Free Republic

When Mexico's former drug tsar Noé Ramírez was arrested on suspicion of receiving monthly payments from the Beltrán-Leyva drug cartel he was confident the charges would quickly be dropped. No court, he thought, would believe testimony from a former cartel member who claimed to have seen Ramírez receive a briefcase full of cash at a Mexico City restaurant – on a day he was actually travelling to Las Vegas for a meeting with US law-enforcement officials, in the company of two US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents. Ramírez was wrong. It took four years, four months and a change of...

Here they come: Migrants bound for the U.S. border ride on top of a train in Ixtepec, in Oaxaca, southern Mexico (AP).- For months, Stand With Arizona has been reporting (most recently here, here and here) on the massive increase in border crossings since Obama and the 'Gang of Eight' started promising amnesty for millions of illegal aliens. And I have been interviewed by two dozen media outlets from the Washington Post and L.A. Times to CNN and even FoxNews. Each time I begged them to report the truth about what border agents were telling me - that a tidal...

Mexico said on Wednesday that killings linked to organized crime fell 14 percent to 4,249 in the first four months of the presidency of Enrique Pena Nieto, who has vowed to quickly reduce the menace posed by drug cartels. The figure refers to killings from December 2012 through March 2013, and compares to the 4,934 organized crime-related killings during the same period a year earlier, said Interior Minister Miguel Osorio Chong. "It's still too early to adopt a triumphalist attitude," said Osorio Chong. "The trend is there, but it's still early and it could surprise us and pick up tomorrow,...

Author says government's actions are 'comparable to U.S. funding al-Qaida' WASHINGTON—The U.S. government running guns to Mexican cartels is “comparable to the United States funding al-Qaida to make someone in the United States look bad,” according to the author of a new best-seller. Katie Pavlich is the author of “Fast and Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal and the Shameless Cover-Up,” news editor of Townhall.com and an expert on the Fast and Furious scandal. In an interview with WND, she asserted that the Obama administration intentionally orchestrated a “false flag” against lawful gun dealers, the U.S. Border Patrol and Mexican citizens...

Mexican drug cartels whose operatives once rarely ventured beyond the U.S. border are dispatching some of their most trusted agents to live and work deep inside the United States — an emboldened presence that experts believe is meant to tighten their grip on the world's most lucrative narcotics market and maximize profits. If left unchecked, authorities say, the cartels' move into the American interior could render the syndicates harder than ever to dislodge and pave the way for them to expand into other criminal enterprises such as prostitution, kidnapping-and-extortion rackets and money laundering. Cartel activity in the U.S. is certainly...

The Associated Press is out with an extensive piece today showing just how far Mexican drug cartels have infiltrated American society. The cartel problem is no longer a border problem, it's a problem for the entire country. Violent cartel members are carrying out crimes in our backyards with the potential to develop into something much worse. Mexican drug cartels whose operatives once rarely ventured beyond the U.S. border are dispatching some of their most trusted agents to live and work deep inside the United States — an emboldened presence that experts believe is meant to tighten their grip on the...

Kaufman County District Attorney Mike McLelland and his wife Cynthia Woodward McLelland were shot to death in their home last night as reported by The Dallas Morning News: "A law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity described the scene at the McLellands' home as an awful scene where the door appeared to have been kicked in. 'There are shell casings everywhere,' the official said. 'This is unprecedented. This is unbelievable. This is huge.'" Last month Kaufman County Assistant District Attorney Mark Hasse was gunned down outside the local courthouse by two men in tactical gear who remain at...

CHICAGO — Mexican drug cartels whose operatives once rarely ventured beyond the U.S. border are dispatching some of their most trusted agents to live and work deep inside the United States — an emboldened presence that experts believe is meant to tighten their grip on the world's most lucrative narcotics market and maximize profits. If left unchecked, authorities say, the cartels' move into the American interior could render the syndicates harder than ever to dislodge and pave the way for them to expand into other criminal enterprises such as prostitution, kidnapping-and-extortion rackets and money laundering. Cartel activity in the U.S....

WASHINGTON, DC - President Barack Obama signed a spending bill, HR 933, into law, the "Monsanto Protection Act," that strips federal courts of the authority to immediately halt the planting and sale of genetically modified (GMO) seed crop regardless of any consumer health concerns. "The provision would strip federal courts of the authority to halt the sale and planting of an illegal, potentially hazardous GE crop while the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) assesses those potential hazards," explains a letter to the House that has been signed by dozens of food businesses and retailers, as well as interest groups and...

FULL TITLE: How gang members behave like animals... and maths experts are now predicting where they will fight rivals with 99% accuracy ~Jeffrey Brantingham, UCLA anthropologist, uses statistics to study crime ~He used the Lotka-Volterra equation to accurately predict fight locations ~The theory states that species claim territories whose boundaries form a perpendicular line halfway between each group’s home Maths experts have used geometric equations learned from wild animals to predict the location of fights between rival gangs with almost 99 per cent accuracy. Jeffrey Brantingham, an anthropologist at UCLA, in California, who uses statistics to study crime, has employed...

Iraq and immigration have one thing in common. Both are founded on the assumption that national political philosophies can be universally applied to any population with the same results. The same leftists and radical libertarians who mocked the idea that Iraqis could be successfully transformed through democracy insist millions of illegal aliens from countries every bit as violent and unstable as Iraq can be successfully transformed by giving them legal status and the vote. Both assumptions were and are wrong. They are both symptoms of an internationalism that assumes a favorite political philosophy that works in the United States can...

Top homeland security officials told Congress Wednesday they still don’t have a way to effectively measure border security — a revelation that lawmakers said could doom the chances for passing an immigration legalization bill this year. Three years after the Obama administration scrapped the previous yardstick, which measured miles of the border under “operational control,” top Customs and Border Protection officials told Congress the new measure they’re working on won’t be ready for public use any time in the near future. The revelation stunned lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, who said that without a way to

In October 2010 a man was repeatedly stabbed and then grotesquely beheaded in Chandler, AZ, and now one of the three reputed narco soldiers from the Sinaloa cartel whom authorities suspect in the gruesome crime has pleaded no contest for his alleged role as reported by the Daily Mail. Although the Obama Administration insists that there is no drug cartel spillover violence the dead bodies on the north side of the border stubbornly belie the President's cynical lie. Former DEA supervisor Phil Jordan insists that the drug traffickers' most gruesome tactics including beheadings are occurring on American soil, and says...

Violence along the southern border has gotten so out of control that both Mexican and American journalists have stopped reporting it out of fear that drug cartels will retaliate against them and their families. This means Americans will be kept in the dark about the crisis along the porous and increasingly dangerous Mexican border. We certainly can’t expect the truth from the government. Remember that the nation’s Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, insists that the region is “as secure as it has ever been.” This delusional assessment has been repeated by Napolitano over and over again in a seemingly...

A Mexican officer claims the military is indeed at war with drug cartels for territory in northern Mexico and that vast numbers of children have been left homeless and hungry by the war in the seemingly unreachable cartel-controlled territory. The officer spoke with me in person on the condition of anonymity. When I asked him to explain which cartels were fighting in Nuevo Laredo, he explained that things were not so simple and not so easily defined. The officer did not speak in law enforcement terms but instead used military terms. It grew clear that the troubles facing Mexico had...

There are so many killer children working for the Mexican drug cartels that perhaps kiddy network Nickleodeon should launch a comedy series titled I Was A Teenage Hitman or something (hey, it's already making the mob movie Nicky Deuce). The tortured and slain body of a 13-year-old boy who last month confessed to his involvement with ten murders for Los Zetas was found in the Central Mexican state of Zacatecas as reported by Rafael Romo for CNN: "After his February arrest, the Federal Police released the boy into the custody of the Mexican Attorney General's Office, which later set him...

Hundreds of thousands of kilograms (pounds) of cocaine are seized en route to the U.S. every year, and the Defense Department estimates about 850 metric tons of cocaine departed South America last year toward the U.S., down 20 percent in just a year. The most recent U.S. survey found cocaine use fell significantly, from 2.4 million people in 2006 to 1.4 million in 2011. ... Assistant Secretary of State William Brownfield, head of the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs said the goal is to make it so hard for traffickers to move drugs to the U.S. that...

Forget about blessing the beasts and the children; sometimes the children are just beasts. Two teen girls -- one 13, the other 15 -- have confessed to gunning down a man in Guatemala City as reported by the Deccan Herald: "Criminal organizations are hiring and training minors as contract killers to exploit provisions in Guatemalan law that exempt minors from prosecution for such crimes, Interior Minister Mauricio Lopez said." Gutemalan crime groups must be pulling a page from the playbook of the Mexican drug cartels. In December 2010 Mexican authorities arrested Edgar Jimenez a/k/a El Ponchis or The Cloak, an...

America has almost 12 million illegal immigrants. Many of them came here on visas and never left. But about 60 percent of them walked in from just one country -- Mexico. Though the stalled Obama Economy has caused about 900,000 to go home since 2007, there are still about 6 million Mexicans living in the United States who've sneaked across our borders. Everyone from Marco Rubio to John McCain and our golfer in chief are trying to figure out how to deal with the illegal immigrants we have already and prevent future waves of Mexican migrants. But no one seems...

Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, the Forbes-listed billionaire who heads the Sinaloa cartel, may have died in a shootout with rival narcos in Guatemala's northern Peten province as reported by Sonia Perez for The Associated Press. However, it's still too early to pop the champagne, dance in the streets and celebrate with joy on the hopeful news because "officials stressed late Thursday that they had not yet found any bodies or even confirmed a shootout happened." Guatemala is among the major transit points for cocaine smuggled from Colombia through Central America and Mexico before reaching crazed druggies in the United States....