Tren Ligero 3 to begin trial runs in July

Trial runs of Guaadalajara’s new Tren Ligero 3 metro line will – if you put any stock in the city’s infrastructure project timeline prognostications – begin not in May, as was previously promised, but rather in July. 

This is according to Gerardo Ruiz Esparza, secretary of the federal Communications and Transportation Secretariat, who visited a work site in Tonala earlier this week.  During his stop, Ruiz also informed the press that the project’s final cost will be around 25 billion pesos, and that it is about 96-percent complete.

Local towel giant calls it quits

Hilasal, a Guadalajara born-and-bred towel giant that dominated the industry in Latin American for decades, is closing up shop, thanks, representatives say, to market saturation of products from China.  Hundreds of employees will lose their jobs in the process.  Hilasal isn’t the only company affected by overseas competition; Jalisco is home to about 60 textile firms, and they’re shrinking by the minute, reports suggest.

Caro Quintero: FBI’s Most Wanted

Fugitive drug kingpin Rafael Caro Quintero has been added to the FBI’s Top 10 Most Wanted list.  The leader of the Guadalajara cartel in the 1970s and 1980s served 28 years of a 40-year term before his conviction was controversially overturned by a Mexican judge in 2013. Released before U.S. authorities could object, he has since gone to ground.  Considered the mastermind behind the February 1985 kidnapping and killing of undercover DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, Caro Quintero has always been one of U.S. law enforcement’s prime targets.  Some reports suggest he continues to run illegal narcotics operations from his hideout as a key leader of the Sinaloa Cartel.