Spain Chosen to Replace Mexico as Guest of Honor at French Fair

This story from The LAHT has so many threads.  What a sad mess.

Spain is replacing Mexico as the guest of honor at the 79th European Fair in Strasbourg because of the tensions between Paris and Mexico City over the Cassez case, organizers said Tuesday.

Mexico’s participation ended because of “the events,” Strasbourg Evenements, which is organizing the fair, said in a statement.

The long-running fair features food, tourism, crafts and other exhibits.

The statement was referring to the diplomatic dispute between France and Mexico over the case of Florence Cassez, a Frenchwoman convicted of kidnapping and sentenced to 60 years in prison in Mexico, company officials told Efe.

Numerous activities planned as part of the “Year of Mexico,” a series of more than 350 art, cultural and business events scheduled to be held in France throughout the course of 2011, have been cancelled since February, when Mexico suspended its institutional participation in the program......
Cassez was arrested on Dec. 8, 2005, on the Mexico City-Cuernavaca highway along with her boyfriend, Israel Vallarta, the suspected leader of the Los Zodiaco kidnapping gang.

A day later, agents from the now-defunct AFI, Mexico’s equivalent of the FBI, staged a mock raid so TV cameras could film the arrest of the gang members in a wooded area near Mexico City.

Cassez’s defense team said witnesses changed their testimony and implicated the Frenchwoman in the abductions after it emerged that the raid shown on television was a re-enactment of the original police operation.

The Frenchwoman has proclaimed her innocence from the beginning, denying that she participated in kidnappings.....