Interesting Stories from the Past Few Days

In an enormous and triumphant headline, El Universal reported over the weekend that Diego Fernández de Cevallos had been released healthy and happy, a happy fact which was subsequently denied by the family. Then El Universal, in much smaller type, repeated the claim in Sunday's paper, this time attributing the news to a nephew of the former presidential candidate. Is he free but stowed away at a family compound? Still locked up? Your guess is as good as mine.

The fact that this comes from one of Mexico's most respected papers makes the whole situation even odder. One would expect to see the offending reporter and his editors all publicly flogged after a comparable episode involving the NY Times, but the More from Burro Hall here.

Plus, Julián Leyzaola is out in Tijuana:

Tijuana's mayor-elect said Friday that he will replace the border city's top cop, who launched an unprecedented campaign to loosen the grip of drug cartels on what has been one of Mexico's most corrupt police forces.

But in a sign of continuity, Julian Leyzaola will be succeeded as public safety secretary by his closest aide, Gustavo Huerta, when the mayor's term begins Tuesday.

First, "unprecedented" gets thrown around too much. Second, this sounds more like a lack of comfort with the guy's profile than a wholesale shift in policy, but interesting nonetheless. One wonders if, a la Sports Illustrated or John Madden, it's the beginning of a New Yorker curse.

Lastly, the leader of the Los Aztecas in Juárez was arrested. Authorities are saying he was behind the murders of the US consular employees as well as the mass murder of partying youths in January. Then again, the Federal Police is saying that he is responsible for 80 percent of the murders in Juárez since 2009, which is ridiculously high proportion for a single man in a city as chaotic as Juárez and seems to indicate that they want to hang everything on him. Rumors that he killed Pancho Villa have not yet been confirmed or denied.