At least 15 bodies found near U.S. retiree hamlet in Mexico

MEXICO CITY -- Chopped-up parts of at least 15 bodies stuffed into two vans were discovered Wednesday on the road to Lake Chapala, Mexico's largest inland body of fresh water and a popular retirement community for U.S. citizens.

The bodies found just south of Guadalajara, in Jalisco state, may be the latest victims in a bloody turf war between the vicious Zetas gang and an offshoot of the powerful Sinaloa cartel, a fight that has bloodied the area around Guadalajara, Mexico's second-largest city, for a year or so (link in Spanish).

"We are investigating ... dismembered persons ... to know exactly how many there were," Tomas Coronado Olmos, top prosecutor for Jalisco state, said in a news conference. He confirmed that there were at least 15 bodies because 15 heads were recovered.

"That is a preliminary number," he said.

The Chapala Lake region, home to thousands of U.S. retirees  and mecca for  seasonal tourists, has seen Mexico's drug war slowly encroach at the edges of the heretofore placid community. In 2007, The Times' Marla Dickerson reported that the area's perfect climate, laid-back outdoor-indoor lifestyle and affordability were attracting unprecedented numbers of new arrivals.

But more recently, the idyllic tranquillity has been shattered. Three Americans were slain around Chapala last year amid a spate of violence punctuated by several gang shoot-outs, executions and bombs, as the Houston Chronicle reported last month.

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Photo: Thousands of Americans flock to Mexico's Lake Chapala, seen here in a 2007 photograph. Credit: Michael Robinson Chavez / Los Angeles Times.

 

Rome pushes costumed gladiators away from Colosseum

Every day on WorldNow, we choose a striking photo from around the world. Today we picked this image of a costumed centurion giving a thumbs-up outside the Colosseum in Rome, a photo-op that might disappear.

Rome has pushed before to get rid of the costumed gladiators and centurions who ring the Colosseum, ready to draw their weapons and pose with tourists for a price. According to news reports, the Eternal City has passed a law banning unauthorized people from asking for money outside the famous attraction.

The faux fighters have gotten in trouble before: Several gladiators were arrested by undercover police in August after tourists complained of scams and threats to get money, the Guardian reported.

Officials say gladiators and centurions will still be able to work elsewhere, including the road leading  to the Colosseum, the Trevi Fountain and the Renaissance Piazza Navona, news services reported.

The costumed vendors aren't happy. “This will end badly. We’ll wage a revolution. We’ll burn down the Colosseum rather than move from here,” said one centurion  quoted by Adn Kronos International.

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Photo: A man dressed as an ancient Roman centurion at the Colosseum on Friday. Credit: Filippo Monteforte / AFP/Getty Images

Titanic Belfast exhibit opening where doomed ship was built

REPORTING FROM LONDON -- One hundred years after her doomed maiden voyage, RMS Titanic lives on in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where the cruise ship was built and launched in 1912 and where a new building of exhibition galleries opens on Saturday.

The massive Titanic Belfast complex, owned and managed by the charitable trust Titanic Foundation in partnership with Belfast City Council, is designed to commemorate and celebrate Belfast’s life as a shipbuilding center as well as the ship that sank after being hailed as "practically unsinkable" by her builders Harland and Wolff. The Titanic went down on its first voyage, which began April 10, 1912, with more than 2,000 passengers and crew from the southern English port of Southampton, bound for New York.  

Five days later, she lay at the bottom of the North Atlantic with her hull ripped open by an iceberg.  More than 1,500 people drowned in the freezing Atlantic water, leaving little more than 700 survivors.

The new six-story building designed by Eric Kuhne is a shimmering complex of aluminum shards as high as the original Titanic hull, occupying the original shipbuilding dockside and slipway where hundreds of vessels were built in the early 20^th century. The area is now known as the Titanic Quarter.

Titanic Belfast is a series of nine galleries which open with a three-week festival of events evoking early 20^th century Belfast. 

Susie Millar is a great granddaughter of Thomas Millar, a deck engineer on the Titanic who drowned in the tragedy. Now on the board of Belfast’s Titanic Society, she says a visit to the new galleries “shows early 1900s Belfast and what was happening here at the time with all the sights and sounds of the shipyards and what it was like to work in them.”

She says visitors will see exhibits depicting the early days of Belfast’s docklands, with holograms and recordings bringing them to life.  Then they can step into projected images of the Titanic itself, experiencing life on board and the iceberg hitting the ship. 

“You hear the Morse code signal then the sounds and cries of the passengers in the darkness as testimonies are read out,” says Millar.

The aftermath and the inquiry into the tragedy follow and the visit comes to the present-day underwater pictures of the vessel since it was first discovered on the ocean bed by marine explorer Robert Ballard in 1985.   

Belfast, more recently known for sectarian violence than as a tourist destination, is seeking to become a leading cultural center.  The BBC reports advance sales of over 100,000 tickets for Titanic Belfast.

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Photo: Titanic Belfast, a new tourist attraction opening Saturday. Credit: EPA

Mexico sets tourism record despite drug violence

REPORTING FROM MEXICO CITY — Mexico attracted a record number of foreign visitors last year despite a frightening drug war that is prompting travel warnings for a number of areas around the country.

Mexico’s tourism agency released new figures (link in Spanish) showing that the number of foreign travelers arriving by air in 2011 rose to 22.7 million, the most since the Bank of Mexico began keeping track in 1980. There was growth in each of the last five months of the year, officials said.

Tourism also got a boost from Mexican travelers, who registered 167 million visits to tourist spots. The total of Mexican and foreign tourists was 2% higher than for 2008, which had been the best year on record.

The number of air travelers from the United States to Mexico fell by 3% last year, but tourists from other countries — especially Brazil, Russia, Peru and China — registered sizable increases over 2010.

The enduring carnage of the drug war, with about 50,000 dead in the last five years, has generated substantial media coverage abroad.

Travel operators and Mexican resorts have sought to fill rooms by offering discounts in places such as  Acapulco, now among the deadliest spots in the country, though most of the violence occurs far from the main tourist strip. Mexico remains a relatively affordable destination and, generally speaking, the tourist centers of well-known resort areas such as Cancun and Los Cabos have not suffered drug-related slayings.

The State Department’s latest travel warning for Mexico says Americans should avoid travel in parts or all of 14 states around the country, and several others where travelers should exercise caution.

Last week’s warning is more detailed than prior announcements about potential trouble spots and the perils there. Few major tourist areas are mentioned, though travelers are urged to exercise caution in Acapulco, Ixtapa and Zihuatenejo — all in the violence-plagued state of Guerrero — and in Mazatlan, a popular beach spot in the northwestern state of Sinaloa where killings have soared since 2009.

Tourism is one of Mexico's top sources of foreign income.

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Photo: Soldiers at the scene of shootout with gunmen in Acapulco last April. The State Department urges visitors to Acapulco and some other tourist spots to exercise caution. Credit: Bernandino Hernandez / Associated Press