Accused Narco Banker to Host Bush-Calderón Meeting
March 12, 2007
Please Distribute Widely
Dear Colleague,
In 1999 Narco News’ Al Giordano reported on an "anti-drug" summit between the President of the United States and his
counterpart in Mexico held on land owned by then President of Banamex, Roberto Hernández Ramírez. While the mainstream
media was reporting this event as a positive step against drug-trafficking, Mexican newspaper Por Esto! reported the
dirty truth behind the scenes. Banamex went on to sue Por Esto! and Narco News in the New York Supreme Court, only to
have the move backfire on them.
Giordano reports:
"...By July of that year, Narco News, the Por Esto! publisher Mario Menéndez Rodríguez and I found ourselves as
defendants in the New York Supreme Court from a lawsuit filed by Banamex. The bank had hired the mega-lobbying and law
firm Akin Gump, of Washington DC, to harass us with that nuisance suit. More than a year of our lives was dominated by
the painstaking presentation of all the evidence to the Court. In December 2001, the New York Supreme Court delivered a
thunderous blow to Banamex (by then part of Citigroup, the world's wealthiest financial institution): it dismissed
Banamex's case, and established, for the first time, First Amendment protections for Internet journalists in the United
States.
"...Eight years later, both countries have new presidents, and both rose to those posts via brazen acts of electoral
fraud. Today, Air Force One will deliver George W. Bush to the Yucatán capital of Mérida, where he will hold two days of
meetings with his Mexican counterpart Felipe Calderón. Part of those meetings will be held at the same Temozon Sur
Hacienda of Roberto Hernández where Clinton and Zedillo met in 1999. The hotel zone of Mérida and the town of Temozon
Sur are today 'under siege' by more than 3,000 US and Mexican soldiers and police officers; 900 of whom are camped out
in tents behind the Hyatt Regency and the Fiesta Americana. Residents of these places are blocked from walking in their
own neighborhoods. Demonstrators are kept walled out miles away. The corporate media will - if past is prologue -
withhold the uncomfortable facts from the public about the narco hacienda where the presidents will meet but it will, no
doubt, quote the presidents as they praise each other's heroism in the so-called fight against drug trafficking."
Read Giordano’s full report, as well as other breaking news from Latin America and the Drug War, at The Narco News
Bulletin:
From somewhere in a country called América,
David B. Briones
Webmaster
The Narco News Bulletin