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Borderwatch 12-31-2009 10:32 PM

El Monte school board member slain in Mexico
 
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lano...e-durango.html

A 33-year-old El Monte school board member and five other men were shot dead execution-style in north central Mexico on Wednesday night, after they were abducted by gunmen, according to family members.

Agustin Roberto “Bobby” Salcedo was having dinner with his wife in a restaurant when armed men burst in and kidnapped Salcedo and five other men. All six were found dead Thursday, El Monte officials said. Salcedo’s wife was not abducted.

Salcedo, who was also the assistant principal of instruction at El Monte High School, had arrived in the Mexican city of Gomez Palacio earlier this week. The city of 240,000 is in the state of Durango and is the hometown of Salcedo’s wife, Betzy.

Salcedo, who was born and raised in the Los Angeles area, and his wife were dining with some of her former classmates when the attack occurred, said Salcedo’s brother, Carlos.

“They ordered everyone to the floor. They threatened to shoot them all if anyone dared to look up. They abducted the men,” Carlos Salcedo said. “Their whereabouts were unknown until the police chief informed my sister-in-law that they found the bodies, my brother included. They were found early this morning about 3 a.m.”

The bodies were discovered alongside a canal, local media reported. All had been shot in the head, and dozens of spent bullet casings were found at the site, suggesting they had been slain on the spot, local media said.

Carlos Salcedo said he did not know the identities of the other men.

Friends and family were in shock Thursday. They said there was no reason for the couple to be targeted. Salcedo’s wife told family members that she did not recognize any of the gunmen’s voices.

“From all accounts right now, it sounds random,” Carlos Salcedo said. “There is no reason for my brother to be targeted.”

Raging drug violence and rampant corruption have been a major problem in Durango, a tense, rough state. The local Catholic archbishop, Hector Gonzalez Martinez, recently described the region to The Times as one where gunmen “own the night” in village after village, even threatening priests.

The couple had been married two years, and Betzy Salcedo was a physician in Mexico. She has been preparing for examinations to practice in the United States.

Carlos Salcedo said his brother’s wife was devastated.

“She’s extremely brokenhearted. It’s a nightmare. I can’t believe it’s happening,” he said. “My brother had just such a bright future. He was finishing up his doctorate at UCLA — just the type of person you want in your community as a leader.”
In November, Salcedo was reelected to a new term on the school board of the El Monte City School District, which governs the city’s elementary schools. A photo on the school district’s website shows his brother, Carlos, swearing him in.

Salcedo was born to a family of Mexican immigrants who arrived in the Los Angeles area in the 1960s. His father was a construction worker and his mother a homemaker. The parents had only an elementary school education, Carlos Salcedo said, but they pushed their five children to succeed educationally, and all went to college.

Salcedo wanted to give back to his community by becoming an educator, his brother said.
Salcedo was student body president when he attended Mountain View High School in El Monte in the early 1990s and graduated from Cal State Long Beach with a degree in history, later earning a master’s in educational administration at Cal State San Bernardino. He had been completing work on a doctorate in educational leadership at UCLA.

Before becoming a school administrator, he taught world history, government and economics. He inspired some of his former students to become teachers themselves, and some now work in El Monte, his brother said.

El Monte Mayor Andre Quintero, a friend of Salcedo’s, described him as devoted to education and leadership, and said he volunteered at book giveaways and food drives.

“Bobby was an absolute bright, shining star in our community,” Quintero said.
Gomez Palacio was a familiar city to Salcedo. He and his wife married there about 2 1/2 years ago, and Salcedo was a past president of the South El Monte/Gomez Palacio sister city organization.

Quintero said he hoped authorities would do whatever possible to catch the suspects.
“They didn’t just take his life. They robbed him from our community .... We have to get justice,” Quintero said.

According to a Times’ interactive map, there were at least 669 drug-related killings in Durango between Jan. 1, 2007, and May 29 of last year, the most recent information available from the University of San Diego Trans Border Institute’s analysis of data from the Agencia Reforma newspaper group. Overall in Mexico, more than 9,900 drug-related killings occurred during that period.

-- Ron Lin

Photo: Agustin Roberto “Bobby” Salcedo. Credit: courtesy of the Salcedo family.

Related links

Patriotic Army Mom 01-01-2010 08:08 AM

What a way to start the New Year off.

Ole Glory 01-02-2010 07:32 AM

Something smells fishy.

Just like the Bishop that was shot in Church.

Can you say DRUGS, boys and girls? :eek:

ilbegone 01-02-2010 08:11 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ole Glory (Post 3164)
Something smells fishy.

Just like the Bishop that was shot in Church.

Can you say DRUGS, boys and girls? :eek:

Drugs will be in the background of the attackers at the least, and the police may have been in on it.

I spoke with a Mexican yesterday who's been here since the mid - 70's. He said "You just can't go to Mexico anymore". He said that he bought some property there to retire on, but he might have to give it up. He's afraid to return.

Another Mexican told me his brother, who owns an avocado farm and actually is quite wealthy, pays out a bundle in protection money. A lot of his brother's neighbors have simply disappeared, the assumption being that they didn't pay up or otherwise offended the narcos. He added that there was a lot of kidnapping for ransom, and it's now affecting ordinary people.

Some years ago, I asked a Mexican woman about la mordida, civil "servant" shakedown of the powerless or compensation for looking the other way.. She replied that it would never end, there was no hope for reform, that is was the base reason behind all the others why so many Mexicans come to the US.

And that was before the killing started.

This last week I was seriously thinking that we need to get out of Iraq and into Mexico.

Ole Glory 01-02-2010 09:29 AM

We here at the old/new SOS have been telling/warning people for years, DO NOT GO TO MEXICO! What part of don't go don't you understand.:rolleyes:

Enter at your own risk, has a whole new meaning. Good Luck.

Twoller 01-02-2010 09:55 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ole Glory (Post 3172)
We here at the old/new SOS have been telling/warning people for years, NO NOT GO TO MEXICO! What part of don't go don't you understand.:rolleyes:

Enter at your own risk, has a whole new meaning. Good Luck.

Why would a school board member go visiting in Mexico? Maybe he had relatives there. There could have been a lot of connections and probably were. The confrontation was not conducted in English. Which sort of begs the question, what kind of "contributions" was this party making to the LA school district? Probably they were involved in making sure illegals got educated or at least that there was education going in Spanish, two things we don't need.

Would it suprise anyone to learn that these school board associates and employees had something that the gangsters wanted? Maybe they were not providing the services these guys needed in our public education system, whatever they were. They say that drugs flow pretty casually in the schools and where hispanics have taken over the public schools, there could be a lot of money at stake. Maybe that's what they were doing there, negotiating some kind of graft involving drug flow or turf in the schools.

I'm not shocked to hear US born travelers to Mexico are finding themselves involved in violence there. Just look at the names and no other explanation is necessary.

ilbegone 01-02-2010 11:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Twoller (Post 3174)
Why would a school board member go visiting in Mexico? Maybe he had relatives there. There could have been a lot of connections and probably were. The confrontation was not conducted in English. Which sort of begs the question, what kind of "contributions" was this party making to the LA school district? Probably they were involved in making sure illegals got educated or at least that there was education going in Spanish, two things we don't need.

Would it suprise anyone to learn that these school board associates and employees had something that the gangsters wanted? Maybe they were not providing the services these guys needed in our public education system, whatever they were. They say that drugs flow pretty casually in the schools and where hispanics have taken over the public schools, there could be a lot of money at stake. Maybe that's what they were doing there, negotiating some kind of graft involving drug flow or turf in the schools.

I'm not shocked to hear US born travelers to Mexico are finding themselves involved in violence there. Just look at the names and no other explanation is necessary.

So you're asserting that since the guy was an American school board member with a Spanish last name and was recently abducted from a restaurant in Mexico with five strangers and summarily executed with them, he was involved in peddling drugs to school children in El Monte.

That's quite the logical, in depth objective analysis.

No such thing as being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Jeanfromfillmore 01-02-2010 12:20 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Twoller (Post 3174)
Why would a school board member go visiting in Mexico? Maybe he had relatives there. There could have been a lot of connections and probably were. The confrontation was not conducted in English. Which sort of begs the question, what kind of "contributions" was this party making to the LA school district? Probably they were involved in making sure illegals got educated or at least that there was education going in Spanish, two things we don't need.

Would it suprise anyone to learn that these school board associates and employees had something that the gangsters wanted? Maybe they were not providing the services these guys needed in our public education system, whatever they were. They say that drugs flow pretty casually in the schools and where hispanics have taken over the public schools, there could be a lot of money at stake. Maybe that's what they were doing there, negotiating some kind of graft involving drug flow or turf in the schools.

I'm not shocked to hear US born travelers to Mexico are finding themselves involved in violence there. Just look at the names and no other explanation is necessary.

The article states that the husband who was shot was born here, but the town in Mexico where he was assassinated was the home town of his wife. She was a doctor in Mexico and was working on her credentials here. They had only been married 2 years and so she would have a big family connection to that town. These weren't the typical drug involved people, at least on the surface. It is quite possible they just were in the wrong place, put with Mexico and all that drug money, who knows. No one's safe there, and so few a innocent yet so many are. Nothing makes sense there.

Twoller 01-03-2010 07:51 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ilbegone (Post 3182)
So you're asserting that since the guy was an American school board member with a Spanish last name and was recently abducted from a restaurant in Mexico with five strangers and summarily executed with them, he was involved in peddling drugs to school children in El Monte.

That's quite the logical, in depth objective analysis.

No such thing as being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Do you think that they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time? They weren't robbed. They spoke Spanish. These gangsters down south don't have a lot of time on their hands. They don't just go arbitrarily grabbing people out of restaurants and shoot them in the head. Could it have been a case of mistaken identity? Six people? Did they want to get rid of witnesses? They left the wife who was originally from the area. They took the husband who was from LA.

Yeah, he could have been involved with dealing drugs to school children in El Monte. He probably was involved in something.

Our sympathy is misplaced with people who consort accross the borders with Mexico.

Ole Glory 01-03-2010 12:16 PM

Bravo Twoller,

My hat is off to you. I couldn't have said it better myself. Way to go!:)


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