Accused Narco Banker to Host Bush-Calderón Meeting

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:

http://www.narconews.com/Issue45/article2584.html

From somewhere in a country called América,

David B. Briones
Webmaster
The Narco News Bulletin
http://www.narconews.com

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