The Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez, viewed from across the border in El Paso.
Latin America: Week in Review, Mexico

Three Teenagers Killed In Ciudad Juárez, Mexico; Two U.S. Citizens

February 8, 2011 By Staff

The Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez, viewed from across the border in El Paso.

Today in Latin America

Top StoryThree teenage boys were shot to death in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juárez, with at least two of them being U.S. high school students from Texas.

The boys were killed on Saturday afternoon while at a car dealership across the border from El Paso, Texas. At least 60 bullet casings were found at the scene, with one of the boys found inside a white Jeep Cherokee and the other two in the courtyard.

There have been no leads in the shooting and one of the dealership managers has refused to give a statement, while the statement from the other has not released due to a pending investigation.

The two boys who were U.S. citizens were Carlos Mario Gonzalez Bermudez, a 16-year old sophomore at Cathedral High School in El Paso and Juan Carlos Echeverri, a 15-year old who had been a freshman at a private Catholic school last year, but left to study in Ciudad Juárez. The U.S. Embassy said it could not provide any information on the case.

The third teenager was identified as 17-year old César Yalín Miramontes Jiménez.

“We believe (Echeverri) and the two others had been friends for a long time. He was here in the city to visit them,” said Chihuahua State prosecutor’s office spokesman Arturo Sandoval, according to CNN.

Cathedral High School held a prayer service for the deceased on Monday and officials planned a rosary service for the entire school later in the week. Gonzalez Bermudez lived in Ciudad Juárez and commuted to the school everday, something about 20 percent of the 485 students enrolled at Cathedral do, according to the school’s principal Nick Gonzalez.

“Our Juarez kids knew all three” of the teenagers killed over the weekend, he said, according to The Houston Chronicle. “It’s a very tight knit community. A lot of them car pool; that’s how they know each other.”

Headlines from the Western Hemisphere

North America

Caribbean

Central America

Andes

  • Venezuela has terminated Crystallex’s permit to operate the biggest gold mine in the country, the Canadian mining company said Monday.
  • Six Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, guerrillas turned themselves in voluntarily to army troops in a rural area in the southern province of Caqueta, the army said Sunday.
  • A prominent U.S. law firm accused Chevron of mounting a “smear campaign” aimed at keeping it out of a high stakes Ecuadorean environmental pollution case.
  • A strike at Peru’s main port of Callao is complicating the country’s flow of mineral exports, said Eva Arias, the president of the National Oil, Mining and Energy Society’s committee on mining.

Southern Cone

Image: dherrera_96 @ Flickr.

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