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MIGUEL CERVANTES Law enforcement officers inspected several bodies found on a Tijuana street Friday. The string of violence continued yesterday, with 10 more bodies found around the city +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ After a particularly violent week in Tijuana that has left 54 dead in a fierce cartel power struggle, experts on both sides of the border fear the worst is yet to come. Since early last year, Mexican President Felipe Calderón has deployed thousands of soldiers and federal police to drug-route battlegrounds such as Baja California, Chihuahua and Michoacan. Experts say it's clear that the recent bloodbath along the border, felt...

(VIDEO) Kidnappings and violence are spreading across the border and now the AP reports Mexican drug cartels have green-lighted hits against targets in the United States.

Mexican police discovered an air-conditioned drug-smuggling tunnel less than 60 meters (65 yards) from the US border in northwest Mexico, state police said Tuesday. Policemen surprised workers who were five meters underground digging a tunnel to the United States while they were searching a house in the border city of Mexicali, Mexican police said. (AFP/SSP/Ho) MEXICO CITY (AFP) - Mexican police discovered an air-conditioned drug-smuggling tunnel less than 60 meters (65 yards) from the US border in northwest Mexico, state police said. The 140-meter-long (150-yard), 1.3-meter-wide and five-meter-deep tunnel included an electric rail for container transport, ventilation and lights as...

MEXICO CITY — The sickening discovery this week of 11 headless bodies heaped like broken dolls near the colonial city of Merida underscored a bitter lesson for Mexico: The battle to control the multibillion-dollar drug trade knows no boundaries. The bodies are piling up nationwide, even in normally tranquil and touristy spots such as Merida, not far from the Maya ruins of Chichen Itza. During a seven-day period ended Friday, more than 130 people died violently throughout the country. Headless bodies turned up in four states, including Baja California. The Yucatan peninsula, strategically close to smuggling routes through Central America,...

EL PASO, Texas — Security is being heightened along the southern U.S. border because of a threat that warring Mexican cartels may send hit men into the United States, authorities said Monday. Law enforcement officials would not discuss specific security measures being taken at the ports of entry, along the border or in the city of El Paso, Texas. "We received credible information that drug cartels in Mexico have given permission to hit targets on the U.S. side of the border," El Paso police spokesman Officer Chris Mears said.

EL PASO, Texas — Security is being heightened along the southern U.S. border because of a threat that warring Mexican cartels may send hit men into the United States, authorities said Monday. Law enforcement officials would not discuss specific security measures being taken at the ports of entry, along the border or in the city of El Paso, Texas. "We received credible information that drug cartels in Mexico have given permission to hit targets on the U.S. side of the border," El Paso police spokesman Officer Chris Mears said. Authorities learned of the threat last week. U.S. Customs and Border...

A man suspected in the massacre of 19 men, woman and children during a Baja California drug war 10 years ago has been arrested in Los Angeles and returned to Mexico where he faces murder and other charges. 33-year-old Jesus Ruben Moncada was taken into custody Thursday night while taking out the garbage at his home in East L-A. He was allegedly a high-ranking member of the Felix Arellano drug cartel, who in 1998 helped gun down 19 people during a raid on an Ensenada ranch in search of a rival pot smuggler. Moncada was arrested on an immigration violation...

TIJUANA – A special federal task force captured several men believed to be high-ranking members of the Arellano Felix cartel amid gunfire in a pre-dawn raid Friday, according the local Mexican military command. The suspects were gambling around 2 a.m. in a room at Caliente Casino, owned by former mayor Jorge Hank Rhon. Alfonso Duarte Mujica, local military commander, said at a press conference Friday morning that one of those captured was Pedro Ignacio Zazueta, known as “El Pit,” believed to be one of the leaders of the Arellano cartel. Zazueta is a lieutenant to Fernando Sanchez Arellano, known as...

ELKHART — A man accused of stealing a full-automatic rifle from a Elkhart County Sheriff’s Department squad vehicle in June was arrested last week. Jesse M. Leal, 32,(see photo) of Elkhart, has been charged with possession of a machine gun, a Class C felony, and theft, a Class D felony. He faces up to 11 years if convicted. His bond has been set at $150,000. Authorities say they received information Leal had the M-16 military-style rifle, which was locked and secured in the squad vehicle, while they were investigating a "Mexican cocaine importation and distribution ring" that has so far...

The violence in Mexico's drug war is getting nasty. About 460 people have been killed in the border city of Ciudad Juarez this year, the greatest concentration of drug killings in the country. Today, hooded gunmen dressed in black burst into a drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre in northern Mexico, dragged patients out of a prayer session and shot them dead in an attack that killed eight people. In June, the high-profile police administrative director was shot 10 times as she was parking her car outside her house. More than 560 police have been slain since Felipe Calderon, the Mexican...

An article yesterday, 'Lost Sovereignity, Oil-rich Fund Eyeing Foreclosed US Homes', talked about how foreign money is now moving to scoop up tens of thousands of discounted foreclosed homes across the country. I caught Letterman the other night when Donald Trump was on. He was saying since our dollar is devalued and everything we have is now a world wide bargain, foreigners are buying up all the choice real estate. He admitted he’s inflating prices to get his best deal, and they’re happy to pay it. Today Mike Cutler brought another related story to our attention. We have done several...

SEQUOIA NATIONAL FOREST, California (CNN) -- Beyond the towering trees that have stood here for thousands of years, an intense drug war is being waged. Illegal immigrants connected to Mexico's drug cartels are growing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of marijuana in the heart of one of America's national treasures, authorities say. It's a booming business that, federal officials say, feeds Mexico's most violent drug traffickers. "These aren't Cheech and Chong plants," said John Walters, director of the National Drug Control Policy. "People who farm now are not doing this for laughs, despite the fact Hollywood still thinks that....

A Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy gunned down Saturday outside his boyhood home in Cypress Park had been assigned to guard the most dangerous inmates in the county, including members of the notorious Mexican Mafia gang, authorities said Sunday. Los Angeles police and sheriff's officials said the prospect that Deputy Juan Abel Escalante was killed because of his work at the jail remained one of three possible motives. Investigators were also considering the possibility that neighborhood gang violence or a personal grudge were behind the killing. As of right now, all of those possibilities are on the table," said Los...

WEST COVINA - Two men believed to be Mexican federal police officers were arrested along with two others Wednesday on suspicion of being part of a narcotics ring at a home in an unincorporated county area near West Covina, authorities said. Victor Manuel Jaurez, 36, and Carlos Cepano Filippini, 34, were taken into custody by a Drug Enforcement Administration Task Force, Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office spokeswoman Jane Robison said. They are both believed to members of the Agencia Federal de Investigacion. Filippini is a commander in the AFI, she said. Juarez's rank was not clear Friday.

<p>A Mexican federal police commander whose top deputies were gunned down last weekend was charged Friday with possessing more than $500,000 from drug trafficking.</p> <p>Carlos Cepano Filippini, 34, was one of four people charged with one felony count each of possession of money as part of narcotics trafficking, the Los Angeles County district attorney's office said in a statement.</p>

The Castorena Family Organization is a large-scale criminal organization with more than 100 key members who oversee cells of 10 to 20 individuals in cities across the United States, according to public court documents filed by the US government in Colorado and in other judicial districts around the country. Several of the senior leaders of the organization are believed to be based in Mexico, although they enter the US occasionally to oversee the operations of lieutenants of the crime family. The organization is alleged to be involved in the manufacture and distribution of high-quality counterfeit identity documents, including social security...

A package of baby diapers yielded an unlikely load in Mexico on Friday, according to the defense ministry: nearly half a million dollars in cash. Soldiers conducting a routine check "found in a tractor-trailer a packet of diapers containing 490,300 dollars," the ministry said. It said that the cash was likely a stash of narco-dollars destined for money-laundering, as the truck had come from Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa state in Mexico's northwest, a region known for trafficking by major drug cartels. The driver of the truck was arrested. Copyright AFP 2008, AFP stories and photos shall not be published,...

Recent attacks are a troubling sign innocents aren't off-limits MEXICO CITY — Many Mexicans have long shrugged off the violence shaking their country by telling themselves it only affects those involved in the narcotics trade and corrupt law enforcement officers. But innocent civilians, once considered largely off-limits, now find themselves increasingly targeted. In the past five days, two attacks in the Pacific Coast state of Sinaloa claimed the lives of perhaps more than a dozen people with no apparent connection to the drug trade — including at least four teens, a 12-year-old girl and a father-and-son team of university accounting...

MEXICO CITY — Unknown assailants shot to death a Federal Police commander and his bodyguard in a Mexico City restaurant at mid-day on Thursday, Mexican officials said. Igor Labastida, head of the Traffic and Contraband office of the Federal Preventive Police (PFP), was shot dead along with one of his bodyguards, spokesperson Minerva Amado with the attorney general's office (PGR) said. "Two subjects got out of a black vehicle, entered a restaurant where the commander was eating and opened fire on him and his escorts," said Amado. Two other Labastida bodyguards were wounded and hospitalized, Amado said. Police are searching...

Authorities say it's the biggest pot bust in Cocke County in the last five years, maybe more. Around 10 a.m. Monday, helicopter pilots spotted hundreds of thousands of marijuana plants growing in the Cherokee National Forest in Cocke County. They alerted officers on the ground, and the crew trekked more than a mile into the forest from Interstate 40, where they came upon what they call a DTO, or drug trafficking organization. "They just live in it, move in, grow, and that's all they're there to do is grow marijuana," Special Agent Jason Poore said of the growers. Poore is...

Police may have found the smoking gun — literally — that could ensure convictions for six suspects in the gruesome, execution-style murders of three college-bound New Jersey youths. The gun, a .357-caliber revolver, was recovered from the Long Island, N.Y., house of a reputed MS-13 gang member, and it may have been used in several other killings, authorities said Thursday.

Mexico: the danger of 'drug ballads'  Last Updated: 12:01am BST 01/06/2008       In the past two years, 15 mexican musicians have been murdered. Their crime: to fall foul of the country's drug barons. Ioan Grillo reports It was three in the morning and the Mexican group Banda Guasavena were driving back from a concert at a cockfighting festival, just over the border from Texas. The audience had been even more rapturous than usual and Fausto Castro-Elizalde, the band's horn player, recalls them chatting happily about the evening.   Grupo Cartel de Sinaloa pose in a cemetery full of extravagant...

<p>MEXICO CITY — The U.S. Congress has scaled back on President Bush's anti-drug plans for Mexico and put human rights conditions on some of the aid, drawing fire from some Mexicans who accuse American lawmakers of meddling in their country's internal affairs.</p>

U.S. Wary Of Small Boat Terrorism As boating season approaches, the Bush administration wants to enlist America's 80 million recreational boaters to help reduce the chances that a small boat could deliver a nuclear or radiological bomb somewhere along the 95,000 miles of U.S. coastline and inland waterways. According to an April 23 intelligence assessment obtained by The Associated Press, "The use of a small boat as a weapon is likely to remain al Qaeda's weapon of choice in the maritime environment, given its ease in arming and deploying, low cost, and record of success." While the United States...

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — Drug cartels are sending a brutal message to police and soldiers in cities across Mexico: Join us or die. The threat appears in recruiting banners hung across roadsides and in publicly posted death lists. Cops get warnings over their two-way radios. At least four high-ranking police officials were gunned down this month, including Mexico's acting federal police chief. Mexico has battled for years to clean up its security forces and win them the public's respect. But Mexicans generally assume police and even soldiers are corrupt until proven otherwise, and the honest ones lack resources, training and...

TIJUANA, Mexico (Reuters) - Fourteen Mexican drug gang members were killed and eight others were injured in a gun battle near the U.S. border on Saturday, one of the bloodiest shootouts in Mexico's three-year-long narco-war. Rival factions of the local Arellano Felix drug cartel in Tijuana on the Mexico-California border fought each other with rifles and machine guns in the early hours of the morning, police said. The bodies lay in pools of blood, strewn along a road on the city's eastern limits, surrounded by hundreds of bullet casings. Many of the victims' faces were destroyed. "By the way this...

Mexican authorities have scored key victories in recent months in their ongoing campaign against the Tamaulipas-based Gulf Cartel. An increased military presence in cities along the nation's northern border has yielded numerous arrests of top organization officials and high-profile raids on drug stashes and safe houses. But there is evidence that despite their successes, the cartel and its paramilitary wing, the Zetas, are adapting. Leaders of both have moved out of once prominent hotspots and may be entering new forms of criminal and legitimate business, say law enforcement officials and analysts. "When the smoke clears and the military leaves, we...

Afghanistan to Ask NATO for Bigger Army Afghan officials will go to the NATO summit in Romania Thursday with a request: pay to increase our national Army by 40 percent. A bigger Army, Afghan officials argue, will allow the US and other coalition members to scale back in the coming years. This appeal comes amid pleas from the US and Canada for other NATO members to commit more to the Afghanistan mission, which many analysts say has floundered over the past year for lack of resources and a coherent strategy. France is expected to contribute another 1,000 forces and...

EL PASO, Texas - Mexican Consulate officials in El Paso, Texas, said Mexican drug cartels have been posting help-wanted ads in Juarez, Mexico, newspapers. The officials said publications including P.M., El Diario de Juarez and El Norte have been printing vague help-wanted ads that are designed to trick young people into smuggling drugs over the border into the United States, the Las Cruces (N.M.) Sun-News reported Friday. Mexican Consulate spokeswoman Socorro Cordova said the issue came to the attention of officials nine months ago when the family of a driver stopped at the U.S. border showed the ad to Mexican...

Murders and kidnappings on both sides of the border have significantly increased in recent years. The violence along the U.S.-Mexican border has increased so dramatically that the Juárez Mayor José Reyes Ferriz asked Mexican President Felipe Calderón to send more help as reported in the El Paso Journal. Only thirty federal officers had been sent at that time to Juárez despite repeated requests for more help. It's necessary and urgent to have agents from the federal preventive police to patrol the streets the way that we need to confront this situation," Reyes Ferriz said in a news conference. The Mexican...

Nearly 1,000 Mexican troops arrived at the international airport in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, yesterday to quell drug war violence that has surged recently in the city across the border from El Paso, Texas

CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico – The government of Mexican President Felipe Calderón on Thursday announced a military surge of more than 2,000 soldiers in this besieged border community – caught in the crossfire between two warring drug cartels. "Operation Chihuahua," named after Mexico's biggest state, nestled against New Mexico and Texas, is aimed at restoring law and order in a region that many say has grown lawless. Since Jan. 1, nearly 200 people have been killed in this city of 1.2 million. "In this fight, Chihuahua is not alone," said Mexico's interior secretary Juan Camilo Muriño, who was accompanied by the...

NEW YORK -- The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has released a new report. It warned that the axis between South American drug cartels and the Albanian mafia have reached "alarming proportions", while reports by several intelligence agencies show that Kosovo is a distribution center on the crossroads of global routes and pathways of drug trafficking. This presents reason for concern, primarily because of the new pathways of drug trafficking, and "inclusion of cocaine in the range of products offered by the groups that are active along the Balkan drug route", the UNODC annual report for 2007...

MEXICO CITY - Suspected drug cartel gunmen killed five people in an attack on a police station in central Mexico and during their subsequent escape, authorities said on Saturday. At least six masked, heavily armed men raided the police station in the town of Jerecuaro, in the state of Guanajuato, on Friday, shooting and killing two police officers and a secretary. Making their escape in sport utility vehicles, they gunned down another two police officers on a nearby highway, state authorities said. Police later found one of the gunmen dead of a gunshot wound in one of three abandoned bullet-riddled...

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexican soldiers battling a violent drug gang and corrupt local police confiscated a sport utility vehicle decked out with extras worthy of a James Bond movie. Cartel members rammed their SUV into a military truck patrolling in the state of Tamaulipas and threw a hand grenade before making their escape with the help of local police, the army said in a statement late Tuesday. Following a shootout with the gang, soldiers said they arrested four municipal police and confiscated an armored Jeep Grand Cherokee equipped with a smoke machine and spike sprayer meant to deter pursuers....

Soldiers seized assault rifles, grenades, marijuana and bulletproof vests bearing police insignia after a brief shootout in the Mexican border city of Tijuana. No one was wounded in the overnight exchange of fire with three suspects hunkered down in a house in La Mesa district, army Gen. Sergio Aponte Polito told reporters Friday. Troops seized 91 assault rifles — some with butts of gold and ivory — along with 18 grenades, the bulletproof vests and more than 880 pounds of marijuana, Aponte Polito said. The three suspects, aged 25 to 33, were arrested. The bust followed weeks of bloody confrontations...

Drug cartel hit men have killed a popular Mexican singer, along with his manager and assistant, near the U.S. border, authorities said Wednesday. Jesus Rey David Alfaro, known as the Little Rooster, is one of at least six singers of narcocorrido ballads about drug trafficking who have been slain since Mexico's drug war flared in 2006. "We believe Alfaro had links to the Arellano Felix cartel," said an official with the Baja California attorney general's office, who declined to be named. Alfaro's body was found last week covered with a blanket on the edge of the city, with rope marks...

They've already shot up his house and gunned down three cops. He urges citizens to stand with him. TIJUANA -- The bullet holes pockmarking the walls of his home were just three days old when Alberto Capella Ibarra took over the police force of this violence-plagued city. Twenty gunmen dressed in black had swarmed his yard in the middle of the night, and he'd fought them off, firing an automatic rifle. Taking office Dec. 1 as the city's secretary for public security, Capella, a longtime activist, declared war on organized crime and challenged citizens to join him in the battle....

MORELIA, Mexico -- Sergio Gómez roared into town in a big SUV, entourage in tow, pressed suits, fancy cowboy boots. Everything about him said superstar. He had an international following and a star on the walk of fame in Las Vegas. More than 20,000 fans swarmed the parking lot of this colonial city's soccer stadium to dance and hear him sing romantic "Duranguense grupero" pop songs backed by a driving drumbeat. After the show, in the small hours of Dec. 2, Sergio Gomez was kidnapped. Police found his body the next day. He'd been strangled and beaten. His face --...

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Gunmen shot a crime reporter 45 times in a Mexican town plagued by drug violence on Saturday after a high-speed chase as he tried to escape on his motorcycle. Cut off by a vehicle in Uruapan, in the state of Michoacan, Gerardo Garcia fled on his motorcycle as far as his home, where his pursuers killed him, police and a source at the newspaper where he worked told Reuters. Mexico's drug cartels are battling for control of regions key to trafficking South American cocaine and other drugs into the United States. Mexican journalists are targets of...

Informer tells of corrupt Mexico October 25, 2007 By Jerry Seper - An informant who worked for U.S. authorities for more than four years says government, police and military authorities in Mexico have been corrupted by drug smugglers, often carrying out kidnappings and killings on the orders of drug cartel bosses. The accusations are outlined in sworn testimony before a U.S. immigration judge by Guillermo Eduardo Ramirez Peyro, a former Mexican police officer who was paid $224,000 for information U.S. anti-drug agents used to convict dozens of high-ranking Mexican drug traffickers. Ramirez told U.S. Immigration Judge Joseph R. Dierkes in...

Report: This will be deadly year for Mexican drug-related crimes AUSTIN — Escalating violence from Mexico's drug cartels and deteriorating security across the border will make 2007 the most deadly year yet for Mexican drug-related crime, according to a report by a former U.S. counterterrorism agent. Law enforcement on the U.S. side of the border has trouble battling drug smuggling and the violence that spills into the United States because of poor coordination, corruption and lack of resources, said the report by the Austin consulting firm Stratfor. Fred Burton, a former State Department counterterrorism agent and now vice president for...

WASHINGTON – Rep. Tom Tancredo's charge that Mexican drug cartels are buying up legitimate businesses in U.S. cities to launder money and using some of the proceeds to win local mayoral and city council seats for politicians who can shape the policies and personnel decisions of their police forces, has been backed up by a veteran gang investigator. Richard Valdemar, a retired sergeant with the L.A. County sheriff's department and a longtime member of a federal task force investigating gang activity, went beyond the charges made by Tancredo, the chairman of the House Immigration Reform Caucus who has led the...

(Medford, Or) - Much of the day Friday, a helicopter brought out load after load of marijuana plants from hillsides in the Applegate... more than 10,000 plants, according to Jackson County Sheriff Mike Winters. Winters says marijuana retails for about 5-thousand dollars a pound, street value. He says last year his department confiscated 27.6 tons of marijuana. The grows are not just valuable. They're also dangerous. Law enforcement officers say the grow is most likely part of a Mexican drug cartel. Winters says members of the cartel will fight in a gun battle to protect their crop... and to try...

MEXICO CITY, July 13 -- The San Antonio Express-News, a 230,000-circulation daily, this week withdrew its U.S.-Mexico border reporter after learning of what appears to be an unprecedented plan to assassinate American journalists who frequently write about drug cartels in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. Sources have told several Texas newspapers that hit men from Los Zetas, a group of former Mexican military officers who operate as the Gulf cartel's assassins, may have been hired to cross into the United States and execute American reporters. Word of the threat shattered the widely held perception here that foreign journalists are somehow shielded from...

President Bush's so-called “drug czar,” John P. Walters, is scheduled to be in Shasta County Thursday to participate in the launch of Operation Alesia, a multi-agency marijuana eradication operation on public lands that began this Monday. Seventeen local, state and federal agencies are participating in Operation Alesia, which has the stated goal of “education, eradication and reclamation of marijuana cultivation sites on public lands” in Shasta County, according to a press release from the Shasta-Trinity National Forest office in Redding. In a press release from his Washington, DC, office, Director of National Drug Control Policy Walters states, “America's public lands...

SAN DIEGO -- A June 8 kidnapping in Chula Vista is raising fears that brazen crimes related to drug cartels south of the border are making their way north. Federal authorities rescued the victim earlier this month and took five people into custody, but are being especially closed-mouth about the crime because of its possible connection to drug traffickers, The San Diego Union-Tribune reported. The house where the man was held for eight days is about a mile from where Mexican-drug-trafficking suspects shot at a Chula Vista police officer in 2005 and about 3 miles from where a body was...

Mexican authorities uncover border tunnel into San Diego County By: North County Times wire services - SAN DIEGO - Mexican authorities have discovered an unfinished cross-border tunnel that extends 31 feet into San Diego County, federal officials announced today. The passageway, discovered yesterday morning, originates in Baja California and is located south of the intersection of Via de la Amistad and Enrico Fermi Drive and about a half-mile east of the Otay Mesa Port of Entry, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials. So far, U.S. Border Patrol agents have not discovered access to the tunnel on the U.S....

MEXICO CITY — Mexican police rearrested a former governor Thursday as he was released from prison with the intent of extraditing him to the United States to face cocaine-trafficking charges. Mario Villanueva, 58, who governed the Yucatan Peninsula state that includes the resorts of Cancun and the Riviera Maya from 1993 until 1999, was arrested at dawn, moments after finishing a six-year sentence here for money laundering. He faces federal charges in New York of taking part in a conspiracy to smuggle as much as 200 tons of cocaine into the United States while governor of Quintana Roo state. Much...

The severed head of a town councilman was dumped outside the offices of a newspaper in Mexico's Gulf state of Tabasco in what the paper's publishers said was an attempt to intimidate reporters. The head, left outside Tabasco Hoy's offices in Villahermosa, was wrapped in newspaper inside a cooler and left by a man who stepped out of a sport utility vehicle early Saturday, the paper said on its Web site.