about the decision to execute Medellin. The World Court ordered U.S. authorities to review the case, which drew international attention because of allegations that Medellin wasn't allowed to consult the Mexican consulate for legal help following his arrest.
Mexican officials "were concerned for the precedent that (the execution) may create for the rights of Mexican nationals who may be detained in that country," according to a government statement.
In Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, where Medellin was born, a small group of relatives condemned his execution.
"This is another murder because no one has the right to take someone else's life, only God," said Medellin's cousin Reyna Armendariz.
A large black bow and a banner that read "No to the death penalty ... may God forgive you," hung from an iron fence in the front of a house where Medellin lived before moving to the United States at the age of 3. |
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