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Generals of the Venezuelan Army may have been involved in drug trafficking according to a testimony given by Mexican drug kingpin Sergio Villarreal Barragán commonly known as El Grande (The big one), who was arrested two years ago in Mexico. Villareal, who became one a major drug member of Beltran Leyva cartel, has told the Mexican authorities that Graumman aircrafts carrying as many as three tons of cocaine often departed from Maracaibo, west Venezuela, and landed in Toluca, north Mexico, DPA noted. "Several generals of the Venezuelan Army along with Venezuelan drug lord El Turco were fully aware of the...

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Mexico has sent soldiers to patrol a suburb of Mexico City for the first time to combat a rise in drug-related violence that is beginning to encroach on the capital. From late Wednesday, a combined force of around 1,000 soldiers, federal police and local police took to the streets of Nezahualcoyotl on the capital's eastern flank, which has suffered from a dispute between two rival drug cartels. Mexican President Felipe Calderon's fight against drug gangs has overshadowed his administration, and the deployment in Nezahualcoyotl brings the conflict into the home state of his successor Enrique Pena Nieto, who takes office...

The Mexican government will aim to follow the lead of Colombia in the fight against drug trafficking, according to the country's elected president. Enrique Peña Nieto, who met with Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos on Tuesday, will take office in Mexico on December 1 and he has already revealed his desire to learn from Colombia’s strategy on drug control. Several drug cartels are currently in the midst of a fierce fight for power in Mexico, leading to continued violence which has allegedly left at least 55,000 people dead in six years. Peña Nieto will succeed current Mexican President Felipe Calderon...

More than 130 inmates escaped through a tunnel from a Mexican prison on the border with the United States in one of the worst jailbreaks the country's beleaguered penal system has suffered in recent years. Homero Ramos, attorney general of the northern state of Coahuila, said 132 inmates of the prison in the city of Piedras Negras had got out through the tunnel in an old carpentry workshop, then cut the wire surrounding the complex. Corrupt prison officials may have helped the inmates escape ... At the end of 2010, more than 140 inmates escaped a prison in the border...

'clandestine tap' Despite 130-ton pot busts and their being locked in a five year, multilateral war with the government/other gangs in which 5x more people have died than US losses for the entire Iraq war, frightening Mexican drug mafias continue to grow in wealth, power, and influence... and are now extending their unique brand of chaos directly to US soil.The Mexican federal government already had enough problems facing an utterly ruthless enemy equipped with machine guns, narco-tanks and homemade submarines attained via almost unlimited cash- now the gangs have gone on the offensive against the feds' own primary revenue source, Pemex: over thirty of the...

MEXICO CITY — The two Americans who were wounded when gunmen fired on an American Embassy vehicle last week were Central Intelligence Agency employees sent as part of a multiagency effort to bolster Mexican efforts to fight drug traffickers, officials said on Tuesday. The two operatives, who were hurt on Friday, were participating in a training program that involved the Mexican Navy. They were traveling with a Mexican Navy captain in an embassy sport utility vehicle that had diplomatic license plates, heading toward a military shooting range 35 miles south of the capital when gunmen, some or all of them...

President Obama and his useless administration insist that the drug violence in Mexico is not spilling over the border into America. Don't buy the political BS from Washington, D.C. In fact, Jack Riley, the special agent in charge of the DEA's field office in Chicago, IL, says that the local street gangs are proxies for the Mexican drug cartels in the battle for turf as reported by Armen Keteyian for CBS News: Riley says Mexican cartels have a significant influence in Chicago's gang violence problem. "Let's take the gloves off on that," he said. "We know that the majority of...

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...