-Swiss insurance company Zurich Financial Services Ltd. wants to boost its presence in Brazil and Mexico as it bets consumers in Latin America’s two largest economies will demand more insurance products, according to a top executive.
“In the short-run, I think the focus is to continue building up our presence mainly in Mexico because in the other markets we already have a very strong position,” Peter Rebrin, chief executive for Zurich Latin America, said in an interview in Mexico City.
Zurich has operations in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, and Venezuela.
Rebrin said the company will look to grow in the region both organically and through acquisitions.
“Certainly in the bigger markets, Mexico, there are less opportunities. I think many of the good opportunities have been taken,” he said in reference to potential deals.
In late 2008, Zurich acquired two insurance companies in Brazil from private investors and local bank Banco Mercantil Do Brasil SA (BMEB4.BR). The deal included an exclusive agreement with Banco Mercantil for the distribution of Zurich Brazil’s insurance products.
In Mexico, Zurich ranked No. 15 in 2008 with 3.8 billion pesos ($294 million) in premiums and a 1.8% market share, according to regulatory data. - wsj.com
Mexico considers clamping down on Twitter By By Michael E. Miller
Mexico has racked up its fair share of menacingly named outlaws in a three-year drug war: the Zetas, Aztecas and even a band of female assassins called the Panthers.
Now, if the government gets its way, another name will also make the wanted list: los Twitteros.
That’s right. Twitter users are fast becoming public enemy No. 1, at least in Mexico City, where they have angered authorities by warning one another of roadside “alcoholimetro” — or Breathalyzer — checkpoints set up by the police. – minnpost.com
The Twitter feed in question, Anti Alcoholimetro, doesn’t hide its intent. On any given night, a dozen people write in listing the time and location where they saw a police checkpoint, helping others to avoid it.
No one’s Olympic uniform is more confounding than Hubertus von Hohenlohe’s. “It sounds strange,” von Hohenlohe admits while relaxing in an Olympic Village coffee shop before the Mexican flag-raising event. “But it’s not all that bad.” The skier’s grandmother is half-Mexican, and von Hohenlohe, who is a Vienna-based singer and photographer when he’s not speeding down the slopes, was born in Mexico City while his father was running a Volkswagen plant there. “We always wanted to have one member of the family [who was] Mexican,” he says. “So they chose that I was going to be born in Mexico. That was the idea.”
Hubertus von Hohenlohe Skier For Mexico
This will be his fifth Olympics for Mexico, but only the first since 1994. Although he qualified for the Torino Olympics in 2006, the Mexican Olympic Committee refused to send a one-man team. More eager for exposure this year, Mexico decided to support his next-to-nothing shot at a medal in the slalom and giant slalom races.
Read more: time.com
Standing beside visiting Prince Andrew of Britain, Calderon said that “a key strategy for Mexico is to diversify its trade and investment (and) reduce its dependence on the United States.
“The opportunity is primarily in the European Union,” Calderon told reporters.
The president confidently stated that the Duke of York’s three-day visit would help “strengthen the bonds of cooperation and promote better mutual investment” between Mexico and Britain.
More than 80 percent of Mexico’s foreign trade is with its northern neighbour the United States, a movement of goods that has soared since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was implemented along with Canada in 1994.
The Mexican economy, the second largest in Latin America behind Brazil, shrank by around 6.8 percent in 2009, in a drop spurred by the US economic crisis, according to official figures released late last month.
The Zetas, once the armed wing of the Gulf cartel, have increasingly branched out on their own and are seen by Mexican authorities as one of the country’s most brutal crime groups, known for gruesome tactics such as beheading victims.
In addition to drug trafficking, authorities say, the Zetas are involved in extortion, kidnapping, producing pirated CDs and DVDs, sales of alcohol and migrant smuggling.-
The gang has been locked in a bloody turf war
in western Mexico with a gang known as La Familia, which on Monday posted banners around the state of Michoacan calling on Mexicans to join its fight against the Zetas and help clean the streets from the dirty thugs.
La Familia Michoacana: Drug trafficking and protection.
unlike the zetas this drug cartel is not killing innocent people , furthermore it goes out of its way to tell people not to associate themselves with the zetas. La Familia Michoacana also helps communities by punishing thieves , rapist and extortionist.
The highway shootout was the latest outbreak of violence in Torreon, which is the center of a region known as the Laguna, a major milk producer.
Early Sunday, 10 people died and 13 were wounded when four gunmen in a convoy burst into a Torreon bar and opened fire with high-powered weapons. Bodies were strewn on the sidewalk outside and inside the bar.
On Tuesday, a written message surfaced on YouTube that referred to the Sunday slayings. It warned Torreon authorities and residents against having anything to do with the Zetas, including patronizing bars that it said the gang runs.
-www.latimes.com
“If you can come to Mexico for heart surgery, why not rehab? We pick people up from the airport, they get their own hotel room, they get top doctors,” said Salazar, as a row of doctors answered calls from prospective U.S. patients.
Charging a third of the price of upscale clinics in the United States, a luxury rehab center aimed at foreigners opened recently at a posh hotel in the city of Monterrey about 100 miles from Texas.
Americans have long crossed the border for cheap medicine and are now choosing Mexico for dentistry and eye and heart surgery instead of far-flung destinations in Asia.
Its month-long recovery packages come with English-speaking doctors and extras like massages, body masks and Botox shots.
Gilberto Salazar, a former alcoholic, is marketing his spa-like centers under the brand “Rehab in Mexico” and is even using Mexico’s official tourism logo on his website and in leaflets, with the government’s permission.
Mexico — Chrysler Group LLC will invest 550 million dollars in Mexico to produce Fiat 500s for the United States and Latin America, Mexican President Felipe Calderon said Monday.
The investment would generate 400 direct jobs and more than 1,200 indirect jobs, Calderon said at a launch ceremony at the Chrysler plant in Toluca, some 70 kilometers (40 miles) west of Mexico City.
The vehicles would be produced at Toluca, one of five Chrysler plants in Mexico, and would start distribution at year end to the United States and Latin America, Fiat chief executive officer Sergio Marchionne told AFP.
Mexico “has an ideal position as a bridge between NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement between Mexico, the United States and Canada) and Latin America,” Marchionne said.
Mexico would play a key role in the renovation of Chrysler, he added.
Chrysler formed a global strategic alliance with Italy’s Fiat Group after emerging from government-backed bankruptcy last year.
The automobile industry represents 20 percent of Mexico’s manufacturing GDP, and more than 70 percent of its exports go to the United States.
TIJUANA, Mexico – Mexican authorities on Monday arrested two suspected leaders of a brutal drug trafficking gang that terrorized the border city of Tijuana for several years, a U.S. official said.
The capture of Raydel Lopez Uriarte and Manuel Garcia Simental apparently wipes out the existing leadership of the cartel headed by Teodoro Garcia Simental, who was captured last month. Teodoro and Manuel Garcia are brothers.
Lopez, known as “El Muletas,” and Garcia, known as “El Chiquilin,” were arrested Monday in La Paz, a city in the southern end of the Baja California peninsula, said Amy Roderick, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. She had no further details on the operation that led to their capture.
By contrast, present-day conditions “lend themselves to a much closer interaction, much better co-ordination in the messages, between the federal government and the Banco de Mexico”. Mr Carstens said closer co-operation with the government would involve “having more of a discussion and a joint understanding [about] what is going on in the economy. Such discussions would lead to “much better information to take monetary policy decisions”.
“There is no reason to worry; the only thing that both the president and the Banco de Mexico under my leadership are trying to do is to exploit those synergies that are possible,” he said.
Underlining that he would be prepared to take decisions that were not “fully in line with what the federal government expects or wants”, Mr Carstens said one of the legally established roles of the bank was to advise the federal government on economic and financial matters. “President Calderón, when he invited me to become governor, he told me that he expects me to provide that service.”
if America can do this , why cant Mexico do this? the fed works closely with the president in America.
Archaeologists believe a newly discovered 1,100-year-old tomb in Mexico may hold clues to finally understanding the decline of the Mayan empire.
The ancient tomb was discovered at the site of the Mayan city of Tonina in Mexico‘s state of Chiapas, on the border with Guatemala.
Experts have dated the find – which included a stone sarcophagus, ceramics and human bones – to between 840 and 900 AD. – read more
“This is very interesting, because we are going to see from the bones who these people are, after the Maya empire.
“Everyone who has studied the Mayan world has the same concern because from 820 AD onwards, all areas of the ancient empire were abandoned.
“That marvellous ancient civilisation completely disappeared and in its place, these Toltec groups appeared.
“They already had a corporate organisation which was not elitist and destroyed what the ancient dynasties had created.”
But some experts have expressed doubt over the significance of the find.
“One tomb, even if it is very fancy, isn’t going to answer big things about the trajectory of Maya history all over the place … maybe locally,” said David Stuart, a specialist in Mayan epigraphy at the University of Texas.
