Posted on 11/14/2006 3:11:50 PM PST by james500
MEXICO CITY — Six police officers were shot to death in an apparent ambush in a rural part of western Mexico that has been plagued by drug violence, prosecutors said Tuesday.
The bullet-riddled bodies of an investigative officer, a group commander and four officers were found after a caller reported gunshots late Monday near Aguililla, a mountain town about 200 kilometers (125 miles) southwest of the Michoacan state's capital of Morelia.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
There have been more than 420 homicides in the state this year, including 19 police chiefs and commanders. Juan Antonio Magana, the state's attorney general, has said well over half the killings were drug-related.
So rest easy. The approx 200 civilians and 7 or 8 police chiefs and commanders killed in Michoacan this year were killed for reasons OTHER than drug activity.
Thank goodness.
And some are encouraging these types to come on over...
our spanish-speaking Iraq next door...
Ping!
AND the largest newspaper EL UNIVERSAL here in Mexico mentions nothing of this as of 5:31 CST...today. Main Stream Media.
So rest easy. The approx 200 civilians and 7 or 8 police chiefs and commanders killed in Michoacan this year were killed for reasons OTHER than drug activity.
And to think that the silly conservatives want to keep these folks in Mexico and out of the United States!
From what I read, next to dead LEO's, reporters get killed in Mexico a lot! They're probably afraid to report.
Michoacan state's capital of Morelia.
I was reading about Michoacan earlier.
"Of all Mexican states, Michoacan has the highest dependency on remittances, with one out of ten households receiving them. Now if the remittances-are-great theory were correct, wouldn’t Michoacan be booming? On the contrary, it is one of Mexico’s least developed states and continues to expel large amounts of emigrants. The same is true of other states with high remittance-dependency, such as Zacatecas, Guanajuato and Durango."
We have a very good friend from Michoacan and we used to go down there at least twice a year, to Manzanillo.
We were down there one year when the marijuana wars were going on. Because of the mountainous area a ton of marijuana is grown there and has been forever.
Heaven help any law enforcement officers who get in the way.
Sadly, you reap what you sow.
what is a remittances?
It's the money that immigrants (both legal and illegal) send back to their families in their native country. Last year Mexicans sent about $20 billion dollars to their relatives in Mexico.
more like "beaner bills"
Not to worry, the Mex. Gov. has everything under control. An investigation will start draggin ass soon.
Those were the "good ol' days", sheana. Now the Mexican drug cartels can grow their drugs in our national forests without interference. These pot farms are growing all over the country, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Oregon, Washington, you name it.
Marijuana Growers Cultivate Crops on Public Land-
VoiceofAmerica
http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/2006-10/2006-10-05-voa24.cfm?CFID=75152348&CFTOKEN=14390914
It's harvest season in the Northwest, not just for apples and wine grapes, but also for marijuana. That's why, as summer fades to fall, police in Washington and Oregon have taken to the air in search of large outdoor marijuana fields, or grows. The majority are planted on public lands and, police say, managed by Mexico-based drug cartels. At 9 o'clock in the morning, at a small airport at the base of the Cascade Mountains, helicopters come and go. Police officers dressed in desert camouflage await their orders. This is the staging ground for what you might call Operation Marijuana Eradication.
Sheriff Harum says a decade ago the largest marijuana grows here were a few hundred plants. "Now we're talking 7,000; 8,000; 9,000 plants out there and they're trying their best to try and hide it from us because they know we're looking from the air."
Montemayor says the spotters are looking for something that doesn't belong. "It's a lighter color green. It looks like a great big green Q-tip." Here in the central part of the state, the climate lends itself to huge outdoor gardens. Last year, a record 136,000 marijuana plants were seized in Washington.
Tommy Lanier, a former Forest Service special agent who now heads the National Marijuana Initiative, notes "All public lands are being inundated with this epidemic. Mexico-based drug trafficking rings run the operations. "Those same organizations are trafficking in cocaine, trafficking in heroin, trafficking in illegal alien smuggling, trafficking in money laundering, trafficking in ID fraud, they're involved in all those things, but they make most of their money off the marijuana trade."
On day two of Operation Eradication in Central Washington, eight narcotics officers take off for a remote site in the Wenatchee National Forest where a 3000-plant marijuana grow has been found. Lt. Rich Wiley with the Washington State Patrol says this grow, like most, is sophisticated and environmentally destructive. "They've got a small creek that they were able to dam up," he explains. "They've got PVC pipe running a significant distance, probably [almost a kilometer] down the hillside. And then they've got a second holding pond where they kind of store water - a little reservoir. And then they've got lines that come out of that and go on down the hill."
But officers do find a Catholic shrine with a candle still burning. Typically each grow has at least two and sometimes as many as 20 full-time gardeners. They're usually armed. They are mostly men but this year, for the first time, police have found evidence that women and children are also living in these hidden camps.
Lt. Wiley says often the gardeners are paying off their debt for being smuggled into the U.S. "Frankly the people that in many cases are out tending the grows are folks that are trying to do the right thing by their family back home in Mexico. Yes, what they're doing is illegal. We don't approve it. But it's the organizations that are behind them, that are forcing them to do this, and that are organizing it, that we're really after."
This search and destroy operation is part of a national marijuana eradication program. The federal government will spend $3.5 million this year to put spotters in the air and crews on the ground. Lt. Wiley notes the number of grows on public lands. "When you talk about people now growing marijuana in Yosemite and Kings Canyon National Parks, I mean that's just atrocious. And it's happening in our Olympic National Park, it's happening in our public lands up and down the Cascades." He makes no apologies about aggressively going after those illegal gardens. "I don't like that as a taxpayer. I don't want to think that my family can't go hiking on public lands and be safe."
Lt. Wiley is realistic. It's impossible to stamp out all the marijuana grows. But he takes pride in destroying drugs before they hit the streets, and in making public lands safer.
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