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Friday, December 2, 2011

Murder of Mexican activist sparks corruption claims

An activist who publicly accused police of kidnapping his teenage son was shot dead as he drove through his hometown in northern Mexico, a killing that instantly fuelled a bitter nationwide debate over crime and corruption.

Corrupt officials were being blamed yesterday by activists who worked with Nepomuceno Moreno in a national anti-crime movement that has been calling for an end to organised crime, police abuse and a military-led government assault on drug cartels.

The prosecutor's office in Sonora said Moreno had a criminal past and it was that which appeared to have led to his death.

Officials said Moreno was shot at least five times when he stopped his van at an intersection on Tuesday in Hermosillo, the capital city of Sonora, which borders Arizona.

Many Mexicans focus the blame for tens of thousands of crime-related deaths on the incompetence and corruption of federal, state and local authorities. President Felipe Calderon has outraged crime victims and their families by saying 90 per cent of those killed in a five-year-old government war on drug cartels were involved in crime.

Moreno, a 56-year-old seafood vendor, became one of the most visible faces of Mexico's anti-crime movement after his 18-year-old son Jorge Mario disappeared in July last year.

Saying masked police had snatched his son and two other young men, Moreno pleaded his case directly to Calderon last month in a meeting between the conservative leader and members of poet Javier Sicilia's Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity.

Moreno also said he had been repeatedly threatened by the men who grabbed his son, whom he described as police working with organised crime.

Sicilia began his movement after his son Juan Francisco was killed on March 28 in Cuernavaca along with six other people in what officials called a case of mistaken identity by drug-cartel members warring with other criminals. The movement has organised a series of high-profile marches and protests throughout the country.

Sicilia said yesterday Moreno's relatives now feared for their lives, and he focused the blame for the killing on unidentified people in authority.

"The family is terrified," Sicilia told Milenio television. "This is collusion with crime. Otherwise it's not possible for a man to be killed like this ... I don't know where the state ends and organised crime begins."

A spokesman for the Sonora state attorney general's office, Jose Larrinaga Talamantes, said the principal line of investigation in Moreno's death was drug trafficking, saying the victim had been involved with organised crime at least since his 1979 arrest in Arizona for heroin smuggling and possession.

In 1997, Moreno was jailed again on drug-related charges, Larrinaga said.

Violence attributed to organised crime has killed more than 35,000 people between December 2006 and the end of 2010.

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