The Mexican Drug Wars [Archive]

buglerbilly

30-05-10, 01:37 PM

Mexican pirates attack Texas fishermen on Falcon Lake, which straddles border

Assistant agent in charge Jose E. Gonzalez patrols Lake Falcon. (William Booth/The Washington Post)

A Border Patrol boat on Lake Falcon, on the border of Mexico and Texas. (William Booth/The Washington Post)

By William Booth
Sunday, May 30, 2010

ZAPATA, TEX. -- Falcon Lake is famous for its monster bass and for the maniacal obsession of the fishermen who come from all over Texas -- and the world -- to stalk them. Now this remote reservoir that straddles the international boundary is known for something else: pirates.

In the past month, crews of outlaws in a small armada of banged-up skiffs and high-powered bass boats launched from the Mexican shore have ambushed bass anglers from the Texas side innocently casting their plastic worms over favorite spots. The buccaneers have struck in Mexican waters but within sight of the Texas shore.

Dressed in black, the pirates brandish automatic weapons, carry radio cellphones and board the anglers' boats. They demand weapons or drugs from their captives, but finding neither, seem satisfied with taking $400 or $500 as booty, according to law enforcement officials and victims' accounts.

There is a saying about not messing with Texas, and the idea that criminals are preying on American anglers is raising already-high temperatures along the southwest border. Answering calls for help, President Obama last week ordered 1,200 National Guard troops to the region.

The pirates claim to be "federales," or police, but instead are brigands -- with the letter "Z" tattooed on their necks and arms -- from the notorious drug cartel Los Zetas. The Zetas are on a rampage of killing and extortion along the Mexican border as they fight gun and grenade battles against the military and the rival Gulf Cartel.

"Within the last month, with all the feuding going on over there, the dope smuggling has dropped off and it is starving them. This water is Zeta central. They controlled the whole lake. They distributed everything. Now they're desperate and diversifying," said Jose E. Gonzalez, the second in command of the Border Patrol's Zapata station, which operates an around-the-clock maritime patrol.

At least three armed robberies have been reported in Mexican waters. The Texas Department of Public Safety put out a warning for people to stay on the U.S. side. On Memorial Day weekend, when 200 bass boats would usually be in town, only two dozen were seen at county ramps Friday afternoon.

One group of pirates was savvy enough to demand the memory chip from an angler's camera, lest they be identified. Another fisherman told authorities that armed men came roaring toward him. "I saw 'em, and I saw they were machine guns. They were that close, they were 15 yards away from me," San Antonio bass chaser Richard Drake told a local television station. "I was scared."

'Some bad boys out there'

Last week, Border Patrol agents tried to follow a Mexican boat filled with men wearing ski masks, but it was too fast for the agents and entered Mexican waters, where U.S. law enforcement is forbidden.

Olga Juliana Elizondo, the mayor of Nueva Guerrero, Mexico, said ranchers are harassed on their land, motorboats have disappeared, vehicles have been stolen and tourists have fled. "We hope this ends soon," she said.

"We've all heard about the pirates, and we're all sticking to the American side of the lake, because those are some bad boys out there," said Dwayne Deets, a fisherman from Houston who was sliding $50,000 worth of cream-colored bass boat, bristling with sonar and GPS electronics, down a ramp in Zapata.

Deets said Texans loved fishing the Mexican side. It is legal to carry a loaded firearm in a boat in Texas, but it is illegal to bring ammunition or weapons into Mexico. "I just pray no one gets killed out there," he said.

The International Falcon Reservoir was born in the early 1950s, when engineers erected a dam on the Rio Grande, flooding the banks and inundating towns on both sides. The 98,960-surface-acre impoundment stretches 60 miles and provides for irrigation, power, flood control and recreation in the area.

"Until this started, we fished everywhere, and we never cared about the border, Texas to Mexico. But now? No. Hardly anybody is fishing the Mexico side of the lake," said Tom Bendele, who with his brother owns the Falcon Lake Tackle shop in Zapata, now serving as the de facto intel center on all things piratical.

Out on the water, with a reporter in tow, Tom Bendele pointed out the picket line of 14 large concrete beacons that mark the international boundary. Some are swimming distance from the Texas shore; others are miles out in the middle of the lake.

Bendele ventured up the Rio Salado cove on the Mexican side, where two of the acts of piracy occurred. Around the bend, the steeple of the church in Old Guerrero is now mostly underwater. The shoreline is lonely mesquite brush, dotted by rough fish camps used by Mexicans who string gill nets along their side of the lake, hauling up tilapia, carp and bass.

Though illegal in the United States, the Mexican netters often cross into the Texas side to fish, playing an endless hide-and-seek with Texas game wardens.

Bendele cut off his engine, and the boat rocked in the cove. "You could see how it would be easy to get jumped in here," he said. "Notice you don't see any Americans."

'They watch us'

Out on the water with the U.S. Border Patrol, roaring right down the international boundary line but careful never to cross into Mexico, Gonzalez and a crew pointed out spot after spot where they have intercepted tons of marijuana crossing the lake.

The Border Patrol seized 18,000 pounds of marijuana in the lake region last year, worth about $14 million at $800 a pound; it will likely confiscate even more this year.

"But, man, they are so good at counter-surveillance," Gonzalez said, describing the lake as kind of a Wild West on the water. "They watch us, they watch our boats, our cars, our homes. The smugglers, they know every move we make."

The traffickers cross day and night, driving boats with bales of marijuana right into the backyards of homes along the lake. They rent cabins at the lakeside state park and stash dope there. The border agents point to a three-story house built like a watchtower on the Mexican shore. The officers frequently see observers with binoculars on the roof. Up and down the lake, netting boats are idled. Nobody waves.

"We're telling folks that right now, Mexico is not safe. Don't cross, because we can't go over and help you. It's just an imaginary line, but it's a line I can't cross," said Jake Cawthon, a Texas game warden. He said that anyone fishing the Mexican side these days has "got to have one hand on their fishing pole and the other on their boat keys, ready to haul back home."

buglerbilly

04-06-10, 04:07 AM

US Feared Mexican Cartel Attack on Border Dam

June 03, 2010

Houston Chronicle

An alleged plot by a Mexican drug cartel to blow up a dam along the Texas border -- and unleash billions of gallons of water into a region with millions of civilians -- sent American police, federal agents and disaster officials secretly scrambling last month to thwart such an attack, authorities confirmed Wednesday.

Whether or not the cartel, which is known to have stolen bulk quantities of gunpowder and dynamite, could have taken down the 5-mile-long Falcon Dam may never be known since the attack never came to pass.

It may have been derailed by a stepped-up presence by the Mexican military, which was acting in part on intelligence from the U.S. government, sources said.

The warning, which swung officials into action, was based on what the federal government contends were "serious and reliable sources" and prompted the Department of Homeland Security to sound the alarm to first responders along the South Texas-Mexico border.

Mexico's Zeta cartel was planning to destroy the dam not to terrorize civilians, but to get back at its rival and former ally, the Gulf cartel, which controls smuggling routes from the reservoir to the Gulf of Mexico, said Zapata County Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez, head of the Southwest Border Sheriff's Coalition, as did others familiar with the alleged plot.

But in the process, massive amounts of agricultural land would stand to be flooded as well as significant parts of a region where about 4 million people live along both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.

The dam along the lower Rio Grande was finished in 1954 as part of a joint U.S.-Mexico project to collect water for flood control, hydroelectric power and water for drinking and agriculture.

Gonzalez's agency was among many that responded, as did the U.S. Border Patrol, the Texas Department of Public Safety and even game wardens, who put more boats on the water.

Citing security concerns, neither Homeland Security nor DPS commented.

"We trust that DPS and their federal and local law enforcement partners are constantly collecting intelligence and monitoring all threats to Texas and taking the appropriate action to protect our citizens from those who would do us harm," said Gov. Rick Perry's deputy press secretary Katherine Cesinger.

Varying credibility

Law enforcement officials huddled at the dam, near Rio Grande City, to discuss the threat and how to stifle it, said an officer who attended the meeting.

Officers interviewed by the Chronicle gave the warning varying degrees of credibility. They noted that among the Zetas' ranks are Mexican military defectors who were trained in special forces tactics, including demolition.

Special cameras were set up along the dam, which has six 50-foot-tall steel gates, and lawmen hid in brush.

A Mexican military spokesman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said he had not heard of any threat to the Falcon Dam and expressed doubt that the Zetas would try such an attack.

"This isn't the way these groups operate; they have never attacked installations like that," he said.

Rick Pauza, a spokesman for Customs and Border Protection, in Laredo, said the port of entry at the dam had been at a heightened alert due to violence in Mexico.

Residents warned?

The attack may have been thwarted in Mexico. It raises the fear of what the powerful cartels could do.

"It would have been a hell of a disaster," said Gene Falcon, director of emergency preparedness for Starr County, site of the dam. "There was plenty of concern."

With handbills and bullhorns, members of the Zeta cartel are said to have warned the civilian population on the Mexican side of the river near the dam to get out of the area, according to residents and intelligence information from law enforcement officials.

A border law enforcement official told the Chronicle the warnings originated in part by the seizure of small amounts of dynamite near the dam, and the discovery of a copy of the alert on the Mexican side of the border.

Capt. Francisco Garcia, of the Roma (Texas) Police Department, said there was no way to know what the traffickers were capable of doing, but bringing down the dam would require nearly a tractor-trailer full of dynamite.

"As far as blowing it up -- making it fall apart completely -- it would have to be something like 9/11," he said. "By the time they'd start to do something, there will be so much law enforcement there, it'd be ridiculous."

© Copyright 2010 Houston Chronicle. All rights reserved.

buglerbilly

04-06-10, 11:20 AM

Ariz. Gov. Brewer, Obama meet to discuss immigration enforcement

By Michael D. Shear

Friday, June 4, 2010

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) said Thursday that President Obama assured her that he would send White House staff members to her state to talk with officials about efforts to secure the U.S.-Mexico border.

The governor said her meeting with Obama in the Oval Office was cordial, despite their disagreement over the widely criticized state law she signed in April, which gave police greater powers to enforce federal immigration laws.

She said Obama declined to discuss whether the Justice Department plans to file a lawsuit to block the law before it takes effect next month.

The White House said in a statement that the meeting went well but that Obama reiterated his concerns about the law, including that a patchwork of state immigration regulations would complicate the federal government's role in setting and enforcing immigration policy. The White House said Obama would like Brewer to work with him to help pass comprehensive changes to the immigration system that would provide a path to citizenship for those already in the country illegally.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters that, in particular, the president hoped Brewer would help persuade Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to support broad immigration legislation, as he did several times earlier this decade. "I doubt we are going to get comprehensive immigration reform if we don't have John McCain doing what he did during those years," Gibbs said.

But as she was leaving the White House, Brewer said that she thinks the border must "be secured" first.

buglerbilly

06-07-10, 03:36 PM

Not Mexico directly but its all part of the same fight..........

Costa Rica to Allow US To Send Troops

July 06, 2010

Knight Ridder

Costa Rica has granted the U.S. military a six-month window to bring 7,000 Marines, five planes and 46 warships into its territory to help stem the flow of drugs northward.

The Central American country has increasingly become a target for drug traffickers as intelligence and law enforcement agencies have cut off other routes through Mexico. Without an army and with long coastlines and poorly guarded borders, Costa Rica is vulnerable to drug cartels using well-refined transportation mechanisms and the latest technological equipment, security experts say.

Some Costa Rican legislators voiced concern about the authorization, saying it gives the United States a "blank check" to use its territory and threatens the nation's sovereignty.

According to a letter from Costa Rican Public Security Minister Jose Maria Tijerino, specific requests to dock or unload U.S. military ships must be submitted to the country one month in advance.

The permission was granted by a 31-8 vote of the Legislative Assembly and allows the United States to use the country's territory through Dec. 31.

© Copyright 2010 Knight Ridder. All rights reserved.

buglerbilly

17-07-10, 12:16 PM

Mexican drug cartels' newest weapon: Cold War-era grenades made in U.S.

Federal police respond to an attack Thursday on the main avenue of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, across the border from El Paso. (Jesus Alcazar/agence France-presse Via Getty Images)

By Nick Miroff and William Booth
Saturday, July 17, 2010

MEXICO CITY -- Grenades made in the United States and sent to Central America during the Cold War have resurfaced as terrifying new weapons in almost weekly attacks by Mexican drug cartels.

Sent a generation ago to battle communist revolutionaries in the jungles of Central America, U.S. grenades are being diverted from dusty old armories and sold to criminal mafias, who are using them to destabilize the Mexican government and terrorize civilians, according to U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officials.

The redeployment of U.S.-made grenades by Mexican drug lords underscores the increasingly intertwined nature of the conflict, as President Felipe Calderón sends his soldiers out to confront gangs armed with a deadly combination of brand-new military-style assault rifles purchased in the United States and munitions left over from the Cold War.

Grenades have killed a relatively small number of the 25,000 people who have died since Calderón launched his U.S.-backed offensive against the cartels. But the grenades pack a far greater psychological punch than the ubiquitous AK-47s and AR-15 rifles -- they can overwhelm and intimidate outgunned soldiers and police while reminding ordinary Mexicans that the country is literally at war.

There have been more than 72 grenade attacks in Mexico in the last year, including spectacular assaults on police convoys and public officials. Mexican forces have seized more than 5,800 live grenades since 2007, a small fraction of a vast armory maintained by the drug cartels, officials said.

According to the Mexican attorney general's office, there have been 101 grenade attacks against government buildings in the past 3 1/2 years, information now made public for the first time.

To fight back, U.S. experts in grenades and other explosives are now working side by side with Mexican counterparts. On Thursday, assailants detonated a car bomb in downtown Ciudad Juarez, killing two federal police officers and an emergency medical technician and wounding seven.

The majority of grenades have been traced back to El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua, according to investigations by agents at the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and their Mexican counterparts. ATF has also found that almost 90 percent of the grenades confiscated and traced in Mexico are more than 20 years old.

The administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush sent 300,000 hand grenades to friendly regimes in Central America to fight leftist insurgents in the civil wars of the 1980s and early 1990s, according to declassified military data obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the Federation of American Scientists.

Not all grenades found in Mexico are American-made. Many are of Asian or Soviet and Eastern European manufacture, ATF officials said, probably given to leftist insurgents by Cuba and Nicaragua's Sandinistas.

One of the most common hand grenades found in Mexico is the M67, the workhorse explosive manufactured in the United States for American soldiers and for sale or transfer to foreign militaries. Some 266,000 M67 grenades went to El Salvador alone between 1980 and 1993, during the civil war there.

Now selling for $100 to $500 apiece on the black market, grenades have exploded in practically every region of Mexico in recent years.

In the past year, assailants have rolled grenades into brothels in the border city of Reynosa. They have hurled one at the U.S. consulate in nearby Nuevo Laredo. They have launched them at a military barracks in Tampico and at a television station in Nayarit state.

In the state of Durango, 10 students, most teenagers but some as young as 8, were ripped apart on their way to receive government scholarships in March when attacked with grenades at a cartel checkpoint. The blasts tore a gaping hole in the side of their pickup, peeling back the door panels as if it were a soda can.

"They are a way to spread fear and terror," said Paulino Jiménez Hidalgo, a retired Mexican army general. "And they're a way to gain the upper hand over the authorities."

Grenade attacks began in 2007 in response to the expanded role of the military in anti-narcotics enforcement and the rise of the Zetas, the fearsome cartel founded by former special-forces soldiers, according to Martín Barrón Cruz, an expert in arms and security at Mexico's National Institute of Criminal Sciences, a government agency.

"It's an arms race," Barrón said.

Demand for military hardware is soaring, he said, citing recent seizures of .50-caliber rifles, mortars and anti-personnel mines.

The criminal organizations are demonstrating a growing tactical knowledge about how to use grenades in close-quarters combat.

"They're a good way to cover your retreat or to initiate an attack," said Anna Gilmour, a drug-war expert at IHS Jane's, a global security consulting firm. "You can use them as a means of spreading confusion."

As one senior U.S. law enforcement official in Mexico put it, grenades are "a lazy man's killing weapon" because they don't require good aim.

"You don't have to be able to hit a bull's-eye. You just roll it out," he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of security protocols.

Frequently, grenades are left unexploded at attack scenes. U.S. officials attribute this to operator error rather than the age of the munitions, since grenades can last for decades if stored properly. While some seized grenades are covered in rust or dirt, others are in mint condition, suggesting they may have been removed recently from military stores.

ATF and its Mexican counterparts consider information about the source country and specific make of grenades classified. Federal police in Mexico are now offering $200 -- about six weeks' pay at minimum wage in Mexico -- as a reward for every grenade turned over to authorities.

U.S. investigators and independent experts suspect that few military grenades have entered Mexico directly across the northern border from the United States.

"There might be a few thefts from U.S. military bases, but there has been little evidence that grenades in Mexico are being smuggled from the United States," said Colby Goodman, an arms trafficking expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Interviews with military, police and U.S. law enforcement agents in Central America suggest authorities are increasingly concerned about preventing thefts from grenade stockpiles but are virtually powerless to prevent the spread of weapons that are already loose.

"Almost all of the attacks we've seen have been with M67s," said Howard Cotto, a chief investigator with El Salvador's National Civil Police. "There are so many of them floating around here."

Salvadoran police have seized 390 M67s since 2005.

Black-market grenades are so easy to obtain in El Salvador that street gangs routinely use them as tools of extortion, to menace business owners and bus drivers. Concern that grenades could leak out of army garrisons prompted the Salvadoran military to consolidate its abundant supply in two high-security facilities last year, the Salvadoran defense minister, Gen. David Munguía Payés, said in an interview. The U.S. government is planning to send a threat-assessment team to the country to help secure its arsenals.

"Since 2009 we haven't registered any missing grenades," Munguía Payés said. "But we know that there are grenades out there on the black market."

In Guatemala, aging American-, Israeli- and Asian-made grenades have been seeping out of the country's Mariscal Zavala armory for years, according to military officials and security experts.

The military official who oversees the arsenals, Col. Luis Francisco Juárez, said safeguards are now in place to ensure that no weapons are illegally removed. But Guatemalan court records show that when his predecessor, Col. Carlos Toledo, reported to his superiors last year that 500 weapons were missing, he was stripped of his command and subjected to death threats.

Just two months after Toledo reported the missing weapons, arms diverted from the Guatemalan military turned up at a bloody scene where five police officers were killed while allegedly trying to steal 370 kilos of cocaine from a cartel safe house. A huge arms cache was uncovered at the site, including more than 550 40mm projectile grenades, many of which had lot numbers matching those in the Guatemalan armory and which appeared to be manufactured in the United States, according to military and legal sources.

In another large seizure, 500 grenades were recovered in March 2009 at a site in northern Guatemala that authorities described as a training camp run by the Mexican Zeta drug organization.

An investigation by Guatemala's El Periódico newspaper found that as many as 27,000 military weapons, including an unknown number of grenades, may have been illegally sold or stolen in recent years.

Miroff reported from El Salvador and Guatemala.

buglerbilly

20-07-10, 03:04 AM

National Guard to Deploy to Mexican Border

July 19, 2010

Associated Press

WASHINGTON - National Guard troops will head to the U.S.-Mexico border Aug. 1 for a yearlong deployment to keep a lookout for illegal border crossers and smugglers and help in criminal investigations, federal officials said Monday.

The troops will be armed, but can use their weapons only to protect themselves, Gen. Craig McKinley, chief of the National Guard Bureau said at a Pentagon news conference. The troops will undergo initial training and be fully deployed along the nearly 2,000-mile southern border by September.

The deployment announcement comes as drug-related violence has escalated in Mexico. Several people were killed over the weekend in a car bombing and in a separate massacre at a private party in Mexico. It also comes as the U.S. debate over illegal immigration has intensified in this election year.

"The border is more secure and more resourced than it has ever been, but there is more to be done," said Alan Bersin, commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, part of the Homeland Security Department.

The 1,200 troops will be distributed among four border states, with Arizona getting 524; Texas, 250; California, 224 and New Mexico, 72. Another 130 would be assigned to a national liaison office.

Bersin also said the Homeland Security Department will provide six more aircraft, including helicopters, to the border. He said at least 300 Customs and Border Protection agents and inspection officers would be sent to the Tucson area, along with mobile surveillance vans and additional technology.

"It will help," Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard, said Monday in Santa Fe, N.M., where he was attending the annual meeting of the Conference of Western Attorneys General. "Manpower clearly has been deficient. Technology has been somewhat deficient and they're bolstering that."

But the governors of Texas and Arizona, both Republicans, complained last week that 1,200 troops are insufficient.

McKinley said even though the four border states are contributing 54,000 troops to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they still have a sizable number of guard troops in the states for other deployments or disaster response. More can be deployed at state cost if governors wish, but the 1,200 are being paid for by the federal government, he said.

"Right now I cannot see a case where we would be overextending the National Guard for this effort," he said.

As part of the effort, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is beefing up its presence in Arizona, said John Morton, the Homeland Security Department assistant secretary overseeing the agency.

Morton said ICE is opening a new office in Ajo, Ariz., to focus exclusively on cross-border crime and to deploy a specialized investigative team in Douglas, where an Arizona rancher was murdered.

Also, the agency will send ICE lawyers to U.S. attorneys offices to help prosecute felons who illegally re-enter the country after deportation. It also will increase the number of ICE agents in Mexico to 40, making it ICE's largest office among 63 offices in 44 countries.

"We are placing a particular emphasis on the Tucson sector in Arizona, an area favored by smugglers and the principal point of illegal entry into the United States along the southwest border," Morton said.

© Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

buglerbilly

21-07-10, 03:54 AM

Mexican Drug Gang Used Commercial Grade Explosive in Car Bomb

Back in 2006, British Army Maj. Gen. Jonathon Riley issued a dire warning to a largely military audience: “We have not developed the intelligence or the tactics or the correct approach to defeat the [global] IED network.” It’s difficult to say that four years later there has been dramatic progress in defeating that global network.

The latest evidence of the proliferation of IED know-how: a Mexican drug gang in Ciudad Juarez used a commercial grade gel explosive, called Tovex, last week in the first successful car bomb attack on Mexican security officers that killed three including a federal agent. The Tovex used in the VBIED was likely stolen from a mining company, U.S. officials said.

The car bombing “may represent a different tactic,” State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told reporters yesterday, “these drug cartels, they have an enormous amount of resources at their disposal. They can buy any kind of capability they want.”

Why do IED networks pose such an intractable problem? First, a market dynamic is at work — well-financed insurgents or gangs pays enterprising guerrilla fighters to conduct attacks. Second, the simplicity of the bombs makes them almost impossible to counter by technological means. Third, because bomb-making cells are neither organized nor persistent, they are an ever changing, highly adaptable and therefore hard to engage enemy.

In somewhat relate news, yesterday the Pentagon announced that 1,200 National Guard personnel will be deployed to beef up security on the southern border with Mexico; they will join 300 National Guard already working along the border.

– Greg Grant

Read more: http://defensetech.org/2010/07/20/mexican-drug-gang-used-commercial-grade-explosive-in-car-bomb/#more-8310#ixzz0uHGwGjFq
Defense.org

buglerbilly

21-07-10, 03:56 AM

The earlier Washington Post article linked to the above.................

US official: Mexican car bomb likely used Tovex

A dark red stain is seen at a wall of a site marked as a crime scene by police at the entrance of a house where a party was interrupted by gunmen early Sunday in the town of Torreon, in the Mexican northern state of Coahuila, Sunday, July 18, 2010. The gunmen arrived at the party in several cars and opened fire without saying a word, the Coahuila state Attorney General's Office said in statement. According to the statement 17 people were killed and at least 18 wounded.(AP Photo) (Str - AP)

By ALICIA A. CALDWELL
The Associated Press

Monday, July 19, 2010; 11:37 PM

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico -- A drug gang that carried out the first successful car bombing against Mexican security forces likely used an industrial explosive that organized crime gangs in the past have stolen from private companies, a U.S. official said Monday.

The assailants apparently used Tovex, a water gel explosive commonly used as a replacement for dynamite in mining and other industrial activities, said the U.S. official, who is familiar with the investigation but spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss the Mexican-led investigation.

The U.S. official had no other details on how the bomb was constructed, and Mexican officials declined to comment.

The car bomb killed three people - including a federal police officer - Thursday in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, and introduced a new threat in Mexico's drug war. Mexican authorities say the assailants lured police and paramedics to the scene through an elaborate ruse seemingly taken out of an Al-Qaida playbook.

A street gang tied to the Juarez cartel dressed a bound, wounded man in a police uniform, then called in a false report of an officer shot at an intersection. They waited until the authorities were in place to detonate the bomb.

U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said the car bomb "may represent a different tactic."

"Unfortunately, these drug cartels, they have an enormous amount of resources at their disposal. They can buy any kind of capability they want. But we are determined, working with Mexico, to do everything in our power to reduce this violence that affects not only the Mexican people, but our own," Crowley told a news conference Monday.

A graffiti message scrawled on a wall Monday threatened more attacks in the city across the border from El Paso, Texas. The message directed its threat at the FBI and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, demanding an investigation of Mexican law enforcement officials who "support the Sinaloa cartel."

The Sinaloa cartel - one of the world's most powerful drug-trafficking organizations - has been battling the Juarez cartel for control of Ciudad Juarez in a 2-year-old war that has converted the city into one of the world's deadliest.

Messages that presumed drug-gang members have scrawled on walls and banners and attached to the bodies of their victims frequently accuse Mexican federal forces of protecting the Sinaloa cartel, a charge President Felipe Calderon's administration vehemently denies.

Monday's graffiti message said there would be another car bomb unless "corrupt federal" officials are arrested within 15 days. There was no way to verify the authenticity of the message.

The FBI and the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Explosives are aiding the Mexicans in the car bomb investigation, officials from those agencies have said.

"This is a whole new level" of aggression from drug gangs, said Tony Payan, a political analyst and expert in Mexico's effort to combat drug cartels. "When you compare it to terrorism as it is traditionally understood, there are some similarities. The modus operandi was definitely of a terrorist attack. It was designed to instill fear in the police and the general population."

Payan added that the Mexican government was too quick to dismiss the possibility that the motive behind the attack was political.

"When you state purposefully that your goal is to intimidate the police and scare the population it means that you intend to drive an even wider wedge between the government and the government's popular support for the war on drugs," he said.

The day after the bombing, Mexican Attorney General Arturo Chavez insisted there was no evidence of "narcoterrorism" in Mexico or any ideological motive behind the attack. On Monday, officials from his office said they could provide no new information on the ongoing investigation.

Brig. Gen. Eduardo Zarate, the commander of the regional military zone, has said as much as 22 pounds (10 kilograms) of explosives might have been used in the car bomb attack. He said last week that batteries and a mobile phone found at the scene suggested it was remotely detonated.

Mexico's powerful drug cartels have long been experimenting with explosives. In the northern state of Durango in 2009, more than a dozen masked gunmen stole 900 cartridges of Tovex water gel explosives from a warehouse run by the U.S.-based Austin Powder Company. Mexican authorities recovered the stolen material, but the theft underscored how easy it can be to get explosive material in the country, where armed men also have attacked transport vehicles carrying such substances.

The ATF has helped investigate several events involving improvised explosive devices around Mexico, including a roadside bomb in March at a gas station in the northern state of Nuevo Leon. That bomb, which didn't injure anyone, consisted of two large cylinders filled with nails and possibly black powder, another substance that is readily available on the black market.

Mexico's drug violence has killed nearly 25,000 people since December 2006, when Calderon deployed thousands of troops and federal police to fight the cartels in their strongholds.

The government announced Monday it would send more federal troops to the northern state of Coahuila following the massacre of 17 people at a private party there. Gunmen stormed the party in the city of Torreon on Sunday and opened fire without saying a word.

Investigators had no suspects or information on a possible motive but Coahuila is among several northern Mexican states that have seen a spike in drug-related violence as the Gulf cartel and its former enforcers, the Zetas, fight for control of drug-trafficking routes.

The Coahuila state Attorney General's Office said in a statement early Monday that the death toll rose to 18 overnight after one of the wounded died. Later Monday, state Prosecutor Jesus Torres Charles said that person was still in intensive care.

There were 12 male and six female victims; among them were four teenagers, the youngest a 17-year-old boy. At least 17 were wounded.

The attack was ghastly, but no longer unprecedented in a region that is slammed day after day by gruesome slayings that authorities attribute to an increasingly brutal battle between drug gangs feuding over territory.

---

Associated Press Writers Morgan Lee, Istra Pacheco and Alexandra Olson in Mexico City; and Foster Klug in Washington, contributed to this report.

buglerbilly

22-07-10, 01:10 PM

Ciudad Juarez car bomb shows new sophistication in Mexican drug cartels' tactics

A soldier patrols Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Soldiers were entering homes Tuesday in search of explosives in response to an anonymous call. (Associated Press Photos)

The remains of a vehicle are cordoned off in a Ciudad Juarez street after a sophisticated car bomb exploded last Thursday. (AP)

By William Booth
Thursday, July 22, 2010

MEXICO CITY -- The car bomb that exploded near the U.S. border in Ciudad Juarez last week was a sophisticated device never before seen in Mexico, triggered by cellphone after police and medical workers were lured to the scene, according to Mexican and U.S. investigators.

The attack, which killed a police officer, a doctor and a man used as a decoy, represents a clear escalation in the weapons and tactics employed by Mexico's powerful drug trafficking organizations, U.S. law enforcement agents say.

Bomb experts with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, who have been training their Mexican counterparts, scrambled to help reconstruct the device. Parts of it recovered from the scene in downtown Ciudad Juarez were flown to Mexico City, where top officials from the United States and Mexico were briefed on the heightened threat.

U.S. and Mexican officials said they are taking seriously a message found after the attack that warned of more violence and demonstrated how closely the United States and Mexico are intertwined in the fight against the cartels.

Graffiti left on the wall of an elementary school Monday specifically warned the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration that more car bombs would follow in the next two weeks unless U.S. agents investigated alleged ties between Mexico's "corrupt federal authorities" and Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman's Sinaloa drug cartel, which is fighting for control of the billion-dollar smuggling routes to the United States.

U.S. and Mexican investigators who have examined the bomb debris found that the assailants placed as much as 22 pounds of Tovex, a water gel explosive commonly used as a replacement for dynamite in mining activities, into an old Pontiac parked on the curb.

The assailants drew police and medical workers to the scene by leaving a bound, wounded man in a police uniform near an intersection and then calling in a false report that an officer had been shot.

The bomb was then detonated by cellphone by someone within the line of sight of the Pontiac. Metal objects were packed around the device, increasing its lethality by producing a spray of shrapnel.

"Somebody knows what they're doing," said a U.S. law enforcement official with knowledge of the improvised explosive device, or IED, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing security protocols. "It was complicated. It was not unlike the kinds of IEDs you see in Iraq, but not quite as sophisticated," the official said.

Bomb technicians in the United States said instructions for making such bombs are not easily gleaned from the Internet. "It's not like making a pipe bomb, which is relatively easy," one expert said.

Nongovernmental security experts in Mexico said they suspected that someone from Colombia's drug trafficking organizations or guerrilla forces might have supplied instructions or built the device, though they offered no evidence to support the speculation.

Diplomats, police and officials scrambled to assess the new threat.

In Washington, Mexican Ambassador Arturo Sarukhan told Congress, "What is important is not to create the perception that it was an indiscriminate act against civilians. It was not placed in the middle of a market. It was clearly directed against the police."

The U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Carlos Pascual, said the violence in Mexico is disturbing but has not reached the level of terrorism.

"The bomb we saw in Ciudad Juarez and at the Nuevo Laredo Consulate, where they threw a grenade, are obviously acts that we have to worry about," he said. "But we must differentiate between what is terrorism and what is not."

Terrorism, the U.S. ambassador said, refers to the acts by groups with political objectives that seek to control the government.

"These drug cartels, they have enormous amounts of resources at their disposal," said U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley. "They can buy any kind of capability they want. But we are determined, working with Mexico, to do everything in our power to reduce this violence."

In Mexico, opposition politicians and editorial writers scoffed at the assertion that a car bomb attack at a busy intersection in Ciudad Juarez was not terrorism and said that U.S. and Mexican government officials were playing down the threat because their actions -- and failures -- were partly responsible.

"Mexico confronts a serious situation like no other in history since the 1910 Mexican Revolution," the leader of Mexican Senate, Carlos Navarrete, said this week. "It is a struggle that has exhausted our government and the armed forces but has shown no reduction of the consumption of drugs or the availability of drugs in America."

buglerbilly

27-07-10, 11:24 AM

Mexican drug cartels bring violence with them in move to Central America

On one April night, nine people died in gun battles between rival Honduran gangs. Here police investigated a shooting near Tegucigalpa. (Fernando Antonio/associated Press)

By Nick Miroff and William Booth
Washington Post staff writers

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

SAN SALVADOR -- Drug cartel violence in Mexico is quickly spilling south into Central America and is threatening to destabilize fragile countries already rife with crime and corruption, according to the United Nations, U.S. officials and regional law enforcement agents.

The Northern Triangle of Central America -- Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras -- has long been a major smuggling corridor for contraband heading to the United States. But as Mexican President Felipe Calderón fights a U.S.-backed war against his nation's drug lords, trafficking networks are burrowing deeper into a region with the highest murder rates in the world.

The Mexican cartels "are spreading their horizons to states where they feel, quite frankly, more comfortable. These governments in Central America face a very real challenge in confronting these organizations," said David Gaddis, chief of operations for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

U.S. attention has mostly focused on Mexico. But the homicide rate there -- 14 for every 100,000 residents -- is dwarfed by the murder statistics in the Northern Triangle, where per-capita killings are four times higher and rising.

In El Salvador, the region's most violent country, homicides jumped 37 percent last year, to 71 murders per 100,000 residents, as warring gangs vied for territory and trafficking routes. Police and military officials in El Salvador said cartels are increasingly paying local smugglers in product, rather than cash, driving up cocaine use and the drug dealing and turf battles that come with it.

"The more pressure there is in Mexico, the more the drug cartels will come to Central America looking for a safe haven," Gen. David Munguía Payés, El Salvador's defense minister, said in an interview here.

The amount of cocaine moving through the region has risen sharply, although the overall volume entering the United States is falling. Cocaine seizures in Central America nearly quadrupled between 2004 and 2007, according to the most recent U.N. data.

The United States has allocated $258 million in anti-narcotics assistance for Central America since 2007 as part of the three-year, $1.6 billion Merida Initiative. But a report this month by the Government Accountability Office found that only 9 percent of the money promised under the initiative has been spent and that U.S. officials had no reliable way to determine whether it was making a difference in the drug war.

'A paradise for criminals'

In remote, lawless regions of Guatemala, the Mexican organized crime syndicate known as the Zetas is setting up training camps and recruiting elite ex-soldiers to serve as assassins, arming them with weapons diverted from the country's military arsenals.

Last month, four human heads were left near the Guatemalan Congress and elsewhere in the capital. The national police spokesman, Donald González, said the grisly display was the work of the Zetas and other Mexican traffickers.

"Guatemala has become a paradise for criminals, who have little to fear from prosecutors owing to high levels of impunity," the International Crisis Group, a conflict research organization, said in a June report. "High-profile assassinations and the government's inability to reduce murders have produced paralyzing fear, a sense of helplessness and frustration."

Over the past two years, Guatemala's top anti-narcotics official, two national police chiefs and the former president have been arrested on charges related to drug trafficking or corruption. Two former interior ministers are fugitives. In May, the Guatemalan president appointed, then removed after international protests, an attorney general who U.N. prosecutors say has ties to mobsters.

In Honduras, where a military coup last year toppled the president, Mexican cartels have established command-and-control centers to orchestrate cocaine shipments by sea and air along the still-wild Caribbean coast, often with the help of local authorities, according to DEA and U.N. officials. Ten anti-narcotics officers were caught smuggling 142 kilos of cocaine last July. In December, Honduras's drug czar, Gen. Julián Arístides González, was killed after trying to shut down clandestine landing strips allegedly operated by Mexico's Sinaloa cartel.

Police in El Salvador say traffickers are cultivating ties to street gangs such as MS-13 and 18th Street, building alliances that could eventually help those groups mature into international syndicates.

"Organized crime has penetrated the government," said Jeannette Aguilar, a crime expert at San Salvador's University of Central America, citing recent arrests of police commanders and prominent politicians. "We've made strides toward democracy, but this threatens to reverse that progress."

According to Steven S. Dudley, a consultant for the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the high homicide rates signal the expanding presence of Mexican drug cartels. Investigators are finding more corpses bearing marks of torture or execution in well-coordinated hits by assassins armed with high-caliber weapons, trademarks of Mexican crime gangs.

The newspaper El Diario de Hoy in El Salvador recently counted 35 bodies found in plastic bags over a six-month span.

A U.N. report found that the highest homicide rates were not in the largest cities, but in provinces with strategic value to drug traffickers: along borders, coasts and jungles.

Some victims had ties to the drug trade; others were simply in the way. In Honduras, in the Caribbean province of Atlantida, one of every 1,000 residents was murdered last year.

Central American migrants, interviewed at three shelters as they crossed Mexico on the way to the United States, said they left their countries not only because of economic desperation but also to escape soaring violence.

Undermining democracy

The expansion of cartel power in the Northern Triangle threatens to undermine democratic gains made since the end of civil conflicts here in the mid-1990s. Analysts say the lucrative profits of the drug trade wield powerful influence in these countries, where half the people live in poverty.

"The Guatemalan government is weak, and the drug cartels provide services that the state does not," such as health clinics, soccer fields and schools, said Fernando Giron Soto, a researcher at the Myrna Mack Foundation, a human rights organization in Guatemala City whose doors are guarded by armed sentries. "It's the same thing that Pablo Escobar used to do in Medellin" during the 1990s in Colombia, he said.

In many areas of the Northern Triangle, police are ineffective, if they exist at all, experts say. Guatemala and Honduras have fewer than half as many police per capita as Mexico, U.N. data show. In Guatemala, as many as seven of the country's 22 provinces appear to be under the control of criminals, according to the International Crisis Group report.

The region is awash in weapons left over from the Cold War, making it an important source of arms for the Mexican cartels. Before Guatemalan gun laws changed last year, anyone could legally buy up to 500 rounds of ammunition a day, said Sandino Asturias, a crime analyst for the Center for Guatemalan Studies.

A special U.N. prosecutor's office has been working in Guatemala since 2007 to break the country's culture of impunity, but it faces enormous obstacles. Of 6,548 murders last year, 423 suspects were arrested. However, that was a significant improvement over the previous year, when 128 homicide arrests were made, Asturias said.

Booth reported from Mexico.

buglerbilly

02-08-10, 02:39 PM

In Mexico's Nuevo Laredo, drug cartels dictate media coverage

In Mexico, a Fight Against Drugs and Fear
Drawing on firepower, savage intimidation, and cash, drug cartels have come to control key parts of the U.S.-Mexico border, as Mexican troops wage a multi-front war with the private armies of rival drug lords.

By William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 2, 2010

NUEVO LAREDO, MEXICO -- Two weeks ago, Mexican soldiers clashed here with drug cartel gangsters in running gun battles that lasted five hours. The outlaws hijacked vehicles, including a bus, for use as barricades and battering rams. Terrified residents scrambled for safety. At least a dozen people were killed, including bystanders. Children were wounded in the crossfire.

Nuevo Laredo has three television news channels, four daily newspapers and at least five radio stations that broadcast news, but every outlet ignored the biggest story of the year. Nuevo Laredo is not an isolated village but the busiest city along the U.S.-Mexico border, a vital U.S. trade partner with a population of 360,000, professional sports teams, universities and an international airport.

Fearing for their lives and the safety of their families, journalists are adhering to a near-complete news blackout, under strict orders of drug smuggling organizations and their enforcers, who dictate -- via daily telephone calls, e-mails and news releases -- what can and cannot be printed or aired.

"We are under their complete control," said a veteran reporter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Editors and managers of news organizations who agreed to speak with The Washington Post insisted that the interviews take place away from their offices, at back tables in empty bars. "The cartels have eyes and ears inside our company," one editor said.

On Friday night, assailants tossed a grenade at the front door of the Televisa affiliate in Nuevo Laredo. The blast shattered windows but caused no injuries. The television station did not report on the attack, and neither did its competitors.

In the 400-mile arc along the South Texas border, millions of Mexicans live without news of the spectacular violence swirling around them.

"The chaos, the disintegration we are seeing in the Mexican media as the drug war continues is without precedent," said Rosental Alves, director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin.

Information war

The news blackout extends to government officials. In Nuevo Laredo, the mayor mysteriously disappears for days and refuses to discuss drug violence. The military general who presides over the soldiers patrolling the city does not hold news conferences, issue statements or answer questions from the media. Neither do local representatives of the federal police and prosecutors.

"Intimidation and coercion have been taken to an extreme level. This drug war is also a war of information. The cartels are now telling reporters what they can and cannot print, and the drug organizations themselves are the content providers," said Carlos Lauria, the Latin America director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. "The Mexican government cannot lose this fight over information. It is at the very center of democracy."

Lauria said Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries for a reporter to work in. More than 30 journalists have been killed or have disappeared since President Felipe Calderón launched his U.S.-backed offensive against organized crime in December 2006. More than 25,000 Mexicans have died.

Last Monday, four journalists were kidnapped after they covered a protest at a penitentiary where the warden allegedly armed inmates and allowed them to leave the prison at night to carry out assassinations, including a massacre last month of 17 young people attending a party in a nearby town.

In its newspaper Wednesday, the Milenio news organization reported that its abducted cameraman contacted his editor Monday evening and said the lives of the kidnapped journalists depended on the television station broadcasting raw video posted on a Web site called Blog del Narco, which showed masked gunmen interrogating local police officers. The national news network broadcast the three unedited videos.

Milenio said the kidnappers "were unhappy with our coverage" about the prison. The federal police chief said Saturday that the journalists were snatched under orders of Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, leader of the Sinaloa cartel. The four have been released.

After the gun battles two weeks ago, the U.S. Consulate in Nuevo Laredo warned Americans in the city to remain indoors. Authorities at the Interior Ministry in faraway Mexico City later issued a statement saying 12 people were killed: nine suspects, two civilians and one soldier. Twenty-one people, including three children, were wounded, authorities said.

But journalists in Nuevo Laredo who went to the scene of the street battles said that 20 or 30, possibly more, people might have been killed but that they had no way to check. The ordinary work of reporters in conflict zones -- going to the hospital and morgue, attending funerals, talking with widows -- is impossible in Nuevo Laredo. Witnesses told reporters that Mexican soldiers shot gang members lying wounded on the ground, but this could not be confirmed.

"We live in a world of rumors now," said Emilio Girón Fernández Jáuregui, president of the Nuevo Laredo Chamber of Commerce. His wife and daughter sort through Facebook and Twitter feeds for information about which routes are safe and where gunfire is occurring, but Fernández said many of the postings are pranks, or worse, "designed to increase the fear, the panic."

Insiders in the media

After ignoring the story about the gun battles, the newspaper La Tarde printed gruesome photographs on its front page of four bodies left at the city's bull ring July 25. Alongside the corpses were their executed pets, a small brown dog draped on one man's bloody chest, a white cat in the hand of another.

Rambling placards, called "narco-messages," left with the bodies tied one of the dead to a grenade attack that killed one and injured more than a dozen at a soccer field.

Journalists in Nuevo Laredo and other cities under siege say crime reporters typically receive word from colleagues and intermediaries, who they suspect are employed by the cartels, about what is safe to publish and what is not. Until recently, Nuevo Laredo and surrounding cities were relatively calm compared with other parts of Mexico, but war has broken out here between the Gulf cartel and its former enforcers, the Zetas, as they vie for the billion-dollar smuggling routes into the United States, the world's largest consumer of illegal drugs.

"They are very vicious, these Zetas, and there are times when there's an official Zeta press release, an e-mail or a sheet of paper, that they want published," said Diana Fuentes, editor of the Laredo Morning Times in Texas, whose reporters work in Mexico. "The criminal organizations have their representatives in the press."

In the absence of professional news gathering, citizens post on Twitter and Facebook, but these efforts have quickly become corrupted, as users spread rumors and lies, along with solid information. "Please confirm!" begs a tweeter about news of a gunfight that turned out to be the grenade attack at the Televisa station. "Is it safe or not?!?!"

buglerbilly

12-08-10, 07:02 AM

Mexico rethinks drugs strategy as violence escalates

Rising fatalities spur calls for legalisation as president admits military tactics are failing

Jo Tuckman in Mexico City guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 11 August 2010 21.33 BST

Military and forensic experts inspect the body of a man killed outside a nightclub in the Mexican border city of Ciudad. Photograph: Alejandro Bringas/Reuters

Mexico's president, Felipe Calderón, launched his presidency three and a half years ago with an unprecedented military-led offensive against the country's drug cartels. Since then 28,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence that continues to escalate, with little sign that the power of the traffickers has been reduced.

Yesterday Calderón finally accepted that the strategy had failed to rein in the cartels, and called on his growing number of critics to help him revise the government's approach to the drug wars.

"I agree that the strategy should be questioned," the president said. "And so I am willing to receive and analyse proposals of how to change and improve it."

The admission came days after Calderón's predecessor called for drugs to be legalised. Vicente Fox, who also belongs to the National Action party, said prohibition had failed to curb violence and corruption. "We should consider legalising the production, sale and distribution of drugs," Fox wrote on his blog. "Radical prohibition strategies have never worked."

Calderón himself fervently opposes legalisation, although he recently called for a "fundamental debate" on the issue. He has also claimed that Fox's relative inaction in the face of the cartels' growing power contributed to the current situation.

In the latest of a series of government-organised debates on the drug war, Calderón repeated that unilateral legalisation would increase drug use and do little to reduce the cartels' income. But he was forced to listen to blistering attacks on the government strategy by opposition leaders.

"The government's strategy is not working," Jesus Ortega, leader of the leftist Democratic Revolution party, said. "If the government only attacks the traffickers then the error, and the failure, of the strategy is evident."

Ortega also railed against the use of the army and navy in anti-drugs operations. Critics of the offensive say the military's lack of preparation for an internal policing role has caused human rights abuses.

Calderón said he agreed that withdrawing the military was desirable, but impossible until civilian state and municipal police forces had been purged of rampant corruption and were strong enough to face the problem on their own.

The sessions also produced complaints about the scant attention paid by the government to the money-laundering that fuels the illegal industry and finances the violence. Mexican drug trafficking is estimated to be worth anywhere between $10 billion (£6.4b) and $40b a year.

Calderón admitted that not enough had been done to track illicit earnings but said the government had trouble hiring top financial experts who could make much more money in the private sector without putting themselves in danger.

The president agreed with calls by other leaders on the need to improve education and employment opportunities for young people to help them avoid drug use or recruitment by the cartels.

Analysts said the Mexican president's new willingness to open the debate marks a dramatic departure from his previous tendency to equate any criticism with a capitulation to organised crime.

"In almost four years the government cannot claim any kind of victory and the debate is the result of the crisis of legitimacy in the strategy," said Samuel Gonzalez, a former Mexican drugs tsar who has been pushing for a rethink for years. "But at least it is now being discussed and that has to be a good thing."

The debate was also seen as an attempt to spread responsibility for the bloodshed. "If we join together we can win this battle," Calderón said. "But if we continue to lack coordination and blame each other, the simple truth is that we cannot move forward. I understand perfectly well that there is a perception that the war is being lost, but I do not share it."

The main problem, he said, is that local public institutions are too weak to maintain control when the forces withdraw.

He added: "I am asking for the political parties for their help, their strength and their collaboration to allow us to rebuild the institutions of security and justice at all levels," he said. "We can beat the criminals. We can re-establish the rule of law in this country."

Turf wars

Mexico's drug violence is rooted in a series of turf wars between different trafficking organisations that are also involved in other illegal activities, such as kidnapping, extortion and people trafficking. The violence and the number of civilian casualties has increased since December 2006, when the government launched an offensive against them involving tens of thousands of soldiers and federal police. The main axis of the war is the rivalry between the Sinaloa cartel and the Zetas – a group founded by renegade special forces troops. Sinaloa, led by the country's most famous kingpin, Joaquin El Chapo Guzman, is based in the Pacific coast state of the same name. The Zetas control much of the Gulf coast. Both Sinaloa and the Zetas are also present in other parts of the country. One of the most intense current battles is for control of the northeastern border state of Tamaulipas, just across from Texas, where Zetas are fighting their erstwhile bosses in the Gulf Cartel, which has now reputedly allied with Sinaloa.

Other relevant trafficking organisations involved in the wars include La Linea, which is based in Ciudad Juarez, just across from El Paso in Texas, and is trying to hold off the encroachment of Sinaloa. Here the extreme violence is intertwined with rivalry between local youth gangs reflecting a dramatic degree of social decomposition.

Elsewhere, the quasi sect-like group called La Familia is rooted in the central state of Michoacan, and the Tijuana cartel maintains its bastion in the border city just over from San Diego in California. The Beltran Leyva group is involved in a bitter struggle for control of the organisation following the death of its leader in a navy operation last year.

buglerbilly

12-08-10, 10:34 AM

Mexico hopes $270 million in social spending will help end Juarez drug violence

Alarming violence stifles hope of change in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico
Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, a border ciity that once seemed like a model for U.S.-Mexico economic integration, has become a dangerous place full of murder and violence. As the Mexican government struggles to repair the city's social fabric, inhabitants struggle to stay alive.

By Nick Miroff, Washington Post

Thursday, August 12, 2010

CIUDAD JUAREZ, MEXICO -- At night in this border city, radio newscasts give a rundown of the day's homicides -- 15 one day, 12 the next -- a segment as regular as weather or sports. At least 291 people were killed last month, and more than 1,786 so far this year.

The runaway drug violence has brought 10,000 soldiers and federal police officers to Juarez, but the influx has not resulted in security or a decline in the death toll. That has forced Mexican leaders and their U.S. advisers to try a new strategy to stop the killing in a city that once seemed like a model for U.S.-Mexico economic integration.

"We have to repair the social fabric here," said Abelardo Escobar, a cabinet member sent by Mexican President Felipe Calderón with a new rescue package for Juarez, a $270 million surge in social spending.

The money is paying for schools, hospital renovations, student breakfasts, a youth orchestra, anti-violence training and drug treatment centers. There are funds to promote physical fitness, build eco-friendly houses and support free concerts -- 160 projects in all.

The government calls the campaign "Todos Somos Juárez" -- "We are all Juarez."

"We need to build trust and a sense of belonging," Escobar said. "We need to give people hope again."

The 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement brought hundreds of thousands of migrants to Juarez, touted as a place where American industry and Mexican workers could meet halfway. Jobs were so plentiful that assembly plants sent buses to the poorest parts of southern Mexico to find recruits, promising a cash bonus to anyone willing to get on board.

The Mexican government laid tracts of inexpensive housing in the desert, but built few schools, parks or libraries for the new arrivals and their families. Today, in the city's northwest slums, there is one high school for 400,000 residents.

Escobar and others here say years of government neglect have produced a civic experiment gone awry, allowing organized crime to fill a moral and social vacuum in a place of rootless newcomers and frayed family structures.

Parts of Juarez, a city of 1.3 million, still convey the sense of almost-America it once promised. But just off the wide boulevards lined with Starbucks, Applebee's and strip malls, masked soldiers and federal police patrol the city's dusty, treeless streets, riding in the backs of Ford Lobo pickup trucks with automatic weapons and body armor.

Few believe the Todos Somos Juárez campaign can turn the city around anytime soon.

The Juarez and Sinaloa cartels are fighting each other for control of drug-smuggling routes into the United States, and both are battling Mexican authorities. Last year, 2,754 people were killed in the city, and 2010 is on pace to be the deadliest year yet. Ninety-eight percent of murders go unsolved.

U.S. officials have pledged more aid for community and social development as part of the $1.6 billion anti-narcotics Merida Initiative. But the violence in Juarez is so bad that the large U.S. Consulate here has been shut since July 29, after a car bombing downtown two weeks earlier was followed by threats of more attacks.

Six months have passed since Calderón came to the city to announce the Todos Somos Juárez campaign, after gunmen massacred 14 people at a birthday party in a neighborhood of factory workers on the city's southeastern edge. Most of the dead were junior high and high school students.

Todos Somos Juárez is building a sports park there. It has helped Alonzo Encina get counseling after his 17-year-old son, an honors student, was slain that night.

But Encina was laid off this spring from the factory where he made car radiators, and he now sells posters of Mexican saints and wrestlers from the back of his pickup. "I live day to day," he said. "I feel half-dead. I'm trying to go on."

'Lost generation'

From his office, Juarez Mayor José Reyes Ferriz has a sweeping view of El Paso and the border crossings that feed into it. The two cities are split by tall fences and the cement-lined channel of the Rio Grande.

In El Paso, there has been one homicide this year.

In Juarez, someone is slain every three hours.

"Juarez is a tremendous city of opportunity," said Reyes Ferriz, ticking off the city's industrial output: auto parts, dishwashers, televisions, computers. "We have more manufacturing jobs than Detroit and Atlanta combined."

The violence hasn't soured investors on Juarez, the mayor insisted.

Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer that makes iPhones, Sony PlayStations, Dell computers and other Best Buy merchandise, has hired 10,000 people in the city and plans to take on 70,000 more, he said.

When the global recession pushed Juarez's unemployment rate to 20 percent in 2008, the murder rate soared, the mayor said.

Many of the city's gang members and gunmen are the children of factory workers, he and others said, a "lost generation" that grew up in the streets while their parents were making car batteries and keyboards. A cartel foot soldier can make $160 a week carrying out assassinations, kidnappings and beheadings.

Assembly plant workers make about $60 a week, so Todos Somos Juárez will give them better child care, recreation opportunities and job training. More than 120,000 have signed up for the city's new health-care plan.

But the raft of promises seem to be outpacing the government's ability to deliver.

On a recent afternoon, Daisy Campos, 22, stood with her 3-year-old daughter outside a downtown health clinic, deflecting the desert sun with a yellow umbrella topped with cat ears. She was glad to have insurance, but the wait to see a nurse was two, maybe three hours.

A day earlier, Campos quit her job at a fruit market after a group of men executed two of her co-workers, shooting one in the face right in front of her. "I don't want to live here anymore," Campos said. Her father is in Tennessee. Maybe she will go there, she said.

A promise pending

Todos Somos Juárez has pledged to build a high school in the trash-strewn hills on the city's western edge, among the scrap-wood shacks and creosote bush. It would be the neighborhood's first. Local officials laid the cornerstone several months ago and paved the street right up to the empty lot. But no one from the government has been back since, said José Luis Contreras, 26, who lives across the street and would like to go to school, if it's not too late for him.

Contreras and his 80-year-old grandmother run a small store. Three months ago, thieves put a gun to her head and stole everything off the shelves.

"Maybe it was just lies," Contreras said of the government's plan, watching dust swirl over the empty school site.

On the radio that night, the state governor called the Juarez program an election gimmick of his political rival, President Calderón's National Action Party.

No one is sure what will happen when the $270 million runs out.

Arturo Valenzuela, a trauma surgeon who stitches up the city's wounded -- killers and victims alike -- said the program should be expanded and made permanent.

"I think Juarez is the most important city in the world right now," said Valenzuela, a community adviser to Todos Somos Juárez. "This is the place to see where our whole human endeavor is going. If we can fix it, we can fix any other place in Mexico."

buglerbilly

13-08-10, 06:09 AM

A war on drugs? No, this is a war on the Mexican people

29,000 dead, human rights leaders murdered, the constitution violated – the price of President Calderón's popularity bid

Luis Hernandez Navarro guardian.co.uk,

Thursday 12 August 2010 21.00 BST

Vicente Fox, the former president of Mexico, began his administration in 2000 with a popular festival. Felipe Calderón, who took over in 2006, began his with a show of military force. His affinity for uniforms, army brass bands and public events with the armed forces makes an overt connection between the military and the executive that was unusual in Mexican politics before his presidency.

In January 2007 in Apatzingán, Calderón had his picture taken in military uniform, with a five-star cap and the national emblem. In May, again in Apatzingán, another photo op: officers with armoured vehicles and grenade launchers confronted alleged drug traffickers. But this great publicity stunt worried some – drugs are supposed to be under police, not military, jurisdiction.

After his 2006 victory was greeted by massive demonstrations over allegations of electoral fraud, Calderón needed to make up for his lack of popular legitimacy. The drug war soon became the central theme of his government. Taking on organised crime – leaning heavily on the army, which helped him into office in the first place, and with financial support from the US – has given Calderón a legitimacy that he did not receive in the voting booth, while militarising politics has given him the tools to run the country using emergency measures normally reserved for wartime. Here Calderón followed much the same script used by George Bush after 9/11, when the US president made war the constituent power of a neoconservative order. But, instead of sending troops to Iraq or Afghanistan, the Mexican president has ordered them into the streets of their own country.

The army now virtually occupies communities throughout the country, carrying out functions that, under the constitution, are not the responsibility of the armed forces: it has set up checkpoints, de facto curfews and inspections. In what appears to be the pilot of a plan for the entire country, in several northern states there is a situation that resembles a state of siege – one never decreed by congress.

In the short term, the politicisation of public security has worked for the president. Surveys show relatively high approval ratings, although they have been falling in recent months. Drug trafficking existed before Calderón took office, but his handling of it – while successful in terms of his popularity – has been a disaster for security. The president launched a war without a plan, and without assessing the consequences. Now he does not know where to go.

Recently, Calderón announced that there was to be a debate on the legalisation of marijuana in Mexico, while adding that he himself is against legalisation. Many people, including the leader of the opposition Institutional Revolutionary party, warn that this is merely an attempt to distract attention from the main issue on the political agenda: the failure of the war on drugs.

Trafficking in Mexico is now a $5bn-a-year business. Half a million people – 150,000 armed – are employed in the production of marijuana, opium and amphetamines, and the transit of cocaine, with two cartels fighting for the routes and the markets. The networks of the drug lord, Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán are barely touched. He is on the Forbes list of the wealthiest men on the planet and in sixth place in Time's ranking of the most influential people of 2008.

When Calderón took office there was no indication that trafficking would increase as it has. But it was as if he had smashed open a hornets' nest. Violence became intractable, and almost 29,000 people have died since 2006.

Human and civil rights have been this war's other casualty, thanks to changes in legislation. If a public building is occupied as a protest, anti-drug laws are used to accuse union leaders of kidnapping people who are inside. Homes can now be searched without a warrant.

In parts of Mexico, violence has been unleashed against human rights activists, environmentalists and grassroots leaders. Raúl Lucas García and Manuel Ponce Ríos were violently murdered by police in 2009. Indigenous and poor, they were dedicated to defending the rights of indigenous peoples in their state of Guerrero, denouncing human rights violations and carrying out social welfare projects. In Guerrero, military forces have engaged in low intensity warfare whose tactics include stealing crops, raping women, extrajudicial killings and even forced sterilisation. Similar stories can be told in other parts of Mexico.

In the macabre list of beheaded corpses, unburied bodies and mass graves that newspapers report on a daily basis, the assassination of grassroots leaders barely figures. And when it does, it is difficult for the public to register the difference between those killed due to drug trafficking and those targeted for their political activism.

The president doesn't seem to care that the militarisation of politics leads to a degradation and a weakening of the political sphere. He seems little concerned with the fact that in the middle of a major economic crisis – with manufacturing at a virtual standstill, unemployment growing and the escape valve of emigration to the United States closed – Calderón's room for manoeuvre has diminished significantly. The only way out, according to his logic, is to intensify the war.

buglerbilly

20-08-10, 02:30 AM

California Deploys National Guard to Mexico Border

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

Published: 19 Aug 2010 12:22

California is deploying a first group of 224 National Guard troops to its southern border with Mexico to assist Border Patrol agents attempting to stem the flow of drugs and illegal immigrants.

"Today, our National Guard has been called to help secure the border and protect the safety of the American people," said Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

"I am proud that we are the first state to have our troops operational for this mission," he added at an event in San Diego, a border town some 124 miles south of Los Angeles which neighbors the Mexican city of Tijuana.

Schwarzenegger stressed the deployment was not an alternative to a legislative solution to deal with illegal immigration, an issue President Barack Obama has been unable to tackle amid widespread opposition to immigration reform and amnesty for the millions of people in America illegally.

"We must find a permanent solution to our broken immigration system," he said.

"We need the federal government to step up with even more manpower and funding, and I will continue to push President Obama and Congress for action."

Obama last week signed legislation sending drones and an additional 1,500 new agents to the U.S. border with Mexico, which runs across the states of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

The legislation also provides an additional 600 million dollars to combat drug, arms and people trafficking across the border.

buglerbilly

13-09-10, 03:20 AM

Racked by drug violence, Mexico wary of Calif. vote on legalizing marijuana

By Nick Miroff and William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writers

Friday, September 10, 2010; 4:05 AM

TIJUANA, MEXICO - To embattled authorities here, where heavily armed soldiers patrol the streets and more than 500 people have been killed this year, marijuana is a poisonous weed that enriches death-dealing cartel bosses who earn huge profits smuggling the product north.

"Marijuana arrives in the United States soaked with the blood of Tijuana residents," said Mayor Jorge Ramos, whose police department has lost 45 officers to drug violence in the past three years.

But just over the border in California, cannabis is considered by law a healing herb. After the Obama administration announced that it would not prosecute the purveyors, about 100 medical marijuana dispensaries opened in San Diego alone in the past year, selling vast quantities of Purple Goo, Green Crack and other varieties of super-charged pot to virtually any adult willing to pay $59 for a doctor's prescription and $10 for a joint.

The marijuana divide between these sister cities points to major disparities between the fight against drugs in Mexico and their acceptance in the United States.

As the Obama administration presses Mexican President Felipe Calderon to stand firm in his costly, bloody military campaign against drug mafias, Mexican leaders are increasingly asking why their country should continue to attack cannabis traffickers and peasant pot farmers if the U.S. government is barely enforcing federal marijuana laws in the most populous state.

This debate grows more urgent as California prepares to vote in November on Proposition 19, a game-changing ballot initiative to legalize the recreational consumption of marijuana. According to the polls, the vote is tight.

Weary of spectacular violence and destabilizing corruption stoked by the prohibition against pot, some of Mexico's most prominent figures are wondering aloud what legalization would do on their side of the drug war.

Vicente Fox, the former president of Mexico, a rancher and a free-market conservative, said last month that cannabis should be legal in his country. "The sales could be taxed, with high taxes, as we do with tobacco, to be used to fight addiction and reduce consumption," he said.

Marijuana smuggling and sales represent a roughly $10 billion business for Mexico's drug mafias, which earn up to 60 percent of their profits from pot, according to U.S. estimates.

Fox said legalizing marijuana and other drugs "will allow us to hit and break apart the economic structure that allows the drug mafias to generate huge profits - profits they use to corrupt and increase their power."

Calderon, a center-right politician, devout Catholic and father of three young children who has staked his presidency on his fight against organized crime, hosted three days of nationally televised meetings last month to debate "the pros and cons" of legalization.

"It is worth asking if it still makes any sense to maintain our prohibition against marijuana in Mexico when the United States is taking gradual steps toward legalization," said Jose Luis Astorga, one of Mexico's most prominent scholars of drug policy. "Why are we spending our resources on this?"

Legal-pot predictions

U.S. voters have already passed measures allowing the medicinal use of marijuana in the District of Columbia and 14 states, including Maryland. Proposition 19 would legalize the drug for all adults in California over 21.

The nonpartisan voter guide written by the California secretary of state concludes that a commercial marijuana industry could produce "hundreds of millions of dollars annually" in new taxes.

Proposition 19 would allow local governments to adopt ordinances regarding commercial marijuana activities - including cultivation, processing, distribution, transportation and retail sales. For example, local governments could license establishments to sell marijuana and allow customers to get high on the premises. Oakland's City Council has already approved giant indoor marijuana farms as large as two football fields.

But no one knows whether legalization in California would hurt or help Mexico. Bringing marijuana into California from Mexico would remain illegal under federal law.

Still, U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officials worry that legalization in California could stoke greater demand that would be met by Mexican cartels.

The Mexican military, working with U.S. agents and intelligence, chops and burns thousands of tons of pot each year in the rugged mountains of the "golden triangle" in Chihuahua, Sinaloa and Durango. Mexico's marijuana- eradication program is the largest in the world, according to the United Nations.

Advocates of legalization in the United States and Mexico argue that California's Proposition 19 would actually hurt the drug cartels.

Given California's agricultural expertise and fertile soils, these advocates say, domestic marijuana yields would soar. A study released in July by the Rand Corp. predicted that the price could crash by as much as 80 percent, a step that could carry with it the potential to displace Mexican supplies and deal a major financial blow to the Mexican syndicates.

"The cartels' power would be greatly reduced," said John Kirby, a former assistant U.S. attorney in San Diego who has prosecuted cross-border drug cases. "For them, marijuana is an easy crop that provides a daily infusion of cash. All of that would be gone."

Much of the Mexican marijuana that reaches U.S. consumers today is a lower-quality, relatively inexpensive product raised on large mountain plantations with little husbandry. At harvest time, it is hacked up, dried and packaged into shrink-wrapped bricks that weigh 30 or 40 pounds and can be smuggled over the border on foot or be stashed in vehicles.

In contrast, the meticulously tended, genetically refined, ultra-potent marijuana typically sold in California dispensaries for $20 to $40 a gram is a cartel-free local product, Eugene Davidovich said. His San Diego dispensary, the Best Buds Collective, acquires its wares only from known providers, not Mexican smugglers, he said.

Made in the U.S.A.

"If someone comes in off the street, it doesn't matter what the price is - we won't buy it," said Davidovich, whose by-the-books operation nevertheless offers medications such as Trainwreck Hash, pot-laced arthritis balm, and jars of crystallized super-cannabis with names such as Afghani Goo.

As much as half of the U.S. marijuana supply is now domestically produced, according to Drug Enforcement Administration estimates, and the homegrown trend has already cut into the earnings of Mexican cartels. The criminals have responded by setting up indoor operations in the United States or large outdoor plots on public lands.

In California, medical marijuana has become a fig leaf for those who want to legally smoke pot.

At one San Diego area doctor's office next to a driving school and a Christian youth center, walk-in patients can fill out a questionnaire, undergo a four-minute consultation with a physician, and purchase a medical marijuana certificate with a "420" identification card granting them access to the state's dispensaries.

Gil Kerlikowske, chief of the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy, has stressed that the Obama administration is opposed to the California measure. The White House drug czar traveled to Mexico City last month to counter calls in Mexico for legalization and to show support for Mexico's fight against the cartels.

But in the United States, the Obama administration has largely taken a hands-off approach to state and local efforts to ease cannabis laws, saying it would not pursue licensed medical marijuana users.

In Mexico, the governors of the states that grow the most marijuana and face the most drug violence have warned that no solution is possible unless Mexico and the United States adopt a single, coordinated approach to drug use and drug trafficking, and Mexico's president has made clear that he agrees.

"If there is not an international approach, Mexico will pay the costs and will get none of the benefits," Calderon said in a recent debate. "The price of drugs is not determined by Mexico. The price of drugs is determined by the consumers in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago."

miroffn@washpost.com boothb@washpost.com

buglerbilly

13-09-10, 03:31 AM

Woman's links to Mexican drug cartel a saga of corruption on U.S. side of border

Cartel corruption, on the U.S. side of the border
Lots of attention is paid to the role of corrupt Mexican officials in drug trafficking, but the story of Martha Garnica, a U.S. border agent, reveals how a similar problem has grown on the other side of the border.

By Ceci Connolly
Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, September 12, 2010; 4:13 AM

EL PASO - She lived a double life. At the border crossing, she was Agent Garnica, a veteran law enforcement officer. In the shadows, she was "La Estrella," the star, a brassy looker who helped drug cartels make a mockery of the U.S. border.

Martha Garnica devised secret codes, passed stacks of cash through car windows and sketched out a map for smugglers to safely haul drugs and undocumented workers across the border. For that she was richly rewarded; she lived in a spacious house with a built-in pool, owned two Hummers and vacationed in Europe.

For years, until an intricate sting operation brought her down in late 2009, Garnica embodied the seldom-discussed role of the United States in the trafficking trade.

Cartels based in Mexico, where there is a long history of corruption, increasingly rely on well-placed operatives such as Garnica to reach their huge customer base in the United States. It is an argument often made by Mexican officials - that all the attention paid to corruption in their country has obscured a similar, growing problem on the U.S. side of the border.

The cartels have grown so sophisticated, law enforcement officials say, that they are employing Cold War-era spy tactics to recruit and corrupt U.S. officials.

"In order to stay in business, the drug trafficking organizations have to look at different methods for moving product," said Thomas Frost, an assistant inspector general in the Department of Homeland Security. "The surest method is by corrupting a border official. The amount of money available to corrupt employees is staggering."

In late August, Garnica's double life ended. U.S. District Judge David Briones sentenced her to 20 years in prison after she pleaded guilty to six counts of drug smuggling, human trafficking and bribery. She was, in the words of prosecutors, a "valued asset" of the crime syndicate La Linea based in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, directing the movements of at least five men, four of whom are in prison or dead.

"Everybody makes mistakes," she said in court, wearing handcuffs and an orange prison jumpsuit. "I take responsibility for my mistakes."

Garnica's saga - pieced together from hundreds of pages of court testimony, tape-recorded conversations, and interviews with border officials, investigators, undercover agents and members of the judiciary - underscores the enormous challenge facing the United States as it tries to curtail the $25 billion-a-year business of illegal drug trafficking.

Corruption is on the rise in the ranks of U.S. law enforcement working the border, and nowhere is the problem more acute than in the frontline jobs with Garnica's former employer, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, according to federal investigators. Garnica's stiff sentence represented a rare victory in the struggle to root out tainted government employees.

Homeland Security statistics suggest the rush to fill thousands of border enforcement jobs has translated into lower hiring standards. Barely 15 percent of Customs and Border Protection applicants undergo polygraph tests and of those, 60 percent were rejected by the agency because they failed the polygraph or were not qualified for the job, said Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), who oversees a Senate subcommittee on homeland security.

The number of CBP corruption investigations opened by the inspector general climbed from 245 in 2006 to more than 770 this year. Corruption cases at its sister agency, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, rose from 66 to more than 220 over the same period. The vast majority of corruption cases involve illegal trafficking of drugs, guns, weapons and cash across the Southwest border.

"We have in our country today a big presence of the Mexican cartels," Pryor said. "With about 50 percent of the nation's methamphetamine and marijuana coming through Mexico and about 90 percent of the cocaine, there is a huge financial incentive for cartels to try to corrupt our people."

CBP Commissioner Alan D. Bersin said the rise in investigations might simply correspond to the rapid growth in personnel.

Corruption of "customs officials all over the world has been a perennial problem of border inspection and border enforcement," he said in an interview. "What we haven't seen is a vast conspiracy in the workforce."

Still, Frost said, it takes only a handful of dirty government workers on the inside to make millions for the cartels.

"It would be naive to think a $1 billion smuggling industry would allow itself to be dependent on one or two corrupt employees, or if you eliminate that corrupt employee that they won't try to corrupt someone else," he said.

'An air about her'

There was always something about Martha Garnica that just didn't feel right.

As early as 1997, colleagues had suspicions about the assertive young mother of two who had worked seven years as an El Paso cop before joining the U.S. Customs Service. (Her division became part of CBP in 2003.)

Garnica had a pattern of filing questionable workplace injury claims and socialized in bars popular among drug dealers.

"There was an air about her that made her suspect," said Ed Abud, an internal affairs officer at CBP El Paso who was involved in the investigation.

Garnica's adult daughter and attorney refused interview requests. In court, her attorney pleaded for leniency and counseling, saying Garnica had been the victim of abuse by a family member and a boyfriend.

Abud said he now believes Garnica transferred to the federal agency with an eye toward criminal smuggling activities.

"She came on board probably with the main purpose of trying to exploit the border for herself," he said recently. "She figured, 'What's in it for me?' "

In November 1997, authorities seized nearly 100 pounds of marijuana on the Bridge of the Americas into El Paso. An informant fingered Garnica as part of the conspiracy, according to two investigators. The FBI opened a case, but it went nowhere.

In March 2005, she came under scrutiny again. That week, a van packed with 531 pounds of marijuana tried to enter the United States through the lane Garnica was staffing.

She was not originally scheduled to work the lane that day, but "the duty roster had been tampered with," said James Smith, head of the inspector general's investigative unit in El Paso.

As the van neared Garnica in the inspection booth, drug-sniffing dogs detected the marijuana and agents arrested the driver.

Others on the scene reported that Garnica looked shaken and left for the day, Smith said. But despite the mounting suspicions, authorities lacked the evidence to suspend or charge Garnica.

"We kept hitting dead ends," Smith said.

Four years passed before they got their big break. In the spring of 2009, a CBP employee contacted Smith's office. Garnica, he said, was overly friendly; he suspected she was trying to lure him into the smuggling business.

The man was the perfect target, right out of the Cold War-era espionage handbook. He was recently divorced, with a child heading to college and a modest government salary. He was struggling to pay his bills.

"It's no different from spy agencies," Smith said. "They look for weaknesses. Sex is a biggie. Alcohol, drug abuse, financial woes."

The man, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because officials say his life is in danger, agreed to work undercover. His code name would be Angel.

The recruitment

It began subtly with chatty text messages, then drinks in a bar. They would talk about the weather and gripe about work, intermingling Spanish and English as so many people along the border do.

Within a few months, they were meeting for dinner. Garnica always picked up the tab and Angel always wore a wire, their taped conversations and text messages sent directly to Smith and his team in the inspector general's office.

"Garnica was becoming his best friend," Smith said. "Good recruiters don't just jump into it. They chip through the wall. That's what she was doing."

On Aug. 1, 2009, Garnica invited Angel to Jaguar's, a strip club in east El Paso, to meet a man she described as a drug trafficker. She and her boyfriend, Carlos Ramirez-Rosalez, arrived in a Hummer, according to court records.

The group met in a VIP lounge, where Hugo Alberto Flores Colmenero told Angel he could supply him with money and a weapon, specifically a Glock semi-automatic pistol. They exchanged phone numbers.

Garnica offered to pay for a stripper for Angel; he demurred, saying he had a new girlfriend.

"There's plenty of fish in the sea," Garnica replied, according to the tape recording.

Angel left Jaguar's around 11 p.m. At 2 a.m., Flores Colmenero left him a voice message. In a stroke of luck for investigators, instead of hanging up, Flores Colmenero switched to a call on another line - all of it recorded by the inspector general's team.

"I've met with el cuatro," or "the fourth," he said, referring to Angel. He called Garnica "la original."

It was a disturbing revelation.

"We take that to mean that there are two or three other people that Garnica has brought into the organization," said Juanita Fielden, the assistant U.S. attorney prosecuting the case.

A few days later, over dinner at the restaurant La Mar, Flores Colmenero gave Angel $500 in cash. They brainstormed about how best to smuggle "motita" - marijuana - into the States. At the time, Angel was working the "cargo" lanes designated for large vehicles. They discussed using a van or renting a truck and debated ways to camouflage the drugs, perhaps buried deep in a pallet of tiles or a load of televisions.

On Aug. 19, one of Flores Colmenero's brothers was killed in a shootout at the Seven & Seven bar in Juarez. The next time Angel saw Garnica, she explained that Flores Colmenero had gone into hiding. Before they parted, she handed him $200.

In late September 2009, after four months of secret meetings and text messages, free drinks and small bribes, Garnica decided to test Angel. Until then they had only talked about dirty deals. Now she wanted action.

She gave Angel a minor task: sign a form claiming the injury she suffered playing volleyball actually occurred at work. He did what he was told.

Confident that she'd reeled him in, she asked for something more serious. She wanted him to request a change in his work assignment: Move to the Ysleta Port of Entry, the smallest of the three El Paso border stations, and switch to the midnight shift when traffic is the lightest. Investigators say smugglers prefer off-peak hours to ensure they can steer into the lane of a friendly inspector without being blocked by clogged traffic.

For investigators, each meeting and message provided insight into the methods and mind-set of the cartels.

"We were able to see the entire recruitment process play out through Angel," Smith said. "It starts with small probes. If you're willing to do that, it escalates."

New recruits get tested, and with each test they pass it becomes more difficult for them to refuse, he said.

For the next few weeks, Angel met often with Garnica and Ramirez-Rosalez, discussing money, vehicles and a plan to smuggle a friend into the country. The person would ride in a white Volkswagen Beetle with a company logo on the doors.

In the predawn darkness of Sunday, Oct. 11, the vehicle approached the Ysleta border crossing station and steered into Angel's inspection lane. Inside were two of Ramirez-Rosalez' brothers, both undocumented Mexicans who would eventually be arrested as part of Garnica's smuggling ring. At the time, Angel made a show of checking the driver's identification, then waved the Volkswagen through. Investigators followed the car straight to Garnica's house.

"We couldn't believe it," said one of the agents.

At 7 a.m., Garnica sent Angel a text message: "Prueba de fuego. Superada." Trial by fire. Passed.

The following afternoon, Angel, Garnica and Ramirez-Rosalez met in a McDonald's parking lot. From the passenger-side window of one of her Hummers, Garnica handed Angel a pile of $20 bills wrapped in a piece of paper.

"It's 500," she said.

Undercover risks

Angel was suffering the strains of his own double life: undercover agent to a tight circle of investigators, dirty employee to many of his co-workers.

Investigators worried about his safety and the psychological effects of "living a lie," as Smith put it.

"I was nervous from Day One," Angel said in an interview after Garnica was sentenced. "I was always afraid her associates would get on to me."

As the undercover operation continued, the inspector general's office pored over Garnica's phone records and finances. She had two homes, two Hummers, a Cadillac and a truck. Her extended family took cruises, traveled to Europe and decorated one house with ostentatious statues and a fountain - signs she was living above her government salary.

In several instances, Garnica's number turned up in the cellphones of convicted drug traffickers and money launderers. Vehicles used in other smuggling cases appeared at her homes, according to surveillance information.

On the night before Halloween, Garnica summoned Angel to the Agave bar. They had been talking for days about a big shipment - two large vehicles. The payoff would be several thousand dollars.

Angel raced to meet Garnica; he had less than an hour before his shift began. He had trouble finding the bar, he said later, and when he spotted it, a pair of beefy men were guarding the door. "That made me uncomfortable," he said.

"I felt like everybody in the bar looked me up and down when I walked in," he said later.

As he scanned the room, Garnica pulled him aside to a table. She handed him a Nextel walkie-talkie-style phone and a cocktail napkin with 12 ordinary phrases written in Spanish. Each corresponded to a lane at the port.

"You have to memorize this," she said. Angel hurried out of the bar to change his clothes and report for work.

Around 1 a.m., Angel pushed the button on the phone and said simply: "Esta haciendo mucho frio" - it's very cold out. The code words meant he was working Lane 10.

But Garnica, who investigators spotted watching the station in one of her Hummers, messaged back: "Hay mucha de la fea." The slangy phrase translates roughly: "There's a lot of ugliness" - criminal code warning of the presence of Mexican military or law enforcement. They aborted the delivery.

A week later, Angel and Garnica repeated the routine, Angel again remarking on the cold weather to direct smugglers to Lane 10. He'd been given $3,500 in advance and told to look for a red pickup truck.

When the truck reached Angel in the booth, he recognized Garnica's nephew in the passenger seat and one of Ramirez-Rosalez's brothers behind the wheel.

"I acted like it was a normal inspection," he recalled. "I stalled for a few minutes to make it look like I was checking the vehicle." Then he waved the pair through.

Just up the road, El Paso police stopped the truck, loaded with more than 160 pounds of marijuana, and arrested the pair. Two days later, a federal grand jury meeting in secret indicted Garnica and her co-conspirators.

Garnica, unaware of the indictments or Angel's role in the sting, prepared to bring across another load. The next shipment was set for the night of Nov. 17. At the last minute, investigators told Angel to call it off.

"We'd already indicted Garnica and we didn't want to take any more risks," Smith said.

The next day, La Estrella was behind bars.

News researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

buglerbilly

15-09-10, 03:04 AM

Ares

A Defense Technology Blog

All Along the Watchtower

Posted by Paul McLeary at 9/14/2010 12:13 PM CDT

Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Web site FierceGovernmentIT, we now have in our hands a document that should be fascinating to anyone who has been following the progress of the Department of Homeland Security’s troubled Secure Border Initiative and its high-tech arm, SBInet. The Secure Border Initiative is part of the Department of Homeland Security’s very expensive effort to secure the United States’ southern and northern borders, of which SBInet is its effort to gain information dominance over the southern border through radar, sensors, cameras, and other communications and surveillance gear.

The document, the DHS’ Fiscal 2010 "Border Security Fencing, Infrastructure and Technology" spending plan submitted to Congress, reports that despite five years of work and billions spent, Customs and Border Protection “does not have the engineering and logistics resources or capabilities to support deployed SBI technology and has been challenged to support legacy systems in the CBP inventory.” In order to develop this capability within the government workforce, “a significant investment is required” in coordination, software support, as well as engineering and logistics.

The DHS report goes on to say that CBP paid contractor staff from Boeing $45.1 million during FY10 for service support and engineering, an increase from the $37.5 million the government paid contractors in FY09, and that as of Dec. 2009, contractors working on SBInet outnumbered government staff by a count of 154 to 135. But that in itself isn’t a tragedy. The CBP isn’t a huge or traditionally well-funded government operation, so shouldn’t be expected to have skills like this available in-house. But still, the release of the report comes at a sensitive time for the SBI program, which saw its SBInet segment halted in March by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who also announced that she was diverting $50 million earmarked for the project into other programs like mobile sensor stations that might have a cheaper, quicker payoff.

Work on the SBI program began in 2005 with $3.6 billion in funds allocated by Congress, but in July, the DHS’ Inspector General estimated that SBInet’s technologies will cost $7.6 billion to deploy along the southwest border from fiscal 2007 through 2011.

Boeing has been the lead contractor on the program since receiving three-year, indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity contract in 2006 to integrate and implement the specified technologies along the border. As of February 2010, CBP had awarded a total of thirteen task orders to Boeing, for approximately $1.2 billion for the program.

Finally, it is significant that the DHS report hardly offers a ringing endorsement for the SBI program, reporting that if a pending review ordered by Secretary Napolitano

suggests that the SBInet capabilities are worth the cost, this administration will extend deployment of these capabilities. If this analysis suggests that alternative technology options represent the best balance of capability and cost-effectiveness, this administration will immediately begin redirecting resources currently allocated for border security efforts to these stronger options.

Look for more on this soon, as I am heading to Arizona later this week to report on how current SBI technologies are being used by agents in the field.

buglerbilly

15-09-10, 03:09 AM

Mexico’s Top Narco-Blogger Comes Forward

By Spencer Ackerman September 14, 2010 | 10:20 am

Guns, drugs, murder. Death squads and cocaine cowboys. That’s what life is increasingly like in the wealthy Mexican city of Monterrey, barely two hours south of the border. And an anonymously-typed website called Blog Del Narco is documenting Monterrey’s decline as it happens.

Even if you don’t read Spanish (like me), the images on Blog Del Narco tell the gruesome story. Old, wealthy men held hostage and humiliated. Paramilitary cops in ski masks taking dudes into custody. People walking the streets in body armor, automatic weapons out. Then there’s all the dead bodies and shot-up cars.

Facing a situation like that, it’s no surprise that the blog’s author, who’s not even 30 years old, would want to stay anonymous. Which is why it’s remarkable that he’s given an interview to Boing Boing describing what it’s like to work in a wealthy city turned urban warzone. “People have a right to know why things have become so insecure in recent years,” he tells Boing Boing. “The violence that is happening in Mexico is not because the public reads about what is happening in BlogdelNarco.com, the factors that provoke violence in Mexico are much more important, and ultimately they are economic.”
As he emails Boing Boing, the Mexican government — bought off by the narco-gangsters — wants to “pretend that NOTHING IS HAPPENING.” His blog has accordingly attracted a community of 3 million unique monthly viewers that wants a news outlet that doesn’t “pre-digest the news before publishing it.” That means publishing a lot of raw material — both in terms of how graphic it is and how seemingly unedited it is. Asked if he’s being used for propaganda purposes by his sources, he essentially shrugs: “[W]e’re not investigators, for that there are the police.”

But he may have a point about Mexico’s unwillingness to face how dire its narco-crime problem is becoming. Last week, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton compared the rise of the gangsters to the narco-guerillas that plagued Colombia for decades — and even used the I-word. “These drug cartels are showing more and more indices of insurgencies,” she told an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations.

That earned Clinton a swift rebuke from the Mexican government. “We do not share these findings,” a top adviser to President Felipe Calderon told reporters shortly after Clinton’s remarks, “as there is a big difference between what Colombia faced and what Mexico is facing today.” For good measure, he noted that the rise of violent drug crime is fueled by the U.S.’s ceaseless appetite for narcotics.

Whatever the explanation, Blog Del Narco shows no signs of relent in documenting the phenomenon. “[W]e decided to tell people what is actually happening and tell the stories exactly as they happen, without alteration or modifications of convenience,” its author tells Boing Boing. “The main goal of the blog is to help Mexican people to take all necessary measures against the insecurity.” Read the whole thing, and follow the guy on Twitter.

Credit: Blog Del Narco

Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/09/mexicos-top-narco-blogger-comes-forward/#more-30774#ixzz0zYXXIBK1

buglerbilly

20-09-10, 09:24 AM

A double agent helps net corrupt immigration official

September 20, 2010

Arrested ... Martha Garnica.

Trafficking of drugs and humans is run from inside the US, writes Ceci Connolly in El Paso, Texas.

For years Martha Garnica lived a double life. At the border crossing she was Agent Garnica, a veteran law enforcement officer. In the shadows, she was ''La Estrella'', the star, a brassy looker who helped drug cartels make a mockery of the US border.

Garnica devised secret codes, passed stacks of cash through car windows and sketched out a map for smugglers to safely haul drugs and undocumented workers across the border. For that she was richly rewarded; she lived in a spacious house with a built-in pool, owned two Hummers and spent holidays in Europe.

But late last month her double life ended. A US district judge, David Briones, sentenced her to 20 years' jail after she pleaded guilty to six counts of drug smuggling, human-trafficking and bribery. She was, in the words of prosecutors, a ''valued asset'' of the crime syndicate La Linea in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, directing the movements of at least five men, four of whom are in prison or dead.

''Everybody makes mistakes,'' she said in court, wearing handcuffs and an orange prison jumpsuit. ''I take responsibility for my mistakes.''

For years, until an intricate sting operation brought her down late last year, Garnica embodied the seldom discussed role of the US in the trafficking trade.

Cartels based in Mexico, where there is a long history of corruption, increasingly rely on well-placed operatives such as Garnica to reach their huge customer base in the US. It is an argument often made by Mexican officials - that all the attention paid to corruption in their country has obscured a similar, growing problem on the US side of the border.

The cartels have grown so sophisticated, law enforcement officials say, that they are employing Cold War-era spy tactics to recruit and corrupt US officials.

''In order to stay in business, the drug trafficking organisations have to look at different methods for moving product,'' said Thomas Frost, an assistant inspector-general in the Department of Homeland Security. ''The surest method is by corrupting a border official. The amount of money available to corrupt employees is staggering.''

Garnica's saga - pieced together from hundreds of pages of court evidence, tape-recorded conversations, and interviews with border officials, investigators, undercover agents and members of the judiciary - underscores the enormous challenge facing the US as it tries to curtail the $US25 billion ($26.5 billion) -a-year business of illegal drug trafficking.

Corruption is on the rise in the ranks of US law enforcement working the border, and nowhere is the problem more acute than in the frontline jobs with Garnica's former employer, US Customs and Border Protection, federal investigators say. Garnica's stiff sentence represented a rare victory in the struggle to root out tainted government employees.

Homeland Security statistics suggest the rush to fill thousands of border enforcement jobs has translated into lower hiring standards. Barely 15 per cent of Customs and Border Protection applicants undergo polygraph tests, and of those, 60 per cent were rejected by the agency because they failed the polygraph or were not qualified for the job, said the Democrat senator Mark Pryor, who oversees a Senate subcommittee on homeland security.

The number of Customs and Border Protection corruption investigations opened by the inspector-general climbed from 245 in 2006 to more than 770 this year. Corruption cases at its sister agency, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, rose from 66 to more than 220 over the same period. The vast majority of corruption cases involve illegal trafficking of drugs, guns, weapons and cash across the south-western border.

''We have in our country today a big presence of the Mexican cartels,'' Senator Pryor said. ''With about 50 per cent of the nation's methamphetamine and marijuana coming through Mexico and about 90 per cent of the cocaine, there is a huge financial incentive for cartels to try to corrupt our people.''

A Customs and Border Protection commissioner, Alan Bersin, said the rise in investigations might simply correspond to the rapid growth in personnel.

Corruption of ''customs officials all over the world has been a perennial problem of border inspection and border enforcement'', he said in an interview. ''What we haven't seen is a vast conspiracy in the workforce.

''It would be naive to think a $US1 billion smuggling industry would allow itself to be dependent on one or two corrupt employees, or if you eliminate that corrupt employee that they won't try to corrupt someone else.''

Garnica came to the attention of authorities in 1997 when they seized nearly 45 kilograms of cannabis on the Bridge of the Americas into El Paso. An informant fingered Garnica as part of the conspiracy. The FBI opened a case, but it went nowhere. In March 2005 she came under scrutiny again, but authorities lacked the evidence to charge her.

Four years passed before they got their big break. Early last year a Customs and Border Protection employee contacted Smith's office. Garnica, he said, was overly friendly; he suspected she was trying to lure him into the smuggling business.

The man was the perfect target, right out of the Cold War-era espionage handbook. He was recently divorced, with a child heading to university and a modest government salary. He was struggling to pay his bills.

''It's no different from spy agencies,'' Smith said. ''They look for weaknesses. Sex is a biggie. Alcohol, drug abuse, financial woes.''

The man, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because officials say his life is in danger, agreed to work undercover. His code name would be Angel.

It began subtly with chatty text messages, then drinks in a bar. Within a few months they were meeting for dinner. Garnica always picked up the tab and Angel always wore a wire, their taped conversations and text messages sent directly to Smith and his team in the inspector-general's office.

''Garnica was becoming his best friend,'' Smith said. ''Good recruiters don't just jump into it. They chip through the wall. That's what she was doing.''

In late September 2009, after four months of secret meetings and text messages, free drinks and small bribes, Garnica decided to test Angel.

She gave Angel a minor task: sign a form claiming the injury she suffered playing volleyball actually occurred at work. He did what he was told.

On the night before Halloween, Garnica summoned Angel. They had been talking for days about a big shipment - two vehicles. The pay-off: several thousand dollars.

Following instructions, Angel let the shipment through. El Paso police then stopped the truck, loaded with more than 70 kilograms of cannabis, and arrested the driver. Two days later a federal grand jury meeting in secret indicted Garnica and her co-conspirators.

Garnica, unaware of the indictments or Angel's role in the sting, prepared to bring across another load. The next shipment was set for the night of November 17. At the last minute investigators told Angel to call it off.

The next day La Estrella was behind bars.

The Washington Post

buglerbilly

28-09-10, 04:04 PM

Ares

A Defense Technology Blog

On the Border

Posted by Paul McLeary at 9/28/2010 8:39 AM CDT

NOGALES, Ariz--Standing on a hilltop that overlooks a series of ravines used by Mexicans to cross into the U.S. illegally, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent Paul Boulier remarks that in his 16 years of service here, the past year was the quietest. “They used to come over in groups of 20-30,” he says while watching two men move suspiciously on a hilltop on the opposite side of the border fence. “But now we see groups of 2-3.”

Boulier’s definition of quiet may be skewed by the volume of humanity he witnessed streaming across the border in previous years. Things along the Arizona border may be quieter for some Border Patrol veterans, but by any calculus they are still amazingly active. The 262-mi. stretch of the Tucson border sector has traditionally been the country’s most active—with more than three times as many arrests as the next-busiest sector. Fiscal 2010—ended Aug. 31—saw 203,000 arrests of illegal immigrants along the Tucson line, along with 940,000 lb. of marijuana seized and the deaths of 210 immigrants who succumbed to the desert or violence of the “coyotes”— smugglers immigrants pay up to $3,000 to sneak them across. Compare those numbers with FY09, and there has been a slide, which is in keeping with trends over the last decade. Fiscal 2009 saw 226,000 arrests and 1.1 million lb. of marijuana seized, while deaths stayed about the same. Those numbers may pop, but consider that in 2000 there were 616,000 arrests of illegal immigrants attempting to cross the border in the Tucson sector.

The reason for the drop in illegals is hard to pin down, but reasons normally given range from the lack of jobs due to the U.S. recession to better enforcement, tough barriers and technologies such as cameras and sensors that act as deterrents.

When it comes to the drug trade, however, the border area is about as porous as it's ever been, both in terms of volume as well as the political storm surrounding the issue. Nevertheless, the drug cartel violence that has been ripping northern Mexico apart, and which recently caused Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to compare it to an insurgency, is not spilling across the border. Take the Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez, whose 2,700 mostly drug-related murders last year have saddled it with the moniker “murder capital of the world.” Just across the border, El Paso, Tex., saw just one murder last year. Arizona, which sees more illegals and drugs pass over the border with Mexico than any other state, actually saw its crime rate drop 12% last year.

The reasons for this are simple. The drug cartels are big business, and like any big business the bosses are brutally rational actors who know full well that violence and crime on the American side of the border would be bad for their bottom line. If Border Patrol agents or local police were to be killed, the weight of the U.S. military and law enforcement institutions would wake up and clamp down hard, sealing off their smuggling routes. And so the cartels are willing to lose a few battles, and a few bundles of drugs, to win the larger smuggling war.

buglerbilly

01-10-10, 05:39 PM

Ares

A Defense Technology Blog

Rethinking the 'War' in War on Drugs

Posted by John M. Doyle at 10/1/2010 8:46 AM CDT

The 'War on Drugs” is a national security issue and not just a law enforcement problem, says a new study by a Washington think tank.

The report, Crime Wars: Gangs, Cartels and U.S. National Security, says the current threat from drug gangs throughout much of the Americas is nothing short of a “criminal insurgency in the Western Hemisphere.” The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) released the 80-page study in Washington Thursday (Sept. 30).

http://www.cnas.org/node/5022

Written by Robert Killebrew, a retired U.S. Army colonel, and Jennifer Bernal, a CNAS researcher, it says interlocking narcotics cartels operate within 14 sovereign nations in the Americas and pose a threat to civil society in those countries.

But the report says the insurgency should not be viewed as an attempt to take over a government – but rather a drive to destabilize it and destroy its credibility with its citizens – making it easier to do business. The study notes narcotics money fueled -- and corrupted -- the 30-year insurgency in Colombia by the FARC guerrillas. With U.S. assistance and perseverance in Bogota, the Colombian government has started to stabilize the country.

The risk to the U.S. doesn't stop at the Mexican border, the reports says, noting Mexican drug cartels operate “branch offices” in more than 230 U.S. and Canadian cities. The Salvadoran gang, MS-13, operates in 30 U.S. states.

“Whatever national strategy is developed to counter the cartel insurgency, the focus must ultimately include supporting local police departments and the cop on the beat, who confronts the gangs every day,” the report declared.

Unlike Mexico or Colombia, where there has been open warfare between drug gangs and the government, there is no counter insurgency role within U.S. borders for the U.S. Military, says Killebrew, a former Special Forces officer and Airborne commander. However, the U.S. Military can support and train militaries and law enforcement agencies in other countries – although with a light footprint. It's better for the U.S. to train locals in intelligence gathering, surveillance and reconnaissance than to do it for them, he adds.

The take-away, Killebrew said after his presentation, is that “we have to help people help themselves … the further in the background we can be, the better off we all are going to be.”

The report, which focused only on the Americas, reached five conclusions:

--crime, terrorism and insurgency are interwoven;

--the challenge of criminal networks is multinational;

--U.S. efforts to counter the drug scourge must include appropriate assistance to strengthen security and law enforcement institutions in Latin America;

--the U.S. must clean its own house, reducing the use of illegal drugs and the influence of gang culture – particularly among young people;

--defeating the cartels and their allies will take a long time.

buglerbilly

03-10-10, 01:52 PM

Mexico's mayors becoming casualties of drug wars; many towns without leaders

Mexican mayors caught in deadly drug-cartel crossfire
Rival mafias fighting to control drug sales, marijuana and poppy fields, meth labs and lucrative smuggling routes are targeting local officials.

By Anne-Marie O'Connor and William Booth
Washington Post Foreign Service

Sunday, October 3, 2010; 4:10 AM

TANCITARO, MEXICO - Gustavo Sanchez worked hard in this Mexican farming town at one of the most dangerous jobs in the country. He was a mayor. Last weekend, Sanchez and a town councilman disappeared. Their bodies were found Monday, the skulls smashed open in the fifth killing of a mayor in six weeks.

According to supporters at city hall, Sanchez was honest and brave. Less than a year ago, the 36-year-old schoolteacher and martial-arts instructor agreed to lead this prosperous western community after the previous mayor abruptly quit, citing threats by drug traffickers, and took the entire town council with him.

Sanchez's short political career ended on the side of a muddy, lonely road, his handsome, mustachioed face unrecognizable. His mutilated colleague Rafael Equihua lay dead beside him.

At least 11 mayors have been killed this year across Mexico, as a spooky sense of permanent siege takes hold in the many communities where rival mafias fight for control of local drug sales, marijuana and poppy fields, methamphetamine labs and billion-dollar smuggling routes to the United States.

In recent months, one mayor was killed by masked gunmen who stormed city hall. One was dragged out of his home and later executed, allegedly by renegade members of his own municipal police force. Another was shot in a restaurant by men wielding AK-47 assault rifles.

More than 100 mayors have been threatened, kidnapped, shot at or subjected to extortion in the past two years, according to Ramon Galindo Noriega, a senator and head of a congressional commission that supports municipal governments. The number is actually far higher, Galindo Noriega said, but many go unreported because of fears that a police investigation would only make matters worse.

The threats and killings targeting city halls have left many towns without candidates for office, forcing state governments to appoint caretaker administrators. The result, observers say, is a civil society at risk. In most of Mexico, city halls are the people's main contact with the state. When local governments become paralyzed, schools go unbuilt, potholes unfilled, and economic and social development programs grind to a halt.

'A psychosis of fear'

Tancitaro does not seem a likely node for the vicious drug wars that have left tens of thousands of Mexicans dead in the past four years. Nestled high in pine forests at the foot of a sacred volcano in the western state of Michoacan, the municipality of 26,000 promotes itself as "the world avocado capital."

But its sleepy appearance belies a recent spasm of violence. Last year, the town secretary was kidnapped, tortured and killed. In the nearby village of Pareo, six policemen were ambushed and executed. Officials say that doctors and nurses have refused assignments to the area following attacks on health workers. In March 2009, masked gunmen stopped an ambulance in Tancitaro and ordered its doctor and nurse to treat wounded colleagues.

In December, after the former mayor and town council resigned, Sanchez fired the municipality's 60-strong police force, on the grounds that it was too corrupt to salvage. One local newspaper columnist called his killing this week a "chronicle of a death foretold."

"It's sad and painful," said Martin Urbina, the current town secretary. "People are very nervous. We are trying to stay on track. When something like this happens in a community, there is a collective psychosis. A psychosis of fear. I don't know if I am staying or leaving."

Sanchez was "very beloved," Urbina said. "He was charismatic, honest. He loved to help the people."

Juan Jose Alejo Guerrero, commander of the state police in Tancitaro, blames "organized crime" for the violence. "This is a dispute for the plaza of Tancitaro," he said, using the term for an area controlled by one mafia or another. "This is happening in towns all over Mexico."

Alejo Guerrero added: "This is a small municipality. It is a very tranquil place. There's nothing else here except avocado orchards."

Shadow of drug violence

But drugs are also here. Two weeks ago, the Mexican army raided a clandestine meth lab in the hills outside the municipality. Marijuana and poppy plantations are hidden in the mountains, their illicit crops frequently burned by the military at the urging of the U.S. government. Asked which groups were fighting for control of the area, the police commander said, "Who knows?"

The Michoacan attorney general told reporters that Sanchez's killing is being investigated as a possible robbery, because of "the unusual circumstances." Instead of binding, gagging and shooting him at close range, his killers appeared to have bashed his head in with rocks. Few people here give credence to the robbery theory.

A drug counselor who works with meth addicts in the area spoke on the condition of anonymity because of security concerns. The counselor said the killings represented an attempt by an ascendant paramilitary criminal organization called the Zetas to unseat the hyperviolent regional drug organization known as La Familia, which he said had long controlled the Tancitaro area. The Zetas "do not want government," the counselor said.

Four members of the current town council said when asked that they didn't know whether they would remain in office.

Rosario Rico, a councilwoman, is worried about the delivery of services. Elderly residents who live in rural areas were called into town Sunday to receive federal assistance. But when they arrived Monday, the discovery of Sanchez's killing had created an uproar, and there was nothing to give them.

"We think the people are the biggest losers," Rico said.

"The reality is that none of us know how the city hall will continue functioning," another local official said.

Town officials said Margarita Soriano Pantoja was next in line to be named mayor. But in an interview, she said she had not volunteered for the post.

"The risk exists, but someone needs to take the job," Soriano said. "We will propose someone to serve while the state congress decides. But we are all wondering who."

Researcher Gabriela Martinez in Mexico City contributed to this report.

buglerbilly

14-10-10, 04:20 PM

CBP Begins Unmanned Aircraft Operations from Corpus Christi

(Source: General Atomics Aeronautical; dated September 8, issued October 13, 2010)

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas –-- U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) announces today the beginning of operations for its Unmanned Aircraft Systems Program (UAS) from the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station during an official ceremony at its facilities on the naval base. The UAS flights performed from this location will provide critical aerial surveillance assistance to CBP border security personnel on the ground along the Texas-Mexico border.

“Over the last year, CBP worked closely with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the U.S. Navy to obtain approvals to operate the CBP Predator B Unmanned Aircraft System from Naval Air Station Corpus Christi, Texas, and routinely fly across the entire Texas-Mexico land border” said CBP Commissioner Alan Bersin. “The expansion of UAS demonstrates CBP’s commitment and dedication to maintain the highest levels of public safety and security and represents another layer of our strategy to fulfill our mission of securing our borders while facilitating travel and trade.”

The FAA recently approved two Certificates of Authorization (COA) requests that will enable CBP to operate a CBP UAS in Texas airspace. The first allows access into Texas from Arizona to the Big Bend border region. The second enables CBP to launch and recover a UAS from Naval Air Station (NAS) Corpus Christi, Texas, and to operate along the entire Texas land border, coastal region, and over open water.

The two COAs provide CBP the capability to simultaneously operate two unmanned aircraft along the southwest border: one aircraft operated by the National Air Space Security Operations Center in Corpus Christi and a second aircraft flying from the National Air Space Security Operations Center in Sierra Vista Arizona. Furthermore, CBP UAS flights can now cover the entire Texas border and Gulf Coast region.

On the Southwest border, CBP operates now Predator Bs from Sierra Vista, Arizona and Corpus Christi, Texas. The missions from these two centers will allow CBP to deploy its unmanned aircraft from the eastern tip of California across the common Mexican land borders of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.

CBP identified NAS Corpus Christi as a location for its fourth UAS Operations Center because it will allow for the greatest support of the CBP Air and Marine Strategic Plan to secure the Gulf of Mexico and shared border between Texas and Mexico, and will allow for the most effective execution of counter-drug operations in the Western Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. Additionally, basing a CBP UAS at NAS Corpus Christi best postures CBP for rapid deployment throughout the southern tier of the U.S. and the Western Hemisphere. This operational capability increases CBP ability to provide disaster relief and humanitarian support in the Gulf Coast region. CBP currently has one of its two P-3 Operations Centers located at NAS Corpus Christi.

Since the inception of the CBP UAS Program, the Office of Air and Marine has flown more than 7,130 UAS hours, responding to more than 4,000 requests for support from CBP agents on the ground and in support of CBP partners in disaster relief and emergency response, including various state governments and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The efforts of this program, the Nation’s first UAS program for homeland security, has led to the seizure of approximately 39,000 pounds of illicit drugs and the detention of more than 7,000 individuals suspected in engaging in illegal activity along the Southwest Border.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection is the unified border agency within the Department of Homeland Security charged with the management, control and protection of our nation's borders at and between the official ports of entry. CBP is charged with keeping terrorists and terrorist weapons out of the country while enforcing hundreds of U.S. laws.

-ends-

buglerbilly

19-10-10, 12:19 PM

Threat grows as Mexican cartels move to beef up U.S. presence

Tijuana drug violence comes close to the U.S.
U.S. authorities fear Mexican drug cartels are attempting to build up their U.S. presence.

By William Booth and Nick Miroff
Washington Post Foreign Service

Tuesday, October 19, 2010; 1:36 AM

SAN DIEGO -- When a major Mexican drug cartel opened a branch office here on the California side of the border, U.S. authorities tapped into their cellphones - then listened, watched and waited.

Their surveillance effort captured more than 50,000 calls over six months, conversations that reached deep into Mexico and helped build a sprawling case against 43 suspects - including Mexican police and top officials - allegedly linked to a savage trafficking ring known as the Fernando Sanchez Organization.

According to the wiretaps and confidential informants, the suspects plotted kidnappings and killings and hired American teenage girls, with nicknames like Dopey, to smuggle quarter-pound loads of methamphetamine across the border for $100 a trip. To send a message to a rival, they dumped a disemboweled dog in his mother's front yard.

But U.S. law enforcement officials say the most worrisome thing about the Fernando Sanchez Organization was how aggressively it moved to set up operations in the United States, working out of a San Diego apartment it called "The Office."

At a time of heightened concern in Washington that drug violence along the border may spill into the United States, the case dubbed "Luz Verde," or Green Light, shows how Mexican cartels are trying to build up their U.S. presence.

The Fernando Sanchez Organization's San Diego venture functioned almost like a franchise, prosecutors say, giving it greater control over lucrative smuggling routes and drug distribution networks north of the border.

"They moved back and forth, from one side to the other. They commuted. We had lieutenants of the organization living here in San Diego and ordering kidnappings and murders in Mexico," said Todd Robinson, the assistant U.S. attorney who will prosecute the alleged drug ring next year.

The case shows that as the border becomes less of an operational barrier for Mexican cartels, it appears to be less of one for U.S. surveillance efforts. Because the suspects' cellphone and radio traffic could be captured by towers on the northern side of the border, U.S. agents were able to eavesdrop on calls made on Mexican cellphones, between two callers in Mexico - a tactic prosecutors say has never been deployed so extensively.

Captured on one wiretap: a cartel leader, a former homicide detective from Tijuana, negotiating with a Mexican state judicial police officer about a job offer to lead a death squad.

Recorded on other calls: the operation's biggest catch, Jesus Quinones Marquez, a high-ranking Mexican official and alleged cartel operative code-named "El Rinon," or "The Kidney." As he worked and socialized with U.S. law enforcement officials in his role as international liaison for the Baja California attorney general's office, Quinones passed confidential information to cartel bosses and directed Mexican police to take action against rival traffickers, prosecutors say.

He and 34 other suspects are now in U.S. jails. The remaining eight are still at large.

Investigators say it is not unusual for Mexican cartel leaders and their underlings to move north to seek refuge, or place representatives in such cities as Los Angeles, Chicago and Atlanta to manage large deliveries of drugs. But the Fernando Sanchez Organization was more ambitious. It was building a network in San Diego, complete with senior managers to facilitate large and small drug shipments and sales.

The gang is an offshoot of the Tijuana cartel, led by baby-faced Fernando Sanchez Arellano, a nephew of the once fearsome Arellano-Felix brothers who ran the Tijuana drug trade for almost 20 years before they were captured or killed. The nephew's organization is a weaker syndicate, at war with itself and rivals, police say, and locked in a desperate struggle to maintain market share in the highly competitive billion-dollar drug corridor into California.

Unlike the cartel crews in Mexico, which are typically built on strong ties between families or friends, the San Diego franchise recruited from U.S.-based Latino street gangs. Some were illegal immigrants, others U.S. citizens, according to arrest warrants. Twelve of the 43 indicted have alleged gang affiliations in San Diego. Six of the 43 are current or former Mexican law enforcement officers. Eight are women.

"You couldn't pick these people out of a crowd," said Leonard Miranda, a retired captain in the Chula Vista, Calif., police department who worked on the investigation. "Some of them kept a very low profile. Their family members didn't even know."

According to the 86-page federal racketeering indictment unsealed July 23, cartel members operated stash houses, managed smuggling crews, distributed marijuana and methamphetamine, trafficked weapons, laundered money, committed robberies and collected drug debts. When people did not pay, they were kidnapped or targeted with execution on both sides of the border.

U.S. authorities say the wiretaps allowed them to foil murder plots and other violent acts. The assistant special agent in charge of the San Diego FBI office, David Bowdich, said his teams stopped the execution of two Mexican police officers. The authorities also saved a cartel associate called "Sharky" who was going to be killed because he had disrespected drug lords in Tijuana.

Troubling signs

From their apartments by the beach or cars parked at motels, the targets of the investigation talked and talked on their cellphones.

They almost always spoke in Spanish, usually in clipped code, with lots of street slang. They bought and quickly discarded the phones. Top lieutenants often employed "alineadores," personal assistants who juggled a dozen phones and took messages so that the boss would not be heard on the line. Investigators say the alleged cartel members clearly were afraid that their calls could be monitored.

And they were right. In February, the FBI secured hard-to-get "roving" wiretaps for 44 individuals that allowed investigators to track their movements via global positioning satellites.

According to U.S. law enforcement officials, the Mexican government was not involved in the investigation.

Quinones, the high-ranking Mexican official, was a close adviser to Attorney General Rommel Moreno, the top prosecutor in Mexico's Baja California state. He was arrested July 22 when U.S. agents invited him to the San Diego police department to help with an investigation. It was a setup.

"My client's gone from a cross-border international liaison officer to a guy in a 10-by-10-foot isolation cell in lockdown 23 hours a day," said his defense attorney, Patrick Hall, who described Quinones as "a normal dad with three kids, married 11 years, who lived in Tijuana all his adult life and was one of the dads out there at the Little League baseball games."

Hall said the federal agents were "reading in facts and interpretations and distortions into the true meanings of what's being said on the wiretaps."

Quinones's arrest has almost certainly dealt a blow to efforts at cross-border information sharing and collaboration, though officials on both sides played down the apparent betrayal. "Would you stop going to church just because of one bad priest?" Quinones's boss, Moreno, said in an interview in Tijuana.

But the U.S. wiretaps also detected other troubling signs of corruption.

On the day of the mass arrests, U.S. agents arranged for suspected drug lieutenant Jose Najera Gil to pick up visa documents he was seeking from the U.S. Consulate in Tijuana. But the Mexican police who were supposed to arrest him at the consulate failed to show up.

A day before the arrests, another Mexican police officer, Jose Ortega Nuvo, received a call on his cellphone, which was being tapped by U.S agents. The caller warned him that he was about to be arrested. According to court testimony, the call came from the offices of the federal police in Mexico City - a special unit vetted to work alongside agents from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

boothb@washpost.com miroffn@washpost.com

buglerbilly

02-11-10, 04:41 AM

Three Americans killed in Mexico

November 2, 2010 - 12:24PM

Three Americans were fatally shot over the weekend in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico's notorious murder capital and a focal point of its brutal drug violence, US officials say.

US State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said it was not clear if the three Americans were killed in deliberate attacks or if they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"We offer our condolences to the families of the victims," he said.

Crowley said Washington is "providing all possible assistance" to Mexico in the investigation of the murders.

"Two (US) citizens were fatally shot early Sunday, close to the Zaragoza International Bridge" linking Ciudad Juarez to El Paso, Texas, Crowley said.

"And in a separate incident, another US citizen was fatally wounded in Ciudad Juarez itself," he said.

Meanwhile, authorities in Mexico said the three Americans were two brothers and a woman who were killed on Sunday while driving toward the bridge straddling the border.

Mexican officials said a 14-year-old boy was also wounded in the incident.

According to Mexican news reports, the men were aged 23 and 15 and the woman was the wife of the older brother.

Officials in the state of Chihuahua said the shooting took place about a kilometre from the bridge, by gunmen with assault weapons who fired off more than 50 rounds, the office said in a statement.

"The three bodies were recovered with help from US authorities to be taken to El Paso," the statement added.

The three murder victims were of Hispanic origin, the office said without mentioning whether the 14-year-old boy wounded in the action was also a US citizen.

The fatal shootings come as Mexico announced that its military arrested a fourth suspect in the March 13 murder of a US consular employee and her husband, a crime that also took place in Ciudad Juarez.

Mexico's army arrested Miguel Angel Nevarez, alias "Glasses", on Saturday night, for his suspected role in the killing of an American working at the consulate and her husband and the husband of another staff member, the ministry said in a statement.

Mexico in September extradited one of three suspects already arrested for the triple murder, which officials blame on the Los Aztecas gang -- hitmen for the powerful Juarez drug cartel.

The US consulate in Ciudad Juarez was briefly closed after the killings in March, and again at the end of July due to an unspecified threat.

© 2010 AFP

buglerbilly

05-11-10, 02:41 PM

C-4 Seized in Navy SEAL Smuggling Case

November 05, 2010

Associated Press

BIG problem for Mexico, guns and explosives coming from the USA...........it's OK for the US to complain about drugs coming North BUT they also need to do heaps more about Guns going south.............

LAS VEGAS -- Federal agents seized five pounds of C-4 military explosives from the home of a man accused with a Navy SEAL and a Las Vegas associate of smuggling machine guns from Iraq into the U.S. for sale and shipment to Mexico, authorities said Thursday.

Grenades and night-vision goggles also were found in the Colorado home of 34-year-old Richard Paul, according to federal prosecutors and federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents in Las Vegas and Colorado.

Paul and Andrew Kaufman, 36, of Las Vegas, were arrested Wednesday and appeared Thursday before federal magistrate judges in Durango and Las Vegas on conspiracy charges. Each was ordered held in federal custody pending an evidentiary hearing.

They are accused of conspiring with Navy SEAL Nicholas Bickle of San Diego to smuggle and sell weapons to an undercover federal agent in Nevada and Colorado.

"As long as they got paid ... they didn't care if the weapons wound up in Mexico or on the streets of Las Vegas," federal prosecutor Drew Smith told U.S. Magistrate Judge George Foley Jr. in Las Vegas.

Smith characterized Bickle, 33, as a "rogue Navy SEAL" -- an active-duty special warfare operator 1st class who Smith said also worked as a consultant on the Hollywood movie "Transformers 3."

Bickle was arrested Wednesday and was due to appear Friday before a federal magistrate judge in San Diego.

Smith said outside court that federal agents expected to find weapons, but were surprised to find 5 pounds (2.3 kilograms) of C-4 plastic explosive, blasting cap detonators and other military items at Paul's home in Colorado.

Brad Briersdorf, a Colorado-based ATF spokesman, said there were no evacuations of the neighborhood while agents removed the military-grade explosive. C-4 is a stable compound that requires an initiator or a blasting cap to cause a blast.

Briersdorf declined to elaborate about the destructive power of the explosives found in Paul's home.

Smith said federal agents were still serving search warrants Thursday at Bickle's home, vehicle and a storage unit in the San Diego area.

"What we have here is simply greed at any cost," Smith told the judge in Las Vegas.

Bickle is accused in a criminal complaint of smuggling 80 AK-47 weapons from Iraq or Afghanistan, including factory-made 7.62 mm Iraqi machine guns that would be difficult or impossible to trace. Other weapons included Ruger handguns of the type used by U.S. military police officers.

"According to the other members of the organization, this was possible because Navy SEALs are not searched when returning from deployments," the criminal complaint said.

Las Vegas-based ATF Special Agent Eric Fox alleged in a criminal complaint filed Oct. 29 that at least one of the accused co-conspirators bragged that the guns were from the military in the Middle East and would be untraceable.

The investigation began with a tip from a fourth man, an ex-felon turned confidential informant facing felony battery domestic violence and robbery charges in Nevada. He is cooperating with authorities and was not charged in the federal case.

Neither the informant nor the undercover agent was identified.

Bickle is quoted in the complaint as warning the informant of the consequences of turning against him.

"If you ever [expletive] me, you know who we are," he is quoted as saying. "We're the government, we'll catch you."

Smith said Bickle, his close friend, Paul, in Colorado, and their associate Kaufman in Nevada sold machine guns for $1,300 to $2,400 each, and handguns for $300 to an undercover federal agent who told them they would be shipped to Mexico.

The prosecutor said the group could have reaped hundreds of thousands of dollars selling arms over the last year.

Smith told Foley that prosecutors expect to seek an indictment in Las Vegas on charges including distribution of explosive materials, arms smuggling and illegal firearms dealing. He said the explosives charge carries a possible sentence of 20 years in federal prison.

Ben Nadig, Kaufman's lawyer, declined comment before and after the brief court appearance.

Alex Chavarria Tejada, lawyer for Paul in Durango, did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.

The complaint accuses the trio of conspiring to smuggle and sell 18 weapons and 14 other firearms since June to an undercover federal agent in Las Vegas and Colorado. The single conspiracy charge carries a possible sentence of up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

It alleges that Bickle, Kaufman and Paul engaged in firearms dealing without paying a special tax, possessed a machine gun that wasn't registered in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record, and transferred an unregistered machine gun.

© Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

buglerbilly

07-11-10, 02:43 AM

Mexican drug lord killed as running battles close border city

Mexican drug baron Antonio 'Tony the Storm' Ezequiel Cárdenas has been killed in a raging firefight at the US border between government security forces and gunmen from the Gulf narcotics cartel.

By Philip Sherwell, New York

Published: 5:45PM GMT 06 Nov 2010

Cárdenas, who had a $5 million US bounty on his head, was nicknamed 'Tony Tormenta' for his reputation for torturing and beheading rivals Photo: EPA

Ezequiel, one of Mexico's most wanted drug lords, died during the running battles that lasted several hours as terrified locals hid behind locked doors in the city of Matamoros, just across the frontier from Brownsville, Texas.

Backed by helicopter support, 150 Mexican marines exchanged fire with snipers and gunmen moving through abandoned streets in trucks as they closed in on the hideout of Cárdenas.

Three marines and four gunmen were killed in the battles and a local reporter died after being shot in crossfire.

Cárdenas, 48, who had a $5 million US bounty on his head, was nicknamed "Tony Tormenta" for his reputation for torturing and beheading rivals. He replaced his brother Osiel at the helm of the Gulf cartel after he was arrested and extradited to the US in 2007.

He is the latest narco-boss to be killed or captured by the Mexican authorities in their war with the drug gangs that run the lucrative cocaine trafficking operations into the US.

"Today, we have taken another meaningful step toward the dismantling of criminal groups that do so much damage to our country," said Alejandro Poire, presidential security spokesman.

But those recent successes have done little to diminish the bloodshed as rival cartels fight out their brutal turf war.

More than 28,000 people have been killed across Mexico in drug-related violence since December 2006, when the newly-elected President Felipe Calderón launched his crackdown.

And within hours of Cárdenas' death, gangs set up roadblocks and set cars on fire near the colonial city of Morelia in western Mexico after soldiers captured a local cartel leader.

buglerbilly

10-11-10, 12:40 PM

U.S. military helping Mexican troops battle drug cartels

By Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Staff Writer

Wednesday, November 10, 2010; 12:52 AM

The U.S. military has begun to work closely with Mexico's armed forces, sharing information and training soldiers in an expanding effort to help that country battle its violent drug cartels, according to U.S. and Mexican officials.

U.S. military officials have been hesitant to discuss publicly their growing ties with Mexico, for fear of triggering a backlash among a Mexican public wary of interference. But current and former officials say the U.S. military has instructed hundreds of Mexican officers in the past two years in subjects such as how to plan military operations, use intelligence to hunt traffickers and observe human rights.

The Pentagon's counternarcotics funding for Mexico has nearly tripled, from $12.2 million in 2008 to more than $34 million in 2010, according to estimates by the Government Accountability Office. While that is a small fraction of the Mexican anti-drug money provided by the State Department, the funding is significant because of the history of chilly relations between the two militaries.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton recently reflected U.S. alarm over the Mexican cartels, saying that in some cases they were "morphing into or making common cause with what we would consider an insurgency." The comment was splashed across front pages in Mexico, and President Obama hastened to assure angry Mexicans that he did not characterize the traffickers as a rebel movement.

Even so, U.S. military officials see similarities with their own counterinsurgency efforts and are passing on to the Mexicans some of the techniques they have honed, such as analyzing intelligence to track down enemy fighters.

"We have tried to share many of the lessons we've learned in chasing terrorist organizations in Iraq and Afghanistan," said Gen. Victor Renuart, who recently retired as head of the U.S. military's Northern Command, which oversees the bilateral cooperation.

Mexico historically has been among the most reluctant countries in the hemisphere to cooperate with U.S. forces, in part because of lingering bitterness over invasions. Mexico still will not permit U.S. military trainers or advisers to deploy there full time.

But U.S. military officers are regularly traveling to Mexico to provide short courses for their Mexican counterparts, who then train their own personnel. In addition, more Mexicans are being trained at various U.S. military bases, officials say. The two sides' exchange of information has improved dramatically, officials say.

"The changes in the relationship between the Mexican military and the U.S. military are, I believe, historic," Renuart said.

The Obama administration is now considering what more it can do for Mexico's security forces.

"We've been directed by the president, at a very high level, to really think hard about how we can up our game, do more to support" the partnership with the Mexican government, said one senior U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

One plan under consideration involves using $50 million in funds from the Pentagon's 2011 budget to improve security along Mexico's southern border, an important corridor for drugs, officials said.

The Pentagon funds are in addition to the Merida Initiative, a package of law enforcement equipment and training run through the State Department. It has provided about $1.5 billion for Mexico over three years.

U.S. officials emphasize that the military assistance is part of a government-wide effort to assist Mexico on security. U.S. law enforcement agencies have also dramatically increased their cooperation with their Mexican counterparts, even embedding U.S. intelligence specialists in a Mexican command center.

"There clearly is a role for the U.S. military, but it is as a supporting player," said Roberta Jacobson, acting principal deputy assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere, who coordinates Merida Initiative assistance.

The Pentagon will also foot part of the bill for the 1,200 National Guard troops that Obama recently decided to send to the border with Mexico. Those forces are under state control.

Alarmed by the soaring drug violence, some U.S. lawmakers are urging the Pentagon and intelligence community to do more to help Mexico. "These might include new ways to jointly deploy aviation, surveillance and intelligence assets," Sen. Richard G. Lugar (Ind.), the senior Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, said in a recent speech.

But some U.S. analysts are skeptical. Mexican President Felipe Calderon has faced increasing criticism over his decision to battle the cartels with troops, who have been accused of thousands of human rights abuses.

"It's better to have a military that's better and more accountable. That said, I'm not sure the military is the right response. I think the deployment of the military has been done very badly" in Mexico, said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a Brookings Institution fellow who has studied the drug war.

Mexican soldiers were long taught that their main mission was protecting their country from the United States, which took half its territory after the mid-19th century Mexican-American War.

Cooperation began to increase in recent years with the collapse of Mexico's one-party political system. But it is the growing threat from drug traffickers that has prompted the biggest change. Drug violence has claimed at least 30,000 lives in Mexico in the past four years.

"President Calderon wants us in," said the senior U.S. official, adding: "We have to be respectful, obviously, and make clear we take responsibility for part of the problem and are supporting, not telling Mexico what to do."

Navy Adm. James A. Winnefeld Jr., the chief of the Northern Command, has called the partnership with Mexico his "number one priority." He declined an interview request.

In the past, U.S. military training teams rarely went to Mexico, analysts say. But Renuart said that small U.S. teams have been visiting the Mexican military academies, as well as regional military commands. Increased training is also occurring in the United States, officials say.

In addition to providing intelligence and human rights courses, U.S. military instructors are teaching Mexicans how to use and maintain equipment provided through the Merida Initiative, such as helicopters and night-vision goggles.

Among those traveling to Mexico to give seminars to the military are staff members from the Joint Special Operations University, a sort of "college" for U.S. Special Operations forces.

Mexico's army has stationed a permanent liaison officer at the Northern Command, which is based in Colorado. And for the first time, a Mexican officer is serving as assistant commandant at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation at Fort Benning, Ga., formerly known as the School of the Americas.

Information-sharing between the two militaries has improved "immensely," said Mexican Ambassador Arturo Sarukhan.

The Northern Command "has become a valuable clearinghouse on the U.S. side, ensuring all the disparate U.S. agencies are working together, ensuring that information is reaching those who need to have it in real time - so we can provide the endgame," he said.

Staff writer Greg Jaffe contributed to this report.

buglerbilly

11-11-10, 02:23 AM

U.S. Flailing as American Guns Fuel Mexico’s Drug War

By Adam Rawnsley November 10, 2010 | 6:12 pm

Last month, a pair of Mexican drug cartels got into a shootout – and killed 15 recovering addicts who happened to be working at a car wash nearby. It’s part of a wave of violence that’s killed tens of thousands of people in recent years. And it’s partially America’s fault. 70,000 American guns have flowed into Mexico. And U.S. efforts to keep that from happening have been lame, at best, according to a new report from the Justice Department’s inspector general. “Project Gunrunner” didn’t even bother “pursu[ing] those who request and pay for the guns.”

DOJ’s inspector general report knocks the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms effort to trace the guns and nab the weapons traffickers who are fueling Mexico’s increasingly bloody and well-armed drug war that playing out along America’s southern border. According to the report, the ATF’s anti-weapons trafficking efforts are unambitious, poorly coordinated and a lack of resources.

Instead of taking down the networks who orchestrate gun trafficking, the report found that ATF is wasting it time on nickel and dime busts against the patsies that weapons traffickers put up to fill out the legal paperwork to buy their guns — around two defendants per case. Meanwhile, cases that target the networks as a whole are yet to be filed.

Justice Department investigators found that ATF had trouble cooperating with Mexican government officials regarding Project Gunrunner traces because of a lack of coordination within the various Mexican law enforcement agencies. ATF had also not informed Mexican government officials well enough about the Gunrunner program, its goals and successes, investigators said.

buglerbilly

19-11-10, 11:25 AM

Trying to save lives amid relentless drug violence, Mexican medical workers put their own on the line

Inside Mexico's drug war
Mexico's ongoing drug war continues to claim lives and disrupt order in the country.

By Anne-Marie O'Connor and William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writers

Friday, November 19, 2010; 12:46 AM

ZAPOPAN, MEXICO - Physician Jose Luis Guerrero was at the bedside of a patient when the terrified young man splattered with blood burst into the hospital, screaming that hit men were chasing him.

Minutes later, automatic weapons fire strafed the walls. Two receptionists fainted. A grenade exploded through the window of the intensive care unit, raining glass beside a 14-year-old girl who had been injured in a car accident. Police shot wildly in the streets as patients in hospital gowns ran in search of closets to hide in.

It is the kind of medical emergency Mexico's doctors and nurses have come to dread, as mounting drug violence tears at the country's social safety net, shuttering clinics, creating no-go zones for ambulances and forcing medical workers to flee north of the border.

"We pray not to have these kinds of patients," said Guerrero, a 32-year-old trauma specialist who is director of the clean, modern Arboledas Hospital in the suburbs of Guadalajara, still visibly upset by the memory of the July melee. The bloodied young man was targeted by two truckloads of assassins, police later said, because he was dating the girlfriend of a drug trafficker. He survived.

With alarming frequency, narcotics violence is spilling into hospitals and clinics across Mexico. Drug traffickers have shot doctors who treated them. They've burst into emergency rooms and executed their enemies on operating tables. They've hijacked ambulances, demanding that paramedics save the lives of wounded gunmen.

"These attacks have not been reported by the press, who fear reprisals," said Ricardo Monreal, a federal senator and former governor of Zacatecas state. "Like teachers who are afraid to teach, the doctors do not want to work. This is more collateral damage generated by the fight against organized crime."

Physician Ramon Murrieta Gonzalez, the president-elect of the Medical College of Mexico, a national umbrella organization, said professional groups like his try to keep word out of the media when a doctor is shot to death to avoid stigmatizing the children and other survivors, as readers often wrongly assume that the doctor was mixed up with drug traffickers.

Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova Villalobos has warned that drug violence is undermining Mexico's ability to provide quality medical care for its citizens - one of the proudest achievements of the modern Mexican state - as specialists refuse jobs in violence-plagued regions.

'In the middle of a war'

Murrieta said that in the past two years, 15 doctors have been shot to death in Ciudad Juarez - in drug rehabilitation centers, at their practices, in public places.

More than 250 Ciudad Juarez doctors now commute across the border from El Paso, where they have moved with their families for safety, Murrieta said. Seventy-five more have fled the area, and 30 percent of the city's private practices have closed, he said.

"We are in the middle of a war without choosing to be," Murrieta said. "Commandos assassinate wounded men in the hospital - once in the surgical suite while they were operating on the patient. This is a grave danger to the entire country."

Six doctors have been killed in Tamaulipas in the past two years, and two others in Tijuana, he said. The bullet-riddled body of a respected doctor was dumped on the highway in San Luis Potosi the other day, he said. Kidnappings are commonplace.

"Organized crime is taking a toll on us," he said.

In Tijuana, doctors have marched to demand more protection from organized crime after being targeted in kidnappings and endangered by gunmen who left three dead and three wounded in a 2007 attack at the main hospital.

Physician Jesus Cornejo Rincon, the president of the Medical College of Tijuana, said 50 doctors have left that city in the past two years because of the insecurity. And he said there has been a 50 percent decline in medical tourism - Americans coming to Mexico for cheaper treatment - because of fear and the delays at border crossings that have resulted from intensified security checks.

"There has been a very significant exodus of doctors because of the insecurity," he said. "Many have gone to the United States to work as paramedics."

"In the last four years, 40 doctors I know have moved to San Diego, and every night they drive across the border to go home," said physician Luis Calderon, the former vice president of the National Federation of Medical Colleges of Mexico and past president of the Medical College of Baja California. "The exodus on the border is much greater than it appears because many Tijuana doctors and their families live in the United States."

Impact across the border

U.S. cross-border medical delivery is also being hurt. The Salt Lake City branch of the Shriners Hospitals for Children recently suspended an outpatient clinic program it had run for 30 years in Ciudad Juarez, at which U.S. doctors would identify Mexican children in need of surgery for spinal injuries or treatment for scoliosis and spina bifida.

The Shriners moved the clinic to El Paso, but visas to bring the children over cost $166 each for a child and parent. The Ciudad Juarez clinic saw an average of 200 children each time the program was run, but only 35 showed up when it moved to El Paso.

"It has almost killed it," said Craig Patchin, the hospital administrator. "We struggled to keep it going as the violence escalated. But it became so apparent that targets over there weren't just drug traffickers, but innocent people at birthday parties and other gatherings."

The violence doesn't affect only doctors on the embattled border. Last month, gunmen shot a wounded man dead in his hospital bed in the Pacific Coast beach town of Mazatlan, then strolled to another room and dragged off a convalescing patient who was in police detention. The patient's whereabouts are not known.

"As citizens, we must overcome our fear and speak openly about this, for the good of our society," said physician Leticia Chavarria, the president of the Citizens Medical Committee in Ciudad Juarez. "Last year an armed commando barged into an emergency room and threatened everyone until they found the wounded man, and killed him right then and there, in the middle of the day."

Chavarria's group is calling for authorities to make it a federal crime to harm a doctor or endanger a medical facility. There has been no response by the government yet.

First responders at risk

The assaults in Mexico's hospitals and clinics have become so common that doctors and journalists have invented a new verb - "rematar," meaning "to re-kill."

"This is having a significant impact on public health," said human rights activist and university professor Victor Quintana, a former legislator from the border state of Chihuahua. "Organized crime is engaged in kidnappings, constant intimidation and extortion. Many doctors have been forced to emigrate because they had to close their clinics. This is reducing medical services."

Neither the government nor medical associations track how many doctors or nurses have left the country or stopped practicing. Government and media databases keep track of police and soldiers killed in drug violence - nearly 700 in the last four years - but not the number of medical workers.

In Mexico, hospitals have traditionally been seen as sanctuaries of healing, almost like churches, and so their violation is especially unnerving to Mexicans. "Before, hospitals were respected," said Martin Barron Cruz, a researcher at the National Institute of Criminal Science in Mexico City. "This adds to the psychological war by organized crime, as a show of force that is part of an alarming social deterioration."

Earlier this year in the Gulf Coast city of Tampico, south of the Texas border, Red Cross leader Miguel Angel Valdez told his staff not to begin treating anyone with bullet wounds until authorities arrive and secure the scene. Valdez acknowledges that help for victims may be delayed but says the new measures are needed to protect his paramedics.

"Otherwise, people are too much at risk," Valdez said. "Who would want to be in a situation like this? It is difficult to find people who want to go to a conflict zone."

In Ciudad Juarez, when a car bomb was set off in July, respected veteran physician Guillermo Ortiz Collazo rushed to where two policemen lay. As Ortiz examined the victims, there was a second explosion. Ortiz was killed, along with a paramedic.

oconnoram@washpost.com boothb@washpost.com

Researcher Gabriela Martinez in Mexico City contributed to this report.

buglerbilly

24-11-10, 01:18 AM

Does This Mexican Compound House Tons of U.S. Spies?

By Spencer Ackerman November 23, 2010 | 2:38 pm

Located just down the street from the U.S. embassy in Mexico City, this unassuming compound might house a smorgasbord of U.S. government agencies, devoted to spying on drug cartels, crime syndicates the Mexican security services and anyone else its inhabitants feel like. But Pentagon says the truth is much more boring.

In a recent story for Mexico’s Proceso, Jorge Carrasco A. and J. Jesús Esquivel introduced the world to the Office of Bi-National Intelligence, supposedly a joint U.S.-Mexico spy apparatus that isn’t so Bi in practice.

Located at 265 Paseo de la Reforma, the “super spy center” is home to (deep breath) the CIA; the FBI; the Department of Homeland Security; the Treasury; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; the National Reconnaissance Office, the NSA; the Defense Intelligence Agency; and the Drug Enforcement Agency. Not evidently included: Mexican agencies.

That might be because Mexican Presidents Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderon authorized and stood up the office “without taking into account any objections from the Mexican military,” according to the Proceso piece, and allowed it to “spy on Mexican government agencies, including the Secretariat of National Defense, Navy, and the diplomatic missions in Mexico.”

The U.S. government says it’s doing nothing of the sort. Representatives from the Pentagon and the CIA say there is no Office of Bi-National Intelligence.

A Pentagon spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Ditchey, says the compound is actually called the Bilateral Implementation Office for the Merida Initiative, a two-year old multimillion-dollar program providing U.S. aid to train Latin American law enforcement entities. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced its establishment in March 2009 during a Mexico City presser, and it opened its doors this past August 31.

“We have space within the office to use when we visit and attend coordination meetings,” Ditchey says, “however, we do not have personnel assigned there at this time.”

We’re told by a different government agency — cough — there aren’t any spies at the compound. Um, OK. But there appears to be information being exchanged at the facility. When announcing it, Clinton pledged that the Merida Initiative would “use every tool at our current disposal through administrative actions to track illegal guns, to arrest and punish those who are trafficking in illegal guns, to share more information with the Mexican Government so that they can also track and seize these guns.”

Since the establishment of Merida, the United States has become involved in Latin American efforts to stop the flow of drugs and guns to the tune of $1.3 billion. Roberta Jacobson, a senior State Department official for Latin American affairs, bragged in April about seizing “record amounts of drugs” from the cartels and “strengthening institutions, working with the Mexican government on the expansion of their national police.”

The United States has also provided Mexico with five Bell 412 Enhanced Performance helicopters for tracking and harassing the drug dealers — which has alarmed some in Mexico as a measure to even further militarize the increasingly violent struggle with the cartels.

And that’s what really concerns the Proceso writers. As the U.S. military increases its training efforts in Mexico, they write, “the Pentagon has brought counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism expertise from Iraq and Afghanistan to their offices in central Mexico.” Indeed, Robert Killebrew, a retired Army colonel now at the Center for a New American Security, argues that the best way to understand the rise in cartel violence across the Americas is through the prism of insurgency.

But Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been careful to avoid such characterizations. “In terms of helping Mexico, we’re prepared to help the Mexicans insofar as they want our help. They are a sovereign state,” he said in Bolivia yesterday. I would say that our military relationship is probably better now than it has been ever. But there are still obvious sensitivities in Mexico and we have to be attentive to those.”

Still, should the United States ratchet up its aid to Mexico — or move firmly into spycraft down there — 265 Paseo de la Reforma is likely to be where it’s coordinated.

Image: GoogleMaps

buglerbilly

25-11-10, 04:00 AM

NOVEMBER 24, 2010, 9:05 P.M. ET.

Mexico to Send Troops to Zone Near Texas

MEXICO CITY—Mexico will send more troops and federal police to fight drug violence that has spiraled out of control this year in northeastern Mexico along the U.S. border, the federal government said Wednesday.

The goal of "Coordinated Northeast Operation" is to reinforce government authority in the two states most heavily affected by fighting set off earlier this year by a split between the Gulf and Zetas drug gangs, federal police spokesman Alejandro Poire said.

The new effort also will to keep the cartels from regrouping after the takedown of key leaders, he said.

Cartel violence has escalated to warfare in parts of Tamaulipas state across the border from Texas and the industrial city of Monterrey in Nuevo Leon state.

Earlier Wednesday, federal police said they captured the new leader of a drug gang formerly led by jailed U.S.-born suspect Edgar "La Barbie" Valdez Villarreal, in a blow to a cartel fighting to control the region south of Mexico City to the Pacific resort of Acapulco.

Carlos Montemayor was arrested in Mexico City on Tuesday with the help of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and with information obtained after Mr. Valdez's arrest on Aug. 30, said Ramon Pequeno, the federal police anti-narcotics chief.

Mr. Montemayor, whose daughter is married to Mr. Valdez, took over his faction the splintered Beltran Leyva cartel after "La Barbie" was caught, Mr. Pequeno said.

Authorities said Mr. Valdez, a Texas native who faces possible extradition to the United States, tried to seize control of the gang after boss Arturo Beltran Leyva died in a December shootout with marines.

The battle within the cartel was marked by decapitations, bodies hung from bridges and shootouts in the area from Acapulco to the picturesque city of Cuernavaca.

Mr. Montemayor also told police that his faction was responsible for kidnapping and killing 20 Mexican tourists in Acapulco, mistaking them for members of the rival La Familia cartel, Mr. Pequeno said.

The group of men, many of them mechanics and some of them related to each other, were kidnapped in September while traveling in cars with license plates from their home state of Michoacan—the birthplace of La Familia.

The bodies of the men were found in a mass grave outside Acapulco earlier this month.

Mr. Pequeno said Mr. Montemayor joined the Beltran Leyvas in 2003 after meeting cartel leader Sergio Villarreal Barragan, a cousin of Mr. Montemayor's wife. Mr. Villarreal, who isn't related to "La Barbie," was captured in September.

Mr. Montemayor started out smuggling about 60 kilograms of cocaine a month to the United States, hidden in trucks, Mr. Pequeno said. At the time, the Beltran Leyvas were aligned with the powerful Sinaloa cartel.

The steady dismantling of the Beltran Leyva gang has been one of the biggest successes in President Felipe Calderon's drug war since he deployed tens of thousands of federal police and soldiers in 2006 to fight Mexico's cartels in their strongholds.

But the increasing splintering of the gangs has come with a bloody cost. An unprecedented 28,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence since 2006, and the fighting has become more horrifying.

buglerbilly

26-11-10, 01:59 PM

Mexico should call in the Marines

By Edward Schumacher-Matos, Washington Post

Friday, November 26, 2010

National pride is a good thing - until the water reaches your chin and your nation is still sinking. Mexico is not in that deep yet, but parts of the country are. Seven criminal cartels effectively control most cities and the drug trafficking lanes near the U.S. border, as well as their bases and production centers in the interior.

The Mexican government announced on Wednesday that it will send more troops and federal police to its northeastern corner near the U.S. border.

Yet the Mexican elite class and military remain too proud to do what they immediately should: Call in the Marines.

I say this a bit tendentiously to get Mexicans out of their nationalistic stupor. They, in fact, should call in the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force, too. But not in large units. Rather, Mexico is in dire need of American military specialists stationed within its borders to help the country build powerful electronic intelligence systems and train modern military and police forces to replace its suffocatingly hierarchical, outdated ones.

My saying this will insult many Mexicans, but I speak out of love for the country and its people. Mexico is neither a "failing state" nor a totally corrupt society, as - curiously - American nativists and humanitarians in the immigration debate claim (one wanting to wall off Mexico, the other to save Mexicans and invite into the United States anyone who wants to come).

But Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was right when she said the cartels are "morphing into or making common cause with what we would consider an insurgency." Mexican officials and media erupted in protest, and President Obama apologized.

He shouldn't have. The United States and Mexico have to recognize that cartels in Mexico and other parts of the world represent what a growing number of clear-eyed specialists are calling a new form of "criminal insurgency."

"They are attacking the state from within through corruption and violence and seeking to establish areas of influence in which they can operate without restriction," Bob Killebrew and Jennifer Bernal wrote in a just-released study for the Center for a New American Security.

Where it interests them, the cartels have cowed the local police, politicians and the press through intimidation, executions, massacres and coerced bribery. More than 200,000 people have fled Juarez; the border maquiladoras that were a national growth engine are struggling; and many business leaders from Monterrey, the modern industrial center of Mexico, have moved to Texas.

President Felipe Caldern has bravely tried to break the cycle by going to war with the cartels; but after about 28,000 deaths, most Mexicans think the cartels are winning. Caldern's term is up in two years, and Mexico will face the choice to keep fighting or return to an older policy of live and let live with one or more of the cartels. The latter is looking ever more attractive.

Mexico thus needs military and police help now. Yes, more fundamental matters such as drug demand in the United States and weak institutions in Mexico need addressing, but those are long-term concerns. Not even legalization of drugs - which I favor - will make the criminal cartels go away. They are in many businesses now, and they have tentacles throughout the hemisphere and in every large and medium-size U.S. city.

What is getting in the way of deeper cooperation with the U.S. military is that the Mexican military, political and intellectual leaders, abetted by U.S. intellectuals, still have their heads in the Mexican and American wars of the 19th century and the Cold War of the 20th. They talk of imperialism and hegemony - which are irrelevant today.

Though Mexico is our neighbor and supposed longtime ally, the Mexican army has never - never - participated in a joint military exercise with the U.S. military, as Roderic Ai Camp notes in a recent study for the Woodrow Wilson Center.

The Merida Initiative funds some police training by Mexicans in Mexico; Mexican military officers are increasingly studying in the United States; and Mexico has recently asked our Northern Command for help in setting up a joint intelligence center. But that's not nearly enough.

Plan Colombia, a U.S. initiative to thwart drug smuggling in Colombia, has been a success because several hundred military trainers and intelligence operatives have worked hand in glove with Colombians inside that country. More than just teaching officers, they empower sergeants and enlisted men from the working class, something the Mexican military, like the Mexican elite, has yet to do.

Edward Schumacher-Matos is syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group. His e-mail address is edward.schumachermatos@yahoo.com

buglerbilly

28-11-10, 01:13 PM

Mexican cartels emerge as top source for U.S meth

By William Booth and Anne-Marie O'Connor
Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, November 28, 2010; 12:37 AM

IN VERACRUZ, MEXICO Exploiting loopholes in the global economy, Mexican crime syndicates are importing mass quantities of the cold medicines and common chemicals used to manufacture methamphetamine - turning Mexico into the No. 1 source for all meth sold in the United States, law enforcement agents say.

Nearly three years ago, the Mexican government appeared on the verge of controlling the sale of chemicals used to make the drugs, but the syndicates have since moved to the top of the drug trade.

Cartels have quickly learned to use dummy corporations and false labeling and take advantage of lax customs enforcement in China, India and Bangladesh to smuggle tons of the pills into Mexico for conversion into methamphetamine. Ordinary cold, flu and allergy medicine used to make methamphetamine - pills banned in Mexico and restricted in the United States - are still widely available in many countries.

In the past 18 months, Mexican armed forces have raided more than 325 sophisticated factories capable of producing a million pounds of potent methamphetamine a year. Seizures of Mexican methamphetamine along the southwest border have doubled.

"As hard as everyone is working to stop it, the stuff is just going to continue to flow in massive quantities," said Michael Braun, the former chief of operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration and now with Spectre Group International, a security firm.

In a typical scenario, United Nations investigators say, a legitimate pharmaceutical company in India exports cold pills to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, where they are falsely labeled as herbal supplements and shipped to Belize, and then to Veracruz by cargo container.

"Mexico-based trafficking groups have shown tremendous resilience in getting around the precursor chemical prohibitions and controls," said Special Agent Alex Dominguez in the DEA Office of Diversion Control. "They are currently pursuing very sophisticated smuggling techniques. They are trafficking ephedrine-type medicines, just like you would smuggle any high-value contraband such as cocaine or heroin."

Legal ingredients

Ever resourceful, Mexican cartels have begun to manufacture methamphetamine using legally obtained ingredients - such as phenylacetic acid, or PAA, a honey-smelling chemical used in everything from perfumes, soaps and body lotions to food flavoring and antibiotics.

Traffickers prefer methamphetamine made from cold tablets because it is more potent, but they are increasingly relying on PAA, as resilient Mexican cartels revert to old-school recipes developed by U.S. motorcycle gangs in the 1970s that use phenylacetic acid and its chemical cousins.

At least half of all the methamphetamine seized along the border in the past year was made with precursor chemicals such as phenylacetic acid, U.S. agents told The Washington Post.

"For the cartels, the great thing about meth is it is not bound by geography," a senior U.S. law enforcement agent with direct knowledge of the Mexican drug syndicates who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of security concerns. "You can buy the precursor chemicals off the shelf. You can order them on the telephone."

Mexican mafias have quickly replaced American mom-and-pop domestic producers, who use soft drink bottles to "shake and bake" a few ounces of meth in motel rooms and rural slums, according to DEA officials.

The Chinese government concedes that it has no idea how many cold tablets its state-run companies sell each year. The Mexican government is unsure how much phenylacetic acid is used by legitimate manufacturers, such as Proctor & Gamble, and how much is diverted to the meth labs.

Mexican cartels began to produce ever larger amounts of methamphetamine over the past decade. But under heavy pressure from the United States, Mexico three years ago banned the import and sale of cold, flu and allergy medicines containing ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, the most sought-after chemicals used to make methamphetamine and ecstasy. Most Central American countries implemented their own bans.

Meth production in Mexico plummeted. In 2007, military busted 33 clandestine laboratories and 51 in 2008, compared with the 215 they uncovered in 2009. Street prices spiked and purity dropped in the United States, an indication of relative scarcity. U.S. diplomats and law enforcement officials hailed Mexico's ephedrine ban as a major success.

But Mexican methamphetamine is surging again. After several years of declining production, the 2010 threat assessment by the Justice Department's National Drug Intelligence Center said Mexico was again "the primary source of methamphetamine consumed in the United States." A companion report was not released for fear of embarrassing Mexican President Felipe Calderon on the eve of his trip to Washington in May.

A tough opponent

U.S. diplomats praise Mexico for its fight against methamphetamine. At the port in Veracruz, where more than 1,700 ships arrive each year, disgorging 720,000 containers on the docks, Mexican marines and customs agents work side by side searching for contraband. The metal boxes are scanned with gamma rays and X-rays and sniffed by dogs. Suspicious cargo is unloaded, blue plastic drums opened and the chemicals inside tested.

"But if there are 2,000 containers a day and you can manage to get in just one or two containers with narcotics, that's a lot. That is tons," said a Mexican navy captain at the port, who spoke on the condition his name not be used because of security concerns.

Masked men kidnapped the former director of customs in Veracruz, Francisco Serrano, in June 2009 as he was implementing new scrutiny measures. There have been no arrests, no ransom demands. Serrano vanished.

On the black market, a single allergy pill containing ephedrine can sell for $2.50 in Guatemala. A kilogram of bulk ephedrine from China - about 2.2 pounds of powder - goes for $10,000 on the Mexican black market.

In January, Mexican authorities found three tons of ephedrine concealed in fire extinguishers coming through the port of Manzanilla. In February, agents stopped 120,000 pseudoephedrine pills in Guatemala en route to Mexico City airport. In April, Mexican marines in Veracruz found four tons of ephedrine in jute bags that came from India by way of Europe.

According to investigators with the U.N. International Narcotics Control Board, numerous African countries import quantities of cold remedies that far exceed legitimate medical needs. In Ethiopia, for example, Mexican traffickers and their middlemen used bogus documents to import more than 12 tons of ephedrine. Similar diversions have been uncovered in Argentina, where ephedrine cold pills are still legal. U.N. investigators say most of the suspicious shipments have Mexico as their final destination.

Local victims

As Mexico fights the flow of methamphetamine to the United States, the drug is ravaging citizens here.

At a rehab center in Apatzingan in the western state of Michoacan, a meth-producing hub, two dozen men huddle in a converted garage, sleeping on bunks, sharing meals, making furniture. They were all addicted to drugs, most to methamphetamine.

Francisco Rodriguez is 53 years old but looks in his 70s. Meth almost killed him. His decalcified bones are so brittle that he walks with a cane. He has lost his teeth. He left his wife, his children, his law career.

"I came to Apatzingan on vacation and tried the local crystal meth. I became an addict instantly," he said. "The streets here were filled with people who looked crazy."

Rodriquez said the local mafia - La Familia de Michoacan - blocked all street sales in the city a few years ago. The cartel said it was protecting the people from a scourge. Mexican law enforcement agents confirm that La Familia ordered a halt in local use, though they say it was a cynical ploy, a bit of propaganda.

"Now if you use it, they'll kill you," Rodriguez said. "Now it is just for the foreigners."

Researcher Gabriela Martinez contributed to this report.

boothb@washpost.com oconnoram@washpost.com

buglerbilly

30-11-10, 03:59 PM

Black Hawk delivery to aid Mexican narcotic crack-down

November 30, 2010

The US is kitting out Mexico’s Federal Police Force (SSP) for the fight against drug cartels, the Department of State announcing on 24 November the delivery of three Black Hawk helicopters to the organisation.

The UH-60M Black Hawk helicopters were purchased to aid SSP law enforcement personnel in its mission to target illicit activities.

Carlos Pascual, US Ambassador to Mexico, said at the delivery ceremony: ‘Despite the significant threat transnational organised crimes pose to public security, we also have tools in our arsenal to fight back. Our bilateral relationship, while intangible, is one such tool. These helicopters are another.’

The Black Hawks are said to compliment the current SSP fleet, allowing for rapid response and increased mobility, and providing access to remote and hard-to-reach regions.

The aircraft have been purchased under the Merida Initiative – a drug-reduction cooperation programme between the US and other governments such as Mexico. The Black Hawk is the first Merida Initiative aviation delivery to the SSP, and is valued at $64 million.

Through this programme, the US has delivered more than $130 million in training and equipment, and plans to deliver an additional $495 million by the end of next year.

As well as the delivery of the three Black Hawks, five Bell 412 helicopters were delivered to SEDENA (the Mexican Ministry of National Defence) in December 2009, and according to the US embassy, it is intended that one CASA 235 aircraft will be delivered to the navy.

buglerbilly

04-12-10, 12:26 PM

DEA intelligence aids Mexican marines in drug war

Mexico's marines take lead in drug war
Mexican marines have emerged as the country's most effective cartel-fighting organization, and WikiLeak documents support reports that the U.S. is training them.

By Nick Miroff and William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, December 4, 2010; 12:41 AM

MATAMOROS, MEXICO - The U.S. government is turning to elite units of Mexican marines to go after drug cartel bosses in aggressive "capture or kill" missions, providing intelligence and training to bolster what officials say is Mexico's most trustworthy and nimble force.

The effort includes more direct information-sharing and training than previously known, according to diplomats and law enforcement officials, and reflects a sense of urgency on the part of the U.S. government to find a professional partner to combat drug violence in Mexico that is seen as posing a threat to American security.

The U.S. government has long been wary of corruption among Mexican police and frustrated by the slow response of the Mexican army. The decision to rely on the marines has enabled that force to carry out the kind of rapid-strike operations undertaken by U.S. forces against Taliban leaders Afghanistan.

Based in the U.S. Embassy and in consulates in conflict zones along the border such as Matamoros, agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration deliver "intelligence packages" about the location of drug bosses to the Mexican marines, who then charge into action, often within hours, sometimes capturing, sometimes killing their quarry in spectacular urban firefights.

Mexican officials deny that the U.S. military is training Mexican marines, and the Pentagon declines to discuss the training, but U.S. officials confirm in interviews and recently leaked diplomatic cables that the U.S. military is conducting urban-combat and counterinsurgency instruction in Mexico and the United States.

Employing the marines is a strategy not without risks - the Mexican navy, like the army, lacks real transparency, is not subject to broad civilian oversight and has embarrassed itself. U.S. officials were shocked to see the bloodied, half-naked corpse of cartel leader Arturo Beltran Leyva covered in peso bank notes and jewelry in "trophy photographs" splashed on the front pages of newspapers hours after his death.

Human rights groups say complaints against the marines may increase as their role in the drug war expands.

"By bringing the navy in for short-term operations - to take somebody out and leave again - they preserve some level of immunity," said Maureen Meyer, a Mexico expert at the Washington Office on Latin America. "But having the navy doing patrols on the streets is blurring the lines, and that's the big risk now."

In a cable dated Jan. 29, John Feeley, the deputy chief of mission for the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, praised the Mexican marines and said that "our ties with the military have never been closer in terms of not only equipment transfers and training, but also the kinds of intelligence exchanges that are essential to making inroads against organized crime." The cable was written before a high-level Defense Bilateral Working Group meeting in Mexico in February.

The diplomat wrote that "for the first time," the Mexican army is "following the Navy's lead" and "has asked for SOF training." SOF is an acronym for Special Operations Force. The cables were provided by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks to media sites Thursday night.

In another cable, after a December 2009 operation that resulted in Beltran Leyva's killing in a luxury condo in Cuernavaca, U.S. Ambassador Carlos Pascual also praised the marines corps for "its emerging role as the key player in the counter-narcotics fight."

According to the ambassador, the marine unit that led the operation had been "extensively trained" by the U.S. Northern Command, the Pentagon's joint operations center in Colorado that oversees and coordinates defense in North America, including Mexico.

"The Mexican Navy and their Marines have demonstrated the ability to take intelligence information and move rapidly against these senior cartel leaders," Gen. Victor E. Renuart Jr., who retired as head of the Northern Command in May, said in an interview.

The marines' successes, which include captures and kills of a dozen top-level drug bosses, put the Army "in the difficult position of explaining why it has been reluctant to act on good intelligence and conduct operations against high-level targets," Pascual wrote.

The ambassador stated that intelligence on Beltran Leyva's whereabouts was first provided by the DEA and other U.S. law enforcement to the Mexican army, "whose refusal to move quickly reflected a risk aversion that cost the institution a major counter-narcotics victory." He added that the head of the federal police, Genaro Garcia Luna, "can also be counted as a net loser" for failing to play a major role and asserted that Garcia Luna complained the operation should have been his.

U.S. intelligence is key

Acting again on U.S. intelligence, marines here in Matamoros sent 660 troops and three helicopters last month to take down Antonio Ezequiel Cardenas Guillen, the Gulf cartel boss known as Tony Tormenta, or Tony the Storm.

The rolling seven-hour gun battle that followed was so fierce it left holes the size of a hatchback in the office building where Cardenas Guillen made his last stand.

Fears of stray bullets forced the University of Texas at Brownsville across the river to shut down. One shopkeeper in downtown Matamoros who spent the day cowering under his desk passed the time tallying grenade blasts. He stopped counting at 67.

"Killing the capos is important, and that's what soldiers are trained to do," said Raul Benitez, a security analyst at Mexico's National Autonomous University. "But it's better to capture them alive."

While the top drug lords often don't let themselves be taken prisoner, the marines have captured several major underbosses, and Mexican security analysts and U.S. officials say the marines have benefited from an unparalleled level of cooperation with American military and anti-narcotics agencies.

Mexican security analysts, U.S. officials and former military commanders say the marines are the recipients of an unequaled level of cooperation with American military and anti-narcotics agencies.

"They are working almost exclusively on our intel," said a senior U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of upsetting nationalist sensitivities here.

The U.S. official described the training as QRF - Quick Reaction Force training - consisting of "light armored infantry training, with small unit operations in urban settings, and tactical maneuvering."

The training draws on American counterinsurgency lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan, he and other U.S. officials said.

Congress has set aside at least $310 million for the Mexican navy since 2007, including surveillance planes and Black Hawk helicopters, as part of the $1.6 billion Merida Initiative, according to the Washington Office on Latin America, which tracks military aid to the region.

Mexico's army has been more visible than its navy in the fight against organized crime, having been deployed by President Felipe Calderon in a law enforcement role that involves conducting street patrols in urban hot spots such as Ciudad Juarez.

But while U.S. intelligence-sharing with the army has increased, army generals have historically been less open to U.S. military cooperation, security experts in both countries say.

In one of the leaked cables, U.S. diplomats refer to the Mexican army as parochial, risk-averse and jealous of its turf and privileges.

In contrast, Mexican navy officers have been working with American and other foreign counterparts for years, developing a degree of trust enjoyed by no other Mexican force.

According to Martin Barron Cruz, a military expert at Mexico's National Institute of Criminal Sciences and a former navy officer, that cooperation is partly the product of geographical necessity.

"Mexico's coastline is vast and its navy has traditionally been small," he said. "So the navy has always needed help - with technology, with vessels, with intelligence. They were still using ships from the 1930s until recently."

Because it is a smaller force, the Mexican navy has also been better able to police corruption among its ranks, with a corps of professional officers who have long personal ties dating back to their time at Mexico's naval academy.

"We know each other," said Rear Adm. Jose Luis Vergara, a spokesman for the Mexican navy. "So if one of my subordinates suddenly has a new car and a new house, I'll notice," he said, adding that officers are subjected to regular polygraph tests.

Longtime partners

The presence of U.S. troops on Mexican soil has long been politically taboo, limiting contact between the countries' armies. But the Mexican navy has been teaming with the United States for years, conducting joint operations at sea without public controversy in Mexico. Mexican navy officers have attended classes and training sessions in the United States, strengthening the relationships that are the foundation of intelligence-sharing.

"If you don't gather intelligence and you don't know where the criminals are, you're just swinging at a pinata with a blindfold on," Vergara said, noting that the final assault on Cardenas Guillen was preceded by two operations in previous weeks in which 47 cartel members were arrested and 176,000 rounds of ammunition, two rocket launchers and 257 grenades were seized.

Matamoros has remained on edge since Cardenas Guillen's death, as marine units patrol the town in gray Ford Lobo pickup trucks with mounted machine guns. The navy's annual holiday, Nov. 23, is traditionally commemorated in the city square, but no public event was held this year.

As street patrols increase and the navy's role in Mexico's drug war expands, its reputation will come under new pressure, and its officers will face added temptations, experts say.

miroffn@washpost.com
boothb@washpost.com

buglerbilly

08-12-10, 05:25 AM

Ares

A Defense Technology Blog

New Wars: Drug Cartels Destabilizing Neighbors

Posted by Paul McLeary at 12/7/2010 11:17 AM CST

US Army Chief Gen George Casey inspects Mexican Special Forces. (Pic: US Army)

Over the past half decade Mexico has been the scene of some of the world’s most grotesque violence—car bombs, beheadings, mass executions, unlucky souls dipped in chemical baths or lit on fire—in a multifront war that pits the government against powerful drug cartels, the cartels against one another, and both against innocent civilians caught in the crossfire.

The result of this violence has been the murder of 30,000 Mexican civilians since President Felipe Calderon declared war on the drug cartels after his election in 2006. Calderon sent 50,000 troops into the streets to try and take back some of the ungoverned spaces carved out by outfits like the Gulf Cartel, the Sinaloa Cartel, the Juarez Cartel and others who reap the benefits of an estimated $19 to $29 billion in yearly drug and smuggling profits, but the results have been anything but conclusive.

It is important to note however, that Calderón’s policies didn’t create this spasm of violence, they simply helped inflame an already volatile situation brought about by myriad social and political changes that feed the growth and the bloodlust of the cartels.

But what has caused the recent orgy of violence? Paradoxically, according to a study by the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute (PDF), it was the successful crackdown on the gangs by the Mexican government: “Each successive disruption of drug trafficking networks has intensified conflict and competition among organized crime groups, thereby contributing to unprecedented, high intensity violence.”

http://www.wilsoncenter.org/topics/pubs/Drug%20Trafficking%20Organizations.%20Astorga%20an d%20Shirk.pdf

As a result of the growing strength and power of the cartels, and the poor training, equipping and support for local police, large swaths of northern Mexico have become ungoverned spaces, resulting in the killing fields of Ciudad Juárez, a city of 1.5 million just across the border from El Paso, Tx., which saw 2,700 murders in 2009, and which is on pace to top 3,000 for 2010.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently sparked controversy when she said that the Mexican cartels are “in some cases, morphing into or making common cause with what we would consider an insurgency.” Mexican officials bristled, and president Obama quickly walked back the remarks, saying that the cartels are not a threat to the Mexican state. And he’s right. As a state, Mexico is in no danger of falling, nor would the cartels want it to. But Clinton’s remarks set off debate over criminal insurgency and gang violence, and how law enforcement should define its terms.

“Crime, terrorism and insurgency are blending together,” says Robert Killebrew, a retired U.S. Army Col. and Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). “The impact of that, at least in this hemisphere and I believe around the world, is a challenge to civil society in that these three things have blended together challenge civil authority, and challenge civil law, and life.”

Killebrew, who is also the author of a CNAS report released this fall, Crime Wars: Gangs, Cartels and U.S. National Security, adds that further militarization of the problem isn’t the answer, but that the United States can lend a hand to its southern neighbors by providing security assistance, mostly in the form of law enforcement and justice sector training. The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), he says, is playing a critical role in this regard. “The DEA is becoming our global paramilitary police force—they’re working closely with the police forces in many countries. They are on the edge of doing counterinsurgency work because insurgency and crime are blending together, and dollar for dollar they’re probably doing more to help us beat this than any other agency.”

buglerbilly

09-12-10, 12:23 PM

In Mexico, a legal breakdown invites brutal justice

Vigilante violence in Mexico
Across Mexico, and especially in northern border areas, the ravages of the drug cartels and the breakdown of the legal system are giving way to a wave of vigilante violence.Nine-year-old Lisette mourns her mother, Rosalia Esther Vazquez, at their home in the town of Praxedis G. Guerrero, in Chihuahua, Mexico's most violent state. Vazquez was one of five people killed in October when gunmen opened fire on three buses transporting factory workers in Juarez.

By Nick Miroff and William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writers

Thursday, December 9, 2010; 12:25 AM

IN ASCENCION, MEXICO -- In this dusty farm town, an hour south of the U.S. border, more than 40 people were abducted - one a week - in the first nine months of the year.

Then, on Sept. 21, the kidnappings stopped.

That was the day a gang of kidnappers with AK-47s burst into Lolo's seafood restaurant and tried to abduct the 17-year-old cashier. A mob of enraged residents chased down two of the teenage attackers and lynched them in a cotton field on the edge of town.

"We're not proud of what happened," said Georgina "Coca" Gonzalez, who helped form an armed citizens' group after the incident to fight crime and prevent kidnappings. "But we're united now - the whole town. And we all want justice."

Across the country, and especially in northern Mexico, the breakdown of the legal system is giving way to a wave of vigilante violence. As Mexicans grow frustrated with the depredations of drug mafias and the corruption and incompetence of authorities, some are meting out punishment the old-fashioned way, taking an eye for eye, or in some cases, an eye for a tooth.

Some of these retributive acts have happened spontaneously, such as the Ascencion "uprising," as many here have celebrated it. But other killings in the past year appear to have been carried out by shadowy forces who have left bodies along highways or hanging from bridges with handwritten notes that advertise the dead as "extortionists" or "kidnappers."

Mexico has a long history of rough justice carried out by citizens, but it has traditionally occurred in isolated villages, in the mountains or jungles, often among Mexico's indigenous peoples.

Today, vigilante groups appear to be at work even in major cities.

Late last year, authorities discovered four bodies, including an alleged Monterrey gangster, Hector Saldana, and his two brothers, in a car in Mexico City. The deaths were announced by Mauricio Fernandez, the new mayor of the Monterrey suburb of San Pedro Garza Garcia, even before police identified the bodies.

Fernandez said he had nothing to do with the killings, although he boasted of his plans to create "cleansing teams" to rid his city of criminals.

"Sometimes coincidences happen in life. It's better to see it that way," Fernandez told a Monterrey newspaper.

'Social cleansing'

In Ciudad Juarez, the epicenter of violence, murder suspects seem more likely to end up dead than appear before a judge. Several days after gunmen massacred 13 people at a party there in October, two heads were found in plastic bags on the hood of a car with a note warning, "This is what happens to those who kill women and children."

group of Mexican senators has called for an investigation into extrajudicial killings in the country, alleging that "death squads" of current and former soldiers and police were to blame for some of the more than 30,000 killings since President Felipe Calderon declared war on the country's drug cartels four years ago.

According to Sen. Ricardo Monreal, wealthy business families have hired former police and soldiers to guard their interests and protect them from kidnapping and extortion. Some of the paramilitary-style groups work as contract killers for the drug cartels, the senator said; others might work as freelancers for the families of victims, who are seeking revenge or tired of paying extortion. Finally, some may be engaged in a kind of "social cleansing" aimed at low-level gang members, petty criminals and drug addicts.

Gustavo de la Rosa, a top human rights official in Chihuahua, Mexico's most violent state, said the flood of killings and other crimes in recent years has resulted in the "collapse" of the legal system, leaving frustrated citizens to view raw vengeance as their only recourse.

"First, people wait for the government to deliver justice," de la Rosa said. "Then they move onto the next phase, when they go looking for it themselves. I think we're now at the beginning of the second stage."

More than 96 percent of crimes committed in the city over the past three years remain unsolved, according to a database maintained by the city's El Diario newspaper.

At the state prosecutor's offices in Juarez, unsolved homicide cases were stacked up in manila folders, rising from investigators' desks in mountains of paper.

'We won't take it'

Members of the armed citizens' group in Ascencion said they're not trying to challenge the drug cartels or interfere with their smuggling operations, which would be suicidal. But they said they can no longer abide the kidnappings, rapes, shakedowns and other abuses that have terrorized residents.

"We won't take it anymore," said Victor Hernandez, a block captain delegated to oversee security in Ascencion, which the group has divided into quadrants.

Mexican gun control laws limit citizens to owning smaller-caliber weapons and a handful of bullets for home defense, but group members said they were not going to leave themselves vulnerable and outgunned.

In Ascension, the group has erected a siren tower, like the kind that might warn residents in Kansas of an impending tornado, to alert everyone in town that a kidnapping is in progress. Members of the group then quickly mobilize and block the highway that passes through town.

With support from local officials, the group has also dug a trench around the town, wide and deep enough that a vehicle could not escape by driving off-road.

Members of the group said they plan to turn suspects over to authorities but were prepared to "disappear" them if authorities fail to do their jobs. The body of a suspected stereo thief was found on the edge of town in October, as rumors circulated that he too had been lynched.

"This whole country is suffering," said Fernando Saenz, the citizen group's elected leader. "It's time for the people to take over, because the government isn't doing its job. We have to take care of ourselves."

Not waiting authorities

Saenz, 63, was one of the residents who attacked the kidnappers on Sept. 21. Some in the crowd broke their hands and wrists as they pounded the suspects furiously, he said.

Federal police pulled the kidnappers from the mob, and then handcuffed and locked them in a police vehicle. As the crowd swelled, chanting "Kill them! Kill them!" and "We want justice!" residents blocked the police from leaving or landing helicopters.

Already bloodied from the beating, the kidnapping suspects died inside the sweltering-hot police vehicle. No one was charged, which is not surprising given the huge crowd and the widespread public support for what happened.

"These people are farmers; they're not murderers," said Julian Lebaron, a leader of the large Mormon community south of Ascension. "I don't approve of the lynching here in Ascencion, but the spirit of what happened here is what we need in Mexico."

In his own town, Lebaron said residents have erected a watchtower, and each night two men climb the ladder and peer out into the darkness through night-vision goggles. Asked what they would do to stop a kidnapping or assault, Lebaron said, "We would call the authorities, but we wouldn't sit around and wait for them to come help us. We would defend ourselves."

miroffn@washpost.com boothb@washpost.com

buglerbilly

11-12-10, 03:03 AM

Mexican police kill 'La Familia' drug cartel boss

Mexican authorities claim to have killed the boss of the 'La Familia' drug cartel in a shoot-out in the western state of Michoacán.

Federal police stand guard in Apatzingan Photo: REUTERS

12:26AM GMT 11 Dec 2010

Nazario Moreno Gonzalez, one of two chiefs of the powerful drug trafficking cartel, was gunned down on Thursday by police in the town of Apatzingan, government spokesman Alejandro Poire said.

At least three alleged La Familia gunmen, five officers and three civilians were killed in the shoot-out, Mr Poire said, adding that the toll could be higher because many cartel members fled with their wounded and possibly some dead.

"Various sources and information obtained from the operation agree that Nazario Moreno Gonzalez, also known as 'El Chayo' or 'The Doctor,' the main leader and one of the founders of La Familia, was shot dead yesterday," said Mr Poire, the spokesman on security issues.

Moreno, believed to be about 40 years old, is among the country's 24 most-wanted drug cartel leaders, and has a $2.4 million bounty on his head.

Mexican authorities on Tuesday captured La Familia's co-boss Jose Antonio Arcos, one of Mexico's most wanted drug lords. Arcos is also sought in the United States.

Police and navy marines on Friday rushed to Apatzingan, a town of some 100,000 near the Michoacán state capital Morelia, as military helicopters flew over the area searching for cartel members.

Clashes between police and La Familia gunmen broke out late on Wednesday in Apatzingan, Moreno's home town. Police believe the group's main headquarters were located nearby.

Alleged La Familia supporters, many carrying weapons, set vehicles ablaze at the main points of access to the town.

La Familia, one of the seven main Mexican drug cartels, blends family values and quasi-religious zealotry with brutal enforcement methods. Police say it specialises in the production of synthetic drugs such as methamphetamine.

Moreno also is believed to be the man behind the group's philosophy, which bans drug use but approves of drug trafficking, and justifies crimes of retribution as "divine justice."

La Familia made headlines in October 2005 when members entered a nightclub and rolled five human heads onto the dance floor.

The group also openly challenged the federal government by hurling grenades at a holiday crowd in Morelia in September 2008, killing eight people.

In late 2009 it claimed the killings of 16 federal police officers. Twelve of their bodies were found heaped next to an area highway.

Michoacán is the home state of President Felipe Calderón, who launched a nationwide crackdown on the drug cartels after taking office in late 2006.

Mexican authorities have been battling a spiralling wave of drug-related crime and murder that has killed more than 28,000 people since 2006, despite the deployment of some 50,000 troops across the country.

The FBI arrested more than 300 La Familia members a year ago in the United States.

buglerbilly

13-12-10, 11:53 AM

As Mexico drug violence runs rampant, U.S. guns tied to crime south of border

By James V. Grimaldi and Sari Horwitz
Washington Post Staff Writers

Monday, December 13, 2010; 12:41 AM

No other state has produced more guns seized by police in the brutal Mexican drug wars than Texas. In the Lone Star State, no other city has more guns linked to Mexican crime scenes than Houston. And in the Texas oil town, no single independent dealer stands out more for selling guns traced from south of the border than Bill Carter.

Carter, 76, has operated four Carter's Country stores in the Houston metropolitan area over the past half-century. In the past two years, more than 115 guns from his stores have been seized by the police and military in Mexico.

As an unprecedented number of American guns flows to the murderous drug cartels across the border, the identities of U.S. dealers that sell guns seized at Mexican crime scenes remain confidential under a law passed by Congress in 2003.

A year-long investigation by The Washington Post has cracked that secrecy and uncovered the names of the top 12 U.S. dealers of guns traced to Mexico in the past two years.

Eight of the top 12 dealers are in Texas, three are in Arizona, and one is in California. In Texas, two of the four Houston area Carter's Country stores are on the list, along with four gun retailers in the Rio Grande Valley at the southern tip of the state. There are 3,800 gun retailers in Texas, 300 in Houston alone.

"One of the reasons that Houston is the number one source, you can go to a different gun store for a month and never hit the same gun store," said J. Dewey Webb, special agent in charge of the Houston field division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. "You can buy [a 9mm handgun] down along the border, but if you come to Houston, you can probably buy it cheaper because there's more dealers, there's more competition."

Drug cartels have aggressively turned to the United States because Mexico severely restricts gun ownership. Following gunrunning paths that have been in place for 50 years, firearms cross the border and end up in the hands of criminals as well as ordinary citizens seeking protection.

"This is not a new phenomenon," Webb said.

What is different now, authorities say, is the number of high-powered rifles heading south - AR-15s, AK-47s, armor-piercing .50-caliber weapons - and the savagery of the violence.

Federal authorities say more than 60,000 U.S. guns of all types have been recovered in Mexico in the past four years, helping fuel the violence that has contributed to 30,000 deaths. Mexican President Felipe Calderon came to Washington in May and urged Congress and President Obama to stop the flow of guns south.

U.S. law enforcement has ramped up its focus on gun trafficking along the southwestern border. Arrests of individual gunrunners have surged. But investigators rarely bring regulatory actions or criminal cases against U.S. gun dealers, in part because of laws backed by the gun lobby that make it difficult to prove cases.

All of the stores among the top 12 have had double-digit traces of "crime guns" to their stores from Mexico, a statistic that can be a red flag for investigators. A high number of traces does not necessarily signal wrongdoing. It could be the result of sales volume, geography or clientele. Carter's Country, for instance, is the largest independent gun retailer in the region. Most experts and ATF officials agree that the majority of dealers are law-abiding.

Many dealers tip off ATF when they suspect "straw purchases," in which a person buys for someone who is prohibited from owning a gun, a common practice in Mexican gunrunning cases. Many of the dealers "view themselves as the first line of defense," said Lawrence Keane, general counsel and vice president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a firearms industry trade group.

The foundation and the National Rifle Association aggressively challenge statistics that show 80 to 90 percent of the weapons seized in Mexico are first sold in the United States, calling the numbers highly inflated. After being criticized by the gun lobby, ATF stopped releasing such statistics this year.

"To suggest that U.S. gun laws are somehow to blame for Mexican drug cartel violence is a sad fantasy," said Chris W. Cox, executive director of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action.

Cox said guns are coming to Mexico from other Central American countries and from former Mexican soldiers who have U.S. weapons and are now working for the cartels.

ATF disagreed, saying the biggest factors are the high number of dealers along the border and the convenient location.

"When you look at the highway system in Mexico, the main highways that come into the United States are through Laredo and Brownsville," Webb said. ". . . As long as it is cheaper and easier to come to the United States to buy them, that's going to be the source they'll go to."

Guns from the United States "have been feeding the violence and overwhelming firepower being unleashed by drug traffickers," said Arturo Sarukhan, Mexico's ambassador to the United States. "We need to defang drug trafficking organizations of these high-caliber and semiautomatic and automatic weapons, and we need to do it now."

The flow of guns

To examine the gun flow from the United States to Mexico, The Post reviewed hundreds of court documents and federal reports and interviewed Mexican officials and dozens of current and former U.S. law enforcement officials.

ATF in 2006 launched Project Gunrunner - a program that now involves more than 220 agents who make criminal cases against gun traffickers and about 165 inspectors who check gun dealers for compliance with federal regulations. The agency has conducted about 1,000 inspections in the border region, leading to the seizure of more than 400 firearms. Two dealers have lost their licenses to sell guns.

On the criminal side, a recent Justice Department inspector general's report called the program weak and ineffective, with most of the cases brought against single defendants hired to buy small numbers of firearms.

U.S. law enforcement has traditionally focused on seizing drugs moving north from Mexico, not guns moving south. In 2008, only 70 guns were seized at U.S. border crossings.

The cornerstone of the $60 million program is gun tracing - tracking weapons to the dealers who originally sold them. It has long been considered a powerful tool for combating trafficking.

But the Justice IG report said that Mexican gun tracing has been "unsuccessful." ATF officials complain that, in the past, most guns seized in Mexico were not traced. Although the number of traces has increased, problems persist, ATF officials say.

"We're not getting all the information we need from them," said Bill Newell, special agent in charge of ATF's Phoenix field division.

Mexican officials say they send information in but get little that is useful in return. An official in the Mexican attorney general's office called tracing "some kind of bad joke," the Justice inspector general's report said.

A Government Accountability Office report on Project Gunrunner found that ATF has not done "recent systematic analysis and reporting of aggregate data," hampered by congressional restrictions on the tracing information. ATF officials said that they do analyze the data and that tracing information has led to some major cases.

One investigation showed that 23 traffickers had purchased more than 335 firearms, including 251 rifles, from 10 dealers. One of the suspects bought 14 AK-47s in one day from one dealer.

About one-third of the weapons were traced to incidents in Mexico involving 63 deaths, including those of 18 law enforcement officers. Some of the guns ended up being seized at the site of the "Acapulco Police Massacre," where drug gangsters disguised as soldiers invaded two offices of the state attorney general and killed three investigators, one prosecutor and two secretaries. One gun sold at Carter's Country was recovered 65 days later by police investigating the kidnapping and murder of a businessman.

Fifty of the guns were purchased at three Carter's stores, including 29 at the chain's flagship store in Spring, Tex. When one of the traffickers purchased eight Bushmaster .223-caliber sniper rifles for nearly $9,000 on May 12, 2007, an employee of the store contacted ATF.

The ringleader of the gun buyers was U.S. citizen John Phillip Hernandez, a 23-year-old unemployed machinist living with his parents. He pleaded guilty last year to one count of making a false statement to a gun dealer.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark White asked for the maximum 10-year sentence.

"He knew [the guns] were going to go to drug killers in Mexico," White said.

Hernandez got eight years.

There was no indication that the gun stores named in court documents - Carter's Country, Academy Sports and Outdoors, and Collectors Firearms - had done anything wrong. All three retailers are on the list of top 12 stores.

The Academy purchases by Hernandez were at an outlet in Houston. Another Academy store in McAllen, about 10 miles from the border, has had about 95 traces in two years. After the Hernandez case, Academy stopped selling all military-style tactical weapons, including AK-47s and AR-15s, at its eight stores near the border.

In the rest of the chain's 120 stores, such "assault weapons" are limited to one per customer per visit.

"We wanted to do what we can to make sure that our firearms aren't contributing to the border problem," Academy spokeswoman Elise Hasbrook said.

Collectors owner Mike Clark said the 60 traces to his Houston store were insignificant given the store's volume, which he would not reveal. "Pretty small, I'd have to say," Clark said.

Carter's Country

In his "Ol' Bill Sez" commentary atop his weekly newspaper advertisement in April, Carter made light of the guns leaving Texas for Mexico: "Why all the talk about guns going south when so many drugs are coming north that our cows along the interstate are gettin' high off the fumes!"

Volume might factor into why many dealers are on the top-12 list, including Carter's Country, which sells thousands of firearms and is the largest independent gun retailer in the region.

Greeting a reporter last month in his store in Spring, standing near giant ivory tusks and stuffed grizzly bears and lions, Carter declined to be interviewed. "I'd like to talk to you, but I just can't," Carter said. "We're in litigation."

Dogged for years by lawsuits over his business practices, Carter pushed for the 2003 federal secrecy law governing gun traces because trial lawyers had been using the information in lawsuits against gun stores.

"If the gun-ban lawyers succeed, the floodgates will open," Carter said at the time in a newsletter he issued as president of the Texas Gun Dealers Association.

In one suit, a former employee who filed a wrongful-termination suit said Carter's Country permitted straw purchases. Carter's Country, which settled the suit for a small amount, denied the allegations.

In another case, a man who killed a Houston police officer said he bought the murder weapon, a 9mm Smith & Wesson, "in the name of my wife" at Carter's Country in Pasadena, outside Houston. An illegal immigrant who had been convicted of a felony sex offense, he was prohibited from buying a gun.

The officer's wife, Joslyn Johnson, a Houston police sergeant, alleges that Carter's Country knew the sale was illegal. "I think it is all about money and that it is a common practice for them," Johnson said. "They are putting guns in the hands of criminals."

Carter's Country denies the allegation, saying the gun was purchased legally by the man's wife.

Small-time gunrunners along the border are known as "hormigas," the Spanish word for ants. Hernan Ramos, a 22-year-old U.S. citizen, was one of them. On May 17, 2008, he headed to a gun show in Arizona, where he bought an Olympic Arms .223-caliber rifle from a Tucson firearms business, Mad Dawg Global.

That same day, a friend of Ramos's, another U.S. citizen, bought two more .223-caliber rifles from Mad Dawg. Over the next three months, the two men and several of their associates returned to Mad Dawg repeatedly to buy rifles.

They smuggled the guns across the border, an hour south of Tucson, to "Rambo," a member of the Sinaloa drug cartel.

All in all, Ramos and nine others bought 112 firearms worth more than $100,000 - 30 from Mad Dawg and the rest from 14 other firearms dealers across Arizona, court records show.

The hormigas were eventually arrested and charged with firearms violations. Ramos, one of the ringleaders, was sentenced this summer by a federal judge in Tucson to four years and two months in prison.

No charges were brought against any of the gun dealers involved, and there was no indication the dealers did anything wrong.

One of the dealers, J&G Sales in Prescott, ranks third on the top-12 list, with about 130 of its guns traced from Mexico over the past two years. The store owner said he is diligent about making legal sales.

"I would stand by every transaction we make at the time we make it," said J&G owner Brad Desaye. "But I'm disappointed to hear that number. It saddens me. It should not happen."

The lack of charges against dealers is not unusual, in part because it's difficult to prove a straw purchase took place.

"If you're a gun dealer and you see a 21- or 22-year-old young lady walk in and plop down $15,000 in cash to buy 20 AK-47s, you might want to ask yourself what she needs them for," said Newell, the ATF special agent in charge in Phoenix. "If she says, 'Christmas presents,' technically the dealer doesn't have to ask for more."

Under federal law, a gun dealer who sells two or more handguns to the same person within five business days must report the sales to ATF. The agency has identified such sales as a red flag, or "significant indicator," of trafficking. But multiple sales of "long guns," which include shotguns and rifles such as AK-47s, do not have to be reported to ATF.

The Justice Department inspector general said in a report last month that "the lack of a reporting requirement of multiple sales of long guns - which have become the cartels' weapons of choice - hinders ATF's ability to disrupt the flow of illegal weapons into Mexico."

Over the years, the gun lobby has successfully opposed such a requirement, arguing it is not needed, because long guns are far less likely to be used in crimes. But the percentage of long guns recovered in Mexican crimes has been steadily increasing, from 20 percent in 2004 to 48 percent in 2009, reports show.

"The reasons that the deaths are so high in Mexico are the long guns," said James Cavanaugh, a former high-ranking official with ATF. "The velocity of the round and the amount they can put out quickly is what makes it so deadly."

Roadblocks for ATF

The biggest case ATF brought against a gun dealer in Project Gunrunner illustrates the obstacles agents face when they try to do something about stores sending guns to Mexico.

It was a case that seemingly had everything in its favor.

Corrupt gun stores usually are hard to catch because law enforcement needs evidence that the stores knowingly sold weapons intended for criminals. In this case, the agents had tons of evidence: surveillance, recorded phone calls, confidential informants and undercover agents posing as straw buyers.

In late 2007, ATF agents busted suspects who told the agents they had purchased hundreds of weapons from a single dealer: George Iknadosian, who owned a Phoenix gun store called X-Caliber.

Agents examined the dealer's traces and found that 86 guns had been recovered by police in the United States and Mexico between 2005 and 2008. Of those, 47 had been traced from Mexican crime scenes.

The store had sold 710 guns of the types known to be popular with Mexican drug cartels - more than 500 AK-47s and SKS-style rifles, plus one especially lethal .50-caliber Barrett rifle capable of piercing armored vehicles.

The U.S. Attorney's Office in Phoenix declined to take the case, because it started out with low-level straw-purchaser charges and was going to require a lot of time and resources to develop further. So ATF took the case to the Arizona attorney general, who worked on it for more than a year with the Phoenix Police Department.

Iknadosian instructed undercover agents posing as straw purchasers about how to sneak weapons across the border, advising them to cross on weekends and Fridays when border agents might be off fishing.

"When you guys buy them [guns], I run the paperwork, you're okay, you're gone," he said. "On my end, I don't give a crap."

Iknadosian was charged with violations of state fraud, forgery, racketeering and money laundering laws.

"This was an amazingly well-prepared case," said Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard. "The evidence was all there. There is no question what was going on."

But in March 2009, a state judge, Robert Gottsfield, dismissed the case before it went to the jury.

"The judge's decision was inscrutable," Goddard said. "It was a real shock to our office."

Iknadosian's attorney, Thomas M. Baker, said he showed on cross-examination that ATF's informants were not credible.

"The ATF and Terry Goddard decided to give every single one of them probation if they would testify against George," Baker said. He said the conversations with Iknadosian were "out of context."

In an interview, Gottsfield defended his decision, which he said was one of the few times in 30 years he had dismissed a case before it went to a jury.

He agreed that there was ample evidence against Iknadosian, but he called the case "overcharged."

"There certainly was evidence that Iknadosian was selling to people who were not buying the guns for themselves, and that's a class-one misdemeanor," Gottsfield said.

About guns going to Mexico from the United States, the judge said: "It is a terrible problem. They have to do something about it."

grimaldij@washpost.com horwitzs@washpost.com

Research editor Alice Crites and staff writer William Booth contributed to this report.

buglerbilly

16-12-10, 02:17 AM

Ares

A Defense Technology Blog

Violence Along the Arizona Border

Posted by Paul McLeary at 12/15/2010 11:48 AM CST

Last night, just north of Nogales, Ariz., Border Patrol Agent Brian A. Terry was shot and killed after coming in contact with several suspicious men near Rio Rico, Ariz. Four suspects have been taken into custody while another is still at large, according to the Customs and Border Patrol.

Back in September I had the chance to spend a day with Border Patrol agents around Nogales, doing a story both on what they contend with on a daily basis, as well as how they use sensing technologies to help them do their jobs.

The area around Nogales is part of the Tucson Sector, which is the most active alone the entire border. Covering only 262 mi. of border, the sector still managed to account for 1 million lb. of marijuana seized in Fiscal 2010, and 203,000 illegal border crossers detained. Tucson also has the distinction of being the test bed for the Homeland Security Department’s huge and controversial SBInet program, part of its larger Secure Border Initiative. SBI was initiated in 2005 to add fencing, paved and graded roads and install SBInet technologies such as radar, sensors, cameras and other communications gear along the border.

Five years on, and $800 million later, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano ordered a freeze on the program pending a top-to-bottom review. At the time, nine towers in the Tucson Sector had been completed, and by late October six more were conducting limited operations in the Ajo Sector. Still, the agents on the ground loved the gear, which gives them real-time access to radar and camera feeds, and increases both their safety, as well as their response time.

I wrote the whole thing up here.

http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story.jsp?id=news/dti/2010/11/01/DT_11_01_2010_p37-262578.xml&headline=New%20Technologies%20Aid%20Border%20Patro l&channel=dti

But the bigger issue for the border, and for the region south of the border, are the organized, deadly and very wealthy criminal gangs that hold sway throughout portions of northern Mexico, and in places like Guatemala, Honduras, and Colombia. I explored this problem in the December issue of DTI.

In Mexico alone, over 30,000 Mexicans have been killed since President Felipe Calderon declared war on the drug cartels after his election in 2006. Calderon sent 50,000 troops into the streets to try and take back some of the ungoverned spaces carved out by outfits like the Gulf Cartel, the Sinaloa Cartel, the Juarez Cartel and others who reap the benefits of an estimated $19-29-billion in yearly drug and smuggling profits. The results, however, have been anything but conclusive.

Calderon’s policies didn’t create the violence; rather they helped inflame an already volatile situation brought about by myriad social and political changes that feed the growth and bloodlust of the cartels.

Major political changes came about in Mexico with the breakup of the single-party rule enjoyed by Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ran the country for 70 years, and the Federal Security Directorate (FSD), which oversaw domestic security matters from the 1940s to the mid-1980s. After the corrupt FSD was broken up in the 1980s and the PRI lost the presidency in the 1990s, the cartels stepped up competition for the lucrative drug smuggling routes that serve as pipelines for illegal substances to be shipped across the U.S. border.

It’s not a problem that can be solved quickly, cleanly, or without a lot of money and effort spent by both the Mexican and U.S. governments. It is, after all, the insatiable thirst for drugs north of the border that allows these drug cartels to flourish. Tragically, the murder of agent Terry last night probably won’t spur an honest and open discussion of the issues involved. Rather, it will most likely result in a political sideshow that will call for redoubling efforts to seal off and militarize the border—things we’ve tried before, and have been shown to be ineffective if not coupled with social, and political, action.

buglerbilly

16-12-10, 03:59 AM

Mexican drug cartel urged to stand firm after death of 'The Doctor'Servando Gómez Martinez, alias La Tuta, has called on La Familia to unite in the face of a federal push to go after the group

Jo Tuckman in Mexico guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 15 December 2010 20.41 GMT Article history

A wanted poster for four members of La Familia, including El Chayo (also known as The Doctor, now dead) far left, and La Tuta, far right. Photograph: EPA

A recording leaked to the Mexican press features a senior leader of the La Familia drug cartel urging members to stand fast in the wake of the death of their figurehead and painting the criminal group as rebels with a cause.

"It had to happen one day so don't despair, this is not over," Servando Gómez Martinez, alias La Tuta, says of the death last week of the group's "spiritual leader", Nazario Moreno, also known as the Doctor. "We will stay united and we will achieve what the Doctor wanted and what he inculcated into us with so much love."

The pep talk, delivered at breakneck speed, continues with instructions to all the "heads of area" to stand firm with their guns close by in the face of a federal push to go after the group as it attempts to regroup.

"Don't worry, God is with us and we will continue until we achieve victory," Gómez Martinez says. "Hasta la victoria, hermanos [to victory, brothers]," he screams at one point.

Based in the western state of Michoacan, La Familia (the Family) burst into national consciousness in September 2006 when a member dropped five severed heads on to a disco dancefloor along with a message about divine justice.

Since then the smallest, newest and most idiosyncratic of Mexico's seven major drug cartels has garnered a reputation for operating like a quasi-cult and quasi-guerrilla group, with significant support among the local population.

"Give hope to the comrades everywhere, we are going forward," Gómez Martinez is heard saying. "We are fighting for our people and for our cause. This is a just cause, a social cause born of the way we have been treated."

Gómez Martinez's message was recorded off an open radio frequency in Michoacan on 9 December, the same day that Moreno was killed in a confrontation with the federal police, according to the Televisa TV network. President Felipe Calderon has since claimed that the group is on the edge of disintegration.

"If they think that this is the way that they can enter Michoacan and occupy our turf and our towns they are mistaken," Gómez Martinez says. He goes on to allege that the current government focus on going after La Familia is an attempt to aid the incursion into the state of the Zeta cartel, its main enemy.

"Let's show them who we are. We are a family and we will remain united and we will not fall into the trap of fighting among ourselves," he urges. "Nobody can abandon their areas and we are going to continue going forward. God bless you and goodnight."

At one point in the recording a young female voice is heard thanking La Tuta for his "beautiful words that give a lot of hope to the people". She then screams into the microphone: "Arriba la Familia Michoacana [Come on the Family of Michoacana]."

buglerbilly

18-12-10, 04:44 AM

Ares

A Defense Technology Blog

Invasion! Mexican UAV Crashes in Texas

Posted by Paul McLeary at 12/17/2010 12:46 PM CST

The mini Orbiter, the UAV that apparently crashed in El Paso. (Pic: ADS)

So—here’s a first. On Tuesday, a wayward unmanned aerial vehicle crashed in a residential area of El Paso, Texas, about a half mile inside the U.S. border. It landed in a backyard apparently, and no one was hurt and no property was damaged.

Thing is, however, it turns out that the UAV is owned by the government of Mexico, and while details are sketchy, it appears that it strayed over the border Tuesday afternoon before finding the ground. The El Paso Times reports this morning that the UAV is an “Orbiter” developed by the Israeli company, Aeronautics Defense Systems.

In February 2009, Aeronautics Defense Systems Ltd., announced that it had signed a $22 million contract with Mexico's federal police to provide UAVs, though how many were ordered, and how many were delivered, is unclear. The El Paso Times says that the UAV was returned to Mexican officials, and that local El Paso police were told to stay away from the crash site as Border Patrol and other federal agencies dealt with the situation. “Neither Department of Homeland Security or U.S. Border Patrol official would say why the drone was returned to Mexico before investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board could inspect it,” the report says.

According to the Aeronautics Defense Systems Web site, the Orbiter can reach an altitude of 18,000 ft., is capable of speeds op to 70 knots, has a 3-4 hour endurance and can carry a payload of only 3.3 lbs.

It’s no surprise that Mexican law enforcement would want to fly UAVs near El Paso, since the city sits just over the border from Ciudad Juarez, the teeming Mexican city that has seen over 3,000 murders in 2010, and which has become a violent focal point for the war between rival drug cartels battling it out over smuggling routes into the United States. Over 30,000 Mexicans have been killed in drug-related violence since 2006.

Earlier this week, an American Border patrol agent was killed in Arizona, and there has been speculation that he was killed by rounds from an AK-47, which seriously ups the ante on what border agents might expect to confront.

buglerbilly

20-12-10, 04:44 AM

Guatemala declares state of siege in town taken over by Mexican drug gang

Guatemala has declared a state of siege in a northern province that authorities claim has been overtaken by Mexican drug traffickers.

Soldiers patrolling the streets in Alta Verapaz north of Guatemala City Photo: AFP

11:13PM GMT 19 Dec 2010

This is a true invasion unlike the meandering UAV above.................target the weak State and grow your power..........

The government initiated the monthlong measure in the Alta Verapaz province to reclaim cities that have been taken over by the Zetas drug gang, Ronaldo Robles, a spokesman for Alvaro Colom, the Guatemalan president, said.

"It is to bring peace to the people and recover their confidence in the government," he said.

A state of siege allows the army to detain suspects without warrants, conduct warrantless searches, prohibit gun possession and public gatherings, and control the local news media. Guatemalan law allows the measure amid acts of terrorism, sedition or "rebellion," or when events "put the constitutional order or security of the state in danger."

The state of siege was put in place for 30 days, but "will last as long as necessary," Colom told Emisoras Unidas. He asked citizens to trust and cooperate with authorities.

The Zetas are a group of ex-soldiers who started as hit men for the Gulf drug cartel before breaking off on their own. Authorities believe they established a presence in Guatemala more than two years ago.

Robles said that numerous cities in the Alta Verapaz province have been overrun by drug traffickers and that the government decided it was time to take them back.

Anti-drug agents wearing ski masks to hide their identity patrolled the streets of the provincial capital, Coban, on Sunday.

Police officers and soldiers searched at least 16 homes and offices, as well as all vehicles entering and exiting the city, the government said on its website.

Gudy Rivera, a congressman from the opposition Patriotic Party, said the government's action came too late.

The state of siege also is meaningless "if we continue to have police corruption, a weak justice system and weak jails," added David Martinez Amador, an analyst and expert on criminal behavior.

Guatemalan news media have reported that the local population lives in fear of drug traffickers, who they say roam the streets in all-terrain vehicles and armed with assault weapons. Some were forced to give up their property to the traffickers, according to the reports.

buglerbilly

23-12-10, 02:28 PM

DECEMBER 23, 2010.

To Root Out Dirty Police, Mexico Sends In a General .

By DAVID LUHNOW

TORREON, Mexico—His grandfather was the cross-eyed cousin of Mexico's legendary revolutionary Francisco "Pancho" Villa. Like his famous ancestor, Carlos Villa is a hard-charging general who is charismatic, foulmouthed and not afraid to use his gun.

And some say he is just what Mexico needs as it wrestles with the corruption and violence spawned by the country's powerful gangs of drug traffickers.

Retired Gen. Villa is the 61-year-old police chief in Torreon, an industrial city in Mexico's violent northern badlands—a central drug-running route currently being fought over by two of Mexico's biggest cartels.

Since taking over as the city's top police officer in January, Mr. Villa has battled not only the city's drug lords, but also his own police force, which was on the payroll of a powerful cartel.

In March, nearly the entire force walked off the job to demand the general's ouster. The mayor faced a choice: Fire nearly every officer and leave the city at the mercy of drug gangs, or dump the general and keep corrupt police on the street. He fired the officers.

Jerome Sessini for The Wall Street Journal
Police Chief Gen. Jesus Bibiano Villa got ready to go downtown with his bodyguards on Nov. 23.

"It was the best decision I ever made," says Mayor Eduardo Olmos. "It's not that our cops weren't fighting the bad guys—they were the bad guys."

Crime nearly tripled in Torreon during a summer that saw some of Mexico's bloodiest drug-related crimes, including the massacre by gunmen of 17 civilians at a party in August. But the mayor and his soldier-turned-police chief are building a new force and seeing some success against crime.

"He's the best police chief we've had," says Father Jose Rodriguez, a 73-year-old Torreon priest. "The Bible says you shall know them by their works, and I know the general from his works."

Mr. Villa's effort to remake the Torreon force holds implications for how Mexico tries to quell the drug-related violence that has claimed more than 31,000 lives since President Felipe Calderon took power in December 2006.

Until now, Mr. Calderon's strategy has focused on using federal forces to fight the cartels, including the army and a new federal police. But the strategy has been missing a key piece: local police. There are only about 30,000 federal police and about 45,000 troops deployed on cartels. There are some 240,000 municipal police—but they are widely deemed corrupt and unreliable.

"Local cops are the tip of the spear," says a top DEA agent posted in Mexico. "In the U.S., we'd struggle to do anything without our partners in local law enforcement."

Until the mid-1990s, Mexico spent just 0.008% of annual economic output on law enforcement, among the lowest rates in the world. The average officer earns $500 a month, or about half the average per-capita income in Mexico. Seven of 10 finished only primary school. More than 400 municipalities have no local police at all.

In city after city, local police are a proxy army for cartels—acting as lookouts, killing rivals, even helping fight federal forces.

Efforts to clean up local police have met bloody resistance from the cartels. The new mayor of Santiago, an upscale colonial town near Monterrey, was kidnapped, tortured and executed by members of his own police this summer after he had pledged to clean up local police.

Mr. Calderon's government now realizes its offensive will stall without revamping the local police. It recently proposed eliminating all municipal forces and having 32 state forces, one for each state. "The day we have 32 police forces that are well-paid, well-trained and loyal, we will turn the page in our fight against organized crime," Mr. Calderon said recently.

Mexico's local police are often so corrupt that trying to clean them up slowly may never work. The experience of Torreon shows a radical approach: scrap and start over.

Torreon is a city of half a million that sits in a valley, with a river that separates the states of Durango and Coahuila. In 2007, the Zetas, one of Mexico's cartels, arrived to challenge the Sinaloa Cartel. A turf war erupted.

The Zetas set up in Torreon by infiltrating the police. Last year, the former Torreon police chief found a payroll with a list of officers in the pay of the Zetas. What surprised investigators was how little it cost to bribe the officers: beat police got an extra $10 a week; commanders got $30 to $45.

One commander, Mario Ortiz Fernandez, resigned from the police after five years in 2008 and joined the Zetas, according to police records. Nicknamed "The Shadow," he rose to the top spot in the gang by late last year, police say. Mr. Ortiz Fernandez's bar—called "Bar Ferrie," after his second surname—was shot up by Sinaloa gunmen on Jan. 31, killing 10 civilians.

The Shadow was captured in May by federal forces. His job as the top local Zeta was taken by another former Torreon officer, according to police and intelligence officials.

In 2008, two federal policemen busted a Torreon officer in possession of cocaine and marijuana. Hours later, more than three dozen municipal police turned up at the federal police building with guns to try rescuing their colleague. One Torreon officer was killed and 34 arrested.

Successive police chiefs tried to clean house. In June 2009, some 302 police—nearly half the force—were fired for corruption by former police chief Karlo Castillo, a federal police commander, who took over in 2008.

Mr. Castillo was attacked twice on the job in failed hits believed to have been orchestrated by men under his command. He ended his term Dec. 31.

The following day, Mr. Villa took over.

Born in neighboring Durango, the general is the penultimate son of a man with 36 children. He has a master's degree in military communications, wears SWAT boots and packs an Israeli-made Magnum .45 strapped to his thigh. Locals call him Rambo.

The general says his grandfather was named Jesus Arango, the first cousin of Pancho Villa, whose real name was Jose Arango. There is no bigger legend in Torreon than Pancho Villa, whose raid of the city was a turning point in the Mexican revolution. Mr. Villa cultivates the connection. He answers his phone, "General Villa, at your orders."

In the 1970s, he participated in Operation Condor to destroy marijuana and opium plantations. There he met Guillermo Galvan, now defense minister.

In early 2009, Mr. Villa turned 60, retirement age for a brigadier general. Four months later, he was lying on the beach in Mazatlan when his phone rang.

"Get down here, you lazy goat. Galvan wants to see you." It was a fellow general calling on behalf of the defense minister. Days later, Mr. Villa met Mr. Galvan, who convinced him to try his hand as a police chief in Coahuila, a state that borders Texas.

Coahuila has basically given up on having civilian police chiefs. It has 16 generals in charge of police forces.

Mr. Villa started his new career as police chief in the town of Parras. Soon, he discovered seven of his officers were involved in a kidnapping ring. He had them jailed. Within three months, 56 of the original 80 police had been fired. "I couldn't believe it. They were practically all corrupt," he says. "But those corrupt cops were amateurs. The real pros were here, in Torreon."

Mr. Villa took over as Torreon's top officer on the same day as the incoming mayor, Mr. Olmos. Within days, the general got a taste of what his new force was like. One policeman, driving drunk, hit a father and his little girl as they crossed the street, killing both. Days later, another drunken policeman ran over and killed a woman—and fled the scene.

The general ordered that officers take a breath test before and after their shifts.

A month after he took over, police videos taped seven Torreon police cars escorting Zeta gunmen. The general fired the officers. By early March, some 108 officers out of a force of 700 had been fired.

The general started to impose strict discipline. Anyone late to work was sent home without pay. Cellphones were banned, because police were using them to alert the Zetas of army patrols. The general told residents to report crimes to his own cellphone because the city's emergency number was being used by crooked police to retaliate against Good Samaritans.

Tensions rose. One officer openly talked about killing the general, witnesses say. On March 13, the majority of police on the force walked off the job to demand better working conditions and Mr. Villa's resignation.

As the officers staged a sit-in outside City Hall, luxury cars with tinted windows pulled up to deliver steaks and whisky, witnesses say. Local reporters were ordered by the Zetas to give favorable coverage to the strike, say several reporters.

A delegation of police met the mayor at his office. "It was like a bad Tarantino movie," says the mayor. "These were the scariest looking guys you've ever seen, and they were our city police."

In five hours of negotiations, the mayor agreed to all of their demands except for firing the general. Finally, one senior officer told the mayor the police didn't really care about concessions. They wanted the general gone. "Just agree to change his bodyguards and we'll take care of the rest," the policeman said, according to the mayor.

The mayor refused. "They wanted me to agree to have him killed," he says, shaking his head at the memory. That night, he signed the order to fire 600 officers, nearly the entire force.

The next morning, the state governor called Mr. Olmos and congratulated him. He has also sent him a present: an armored Suburban and eight bodyguards.

The chief lives under siege. Two of his bodyguards disappeared in the months after the strike; another was seized from his home, tortured and executed. His head was placed in front of the police station.

Thanks to the army, the general now has a contingent of 60 former or active-duty soldiers. None are from Torreon. They live in the police headquarters, venturing into the city only on patrol. The general lives in a single room next to his office, with a mattress, an exercise machine and a pet boxer named Chata.

For most of the soldiers, this has been their first time in a police force. "I couldn't believe the lack of discipline," said Lt. Francisco Naranjo.

After the strike, Mr. Villa was left with about 80 police from a force of 700, mostly older officers near retirement. He and his troops went on patrol several times a day and night, often taking on traffickers. "I've seen more action now than in my entire career in the army," he says.

The police chief and mayor also set about recruiting new police. Results were mixed. One applicant had just gotten out of jail for murder.

A psychologist was hired to evaluate recruits. "Most applicants were completely unfit. They had all kinds of psychological issues, including narcissism and delusions of grandeur," says Bismark Soriano, a 26-year-old psychologist.

But then a different type of person started coming through. Hortencia Ovalle, a 36-year-old housewife, heard a radio report about the general and signed up. "I wanted to be a part of something bigger for my city," she says.

A challenge will be keeping new recruits honest. Across Mexico, cartels spend an estimated $100 million a year bribing police, according to the federal government.

One new tactic: buy a home for all beat officers. If a police officer stays 15 years on the force with no issues of corruption, they get the home free. "It's a way to get the wives of the cops to make sure their husbands stay on the straight and narrow," says the mayor. The city raised salaries for police from an average of $570 a month to about $800—which puts Torreon in the top five best-paid police forces in the country. Police are also getting scholarships for their children at private schools.

After the March strike, the city offered to give back jobs to any officer who wanted to return—to help police who were pressured to go on strike. But to win re-entry, police had to undergo a lie-detector exam, psychological profile and physical-fitness tests. Some 300 of the 600 fired police reapplied. Only one—41-year-old Raquel Estrada—passed all the tests. "Meet our only honest cop," Mr. Villa said, chuckling on a recent day, introducing Ms. Estrada.

Around town, Gen. Villa is viewed with a mix of admiration and trepidation. A new neighborhood watch program is starting to produce results. Crime is starting to fall after the summer peak—but is still well above last year's levels.

Write to David Luhnow at david.luhnow@wsj.com

buglerbilly

26-12-10, 06:22 AM

2 Plead Guilty in SEAL Weapon Case

December 25, 2010

Associated Press

It doesn't say so here but there is more than a suspicion these weapons were headed to Mexico.............

LAS VEGAS -- Two Las Vegas men pleaded guilty Thursday to conspiring with a Navy SEAL and another man to sell machine guns and other weapons smuggled in to the U.S. from Iraq and Afghanistan, the top federal prosecutor in Nevada said.

Andrew Kaufman, 36, and Omar Aguirre, 35, appeared for the plea deal before Senior U.S. District Court Judge Lloyd George in Las Vegas, U.S. Attorney Daniel Bogden said in a statement.

Aguirre wasn't previously named after a monthslong undercover operation became public with the Nov. 3 arrests of Kaufman in Las Vegas; active-duty Special Warfare Operator 1st Class Nicholas Bickle, 33, in San Diego; and Bickle's friend Richard Paul, 34, in Durango, Colo.

Bickle and Paul pleaded not guilty Thursday in Las Vegas to amended conspiracy, weapons, explosives, firearms trafficking, weapon registration and dealing in firearms without a license charges, said Natalie Collins, spokeswoman for Bogden.

The judge allowed both men to remain free pending trial Jan. 24.

Kaufman could face up to 15 years in prison for his guilty plea to conspiracy and illegal transfer of a machine gun, according to a plea agreement. Aguirre faces up to five years for conspiracy. Sentencing for both men is scheduled for March 25.

Both are also expected to testify against Bickle and Paul, who could face decades in federal prison if convicted.

Prosecutors have described Bickle as the mastermind and chief weapons smuggler and Paul as the primary seller in a scheme that sold handguns and military machine guns to an undercover federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent who told them they would be shipped to Mexico.

Federal agents also seized some five pounds of C-4 military explosives from Paul's Colorado home following his arrest, authorities said.

Bickle's attorney, James Pokorny of San Diego, said he'll ask a judge next week to allow more time before trial so he can review government evidence.

"The case is still in its infancy," Pokorny said. "A lot more will be revealed as this case goes forward."

Paul's federal public defender didn't immediately respond late Thursday to messages seeking comment.

According to the Kaufman and Aguirre plea memorandums, more than 70 firearms were smuggled and sold, including rifles, pistols, shotguns, and 30 machine guns.

Federal prosecutor Drew Smith told a judge in November that some of the AK-47 rifles included factory-made 7.62 mm Iraqi machine guns that would be difficult or impossible to trace.

Court documents said the scheme was made possible because Navy SEALs aren't searched when returning from deployments.

© Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

buglerbilly

29-12-10, 11:57 AM

In Mexico, only one gun store but no dearth of violence

By William Booth
Washington Post Foreign Service

Wednesday, December 29, 2010; 12:01 AM

MEXICO CITY - In all of Mexico, there is only one gun store. The shop, known officially as the Directorate of Arms and Munitions Sales, is operated by the Mexican military. The clerks wear pressed green camouflage. They are soldiers.

The only gun store in Mexico is not very busy.

To go shopping for a gun in Mexico, customers must come to Mexico City - even if they live 1,300 miles away in Ciudad Juarez. To gain entry to the store, which is on a secure military base, customers must present valid identification, pass through a metal detector, yield to the security wand and surrender cellphones and cameras.

To buy a gun, clients must submit references and prove that their income is honestly earned, that their record is free of criminal charges and that their military obligations, if any, have been fulfilled with honor. They are fingerprinted and photographed. Finally, if judged worthy of owning a small-caliber weapon to protect home and hearth, they are allowed to buy just one. And a box of bullets.

Mexico has some of the toughest gun-control laws in the world, a matter of pride for the nation's citizens. Yet Mexico is awash in weapons.

President Felipe Calderon reported this month that Mexican forces have captured more than 93,000 weapons in four years. Mexican authorities insist that 90 percent of those weapons have been smuggled from the United States. The U.S. and Mexican governments have worked together to trace 73,000 seized weapons, but both refuse to release the results of the traces.

More than 6,600 federally licensed firearm dealers operate on the U.S. side of the border. At least 14 million guns are thought to have been sold in the United States last year, according to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. But no one knows the exact number.

In Mexico, Lt. Col. Raul Manzano Velez, director of the gun shop, knows with precision his annual sales figures. On average, the military has sold 6,490 firearms each year since 2006. Legal gun sales are decreasing, even as seizures of illegal weapons soar.

Daniel Mendoza has come to shop at Mexico's only gun store with a friend. He is interested in something to protect his family. He described himself as a middle-class businessman and was vague about prior gun ownership.

Asked whether Mexico's gun-control laws were working, Mendoza said, "Ask the criminals."

The Mexican military has been handling gun sales in strict military fashion since 1995. "Only a tiny percentage of our weapons end up in the hands of criminals," Manzano said. That percentage, he said, is less than 1.

But Manzano is not a fool. "We have a higher rate of crimes where the weapon involved is coming from the black market, and that happens because in our country, it is much easier to buy a gun on the black market than" at his store, he said.

Manzano said the wide gulf in gun laws between Mexico and the United States creates an almost irresistible arms-trafficking market for the powerful criminal organizations terrorizing wide swaths of his country.

Manzano recently gave a visitor a brief tour of his shop. There are several deer heads mounted on the wall and a handful of customers, who mostly browse. Display cases filled with guns are arranged in two rooms. The first room, which is labeled "Police Sales Only," is filled with weapons that ordinary citizens cannot legally buy - the heavy stuff, such as Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifles and Israeli Galil machine guns, plus gas and concussion grenades, as well as bulletproof vests and helmets.

The second room offers a wide selection of U.S. and European shotguns and rifles - Berettas, Mossbergs - for hunting and competition. They are being sold at very competitive prices but elicit few buyers.

"I think it's okay that there is a control for the sale of weapons, but nowadays, the interest in sports shooting has been greatly diminished and the young are not interested," said Manuel Yoshida, president of the Shooting Club of Los Mochis in Sinaloa, the state where the Pacific cartel and drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman reign supreme.

Yoshida added: "We have lost many members. And most of my clients have brought their weapons from the U.S., because we are near the border. Otherwise, it would be a problem for my customers having to go to Mexico City to buy their guns. It's too far."

At the gun store, there is a display for small-caliber handguns sold exclusively for domestic protection, in calibers no greater than a .38. Glock and Smith & Wesson are well-represented. These guns are legally allowed only at home - not in glove compartments, on waist belts or inside businesses.

Members of the military, police and security firms are exempt from the handgun-control law that applies to the general public. If a business owner wants a gun to protect his cantina or muffler shop, he can apply for a permit. A different permit is required to transport the weapon from one place to another. The paperwork for the latter takes a couple of weeks.

"In most cases, we suggest hiring a private security company, and, to refrain from the use of a weapon, we invite people to use other security mechanisms," Manzano said.

Alberto Islas, a security expert based in Mexico, said it is common knowledge that the easiest way for the average citizen to buy a gun is to ask a friendly local police officer.

"The cop will bring it to your house and show you how to load it," Islas said. "Of course, it is technically illegal."

buglerbilly

20-01-11, 03:01 AM

Ares

A Defense Technology Blog

Gang Violence in Central America Expanding its Reach

Posted by Paul McLeary at 1/19/2011 9:19 AM CST

Despite the emphasis that the United States has placed on fighting Al Qaeda and Middle Eastern-based terrorist networks over the past decade, “the big fight is what’s happening in Mexico and Central America,” says Robert J. Bunker, who studies crime and terrorism as CEO of the Counter-Opfor Corp. With over 30,000 drug-related murders in Mexico since 2006, and Guatemala and Honduras losing control of swaths of their territory to drug cartels, at some point the United States is going to have to make the move toward taking development and diplomacy more seriously south of its border.
But it’s not only the U.S. that is concerned about the region. I’ve got a piece (now online) in the January issue of DTI that reports:

The mass disclosure of U.S. diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks in November shed light on how far the problem of the drug cartels has spread. A cable from the U.S. Embassy in La Paz, Bolivia—a major cocaine source—dated November 2009 notes that given the fact that Mexican cartels have been flying cocaine shipments to Africa, then smuggling them into Europe, the European Union “fear[s] the introduction of third-country criminal organizations” into the continent, and is considering increasing law enforcement and counternarcotics assistance to Bolivia and its neighbors. European officials expressed interest in reopening the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in La Paz.

While the U.S. isn’t about to get involved in major operations to fight the drug trade at its source, U.S. Army Col. (ret.) Robert Killebrew sees a role in a training and advisory capacity in the region, noting that Colombian forces have been successfully trained by U.S. Special Forces and Drug Enforcement Agency personnel. Another role the U.S. can play is that of a third-party jailer, which has the effect of removing drug bosses from their home countries and severing communication between them and their henchmen. Killebrew says the U.S. involvement in Colombia is having an added effect: Colombians are now providing advice to the Mexicans. “Colombia had special forces down there,” he says, adding that a Colombian special forces general told him he gives “great credit [to the U.S.] for re-professionalizing the Colombian military.”

Click on through to DTI to read the whole thing.

http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story_channel.jsp?channel=defense&id=news/dti/2011/01/01/DT_01_01_2011_p30-275748.xml&headline=Central%20and%20South%20America%20Are%20A %20Toxic%20Brew

Pic: Gang members in Southern California. (Pic: DEA)

(Looking at this pic you sure wouldn't be worried about these fat fucks running after you too far! Jeezus, go on a diet guys..........)

buglerbilly

22-01-11, 01:51 PM

Colombia stepping up anti-drug training of Mexico's army, police

By Juan Forero
Washington Post Foreign Service

Saturday, January 22, 2011; 12:00 AM

CAJICA, COLOMBIA - Long experienced in fighting cocaine cartels and Marxist guerrillas, Colombia is training thousands of Mexican policemen as well as soldiers and court officers to help contain drug gangs that have turned parts of Mexico into virtual combat zones.

Most of the training has taken place in Mexico, Colombian and American officials say. But in a sign of how serious the threat posed by the Mexican cartels has become, an increasing number of Mexican soldiers and policemen are traveling here to train with Colombia's battle-tested police commandos.

"Mexico has what we had some years ago, which are very powerful cartels," Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said in a recent interview. "What we can provide is the experience that we have had dismantling those cartels, training intelligence officers, training judicial police."

Colombia's new role provides the Obama administration, which pays for part of the training and has a close alliance with Colombia, with a politically viable way to improve Mexican security forces without a substantial American military or police presence in Mexico. Placing U.S. forces there would be politically contentious in Mexico even as Washington commits hundreds of millions of dollars to help smash powerful drug cartels.

"The American military can indirectly do a lot more through the Colombians than they politically would be able to do directly," said Roderic Ai Camp, an expert on Mexico's military at Claremont McKenna College in California. "Given the loss of half of Mexico's national territory to the United States in the 19th century, and the Mexican army's hesitant cooperation with their American counterparts, the Colombians are a logical proxy."

Colombia's shift reflects its desire to demonstrate an ability to help resolve regional problems instead of being seen as simply a recipient of U.S. aid, which totals $9 billion, mostly in military hardware, going back to the Clinton administration.

Colombia is still the No. 1 producer of cocaine, much of which passes through Mexico en route to American consumers. Colombian drug gangs still battle it out over cocaine routes while guerrillas engage security forces in a conflict now in its 47th year.

But things were far worse a generation ago, when the city of Medellin had the world's highest homicide rate.

Back then, Pablo Escobar's notoriously violent cocaine cartel in that northern city bombed shopping malls, killed high-profile politicians and even blew an airliner out of the sky, before his death when police hunted him down in 1993. A decade ago, another force appeared to be an even greater threat: the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, a rebel group that controlled huge swaths of territory and regularly defeated military forces.

Hard-won experience

These days, though, Colombia's homicide rate has dropped substantially, and the government has wrested control of territory where the FARC once held sway. In the past decade, the size of Colombia's drug crop has been reduced by more than half through an American-funded aerial fumigation program, U.N. officials say. And the country's economy is considered one of the most dynamic in Latin America.

It is now Mexico that, to some observers, appears like that previous Colombia - with ruthless narcos beheading adversaries and innocent civilians often killed in the crossfire.

Mexico's ambassador to Colombia, Florencio Salazar, said Colombia's complex conflict, which at its root is political, is far different from the crisis in his country, where drug gangs are in it solely for the money.

But "the capacity that the armed forces and police have in Colombia is very useful," Salazar said. "We are looking to work together on solutions."

Colombia's national police force collects forensic evidence, like any police department. But it is also unique in the Americas in that it operates like an army light infantry unit, equipped with helicopters and potent munitions to take on heavily armed bands.

"They just have experience in stuff that others don't have: experience in dealing with kidnappings, experience in explosives, experience in taking down powerful narcotics organizations," said William R. Brownfield, a former U.S. ambassador to Colombia who now heads the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs.

Colombian instructors, accompanied by investigators and prosecutors from the United States and Canada, have run weeks-long courses in Mexico on how to collect evidence and carry forward cases to help break up drug cartels.

Mexican judicial authorities, including prosecutors and judges, have come to Colombia to discuss legal reforms that Mexico can implement to give the state more leverage in seizing assets tainted by drugs.

In all, about 7,000 Mexicans have participated in the training, which is paid for in part by $800,000 in U.S. funds.

The violence in Mexico began to spike dramatically in 2006, when President Felipe Calderon deployed thousands of troops and federal police to combat drug cartels.

The death count is now nearly 35,000, as the cartels have fought back ferociously to maintain their fiefdoms.

Some of those gangs have responded with the weaponry and strategies of war, including preemptive ambushes against Mexican forces and efforts to control territory, said Steven Dudley, co-director of InSight, a think tank that tracks organized crime in Colombia and Mexico.

"If a security force encroaches on that territory, then they respond in much the same way as a guerrilla group would respond," Dudley said. "We are increasingly seeing tactics that are similar to guerrillas, like car bombs, use of grenades, the interest in controlling territory."

Commando school

Early one morning shortly before dawn, Colombian police commandos barked orders like drill sergeants at six Mexican policemen and two Mexican soldiers during a mock attack here outside Cajica, a town on a frigid mountain in central Colombia. The target in the training exercise: a heavily defended rebel camp.

It was the tail end of four months of training that included lessons on how to carry out operations in the jungle, jump from helicopters, defuse bombs and conduct raids on urban strongholds.

One of the policemen, Cesar Mejia, had been a lawyer but became a detective, never thinking he would need commando training for his job.

"The criminals get stronger all the time, and with this we are also preparing," said Mejia, wearing camouflage and a helmet and carrying an assault rifle. "You never know when you will be in high-risk situations, in rural areas or in the city."

Carlos Nieves, another Mexican policeman, serves on a Mexico City-based team that rushes into some of the country's hot spots. He said the traffickers frequently have far more firepower than the police.

"They use all kinds of guns, .50-caliber machine guns," he said.

But training here on the high mountain ridgeline, Colombian commandos from the police's Jungla, or jungle team, told Nieves to meet heavy firepower with heavy firepower.

When the operation was over, the trainers demanded more: a long march, with 50-pound packs, that ended with a 100-yard crawl through mud. During his four months here in Colombia, Nieves lost 30 pounds.

But "it will help us become better policemen," he said, "teaching us how to survive."

buglerbilly

28-01-11, 03:45 AM

Smugglers catapult drugs across border

January 28, 2011 - 7:29AM

Surveillance footage shows drug smugglers trying to get marijuana across the US-Mexico border are using a new delivery method: a catapult.

Drug smugglers trying to get marijuana across the Arizona-Mexico border apparently are trying a new approach - a catapult.

US national Guard troops operating a remote video surveillance system at the Naco Border Patrol Station said they observed several people preparing a catapult and launching packages over the International Border fence last Friday night.

Tucson TV station KVOA said Border Patrol agents working with the National Guard contacted Mexican authorities, who went to the location and disrupted the catapult operation.

The catapult was used to launch drugs over the US border. Photo: AP

The three-metre tall catapult was found about 20 metres from the US border on a flatbed towed by a sports utility vehicle, according to a Mexican army officer with the 45th military zone in the border state of Sonora.

The catapult was capable of launching two kilograms of marijuana at a time, the officer said.

Soldiers seized found 16 kilograms of marijuana, the vehicle and the catapult device, the officer said.

The smugglers left the area before they could be captured.

buglerbilly

31-01-11, 11:45 AM

ATF fears budget cuts would imperil gun-trafficking fight at Mexico border

Mexican violence, American guns
Authorities have struggled to keep U.S. retailers' firearms from falling into the hands of drug cartels as violence increases south of the border.

By James V. Grimaldi and Sari Horwitz
Washington Post Staff Writers

Monday, January 31, 2011; 12:08 AM

About three weeks before the deadly shootings in Tucson renewed a national debate about gun control, the White House budget office proposed steep cuts for the agency charged with enforcing federal gun laws.

When officials at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives saw the proposal, they concluded it would effectively eliminate a major initiative in the fight against firearms trafficking on the Mexican border, according to people familiar with the budget process but not authorized to speak on the record.

Project Gunrunner is a signature effort by the Obama administration to assist Mexico in stemming the flow of guns south of the border. Under the project, federal officials in Arizona last week arrested more than a dozen people named in a 53-count indictment alleging that a network of gun buyers and smugglers had planned to ship hundreds of weapons to Mexican drug cartels.

Dubbed "Fast and Furious," the investigation found traffickers purchasing 10, 20, 30 or 40 AK-47-style rifles at a time from gun shops in the Phoenix area. On one day in April, a couple now charged in the case paid $18,000 and walked out of a retail store with three .50-caliber, armor-piercing Barrett sniper rifles.

The proposed ATF cutbacks, which would amount to nearly $160 million out of a $1.25 billion budget request - a 12.8 percent reduction that would also be 3.6 percent below the current budget - are outlined in a preliminary budget document obtained by The Washington Post. ATF spokesman Scot Thomasson declined to comment, because the budget process was not complete.

Administration officials said it is unclear how deep the cuts ultimately will be, since the proposal was an early draft and is likely to change. But to some current and former ATF officials, the fact that budget officials contemplated the reductions is an indication of how low the agency ranks in the Obama administration's pecking order.

"ATF is the ugly stepchild of every administration," said James Cavanaugh, a former senior ATF official who retired last year after three decades. "It would really handicap the ATF. It's a small agency and it's a lean machine. There are not a lot of agents and inspectors. There is not a lot of fat. With ATF, it would be an amputation."

All federal agencies are facing a difficult budget year, with House Republicans calling for cuts of 30 percent or more. But law enforcement is generally more protected than most agencies. For example, the FBI is facing a 0.46 percent cut against its current budget.

Officials with the Office of Management and Budget did not return repeated calls last week.

Obama quiet on guns

Some agency officials held out hope that Obama, whose campaign promised tougher gun laws, would support their mission and budget, and strengthen their legal tools.

In addition to the contemplated budget reductions, the president has yet to make substantive comments about firearms policy - even after the Jan. 8 tragedy in Tucson that left six dead and 13 wounded.

In his State of the Union speech last week, Obama referred to Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), who was shot in the head and seriously wounded, and 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green, who was killed. But the president disappointed gun-control organizations by avoiding the topic of gun regulation. After the speech, White House spokesmen said Obama would address gun policy at a later date.

Lawmakers who favor tighter firearms laws have proposed new restrictions, particularly on high-capacity gun magazines such as the one used in the Tucson shootings. But there is little indication the Obama administration is eager to embrace the proposals, which are fiercely opposed by the gun lobby.

The National Rifle Association and the National Shooting Sports Foundation both said the actions of a "madman" should not cause restrictions that would affect law-abiding gun owners.

"Once again, you and your freedoms are being blamed for the acts of a deranged madman, who sent signal after signal that he was dangerous," NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre said in an e-mail to members last week.

LaPierre's comment suggested problems with the backgroundcheck system, which is supposed to prevent felons and the mentally ill from purchasing firearms. The NRA in recent years has supported increased appropriations to ensure that the checks are "instant."

There might be some common ground for changes to the background check system. Even a pro-gun lawmaker is calling for an audit of the federal background check system for gun buyers. Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), a former NRA board member with an A rating from the group, joined Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.), a gun-control advocate, in asking the Government Accountability Office to look at the system. Republican House Judiciary Committee staffers also plan to question FBI officials who oversee the system.

In addition to those proposals, ATF officials before Tucson asked the White House to approve an emergency rule to crack down on gunrunning to Mexico by requiring gun dealers to report bulk sales of semiautomatic rifles. The proposal was announced in December, and ATF had asked the Office of Management and Budget to approve the rule by Jan. 4. A Justice Department spokesman said he expects the White House to approve the rule this week.

If implemented, the rule would require gun dealers in four states - Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas - to report to ATF sales of two or more "assault rifles" to the same buyer in a five-day period. The affected weapons would be semiautomatic rifles of .22 caliber and above with detachable magazines. Semiautomatic rifles such as AK-47s and AR-15s are favored weapons of Mexican drug cartels. Dealers nationwide already are required to report bulk handgun sales.

In addition to the uncertainty about its budget and enforcement regimen, ATF has been without a director since 2006, when Congress first required Senate confirmation for the position. Every nominee since has been held up in the Senate over problems raised by the gun lobby, which opposes Obama's nominee, Andy Traver, the bureau's special agent in charge in Chicago.

Former ATF director Bradley A. Buckles said the lack of a permanent director hurts ATF at budget time. "Undertaking the budget without a director is like fighting with one hand tied behind your back," he said.

The budget document says the proposed cuts to ATF are meant to eliminate duplication in explosives investigations, which the Justice Department last year divided between two agencies.

"FBI and ATF perform essentially the same functions regarding explosives, with the exception of licensee inspections," the document said.

ATF officials fear the proposed cuts would harm the Project Gunrunner border initiative because federal rules require the last hired to be laid off first, and most new hiring at the agency has been put toward the Southwest border effort. ATF has already moved funds from explosives work to the border initiative, sources said.

Those affected would include personnel in Mexico, where agents are helping Mexican officials trace guns seized by police in the bloody drug wars, the sources said. More than 65,000 guns have been traced back to sales in the United States.

Criticism of project

The Justice Department inspector general criticized Project Gunrunner for "significant weaknesses." It said that 68 percent of the project's investigations "are single-defendant cases, and some ATF managers discourage field personnel from conducting the types of complex conspiracy investigations that target higher-level members of trafficking rings."

ATF officials said that they are taking heed of the criticisms and that the budget cuts are looming at a time when their border efforts are making progress.

"Mexican drug lords go shopping for war weapons in Arizona," U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke said at a news conference in Phoenix last week to announce the bust of the alleged gunrunning ring.

According to the indictment, ATF officials determined that more than 600 of the 700 guns purchased by the network had come from a single U.S. gun store, Lone Wolf Trading Co. in Glendale, Ariz., a Phoenix suburb. Lone Wolf was not charged with any wrongdoing.

Last year, The Post reported that Lone Wolf ranked first among U.S. stores with the most guns traced to Mexican crime scenes, with 185 firearms traced to Mexico over a two-year period.

In a strip mall next to a spa, Lone Wolf features mounted animal heads on walls and model airplanes hanging from the ceiling. A sign last fall behind the cash register advertised AK-47s for $499. With about 1,515 crime guns traced, Lone Wolf ranked eighth overall on the list of U.S. guns stores with firearms traced from crimes. The rank is a jump from No. 61 on the 2004 list of gun stores that sold firearms traced to crimes.

Last year, 12 people were indicted on charges of making false statements in order to buy 17 AK-47-type rifles headed to Mexico. The guns were purchased from seven stores, including Lone Wolf. Owner Andre Howard could not be reached for comment. ATF officials said they have no indication that Lone Wolf has done anything wrong in any of the cases.

Bill Newell, special agent in charge of the ATF Phoenix office, said last week that the "Fast and Furious" investigation was "further proof of the relentless efforts by Mexican drug cartels, especially the Sinaloa Cartel, to illegally acquire large quantities of firearms in Arizona and elsewhere in the U.S."

buglerbilly

16-02-11, 03:49 AM

FEBRUARY 16, 2011.

U.S. Agents Shot, One Killed, In Mexico .

By JOSé DE CóRDOBA And DAVID LUHNOW

MEXICO CITY—An agent for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency was shot and killed and another agent wounded by unknown gunmen in central Mexico on Tuesday, according to U.S. officials.

Pulso Newspaper, San Luis Potosi, Mexico
The car driven by the two ICE agents who were shot on the road to Mexico City.

The men were driving from Mexico City to Monterrey in the central state of San Luis Potosi when they were attacked. U.S. officials condemned the attack and said they would work with Mexican counterparts to bring the assailants to justice.

"Let me be clear: any act of violence against our ICE personnel…is an attack against all those who serve our nation and put their lives at risk for our safety," Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said in a statement.

The wounded agent was shot in the arm and leg and was in stable condition, Ms. Napolitano said. U.S. officials would not speculate about the motive for the attack.

The incident is sure to raise fresh concerns about Mexico's deteriorating security in Washington and elsewhere. Drug-related violence in Mexico has claimed at least 34,000 lives in the past four years as rival drug gangs have fought for control of lucrative drug-smuggling routes.

"In terms of the U.S. law enforcement community, this will greatly raise the significance of Mexico," said George Grayson, an expert on Mexico and drug trafficking at the College of William and Mary in Virginia.

Pulso Newspaper, San Luis Potosi, Mexico
Mexican federal police vehicles at the scene where two ICE agents traveling in a car were shot Tuesday.

NOTE the Sandcats, part of a batch just very recently delivered..............

In a statement, Mexico's foreign ministry said that Mexico's federal police were working with San Luis Potosi state authorities to bring the crime's perpetrators to justice. Mexico "energetically condemns this grave act of violence and expresses its solidarity with the government of the United States and with the families of the attacked persons," the statement said.

Attacks on U.S. officials are rare.

In 1985, the torture-murder of a Drug Enforcement Administration agent, Enrique Camarena, strained bilateral ties and ultimately led to the arrest of several high-ranking Mexican drug lords.

More recently, in December, a U.S. border patrol agent was fatally shot just north of the border in Arizona while trying to catch bandits who target illegal immigrants cross the border.

And three people with ties to the U.S. consulate in Ciudad Juárez, including a pregnant consular employee, were killed in March, prompting the State Department to tighten security at its diplomatic missions in northern Mexico.

The U.S. provides equipment and some training to Mexican security forces under the $1.4 billion Merida Plan, and U.S. intelligence is credited with helping Mexico catch a score of leading drug kingpins in the past two years.

ICE, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, routinely investigates narcotics smuggling as well as money laundering, organized crime and human smuggling.

Violence between organized crime gangs in Mexico is spreading far beyond northern states where most of the killings take place, affecting Mexico's northern business capital of Monterrey, Mexico's second city of Guadalajara, and even into tourist resorts like Acapulco.

San Luis Potosi has also gotten caught up in the violence, with a spate of recent drug-related killings. A shootout in a major supermarket as well as a leading university in the state capital caused panic among residents last week.

Drug gangs have also branched out into activities like human smuggling. Last year, a gang massacred 72 Central and South American migrants who were on their way to the U.S.

Write to David Luhnow at david.luhnow@wsj.com

buglerbilly

17-02-11, 01:09 AM

FEBRUARY 17, 2011.

Mexico Pins Killing on Cartels

By JOSé DE CóRDOBA

MEXICO CITY—Drug-cartel gunmen were responsible for the shooting of two U.S. government law-enforcement agents, the governor of the Mexican state where the men were attacked said Wednesday.

What is still unclear, however, is why the men were attacked.

Associated Press
Mexican police guard the ICE agents' vehicle after Tuesday's attack, in which one of the agents was killed.

Jaime Zapata, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent, was killed Tuesday while driving along a rural Mexican highway with another ICE agent, who was wounded. The second agent, who hasn't been identified, was shot twice in the leg and has been taken back to the U.S. where he is in stable condition, American officials said.

"There was a confrontation, where organized crime....made an attempt on the lives of U.S. officials on a federal highway," said Fernando Toranzo, governor of San Luis Potosí state, during an interview with Mexican radio.

The U.S. government said it created a joint task force including the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice, led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to help Mexico investigate the killings.

"This joint task force reflects our commitment to bring the investigatory and prosecutorial power of the U.S. government to bear as we work with the Mexican government to bring these criminals to justice," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said.

President Barack Obama called the slain officer's parents to express his condolences, telling them their son served his country admirably.

Mr. Zapata, the slain agent, joined ICE in 2006 and had been assigned to the Laredo, Texas, office working on border security and human-smuggling issues before being assigned to Mexico City, the agency said. There are about 30 ICE agents assigned to Mexico, working in areas ranging from human smuggling to money laundering.

It is unclear whether the attack was a case of mistaken identity or a deliberate attempt against U.S. law enforcement—a possibility that would create a major security headache for U.S. personnel in Mexico and mark a worrisome development in Mexico's war on organized crime.

"If it was a deliberate attack, then it's a new precedent," said Victor Cerda, an attorney with Jackson Lewis LLP in Washington and a former senior ICE official.

Normally, Mexican drug gangs steer clear of U.S. officials. The last U.S. law-enforcement agent killed in the line of duty in Mexico was Enrique "Kiki" Camarena, who was kidnapped, tortured and murdered in 1985 by drug traffickers.

Mr. Camarena's death led the U.S. to temporarily close the Mexican border and to put so much pressure on Mexico's government that it ended years of cozy relations with drug traffickers and jailed several leading kingpins involved in the murder.

Since then, Mexican cartels have generally steered clear of deliberately harming U.S. law-enforcement officials. In 1999, an FBI agent and a DEA agent accidentally had a run-in with Osiel Cárdenas, then head of the Gulf Cartel in the city of Matamoros, across the Rio Grande river from Brownsville, Texas. Although Mr. Cárdenas threatened them, the agents managed to talk their way out of danger. Mr. Cárdenas was captured in 2003 and extradited to the U.S. in 2007. He was convicted and is now serving a prison sentence.

Tuesday's attack on the two ICE agents is likely to further ratchet up U.S. attention on the drug violence that has engulfed Mexico, where more than 34,000 people have died in four years of violence.

In Mexico, suspicion for the attack immediately fell on the Zetas, a notoriously bloody cartel that is fighting former ally the Gulf Cartel for control of much of northeastern Mexico, including San Luis Potosí. The Zetas are known for setting up roadblocks on highways to ambush and kill their rivals.

There were conflicting reports about the attack itself. The agents, according to ICE, were returning to Mexico City after meeting other U.S. officials in San Luis Potosí. A person close to the Department of Homeland Security said the men had been shot after they stopped at a fake military-style highway checkpoint manned by cartel gunmen.

But Mexican officials say there is no indication that the shooting involved a false checkpoint. Other people familiar with the case also deny the checkpoint story.

"There were several cars pursuing the car in which the ICE agents were driving," says George Grayson, an expert on Mexico and drug trafficking at the College of William and Mary. "There was no checkpoint." Mr. Grayson said his information came from an "impeccable" U.S. government source. He said he believed the attack will provoke a vigorous U.S. response.

There were also questions about why the agents were driving in rural Mexico instead of flying. As a result of the shooting, Homeland Security officials are discussing suspending some planned personnel trips to Mexico, according to an official with knowledge of the situation.

A spokesman from the Department of Homeland Security declined to comment.

—Miriam Jordan and Tamara Audi in Los Angeles contributed to this article.

buglerbilly

04-03-11, 01:12 AM

Obama to Discuss Armed U.S. Agents in Mexico

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

Published: 2 Mar 2011 21:14

WASHINGTON - The United States will discuss the idea of armed U.S. agents operating inside Mexico, which is being rocked by deadly drug violence, when President Barack Obama meets his Mexican counterpart Felipe Calderon, a senior U.S. official said March 2.

Obama welcomes Calderon to the White House on March 3.

"It's a top priority for the U.S. government to ensure that measures are being taken to protect our personnel," the official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told journalists in a phone briefing.

"That will continue to be a topic of conversation between both governments and will undoubtedly be a topic that gets discussed tomorrow between President Obama and President Calderon," the source said when asked about U.S. agents' inability to carry their weapons in Mexico since 1990.

The ban on U.S. agents carrying weapons became a topic of discussion again after the Feb. 15 murder in Mexico of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jaime Zapata on a Mexican highway.

His was the first killing of a U.S. federal agent on Mexican soil in 26 years, and raised the stakes for the U.S. government in Mexico's increasingly violent drug war.

The two countries launched a joint probe into the killing of Zapata, 32, and wounding of Victor Avila, a second ICE agent, in the roadside attack in the central state of San Luis Potosi.

Both sides have since been active against Mexico's vicious drug gangs.

More than 34,600 people have been killed in rising drug-related violence in Mexico since December 2006, when Calderon's government deployed soldiers and federal police to take on organized crime.

buglerbilly

05-03-11, 03:15 AM

Mexico female police chief flees to US

A 20-year-old student and mother who took on the role of police chief in one of Mexico's most lawless towns has fled to the United States after receiving death threats.

Marisol Valles, a criminology student who has a baby son, was recruited after her predecessor was gunned down in July 2009 Photo: GETTY

By Nick Allen, Los Angeles 6:47PM GMT 04 Mar 2011

Utterly pointless her being in this role and utterly futile for her to stay, she just makes herself and her Family a target, and with little support from the Federal Government, she'd be dead sooner rather than later. She gets full marks from me for even trying...........

Marisol Valles was hailed as "Mexico's bravest woman" after she agreed to take the job in Praxedis Guadalupe Guerrero, a no-man's-land close to the Texas border, in October.

But she has since been targeted by a criminal gang that wanted to make her work for them.

After several months in the job she was forced to flee, along with two relatives, and will seek asylum in the US.

In December Erika Gandara, 28, the only police office left in the nearby town of Guadalupe was kidnapped and her house was set on fire. Her fate remains unknown.

The towns are in an area where the Sinaloa and Juarez drug cartels are fighting for control of smuggling routes into the US.

Miss Valles, a criminology student who has a baby son, was recruited after her predecessor was gunned down in July 2009.

The town had been unable to find anyone willing to take the job for more than a year.

She tried a novel approach to policing in Mexico, declining to carry a gun and sending female police officers door-to-door to build community trust.

After taking the job, she said: "Of course there is fear, I'm like any other human being, fear will always be there." Last year more than 3,000 people were killed in the nearby city of Ciudad Juarez.

The city is at the epicentre of Mexico's four year drug war which has left more than 35,000 dead across the country.

buglerbilly

14-03-11, 04:45 PM

Ares

A Defense Technology Blog

More Money, More Cameras, Along Arizona/Mexican Border

Posted by Paul McLeary at 3/14/2011 9:18 AM CDT

Now that the Department of Homeland Security has capped its $800 million SBInet border surveillance program at only 53 mi. of Arizona borderland, the government has been scrambling to find other ways to get better situational awareness of who and what is trying to get across the Arizona/Mexico border.

Since January, the DHS has released several requests to industry for non-developmental, mature, operationally-proven camera and surveillance equipment that can be quickly delivered and installed along the border to do the job SBInet was being developed to do. The agency has also said that it plans on spending an additional $750 million over the next several years in order to finish the job just along the Arizona border. This means that when all is said and done, installing sensor equipment just along the Arizona section of the border will have cost the DHS a staggering $1.5 billion … but there is, on some level, some upside to this development—let’s call it a positive negative. Through a very expensive and frustrating back and forth, the government finally thinks it has a handle on the kinds of technologies—and the kind of acquisition strategy—it needs along the southwest border, and SBInet’s failures may very well end up ushering in a new era in technology procurement for the DHS, one that just might transform how the United States polices its borders.

In this second go at stitching together a picture of the border with cameras, radar, ground sensors, unmanned assets, and of course, Border Patrol agents, Mark Borkowski of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) says the days of searching for the perfect solution, and giving industry the benefit of the doubt, are over.

At an industry day event in Phoenix last month, Borkowski told a room full of industry hopefuls vying for a crack at a portion of that $750 million that if the gear they provide isn’t exactly what was promised and delivered at exactly the price agreed upon, “we will terminate you for default.” Quite simply, “if you don’t know what it costs, then you’re not ready to sell to us.”

I recently asked Borkowski about the DHS’ technology strategy moving forward, now that the plan is to buy multiple, proven sensor and camera systems that will need to be integrated into a common operating picture. He said that a big part of this new strategy “is laying out a more comprehensive technology deployment that is reasonable in terms of cost, is defensible with what we do know [we need], but which recognizes that what we want to do is get something out there without necessarily shooting for the moon.”

Sounds an awful lot like what secretary Gates has been saying about “exquisite” technologies, and the need to look at “good enough” solutions when gear needs to be deployed quickly to meet urgent needs.

One of the issues that Borkowski highlighted in our chat was the fact that the Border Patrol in many respects hasn’t internalized the use of technology in its everyday field operations, making acquisition up to this point somewhat of an experimental process. “We don’t have a lot of experience with technology as a core part of how we do business in border security,” he said. “It’s something that if we have it we bring to the fight, but it’s not something that’s embedded with years and years of history, in the way that we routinely do business.” In many cases, agents still rely on binoculars, setting ambushes, and riding horses in areas inaccessible to cars and trucks, so there is very little baseline capability with which to build from. “We’re not to the question of better or more [technology] now,” he said, “we’re to the question of at all.” He says that he is now trying to build a cost-effective, “prudent baseline of technology” that can be embedded in CBP operations so that the agency will at some point be “in a better position to talk about future technology investments, and future requirements.”

There is a real sense that the DHS overshot with the SBInet technology concept, much like the Army did with its now-scuttled Future Combat Systems family of sensors and vehicles, and is now pulling back on the search for perfect solutions, in favor of trying to meet the minimum requirements for getting the job done.

Image: CBP

buglerbilly

17-03-11, 02:24 AM

Mexico Allowing US Drones in Drug War

March 16, 2011

Associated Press

MEXICO CITY - The Mexican government said Wednesday it has allowed U.S. drones to fly over its territory to gather intelligence on drug traffickers, but insisted the operations were under its control.

The country's National Security Council said in a statement that the unmanned aircraft have flown over Mexico on specific occasions, mainly along the border with the U.S., to gather information at the request of the Mexican government.

The flights expand the U.S. role in the drug war, in which Americans already have been training Mexican soldiers and police as well as cooperating on other intelligence.

"When these operations are carried out, they are always done with the authorization, oversight and supervision of national agencies, including the Mexican Air Force," the council said.

It said Mexico always defines the objectives, the information to be gathered and the specific tasks in which the drones will be used and insisted that the operations respected Mexican law, civil and human rights.

The drones "have been particularly useful in achieving various objectives of combating crime and have significantly increased Mexican authorities' capabilities and technological superiority in its fight against crime," the council said.

The drone operations were first reported Wednesday by The New York Times.

Mexican politicians have often criticized the involvement of U.S. agencies on Mexican soil. Last week, the Mexican Senate voted to summon Mexico's ambassador to the U.S., Arturo Sarukhan, to talk about allegations that U.S. agents allowed guns to be smuggled into Mexico as part of investigations into drug trafficking.

Mexican Sen. Luis Alberto Villareal said direct U.S. involvement "violates trust and undermines national sovereignty."

More than 35,000 people have died since President Felipe Calderon launched a stepped-up offensive against the cartels in late 2006.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection acknowledges it has flown drones into Mexico, and that it has been going on for years. In July 2009, the agency sent an Unmanned Aerial System, or drone, into Mexico to help investigate the murder of CBP Agent Robert Rosas, who was shot and killed while he was on a routine patrol near San Diego, CBP spokesman Juan Munoz-Torres said.

"At the request of the U.S. Government and concurrence of the Government of Mexico, the (drone) was flown in Mexico airspace to support law enforcement officers assigned to search and apprehend Agent Rosas' murder suspects who fled into Mexico near the border town of Campo, California," Munoz-Torres said. "The UAS ceased operations and returned to the U.S. once several investigative leads materialized."

Munoz-Torres said his agency does not conduct routine drone surveillance in Mexico but that there is no prohibition against the U.S. asking Mexico for permission to fly drones over its territory.

A 17-year-old boy later turned himself in to U.S. authorities and pleaded guilty to Rosas' murder. Christian Daniel Castro-Alvarez was sentenced last year to 40 years in federal prison.

© Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

buglerbilly

18-03-11, 02:57 AM

Wrong thread!

buglerbilly

29-03-11, 07:04 PM

Ares

A Defense Technology Blog

Threats From Mexico May Move to U.S. Littorals, Official Says

Posted by Paul McLeary at 3/29/2011 10:45 AM CDT

Despite plenty of bumps and bruises along the way, the Department of Homeland Security says that it now has a viable, sustainable, affordable plan for using a mix of technology and border patrol agents to provide security along the southern and northern borders. Note that I didn’t say absolute security—DHS and Border Patrol officials will be the first to tell you that perfect security along the border is a chimera not worth chasing, even with the addition of National Guard troops along the southern border.

As a matter of fact, those 1,200 troops sent by president Obama last year are scheduled to leave in June of this year, to be replaced by 1,000 new Border Patrol agents. Speaking at a border security symposium Monday morning in Washington, David Aguilar, deputy commissioner of the Customs and Border Protection, called the National Guard deployment a “bridge” to growing the Border Patrol and getting new technologies in the field.

If the growth in the number of officers on the ground and the new commercial off the shelf technologies work the way the government envisions—leading to some high-traffic smuggling routes being choked off—Aguilar predicts that the problem will simply move rather than disappear, just as it did in the 80s and 90s from the Caribbean to Mexico as the point of transit north. Aguilar sees the next drug smuggling battleground being in the littoral waters along the Gulf Coast and along the Pacific coast. He said that the Department of Homeland Security is working through the Coast Guard to prepare for such a future.

But reducing drug smuggling, cross-border gun running, money laundering, and illegal immigration must come from some serious cross-border coordination said K. Jack Riley, director, RAND National Defense Research Institute. He said that Mexico’s “fractured law enforcement and security service” and “tremendous command and control problems” need to be addressed with more American help, but this assistance shouldn’t be relegated to technology transfers.

Over the last decade the U.S. has done a pretty good job of helping Mexico with technology such as helicopters and surveillance systems, but what we haven’t done enough of is to “engage with them in institution building and capacity” development, in an effort to assist with programs the Mexican government already has in place to clean up and reform an often corrupt and ineffective Mexican police force.

Mexican officials were in Washington on Monday to defend the conduct of its war on drug cartels before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, part of the Organization of American States. Mexico’s under-secretary for Juridical Affairs and Human Rights, Felipe de Jesus Zamora, squared off with representatives from 18 aid groups who criticized the conduct of Mexican security forces.

While Zamora claimed that his government is conducting the fight “with strict respect for human rights,” Carlos Karin Zazueta of Citizens in Support of Human Rights told the organization that the war on the cartels is failing, since “violence, the murder rate and citizen insecurity have skyrocketed.” Complaints about human rights abuses by Mexican security forces have been well documented, and are something that the United States can help with, if it decides to focus on training, and capacity building.

Pic: National Guard

buglerbilly

30-03-11, 02:58 PM

Analysis: When will the border be secure? Experts say lack of strategy makes end goal elusive

By Associated Press, Wednesday, March 30, 8:01 AM

WASHINGTON — The federal government hasn’t come up with a comprehensive strategy to secure the U.S.-Mexico border, even as an all-out war between Mexico and its violent drug gangs has claimed 35,000 lives and pushed hundreds of thousands of immigrants into the United States.

The U.S. government has spent nearly $4 billion on various approaches, including a $2.4 billion border fence effort, two deployments of National Guard troops to temporarily bolster the Border Patrol, and a now-defunct $1 billion “virtual fence” that covered 53 miles of the 2,100-mile U.S.-Mexico border until the Obama administration scrapped it earlier this year.

“In spite of an effort to do more, there does not appear to be a plan in place that actually accomplishes the objectives of a secure border,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said earlier this month in a speech to the U.S.- Mexico Congressional Border Issues Conference.

The physical fence saw drugs catapulted over it, tunneled under it and even driven over with homemade ramps. “Show me a 10-foot fence, I’ll show you an 11-foot ladder” became common wisdom along the border. And the Homeland Security Department now faces lawsuits from landowners who found their property in a no-man’s land on the other side of the fence, inaccessible to the rest of the United States.

The U.S. also tried the SBInet virtual fence plan, abandoned earlier this year after a billion-dollar expenditure. Now there’s a new plan to install cameras, radar and other gadgets. But that gear won’t be in place border-wide until at least 2021 and maybe not until 2026, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says these efforts are working, and she points to a 36 percent drop in apprehensions at the border and the addition of thousands of newly hired Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection agents. Those successes, she tells Congress, need to be built upon.

“In March 2009, the Obama administration launched the Southwest Border Initiative to bring focus and intensity to Southwest border security, coupled with a reinvigorated, smart and effective approach to enforcing immigration laws in the interior of our country,” Napolitano said in written testimony submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this month. “We are now two years into this strategy and, based on our own indicators of progress as well as previous benchmarks by Congress, it is clear that this approach is working.”

But that initiative focused almost entirely on adding people and financial resources to the border, an effort that experts say is incomplete without a wider strategy that focuses on hard information about what and who is getting across the border daily, statistics the administration has been unable to collect. Most of the planning at the moment is focused on the Arizona-Mexico border, the busiest section of the border in terms of smuggling drugs and people. For that, Homeland Security has crafted a plan to replace the virtual fence, at a cost of another $775 million and five years.

Yet an overall strategy from the Pacific to Gulf coasts is lacking, critics say.

Bradley Schreiber, a former Homeland Security senior adviser and current vice president for the Applied Science Foundation for Homeland Security, said the government has employed a piecemeal strategy using technology or personnel. But so far the government hasn’t developed a solid way to measure the threat and therefore can’t know for sure if it is really responding to it in the best way.

“We don’t know what the threat is because we haven’t done a thorough assessment,” Schreiber said. “We don’t know what’s coming across and we don’t have a strategy to address it.”

Doris Meissner, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute and one-time head of the former Immigration and Naturalization Service, said she doesn’t see a clear goal or way to get there.

“There are a series of pieces,” Meissner said. A comprehensive strategy “may already be there, but you can’t tell because there is no goal.”

She said the first step should be to define “secure.” Congress has asked for operational control, which it considers the “prevention of all unlawful entries into the United States,” including terrorists, illegal immigrants and drugs.

But Napolitano and other department officials say the goal is keep illegal crossing and smuggling to a “manageable” level.

David Aguilar, deputy commissioner for Customs and Border Protection and former Border Patrol chief, said the government’s strategy is pretty simple: Mitigate the risk at the border, reduce that risk, and expand control across the border.

He said doing that includes a mix of technology, personnel and enforcement that stretches beyond just the immediate border region and relies heavily on a risk assessment that will vary from area to area. The government is working to collect data on who and what is coming across the border without being caught immediately, Aguilar said, but it’s unclear when that data will be available.

“We will have to be constantly adjusting,” Aguilar said. He added that U.S. authorities also take a close look at intelligence and data from Mexico, including the numbers of people traveling to well-known smuggling staging areas and the amount of bed space at guest houses where migrants often stay before being smuggled across the border.

Illegal border crossers have dropped to the lowest levels since the 1970s, and seizures of illegal drugs coming north and cash and weapons heading south have increased. But jobs in the U.S. have been scarce during one of the worst recessions since the Great Depression, and local and state authorities have increased efforts to make living in certain communities uncomfortable for illegal immigrants.

In a tense back and forth during Napolitano’s Judiciary Committee testimony, Cornyn contended that more needs to be done at the border.

“Sustaining our current effort means that about a half a million people coming across the border here are detained,” Cornyn said.

The fear of what could be unleashed next from Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s four-year-old war against the drug cartels has border-state officials nervous. So far, about 35,000 people have been killed, including several dozen Americans. A recent report suggested about a quarter-million Mexicans have been displaced from their homes and about a quarter of those have come to the United States.

Cornyn said the unknown is precisely what worries him.

“As you know and I know, how many (border crossers) are detained tells you nothing about how many got away,” Cornyn said. “This is a national security threat, so we need to regain the confidence of the American people before they’re going to allow us to move forward on the kinds of things that you and I know we need to do to fix our broken immigration systems.”

___

EDITOR’S NOTE — Alicia A. Caldwell covers immigration and border issues for The Associated Press.

An AP News Analysis

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

buglerbilly

03-04-11, 03:30 AM

How a big US bank laundered billions from Mexico's murderous drug gangs

As the violence spread, billions of dollars of cartel cash began to seep into the global financial system. But a special investigation by the Observer reveals how the increasingly frantic warnings of one London whistleblower were ignored

Ed Vulliamy

The Observer, Sunday 3 April 2011

A soldier guards marijuana that is being incinerated in Tijuana, Mexico. Photograph: Guillermo Arias/AP

On 10 April 2006, a DC-9 jet landed in the port city of Ciudad del Carmen, on the Gulf of Mexico, as the sun was setting. Mexican soldiers, waiting to intercept it, found 128 cases packed with 5.7 tons of cocaine, valued at $100m. But something else – more important and far-reaching – was discovered in the paper trail behind the purchase of the plane by the Sinaloa narco-trafficking cartel.

During a 22-month investigation by agents from the US Drug Enforcement Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and others, it emerged that the cocaine smugglers had bought the plane with money they had laundered through one of the biggest banks in the United States: Wachovia, now part of the giant Wells Fargo.

The authorities uncovered billions of dollars in wire transfers, traveller's cheques and cash shipments through Mexican exchanges into Wachovia accounts. Wachovia was put under immediate investigation for failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering programme. Of special significance was that the period concerned began in 2004, which coincided with the first escalation of violence along the US-Mexico border that ignited the current drugs war.

Criminal proceedings were brought against Wachovia, though not against any individual, but the case never came to court. In March 2010, Wachovia settled the biggest action brought under the US bank secrecy act, through the US district court in Miami. Now that the year's "deferred prosecution" has expired, the bank is in effect in the clear. It paid federal authorities $110m in forfeiture, for allowing transactions later proved to be connected to drug smuggling, and incurred a $50m fine for failing to monitor cash used to ship 22 tons of cocaine.

More shocking, and more important, the bank was sanctioned for failing to apply the proper anti-laundering strictures to the transfer of $378.4bn – a sum equivalent to one-third of Mexico's gross national product – into dollar accounts from so-called casas de cambio (CDCs) in Mexico, currency exchange houses with which the bank did business.

"Wachovia's blatant disregard for our banking laws gave international cocaine cartels a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations," said Jeffrey Sloman, the federal prosecutor. Yet the total fine was less than 2% of the bank's $12.3bn profit for 2009. On 24 March 2010, Wells Fargo stock traded at $30.86 – up 1% on the week of the court settlement.

The conclusion to the case was only the tip of an iceberg, demonstrating the role of the "legal" banking sector in swilling hundreds of billions of dollars – the blood money from the murderous drug trade in Mexico and other places in the world – around their global operations, now bailed out by the taxpayer.

At the height of the 2008 banking crisis, Antonio Maria Costa, then head of the United Nations office on drugs and crime, said he had evidence to suggest the proceeds from drugs and crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to banks on the brink of collapse. "Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade," he said. "There were signs that some banks were rescued that way."

Wachovia was acquired by Wells Fargo during the 2008 crash, just as Wells Fargo became a beneficiary of $25bn in taxpayers' money. Wachovia's prosecutors were clear, however, that there was no suggestion Wells Fargo had behaved improperly; it had co-operated fully with the investigation. Mexico is the US's third largest international trading partner and Wachovia was understandably interested in this volume of legitimate trade.

José Luis Marmolejo, who prosecuted those running one of the casas de cambio at the Mexican end, said: "Wachovia handled all the transfers. They never reported any as suspicious."

"As early as 2004, Wachovia understood the risk," the bank admitted in the statement of settlement with the federal government, but, "despite these warnings, Wachovia remained in the business". There is, of course, the legitimate use of CDCs as a way into the Hispanic market. In 2005 the World Bank said that Mexico was receiving $8.1bn in remittances.

During research into the Wachovia Mexican case, the Observer obtained documents previously provided to financial regulators. It emerged that the alarm that was ignored came from, among other places, London, as a result of the diligence of one of the most important whistleblowers of our time. A man who, in a series of interviews with the Observer, adds detail to the documents, laying bare the story of how Wachovia was at the centre of one of the world's biggest money-laundering operations.

Martin Woods, a Liverpudlian in his mid-40s, joined the London office of Wachovia Bank in February 2005 as a senior anti-money laundering officer. He had previously served with the Metropolitan police drug squad. As a detective he joined the money-laundering investigation team of the National Crime Squad, where he worked on the British end of the Bank of New York money-laundering scandal in the late 1990s.

Woods talks like a police officer – in the best sense of the word: punctilious, exact, with a roguish humour, but moral at the core. He was an ideal appointment for any bank eager to operate a diligent and effective risk management policy against the lucrative scourge of high finance: laundering, knowing or otherwise, the vast proceeds of criminality, tax-evasion, and dealing in arms and drugs.

Woods had a police officer's eye and a police officer's instincts – not those of a banker. And this influenced not only his methods, but his mentality. "I think that a lot of things matter more than money – and that marks you out in a culture which appears to prevail in many of the banks in the world," he says.

Woods was set apart by his modus operandi. His speciality, he explains, was his application of a "know your client", or KYC, policing strategy to identifying dirty money. "KYC is a fundamental approach to anti-money laundering, going after tax evasion or counter-terrorist financing. Who are your clients? Is the documentation right? Good, responsible banking involved always knowing your customer and it still does."

When he looked at Wachovia, the first thing Woods noticed was a deficiency in KYC information. And among his first reports to his superiors at the bank's headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina, were observations on a shortfall in KYC at Wachovia's operation in London, which he set about correcting, while at the same time implementing what was known as an enhanced transaction monitoring programme, gathering more information on clients whose money came through the bank's offices in the City, in sterling or euros. By August 2006, Woods had identified a number of suspicious transactions relating to casas de cambio customers in Mexico.

Primarily, these involved deposits of traveller's cheques in euros. They had sequential numbers and deposited larger amounts of money than any innocent travelling person would need, with inadequate or no KYC information on them and what seemed to a trained eye to be dubious signatures. "It was basic work," he says. "They didn't answer the obvious questions: 'Is the transaction real, or does it look synthetic? Does the traveller's cheque meet the protocols? Is it all there, and if not, why not?'"

Woods discussed the matter with Wachovia's global head of anti-money laundering for correspondent banking, who believed the cheques could signify tax evasion. He then undertook what banks call a "look back" at previous transactions and saw fit to submit a series of SARs, or suspicious activity reports, to the authorities in the UK and his superiors in Charlotte, urging the blocking of named parties and large series of sequentially numbered traveller's cheques from Mexico. He issued a number of SARs in 2006, of which 50 related to the casas de cambio in Mexico. To his amazement, the response from Wachovia's Miami office, the centre for Latin American business, was anything but supportive – he felt it was quite the reverse.

As it turned out, however, Woods was on the right track. Wachovia's business in Mexico was coming under closer and closer scrutiny by US federal law enforcement. Wachovia was issued with a number of subpoenas for information on its Mexican operation. Woods has subsequently been informed that Wachovia had six or seven thousand subpoenas. He says this was "An absurd number. So at what point does someone at the highest level not get the feeling that something is very, very wrong?"

In April and May 2007, Wachovia – as a result of increasing interest and pressure from the US attorney's office – began to close its relationship with some of the casas de cambio. But rather than launch an internal investigation into Woods's alerts over Mexico, Woods claims Wachovia hung its own money-laundering expert out to dry. The records show that during 2007 Woods "continued to submit more SARs related to the casas de cambio".

In July 2007, all of Wachovia's remaining 10 Mexican casa de cambio clients operating through London suddenly stopped doing so. Later in 2007, after the investigation of Wachovia was reported in the US financial media, the bank decided to end its remaining relationships with the Mexican casas de cambio globally. By this time, Woods says, he found his personal situation within the bank untenable; while the bank acted on one level to protect itself from the federal investigation into its shortcomings, on another, it rounded on the man who had been among the first to spot them.

On 16 June Woods was told by Wachovia's head of compliance that his latest SAR need not have been filed, that he had no legal requirement to investigate an overseas case and no right of access to documents held overseas from Britain, even if they were held by Wachovia.

Woods's life went into freefall. He went to hospital with a prolapsed disc, reported sick and was told by the bank that he not done so in the appropriate manner, as directed by the employees' handbook. He was off work for three weeks, returning in August 2007 to find a letter from the bank's compliance managing director, which was unrelenting in its tone and words of warning.

The letter addressed itself to what the manager called "specific examples of your failure to perform at an acceptable standard". Woods, on the edge of a breakdown, was put on sick leave by his GP; he was later given psychiatric treatment, enrolled on a stress management course and put on medication.

Late in 2007, Woods attended a function at Scotland Yard where colleagues from the US were being entertained. There, he sought out a representative of the Drug Enforcement Administration and told him about the casas de cambio, the SARs and his employer's reaction. The Federal Reserve and officials of the office of comptroller of currency in Washington DC then "spent a lot of time examining the SARs" that had been sent by Woods to Charlotte from London.

"They got back in touch with me a while afterwards and we began to put the pieces of the jigsaw together," says Woods. What they found was – as Costa says – the tip of the iceberg of what was happening to drug money in the banking industry, but at least it was visible and it had a name: Wachovia.

In June 2005, the DEA, the criminal division of the Internal Revenue Service and the US attorney's office in southern Florida began investigating wire transfers from Mexico to the US. They were traced back to correspondent bank accounts held by casas de cambio at Wachovia. The CDC accounts were supervised and managed by a business unit of Wachovia in the bank's Miami offices.

"Through CDCs," said the court document, "persons in Mexico can use hard currency and … wire transfer the value of that currency to US bank accounts to purchase items in the United States or other countries. The nature of the CDC business allows money launderers the opportunity to move drug dollars that are in Mexico into CDCs and ultimately into the US banking system.

"On numerous occasions," say the court papers, "monies were deposited into a CDC by a drug-trafficking organisation. Using false identities, the CDC then wired that money through its Wachovia correspondent bank accounts for the purchase of airplanes for drug-trafficking organisations." The court settlement of 2010 would detail that "nearly $13m went through correspondent bank accounts at Wachovia for the purchase of aircraft to be used in the illegal narcotics trade. From these aircraft, more than 20,000kg of cocaine were seized."

All this occurred despite the fact that Wachovia's office was in Miami, designated by the US government as a "high-intensity money laundering and related financial crime area", and a "high-intensity drug trafficking area". Since the drug cartel war began in 2005, Mexico had been designated a high-risk source of money laundering.

"As early as 2004," the court settlement would read, "Wachovia understood the risk that was associated with doing business with the Mexican CDCs. Wachovia was aware of the general industry warnings. As early as July 2005, Wachovia was aware that other large US banks were exiting the CDC business based on [anti-money laundering] concerns … despite these warnings, Wachovia remained in business."

On 16 March 2010, Douglas Edwards, senior vice-president of Wachovia Bank, put his signature to page 10 of a 25-page settlement, in which the bank admitted its role as outlined by the prosecutors. On page 11, he signed again, as senior vice-president of Wells Fargo. The documents show Wachovia providing three services to 22 CDCs in Mexico: wire transfers, a "bulk cash service" and a "pouch deposit service", to accept "deposit items drawn on US banks, eg cheques and traveller's cheques", as spotted by Woods.

"For the time period of 1 May 2004 through 31 May 2007, Wachovia processed at least $$373.6bn in CDCs, $4.7bn in bulk cash" – a total of more than $378.3bn, a sum that dwarfs the budgets debated by US state and UK local authorities to provide services to citizens.

The document gives a fascinating insight into how the laundering of drug money works. It details how investigators "found readily identifiable evidence of red flags of large-scale money laundering". There were "structured wire transfers" whereby "it was commonplace in the CDC accounts for round-number wire transfers to be made on the same day or in close succession, by the same wire senders, for the … same account".

Over two days, 10 wire transfers by four individuals "went though Wachovia for deposit into an aircraft broker's account. All of the transfers were in round numbers. None of the individuals of business that wired money had any connection to the aircraft or the entity that allegedly owned the aircraft. The investigation has further revealed that the identities of the individuals who sent the money were false and that the business was a shell entity. That plane was subsequently seized with approximately 2,000kg of cocaine on board."

Many of the sequentially numbered traveller's cheques, of the kind dealt with by Woods, contained "unusual markings" or "lacked any legible signature". Also, "many of the CDCs that used Wachovia's bulk cash service sent significantly more cash to Wachovia than what Wachovia had expected. More specifically, many of the CDCs exceeded their monthly activity by at least 50%."

Recognising these "red flags", the US attorney's office in Miami, the IRS and the DEA began investigating Wachovia, later joined by FinCEN, one of the US Treasury's agencies to fight money laundering, while the office of the comptroller of the currency carried out a parallel investigation. The violations they found were, says the document, "serious and systemic and allowed certain Wachovia customers to launder millions of dollars of proceeds from the sale of illegal narcotics through Wachovia accounts over an extended time period. The investigation has identified that at least $110m in drug proceeds were funnelled through the CDC accounts held at Wachovia."

The settlement concludes by discussing Wachovia's "considerable co-operation and remedial actions" since the prosecution was initiated, after the bank was bought by Wells Fargo. "In consideration of Wachovia's remedial actions," concludes the prosecutor, "the United States shall recommend to the court … that prosecution of Wachovia on the information filed … be deferred for a period of 12 months."

But while the federal prosecution proceeded, Woods had remained out in the cold. On Christmas Eve 2008, his lawyers filed tribunal proceedings against Wachovia for bullying and detrimental treatment of a whistleblower. The case was settled in May 2009, by which time Woods felt as though he was "the most toxic person in the bank". Wachovia agreed to pay an undisclosed amount, in return for which Woods left the bank and said he would not make public the terms of the settlement.

After years of tribulation, Woods was finally formally vindicated, though not by Wachovia: a letter arrived from John Dugan, the comptroller of the currency in Washington DC, dated 19 March 2010 – three days after the settlement in Miami. Dugan said he was "writing to personally recognise and express my appreciation for the role you played in the actions brought against Wachovia Bank for violations of the bank secrecy act … Not only did the information that you provided facilitate our investigation, but you demonstrated great personal courage and integrity by speaking up. Without the efforts of individuals like you, actions such as the one taken against Wachovia would not be possible."

The so-called "deferred prosecution" detailed in the Miami document is a form of probation whereby if the bank abides by the law for a year, charges are dropped. So this March the bank was in the clear. The week that the deferred prosecution expired, a spokeswoman for Wells Fargo said the parent bank had no comment to make on the documentation pertaining to Woods's case, or his allegations. She added that there was no comment on Sloman's remarks to the court; a provision in the settlement stipulated Wachovia was not allowed to issue public statements that contradicted it.

But the settlement leaves a sour taste in many mouths – and certainly in Woods's. The deferred prosecution is part of this "cop-out all round", he says. "The regulatory authorities do not have to spend any more time on it, and they don't have to push it as far as a criminal trial. They just issue criminal proceedings, and settle. The law enforcement people do what they are supposed to do, but what's the point? All those people dealing with all that money from drug-trafficking and murder, and no one goes to jail?"

One of the foremost figures in the training of anti-money laundering officers is Robert Mazur, lead infiltrator for US law enforcement of the Colombian Medellín cartel during the epic prosecution and collapse of the BCCI banking business in 1991 (his story was made famous by his memoir, The Infiltrator, which became a movie).

Mazur, whose firm Chase and Associates works closely with law enforcement agencies and trains officers for bank anti-money laundering, cast a keen eye over the case against Wachovia, and he says now that "the only thing that will make the banks properly vigilant to what is happening is when they hear the rattle of handcuffs in the boardroom".

Mazur said that "a lot of the law enforcement people were disappointed to see a settlement" between the administration and Wachovia. "But I know there were external circumstances that worked to Wachovia's benefit, not least that the US banking system was on the edge of collapse."

What concerns Mazur is that what law enforcement agencies and politicians hope to achieve against the cartels is limited, and falls short of the obvious attack the US could make in its war on drugs: go after the money. "We're thinking way too small," Mazur says. "I train law enforcement officers, thousands of them every year, and they say to me that if they tried to do half of what I did, they'd be arrested. But I tell them: 'You got to think big. The headlines you will be reading in seven years' time will be the result of the work you begin now.' With BCCI, we had to spend two years setting it up, two years doing undercover work, and another two years getting it to trial. If they want to do something big, like go after the money, that's how long it takes."

But Mazur warns: "If you look at the career ladders of law enforcement, there's no incentive to go after the big money. People move every two to three years. The DEA is focused on drug trafficking rather than money laundering. You get a quicker result that way – they want to get the traffickers and seize their assets. But this is like treating a sick plant by cutting off a few branches – it just grows new ones. Going after the big money is cutting down the plant – it's a harder door to knock on, it's a longer haul, and it won't get you the short-term riches."

The office of the comptroller of the currency is still examining whether individuals in Wachovia are criminally liable. Sources at FinCEN say that a so-called "look-back" is in process, as directed by the settlement and agreed to by Wachovia, into the $378.4bn that was not directly associated with the aircraft purchases and cocaine hauls, but neither was it subject to the proper anti-laundering checks. A FinCEN source says that $20bn already examined appears to have "suspicious origins". But this is just the beginning.

Antonio Maria Costa, who was executive director of the UN's office on drugs and crime from May 2002 to August 2010, charts the history of the contamination of the global banking industry by drug and criminal money since his first initiatives to try to curb it from the European commission during the 1990s. "The connection between organised crime and financial institutions started in the late 1970s, early 1980s," he says, "when the mafia became globalised."

Until then, criminal money had circulated largely in cash, with the authorities making the occasional, spectacular "sting" or haul. During Costa's time as director for economics and finance at the EC in Brussels, from 1987, inroads were made against penetration of banks by criminal laundering, and "criminal money started moving back to cash, out of the financial institutions and banks. Then two things happened: the financial crisis in Russia, after the emergence of the Russian mafia, and the crises of 2003 and 2007-08.

"With these crises," says Costa, "the banking sector was short of liquidity, the banks exposed themselves to the criminal syndicates, who had cash in hand."

Costa questions the readiness of governments and their regulatory structures to challenge this large-scale corruption of the global economy: "Government regulators showed what they were capable of when the issue suddenly changed to laundering money for terrorism – on that, they suddenly became serious and changed their attitude."

Hardly surprising, then, that Wachovia does not appear to be the end of the line. In August 2010, it emerged in quarterly disclosures by HSBC that the US justice department was seeking to fine it for anti-money laundering compliance problems reported to include dealings with Mexico.

"Wachovia had my résumé, they knew who I was," says Woods. "But they did not want to know – their attitude was, 'Why are you doing this?' They should have been on my side, because they were compliance people, not commercial people. But really they were commercial people all along. We're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. This is the biggest money-laundering scandal of our time.

"These are the proceeds of murder and misery in Mexico, and of drugs sold around the world," he says. "All the law enforcement people wanted to see this come to trial. But no one goes to jail. "What does the settlement do to fight the cartels? Nothing – it doesn't make the job of law enforcement easier and it encourages the cartels and anyone who wants to make money by laundering their blood dollars. Where's the risk? There is none.

"Is it in the interest of the American people to encourage both the drug cartels and the banks in this way? Is it in the interest of the Mexican people? It's simple: if you don't see the correlation between the money laundering by banks and the 30,000 people killed in Mexico, you're missing the point."

Woods feels unable to rest on his laurels. He tours the world for a consultancy he now runs, Hermes Forensic Solutions, counselling and speaking to banks on the dangers of laundering criminal money, and how to spot and stop it. "New York and London," says Woods, "have become the world's two biggest laundries of criminal and drug money, and offshore tax havens. Not the Cayman Islands, not the Isle of Man or Jersey. The big laundering is right through the City of London and Wall Street.

"After the Wachovia case, no one in the regulatory community has sat down with me and asked, 'What happened?' or 'What can we do to avoid this happening to other banks?' They are not interested. They are the same people who attack the whistleblowers and this is a position the [British] Financial Services Authority at least has adopted on legal advice: it has been advised that the confidentiality of banking and bankers takes primacy over the public information disclosure act. That is how the priorities work: secrecy first, public interest second.

"Meanwhile, the drug industry has two products: money and suffering. On one hand, you have massive profits and enrichment. On the other, you have massive suffering, misery and death. You cannot separate one from the other.

"What happened at Wachovia was symptomatic of the failure of the entire regulatory system to apply the kind of proper governance and adequate risk management which would have prevented not just the laundering of blood money, but the global crisis."

buglerbilly

06-04-11, 02:30 AM

U.S. Wants Proven Security For Mexico Border

Apr 5, 2011

By Paul McLeary
Washington

The U.S. State Department released last month an important report that provides details about the training, equipment and advisory assistance the government is giving Mexico to help in its ongoing war with the drug cartels that operate with impunity across much of the north.

The International Narcotics Control Strategy outlines how, under the auspices of the Merida Initiative—the much-discussed $1.5 billion American aid package to Mexico—the U.S. has delivered eight Bell helicopters to the Mexican army and air force, along with three UH-60M Black Hawk helicopters to the federal police for use in fighting drug traffickers. Other equipment such as radar, ballistics identification machines and non-intrusive inspection equipment has also been sent south in recent years, while U.S. training teams are advising Mexican police, military and court officials. In 2010 alone, Congress appropriated $379 million in equipment and training assistance for Mexico.

But the U.S. is doing more than providing aid and advice. On the northern side of the border, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is spending billions beefing up surveillance and security in an attempt to stem the flow of narcotics that move north to feed the American appetite for illegal drugs. The effort is also an attempt to keep the violence that has gripped northern Mexico from creeping over the border. Battles between rival cartels and fights between Mexican forces and cadres of well-trained, well-equipped cartel gunmen have killed more than 34,000 Mexicans since 2006.Thousands have been wounded or have vanished into the vortex of violence and kidnapping-for-profit. As disturbing are recent reports that 1,700 Mexican special forces troops deserted over the past decade, with some presumably switching sides to join the high-paying cartels.

The accelerated American effort to improve situational awareness around the border led directly to the public relations disaster known as SBInet, the so-called “virtual fence” DHS developed to monitor the border by incorporating day/night cameras, radar and ground sensors attached to a line of integrated towers that could pick up, identify and track anything moving across the desert. After five years of delays and with $800 million sunk into the program, DHS finally told lead contractor Boeing to stop work in January, leaving the system in operation across only 53 mi. of Arizona. But while the $800 million didn’t come close to giving DHS the results it wanted, in conversations with DTI U.S. Border Patrol agents have expressed their appreciation for the capability it brings. And the program’s curtailment can also be said to have ushered in a new era in technology procurement for DHS—one that may well include Boeing.

The U.S. wants to finish the job it started in Arizona, and has opened up competition to find mature sensor and surveillance technologies to blanket the state’s border with Mexico. The government plans to spend an additional $750 million over the next several years on the effort, only this time, as Mark Borkowski of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) told industry representatives at an industry day event in Phoenix in February, if the gear provided isn’t exactly what was promised, at exactly the price agreed upon, “we will terminate you for default.” He added, for emphasis, “if you don’t know what it costs, then you’re not ready to sell to us.”

Borkowski gave DTI the rundown of his meeting with industry at the Phoenix Convention Center, saying that CBP wants technology solutions “that are producible right away. We’re not going to get involved in development—they need to commit that they are producible right at the time we award the contract.”

Indeed, in a request for information sent to industry after capping SBInet, DHS stated that it is looking for open-architecture solutions that can “plug and play” with hardware and software from other suppliers “without additional integration costs or any additional involvement from the original equipment manufacturer(s).”

One company in the hunt for post-SBInet contracts is DRS Technologies, which is submitting a version of the border surveillance system it provided to Jordan. In 2009 the company delivered networked ground surveillance radars and electro-optic/infrared camera bundles that feed back into a common operating picture, much like what the DHS wants to do along the U.S./Mexico border. The company is also in the final stages of receiving a sole-source award for an additional phase of the Jordanian program.

“We designed [the Jordanian system] as an architecture that can be incrementally applied to the entire border region,” says Jim Hynes, executive director for DHS and Force Protection Systems. The question now is “how do we leverage that and provide the U.S. government with a similar capability” along the Mexican border. While different in several respects from the Jordanian program—Hynes wouldn’t divulge specifics—he says that the system the company is pitching to the U.S. has been installed on existing infrastructure, perched atop tall, fixed towers and fitted to mobile platforms and trailers. He adds that the open, scalable architecture of the system gives it flexibility to grow, something DHS says is a priority.

The procurement of a new generation of border surveillance technologies is going to happen quickly, Borkowski says, with contracts for technologies such as the truck-mounted mobile surveillance system expected to be awarded “by middle-to-late this year.” He wants everything except the integrated fixed towers to be purchased in fiscal 2011 and fielded within months, and to have the towers under contract in fiscal 2012, and up and operational within a year after that. CBP wants the new gear to give the agency the ability to swap out software over time. “For the long-term we’re looking at open-architecture” solutions that allow for different platforms to be networked in a “web-like” structure as broadband and wireless technologies are introduced to the Border Patrol, he said.

In a related but separate contract in January, FLIR Systems Inc. was awarded a firm fixed-price contract from CBP valued at up to $101.9 million, for procurement of mobile surveillance capabilities systems. The five-year deal includes a $26 million funded base year with four option periods and calls for integrated mobile surveillance and detection systems. FLIR’s HRC-X ultra-long-range thermal-imaging camera will be included on vehicle-mounted towers.

Adam Strange, general manager of FLIR’s Integrated Systems Div., says CBP is performing acceptance tests and the company expects a production order later this year. The technology that the company is providing is a step up from that found on the vehicle-mounted tower camera systems or mobile surveillance system currently in the field, which are also provided by FLIR. The new system features radar with longer range (12 km, or 7.5 mi.), higher accuracy, greater resolution and fewer false alarms than the current system.

Another supplier that will likely be involved in the competition is Raytheon, which has been touting its Clear View system for some time. In an interview last October, Raytheon said the combination of cameras, sensors, operating and tracking software, and command-and-control system that manages situational awareness in Clear View is similar to Boeing’s SBInet technologies and to what DRS plans to pitch. While Raytheon declined comment for this article, a company representative said last year that Clear View is a modular system that can “plug and play” with a variety of other data systems, while providing the user with “a common track across multiple sensing technologies, or even sensor views.”

As for Boeing, the company appears interested in participating in the competition to supply more fixed integrated towers, and there has been word that it believes it can drive down the cost per mile from its existing towers. An e-mailed statement from Boeing said that it “remains committed to providing valuable solutions and supporting DHS.”

Borkowski says that Boeing is “certainly welcome” to bid on the integrated fixed-tower procurement, but “I want to look at my other alternatives” from industry. He sees Boeing’s towers as a high-end version of what he wants, and asks, “Is there value, do I really need that, or can I do nearly as well or just as well with a lower-end version?”

Since he plans to have everything under contract within a year, the answer will soon be clear.

Photo: CBP

buglerbilly

07-04-11, 10:02 AM

Official: Mexican drug cartels recruiting common criminals, turning them into killers

By Associated Press, Wednesday, April 6, 9:17 PM

CANCUN, Mexico — Drug cartels are increasingly recruiting common criminals and quickly converting them into killers, the head of Mexico’s federal police said Wednesday.

Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna said new drug cartel recruits can reach the position of hit man in a month, a process that used to take 15 years.

Garcia Luna said his agency has began combatting common crime as it fights drug cartels in response to the changing nature of organized crime in Mexico.

“For too long the fight against organized crime has been concentrated on the leadership and now it’s important to fight crime at every stage,” Garcia Luna told representatives from more than 100 countries attending the annual International Conference for Drug Control.

The drug cartels are recruiting low-level lawbreakers such as street drug dealers and robbers, a tactic first used by the brutal Zetas drug gang and now being copied by other cartels.

The Zetas, originally ex-soldiers acting as hit men for Mexico’s Gulf drug cartel before breaking off on their own, have no geographic concentration like other cartels and therefore have shown up in disparate parts of the country, authorities said. They operate almost like franchises, sending one member to an area they want to control to recruit local criminals.

Officials at the drug control conference say the Zetas have now spread their reign of terror from the border with the United States to the border with Guatemala — and across it.

Guatemala Security Vice Minister Mario Castaneda said the Zetas are recruiting former elite Guatemalan soldiers and training them in camps in the Central American country.

At least six former “kaibiles” — Guatemalan soldiers trained in counterinsurgency — linked to the Zetas have been arrested in Guatemala, Castaneda said.

Mexico first warned in 2005 that the Zetas were recruiting “kaibiles.”

Guatemalan authorities are also investigating military personnel for allegedly stealing weapons from the army and selling them to drug traffickers, Castaneda said.

“We have documented at least three robberies” of army weapons, he said.

In 2009, Guatemalan police seized 563 grenades and more than 3,800 bullets from the Zetas that investigators said belonged to the army.

Since 2008, when the Zetas killed Guatemalan drug boss Juan Jose “Juancho” Leon, the gang began controlling cocaine traffic in the area.

Castaneda said Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa drug cartel is also in Guatemala. A U.S. law enforcement official who was not authorized to be quoted by name said that Sinaloa dominates trafficking in Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Panama and that the Gulf cartel also has operations in the first two countries.

Both the Zetas and Sinaloa cartels appear to operate in Honduras, and Sinaloa has made some inroads in Guatemala as well, the official said. The Central American countries are “a major route for the cocaine coming up from South America,” the official said.

Mexican cartels have been increasing their presence in Central America since 2006, when Mexican President Felipe Calderon launched a crackdown on drug traffickers.

Honduran Security Vice Minister Armando Calidonio said several Central American governments are considering the creation of a regional intelligence center to fight organized crime.

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

buglerbilly

07-04-11, 10:08 AM

Mexican forces seeking kidnapped bus passengers stumble on mass grave holding 59 bodies

By Associated Press, Thursday, April 7, 1:52 AM

MEXICO CITY — Mexican security forces searching for abducted bus passengers in a violent northern state bordering Texas have stumbled on a collection of pits holding a total of 59 bodies.

The grisly find was made near the ranch where drug cartel gunmen less than a year ago massacred 72 migrants who were trying to reach the United States.

Investigators struggled to exhume the bodies in the mass grave to determine whether they belonged to kidnapped bus passengers, migrants who frequently ride buses in the area, or drug traffickers executed by rivals.

Tamaulipas state investigators and federal authorities went to the site about 80 miles (130 kilometers) south of the border at Brownsville, Texas, to investigate reports that gunmen had begun stopping buses and pulling off some passengers in the area starting March 25.

Two other such cases were reported in subsequent days, in what may have been an attempt at forced recruitment by a drug gang, Tamaulipas state interior secretary Morelos Canseco said. The gunmen reportedly abducted almost exclusively men and allowed the remaining passengers to continue on their way.

State and federal investigators and soldiers conducted the raid, but differed on what exactly happened.

The federal Interior Department said the first pit was discovered Saturday and soldiers detained five suspected kidnappers. Tamaulipas officials said the pits were found Wednesday, and a total of 11 suspected kidnappers were captured and five kidnap victims were freed. The reason for the discrepancy was not clear.

But the security forces agreed that a series of eight burial pits had been found, one of which contained 43 bodies and the others 16 corpses. The bodies were being examined to determine their identities and cause of death.

Canseco said two of the dead were women. Many of the victims found in the pits appeared to have died between 10 and 15 days ago, dates that would roughly match the bus abductions, he said.

A statement from the Tamaulipas government, which “energetically condemned” the killings, did not say what drug gang, if any, the suspects belonged to.

President Felipe Calderon’s office issued a statement saying the find “underlines the cowardliness and total lack of scruples of the criminal organizations that cause violence in our country.”

While there was no immediate confirmation that a drug cartel was involved, officials refer to the cartels as “criminal organizations.”

The pits were found in the farm hamlet of La Joya in the township of San Fernando, in the same area where the bodies of 72 migrants, most from Central America, were found shot to death Aug. 24 at a ranch.

Authorities blamed that massacre on the Zetas drug gang, which is fighting its one-time allies in the Gulf cartel for control of the region.

The victims in the August massacre were illegal immigrants from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Ecuador and Brazil. An Ecuadorean and Honduran survived the attack, which Mexican authorities say occurred after the migrants refused to work for the cartel.

Mexican drug cartels have taken to recruiting migrants, common criminals and youths, Mexican authorities say.

But drug gunmen also operate kidnapping rings, and erect roadblocks on highways in Tamaulipas and other northern states, where they hijack vehicles and rob and sometimes kill passengers.

San Fernando is on a major highway that leads to the U.S. border, but it wasn’t immediately known whether the victims found in the mass grave had been kidnapped from that road.

Drug gangs across Mexico also sometimes use mass graves to dispose of the bodies of executed rivals.

The wave of drug-related killings — which has claimed more than 34,000 lives in the four years since the government launched an offensive against drug cartels — drew thousands of protesters into the streets of Mexico’s capital and several other cities Wednesday in marches against violence.

Many of the protesters said the government offensive has stirred up the violence.

“We need to end this war, because it is a senseless war that the government started,” said protester Alma Lilia Roura, 60, an art historian.

Several thousand people joined the demonstration in downtown Mexico City, chanting “No More Blood!” and “Not One More!” A similar number marched through the southern city of Cuernavaca.

Parents marched with toddlers, and protesters held up signs highlighting the disproportionate toll among the nation’s youth. “Today a student, tomorrow a corpse,” read one sign carried by demonstrators.

The marches were spurred in part by the March 28 killing of Juan Francisco Sicilia, the son of Mexican poet Javier Sicilia, and six other people in Cuernavaca.

“We are putting pressure on the government, because this can’t go on,” said the elder Sicilia. “It seems that we are like animals that can be murdered with impunity.”
___

Associated Press writer Mark Stevenson contributed to this report.

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

buglerbilly

13-04-11, 10:11 AM

127 bodies found in Mexico mass graves

April 13, 2011 - 5:39PM .

AFP

At least 11 more bodies were found in five new mass graves in north Mexico, bringing the total to 127 corpses uncovered near the US border.

The mass graves in Sinaloa state on the Pacific coast held 11 bodies, including two women, said an official with Sinaloa prosecutor's office, hours after 116 bodies were uncovered in graves in Tamaulipas state, in the northeast on Tuesday.

The Mexican government accused the Zetas gang of the Tamaulipas killings but by late Tuesday officials had not named any suspects for the Sinaloa discoveries.

A prosecution source said messages were found on the site apparently authored by the Zeta group, as well as messages from members of the Beltran Leyva drug cartel.

Police have detained 17 suspects in the Tamaulipas cases, and believe gunmen from the notoriously violent cartel dragged the victims off buses passing through the San Fernando area of Tamaulipas state.

"We can confirm that a total of 116 people have been found dead as a result of criminal actions apparently caused by actions by the Zetas criminal group," Attorney General Marisela Morales told reporters earlier.

Los Zetas, founded by deserters from the Mexican special forces and thought to have many corrupt former officials and ex-police on its payroll, is at the heart of the narcotics trade and organised crime in Mexico.

Engaged since February 2010 in a turf war for control of lucrative smuggling routes into the United States with the Gulf Cartel - its former employers - the cartel was blamed for the massacre of 72 migrants in August in Tamaulipas.

Mexican officials say that, aside from drug smuggling, the Zetas use extortion and kidnapping to raise money.

The largest concentration of graves ever found in Mexico was unearthed last Thursday in the San Fernando area, about 160km south of the Texan border, and the grisly toll has been rising steadily since.

Tamaulipas state officials said at least six buses have been attacked by gunmen this year and several passengers kidnapped.

Residents told local media the real toll is far higher.

Officials said two buses known to be missing were carrying mostly Mexicans.

However, Guatemala's foreign ministry said one of the bodies found in the graves was that of a 44-year-old Guatemalan man.

Separately, the US consulate in the Tamaulipas city of Matamoros said at least one American was kidnapped while travelling in one of the held-up buses.

Tamaulipas governor Egidio Torre Cantu met in Mexico City with Interior Minister Francis Blake to discuss the killings.

The Mexican military says the graves were discovered thanks to a tip obtained from a suspect identified as Armando Morales Uscanga.

According to Morales Uscanga, several of those killed were travellers aboard two long-distance passenger buses kidnapped between March 24 and March 29.

Morales Uscanga acknowledged "his participation in the assassination and illegal burial of 43 bodies", the military statement said.

Investigators uncovered the mass graves starting on April 1, after responding to complaints of buses being stopped and passengers abducted.

Los Zetas were also blamed for the August 2010 massacre of 72 people, mostly Central American migrants.

Authorities suggested the drug cartel was seeking to recruit young men into their gang and simply killed those who refused.

Some 35,000 people have been killed since 2006 when President Felipe Calderon launched a clampdown on the country's powerful gangs, involving tens of thousands of troops.

Attorney General Morales said more than 30 government experts were working to identify the bodies.

© 2011 AFP

buglerbilly

15-04-11, 02:21 PM

Mexican police officers arrested

16 Mexican police officers have been arrested suspected of protecting four members of a notorious drug cartel for the massacres of at least 145 people in a northern border state.

Mexico's Attorney General Marisela Morales speaks during a news conference Photo: REUTERS

10:57AM BST 15 Apr 2011

Attorney General Marisela Morales said the police were from San Fernando, Tamaulipas, where authorities have unearthed mass graves holding scores of bodies. The body count likely will rise as digging continues, officials warned today.

The police officers allegedly shielded from law enforcement four people - three men and a woman - authorities believe were directly responsible for the killings.

"All are members of the criminal organization Los Zetas," Miss Morales said of the four, who were not identified.

The victims apparently were passengers on public buses running routes through San Fernando to Reynosa and Matamoros, two Mexican cities on the border with the United States.

"The federal government reiterates its commitment to solve these lamentable and reprehensible homicides, and end the corruption of the police force which has made a pact with organized crime," Miss Morales said.

The government offered a $3.8 million (£2.3 million) reward for information leading to the capture of the four chief suspects.

Morelos Jaime Canseco, Tamaulipas Governor, said there was no evidence the San Fernando police were directly involved in the massacres.

But, he said, "the conclusion was reached that some members of the municipal police were involved with the criminals and they were transferred to the capital for questioning."

Authorities had previously arrested 17 people linked to Los Zetas, a notorious gang formed in the 1990s by ex-military commandos now engaged in a fight to the death with their former bosses, the Gulf cartel.

Experts say the war with the Gulf cartel has cut into the gang's income, and so it has turned to fuel theft and kidnapping of migrants for money.

Meanwhile, 70 of the bodies recovered so far were transported Thursday to Mexico City to further the identification process, a justice official said.

"They have been taken for embalming and analysis by the Forensic Medical Service," the spokesman said.

The bodies had been transported from Matamoros, in the state of Tamaulipas, where the remaining bodies were still kept. Dozens of people in Matamoros, across the border from Brownsville, Texas, were waiting to see whether their missing relatives had been found in the mass graves.

Authorities believe most of the victims were Mexicans, although only three bodies have been positively identified - two Mexicans and a Guatemalan.

San Fernando was the same municipality where Los Zetas last year kidnapped and slaughtered 73 immigrants from Central and South America on their way north to try to illegally cross into the United States.

The Ministry of Defense separately announced it had captured a top associate of cartel boss Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.

Sabori Raul Cisneros was arrested Wednesday in the northwestern state of Sonora, which borders the United States. He is accused of kidnapping and killing two police officers last year.

Authorities also found on Thursday the bodies of eight men, heaped in a pile and with signs of torture and gunshots to the head, in the western state of Michoacan.

The state, among Mexico's most violent, is the stronghold of La Familia, the drug cartel considered the country's largest producer and trafficker of illicit synthetic drugs bound for the United States.

Seven major drug gangs are operating in Mexico, and over 34,600 people have been killed since December 2006 in violence related to raging wars for control of smuggling routes and government efforts to stamp them out.

buglerbilly

19-04-11, 07:13 AM

Excellent article on the problems securing the border areas with Mexico...............from Vuurwapen blog............

April 18, 2011

What’s Really Happening Along the US/Mexico Border?

Although the issue has declined in popularity among the major news organizations recently, the proximity of the border between the United States and Mexico to my home keeps border security high on my list of concerns. I regularly travel to various desert locations where “activity” is high, and feel that I have a basic understanding of the real situation, rather than what is presented through various media outlets.

Law Enforcement Challenges

The most important factor to understand is scale. Even in one state – such as Arizona – there’s a massive area to cover. Not only must local and federal law enforcement watch the border itself, trafficking activities regularly extend almost 100 miles north, meaning that it’s practically impossible to lock down anything more than a token area.

Border fence near Lukeville, Arizona

Certain areas are known to have a high level of activity, and are thus selected for heavy monitoring by law enforcement agencies. However, because of the size of even one “small” area, Border Patrol agents can do little more than stay in their vehicles and either watch fences, roads, and trails, or drive along said fences, roads, or trails, while smugglers and illegal immigrants are free to roam the desert. Agents do occasionally use ATVs to travel deeper into the desert, but this is not exactly a frequent occurrence.

Even when driving slowly and looking carefully for abnormalities, individuals in the desert are practically invisible to passing Border Patrol agents.

As I was told by one agent, so many calls are received that the Border Patrol simply cannot respond to them all. This is partly due to efforts by smugglers to overwhelm law enforcement agencies with false calls for assistance. These are immediately responded to, for every report of a group of people stranded in the desert without water has the potential to result in multiple fatalities within hours if ignored.

Air assets are valuable, but scarce – one sheriff’s deputy told me about chasing two drug smugglers across the desert for almost an hour before a county helicopter was able to respond. By that time, he’d already apprehended both smugglers, who were armed with what he described as crude, homemade firearms, and shot at him during the chase.

Like their ground-based counterparts, CBP (Customs and Border Protection) fixed and rotary wing pilots sometimes spend their entire shifts “chasing ghosts,” or calls for assistance that lead them to far corners of their sector, only to find that no one is in need of assistance. I consider their presence to be rare, for in months of regularly visiting areas with trafficking activity – and sporadically in the years prior – I’ve never actually seen a CBP helicopter overhead. I have encountered them when I, too, am flying, but only in passing. They’re out there, but not in great numbers.

The majority of people encountered by law enforcement in these areas are unarmed, but the presence of heavily armed smugglers is a constant threat. While discussing various dangers with one agent, I was advised that if I stayed in the area long enough, I would encounter “multiple guys with AK-47s.” Coincidentally, early the next morning, I heard fully automatic gunfire that I tentatively identified as being from a Kalashnikov, though I never saw its source or its target, and believed it to be at least 500 yards away – given my location at the time, this may have been south of the border.

Southern Arizona terrain is far from being "open desert," and benefits those who are trying to hide.

Still, most of the law enforcement officers that I’ve encountered in the desert travel alone. I wouldn’t characterize any of them as being complacent – with the exception of the Border Patrol agent I found sleeping in his truck – but I’ve always spotted them first, and been able to choose the location and type of our encounter. This also meant that when I wanted to avoid them, I was able to do so with relative ease.

I cannot understate the danger that these agents face. Smugglers avoid killing them for the political pressure it would bring to bear on the issue, but if so desired, cartel “operatives” could easily ambush and murder a dozen or more Border Patrol agents or sheriff’s deputies in a day and disappear across the border before any possible response from other law enforcement officers. The level of coordination and organization required for this would be minimal. The cartels are aware of this. In other words, the only thing keeping a significant number of law enforcement officers alive at any given time is a lack of desire on the part of extremely violent and brutal criminal enterprises to kill them.

When agents do travel on foot to respond to calls or sightings, their abandoned vehicles are easy to spot.

Walking the Desert

For illegal immigrants and smugglers, the journey truly begins at the border fence – if one exists. Near towns or cities, tall fences discourage crossing or jumping, but these fences only extend a few miles past each town. Beyond that, they give way to shorter vehicle barriers, which present no challenge to those on foot. Farther from towns or roads, vehicle barriers change to barbed wire fences or even nothing at all. In other words, crossing the border is more of a milestone than an obstacle.

Were it not for the seriousness of the issue, the haphazard manner in which border fencing is constructed might be amusing. Here, tall "jump" and short "vehicle" fences meet.

Many times, those traveling on foot are dropped off right at the border, and are led by one or two “coyotes” who have made the journey numerous times. Rather than simply walking in the general direction of “north,” the paths chosen seem to be well organized and prepared in advance, though the trail markers are not always easy to spot or identify.

Some trail markers are easier to spot than others...although this arrow pointed south.

Trash is fairly common in remote areas of the desert, which smugglers use to their advantage. Finding two “arm covers” for couches or chairs next to one another marks the recommended direction of travel – the open end of the cover pointing the way. Sometimes, scraps of fabric were used in the same manner.

Trail markers disguised as trash. Other items were also used.

Every plant and animal in the area has adapted itself to desert life, either physically or through behavior modifications, while humans must carry water with them and carefully adopt behaviors that are not naturally occurring.

Not surprisingly, this organ pipe cactus is able to withstand drought better than humans.

Naturally occurring water is exceptionally difficult to find in the desert, but bottles and jugs can often be found under trees or bushes, left by various groups. Most of these are black so as not to shine in the sunlight and attract attention. The majority are empty or only partially full. Some are slashed open or shot, which I consider to be sadistic acts.

For a dehydrated individual crossing miles of desert terrain, finding an empty water jug is a demoralizing experience.

When water is not found, dehydration quickly turns to delirium. Discarded clothing – especially items that are very useful in the hot sun, such as hats – can be a sign that someone was in serious trouble.

(continues........)

buglerbilly

19-04-11, 07:14 AM

(continued.............)

I have covered a little more than 10 miles across desert terrain on a 95-degree day without water, and consider it to be a very challenging experience.

Discarding a hat in the hot sun is not the act of an individual in a clear mental state.

As mentioned above, hiding in the desert is a fairly easy task. Even when most plants aren’t in bloom, the amount of vegetation is sufficient to limit visibility on flat ground to as little as 20 yards, with a maximum of perhaps 200 in more open areas.

There are eight illegal immigrants in this photograph - obscured by vegetation.

A lot of foot traffic in this area follows washes, or dry creek beds, for several reasons. First, they tend to be lower than the surrounding terrain, providing natural concealment from observers on higher ground. Second, they generally run north and south overall, which is beneficial to those traveling from Mexico to the United States. Finally, temperatures can be significantly lower in washes, especially in the evenings and early mornings.

Entrances to heavily traveled washes are easy to spot.

Groups of illegal immigrants can vary in size from half a dozen to over one hundred. Most of the time, these groups have lead and trail elements, looking for dangers ahead of and behind the group.

The light reflected by this man's water jug immediately caught my eye.

Instead of shouting to one another, coyotes apparently communicate with one another using various hand and arm signals – none of which I know the meaning of, but I was at least able to tell that they weren’t just waving at me.

Charged with looking out for dangers, this point man was probably embarrassed to see someone watching him from behind.

This photograph shows the approximate distance between lead and main elements.

When they knew they were being watched, this group of illegal immigrants froze and simply stared.

Smuggling Operations

Daytime activity is reduced compared to night – cooler temperatures and the cover of darkness provide an advantage to those seeking to avoid detection and conserve water in the desert. Technology becomes a bigger foe to them at night, for agents generally have night vision equipment, and helicopters use thermal imaging to locate heat sources.

On moonlit nights, the use of night vision devices provides incredible - and undetectable - observation of terrain.

Smugglers are not unaware of these technologies, and take advantage of it whenever possible. Outside of the environment, the greatest danger to illegal immigrants is not American law enforcement, but rival smugglers or cartels looking to rob, rape, or kill. Most of this activity takes place at night.

Some trails are almost easier to spot at night and with NVGs than during the day.

As has been related to me by various Border Patrol, CBP and local law enforcement agents, hills and mountaintops are sometimes occupied by scouts and observers for smuggling operations. When they are captured, they are often found with radios, cell phones, spare batteries, automatic rifles, night vision devices, and binoculars or spotting scopes. Their purpose is to report on the movement of Border Patrol agents to smugglers or coyotes in the valleys or washes below.

I found evidence of longer-term "habitation" atop this hill just north of the border, but this had occurred at least three months prior. Smugglers constantly change routes and observation hills to avoid detection.

Many coyotes will lead their party into the desert, then demand additional payment – those who cannot pay are left stranded. When this happens, some give up and wait to be rescued by the Border Patrol or local law enforcement, while others continue north – but without knowledge of water caches or which routes to take, the odds are that their journey will not be successful. Those who give up often just sit under a tree and call for help, not wishing to avoid American law enforcement officials any longer. Several officers and agents told me about situations where illegal immigrants had the chance to escape, but did not do so.

In Summary

I’m hesitant to refer to those calling for increased border security as alarmist, for I, too, believe that current border security levels are inadequate. However, the real situation is not exactly what is claimed by some, that one can simply sit at any point along the border and watch drug mules pour across like ants, and so on. When descriptions of the border situation become too fantastic, the average person does not believe them, and starts to discount all reports of trouble along the border. The real situation is more frightening, but also more understated and not as exciting to talk about on TV or the radio.

It is possible for individuals armed with rifles or other weapons and equipment to walk across the border and travel to major population centers in the United States while avoiding contact with law enforcement. This is largely due to the relatively vast area that must be covered by relatively few agents and deputies, who are spread thin and exposed to great danger.

As I stated above, border violence is only limited due to the cartels’ knowledge that “turning up the volume” would cause increased enforcement. This results in an interesting situation, where the potential for violence is extremely high at any given moment, while the actual level of violence does not begin to rise that high – excepting crimes against illegal immigrants, which can be extremely brutal and most often go unreported.

buglerbilly

20-04-11, 02:00 AM

Move and counter-move in DoD’s war on smugglers

By Philip Ewing Tuesday, April 19th, 2011 10:13 am

Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn helped open a new joint command center down in Key West on Monday, which counter-smuggling officials hope will make America’s southern guardians — commanded by the Joint Inter-Agency Task Force-South — all the more effective. Pentagon officials and other top national security leaders take the threats posed by human and drug-smugglers so seriously that they’ve come up with their own DoD-style abbreviation for them: TCOs, for “Transnational Criminal Organizations.” According to Air Force Gen. Douglas Frasier, who runs U.S. Southern Command, these gangs are equal to or greater than some traditional militaries, in terms of the financing they get and the danger they could pose to the U.S.

“If you look at the transnational criminal organizations, it’s a well– financed, capable, capacity — an enterprise, if you will,” Frasier told reporters at the Pentagon last month. “Our estimates are anywhere from, on an annual basis, on a global basis, the transnational criminal organizations bring in $300 billion to $400 billion a year. That’s a significant number when you put it against the capacities of the [South American] governments that we’re talking about.”

So, the brass figures, you need to be as organized and high-tech as possible to fight such a complicated adversary, which probably will never give up so long as there’s such a huge demand for illegal drugs in the U.S. There is so much money involved that drug smugglers take incredible risks, and show uncommon ingenuity, trying to get their shipments north. For example, the U.S. Coast Guard and its allies began spotting crude submersibles, first towed behind surface ships and then moving under their own power, packed with cocaine bound for North America. Now, Frasier said, smugglers have begun experimenting with fully submersible vessels for transporting drugs.

The demand is there, which means the money is there, so the technology of these drug-subs is clearly improving. But where does the expertise come from? Are there legitimate naval architects designing these vessels — and if so, where do they come from? Or are the “shipyards” of the South American jungles just one-off workshops?

Said Frasier: “I think there’s a little bit of both within it. And to back up just a minute and give you a little bit more specifics on it, what I see is still about 50 percent — almost 50 percent of the maritime traffic that transits drugs through the Eastern Caribbean and — or Eastern Pacific and the Caribbean is primarily [carried by speedboats, known as “go-fast boats.”] They transit up close to the coast within territorial waters, if you will, on both coasts of Central America, and then put ashore at various locations, depending on how they’re operating and what their operating standard is. And then once they come ashore, then they transit — drugs transit up through Central America into Mexico and then into the United States.

We saw a rise in the semi-submersibles, if you will, those vessels that float on the surface — hundred feet long, can carry up to 10 tons of cocaine and can travel a thousand to 2,000 miles. They can easily transit from the northern part of South America to Mexico or Guatemala.

We have seen a downturn in the number of those vessels since 2007. We’ve seen a continuing decline in the vessels that we have been able to disrupt or detain. And we’re starting to see now an increase in what we’re calling those fully submersibles. It is still — we have been working with the Colombian government and the government of Ecuador. They have been able to detain two of those vessels. Differing sophistication.

Where they’re getting the expertise to construct these — that is an issue we’re still working on to make sure we can understand exactly who and where and how. But if you look at it, this is not — this is an evolution, if you will, and how much of it is semisubmersible — manufacturers, if you will, producing fully submersibles — and how much of it is a new manufacturing capacity and a new capability, I don’t have a good answer for you. It’s an effort we’re continuing to explore.“

Read more: http://www.dodbuzz.com/2011/04/19/move-and-counter-move-in-dod-war-on-smugglers/#ixzz1K160gsy0
DoDBuzz.com

buglerbilly

20-04-11, 03:16 AM

A couple of reports/papers to read for those interested..........via DiD..........I wonder if I can call myself a Liberal Centrist? :D

The liberal-centrist hybrid warfare specialists at the Center for a New American Security think-tank release “Crime Wars: Gangs, Cartels and U.S. National Security”, and “Security Through Partnership: Fighting Transnational Cartels in the Western Hemisphere.” They are entirely correct to recognize crime cartels as near-state-level security threats, and their reports are worth attention.

http://www.cnas.org/node/5022

http://www.cnas.org/node/6003

buglerbilly

09-05-11, 06:15 PM

Mexicans demand end to drug war bloodshed

Elisabeth Malkin

May 10, 2011 .

People march against gang violence in Mexico City, Red day of the dead ... angry and grieving citizens send a blunt message to the Mexican government about its war on drug gangs. Photo: AP

MEXICO CITY: Led by ordinary citizens who were transformed by grief into activists as the drug war claimed their sons and brothers, tens of thousands of Mexicans marched silently through the capital's avenues on Sunday to demand an end to the bloodshed.

The march was called to send a message to the President, Felipe Calderon, and the rest of the country's politicians: the strategy against drug gangs has failed and must change.

The movement has coalesced around an unlikely hero: Javier Sicilia, a Catholic poet and journalist whose son was murdered seven weeks ago. His grief and fury have resonated with many Mexicans who believe they have become the victims in a battle between organised crime on one side and soldiers and the police on the other.

A Mexican protester. Photo: AP

''The corruption at the heart and the root of the institutions has overtaken us,'' Sicilia said. ''That is why crime like this abounds and it is debasing us. This isn't the country we want.''

More than 35,000 people have died since Mr Calderon's crackdown against drug gangs began more than 4½ years ago. However, sending soldiers to patrol streets in parts of northern and western Mexico seems only to have worsened the bloodshed.

The government insists most of the dead are criminals, but the toll of innocent victims has risen as drug gangs have become more ruthless and the authorities have failed to check the violence. Sicilia's son was found dead along with six other people, supposedly killed by a drug cartel.

Soldiers have found mass graves in the north-eastern state of Tamaulipas that held 183 bodies, many believed to be people kidnapped from public buses on their way to the border. Authorities have pulled 168 other bodies from pits in central Durango state.

Associated Press

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/mexicans-demand-end-to-drug-war-bloodshed-20110509-1efmu.html#ixzz1Ls9Bqykw

buglerbilly

12-05-11, 04:23 AM

And Now Drug Cartels Have Tanks…

Well, not quite, but they’ve at least built seriously armored trucks. Look at this beast that was captured by Mexican authorities following a firefight two weeks ago. The truck can hit 68-mph and carry 12 men and, as you can see, it’s got some serious armor. Apparently it was disabled with shots to its unprotected tires.

Kind of reminds me of the gun trucks used by the U.S. military in Vietnam and later, Iraq.

Via Jalopnik.

Read more: http://defensetech.org/#ixzz1M6JiGi31
Defense.org

buglerbilly

13-05-11, 03:03 AM

Mexico's drugs war escalates as eight headless bodies discovered in Durango

Durango government believes victims may be gang members as decapitated corpses found for second time in a week

David Batty and agencies

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 12 May 2011 21.49 BST

Soldiers stand outside a vacant lot and the site of a mass grave in Durango, Mexico – the bodies of eight decapitated men were found around the city on Wednesday Photograph: Reuters

The naked bodies of eight decapitated men have been found dumped along roads in a Mexican city plagued by increasingly deadly conflict between rival drug gangs.

Six of the corpses were found along a highway leading out of the capital of the northern state of Durango, with their heads lying nearby, said the state attorney general's office.

The two other bodies were found in another street in Durango city. One was identified as the remains of Gerardo Galindo Meza, the deputy director of a city prison who had been kidnapped on Monday.

Galindo's head was on a different street corner, accompanied by a threatening message signed by a drug gang, the attorney general's office said in a statement.

It was the second time this week that decapitated corpses have been found in Durango state. Eleven bodies were found on Monday, including six left opposite a school in the state capital.

Meanwhile, soldiers digging at mass graves in five places around the city on Wednesday uncovered another eight bodies – seven men and one woman, bringing the total number of victims there to 196, said the Durango public safety department.

Durango is one of Mexico's most dangerous states. Its murder rate has more than doubled over the past two years. At least 1,025 killings were reported in 2010, compared to 930 in 2009 and 430 in 2008, according to government figures.

Authorities suspect some of the most-wanted drug kingpins may be hiding in the mountainous state, which has been a battleground between the Sinaloa, Zetas and Beltran Leyva cartels.

Families of people who have disappeared in Durango have come forward to ask whether their relatives may have been buried in the mass graves, according to Juan Rosales, the deputy state public safety secretary. But he said the identification process has overwhelmed the state government, prompting it to seek help from central government.

Durango's secretary for government, Hector Vela, said many of the victims are likely to be gang members killed by rivals. But some may be missing police officers, and others may be victims of kidnapping and extortion attempts.

Only one body has so far been identified – a 31-year-old man who had been reported missing several months ago. His brother claimed the body.

Drug violence has killed more than 34,000 people in Mexico since the president, Felipe Calderón, launched a military-led crackdown on the cartels in December 2006.

Mexico has launched an ad campaign to counter its image as a dangerous country and the negative impact on its vital tourist industry of US travel alerts warning Americans of violence south of the border.

The country is spending millions of dollars on print media and billboard ads in US cities showing its ancient pyramids and sunny beaches to sway Americans from cancelling their visits.

The drug violence is occurring far from the most popular resorts such as Cancun, Huatulco, Ixtapa, Puerto Vallarta and Los Cabos, Mexico Tourism Board CEO Rodolfo Lopez-Negrete said.

buglerbilly

21-05-11, 03:52 AM

MAY 21, 2011.

An American Gun in Mexico

How does a weapon made in Tennessee, sold in Missouri and traded in Texas end up at a drug shootout in Chihuahua?

By EVAN PEREZ

Associated Press
Mexico is awash in guns, thanks mainly to criminal cartels. A cache of seized weapons in Phoenix allegedly destined for Mexico, above.

Late on the night of March 8, 2008, a Mexican military patrol in the northern city of Chihuahua responded to neighbors' complaints about armed men. The soldiers, part of Mexico's ongoing effort to curb narco-trafficking violence, were met with a fusillade of grenades and gunfire. In the end, six men whom officials described as members of a drug gang lay dead.

On the government side, five soldiers were injured and one, Capt. David Mendoza Gómez, was killed. Mexican authorities found a cache of ammunition, grenades and high-powered firearms—including a .50 caliber Barrett sniper rifle. An imposing weapon, nearly 60 inches long, the long-range semiautomatic rifle is popular among the world's militaries.

The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said it traced the rifle to John Shipley, a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent in El Paso, Texas. Mr. Shipley was also a gun hobbyist who had collected and sold dozens of firearms. He bought the rifle in August 2007—for personal use, he said—paying $8,500 to a Missouri dealer over the Internet, and he sold it days later for $12,000 to an El Paso sheriff's deputy, to whom he had sold other firearms. From there it was sold to a Mexican national who resold it in Mexico, authorities said in court filings.

The rifle's path from the Barrett company factory in Murfreesboro, Tenn., to a dealer in Missouri, buyers in Texas, and eventually to a narco-trafficking gang in Mexico is one small illustration of an intractable cross-border trade that the U.S. and Mexican governments say is fueling violence that has taken the lives of thousands.

Mexico has strict legal restrictions on gun ownership, with most legitimate sales processed through one tiny store on a military base on the periphery of Mexico City. Yet the country is awash in guns, thanks mainly to the criminal cartels. Some of the same traffickers who move drugs and illegal immigrants north also move guns south, federal law-enforcement officials say.

In recent years, ATF officials say, traffickers have changed tactics to evade law enforcement. Rather than passing through a single middleman, guns may change hands four or five times or more en route to a Mexican cartel member. Many traffickers prefer to tap small-time buyers for a handful of purchases at a time. The odds are in traffickers' favor as they hide illicit cargo amid more than 100,000 border crossings a day at El Paso.

Getty Images
Family members mourn two men who were shot and killed in Juarez, Mexico.

"The more prolific [they are] and the more money they have, the more they build different layers to protect themselves," says Mike Bouchard, former assistant director of ATF field operations. "They take [guns] home and wait a week or two. They know ATF and law enforcement don't have resources to sit on a house and do surveillance."

In Washington, a separate battle is brewing over what to do about gun trafficking. In recent months, Republican lawmakers have accused the Obama administration of approving an ATF investigative tactic that allegedly allowed hundreds of guns to be sold to suspected traffickers, including some guns that ended up in Mexico. One of the firearms from the ATF's operation, called Fast and Furious, was recovered at the scene of a gun battle with suspected smugglers in which a U.S. border agent was killed in December. Attorney General Eric Holder has ordered a Justice Department inspector general to investigate the operation.

The ATF says that Fast and Furious, which was not involved in Mr. Shipley's case, was aimed at tracking the smuggling to higher-level traffickers, who run well-financed and sophisticated networks of "straw" buyers—people who, often for a few hundred dollars, buy firearms on behalf of others who can't pass background checks or who don't want records of their purchases. Lawmakers and gun-rights groups say that the ATF lost track of the guns and let them into the hands of Mexican traffickers. Gun-rights groups accuse the agency of harassing legal buyers and dealers while using tactics that exacerbate the problem.

Government officials say that ATF agents struggle to stem the trade of a product that is legal and enjoys constitutional protection in the U.S., bolstered by a pro-gun-rights ruling last year by the Supreme Court. People can buy dozens of firearms legally and then sell them later, so long as the guns are for personal use. Large-scale dealing in firearms requires a federal license, but the dividing line between such ventures and smaller-scale traders such as Mr. Shipley is hard to draw.

Gun-rights groups are lobbying against a proposed ATF regulation that would require gun dealers to report sales of multiple rifles and other long-guns, matching regulations already on the books for sales of pistols. The ATF says the regulations would help it to keep up with shifting cartel preferences for high-powered rifles.

Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, says there's ample evidence to indicate that the vast majority of weapons used by drug cartels in Mexico come not from the U.S., but from Russia and China and via Guatemala and other Central American countries. He suggests that the Obama administration should improve enforcement of existing laws, rather than proposing new laws.

"If there's one gun that's going from the U.S. to Mexico, we're against it and they should prosecute it," Mr. LaPierre said. "They have plenty of laws to do that."

The investigation into the .50 caliber Barrett rifle recovered in Mexico has crystallized two rival perspectives on the U.S.-Mexico gun trade: that of the government, which is under pressure to curb illicit sales, and that of gun-rights supporters, who believe that overzealous federal agents are targeting gun hobbyists.

Mr. Shipley, a married father of two and the son of a retired U.S. Army colonel, is a former Army helicopter pilot who served in the first Gulf War. He was injured in a helicopter accident, according to his family and attorneys, and joined the FBI in 1996, assigned to El Paso. He joined an FBI SWAT team two years later and trained as a sniper, earning honors as a top shooter.

In the government's telling in court, he was also running an illegal gun dealership. After the rifle Mr. Shipley had sold ended up at the Chihuahua crime scene, ATF agents searched his home in May 2008, seizing 28 firearms, cash and records. An El Paso grand jury indicted him in June 2009 on six counts, including dealing firearms without a license. Prosecutors alleged that Mr. Shipley lied on ATF forms when he said that he was purchasing firearms for his personal use. They did not allege that he knew he was part of a trafficking operation. Mr. Shipley pleaded not guilty.

Through his attorney, Robert Pérez, Mr. Shipley declined to be interviewed for this article. Mr. Pérez said that there is no evidence the rifle was actually used in the Chihuahua firefight.

ZUMAPRESS.com
Center, Martin Omar Estrada Luna, a presumed leader of the Zetas drug cartel, in Mexico City after his capture.

A portrait of Mr. Shipley can be drawn from court documents, his attorneys and from accounts on a website maintained by his parents to support his defense. The site includes photos of Mr. Shipley as a young Army Reserve officer, with close-cropped hair and an athletic build. One shows him dressed in formal uniform at a military ball beside a pretty blonde named Kathy, who became his wife in 1997. More recent photos from hunting and other recreational trips show the same muscular arms but a beefier build.

Mr. Shipley testified in court that the gun sales helped to build his collection, which included nine handed down from his grandfather. By his account, he also bought guns to learn more about them, and when he sold them, he tried to make a profit, but not in an effort to make his livelihood as a dealer.

"What he was doing was seeking to enhance his collection and seeking to advance his professional skills, and to keep his proficiency up," said Mr. Pérez, the lawyer, at the opening of Mr. Shipley's trial in April 2010.

The Shipley website highlights an enthusiast's love of firearms. "John has loved guns since he was about 2 years old. His educational tinker toys and Lincoln logs were transformed into guns," the family site says.

Mr. Shipley was thrilled to be paid for a job that allowed him to practice his marksmanship, his family says, and stepped up his firearms sales in 2005 to pay for his wife's medical treatment and expenses when the couple adopted their daughter in September 2004 and their son in August 2005.

Prosecutors tell a different tale—of a gun dealer who they say lied to cover his tracks and to obstruct the investigation.

ATF agents tracking the .50 caliber Barrett rifle recovered in Chihuahua were initially pleased when they contacted Mr. Shipley in late March 2008 about the sale of the gun.

Mr. Shipley told investigators that he had sold the rifle to Luis Armando Rodriguez, a jailer with the El Paso County Sheriff's Office. At the time, Mr. Rodriguez was already under the scrutiny of ATF agents for possible trafficking, prosecutors alleged in the Shipley case. They were excited by the lead, authorities say, because of the short "time-to-crime" period—less than seven months between the El Paso sale and the time the gun turned up in Chihuahua. Normally that period averages eight to 11 years, an ATF official said.

"They thought they had a great case," lead prosecutor Greg McDonald later told jurors. The agents believed a fellow federal agent would help to break the case open against a suspected prolific weapons trafficker, the prosecution alleged. But instead, Mr. Shipley met the agents in a parking lot on the west side of El Paso and handed over false sales records, laying "a trail of deceit," Mr. McDonald said. Mr. Shipley's lawyers said that the records were turned over in haste and owners aren't required to keep them anyway.

Mr. Rodriguez frequently crossed the border, and investigators believed he often sold firearms there, according to evidence presented in the Shipley case. But investigators struggled to make a case against him for smuggling.

Mr. Rodriguez, in an interview, said of the prosecutors' suspicions against him: "It's a flat-out lie." Prosecutors tried to get him to testify against Mr. Shipley, but he refused, Mr. Rodriguez said, adding, "To me John Shipley didn't do anything wrong. We didn't do anything wrong, everything we did was legal."

Mr. Rodriguez said he told investigators that he sold the .50 caliber Barrett through a consignment store in El Paso, but prosecutors said they couldn't find records for it. Instead, in a search of his home, they found a handwritten sales record for the .50 caliber rifle and a copy of the buyer's driver's license, they said. The buyer was a Mexican national who was already under investigation in another gun trafficking case, according to prosecutors. Mr. Rodriguez, in the interview, said the sale record "wasn't from me, it was from the store."

The buyer told investigators he regularly traveled across the border from Mexico carrying orders for specific weapons to buy. He told authorities that he sometimes bought firearms in parking lots of gun stores or from other straw purchasers on behalf of a Mexican gun trafficking organization. In all, a group of straw purchasers involved in the separate trafficking case bought at least 110 firearms from multiple sellers for illegal shipment to Mexico, prosecutors alleged. The buyer of the .50 caliber Barrett was indicted along with several others, and he pleaded guilty to charges including smuggling goods from the U.S.

Mr. Rodriguez pleaded guilty in 2008 to a single count of possession of an unregistered firearm and served one year in prison. In April a federal judge appointed a trustee to sell dozens of firearms and a supply of ammunition that Mr. Rodriguez owned, since as a convicted felon he could no longer possess firearms.

Mr. Bouchard, the former ATF official, who wasn't involved in the Shipley and Rodriguez cases, finds fault with current gun laws that hamper gun-trafficking investigations.

Katie Orlinsky for The Wall Street Journal
Relatives of people killed after clashes on Jan. 8 left more than 28 dead in Acapulco, Mexico.

"The straw-purchase statute is very vague," he says. "You have to prove the person went in with the intention of deceiving the government and the gun dealer by saying they were buying for themselves but were really buying for someone else." Buyers can easily explain their actions even if they buy and sell firearms over short periods of time, he says.

At Mr. Shipley's trial, his lawyer, Mr. Pérez, probed the fine line between an illegal dealer and a hobbyist who sells guns legally.

ATF case agent Frank Henderson testified that Mr. Shipley violated the law by making "repetitive purchase[s] and sale[s] with a profit."

"Well, there's no dispute that liquidating a collection…that's absolutely fine, right?" Mr. Pérez asked.

"That's fine," Mr. Henderson said.

"But you're also entitled to sell to enhance your collection, isn't that correct?"

"Right," Mr. Henderson answered. "To sell a firearm that was already in your collection."

"How long do I have to have it before it's part of my collection," Mr. Pérez asked.

"There's no…" Mr. Henderson paused. "There's no definite answer on that."

Prosecutors countered the defense by producing emails and Internet listings that they claimed showed that Mr. Shipley used his law enforcement connections to bargain for lower prices on guns, then quickly offered them for sale at a profit.

In one instance, the prosecutor Mr. McDonald told jurors, records showed "the buyer gave Mr. Shipley a check before Mr. Shipley ever bought the gun." Prosecutors alleged that this indicated that he was acting as any dealer would. Mr. Shipley's attorneys responded that the buyer never ordered the gun from Mr. Shipley but instead only heard that Mr. Shipley had bought the weapon and offered a higher price to buy it from him.

Jurors deliberated for three hours before finding Mr. Shipley guilty of all six counts. He has appealed his conviction, but the case has been complicated by the fact that records from one day of the trial, including Mr. Shipley's testimony, have been lost by the court.

Mr. Shipley is set to surrender June 10 to begin serving his two-year sentence. His lawyer says he still hopes to be exonerated and to return to his job at the FBI.

Write to Evan Perez at evan.perez@wsj.com

A BARRETT 82A1 semiautomatic sniper rifle.
.
One Gun's Travels
June 2007

The gun—an 82A1 sniper rifle—is shipped by manufacturer Barrett in Murfreesboro, Tenn., to a distributor in Grand Prairie, Texas.

July 2007

It is then shipped to a dealer in O'Fallon, Mo.

August 2007

The dealer sells the gun via the Internet to John T. Shipley, an FBI agent and gun hobbyist, in El Paso, Texas.

August 2007

Mr. Shipley sells the rifle to El Paso deputy sheriff Luis Armando Rodriguez, who resells the gun.

March 2008

The gun is found at the scene of a shootout between a Mexican military patrol and a suspected drug gang in Chihuahua, Mexico.

buglerbilly

26-05-11, 10:55 AM

Gang battles rattle western Mexico _ 28 dead in Nayarit state, 700 flee homes in Michoacan

By Associated Press, Published: May 25 | Updated: Thursday, May 26, 3:36 PM

MORELIA, Mexico — Fierce fighting among apparent rival drug gangs in western Mexico bloodied one highway with 28 dead, while in a nearby state more than 700 people huddled in shelters after fleeing villages that had become battlegrounds.

The violence, which appeared to be unrelated, escalated Wednesday in the western states of Nayarit and Michoacan, where drug cartels have been warring for territory.

Police in Nayarit initially responded to a citizen complaint of a kidnapping by a group of armed men, who fled on a federal highway near the town of Ruiz in the central part of the state, according the state prosecutors office.

As the officers headed toward the scene, they heard a second report of a shootout involving the same men, according to the statement, which did not identify the gangs or the victims.

Police found 28 men lying dead and four others wounded on the road littered with bullet casings from high-powered weapons and 10 abandoned vehicles.

The statement released late Wednesday by the attorney general’s office gave no further details.

Earlier in the day, an official in the nearby western state of Michoacan said drug cartel violence had prompted frightened villagers there to flee hamlets and take refuge at five shelters set up at a church, event hall, recreation center and schools.

It is at least the second time a large number of rural residents have been displaced by drug violence in Mexico. In November, about 400 people in the northern border town of Ciudad Mier took refuge in the neighboring city of Ciudad Aleman following cartel gunbattles. That shelter has since been closed and most have returned to their homes.

Michoacan state Civil Defense Director Carlos Mandujano said about 700 people spent Tuesday night at a primitive water park in the town of Buenavista Tomatlan, with most sleeping under open thatched-roof structures.

Mandujano said state authorities were providing sleeping mats, blankets and food for those in the shelter.

Residents told local authorities that gunbattles between rival drug cartel factions had made it too dangerous for them to stay in outlying hamlets. The latest reports said arsonists were burning avocado farms in the nearby town of Acahuato.

“We woke up with fear (on Monday), but things appeared to have quieted down. It wasn’t until later that morning that we saw SUVs with armed men driving by very fast and shooting at each other,” said a woman who did not want to be named for security reasons.

Several displaced people said they would stay at the shelters all week before considering going back to their villages.

“I am not scared, but my children are,” said a mother, who asked not to be quoted by name because of fear of retaliation.

The fighting in Michoacan is believed to involve rival factions of the Michoacan-based La Familia drug cartel, some of whose members now call themselves “The Knights Templar.”

Mexico still has fewer people displaced by violence than countries like Colombia, according to the Norway-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, which tracks such figures. It estimates about 230,000 people in Mexico have been driven from their homes, often to stay with relatives or in the United States. An estimated 3.6 million to 5.2 million people have been displaced by decades of drug- and guerrilla-war violence in Colombia.

Buenavista police chief Othoniel Montes Herrera said he has neither the manpower nor the armament to patrol rural areas frequented by drug gangs. Sending ill-armed officers out there “would be certain death, and we’re not thinking of putting our personnel at that risk.”

Drug violence has been on the rise in Nayarit, a Pacific Coast state known for its surfing and beach towns. In October, gunmen killed 15 people at a car wash in the capital of Tepic, an attack that police said bore the characteristics of organized crime. The bodies of 12 murder victims, eight of them partially burned, were found on a Nayarit dirt road a year ago. Officials have not identified the gangs fighting there.
___

Associated Press writer Adriana Gomez Licon in Mexico City contributed to this report.

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

buglerbilly

27-05-11, 04:38 AM

MAY 27, 2011.

Drug-Gang Battles Leave Mexico Region in Unruly State

By DAVID LUHNOW And JOSé DE CóRDOBA

MEXICO CITY—Three days of raging gun battles this week between rival drug gangs in Michoacán state killed an unknown number of people, forced hundreds to flee their homes and raised fresh fears that another major Mexican state has become all but ungovernable.

Fighting broke out Monday and lasted for three days. But news of the conflict was slow to get out because local media in states like Michoacán have largely stopped covering the carnage on orders from drug gangs.

European Pressphoto Agency
A handout photograph made available by Quadratin shows several vehicles after been set on fire during fighting between Mexican armed groups in Tierra Caliente, Michoacán. Hundreds have fled their homes looking for a safer place.

On Tuesday, a helicopter belonging to the Federal Police was forced to make a hard landing after being shot at by gunmen from a drug cartel, the Federal Investigative Agency, an arm of the Attorney General's Office, said Tuesday. Three federal police were injured.

The police didn't immediately have a number of casualties in the fighting between the gangs. But the lawlessness echoed the scene in Tamaulipas state, where mass graves have recently been found. In another western Mexican state, Nayarit, a gunbattle this week left 28 dead.

"Organized crime groups are fighting for control of the area," said Genaro Guizar, the mayor of Apatzingán, the fourth-largest city in Michoacán. "There was panic throughout the place."

Mr. Guizar said that a total of about 800 people had taken refuge in shelters in the nearby town of Buenavista and in Apazingan, but that the refugees had started to return to their homes Wednesday after fighting eased.

Michoacán, a large agricultural state known also for its tourist attractions like the colonial state capital of Morelia, is the home turf of the powerful La Familia drug cartel, which specializes in making and trafficking methamphetamines, using the port of Lázaro Cárdenas to smuggle in precursor chemicals.

The cartel has infiltrated local police forces and city halls throughout the state, experts say, and largely displaced local governments in many areas.

The situation is so bad that Mexico's three main political parties on Wednesday signed a joint statement saying they were exploring the possibility of fielding a single, unity candidate in November's gubernatorial race in an attempt to set aside partisan bickering and save the state.

"It's indicative of how badly the wheels are falling off," said James McDonald, an anthropology professor at Southern Utah University who lived for many years in Michoacán and is an expert on it. "I think Michoacán is lost, like Tamaulipas. And it could be the realization that they need to get together on this and deal with it, or else."

The uptick in violence in Michoacán this week could be related to December's killing of La Familia chief Nazario Moreno, the messianic leader of the cartel who was known as "El Mas Loco," or "The Craziest One."

But in March, dozens of banners pinned up across the state announced the creation of a new local cartel, dubbed "The Knights Templar."

The Templars are thought to be remnants of La Familia that have regrouped. Mexican police officials believe the Templars are led by a former teacher, Servando Gomez, nicknamed "La Tuta." They believe another surviving La Familia leader, José de Jesus Mendez, known as "El Chango", or the monkey, may be fighting with Mr. Gomez for control of the organization.

A Mexican police report said that La Familia had retreated to the countryside after the arrest of 13 mayors and other officials on drug corruption charges in 2009, but had regained much of their former positions in the state's towns and cities after prosecutors failed to win prosecution against the detained officials, who were released.

Drug-related corruption in Michoacán is rampant, analysts say. The current governor's half-brother and former federal congressman Julio Cesar Godoy was accused of being on the La Familia payroll by Mexican federal officials last year. The congressman was impeached and went on the run. He remains a fugitive.

Raul Benitez, a security analyst at the Autonomous University of Mexico said the federal government is determined not to lose control of Michoacán in part because of its strategic location between Mexico and Guadalajara, the country's two largest cities. "Michoacán is a big problem," said Mr. Benitez, who fears the violence that plagues the state could contaminate the capital and Guadalajara.

Unlike Mexico's other cartels, La Familia and the Templars have a messianic creed and strive to gain popular support among the local population. This worries Mexican officials who see the drug traffickers taking on some of the characteristics of guerrilla fighters, said Mr. Benitez.

Indeed, Michoacán is a prime example of why some military analysts and government officials in the U.S. worry Mexico's drugs war could take on the characteristics of an insurgency, where drug gangs try to displace Mexico's government.

Last year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the violence in Mexico was starting to resemble a "narco-insurgency," but her comments were batted down by President Barack Obama days later.

Some academics think the comparison is not a stretch—at least in places like Michoacán, a state of 4.3 million. "La Familia is the de facto go-to governance system in communities that are largely abandoned by the state. If you need anything, from medicine to loans, they are the ones people turn to," said Mr. McDonald.

Write to David Luhnow at david.luhnow@wsj.com

buglerbilly

03-06-11, 05:36 PM

Drug War Means Boom Times for Armored Car Maker

By Robert Beckhusen June 3, 2011 | 7:00 am

SAN ANTONIO, Texas — A 10-minute drive away from the Alamo, small teams on the factory floor of Texas Armoring Corporation work deliberately, turning everyday civilian vehicles into armored workhorses for the world's governments and business executives. The company is growing rapidly, and one reason is Mexico's drug war.

An adjacent building under construction will double available manufacturing space. TAC's workforce grew 30 percent last year to about 40 employees. That's enough to produce around 80 cars per year. Reality television networks have been calling, attracted to the company's tattooed workers, youngish executives and at-risk clientele.

Displayed inside the building's lobby are spiked road tacks that can be dropped out of rear compartments, armor components dented by rounds fired from AK-47 assault rifles, and a black SUV driver's side door with 2-inch thick bulletproof glass chewed up by ballistic impacts. Next, is a tire with a section cut out of it, showing hardened run-flat inserts underneath the rubber.

The armoring process is fairly straight-forward. A vehicle is sawed down to its frame with cutting torches. The frame is then wrapped in a combination of Kevlar, steel and polyethylene composite plates (industry term: "Spectra Shield") before the original fabrics and interior panels are restored. Eventually, at a price of around $80,000 or more — not including cost of the vehicle, and without options like smoke shields and digital video recorder systems — a client should be protected from rounds sized up to 7.62 millimeters.

Company president Trent Kimball boasts about his clients — heads of state, governments, multinational corporations and business executives — in a general way. But he won't name any; these guys like their privacy. International sales must clear U.S. Department of Commerce export controls, which are supposed to keep known drug traffickers and terrorist organizations from buying the armored rides.

Kimball says he's confident the company has never inadvertently sold to a drug lord. Traffickers avoid companies based in the United States, he said, opting instead for in-house armorers. In fact, Mexico's own armored-car industry is now worth $80 million a year and is growing at a brisk 10 percent. Mexican cartels have even begun building their own tanks.

Armoring is happening across the board, and Kimball says his clients — 20 percent either live or work in Mexico — are reacting to a sharp increase in crime and the threat of kidnapping.

An alarming surge in the practice over the past decade has surfaced in Latin America, the long-running leader in kidnapping. In Mexico, a record number of kidnappings happened last year. The country is now the riskiest country in Latin America for kidnapping and world leader in "express kidnapping" – quick, violent attacks that can last just a few hours and involve victims selected seemingly at random.

Kimball admits some of his clients may be a bit too paranoid. But others have to be, he says. Recently, a client in the Mexican city of Monterrey was nearly killed in an attack. The car saved his life. "Monterrey is a hotbed. There are very wealthy people who live in Monterrey," Kimball says. "It's an industrial city, so one of our clients …" he pauses. "We don’t know what the intentions of the people who attacked his vehicle were, but they did."

The spread of crime has spurred a partial restructuring away from high-end luxury vehicles to more compact and mid-sized, low-profile models. In Mexico's northern badlands and border cities, violence is now so widespread residents have depopulated city districts and abandoned entire towns to drug gangs. SUVs and trucks, particularly luxurious and heavy-duty versions, are favored by gangsters and have become frequent targets for carjackings.

An inspection of the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security last year raised concerns about attacks in Colombia on conspicuous "embassy-owned, white Chevrolet Suburban armored vehicles." Clearly American, the vehicles made tempting prey.

In February, Zetas gunmen ambushed an SUV containing two U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on a highway between San Luis Potosí and Matamoros. One agent was killed and the other wounded. The Zetas cell leader was later arrested and claimed the agents were mistaken for rival gang members.

In Juárez two weeks ago, three people traveling in a Hummer H3 with New Mexico plates were killed.

"We are definitely seeing a shift," Kimball said. "Not necessarily by politicians or State Department employees, but our clients — which are usually normal businessmen — understand if you drive a long Mercedes-Benz, you make yourself a target."

Let there be no mistake: most of TAC's business is in SUVs and luxury cars. On the floor of the company's factory, however, at least one small sedan could be seen nearly finished with Mexican license plates attached. Other low-profile models could be seen lined up elsewhere. The company has also recently armored relatively low-cost Nissan Maximas, Toyota Camrys and Chevrolet TrailBlazers. Kimball said he recently shipped three unassuming Mitsubishi Monteros.

"2008 models, not new ones," he said. "That's a smart guy."

Above:

The Bulletproofing Factory

Vehicles are armored at Texas Armoring Corporation in San Antonio, Texas. The company now bulletproofs about 80 vehicles a year and is doubling its manufacturing space.

Image: Texas Armoring Corporation

http://www.texasarmoring.com/

Armored SUVs

SUVs like these Chevrolet Suburbans are common in the armor industry, but company president Trent Kimball says he is seeing a shift toward smaller vehicles.

Image: Texas Armoring Corporation

The Kevlar VW

Civilian armored cars are modified, but look discreet. This Volkswagen Passat has Kevlar, steel and polyethylene composite plates welded to the frame and inside the door panels.

Image: Texas Armoring Corporation

Defense on the Down-Low

Mexico's drug war has spiked kidnapping rates. As a result, demand is growing for more typical vehicles like this armored Chevrolet TrailBlazer.

Image: Texas Armoring Corporation

Cameras? Those Are Extra

Armoring can cost more than $80,000 — not including the vehicle. Additional features, like this digital video recorder linked to four external cameras, cost extra.

Image: Texas Armoring Corporation

Keep Rolling with Armored Wheels

Armored wheels are standard. This one supports a Mercedes-Benz S-Class.

Image: Texas Armoring Corporation

Steel-Reinforced Batteries, Still Going and Going

Battery compartments are wrapped in steel. This engine belongs to a Chevrolet Suburban. Angular, steel radiator deflectors are additional options.

Image: Texas Armoring Corporation

Options: Smoke or Spikes

Customers can choose to have a smoke-screen apparatus installed. And those in the market for armored cars can opt to purchase a dispenser that dumps spiked road tacks out of a vehicle's rear end.

Image: Texas Armoring Corporation

buglerbilly

07-06-11, 05:55 PM

Via the Firearm Blog...........

Mexican Marines confiscate huge Los Zetas weapon cache

Mexican Marines captured a weapons cache containing 80 rifles, 20 pistols, 3 rocket launchers, 50,000 rounds of ammunition, 880 magazines, 3kg of explosives, 4 hand grenades, 2 40mm grenades, and 1 ton of fireworks.

The weapons were found near the city of Monclova, Coahuila state, and are believed to have been owned by the Los Zetas drug cartel.

What is especially interesting is the number of MWG 90 Rounder AR-15 magazines (or clones). Over 40 appear in the above photo.

buglerbilly

08-06-11, 03:37 AM

JUNE 8, 2011.

Mexico Tourism Feels Chill of Ongoing Drug Violence

By NICHOLAS CASEY And ALEXANDRA BERZON

MEXICO CITY—For several years, Mexico's tourism industry has weathered the storm of violence in the country, persuading vacationers to visit its beaches and ancient ruins on promises that drug-related crime wouldn't affect their travels.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Police confront a gang in Acapulco, a resort town marred by violence.

This year, those assurances might not be enough. Many American travelers are turning their backs on Mexico, put off by some gruesome headlines.

Owners of leading tour operators, including American Express Co., have seen sharp declines in American visitors since the first of the year. Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. recently told analysts the drug wars had "decimated leisure travel" at its Mexican resorts. Three top cruise lines say they've canceled service to Mazatlán, a resort hub that's also become the site of a drug cartel turf war.

"It's very hard for me to think that I'm going to convince someone who lives in Des Moines to take their first international trip to Mexico now," says Trip Barrett, Starwood's vice president of brand management in Latin America. He says violence in Mexico and better deals elsewhere are driving down visitors this year.

American Express's tour operator Travel Impressions says it sent 100,000 passengers to Mexico last year but has seen about a 15% decline in bookings this year for independent travelers, meaning those who aren't part of a group.

Associated Press
Musicians stroll along a deserted beach in Acapulco, Mexico, looking for clients willing to pay for a song.

"Literally, it's just been a continual barrage of stories of finding beheaded bodies and unearthed graves," said John Hanratty, the company's chief marketing officer.

Tourism is a $12 billion-a-year industry for Mexico. Some 22.4 million tourists visited in 2010, up about 4.4% from the year before. But 2009 was affected more by the economic crisis and the "swine flu" outbreak than the drug violence, even though the violence has claimed nearly 40,000 lives since 2006.

Data compiled by Smith Travel Research, a firm that monitors hotel occupancies among large chains, show occupancy in Mexico so far this year either flat or declining across many mid-range hotel chains, though there were some modest gains on the higher end.

A spokesman from Internet booking company Orbitz Worldwide Inc.wouldn't provide specific figures, but said travel to Mexico is lagging significantly behind previous years. Orbitz cites safety fears and last year's bankruptcy of Mexican airline Cia. Mexicana de Aviación, which led to higher airfares among remaining players.

Mexico's tourism officials acknowledge the challenge but say business remains vibrant and most of the violence is not in tourist districts. "There are still travelers coming to Mexico," says Mexico's Tourism Secretary Gloria Guevara.

Mexican President Felipe Calderón recently met with 22 tourist-industry CEOs during a Las Vegas convention to calm jitters. "I saw thousands of spring breakers in Mexico having fun. My understanding is the only shots they received were tequila shots," he quipped before an audience during the visit.

The majority of violence is between drug cartels and isn't directed at foreigners, says Alfonso Sumano of the Mexico Tourism Board, the ministry's arm that works with the private sector. "They are not going after tourists," he says.

Still, last October, a Canadian visiting Acapulco on business was found dead in his charred rental car after disappearing in the beach town. In January, another Canadian was shot in the leg during a firefight that erupted in Mazatlán. He survived but shortly afterward three luxury cruise lines— Walt Disney Co.'s Disney Cruises, Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. and Star Cruise Ltd's Norwegian Cruise Line—canceled service to the port.

According to the U.S. State Department, 107 Americans were killed in homicides in Mexico last year, up from 77 the year before and twice the figure before the drug wars began. The agency doesn't break out tourists from the figures.

Rodolfo López-Negrete, chief operating officer of the tourism board, said he hoped visitors would realize the majority of violence takes place near the border, not in tourist districts.

Acapulco, however, presents a troubling case, tourism companies say. The resort town has also become a major theater of the drug war: On a single weekend this year, more than 30 bodies were found, including night-club workers abducted after hours and later found hanging from a bridge.

Acapulco's violence is affecting resorts that are hundreds of miles away, according to Starwood's Mr. Barrett."When the Joneses hear 'Acapulco,' they know it's a resort," and then other resorts suffer by association, he says. He pointed to recent declines over the usually booked Easter holiday in Puerto Vallarta and Los Cabos, where Starwood operates more than 1,200 rooms under its Westin and Sheraton brands. Puerto Vallarta is about 450 miles from Acapulco and Los Cabos, at the southern end of the Baja peninsula, is even further. But vacancies were high enough that Starwood began offering all-inclusive meal packages and fourth-night-free discounts.

Many foreign hotel companies are banking on security improvement in the long-term and are continuing with development projects in Mexico, according to the Mexican government.

Starwood, which says Mexico remains its sixth-largest country, recently opened a St. Regis in Mexico City and will open a Westin in Guadalajara in August. Hilton Worldwide, the closely held chain that owns brands including Hampton Inns, has plans for 12 new hotels, five of them to open this year, although none is along the border or in Acapulco.

"The perceived situation has been challenging at best to manage," says Terry Dale, president of the U.S. Tour Operators Association, a trade group. "But Mexico is part of the business. It's not going anywhere."

Write to Nicholas Casey at nicholas.casey@wsj.com and Alexandra Berzon at alexandra.berzon@wsj.com

buglerbilly

10-06-11, 05:33 AM

JUNE 10, 2011.

Mexican Guns Tied to U.S.

American-Sourced Weapons Account for 70% of Seized Firearms in Mexico.

By EVAN PEREZ

Reuters
Members of the Mexican Navy lined up suspects and recovered weapons last June after a raid against the Zetas drug cartel in northern Mexico.

The U.S. was the source of at least 70% of 29,284 firearms recovered by authorities in Mexico in 2009 and 2010, according to new U.S. government figures.

The statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are expected to add to controversy over the U.S. role in fueling drug-cartel violence in Mexico, which has killed more than 40,000 people since 2006.

U.S. gun-rights groups long have disputed assertions by the U.S. and Mexican governments that trafficking from the U.S. is a major source of weapons in the cartel wars. They have contended the majority of Mexican guns come from Russia, China and elsewhere.

The controversy was fueled in recent years when U.S. officials backed off earlier claims that up to 90% of firearms recovered in Mexico were of U.S. origin.

The findings come as the ATF defends itself against congressional critics for its Fast and Furious gun-tracking operation, which lawmakers say inadvertently eased trafficking of weapons to cartel gangs.

Lawmakers say the agency lost track of firearms and allowed 2,500 weapons into the hands of suspected traffickers. A weapons cache found in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, in April included five firearms that the ATF has now linked to suspects in the Fast and Furious operation., The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.

The ATF figures show that 21,313 firearms recovered in Mexico in 2009 were submitted for tracing by the agency. Of these, 10,945 were manufactured in the U.S. and 3,268 were imported into the U.S. from third countries before ending up in Mexico. The origin of 7,100 firearms couldn't be determined.

Of 7,971 firearms recovered in Mexico in 2010 and traced by ATF, 4,186 were manufactured in the U.S. and 2,105 were imported into the U.S. The origin of 1,680 firearms couldn't be determined.

Collectively, the data show that of the 29,284 firearms recovered in Mexico in 2009 and 2010 and submitted to the ATF for tracing, 20,504 or 70% passed through the U.S. at some point. The period is the most recent for which data are available.

The ATF said it traced the guns based on information provided by Mexican authorities. The Mexican government doesn't submit every firearm it recovers for tracing.

Mexico has strict restrictions on gun ownership, with most legitimate sales processed through one store on a military base near Mexico City.

ATF Acting Director Kenneth Melson provided the data to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.), who requested the information. It represents the first such analysis to be made public by the agency. The law limits how ATF can share the data it obtains from tracing guns used in crimes.

Sen. Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control, said in a May letter to Mr. Melson that "military-style weapons are arming Mexico's brutal drug trafficking organizations at an alarming rate. Releasing data on firearms recovered in Mexico that originate in the United States will ensure that the American public and policymakers are aware of the severity of this problem."

The figures prompted strong reactions from advocates on both sides of the U.S. gun-control debate.

Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, said he doubted the ATF figures. He said given the ample resources of drug cartels, traffickers easily import weapons from Russia, China, and Central America, rather than risk trying to smuggle firearms from the U.S. "I think all these numbers are phonied up for politics," Mr. LaPierre said in an interview. "The law enforcement people I talk to tell me this doesn't make sense."

Dennis Henigan, vice president of Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said: "The traffickers are following the path of least resistance. They're going to American gun shops, exploiting the permissive U.S. gun laws. It's beyond time for the United States to strengthen its gun laws and shut down the trafficking."

Write to Evan Perez at evan.perez@wsj.com

buglerbilly

16-06-11, 04:15 AM

JUNE 16, 2011.

Top Brass Cited in Gun Sting

Emails Show ATF Director Involved in Troubled Operation Tied to Agent's Death.

By EVAN PEREZ

Associated Press
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, left, with Josephine Terry, mother of slain border agent Brian Terry, at the Arizona Peace Officers Memorial in Phoenix.
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Lawmakers released documents showing that senior federal officials were closely involved in a troubled gun-enforcement operation that came to light after the death of a U.S. border agent in a shootout in December.

The disclosures came at an emotional House hearing at which family members of the agent testified. Republican lawmakers are pressing to determine how high up knowledge and approval of the program went in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and its parent agency, the Justice Department.

Two assault rifles purchased at a gun store that was part of an ATF probe called Fast and Furious were found at the scene of the Arizona shooting in which the 40-year-old agent, Brian Terry, lost his life. The program was created to monitor weapons purchases by suspected gun traffickers. Agency officials hoped eventually to build a case against major arms smugglers serving Mexican drug cartels.

Republican lawmakers leading an investigation of Fast and Furious say the ATF didn't have the means to track the guns and should have known that such tactics were dangerous.

At a hearing by the House oversight committee Wednesday, three ATF agents made scathing assessments of decisions by agency officials to refrain from arrests and allow suspected illicit gun purchases to proceed. Agent Peter Forcelli said Fast and Furious exhibited a "colossal failure of leadership."

The hearing also highlighted partisan differences, as agents raised concerns about existing gun laws one called "toothless." They partly blamed the laws for the aggressive ATF tactics now under scrutiny. Democratic lawmakers at the hearing pounced on those comments to urge consideration of new laws to address the problem of "straw purchasers," small-time buyers who purchase firearms on behalf of cartel smugglers. Many GOP lawmakers, and pro-gun Democrats, oppose new laws.

Mr. Terry's mother and sister sat beside his cousin, Robert Heyer, at the hearing as he tearfully read a statement on behalf of the family. Mr. Heyer spoke of the family's anguish at learning of Mr. Terry's death in a phone call in the middle of the night 10 days before Christmas. He recounted how relatives received presents Mr. Terry had mailed shortly before he was killed.

"We ask that if a government official made a wrong decision, they admit their error and take responsibility for his or her actions," he said.

Rep. Darrell Issa of California, chairman of the committee, and Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, released internal ATF emails that identified the senior officials involved, including Kenneth Melson, the bureau's acting director.

One email among ATF officials describes Mr. Melson's request for the Internet link to hidden cameras the ATF had planted in gun shops cooperating with the Fast and Furious probe, Mr. Issa said, citing the documents. That allowed Mr. Melson to watch a live feed of suspected straw buyers purchasing AK-47-style rifles, Mr. Issa said.

The Justice Department has said the operation never was intended to let weapons be trafficked to Mexico. Attorney General Eric Holder has ordered an investigation of the operation.

An ATF spokesman declined to comment, citing the investigation.

Ronald Weich, assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, testified but gave few details of the program. Mr. Weich said that if the investigation found "flawed strategies" or "insufficient surveillance of weapons," the responsible officials would be held to account. The agents cited the reluctance by some prosecutors to bring charges in gun-trafficking cases as another reason why the ATF operation came about. Law-enforcement officials say it's hard to bring cases. They cite a case in 2008 that was dismissed by an Arizona federal judge, who ruled there was insufficient evidence to charge a man with being an unlicensed gun dealer although he sold 400 firearms. The judge said there wasn't enough proof of profit-making.

A congressional report produced ahead of the hearing included testimony from four Phoenix ATF agents, who described how they and other agents battled supervisors. The dissenting agents said they wanted to make arrests instead of allowing illicit guns into circulation, fearing they would lead to deaths. Supervisors insisted that the investigation proceed, aiming to trace them to weapons traffickers, the congressional report shows.

Rep. Elijah Cummings, of Maryland, the top Democrat on the oversight panel, called the committee's findings so far "very troubling." He cited testimony that instead of agents following the guns, "surveillance of suspected straw purchasers was discontinued repeatedly, seemingly for no reason, so agents could return to gun stores to start over with new suspects."

ATF agents interviewed by congressional investigators described supervisors trying to tamp down agents' misgivings about the strategy to allow the weapons purchases.

An April 2010 email from an ATF agent in Mexico City to a bureau official, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, discussed plans to provide a classified briefing to Mr. Issa's own committee about several cases, including Fast and Furious. A spokesman for Mr. Issa said that the congressman wasn't briefed on specifics of the operation and that staffers who attended the briefing don't recall the operation being mentioned.

Write to Evan Perez at evan.perez@wsj.com