A friendly New Year’s Eve soccer match between teams representing two rival cartels in a Mexican prison turned into a bloodbath after a controversial tackle escalated into a gun fight.

For over a decade, Cieneguillas, a medium-security prison in the Mexican state of Zacatecas, has been home to hundreds of dangerous criminals representing no less than six of Mexico’s main drug cartels. In an attempt to relieve the pressure of the rivalries between these criminal organizations, the prison leadership authorized a soccer game between teams representing Los Zetas and the Gulf Cartel, on New Year’s Eve, but what was meant to be a friendly celebration abruptly turned into a deadly shootout, and not the penalty kind…

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The mayor of a town in Mexico has come under fire from members of his community for deploying cutouts of himself at events that he can’t physically be present at.

Moisés Aguilar Torres, the mayor Pichuclaco, a town in the Mexican state of Chiapas, managed to outrage his constituents by sending a cutout of himself to a local health services event that he didn’t bother attending. Photos of actual attendees posing for pictures with Torres’ cardboard cutout have been doing the rounds on Mexican social media for days, sparking both criticism and hilarious comments.

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Shocking photos of a popular beach in the Mexican state of Oaxaca sinking into the Ocean have been doing the rounds on social media, leaving people scratching their heads in disbelief. It turns out the sinking is being caused by a phenomenon known as “mar de fondo”, or “swell”.

Swells rarely occur at popular seaside destination, which only makes the repeated sinking of the beach at Puerto Escondito, in Oaxaca, that much more peculiar. Swells, also known as surface gravity waves, are created by storms thousands of miles away from the beaches on which they break, and are not influenced by local winds. They cause a rise in sea level, but are different than high tide, eating away at the sand they it, and causing large stretches of beach to simply sink into the ocean. This is what happened at Puerto Escondito last week, but the really strange part is that the exact same thing occurred in the same place, in May of last year.

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A Mexican teacher has come under fire for making high-school students wear cardboard boxes on their heads to block their peripheral vision and prevent them from copying on an exam.

Luis Juárez Texis, the director of Campus 01 “El Sabinal” at the College of Bachelors, in the Mexican state of Tlaxcala, has been accused of humiliating and breaking the basic human rights of his students, after a photo of him overseeing an exam where the students wore cardboard boxes on their heads went viral online. The students’ parents shared the photo on social media and issued a public statement asking educational authorities in Mexico to dismiss Texis.

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Politicians always make promises they can’t keep during electoral campaigns, but voters hardly ever hold them responsible for lying. Well, residents in a small Mexican town recently decided to teach their mayor a lesson for failing to fulfil his campaign promises by parading him in women’s clothes for four straight days.

Javier Sebastián Jiménez Santiz won the mayoral race in the town of Huixtán on promises of improving the local water system, but failed to live up to the expectations of his constituents. Lat last month, after getting sick of his excuses and promises, locals stormed into the mayor’s office and dressed up Santiz and municipal trustee Luis Ton in women’s clothing. Mayor Santiz had to wear a long dark skirt and white blouse with ruffles and flowery embroidery, while Ton was given a bright pink dress with white polka dots.

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As part of an unusual social experiment, a Mexican mayor disguised himself as a disabled person in need of assistance to test the attitude of local public servants first-hand.

After receiving a number of complaints from disabled and other socially disadvantaged people about the treatment they received from social workers, Carlos Tena, the mayor of Cuauhtémoc, a town in Mexico’s Chihuahua state, didn’t know who to believe, the alleged victims or his co-workers. So he devised a plan to test the attitude of local social workers himself. Tena spent two months putting together a believable disguise and then visited public servants at both the Mayor’s Office and Social Services posing as a disabled man in need of help.

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Armed robberies have become so common in Mexico City that people have started buying fake smartphones to hand over to trigger-happy criminals who would rather shoot them than leave empty-handed.

Walking on the street or getting on public transportation in Mexico City have become increasingly risky affairs. According to recently released data, there were an average of 70 violent reported muggings in the Mexican capital in the first four months of 2019. Around two thirds of these crimes targeted pedestrians, while the rest were evenly committed against public transportation passengers and motorists stuck in traffic jams or waiting at traffic lights. The incidence of such crimes has been steadily increasing in the city, but it has gotten so bad that people are now buying fake smartphones to hand over to muggers instead of their real ones.

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Last weekend, a series of photos that seemed to show a very young boy getting married to an adult woman went viral on Mexican social media. There was speculation of arranged marriage and child trafficking, but the true story turned out to be more tragic, and at the same time heartwarming, than everyone thought.

Mexican media recently reported that the protagonists of the viral photos did indeed get married during a two-day celebration in their native town of Xaltianguis, Acapulco. However, although the groom looks like a primary school student, he is actually a 19-year-old man named Jonathan who suffers from a rare disorder that stems his growth and makes him look much younger than his years. Despite his condition, Jonathan managed to find the love, and last weekend he and his fiancee tied the knot in front of family and friends.

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On May 26, 2019, Manuel Germán Ramírez Valdovinos will have been in prison for 19 years, serving a sentence of 43 years for the murder of a man who is allegedly alive and well.

Valdovinos used to work as a music teacher at a school in the town of Texapan, in the State of Mexico. On May 26, 2000, he had just come back from work and was celebrating his son’s one-month anniversary with his wife, when a commando of eight judicial policemen stormed into his home, beat him, handcuffed him and put him into the back of a car with no license plates. He was arrested without a warrant and taken to the local police station where he was hung up by his hands with metal chains, tortured with electric shocks and accused of the murder of a person he barely knew. Manuel was only 22-years-old at the time.

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Colombian singer Maluma is one of the world’s most popular reggaeton stars, but while millions of people love listening to his hits, one jailed Mexican official claims he has been driven crazy by Maluma’s music after police “tortured” him by playing loud reggaeton non-stop for 10 days straight.

Gilberto Aguirre Garza, the former director of the Attorney General’s Office in the Mexican state of Veracruz, was jailed in April for his alleged involvement in the concealment and alteration of evidence relating to the mass burial of 13 human bodies. On January 19, 2016, the remains of 19 victims of enforced disappearance allegedly perpetrated by public servants of the Public Security Secretariat of the State were discovered in a place called La Barranca de La Aurora. However, prosecutors claimed that Garza instructed personnel under his command to report the finding of only 6 bodies, a charge that he has always denied. The jailed official’s lawyer recently told reporters that, in an effort to force his client to admit to the crime and denounce other public servants, the current Verracruz Governor and the state’s Attorney General have been subjecting Garza to music torture.

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Edgardo “Perros” Zuniga has been travelling all around Mexico on a tricycle, looking for abandoned and injured dogs to rescue and put up for adoption. He has rescued over 400 dogs in the last 5 years.

When he left his home in Jalisco in 2013, 48-year-old Edgardo set a very clear goal for himself – to help as many stray dogs as he possible could. Over the last five years, he has travelled through 14 Mexican states and rescued over 400 abandoned dogs, by nursing them back to health and later placing them in the hands of staff at various adoption centers. He also helped dogs that weren’t eligible for adoption, by treating their illnesses, feeding them and doing everything in his power to improve their lives before continuing his journey. He travels with a pack of loyal dogs that make up his ‘rescue team’ and that he claims make his job a lot easier by showing the strays he encounters that they can trust him.

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If you’re familiar with horse reigning, you probably know about the sliding stop, a signature move where the galloping horse lowers its hindquarters as it comes to halt. It’s definitely impressive to watch, but it’s nothing compared to the Mexican version, the Cala de Caballo.

Cala de Caballo is one of several “charras” performed by charros (the Mexican equivalent of the cowboy) in charrerias, popular competitive events similar to the American rodeo. It involves a series of maneuvers, like turning the horse on its own axis both ways a minimum of six times, and walking backwards in a straight line, but the most impressive one has to be the sliding stop, where the charro makes his horse run at full speed and then stop abruptly by sliding on its rear legs, in a marked 20-meter-long rectangle. The competitor who leaves the longest slide marks in the marked area without going over the limit gets the most points.

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Last week, police in the Mexican resort city of Puerto Vallarta reported at least 11 cases of people completely stripped of their clothes tied to lamp posts and with the letter ‘R’ shaved on the back of their heads. So far, no one knows who orchestrated these attacks and why, as the victims all refuse to talk.

Police started receiving calls about naked men being tied to lamp posts in different areas of Puerto Vallarta last Monday. Between 9:26 PM on Monday, and 1:29 AM on Tuesday, four men were discovered in similar circumstances. They had all been stripped naked, had bruises on their buttocks like they had been repeatedly slapped, they were tied to lamp posts at various intersections across the city and they all had the letter ‘R’ shaved into the back of their heads. Authorities announced that they had started an investigation, but little did they know that these four cases was only the beginning.

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Police officers in the Mexican town of Alvarado were recently stripped of their firearms and armed with slingshots and rocks instead, after most of them failed their control tests and were deemed unfit for service.

After only 30 officers of the 130-member police department in Alvarado managed to pass their control tests for the use of firearms, Miguel Ángel Yunes Linares, governor of the Mexican state of Verracruz, decided to strip the entire department of firearms. The governor’s office has confirmed that similar actions have been taken in other municipalities, like Ixtaczoquitlan, Ciudad Mendoza and Pueblo Viejo. However, some local officials have accused Yunes Linares of stripping local law enforcement of what little protection they had against the criminal organisations in Verracruz. In Alvarado, the officers were armed with slingshots and rocks.

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A group of Mexican friends have been causing hilarity on Latino social media by posting photos of their adventures at the Football Wold Cup in Russia featuring a life-size cardboard cutout of their friend, whose wife didn’t give him permission to go with them.

It was during the Brazil 2014 World Cup that five friends from the Mexican city of Durango decided to travel to the next world cup together, in a bus painted in their country’s national colors. They started saving for the trip right away and managed to buy a cheap bust that they decided could handle the long journey to Russia, but in April, just when they were getting ready to leave, one of the five friends gave the others some bad news – he wasn’t going to make the trip with them because his wife didn’t give him permission. He let them know via a Facebook video that has since went viral.

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