A Northern California woman who was kidnapped in Mexico last year while walking her dog has been found safe and is on her way back to the U.S. after being released by her captors, the FBI announced Saturday.
Monica De Leon Barba, 40, was released from captivity on Friday, the FBI said in a news release.
She had been held captive since she was kidnapped on Nov. 29 of last year while walking her dog home from work in Tepatitlán, Jalisco in western Mexico, federal authorities reported.
The FBI said that De Leon Barba, who is from San Mateo, California, is now on her way home. No arrests have been made, and the FBI is working with Mexican authorities to try and identify suspects. No further details were provided, and there was no word on a motive in her kidnapping.
“Our relief and joy at the safe return of Monica is profound,” Robert Tripp, special agent in charge of the FBI’s San Francisco Field Office said in a statement. “The FBI investigation is far from over, but we can now work this case knowing an innocent victim is reunited with her family.”
Mexico has one of the highest kidnapping rates in the world, in part due to the organization and opportunism of Mexican criminal enterprises, according to research from Global Guardian, a security risk intelligence firm.
Earlier this month, three Mexican current and former journalists were abducted in the western Mexican state of Nayarit. One of the three was later found murdered, the second was later released, but the third journalist remains missing.
On Tuesday, three police officers were killed and 10 other people were wounded in an explosives attack in the Jalisco city of Guadalajara, local officials said.
One of Mexico’s most notorious cartels, the Jalisco New Generation cartel, is based in Jalisco. In 2019, the Justice Department called it “one of the five most dangerous transnational criminal organizations in the world, responsible for trafficking many tons of cocaine, methamphetamine, and fentanyl-laced heroin into the Unites States, as well as for violence and significant loss of life in Mexico.”
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico’s top diplomat said Friday her country has sent a diplomatic note to the U.S. government expressing concern that Texas’ deployment of floating barriers on the Rio Grande may violate 1944 and 1970 treaties on boundaries and water.
Foreign Relations Secretary Alicia Bárcena said Mexico will send an inspection team to the Rio Grande to see whether any of the barrier extends into Mexico’s side of the border river.
She also complained about U.S. efforts to put up barbed wire on a low-lying island in the river near Eagle Pass, Texas.
Mexico’s veteran political chameleon, Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, has died at the age of 89. His family did not give a cause of death, but he had been in ill health for some time.
Texas has started rolling out what is set to become a new floating barrier on the Rio Grande. The state’s move on Friday is the latest escalation of Republican Gov.
What this means for many of Tijuana’s 2 million inhabitants is enduring frequent loss of water, having to pay for expensive trucked-in water, and living with uncertainty.
The drug cartel violence that citizen self-defense leader Hipolito Mora gave his life fighting against has flared anew just one day after he was buried.
Bárcena said that if the buoys impede the flow of water, it would violate the treaties, which requires the river remain unobstructed. Mexico has already asked that the barriers be removed.
Migrant advocates have voiced concerns about drowning risks from the buoys and environmentalists questioned the impact on the river.
Once installed, the above-river parts of the system and the webbing they’re connected with will cover 1,000 feet (305 meter) of the middle of the Rio Grande, with anchors in the riverbed.
Ben Cohen wasn’t talking about ice cream. He was talking about American militarism.
At 72, the co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is bald and bespectacled. He looks fit, cherubic even, but when he got going on what it was like to grow up during the Cold War, his tone became less playful and more assertive — almost defiant.
“I had this image of these two countries facing each other, and each one had this huge pile of shiny, state-of-the-art weapons in front of them,” he said, his arms waving above his head. “And behind them are the people in their countries that are suffering from lack of health care, not enough to eat, not enough housing.”
“It’s just crazy,” he added. “Approaching relationships with other countries based on threats of annihilating them, it’s just a pretty stupid way to go.”
It wasn’t a new subject for the famously socially conscious ice cream mogul; Cohen has been leading a crusade against what he sees as Washington’s bellicosity for decades. It’s just that with the war in Ukraine, his position has taken on a new — morally questionable — relevance.
Cohen, who no longer sits on the board of Ben & Jerry’s, isn’t just one of the most successful marketers of the last century. He’s a leading figure in a small but vocal part of the American left that has stood steadfast in opposition to the United States’ involvement in the war in Ukraine.
When Russian President Vladimir Putin sent tanks rolling on Kyiv, Cohen didn’t focus his ire on the Kremlin; a group he funds published a full-page ad in the New York Times blaming the act of aggression on “deliberate provocations” by the U.S. and NATO.
Following months of Russian missile strikes on residential apartment blocks, and after evidence of street executions by Russian troops in the Ukrainian city of Bucha, he funded a 2022 journalism prize that praised its winner for reporting on “Washington’s true objectives in the Ukraine war, such as urging regime change in Russia.”
In May, Cohen tweeted approvingly of an op-ed by the academic Jeffrey Sachs that argued “the war in Ukraine was provoked” and called for “negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality and NATO non-enlargement.”
Ben Cohen outside the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington this month, before getting arrested | Win McNamee/Getty Images
I set up a video call with Cohen not because I can’t sympathize with his mistrust of U.S. adventurism, nor because I couldn’t follow the argument that U.S. foreign policy spurred Russia to attack. I called to try to understand how he has maintained his stance even as the Kremlin abducts children, tortures and kills Ukrainians and sends thousands of Russian troops to their deaths in human wave attacks.
It’s one thing to warn of NATO expansion in peacetime, or to call for a negotiated settlement that leaves Ukrainian citizens safe from further aggression. It’s another to ignore one party’s atrocities and agitate for an outcome that would almost certainly leave millions of people at the mercy of a regime that has demonstrated callousness and cruelty.
Given the scale of Russia’s brutality in Ukraine, I wanted to understand: How does one justify focusing one’s energies on stopping the efforts to bring it to a halt?
Masters of war
Cohen’s political awakening took place against the background of the Cold War and the political upheaval caused by Washington’s involvement in Vietnam.
He was 11 during the Cuban missile crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Part of the reason he enrolled in college was to avoid being drafted and sent to the jungle to fight the Viet Cong.
When I asked how he first became interested in politics, he cited Bob Dylan’s 1963 protest song “Masters of War,” which takes aim at the political leaders and weapons makers who benefit from conflicts and culminates with the singer standing over their graves until he’s sure they’re dead.
“That was kind of a revelation to me,” Cohen said. Behind him, the sun filtered past a cardboard Ben & Jerry’s sign propped against a window. “I hadn’t understood that, you know, there were these masters of war — essentially I guess what we would now call the military-industrial-congressional complex — that profit from war.”
Cohen saw people from his high school get drafted and never come back from a war that “wasn’t justified.” As he graduated in the summer of 1969, around half a million U.S. troops were stationed in ‘Nam. Later that year, hundreds of thousands of protesters marched on Washington, D.C. to demand peace.
It was only much later, while doing “a lot of research” into the “tradeoffs between military spending and spending for human needs,” that Cohen came across a 1953 speech by Dwight D. Eisenhower, which foreshadowed the U.S. president’s 1961 farewell address in which he coined the phrase “military-industrial complex.”
A Republican president who had served as the supreme allied commander in Europe during World War II, Eisenhower warned against tumbling into an arms race. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” he said.
“That is a foundational thing for me, very inspiring for me, and captures the essence of what I believe,” Cohen said.
“If we weren’t wasting all of our money on preparing to kill people, we would actually be able to save and help a lot of people,” he added with a chuckle. “That goes for how we approach the world internationally as well,” he added — including the war in Ukraine.
Pierre Ferrari, a former Ben & Jerry’s board member who was with the company from 1997 to 2020, said Cohen’s view of the world was shaped by the events of his youth.
“We were brought up at a time when the military, the government was just completely out of control,” he said. “We’re both children of the sixties, the Vietnam War and the new futility of war and the way war is used by the military-industrial complex and politics,” Ferrari added, pointing to the peace symbol he wore around his neck.
Jeff Furman, who has known Cohen for nearly 50 years and once served as Ben & Jerry’s in-house legal counsel, acknowledged that his generation’s views on Ukraine were informed by America’s misadventures in Vietnam.
“There’s a history of why this war is happening that’s a little bit more complex than who Putin is,” he said. “When you’ve been misled so many times in the past, you have to take this into consideration when you think about it, and really, really try to know what’s happening.”
Ice-cold activism
Politics has been a part of the Ben & Jerry’s brand since Cohen and his partner Jerry Greenfield started selling ice cream out of an abandoned gas station in 1978.
The company’s look and ethos were pure 1960s; they named one of their early flavors, Cherry Garcia, after the lead guitarist of the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, whose psychedelic riffs formed the soundtrack of the hippy counterculture.
Social justice was one of the duo’s secret ingredients. For the first-year anniversary of the gas station shop’s opening, they gave away free ice cream for a day. On the flyers printed to promote the event was a quote from Cohen: “Business has a responsibility to give back to the community from which it draws its support.”
In 1985, after the company went public, they used some of the shares to endow a foundation working for progressive social change and committed Ben & Jerry’s to spend 7.5 percent of its pretax profits on philanthropy.
In the early years, the company instituted a five-to-one cap on the ratio between the salary of the highest-earning executive and its lowest-paid worker, dropping it only when Cohen was about to step down as CEO in the mid-1990sand they were struggling to find a successor willing to work for what they were offering.
Most companies try to separate politics and business. Cohen and Greenfield cheerfully mixed them up and served them in a tub of creamy deliciousness (the company’s rich, fatty flavors were in part driven by Cohen’s sinus problems, which dulls his taste).
In 1988, Cohen founded 1% for Peace, a nonprofit organization seeking to “redirect one percent of the national defense budget to fund peace-promoting activities and projects.” The project was funded in part through sales of a vanilla and dark-chocolate popsicle they called the Peace Pop.
It was around this time that Cohen opened Ben & Jerry’s in Russia, as “an effort to build a bridge between Communism and capitalism with locally produced Cherry Garcia,” according to a write-up in the New York Times. After years of planning, the outlet opened in the northwestern city of Petrozavodsk in 1992. (The company shut the shop down five years later to prioritize growth in the U.S., and also because of the involvement of local mobsters, said Furman, who was involved in the project.)
Cohen, with co-founder Jerry Greenfield, actress Jane Fonda and other climate activists, in front of the Capitol in 2019 | Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images
Even after Ben & Jerry’s was bought by Unilever in 2000, there were few progressive causes the company wasn’t eager to wade into with a campaign or a fancy new flavor.
The ice cream maker has marketed “Rainforest Crunch” in defense of the Amazon forest, sold “Empower Mint” to combat voter suppression, promoted “Pecan Resist” in opposition to then-U.S. President Donald Trump and launched “Change the Whirled” in partnership with Colin Kaepernick, the American football quarterback whose sports career ended after he started taking a knee during the national anthem in protest of police brutality.
More recently, however, the relationship between Cohen, Greenfield and Unilever has been rockier. In 2021, Ben & Jerry’s announced it would stop doing business in the Palestinian territories. Cohen and Greenfield, who are Jewish, defended the company’s decision in an op-ed in the New York Times.
After the move sparked political backlash, Unilever transferred its license to a local producer, only to be sued by Ben & Jerry’s. In December 2022, Unilever announced in a one-sentence statement that its litigation with its subsidiary “has been resolved.”Ben & Jerry’s ice cream continues to be sold throughout Israel and the West Bank, according to a Unilever spokesperson.
Cohen himself is no stranger to activism: Earlier this month, he was arrested and detained for a few hours for taking part in a sit-in in front of the U.S. Department of Justice, where he was protesting the prosecution of the activist and WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.
Unilever declined to comment on Cohen’s views. “Ben Cohen no longer has an operational role in Ben & Jerry’s, and his comments are made in a personal capacity,” a spokesperson said.
Ben & Jerry’s did not respond to a request for comment.
The world according to Ben
For Cohen, the war in Ukraine wasn’t just a tragedy. It was, in a sense, a vindication. In 1998, a group he created called Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities published a full-page ad in the New York Times titled “Hey, let’s scare the Russians.”
The target of the ad was a proposal to expand NATO “toward Russia’s very borders,” with the inclusion of Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. Doing so, the ad asserted, would provide Russians with “the same feeling of peace and security Americans would have if Russia were in a military alliance with Canada and Mexico, armed to the teeth.”
Cohen is by no means alone in this view of recent history. The American scholar John Mearsheimer, a prominent expert in international relations, has argued that the “trouble over Ukraine” started after the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest when the alliance opened the door to membership for Ukraine and Georgia.
In the U.S., this point has been echoed by progressive outlets and thinkers, such as Jeffrey Sachs, the linguist Noam Chomsky, or most recently by the American philosopher, activist and longest-of-long-shots, third-party presidential candidate Cornel West.
“We told them after they disbanded the Warsaw Pact that we could not expand NATO, not one inch. And we did that, we lied,” said Dennis Fritz, a retired U.S. Air Force official and the head of the Eisenhower Media Network — which describes itself as a group of “National Security Veteran experts, who’ve been there, done that and have an independent, alternative story to tell.”
It was Fritz’s organization that argued in a May 2023 ad in the New York Times that although the “immediate cause” of the “disastrous” war in Ukraine was Russia’s invasion, “the plans and actions to expand NATO to Russia’s borders served to provoke Russian fears.”
The ad noted that American foreign policy heavyweights, including Robert Gates and Henry Kissinger, had warned of the dangers of NATO expansion. “Why did the U.S. persist in expanding NATO despite such warnings?” it asked. “Profit from weapons sales was a major factor.”
Cohen andGreenfield announce a new flavor, Justice Remix’d, in 2019 | Win McNamee/Getty Images
When I spoke to Cohen, the group’s primary donor, according to Fritz, he echoed the ad’s key points, saying U.S. arms manufacturers saw NATO’s expansion as a “financial bonanza.”
“In the end, money won,” he said with a resigned tone. “And today, not only are they providing weapons to all the new NATO countries, but they’re providing weapons to Ukraine.”
I told Cohen I could understand his opposition to the war and follow his critique of U.S. foreign policy, but I couldn’t grasp how he could take a position that put him in the same corner as a government that is bombing civilians. He refused to be drawn in.
“I’m not supporting Russia, I’m not supporting Ukraine,” he said. “I’m supporting negotiations to end the war instead of providing more weapons to continue the war.”
The Grayzone
I tried to get a better answer when I spoke to Aaron Maté, the Canadian-born journalist who won the award for “defense reporting and analysis” that Cohen was instrumental in funding.
Named after the late Pierre Sprey, a defense analyst who campaigned against the development of F-35 fighter jets as overly complex and expensive, the award recognized Maté’s “continued work dissecting establishment propaganda on issues such as Russian interference in U.S. politics, or the war in Syria.”
Maté, who was photographed with Cohen’s arm around his shoulders at the awards ceremony in March, writes for the Grayzone, a far-left website that has acquired a reputation for publishing stories backing the narratives of authoritarian regimes like Putin’s Russia or Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. His reports deny the use of chemical weapons against civilians in Syria, and he has briefed the U.N. Security Council at Moscow’s invitation.
When I spoke to Maté, he was friendly but guarded. (The Pierre Sprey award noted that “his empiricist reporting give the lie to the charge of ‘disinformation’ routinely leveled by those whose nostrums he challenges.”)
He was happy however to walk me through his claims that, based on statements by U.S. officials since the start of the war, Washington is using Kyiv to wage a “proxy war” against Moscow. Much of his information, he said, came from Western journalism. “I point out examples where, buried at the bottom of articles, sometimes the truth is admitted,” he explained.
He declined to be described as pro-Putin. “That kind of ‘guilt-by-association’ reasoning is not serious thinking,” he said. “It’s not how adults think about things.” When I asked if he believed that Russia had committed war crimes in Ukraine, he answered: “I’m sure they have. I’ve never heard of a war where war crimes are not committed.”
Still, he said, the U.S. was responsible for “prolonging” the war and “sabotaging the diplomacy that could have ended it.”
‘Come to Ukraine’
The best answer I got to my question came not from Cohen or others in his circle but from a fellow traveler who hasn’t chosen to follow critics of NATO on their latest journey.
A self-described “radical anti-imperialist,” Gilbert Achcar is a professor of development studies and international relations at SOAS University of London. He has described the expansion of NATO in the 1990s as a decision that “laid the ground for a new cold war” pitting the West against Russia and China.
But while he sees the war in Ukraine as the latest chapter in this showdown, he has warned against calls for a rush to the negotiating table. Instead, he has advocated for the complete withdrawal of Russia from Ukraine and “the delivery of defensive weapons to the victims of aggression with no strings attached.”
“To give those who are fighting a just war the means to fight against a much more powerful aggressor is an elementary internationalist duty,” he wrote three days after Russia launched its attack on Kyiv, comparing the invasion to the U.S.’s intervention in Vietnam.
Achcar said he understood the conclusions being drawn by people like Cohen about Washington’s interventions in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. But, he said, “it leads a lot of people on the left into … [a] knee-jerk opposition to anything the United States does.”
What they fail to account for, however, is the Ukrainian people.
“In a way, part of the Western left is ethnocentric,” said Achcar, who was born in Senegal and grew up in Lebanon. “They look at the whole world just by their opposition to their own government and therefore forget about other people’s rights.”
Cohen, with late-night TV host Jimmy Fallon in 2011 | Mike Coppola/Getty Images for Ben & Jerry’s
His point was echoed in the last conversation I had when researching this article, with Tymofiy Mylovanov, president of the Kyiv School of Economics and a former economy minister.
“It doesn’t really matter who promised what to whom in the 1990s,” Mylovanov said. “What matters is that there was Mariupol and Bucha, where tens of thousands of people were killed.”
Mylovanov taught economics at the University of Pittsburgh until he returned to Ukraine four days before Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“Things like war are difficult to understand unless you experience them,” he said. “This is very easy to get confused when you are sitting, you know, somewhere far from the facts and you have surrounded yourself by an echo chamber of people and sources that you agree with.”
“In that sense,” he added. “I invite these people to come to Ukraine and judge for themselves what the truth is.”
For decades the fishermen around the Santa Clara gulf in the Mexican state of Sonora have lived from fishing and selling jellyfish, a product that has no market in Mexico but sells well in Asia. This year the local industry was expecting a good season. But now the Sinaloa Cartel wants a piece of the multimillion business.
The “cannonball jellyfish” is one of a dozen sea products exported from Mexico to Singapore and Vietnam and leaving over $10 million in revenue during a three-month season, according to Mexican fishing authorities.
By this time of the year, the fishermen should be already processing tons of jellyfish to be sent to other major Mexican companies who run the export side of business. But June is over and no fisherman has dared to get into the sea. The threat is real: Heavily-armed cartel members are making sure no one goes out to fish.
“They want us to work for them exclusively, but we are afraid, we really don’t know what to do,” a local fisherman in the small city of Guaymas, Sonora, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid retaliation from the cartel, told The Daily Beast.
To be ready for exportation, the jellyfish needs to get dehydrated using tons of salt, a part of the process that only a “salina” (an industrial salt processing company) can do. Years earlier these companies worked together with the local fishermen, buying their product and then processing the jellyfish and exporting it themselves to different companies in Asia, mostly in…
The Mexican national newspaper La Jornada said Saturday that its staff reporter in the Pacific coast state of Nayarit has been found dead.
The body of journalist Luis Martín Sánchez Iñiguez was found on the outskirts of the state capital, Tepic, La Jornada reported.
Sánchez Iñiguez, 59, had been missing since Wednesday and an appeal had been made to find him, the Nayarit state prosecutors’ office said. The journalist’s wife reported him missing, along with a computer and his cellphone.
La Jornada reported that state prosecutors’ office confirmed to the paper that Sánchez Iñiguez had been murdered, and that authorities believe his killing was motivated by his work in journalism.
“The body was found with signs of violence, and two handwritten signs were found on it,” prosecutors said in a statement, but did not reveal what the messages said.
Handwritten signs are frequently left by drug cartels with the bodies of victims, but the office said the motive in the killing was still under investigation.
The office said later Saturday that relatives had identified Sánchez Iñiguez’s body, and said he had been dead for one or two days before the corpse was found.
Sánchez Iñiguez was last seen in Xalisco, a Nayarit town that has long been linked to the smuggling of heroin and opium.
He would be at least the second journalist killed in Mexico this year.
In February, news photographer José Ramiro Araujo was stabbed and beaten to death in the northern Mexico border state of Baja California.
2022 was among the deadliest years ever for Mexican journalists, with 15 killed.
Just two days after Sánchez Iñiguez disappeared, another journalist was abducted in the same area. Jonathan Lora Ramírez was abducted on Friday by “armed, masked men who arrived at his home in Xalisco, forced open the door and took him away,” state prosecutors said.
Lora Ramírez was found alive and in good condition Saturday, prosecutors said.
The prosecutors’ office said a third media worker, identified as Osiris Maldonado, has been missing since July 3. Maldonado had formerly worked as a journalist, but now worked as a teacher, the prosecutor’s office said. Maldonado left for work early on the morning of July 3, and has not been heard from since, officials said.
Prosecutors said they were investigating the possibility the abductions and killing were related to the journalists’ profession.
The Committee to Protect Journalists said it “strongly condemns the killing of journalist Luis Martín Sánchez Iñíguez, correspondent of newspaper La Jornada, in the state of Nayarit, and calls on Mexican authorities to immediately and credibly investigate.”
The bodies of four men and two women were found lying on the side of a street near the northern Mexican city of Monterrey early Tuesday, authorities said. Prosecutors for the border state of Nuevo Leon said the victims appeared to have been shot and had their hands tied.
The bodies were discovered in Apodaca, a suburb of Monterrey. Local media reported the six might have been tortured before being shot in the head.
Monterrey was hit by a wave of drug cartel violence in the 2010s, but had been somewhat more peaceful in recent years.
Nuevo Leon suffered heavy violence under the Zetas cartel in the last decade. After quieting somewhat, it saw an uptick in killings last year, including the horrifying death of 18-year-old law student Debanhi Escobar in Monterrey.
Located about 100 miles from the U.S. border, Monterrey is an industrial powerhouse that hopes to benefit from a new wave of foreign investment.
Electric car giant Tesla plans to build a giant new factory outside the city — part of the “nearshoring” trend of U.S. companies bringing production sites closer to their home market.
Mexico has recorded more than 350,000 murders — most of them blamed on organized crime — since the launch of a controversial military operation to combat drug trafficking in 2006.
On Monday, the security minister in the violence-wracked northeastern state of Tamaulipas, Hector Joel Villegas, survived a gun attack, authorities said. He resumed his activities on Tuesday with increased security, they added.
AFP contributed to this report.
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Rutilio Escandón, governor of Chiapas state, confirmed their return on Twitter.
“I want to inform the people of Chiapas and Mexico that the 16 kidnapped colleagues have been released this afternoon,” he wrote in the post.
No details were given on the circumstances of their release. The kidnappers had demanded the dismissal of three local police officials in Chiapas and the release of local singer Neyeli Cinco, who was abducted last week by another gang.
The police workers were captured Tuesday by gunmen in several vans that intercepted a police transport truck on the Ocozocoautla-Tuxtla Gutiérrez highway. The gunmen took all the male employees but left 17 women.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said the group worked at a local prison, apparently as guards or administrative staff, though they are formally employed by the state police.
After the kidnapping, authorities deployed more than 1,000 officers to search for the abductees.
However, the kidnapped men returned on their own aboard a pickup trip, arriving at the state police headquarters in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, an official in the state prosecutor’s office said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity.
Relatives who had set up camp outside the agency ran to wrap their loved ones in an embrace when they saw them get out of the vehicle.
Southern Mexico has seen an escalation of violence in recent months, with narco-blockades of key highways, confrontations, executions, disappearances and other crimes. Officials have blamed a territorial dispute between the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
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The Mexican navy this week intercepted a submersible in the Pacific which was carrying 7,000 pounds of suspected cocaine. Five people aboard the vessel were arrested.
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Mexico City — Armed men abducted 14 state police officers in southern Mexico on Tuesday, prompting a heavy deployment of federal and local forces, authorities said.
The Secretary of Security and Citizen Protection in Chiapas state said in a statement the 14 officers were all men and an air and ground operation was underway to locate them.
An official with the state police force, who asked not to be quoted because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said the agents were traveling to the capital of Chiapas in a personnel transport truck when they were intercepted by several trucks with gunmen.
The women in the vehicle were released while the men were taken away, the official said.
The abduction occurred on the highway between Ocozocoautla and Tuxtla Gutiérrez.
Map shows southern Mexican state of Chiapas, in lower-right near Guatemala
Google Maps
Violence in the Mexican border region with Guatemala has escalated in recent months amid a territorial dispute between the Sinaloa Cartel – which has dominated the area – and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
During a tour of Chiapas on Friday, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador minimized the violence in the area, saying that “in general there is peace, there is tranquility” in the state.
The day before the president’s visit, an official with the Attorney General’s Office was shot in Tuxtla Gutiérrez and her companion was killed. The official was seriously injured and was hospitalized.
In addition, on June 19, a confrontation between the military and presumed members of organized crime left an element of the National Guard and a civilian dead in Ocozocoautla, near where Tuesday’s kidnapping occurred.
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The group, all men who worked in administration in a police station, were snatched from a highway in Chiapas.
Security forces in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas are searching for 14 administrative employees of the state security ministry kidnapped by members of an armed group.
The incident took place on Tuesday, about 34.4km (22 miles) west of the state capital Tuxtla Gutierrez, on the highway connecting it to the town of Ocozocoautla.
Those kidnapped were all men and worked in administration in a police station, the state security agency said in a statement.
“Nothing like this has ever happened,” a ministry spokesperson told the Reuters news agency, adding that the motive for the kidnapping was being investigated.
Both federal and state agents are involved in the search.
Some Mexican news outlets released video of the alleged kidnapping showing several vehicles stopped on the highway with their doors open and men in bulletproof vests pointing guns at the passengers in the vehicles.
The state prosecutor’s office said it was investigating the authenticity of the videos, which also showed at least three trucks blocking a highway.
The newspaper Reforma reported that the armed men took the employees’ mobile phones away and ordered them to lie on the ground. The women in the group were allowed to walk free, it added.
Tuxtla Gutierrez is located about 700km (435 miles) southwest of Mexico City.
During a tour of Chiapas last Friday, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador minimised the violence in the area, saying that in general there was “peace, there is tranquility” in the state.
The day before the president’s visit, an official with the Attorney General’s Office was seriously injured after being shot in Tuxtla Gutiérrez in an attack that killed the person who was with her.
On June 19, a confrontation between the military and presumed members of organized crime left an element of the National Guard and a civilian dead in Ocozocoautla.
Authorities in Mexico said they’re investigating a video that appears to show gunmen from a drug cartel forcing female bar hostesses to kneel on the floor in a mock execution and extorting money from them.
The video, posted on social media last week, shows one of the gunmen holding a pistol to the head of one woman as she is forced to lie flat on the floor. His foot is on her shoulder as she pleads with him not to shoot.
“Yes, yes, yes. Please don’t shoot. Please,” says the woman in the video.
“This is so you know, the owner of the escort business is the CJNG,” the masked gunman says, referring to the initials of the Jalisco New Generation cartel. Those initials also appear on the tactical vests the gunmen are wearing.
“You have to report to us every week,” the gunman says, though he did not say how much the women will be forced to pay.
The Jalisco cartel — which the Department of Justice calls “one of the five most dangerous transnational criminal organizations in the world” — is one of the groups that have waged a bloody years-long turf war in the north-central state of Guanajuato, which has Mexico’s highest number of homicides. Authorities there said Friday they are studying the video to determine if its authentic, or where it was taped, noting they did not yet have any evidence it was taped in their state.
A bullet-riddled wall bearing the initials of the criminal group Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion (CJNG) is seen at the entrance of the community of Aguililla in the state of Michoacan, Mexico, on April 23, 2021.
Enrique Castro/AFP via Getty Images
The gunman says all bar hostesses or waitresses will be forced to pay protection money, and that the cartel will distribute bracelets to show who has paid and who hasn’t. Those who don’t pay will be killed, he threatened in colloquial terms.
Drug cartels in Mexico are increasingly branching out into extortion, kidnapping and demanding protection money from all sorts of businesses, including immigrant smugglers.
During last year’s upsurge in people crossing the U.S. border from Mexico, some migrants were given bracelets to wear, showing which gang had smuggled them and, in some cases, where they were headed.
Guanajuato-based security analyst David Saucedo said that drug cartels have reached new heights in controlling who has paid up and who hasn’t, including inspection-style stickers on some frequently-extorted vehicles, like buses.
“Some organized crime groups are distributing stickers to show who has paid, and who hasn’t,” Saucedo said.
He noted that, while some businesses have still not been targeted by the extortion racket, the shake-downs are growing ever wider.
“As time goes on, more businesses are added to the list of extortions,” he noted.
They need not even be very lucrative businesses. For example, in Guanajuato and the southern Mexico state of Guerrero, drug cartels have shot up or burned tortilla shops for failing to pay protection money — or paying it to a rival gang. Tortillas in Mexico sell for about 65 cents per pound, with relatively small profit margins.
In April, the U.S. Treasury Department announced sanctions against members or associates of the Jalisco cartel who apparently went into a side business of timeshare fraud that allegedly targeted elderly Americans.
The Jalisco cartel is better known for producing millions of doses of deadly fentanyl and smuggling them into the United States disguised to look like Xanax, Percocet or oxycodone. Such pills cause about 70,000 overdose deaths per year in the United States.
The cartel’s leader, Nemesio Oseguera, “El Mencho,” is among the most sought by Mexican and U.S. authorities.
A Kentucky woman has been accused of fatally shooting her West Texas Uber driver after mistakenly believing she was being kidnapped and taken to Mexico, according to police.
Phoebe Copas, 48, remained jailed Sunday in El Paso, Texas, after being charged with murder last week in the death of 52-year-old Daniel Piedra Garcia.
Copas allegedly shot Garcia on U.S. Route 54 as he was driving her to a destination in El Paso’s Mission Valley on June 16, the El Paso Police Department said in a statement.
“At some point during the drive, Copas thought she was being taken into Mexico and shot Piedra. The investigation does not support that a kidnapping took place or that Piedra was veering from Copas’ destination,” the statement said.
Copas was arrested and initially charged with aggravated assault causing serious bodily injury, a second-degree felony.
Piedra was hospitalized for several days before his family took him off life support after doctors told them he would not recover.
Phoebe D. Copas
El Paso Police
After Piedra died, police said they’d be bringing murder charges against Copas.
Court and jail records did not list an attorney who could speak for Copas. She is being held on a $1.5 million bond, according to The Associated Press.
The shooting took place as Copas, who is from Tompkinsville, Kentucky, was in El Paso visiting her boyfriend, according to authorities.
During the ride, Copas saw traffic signs that read “Juarez, Mexico,” according to an arrest affidavit. El Paso is located on the U.S.-Mexico border across from Juarez.
Believing she was being kidnapped and taken to Mexico, Copas is accused of grabbing a handgun from her purse and shooting Piedra in the head, according to the affidavit. The vehicle crashed into barriers before coming to a stop on a freeway.
The area where the car crashed was “not in close proximity of a bridge, port of entry or other area with immediate access to travel into Mexico,” according to the affidavit.
Police allege that before she called 911, Copas took a photo of Piedra after the shooting and texted it to her boyfriend.
“He was a hardworking man and really funny,” Piedra’s niece, Didi Lopez, told the El Paso Times. “He was never in a bad mood. He was always the one that, if he saw you in a bad mood, he’d come over and try to lift you up.”
A GoFundMe campaign set up by Piedra’s family said he was their sole provider and had only recently started working again after being injured in his previous job.
“I wish she would’ve spoken up, asked questions, not acted on impulse and make a reckless decision, because not only did she ruin our lives, but she ruined her life, too,” Lopez said. “We just want justice for him. That’s all we’re asking.”
The Arizona Department of Health Services has lifted the voluntary recall of marijuana products, first announced on July 14 due to possible contamination with aspergillus or salmonella, after retesting found no contamination.
The Arizona Medical Marijuana Act and the Smart and Safe Arizona Act says if a product tests positive, the facility may ask the laboratory to send the original sample to a second laboratory. If that second result is negative, then the facility shall request the sample to be sent to a third lab — which is the result that will stand.
AZDHS laboratory auditors discovered that potential false negative results for contaminants were reported by a licensed marijuana testing laboratory.
The affected products included batches of Caps Frozen Lemon, Twisted Lemonz, and Ghost Train Haze as live resin and concentrate, which initially tested positive for salmonella, and Cherry Punch in plant and trim form, which initially tested positive for aspergillus. Further testing found no comtamination.
AZDHS has received test results from two separate laboratories for the following products and brands that confirm they are negative for aspergillus and salmonella:
WASHINGTON (AP) — Eager to impeach President Joe Biden, hard-right House Republicans forced a vote Thursday that sent the matter to congressional committees in a clear demonstration of the challenge that Speaker Kevin McCarthy faces in controlling the majority party.
The ability of single lawmaker in the 435-member House to drive an impeachment resolution this week caught Republicans off guard and many of them viewed it as a distraction from other priorities.
The measure charges Biden with “high crimes and misdemeanors” over his handling of the U.S. border with Mexico.
Rep. Lauren Boebert, backed by allies, was able to use House rules to force a snap vote on such a grave constitutional matter. The 219-208 party-line vote sent her resolution to committees for possible consideration, like any other bill. They are under no obligation to do anything.
Still, Boebert, R-Colo., argued during debate, “The House is taking historic action.”
The episode underscores the hold that the House conservative flank exerts over McCarthy, compelling him to accommodate their hard-right priorities if he wants to stay in power.
Conservatives are gearing up for more. The process Boebert employed is the same method that Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., relied on to force a vote Wednesday to censure Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff over his investigations into Donald Trump’s ties to Russia.
“There’s going to be no end to this,” Schiff said.
“Kevin McCarthy has no control over his conference,” Schiff said. ”The race to the extreme is now running the House of Representatives and of course it’s doing terrible damage to the institution.”
During Thursday’s debate, Republicans were admonished multiple times by the presiding officer to tone down their remarks.
Democrats argued that the case against Biden made a mockery of the seriousness of impeachment and was merely an attempt to distract from the twice-impeached Trump, the former Republican president now indicted for hording classified documents under the Espionage Act.
“Today they’re dishonoring this House and dishonoring themselves by bringing to the floor this ridiculous impeachment referral resolution,” said Massachusetts Rep. Jim McGovern, the top Democrat on the House Rules Committee, suggesting Trump put his allies up to it.
“This body has become a place where extreme, outlandish and nutty issues get debated passionately, and important ones not at all,” McGovern said. “In short, the Republican Party is a joke.”
The vote capped days of maneuvering by McCarthy, R-Calif., to quell the uprising within his party over a roll call that many did not to take.
A sudden vote to impeach Biden would have been politically difficult for GOP lawmakers and a potentially embarrassing spectacle for McCarthy, splitting his party. In a private meeting Wednesday, McCarthy encouraged lawmakers to consider the traditional process for bringing such consequential legislation forward. Boebert had used what is called a privileged resolution to force the vote.
In the end, McCarthy negotiated a deal with her to send the Biden impeachment resolution for review to the House Judiciary Committee and the House Homeland Security Committee, fending off a vote for some time.
“I think it’s best for everybody,” McCarthy said.
But conservatives said more such votes are ahead.
“We are just beginning,” said Republican Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, an influential member of the House Freedom Caucus.
Conservatives are lining up votes, for example, to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and censure Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson, who was the chairman of the committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. It’s part of their effort to steer control of the House from the traditional centers of power, including the speaker’s office.
“This is what we were talking about,” said Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, a leader in the conservative efforts to block McCarthy’s rise to speaker.
Boebert said that if the committees drag their feet, she would bring her resolution back to the floor “every day for the rest of my time here in Congress,” forcing a House vote on Biden’s impeachment.
Rank-and-file Republicans were angry at being forced into the position of having to vote on a resolution to impeach Biden even though they had not gone through the traditional process of an impeachment inquiry. They resented a single lawmaker jumping the queue of priorities.
In one fiery exchange overheard Wednesday on the House floor, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., laid into Boebert for taking the Biden impeachment on her own. Greene has her own articles of impeachment against the president.
Greene confirmed a report about the exchange later and said of Boebert, “She has a great skill and talent for making most people here not like her.”
Boebert declined to comment about the conversation, only saying it’s “not middle school.”
Trump was impeached twice — on corruption and obstruction charges over withholding military aid to Ukraine while seeking political dirt on Biden, and later on charges of inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol. Both times, Trump was acquitted by the Senate.
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Associated Press writers Farnoush Amiri and Stephen Groves contributed to this report.
A luxury hotel in Mexico owned by Hyatt has temporarily suspended normal operations following the deaths of a California couple, the hotel told CBS Los Angeles.
Abby Lutz, 28, and her boyfriend John Heathco, 41, were found dead in their hotel room last Tuesday.
“Our top priority is the safety and wellbeing of guests and colleagues and the property will not resume normal operations until our investigation is complete,” a Hyatt spokesperson wrote in a statement to CBS Los Angeles.
Abby Lutz and John Heathco
GoFundMe/LinkedIn
Prosecutors in Mexico’s Baja California Sur state said last week that autopsies suggest Lutz and Heathco died of “intoxication by an undetermined substance.” Local police initially said gas inhalation was suspected as the cause of death.
The state prosecutors’ office said the bodies showed no signs of violence. The office did not say what further steps were being taken to determine the exact cause of death.
Authorities said the two had been dead for 11 or 12 hours when they were found in their room at Rancho Pescadero, a luxury hotel near the resort of Cabo San Lucas late Tuesday.
Lutz’s family told CBS News that days before their deaths the couple was treated for what they thought was food poisoning. They spent the night in a Mexican hospital where they were treated for dehydration, her family said.
The next day, they were back at their hotel.
“She said, it’s the sickest she’s ever been,” said Lutz’s stepsister, Gabby Slate, adding that Monday night was the last time the family heard from her.
“She texted her dad and said, ‘good night, love you,’ like she always does and that’s the last we heard from her,” said Lutz’s stepmother Racquel Chiappini-Lutz.
Meanwhile, the sibling paramedics who responded to the incident are now saddled with medical bills after having fallen ill themselves, according to a fundraiser for the pair.
Fernando Valencia Sotelo and Grisel Valencia Sotelo, who tried to revive the couple, “were overcome” as they attended to the couple. Now the two are receiving medical care at a private hospital, a fundraiser for the siblings states.
A U.S. woman and her boyfriend were found dead in a hotel room in Mexico’s Baja California peninsula on Wednesday, a few days after being treated for food poisoning, family members told CBS News.
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Cabo San Lucas, Mexico — Police in a seaside community on Mexico’s Baja California peninsula said Wednesday that two Americans were found dead in their hotel room.
Abby Lutz was identified as one of the victims by her family to CBS News. “Abby had an adventurous spirit and a wonderfully kind heart. She loved to travel, see new places, and share her zeal for life with those around her,” the family said in a statement.
“Abby and her boyfriend thought they had food poisoning and went to the hospital to get treatment,” her family said. The couple said they were feeling much better. A few days later, however, they received a call saying that Lutz and her boyfriend had died in their sleep.
Lutz was due to meet up with her father on Sunday for Father’s Day, according to a GoFundme page organized to raise money for funeral transportation costs.
Police said the deaths occurred in the community of El Pescadero on Tuesday. The town is located between Todos Santos and the resort of Los Cabos, in Baja California Sur state.
U.S. officials said they were aware of the case but couldn’t comment on it because of privacy concerns.
According to police, paramedics received a report Tuesday that the Americans were unconscious in their room. They were dead by the time paramedics arrived. The suspected cause of death was inhalation of gas.
In this aerial view, surfers and tourists enjoy the waves and La Fortuna beach located in the Eastern Cape on June 02, 2023 in Los Cabos, Mexico.
Alfredo Martinez / Getty Images
There have been several cases of such deaths in Mexico due to poisoning by carbon monoxide or other gases. Such gases are often produced by improperly vented or leaky water heaters and stoves.
In October, three U.S. citizens were found dead at a rented apartment in Mexico, apparently victims of gas inhalation.
The Mexico City police department said the three were found unresponsive Oct. 30 in an upscale neighborhood. They’d apparently rented the dwelling for a short visit. Post-mortem examinations suggested the two men and one woman died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
In Mexico, proper gas line installations, vents and monitoring devices are often lacking.
In 2018, a gas leak in a water heater caused the deaths of an American couple and their two children in the resort town of Tulum, south of Playa del Carmen.
An inspection revealed that the water heater at the rented condominium was leaking gas. Prosecutors said the gas leak might have been caused by a lack of maintenance or the age of the equipment.
In 2010, the explosion of an improperly installed gas line at a hotel in Playa del Carmen killed five Canadian tourists and two Mexicans.
In that case, prosecutors said the gas line, apparently meant to fuel a pool heating unit, wasn’t properly installed or maintained. They said gas leaking from the line may have been ignited in an explosion by a spark from an electric switch or plug.
In a separate case in the Caribbean coast resort of Playa del Carmen, prosecutors announced Wednesday that a judge ordered three men to stand trial on homicide charges in the May 30 killing of an Italian woman at a restaurant.
The woman was a longtime resident of Playa del Carmen, not a tourist. Prosecutors didn’t provide information on a possible motive in that case.
A 28-year-old California woman has been identified as one of two Americans found dead at a luxury Mexican resort this week.
Abby Lutz was vacationing at the Hyatt’s Rancho Pescadero resort in Baja California Sur with John Heathco, 41, when they were found dead in their shared room on Tuesday, ABC News reported citing the Baja California Sur Attorney General’s office.
A GoFundMe page set up for Lutz, to help return her body and cover the cost of a funeral, states that the pair may have died from carbon monoxide poisoning and “improper venting” at the resort.
The Associated Press also reported that inhalation of gas was their suspected cause of death.
Abby Lutz has been identified as one of the two people found dead at a Mexico resort this week.
The couple, who was described as romantically involved, thought they had food poisoning during their stay and went to the hospital to get treatment. They started to feel better a few days later before being found dead, the GoFundMe page reads.
“Abby was the most beautiful soul and we will miss her so much,” the page reads. Lutz’s brother also posted a tribute to his “big sister” on Facebook.
A separate statement shared by Lutz’s family expressed their shock and heartbreak at the news of her death.“Abby had an adventurous spirit and a wonderfully kind heart. She loved to travel, see new places, and share her zeal for life with those around her. We ask for your thoughts and prayers for our family during this very difficult time,” the statement read.
A State Department spokesperson told HuffPost that the department is closely monitoring local authorities’ investigation into their cause of death and that it will provide all appropriate consular assistance.
The hotel’s general manager, Henar Gil, said police have not provided specific details about the cause of death and so they “are refraining from speculation about the cause.”
“Local authorities confirmed there was no evidence of violence related to this isolated incident, and there is no threat to guests’ safety or wellbeing at this time,” Gil said in a statement to HuffPost Thursday.
Last year three Americans were similarly found dead in two separate villas at a Sandals vacation resort in the Bahamas after seeking medical care for nausea and vomiting. A second woman was also airlifted to a local hospital for treatment.
Local authorities later determined that they died from carbon monoxide poisoning.
Carbon monoxide is a colorless and odorless gas that’s created when fuel burns. When inhaled, it prevents the body from using oxygen properly.
Symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning include headache, dizziness, nausea and vomiting, shortness of breath, chest pain, weakness and disorientation.
Back in March, the U.S. Embassy issued a warning about counterfeit pills sold in Mexican pharmacies, telling Americans to “exercise caution” when and if they intend to make purchases. However, the breadth of risk may be broader than assumed.
An investigation by the Los Angeles Times found that of 55 pills purchased from 29 pharmacies across eight cities in Mexico nearly half (28) were illegitimate. Forty of the pills were opioids, wherein 15 were counterfeit, and most contained fentanyl.
Another investigation by Vice, in collaboration with drug testing company Bunk Police, yielded similar results: six of 22 opioids were faulty — four came back positive for fentanyl, and two contained traces of the animal tranquilizer Xylazine.
Reporters from both investigations found that most pharmacies would sell the “medication,” often on a per-pill basis, and without a prescription (opioids or benzos require a prescription issued by Mexico’s Health Ministry). Vice found that only major pharmacy chains refused to sell controlled substances without a prescription. However, both outlets found that many small pharmacies in tourist areas had little regulation, and getting the pills often required a simple ask. Sometimes the sales clerks fished loose pills out of plastic bags or even went to a backroom to retrieve “hidden pill containers.”
In popular tourist hubs like Cabo San Lucas, Nuevo Progreso, and Tijuana, there are sometimes multiple pharmacies per block, with some selling full bottles of oxycodone (which later turned out to be counterfeit) for as little as $40, the LA Times noted.
While the legitimacy of opioids varied across both investigations, Adderall proved to be the most consistently fake, containing other substances at a jarringly frequent rate.
The LA Times found that of the 15 “Adderall” tablets purchased, 12 were counterfeit and contained other substances such as methamphetamine and MDMA. All nine of Vice’s Adderall tablets were illegitimate (six contained meth, two contained an “unidentifiable substance,” and one came back positive for Aminorex — a stimulant that has been illegal in the U.S. since 1972).
The reports identified some clear warning signs, such as misspellings on pill bottles or pills that crumbled easily. But many came in bottles with similar branding to American medication; some were even sealed.
“I don’t think Americans realize that their life could be on the line purchasing something from here,” Adam Auctor, founder of the Bunk Police, told Vice. “I think people trust pharmacies to keep them safe and I want Americans traveling in Mexico to know that pharmacies in Mexico are not safe.”
In 2022, the DEA found that six out of 10 fentanyl-laced pills contained a potentially lethal dose of the drug — an uptick from four out of 10 in 2021. The agency says the pills are being “mass-produced” by the Mexican cartels Sinaloa and Jalisco.
“The kind of pills that are turning up in busts in the U.S. pretty much exactly match the pills you turned up in your investigation, so to me it seems likely that all these pills are coming from the same place,” Ben Westhoff, author of Fentanyl Inc, told Vice.
Editor’s Note: This timeline is not all-inclusive. Selected rail incidents with at least 200 fatalities are listed, plus US incidents.
CNN
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Here’s some background information about major rail accidents since 1900.
January 1915 – Guadalajara, Mexico: More than 600 people die when a train derails into a ravine during a steep descent.
May 22, 1915 – Gretna, Scotland: The United Kingdom’s worst rail disaster occurs when three trains collide at Quintinshill, resulting in 227 deaths, many of whom were soldiers of the Royal Scots.
June 1915 – Montemorelos, Mexico: A military train derails into a canyon, killing more than 300.
December 12, 1917 – Modane, France: 427 people die when a train carrying more than 1,000 soldiers derails in the French Alps.
January 16, 1944 – León Province, Spain: A train wrecks in the Torro tunnel, killing more than 500 people.
March 2, 1944 – Near Salerno, Italy: At least 521 people die from carbon monoxide fumes when a train stalls in a tunnel.
October 22, 1949 – Poland: More than 200 are killed when the Danzig-Warsaw express derails.
April 3, 1955 – Guadalajara, Mexico: About 300 die when a night express train derails into a canyon.
September 29, 1957 – Montgomery, western Pakistan: 250 die when a passenger train collides with a cargo train.
February 1, 1970 – Buenos Aires, Argentina: The worst train disaster in Argentina’s history occurs when an express train crashes into a standing commuter train, killing 236.
October 6, 1972 – Saltillo, Mexico: 208 people die after a train traveling at excessive speed derails and catches fire.
June 6, 1981 – Bihar, India: India’s worst rail accident to date occurs during inclement weather when a train derails and plunges into a river in the state of Bihar, killing 800 and injuring more than 100.
January 13, 1985 – Near the town of Awash, Ethiopia: The government says that 392 people died when a passenger train derailed while crossing a bridge over a ravine.
June 4, 1989 – Ural Mountains, Soviet Union: 575 people die when a gas pipeline leaks, causing two passenger trains to explode.
January 4, 1990 – Sindh province, Pakistan: More than 210 people are killed after the Zakaria Bahauddin Express passenger train crashes into a stationary freight train.
September 22, 1994 – Tolunda, Angola: 300 die after malfunctioning brakes cause a train to derail and fall into a ravine.
August 2, 1999 – India: Brahmaputra Mail train en route to New Delhi slams into the idle Awadh-Assam Express at Gaisal Station in West Bengal, killing 285 and injuring more than 300.
June 24, 2002 – Tanzania: A runaway passenger train collides with a freight train and then derails, resulting in 281 deaths.
February 18, 2004 – Near the town of Neyshabur, Iran: A runaway 51-car chemical train derails and explodes, causing at least 320 deaths and hundreds of injuries to residents in the area.
December 26, 2004 – Sri Lanka: Between 1,500 to 1,700 passengers aboard the Samudradevi, or Queen of the Sea, train, are believed dead when the tsunami sweeps their train off the tracks.
March 1, 1910 – Wellington, Washington: An avalanche pushes a passenger train and a mail train into a ravine, killing 96 people.
July 9, 1918 – Nashville, Tennessee: Considered the worst rail disaster in US history, two passenger trains collide on Dutchman’s Curve, resulting in 101 deaths.
November 1, 1918 – Brooklyn, New York: At least 90 are killed when a Brighton Beach Train of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company derails inside the Malbone Street tunnel.
