Mexican man gets double arm transplant

Gabriel Granados Vergara, 52, center, gestures to the press after he received a double arm transplant at the National Institute of Medical Science and Nutrition (INCMN) in Mexico City, Thursday, June 7, 2012.

MEXICO CITY (AP) -- A Mexican man whose arms were severely burned by electricity became the first patient in Latin America to receive a double arm transplant, doctors said Thursday.

Gabriel Granados, a 52-year-old father of two whose arms were amputated just below the elbow, received the arms of a 34-year-old shooting victim, said Dr. Martin Iglesias, head of the surgical team that performed the operation.

Granados told a news conference that the transplant was "terrific" and that he has begun to feel his new hands.

"This is wonderful that after being without hands for some time, all of a sudden I see new hands," said Granados, who is an agent in the financial unit of Mexico City's prosecutors' office.

The surgery was in early May, but Granados was discharged from the hospital on Thursday. Doctors said he has recovered well.

Granados' arms were amputated after they were badly burned in January 2011, when he received an electrical shock while giving instructions to a group of construction workers building a fence.

Before the surgery, doctors say they practiced the procedure on corpses.

"This is a very special day for Mexico from a scientific point of view," said Dr. Fernando Gabilondo, director of Mexico City's National Institute of Medical Science and Nutrition Salvador Zubiran, where the surgery was performed.

Mexican doctors say there are other 23 patients waiting for arms transplant although only six could be successfully done.

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Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman's Head Of Security Captured In Mexican Drug Cartels Battle

Mexico

MEXICO CITY -- The Mexican army announced Sunday that it had captured the head of security for Sinaloa drug cartel head Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, one of the world's most wanted men.

The suspect, who was not identified by name, was captured in the Sinaloa state capital of Culiacan and will be presented to the media Monday morning, the army said.

Guzman, Mexico's top drug lord, is one of the world's richest men, and has eluded authorities by moving around and hiding since his 2001 escape from prison in a laundry truck.

The army said the man they had arrested also ran cartel activities in Durango and southern Chihuahua state, and was responsible for carrying out secret burials of cartel victims, kidnapping, extortion and arson. They did not say if the arrest moved the military closer to capturing Guzman, an arrest that would be seen as a major victory for the government of President Felipe Calderon.

Guzman is worth more than $1 billion, according to Forbes magazine, which has listed him among the "World's Most Powerful People." He has a $7 million bounty on his head, and thousands of law enforcement agents from the U.S. and other countries working on capturing him.

His cartel controls cocaine trafficking on the Mexican border with California and has moved eastward to the corridor between the Mexican state of Sonora, which borders Arizona.

Separately, Mexican soldiers discovered 13 bodies in an abandoned truck Sunday along with a message that they were killed in a war between rival drug cartels in the eastern state of Veracruz, officials said.

The bodies were found in Tamaulipas state, a few hundred yards (meters) from its border with Veracruz, according to the Tamaulipas attorney general's office. The office said that 10 of the bodies had been decapitated.

The area has been the scene of bloody battles between the Gulf and Zetas cartels, and a pair of banners alluding to a rivalry were found in the truck, the statement from the attorney-general's office said.

On Friday, the attorney general's office in Veracruz said it had found 10 bodies in a different area along the border with Tamaulipas after receiving a tip.

On Thursday, three U.S. citizens traveling to spend the holidays with their relatives in Mexico were among those killed in a spree of shooting attacks on buses. In the spree, a group of gunmen attacked three buses in Veracruz, killing a total of seven passengers.

The Americans killed were a mother and her two daughters who were returning to visit relatives in the region.

The five gunmen who allegedly carried out the attacks were later shot to death by soldiers.

Earlier, the gunmen also killed four people in the nearby town of El Higo, Veracruz.

Local police in Veracruz have become so corrupt that on Wednesday the government decided to dissolve the entire force in the state's largest city, also known as Veracruz, and sent the Navy in to patrol. Some 800 police officers and 300 administrative employees were laid off.

News by Huffingtonpost


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26 bodies found in Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-largest city

Dead bodies in Mexico

MEXICO CITY — The bound and gagged bodies of 26 men were found early Thursday in abandoned vehicles in Guadalajara, a grim sign of escalating mafia violence among gangsters vying for control of Mexico’s second-largest city.

Investigators from the state of Jalisco said that the corpses were stuffed in three vehicles left near the Millennium Arches, a major landmark, and that each of the dead had been shot in the head.

The discovery came less than 24 hours after a similarly grisly scene in Mexico’s Sinaloa state, where the charred remains of 16, some of them handcuffed and wearing bulletproof vests, were left in two pickups. Investigators are looking into a possible connection to Thursday’s crime scene.

“These barbaric acts show that the war between the criminals is getting even more brutal,” said Jorge Aristoteles Sandoval, Guadalajara’s mayor.

Guadalajara has not been among the places considered major Mexican drug-war battlegrounds, such as Ciudad Juarez or Monterrey. But analysts say Thursday’s discovery could signal a new push by the Zetas cartel into territory that has long been the domain of the Sinaloa Federation, the reigning criminal power along Mexico’s western coast.

Luis Carlos Najera, Jalisco state police chief, told reporters that a message was left in one of the vehicles, a white van with license plates from the state of Mexico. But he did not disclose the contents of the message.

Drug-war experts say the Zetas may be muscling into Guadalajara to fight for a bigger piece of Mexico’s billion-dollar methamphetamine trade. Local Sinaloa boss Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel was killed by Mexican soldiers in the city in July 2010. Since then, factional fighting has broken out among groups of gangsters with shifting loyalties and names, such as the Resistance, the New Jalisco Cartel and the Milenio Cartel.

The gruesome spectacle Thursday comes at an inopportune time for Guadalajara, which is two days away from hosting an expected 600,000 visitors for the annual Guadalajara International Book Fair, billed as the largest in the Spanish-speaking world.

News by Washingtonpost

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