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January / February 2018
Dear Friends in Christ, January / February 2018
Greetings in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We thank the Lord for you and deeply appreciate your faithful prayers and financial support for the work in Mexico.
Susie and I are doing well and are enjoying many blessings from the Lord in our ministry and family. We are finally over the flue and doctor visits for now.
The churches are doing well and growing. Several churches celebrated Friend Day. Hundreds of invitations were hand delivered to friends, family and neighbors. Special services were planned based on God’s love, friendship and salvation along with banquets and fellowship. The children received small tokens of love and candy along with Bible teaching about God’s love for them. Over 28 souls have been saved through the churches. PTL!
The Bible College students won 31 souls to Christ during their evangelistic efforts! And a big thank you to Trinity B.C. in Big Spring, TX and Trinity B.C. in Berryville, AR for special offerings to cover scholarships for two of our married couples at the Bible Institute.
Also, a dear friend’s help made it possible for us to send all of our students and their 
children on the annual missions trip in February to Fresnillo, Zacatecas.
We had to get the vans serviced, 2 new tires, the trailer repaired, and funds for fuel and food for 5 days. Our students preached and sang at the conference and 12 were saved! Quite a trip! God bless.
Thank you for your faithful prayers and support.
Yours in Christ,
Rick and Susie
UPCOMING EVENTS FOR 2018
EVENTS OF 2018
Posted on January 05, 2018 in UPCOMING EVENTSHere are some of the events planned for this year:
Third year graduates having a little too much fun with the president and director. :)
1. January 15 – students return to classes from Christmas Break
2. January 22-26 – modular week of classes
3. February 5-9 – Missions Trip to Fresnillo, Zacatecas
4. February 10-11 – Friend Day celebrations in the churches
5. March 5-9 – modular week of classes
6. March 18-24 – Spring Break
7. March 25-April 1 – Semana Santa (Easter Week)
8. April 23-27 – last week of classes (final exams week)
9. April 28-29 – churches celebrate Children’s Day (churches celebrate the kids with special services and celebrations as an outreach ministry to their families)
10. April 30-May 4 – Graduation Week
11. May 4 – Graduation Day – Morning Session – 9:00 am – 12:00 pm Lunch Evening Session – 6:00 pm (dinner after meeting)
12. May 12-13 – Mother’s Day celebrations in the churches
13. June 16-17 – Father’s Day celebrations in the churches
14. June_August – summer S.E.N.D. Groups
15. July_August – VBSs in the churches
16. July_August – junior and senior youth camps
17. August 13-20 – married students arrive at campus to enroll children in local public schools and preenrollment for all students
18. September 3 – 9:00-11:00 am. students arrive at campus, Convocation at 6:00 pm
19. September 5 – first day of classes for the 2018-2019 school year
20. September 11 – first day of classes for MA students
21. September 25-October 2 – wedding in Maryland (oldest grandson Joshua and Pamela)
22. October 15-19 – modular week of classes
23. November 5-16 – Missions Conference in Chicago
24. December 3-7 – modular week of classes
25. December 11 – Christmas Party with staff and students
25. December 13 – last day of classes before Christmas Break
26. December 14-January 13 – Christmas Break
27. December 25, Tuesday – Merry Christmas!
28. December 31, celebrating bringing in the New Year!
November / December 2018
Dear Friends in Christ, November / December 2017
Greetings in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We thank the Lord for you and deeply appreciate your faithful prayers and financial support for the work in Mexico.
Susie and I are doing well and are enjoying many blessings from the Lord in our ministry and family. The churches are doing well and growing, and our family is too! The grandkids are growing like weeds, and are doing great in school.
We praise the lord for the souls saved in the churches these past two months. Thousands of evangelistic fliers were distributed throughout many communities and over 35 souls were saved! Many new contacts were made and several new visitors in the churches. We even had snow in Monterrey the 8th of December!
The Bible College students won 11 souls to Christ during their evangelistic efforts! We had a wonderful Christmas party for the staff, students, and children of the married students.
Thanks to a special offering from Bible B. C. of Chickasha, OK, we were able to buy the 12 children new clothes, new shoes, and a big toy wrapped up and under the Christmas tree. Most of them had never had a Christmas like this. Also, Susie was able to prepare 600 candy bags and gifts for 10 of the churchces. God bless.
Thank you for your faithful prayers and support.
Yours in Christ,
Rick and Susie
September / October 2017
Dear Friends in Christ, September / October 2017
Greetings in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We thank the Lord for you and deeply appreciate your faithful prayers and financial support for the work in Mexico.
Susie and I are doing well even though we have battled through some flu and food poisoning. We got to feeling better just in time for Susie to have trouble with severe neck pain and stiffness. After three weeks of therapy she is doing better and able to teach her classes at the Bible Institute.
We praise the lord for the souls saved in the churches these past two months. Some of the churches celebrated ‘Noche Mexicana’ which is a celebration of their independence from France. Invitations went out to the communities, the churches were decorated with flags and banners, and specialty foods were prepared. There were blow-ups for the kids and mechanical bulls for the teens and adults. Many visitors heard the Gospel preached for the first time and over 30 people trusted Christ as Savior!
We had a great September 4th Convocation to kick off the new school year. Over 150 attended for the preaching and fellowship that followed. Ten first year students enrolled along with five for the BA Degree course in the Seminary. We have a total of 25 students this year and praise the Lord for their involvement in ministry. They have won 25 souls to Christ these two months!
Please pray for three of our married couples who need scholarships. They each have two children and come from poor families. The cost this year for their tuition and books is $470.00 per couple. Thank you for your kind consideration of them. God bless.
Yours in Christ, Thank you for your faithful prayers and support.
Rick and Susie
June / July 2017
Dear Friends in Christ, June / July 2017
Greetings in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We thank the Lord for you and deeply appreciate your faithful prayers and financial support for the work in Mexico.
We had a wonderful 2017 graduation with about 400 present for the two graduates. Pastor Mario Carranco preached the charge to the student body and congregation, and we had a great time of fellowship during the graduation dinner. The students will return on September 3rd and 4th, and the convocation will be on the 4th with the first day of classes beginning on the 5th.
Now that the public schools are finally out for summer break, the churches are doing VBSs. Hundreds of kids are being ministered to, and the Gospel is presented to the kids and their parents. There are piñatas, candy, and clowns for the children, and many new adult contacts will be made for future home visits.
We praise the Lord for the Bible Institute students and their involvement in ministry. Of course they are off campus right now until September. However, there is a lot going on while they are away. Windows are being reconfigured and installed in Carter Hall (the married dorms), an apartment remodel for our new dean and his family is taking place, and relocation of the girls’ dorm closer to the bathrooms will be done. Thanks to some offerings from a dear friend, we have been able to acquire another work vehicle, legalize a van for the Bible Institute, and begin the work for the school campus.
Please pray for our family. My mother passed on July 19th after a brief illness, and it hit everyone pretty hard. My three sisters, Susie and I are doing better now but still feel the void left behind by the one who was the bedrock of our family. Special days throughout the year will never be the same without her. We know she is in a much better place now with Jesus and dad and others that went on before her. We love you mom and will miss you greatly.
Yours in Christ, Thank you for your faithful prayers and support.
Rick and Susie
APRIL 2017
Mexico is settling into a violent status quo
Deadly violence in Mexico declined from January to February this year, with homicide cases falling from 1,941 to 1,838 and homicide victims falling from 2,156 to 2,098.
The month-to-month respite may be little relief, as the first two months year have continued a string of violent records, both exceeding their counterparts last year in terms of homicides.
Moreover, the first two months of this year are the deadliest such period on record.
January’s 2,2156 homicide victims were 38.8% more than recorded in the same month last year, and February’s 2,098 homicide victims were a 30% increase over the second month last year.
The number of homicide cases, which can contain more than one victim, were up in January and February by 34.6% and 24.3%, respectively, over January and February 2016.
The 3,779 homicides cases recorded over January and February are a 29.4% increase over the same period in 2016 and the most experienced in Mexico over that period since the government started releasing statistics in 1997. (It didn’t start releasing data for homicide victims until 2014.)
The first two months of 2011, amid the climax of the “war against narco trafficking,” had a similar number of homicides, 3,554, though, as Mexican news site Animal Politico notes, that is still well short of what was seen overthe first two months this year.
Soldiers keep watch at a crime scene where police found trash bags with human remains in the back of an abandoned pick-up truck, according to local media, in Monterrey, Mexico, March 8, 2017.REUTERS/Daniel Becerril
Despite the decrease in monthly homicides between January and February this year, last month’s figures continue the increase in violence that’s been seen in Mexico over the last two years of President Enrique Peña Nieto’s term.
Peña Nieto, who took office in December 2012, presided over two years of declines in deadly violence. The government was quick to take credit for those reductions, but 2015 saw an 8% increase in homicides over 2014, and 2016 had a 22% spike in killings over the year before.
“It seems like there was a point about two years ago, a year ago, where the government seemed to be making progress against the drug cartels, but it seems like there’s a resurgence of them,” Howard Campbell, an anthropology professor at the University of Texas at El Paso who studies Mexico and drug trafficking, told Business Insider.
That resurgence appears likely to have been caused, in part, by the ongoing fragmentation of once powerful criminal groups, in addition to jockeying by remaining criminal groups for territorial control, especially in northwest Mexico.
Even as deadly violence churns upward in Mexico, some parts of the country — typically areas with high levels of organized-crime activity — have seen pronounced spikes.
The north-central state of Chihuahua saw a jump in homicides in the latter half of last year, going from 595 in the first half of the year to 875 over the last six months.
The state also jumped from 152 homicide victims in January to 175 in February.
Ciudad Juarez, the biggest city in Chihuahua and a major border city, also saw a jump in the latter half of the year that has continued into this year.
The Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels, generally considered the two most powerful cartels in Mexico, are thought to be contesting Juarez’s lucrative trafficking routes.
Farther west, the high level of homicides seen Baja California over the final months of last year has been sustained this year, with January and February recording 139 and 137 homicides, respectively.
Tijuana, another major border crossing, registered its only triple-digit-homicide-victim month of last year in December, with 112. January recorded 103 and February saw 108. Tijuana is also the site of Sinaloa-Jalisco New Generation competition.
In many areas of Mexico, state-level homicide numbers ticked down from January to February, but violence-prone areas of the country saw increases.
Homicides in Guerrero rose from 165 to 175; Michoacan went from 130 to 138; Sinaloa went from 118 to 124; Veracruz jumped from 119 to 142.
Much of southwest Mexico, including Guerrero and Michoacan, has been wracked by drug-related violence.
Christopher Woody/Mexican government data
Nearby Colima, which has the smallest population in Mexico, has seen a surge in homicides as cartels compete for its valuable port. Though between January and February this year the number of homicide victims in the state fell by more than half.
In Veracruz, long a battle ground of the Zetas and Gulf cartels, the Jalisco New Generation cartel has reportedly joined the fray, and 300 skulls have been found in mass graves there over the last week.
While violence over the last two years has not reached the level and nature of the worst cartel-related violence between 2008 and 2012, it has led many to believe the anti-crime strategies of Peña Nieto and his predecessor have failed and that the country is unlikely to see relief in the near term.
“So this is a not a threat to the overall Mexican economy or to the national political structure as far as an overthrow of the government or a destruction of the economy,” Campbell told Business Insider.
“But it’s the kind of nagging, persistent problem that’s very similar to Colombia during the worst of the civil war, where you had an effective, functioning country and economy but with this endless violence in very specific areas that was hard on the tourist industry and made it hard for local businesses and hurt the image of the country.”
MARCH / APRIL 2017
Dear Friends in Christ, March/April 2017
Greetings in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We thank the Lord for you and deeply appreciate your faithful prayers and financial support for the work in Mexico.
Susie and I are doing well and in good health except for the arthritis pain and discomfort that always seems to be hanging around. We are so thankful for the Lord’s many blessings in the churches. There have been over 52 souls saved and 8 baptisms!
Children’s Day was one of the special events that many churches participated in. There were piñatas, candy, and clowns for the children, and many adults as well as the children responded to the Gospel.
We praise the Lord for the Bible Institute students and their involvement in ministry. The students have won more 38 to Christ these two months. They are finishing up their studies in April and will be preparing for the school’s graduation during the first week of May. Graduation day is May 5th.
We did a brief furlough time of three weeks and are grateful to the churches for their hospitality and fellowship. The love offerings helped us to pay $4,000 on a new loan for the roof on our house. We still need $5,500.00 to finish the loan. Then we will need help with legalizing a van for the Bible Institute. The van legalization will cost $900 to $1,000. If there is a church or individual that would be interested in donating a van in good mechanical condition for our ministry, please let me know. Thank you and God bless you all.
Thank you for your faithful prayers and support.
Yours in Christ,
Rick and Susie
MARCH 2017
More Than 250 Human Skulls Are Found in Mass Grave in Mexico
Federal police officers were sent to Veracruz to increase security in the city this month. CreditOscar Martinez/Reuters
MEXICO CITY — A mass grave discovered in the Mexican state of Veracruz contained more than 250 human skulls, most likely the victims of criminal drug cartels, the state’s attorney general said on Tuesday.
“For many years, the drug cartels disappeared people and the authorities were complacent,” Jorge Winckler, the state attorney general, said in a television interview with the Televisa network.
Veracruz, on Mexico’s Gulf coast, has been the epicenter of battles among the country’s drug gangs. The remains found at the site indicated that the victims might have been killed years ago, Mr. Winckler said.
Describing the crime-ridden state as a “giant grave,” Mr. Winckler said the state authorities would match D.N.A. samples at the scene to a database from the relatives of the missing.
Mr. Winckler did not say when or by whom the pits were discovered, but the first graves in the area were found in August with the help of members of Colectivo Solecito, a group of women whose children are missing.
The federal police and state prosecutors later discovered 125 clandestine graves over eight months across a large area known as Colinas de Santa Fe, said Lucía Diaz, a spokeswoman for the collective.
On Mother’s Day last year, some of the collective’s members were approached at a street protest by cartel members who handed them a map indicating the locations of the graves, Mrs. Diaz said.
With the new information, the collective raised money by holding bake sales and raffles to finance the searches, including paying for excavators.
Among the remains recovered in the last six months and already identified were the bodies of a former state prosecutor and his secretary, who were kidnapped by police officers working for a drug gang in 2013.
“What we have found is abominable and it reveals the state of corruption, violence and impunity that reigns not only in Veracruz, but in all of Mexico,” Ms. Diaz said.
“A reality that speaks of the collusion of authorities with organized crime in Veracruz, for it is impossible to see what we found without the participation of authorities,” she said.
JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2017
Dear Friends in Christ, January/February 2017
Susie and I are doing well with good health and many blessings on the ministry. We praise God for His blessings in the churches. There have been over 38 souls saved and several presented for baptism! Friend Day was one of the special events that many churches participated in by passing out thousands of fliers and invitations to the communities. Dozens of new adults and children arrived and heard the Gospel. Many of them trusted in Jesus, and the children were given candy and surprises.
We praise the Lord for the Bible Institute students and their involvement in ministry. The students have won more than 25 to Christ these two months. They ha
d a great missions trip to Los Fresnillos (‘fresneeyos’) for a week and spent several days at a pastors’ conference there singing, doing dramas, teaching, and soul winning. Several pastors were encouraged to send their prospective Bible Institute students to our school starting in September.
The students funded most of their trip through the pies they made and sold in the churches and communities months before. This annual trip is one-third of their missions grade, so all students must participate in order to pass the missions course.
We are very thankful for the churches that contributed to paying off the loan to repair the staff and married dorm roofs damaged by the earthquakes last September. Now we can work on the roof for our house that was also damaged. Also, we thank a dear friend for his special gift that allowed us to buy lawn tractors and equipment for the college and youth camp. Thank you and God bless you all.
Thank you for your faithful prayers and support.
Yours in Christ,
Rick and Susie
JANUARY 2017
After eluding prosecution in the United States for decades and escaping from prison twice in Mexico, the crime lord Joaquín Guzmán Loera, better known as El Chapo, appeared on Friday in federal court in Brooklyn and pleaded not guilty to charges that he had overseen a multibillion-dollar drug empire.
Prosecutors said the operation had moved at least 200 tons of cocaine into the United States, had earned $14 billion in profits and had been protected by an army of assassins who killed thousands of people.
Mr. Guzmán’s arraignment, in Federal District Court, was both a news media spectacle and a pro forma counterpoint to his sudden extradition from Mexico on Thursday afternoon, when a police jet flew him from the border to MacArthur Airport in Islip, on Long Island. The brief court proceeding took place under tight security, with police vehicles, heavily armed guards and bomb-sniffing dogs patrolling the grounds outside the courthouse.
Dressed for his arraignment in a blue V-neck T-shirt, blue pajama pants and blue sneakers, Mr. Guzmán, 59, stood with his court-appointed lawyers in front of Magistrate Judge James Orenstein in a fourth-floor courtroom packed with prosecutors, federal agents and reporters.
At the briefing, Robert L. Capers, the United States attorney in Brooklyn, called the extradition of Mr. Guzmán, whose nickname means Shorty, a milestone in the pursuit of a trafficker who achieved mythic status in his homeland as a Robin Hood-like outlaw and a serial prison escapee.
Saying that Mr. Guzmán now faced life in prison on a charge of running a continuing criminal enterprise, Mr. Capers sought to play down Mr. Guzmán’s role as a folk hero and promised that he would not escape his American jailers.
“Who is Chapo Guzmán?” Mr. Capers said, flanked by a phalanx of law-enforcement officials from local, state and federal agencies. “In short, he is a man who has known no other life than one of crime, violence, death and destruction.”
Even at a courthouse that has seen the prosecution of Mafia dons like John J. Gotti, the onetime Gambino family boss, and corrupt public officials like Meade Esposito, the former Brooklyn Democratic leader, the arrival of Mr. Guzmán sent a charge through the building, where scores of international reporters were on hand.
In an extraordinary confluence of events, Mr. Guzmán was taken from Mexico by plane on the eve of the inauguration of Donald J. Trump and was arraigned in Brooklyn only hours after Mr. Trump was sworn in. After the hearing, he was returned to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, a high-security federal jail that has housed some of New York’s highest-risk federal defendants, including many facing terrorism charges.
As the day began, prosecutors in Brooklyn issued a memo laying out their arguments for keeping Mr. Guzmán in custody. They noted his vast wealth and asserted his propensity for violence and his penchant for escaping Mexican prisons — most notably, the maximum-security Altiplano prison, where he lived in isolation under 24-hour surveillance. Nonetheless, he managed to flee after his associates dug a tunnel directly into his shower.
Speaking at the news conference, Angel M. Melendez, the special agent in charge of Homeland Security investigations in New York, said he had been at the airport Thursday night when Mr. Guzmán arrived. Mr. Melendez said he looked into Mr. Guzmán’s eyes and saw “surprise, shock and even a bit of fear” now that he was facing “American justice.”
Mr. Guzmán’s escapes in Mexico came while he was serving a long sentence on drug-related offenses.
Although officials at the gathering refused to discuss details about security measures, Mr. Melendez said, “I can assure you no tunnel will be built to his bathroom.”
Mr. Guzmán is facing charges in six federal districts, and Mr. Capers said the decision had been made to prosecute him in Brooklyn, with the assistance of federal prosecutors in Miami, because the two offices working together could bring “the most forceful punch” to the case against the leader of the Sinaloa cartel. Mr. Capers added that cases in Texas, in California, in Illinois and elsewhere would, for the moment, remain open. The investigation into Mr. Guzmán’s crimes was conducted by a host of agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
In its memo filed Friday, Mr. Capers’s office said it would seek a criminal forfeiture of $14 billion against Mr. Guzmán and announced that it planned to call dozens of witnesses to testify about the staggering scope of Mr. Guzmán’s criminal enterprise: its multi-ton shipments of drugs in trucks, planes, yachts, fishing vessels, container ships and submersibles, as well as its numerous killings of witnesses, law enforcement agents, public officials and rival cartel members.
The memo also said the government had a vast array of physical evidence, including seized drug stashes and electronic surveillance recordings.
The 26-page memorandum of law — supplemented with photographs of seized drugs and the planes, boats and submersibles used to smuggle them — reads like a history of the modern narcotics business. Prosecutors contend that Mr. Guzmán transformed the drug trade with unchecked brutality, remarkable efficiency and brazen corruption.
The document tracks his progression from the 1980s, as a smuggler who transported Colombian cocaine to the United States and returned the profits to traffickers there so efficiently that he earned the nickname El Rápido, through the ’90s, when he began consolidating his control in Mexico.
As Colombian traffickers faced increased enforcement of extradition laws, and thus greater threat of prosecution in the United States, they ceded elements of the distribution networks in the United States to Mexican cartels, according to the memo. As Mr. Guzmán’s operations grew, prosecutors say, they became increasingly sophisticated.
Mr. Guzmán also established a complex communications network to allow him to speak covertly with his growing empire without detection by law enforcement, according to the memo. This included “the use of encrypted networks, multiple insulating layers of go-betweens and ever-changing methods of communicating with his workers.”
Mr. Guzmán also established distribution networks in New York, New Jersey, Georgia, Illinois, Texas and California and created “massive money-laundering efforts that delivered billions of dollars in illegal profits generated from the cocaine sales in the United States to the Mexican traffickers and their Colombian partners,” the memo said.
“These changes,” it added, “enabled Guzmán to exponentially increase his profits to staggering levels.”