Free Republic

In an effort to catch one of the world’s most notorious drug kingpins, the U.S. may use the same daring methods that took down Osama bin Laden. More than a year after the terror leader’s demise in Abottabad, Pakistan, Seal Team Six raid, the highly-trained commandos may be dispatched to Mexico to kill or capture Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman. Like the 9/11 Mastermind, Guzman has been the subject of a vast manhunt for the last ten years after he escaped from a Mexican high security prison in a complex breakout that reportedly cost him nearly $4million

“ATF’s arrest of defendants in Project Coronado highlight the almost inseparable link between illegal trafficking of firearms and narcotics between the U.S. and Mexico,” said ATF Acting Director Kenneth Melson. “ATF ... focuses its investigative tools on criminal groups such as La Familia, ... It is alleged that La Familia used proceeds from the sale of drugs to purchase or obtain hundreds of firearms that were then moved illicitly to Mexico.” Project Coronado through OCDETF., (Special Operations Division), DEA, FBI, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Internal Revenue Service, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Marshals Service and ATF, as well...

A high-ranking Mexican drug cartel operative currently in U.S. custody is making startling allegations that the failed federal gun-walking operation known as “Fast and Furious” isn’t what you think it is. It wasn’t about tracking guns, it was about supplying them — all part of an elaborate agreement between the U.S. government and Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa Cartel to take down rival cartels.

Mexicans have long grown weary of their country’s prolonged War on Drugs. Now, with President-elect Enrique Peña Nieto set to take office in December, it appears change may finally be in the offing. That change, however, may not be what most Mexicans were expecting. “A transnational phenomenon requires a transnational strategy,” Óscar Naranjo, Colombia’s former director of the National Police and current advisor to Peña Nieto, told reporters last week. “No country can succeed in an insular and isolated manner if it is to achieve timely or definitive victories.” Far from “re-envisioning” the approach taken by outgoing President Felipe Calderon,...

Chicago likes to compare itself to other world cities, so Ward Room thought it would find out how we rank in violence. It turns out no one can top us. Among what are considered Alpha world cities, Chicago has the highest murder rate --higher even than the Third World metropolises of Mexico City and Sao Paolo. Here’s how we rank in murders per 100,000 among cities we consider our peers, based on a projected murder total of 505 for this year....New York 6.0 Los Angeles 7.5 Mexico City 8.0 Moscow 9.6 Sao Paolo 15.6 Chicago 19.4

(CNN) -- Google's technology certainly can map out driving directions and organize e-mail (or even make cars drive themselves). But can its digital tools take down drug cartels? The company says it can, with your help. "We believe that technology has the power to expose and dismantle global criminal networks, which depend on secrecy and discretion in order to function," Google said in a blog post this week. "And for the past few months, we've been working with people fighting on the front line to gain a better understanding of what drives these networks and how they function." In coordination...

US Senators accuse HSBC of ‘letting Mexican gangs launder $7 billion and working with Saudi bank linked to terrorism’ * HSBC moved huge sum from Mexico into the U.S. between 2007 and 2008 * Provided services for Saudi Arabia’s Al Rajhi Bank linked to financing terrorism * Senate investigation suggests they also moved money tied to Iran * Accuses bank of ‘pervasively polluted’ culture * Another hammer blow to the credibility of British banking system after Barclays was fined for allegedly rigging LIBOR interest rate HSBC has been accused of handling money from Mexican drugs cartels and working alongside a...

Authorities in Arizona unearthed a sophisticated 240-yard drug-smuggling tunnel stretching into Mexico that included engineered support beams, lights and ventilation. The six-foot-high corridor ran from a store in an abandoned strip mall near Yuma to an ice shop across the border in San Luis Rio Colorado. It provided a direct link to the US for Mexican drug cartels. The Mexican Army also found a second, incomplete, tunnel under a bathroom sink in Tijuana that stretched more than 200 yards into San Diego, California. The diggers had not yet reached the surface when authorities shut it down.

by John HillStand With Arizona The border is “safer than ever”. So says DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano. Again and again. Barack Obama has mocked those who say the border is unsafe: “Maybe they’ll need a moat. Maybe they’ll want alligators in the moat. They’ll never be satisfied.” But for Texans, the Rio Grande is wide open - thanks to Federal failure to secure it  - and is a growing threat to the safety of citizens and law enforcement, on land and water. In January we chronicled how ranchers in the Rio Grande Valley were stocking up on AK-47s to defend their property and lives...

Mexico is the deadliest country on earth for journalists. Almost 50 have been killed since President Felipe Calderon declared war on the cartels six years ago.

EMILIANO ZAPATA, Mexico — Before the sun climbed above the hills around this central Mexican town, Saul Garcia and his family awoke to the sound of bullets piercing the front gate. A masked motorcyclist had opened fire on their brick home, leaving behind a poster signed by the La Familia drug cartel, warning the mayoral candidate to withdraw from the race or the gang would kill him, his wife and three children. Garcia, a candidate for the local Social Democratic Party, didn't pull out. A state police officer now follows Garcia 24 hours a day while he courts voters on...

Barack Obama seems completely obsessed with systematically legalizing illegal immigration. The United States borders a failed narco-state that is one of the most crime-ridden nations on the entire planet, but Barack Obama refuses to secure the border and the consequences for the American people have been absolutely catastrophic. Right now it is already costing us tens of billions of dollars a year to provide welfare for illegal immigrants and to educate their children in our public schools. Right now illegal immigrants are already working millions of jobs that should belong to American workers. Right now Mexican drug cartels are already...

CHICAGO — Everybody has long known that Chicago has a gang problem, but we're just beginning to understand that we have a perfect storm brewing of street gangs with ties to the Mexican narcos. Just last week, the Chicago Police and federal agents announced more than a dozen arrests in the city and suburbs in a coordinated drug raid. The authorities think the suspects arrested have ties to a Mexican drug cartel. Back in November, the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration arrested 12 people in Chicago and charged them with drug trafficking. U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said then that...

Two Federal Police officers under investigation for drug trafficking killed three fellow officers who were about to arrest them at Mexico City's Benito Juarez International Airport, the Public Safety Secretariat said. The official version of the incident confirms eyewitness accounts and information provided by airport security officials, who said police officers or other uniformed individuals killed the three officers. The shooting occurred around 8:50 a.m. Monday in the airport's Terminal 2, leaving two officers dead at the scene. The third officer died while being treated at a hospital. Two Federal Police officers assigned to the airport opened fire when officers...

For decades, American and Canadian expats have flocked to the shores of Chapala, seeking refuge in the spring-like climate of Mexico's largest natural lake, where English author D.H. Lawrence once came for inspiration. But the calm of the clustered lakeside retreats was shattered last month when suspected drug-gang hitmen kidnapped a group of Mexican locals and dumped 18 decapitated bodies in two vehicles just miles (kilometers) from the lakeside tourist enclave of Ajijic. The explosion of violence followed months of escalating tension in a turf war between the Sinaloa and Zetas drug cartels that has spread from smuggling routes in...

MEXICO CITY — The top three contenders for Mexico’s presidency have all promised a major shift in the country’s drug war strategy, placing a higher priority on reducing the violence in Mexico than on using arrests and seizures to block the flow of drugs to the United States. ____________________________snip___________________________ “Results will be measured not by how many criminals are captured, but by how stable and secure the communities are,” Ms. Vázquez Mota wrote on her campaign Web site. Mr. López Obrador — whose security strategy is called “Abrazos, no balazos,” or “Hugs, not bullets” — has criticized how United States...

CIUDAD VICTORIA, Mexico (AP) — Suspected drug cartel gunmen opened fire on a hotel being used as a police barracks then attacked it with a car bomb Thursday, wounding eight officers less than 4 miles (6.5 kilometers) from the U.S. border, Mexican officials said. A Tamaulipas state official said authorities believed the Zetas cartel, one of Mexico's two most powerful criminal organizations, carried out the attack on the Hotel Santa Cecilia in Nuevo Laredo, a city across the border from Laredo, Texas. The Zetas, founded by Mexican special forces defectors, have carried out a number of sophisticated attacks, but Thursday's...

A mother in Texas has been arrested for allegedly using her children and teenage sister to smuggle narco cash from Dallas to Mexico. After pulling over Betzabeth Perez-Torres, 23, in a Mercedes Benz in Combes en route to Brownsville, an officer noticed the three children in the car were fidgeting. The officer became suspicious when Perez-Torres told the children to stop fidgeting and to keep their coats on. The officer eventually discovered the children had cash in plastic bags wrapped around their waists and hidden by the coats. The two younger children, aged 2 and 6, are said to have...

Mexican authorities say that, since 2008, criminal gangs have robbed so many trucks carrying gold shipments that some mining companies have been forced to switch to aerial transportation. This highlights the convenience of gold as a means to launder dirty cash. Drug cartels primarily use the gold to launder their proceeds, usually reworking it into jewelery and selling it on the legal market, reports Excelsior. Theft of gold bar shipments has been reported in some of the states most affected by drug violence, including Chihuahua, Sonora, and Durango. One miners' association in Sonora told the newspaper that their production costs...