Free Republic

Drug war terror spreads in Mexico as bodies are dumped in tourist areas Another day brings another funeral in Mexico. The death toll from violence has already passed 2,700 this year Chris Ayres in Los Angeles Eleven decapitated bodies have been found outside the city of Merida on the Yucatan peninsula, heightening fears that Mexico's recent descent into violence has reached even heavily protected tourist areas.

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.

A massacre at a drug rehab center last week helped push the number of homicides in the Mexican border city of Juarez to more than 800 this year as rival drug gangs battle for turf. On Wednesday a commando-style group fired a barrage of more than 60 rounds during a religious service at the drug rehab center, killing eight and wounding five. Five other people were killed elsewhere in the city on that day. More than 100 people have been killed so far in August in the war between the Sinaloa and Juarez drug cartels, which broke out in January,...

Colombia's left-wing Farc rebels have kidnapped 10 people in the north-west of the country. Guerrillas forced a boat load of people travelling along the Atrato River in Choco province to the shore, before seizing the hostages. Kidnappings for ransom remain the main source of income for the Farc, along with drug trafficking. Earlier this month their best-known hostage, ex-presidential hopeful Ingrid Betancourt, was rescued by troops.

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,...

As organized crime galvanizes their hold on Mexico, their network infiltrates our colleges, street gangs, and our communities. Our country is being raped and ravaged as our elected leaders remain insulated and uncaring within the halls of Congress.

Mexico City, Jun 22 (EFE).- Police found the bodies of five people who were killed with AK-47 assault rifles in Novolato, a city in the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa, in an apparent settling of scores between organized-crime groups, prosecutors told Efe. The bodies were found early Saturday lined up on the edge of an irrigation canal at the main entrance to the city's San Pedro neighborhood. "The five bodies had the hands tied behind their backs and were betweeen 25 and 30 years" old, a spokesman for the Sinaloa Attorney General's Office said. Police found 104 bullet casings from...

MONTERREY, Mexico (Reuters) - A Mexican woman and her three American daughters have been caught smuggling $1.16 million worth of cocaine into Texas from Mexico, a rare case of a mother and her family trafficking drugs, U.S. customs said on Friday. The four women stashed the cocaine under their clothes and inside their 2006 Mercedes Benz and tried to cross through the Brownsville, Texas entry port from eastern Mexico. A sniffer dog alerted customs agents to the smell of cocaine emanating from the car and agents also noted unusual bulges under their clothes, finding cocaine packages on three of the...

PORT ISABEL — A Cameron County constable has been arrested on drug trafficking charges after indictment by a Brownsville grand jury. The U.S. Attorney's Office unsealed the indictment after Drug Enforcement Agency and FBI agents arrested Precinct 1 Constable Saul Ochoa at the Port Isabel Police Department on Wednesday. The grand jury charged Ochoa with possessing five to 10 pounds of marijuana on four different days in May with the intent to distribute. Each of the four counts carries a maximum five years in prison and $250,000 fine. Ochoa is expected to have his initial appearance before U.S. Magistrate Judge...

Cartel Targets Americans At least one police officer named EL PASO - The drug cartels are targeting Americans this morning. Police in El Paso say they received a list of 15 to 20 names, all of people living in New Mexico and Texas. The names include at least one police officer. The drug cartels have made good on death threats on police in Mexico. Out of a hit list of 22 police officers in Ciudad Juarez, only one is still on the force. Seven of those officer were killed. The rest quit. Local law enforcement is working with federal authorities...

More than dozen people living in New Mexico and Texas are named in what appears to be a hit list from a Mexican drug cartel, law enforcement officials said. At least one police officer from southern New Mexico is among the 15 to 20 people named in the threat, said Arturo Baeza, a sheriff's captain in that state's Luna County. The list, thought to be a threat from one of Mexico's powerful and warring drug cartels, was provided June 12 to local authorities by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, Baeza said. Drug cartels are waging a bloody fight for...

(English-language translation) Washington - The U.S. House of Representatives approved last night a $465 million fund included in the Mérida Plan to fight drug-trafficking in Mexico and Central America. The initiative, which President George W. Bush proposed in October of last year, was appproved with 416 votes in favor and 12 against, legislative sources said. The approval includes a total of $400 million for Mexico and $65 million for Central American countries. "The Congress has reached an agreement to support the first year of the initiative meant to fight drug-trafficking and the violence it generates," said Democrat Howard Berman, Chairman...

(CNSNews.com) - Members of Congress are split on whether the National Guard should end its deployment along the U.S.-Mexico border in July, as planned. On Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff predicted the border would not be secured until 2011. (See earlier story)The Guard built 38.1 miles of new fencing, 18.5 miles of new roads, 94.5 miles of vehicle barriers and repaired 717 miles of road. The final withdrawal for the National Guard working in Operation Jump Start is planned for July 15. The National Guard's Noller said that Operation Jump Start is winding down because of a presidential directive....

VILLAHERMOSA, Mexico — A note threatening a Mexican journalist was found outside the office of a newspaper in southern Mexico on Monday, two days after someone left a severed head there. Tabasco state Attorney General Gustavo Rosario said the letter was directed at Juan Padilla, editor of El Correo de Tabasco, which recently carried reports about migrant smuggling and kidnapping in the area. "You are next," the note read. The head of a man police identified as a low-level drug trafficker was found outside the offices on Saturday. Soldiers later located his body in another part of the city alongside...

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...

CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuela said Thursday it arrested a man who identified himself as a U.S. anti-drugs agent, which if confirmed could inflame tensions between the United States and one of its biggest oil suppliers. President Hugo Chavez in 2005 ended cooperation with the the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), saying the agency was spying on him. The United States denied the charge and says Chavez does too little to stop trafficking from neighboring Colombia, the world's largest cocaine exporter. Gen. Gabriel Oviedo said the man was acting suspicious when he was detained close to the border with Colombia while...

COLUMBUS, N.M. – Talking with officials in this high-desert town, it doesn't take long to understand just how concerned they are over the widespread violence south of the border, which they can't control. From the American side of the U.S. Port of Entry in Columbus you can actually look down the streets of Palomas, Mexico – the town is that close. The problem is that Palomas, along with other Mexican cities, has fallen victim to a vicious turf war between rival Mexican drug cartels that has claimed about 4,000 lives since the start of last year. Among those assassinated are...

WASHINGTON (AFP) — The United States said Monday it was shocked at escalating attacks on police officers in Mexico, adding organized crime posed a "serious threat" to democratic institutions there. "We're shocked by the escalating violence against Mexican law enforcement officials," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said in a statement read out at the daily press briefing. "The recent murders of three high-level police officials by criminal syndicates and drug trafficking cartels are a brutal reaction to President (Felipe) Calderon's determination to fight organized crime," he said. "They illustrate the serious threat these organizations pose to democratic institutions in Mexico,"...

MEXICO CITY — Assassins gunned down a senior police official in the border city of Ciudad Juarez early Saturday as Mexico's gangsters pressed their counteroffensive against the country's security forces. Municipal Police Chief Juan Antonio Roman was shot about 2 a.m. in front of his house on the outskirts of the city, which is across the Rio Grande from El Paso. Another of Roman's police commanders was shot shortly before he was killed. Roman's was one of more than 100 deaths, including those of at least 20 police officers, attributed to organized crime last week across Mexico. Among those killed...

MEXICO CITY (AFP) — Gunmen assassinated a commander of Mexico City's anti-kidnapping police Friday, the fourth top police authority slain in 10 days here as the toll from a rising organized crime wave hits top brass. One day after acting federal police chief Edgar Millan was brutally murdered, four gunmen in a truck shot and killed anti-kidnapping commander Esteban Robles, authorities said. Robles was rushed to hospital after the attack Friday but did not survive. The violence, believed to be mostly related to the government's stepped up fight against drug trafficking, saw a new grim chapter Thursday in Mexico City...

WASHINGTON -- Federal prosecutors are investigating Wachovia Corp. as part of a broad probe of alleged laundering of drug proceeds by Mexican and Colombian money-transfer companies, according to people familiar with the matter. Wachovia is one of several large U.S. banks that have come under scrutiny for their relationships with such companies. It is in discussions with the Justice Department about reforms in its compliance system and faces a possible deferred-prosecution agreement that would require extensive federal oversight. An official of Wachovia said it is cooperating in the probe. Wachovia, based in Charlotte, N.C., and some other U.S. banks severed...

Each day, I make the dreaded drive down Interstate 35 to go to work in Fort Worth. Each day, I slug through the snarl and sludge of ceaseless traffic, which intensifies my growing desire to commit hari-kari, or at least incites a vehement curse of the highway gods. Certainly, we in Texas need more lanes, more roads, more rails, more something to deal with the ever-expanding urban population and growing international commerce. Yet how do we solve our transportation needs without carving up the countryside like some congratulatory cake? Or should the construction of a superhighway-rail-utility corridor even concern us?...

(Houston, TX) – Eighteen individuals , including alleged drug traffickers and the owners/operators of commercial bus companies operating from Mexico into the Rio Grande Valley to numerous U.S. cities and their drivers, have been indicted for transporting large loads of marijuana and cocaine in specially modified commercial buses and money laundering. The indictment is the result of a long-term Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF) investigation dubbed Operation Road King II. United States Attorney Don DeGabrielle announced the unsealing of the indictment today at a press conference. The 16-count indictment returned by a Houston grand jury March 31, 2008,...

Wachovia Corp. is involved in a federal investigation launched by the Department of Justice that targets money-laundering by drug organizations, according to The Wall Street Journal. The Charlotte, N.C., company is under scrutiny for its involvement with Colombian and Mexican money-changing establishments known as “casas de cambio,” located along the Mexican/U.S. border. These organizations may be used by drug cartels to launder their money. One such exchange, Casa de Cambio Puebla, a Mexican chain, was recently the subject of a court case in Miami in which $23 million in assets were seized. The money was spread out over 23 Wachovia...

TIJUANA, Mexico - Massive gunbattles broke out between suspected drug traffickers who fired at each other while speeding down heavily populated streets of this violent border city early Saturday, killing 13 people and wounding nine. All of the dead were believed to be drug traffickers, possibly rival members of the same cartel who were trying to settle scores, said Rommel Moreno, the attorney general of Baja California state, where Tijuana is located. "Evidently this is a confrontation between gangs," Moreno told reporters. Eight suspects and one federal police officer were injured in the pre-dawn shootings, none gravely, said Agustin Perez...

By Lizbeth Diaz TIJUANA, Mexico (Reuters) - Seventeen Mexican drug gang members were killed near the U.S. border on Saturday, their bodies scattered along a road after one of the deadliest shootouts in Mexico's three-year narco-war. Rival factions of the Arellano Felix drug cartel in Tijuana on the Mexico-California border battled each other with rifles and machine guns in the early hours of the morning, police said. Fourteen bodies were lying in pools of blood on a road near assembly-for-export maquiladora plants on the city's eastern limits. The corpses were surrounded by hundreds of bullet casings and many of their...

Authorities said Thursday morning that they’ve arrested 41 members of the Barragan Drug Trafficking organization, which they say has been importing 200 pounds of pure crystal meth a month into the United States from Mexico and distributing it throughout Washington and across the country. Five local men were among those busted over the last 36 hours, authorities announced at a press conference this morning in Tacoma. In Woodland, police and drug agents served search warrants at 620 Bozarth St. and 733 Second St. and arrested Epifanio Barragan Estrada, Francisco Manuel Ruiz Chavez and Jesus Larios Ruiz. Their ages and other...

The brick house with the enormous black satellite dish in the driveway sits empty now, the tenants evicted. The building is fenced, its windows are boarded and a For Sale sign hangs outside. Last year, the Los Angeles city attorney's office sued to close the house at 3304 Drew St. in Glassell Park as a public nuisance. Authorities are now seeking to demolish it. For more than a decade, the Satellite House, as it's known in the neighborhood, was the center of the drug trade on two-block Drew Street, where dealers and gang members have operated with near-impunity for years,...

CAMARGO, Mexico – The ranch near this border community is isolated, desolate and laced by arroyos – an ideal place, experts say, for training drug cartel assassins. Mexican drug cartels have conducted military-style training camps in at least six such locations in northern Tamaulipas and Nuevo León states, some within a few miles of the Texas border, according to U.S. and Mexican authorities and the printed testimony of five protected witnesses who were trained in the camps. Also Online Cartel training camps copy pattern set by international terrorists The camps near the Texas border and at other locations in Mexico...

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

Chief Patrol Agent Randy Hill says the planned construction of border fences in Del Rio and Eagle Pass are necessary for the safety of his agents and the security of the communities they help serve and are the logical next steps toward the goal of achieving a secure border. Hill, who heads the U.S. Border Patrol’s Del Rio Sector, in a recent interview also said that the planned fencing in Del Rio and Eagle Pass will not make large areas of the border inaccessible or “give land to Mexico.” “I know that there has been a lot of misinformation out...

An Australian woman faces a firing squad after a Vietnamese appeal court sentenced her to death for heroin trafficking. Jasmine Luong had been jailed for life by a lower court when she was convicted of attempting to smuggle 1.5kg of heroin on to a flight to Australia. But the prosecution appealed, pushing for the death penalty, and yesterday the appeal court in Ho Chi Minh City increased her sentence, the state-run newspaper Liberation Saigon said. Luong, 34, who lives in Sydney, has 15 days to appeal directly to the president, Nguyen Minh Triet. She was arrested in February last year...

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (Reuters) - An American in Costa Rica was caught smuggling nearly a pound of cocaine (0.4 kg) in his stomach after he went into convulsions on a plane bound for Miami, police said on Friday. The 22-year-old man swallowed dozens of capsules stuffed with the drug before boarding a plane on Thursday in the Costa Rican capital, San Jose. Police said he started to vomit and convulse before the plane took off and was rushed to a hospital where he was still recovering on Friday. "They had to open him up too remove the capsules," said...

It seems drug smugglers are always coming up with new and innovative ways to get their drugs onto U.S streets. Well here's the latest, it's a drug smuggling submarine, it's a one of a kind - it's the only one that's ever been captured and made it to shore. It looks like a boat skimming the waves but look closer -- it's actually one of the latest innovations in drug smuggling. "We had a nick name, we called it "big foot" because there were a lot of intelligence that they may have been there, but we never saw one," Joe...

TEXAS CITY — A massive superhighway that Texans have protested at public hearings statewide drew heated opposition among Galveston County residents, who said they feared the toll road would cripple the local shipping industry and do nothing to improve insufficient hurricane evacuation routes. The Trans-Texas Corridor would wind from Laredo to Corpus Christi, wrap around the western edge of Greater Houston, parallel Interstate 59 through East Texas and leave the state in Texarkana. But residents at a public hearing Thursday night in Texas City questioned the real purpose for the road, which would also be part of a national Interstate...

NACOGDOCHES — The rows of extra chairs brought into the The Fredonia's biggest meeting room Thursday night were not enough to accommodate more than 750 people who attended an open house and public hearing on the proposed TTC-69 highway. Texas Department of Transportation officials heard hours of public testimony that continued late into the night overwhelmingly opposed to the construction of new roadways through East Texas. Applause throughout the hours-long meeting never swelled as loudly as it did when the first speaker of the night, state Rep. Wayne Christian, told TxDOT representatives emphatically that "our answer is 'no' on the...

BACKSTORY 11-08-2002 Dateline: PARIS American billionaire investor George Soros, on trial in a 14-year-old insider trading case, told a court Friday that he didn't have privileged information when he bought shares in French bank Societe Generale. Soros and two other businessmen are on trial at the Paris Criminal Court, accused of benefiting from insider knowledge when they bought the bank's stock in 1988 before a failed takeover that pushed up the price. "I have been in business all my life and I think I know what is insider trading and what isn't," said the president of Soros Fund Management, in...

Venezuela is a "trampoline" in the international drug trade, with Marxist rebels in neighboring Colombia smuggling cocaine over the border to the Caribbean and West Africa and importing black market arms, a top U.S. official said yesterday. The Bush administration has no evidence that Venezuela's anti-American president, Hugo Chavez, sanctioned the illegal trade but is disappointed that he refuses to cooperate with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe in the struggle against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Thomas Shannon, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, told reporters... "It's evident that, for a variety of reasons, Venezuela is being...

THURSDAY, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), an organization that in the past decade has kidnapped more than 750 people who remain missing, released two captives into the custody of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez...many wondered what it would get in exchange.... The shocking answer arrived the next day: In a four-hour address to the Venezuelan Congress, Chavez described the FARC as "not terrorists" but "genuine armies." He claimed that they possessed "a Bolivarian political project that is respected here," a reference to his own, half-baked socialism...He demanded that they be recognized as lawful belligerents by the U.S., Latin American...

MEXICO CITY (AP) -- Mexican drug traffickers are the main suppliers of methamphetamine to the U.S. and produce enormous quantities of the drug despite government crackdowns, according to a recent U.S. Justice Department report. Mexico's efforts to restrict imports of precursor chemicals needed to make the drug, and a number of high-profile drug busts, have not led to lower meth production, the report said. "Despite heightened chemical import restrictions in Mexico, methamphetamine production in that country has increased since 2004, and Mexico is now the primary source of methamphetamine to U.S. drug markets,'' the National Drug Intelligence Center's 2008 report...

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 --...

TECATE, Calif., Dec. 6 — The tunnel opening cut into the floor of a shipping container here drops three levels, each accessible by ladders, first a metal one and then two others fashioned from wood pallets. The tunnel stretches 1,300 feet to the south, crossing the Mexican border some 50 feet below ground and proceeding to a sky-blue office building in sight of the steel-plated border fence. Three or four feet wide and six feet high, the passageway is illuminated by compact fluorescent bulbs (wired to the Mexican side), supported by carefully placed wooden beams and kept dry by two...

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...

Federal authorities said Friday they shut down two major Mexico-based drug operations that were using Atlanta as a hub for trafficking marijuana, cocaine and methamphetamine up the East Coast. By late Friday, 88 suspects had been indicted and criminal complaints — charges brought until an indictment is returned — had been brought against another 25.

Colombian drug smugglers deliberately sank a submarine off the country's Pacific coast this week that had been filled with tonnes of cocaine destined for the US, the country's navy said. The homemade submarine was spotted by a Colombian air force plane and pursued by Colombian navy and US Coast Guard boats. The submarine's four crew members opened the hatches and allowed water to enter before surrendering. The craft, with an estimated capacity of 12 tonnes of cocaine, sank in 3,000 metres of water, said Admiral Edgar Cely, the navy's chief of operations. The crew's clothing was covered with traces of...

MEMPHIS - A Memphis police sergeant who was named Tennessee Narcotics Officer of the Year for 2006 was charged with selling illegal anabolic steroids and tipping off drug dealers about surveillance and investigations. Sgt. Brady Valentine, 36, a police officer since 1994, was indicted Friday and relieved of duty after a federal complaint was unsealed. The complaint was based on information from informants, wire taps and taped conversations. Valentine was assigned to the West Tennessee Violent Crimes and Drug Task Force, a multi-agency team that regularly lands some of the biggest drug busts in the state. He was honored by...

MEXICO CITY: The Mexican government announced on Wednesday that it has agreed to extradite a former state governor to the United States to face charges he helped traffickers ship drugs to the U.S. market. Mario Villanueva, who was governor of the Caribbean state of Quintana Roo from 1993 to 1996, served six years in prison in Mexico for money laundering but was cleared in this country of drug trafficking and organized crime charges. He was released from prison in June after finishing his sentence but was immediately re-apprehended on the extradition request. The U.S. alleges that Villanueva offered aid or...

TV Channel Affiliated with Lebanese Parliamentary Speaker Nabih Beri in Show on Protocols of the Elders of Zion: Jews Use Drug Trafficking to Control World, Subjugate Other Nations The following are excerpts from a Lebanese TV report on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The report aired on NBN TV on October 22, 2007. To view this clip visit:http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/1588.htm To view more clips about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion visit:http://www.memritv.org/subject/en/363.htm "Jews Purport to Have Their Own Private God in the Heavens, Who Commanded Them to Annihilate the... Peoples of the World Using Drugs"Maria Maalouf: "On land and...

The problem with poppies - What to do with the plants that kill more than pain Colby Cosh - September 17, 2007 One of the troubling things about NATO's war in Afghanistan is that there continues to be major disagreement between the allies over one of the most important proximate war aims: namely, the interception of funds from opium poppies being used to bankroll guerrilla operations of the Taliban. Not everyone agrees with the U.S.'s determination--reiterated in a State Department policy document Aug. 9--to pursue a policy of poppy eradication through on-the-ground violence and aerial spraying. European governments point out...