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Mexican drug cartels use a “blood wire” to send money to drug and human smugglers, according to Arizona’s attorney general, who testified earlier this week before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Western Union is by far the largest provider of illicit money-movement services, so it is the source of valuable information about illicit money movements and has been the focus of interdiction efforts aimed at criminal proceeds in transit,” Terry Goddard, Arizona’s attorney general, told senators. Goddard was one of several witnesses who testified March 17 before the Judiciary Committee and the Senate International Narcotics Control Caucus on law enforcement responses...

Two suspected drug dealers caused chaos on a California interstate by throwing thousands of dollars from their pickup truck as police gave chase. Other motorists took their lives in their hands to chase the $20 and $100 bills on Interstate 5, near San Diego.

In fiscal year 2008, authorities confiscated about $70 million in drug-related cash in Atlanta, more than anywhere else in the United States, the Drug Enforcement Administration says. This fiscal year, Atlanta continues to outpace all other U.S. regions in such seizures, with $30 million confiscated so far. Next are Los Angeles, California, with about $19 million, and Chicago, Illinois, with $18 million. "There is definitely a center of this type of drug activity here, and we are working to make sure the violence does not spill out to the general public," Atlanta U.S. Attorney David Nahmias said. Atlanta has become...

A Sullivan City man accused of smuggling three Iraqis into the United States was set to appear for a detention hearing Thursday. Prosecutors allege Juan De Dios Martinez Vela, 28, sneaked the men across the Rio Grande as part of a smuggling network with links to the Middle East.

Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard said Congress gets it when it comes to cross-border drug violence. Goddard just returned from Washington where he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. "They all had in their individual states evidence of drug cartel violence that they were aware of, so this is truly a national problem," he said. Goddard is glad Senator John McCain will hold hearings in Arizona next month to address the drug cartel violence.

Want someone murdered? Albanian hitmen are touting for business in London, apparently without any fear of the law are we living in Chicago or a scene of the "Goodfellas" News Desk The London Daily News has discovered that professional Albanian assassins are "touting" for business in the capital claiming to be able to "take out" targets for as little as £5,000. In an under cover investigation into criminal gangs operating in north London Albanians who fought in the KLA during the bloody Balkans conflict against Serbia, now have now established themselves as formidable figures in the London's underworld. Experienced users...

TUCSON — From Friday to Monday, six illegal immigrants who crossed the border were found to have records for sexual offenses, and five of those were taken into custody in Cochise County. And, the Tucson Sector is seeing more individuals who are apprehended with criminal records of all types, U.S. Border Patrol spokesman Mike Scioli said Monday. Throughout the sector, “we are seeing in increase of illegals with criminal records, especially sex offenders,” he said. On Monday morning, Border Patrol agents from the Naco Station arrested a Mexican man who had a warrant out of California, Scioli said. According to...

Reporting from Monterrey, Mexico -- The small houses of the Independencia neighborhood climb a hill that rises from the bone-dry Santa Catarina riverbed. Gang graffiti proliferate the higher you go, until they completely cover the cinder-block walls with slogans, threats and declarations. Young men in baggy pants, sweat shirt hoodies pulled tightly around their faces, populate the desolate street corners, in between vacant lots and shattered wooden stoops. Look out from the top of the hill and in the distance you see the impressive skyline of Monterrey, the wealthiest city in Mexico, its fancy museums, glistening high-rises, leafy plazas and...

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration will try to reinvent a program to allow Mexican trucks full access to U.S. highways. An 18-month pilot program that allowed a few Mexican trucks beyond a border buffer zone died when President Barack Obama signed a $410 billion spending bill yesterday. The bill barred spending on the program. Debbie Mesloh, a spokeswoman for the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, said Obama has told the office to work with Congress, the Transportation and State departments and Mexican officials to come up with legislation to create “a new trucking project that will meet the legitimate...

Expert Tom Diaz says that imports of certain semiautomatic rifles were regulated under the first Bush and Clinton administrations. But he told a House panel Wednesday the import rules were relaxed under the most recent Bush administration.

Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.ice.gov/pi/nr/0903/090310newyork.htm March 10, 2009 International fugitive wanted for murder, robbery, kidnapping, and involvement in organized crime returned to Mexico NEW YORK - A man wanted by the Mexican government for his involvement in several murders, robbery, kidnapping and ties to organized crime was escorted back to Mexico by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers and turned over to authorities there. Liberio Andrew Gonzalez, a Mexican national, departed the United States without incident on Saturday, March 7 and was turned over to Mexican Federal Police officials at Mexico City International Airport. "This arrest...

AUSTIN — Mexican drug cartel violence is not spilling into Texas, several frustrated border mayors told a state legislative committee Monday in an effort to dispel public perceptions that their communities are under siege. “For me to believe that our cities are so endangered by all this violence that we need to send the military to the border is a knee-jerk reaction,” McAllen Mayor Richard Cortez told the House Border and Intergovernmental Affairs Committee. Cortez, mayor for 19 years, said his daughter in San Antonio recently called to express apprehension about his re-election because of fears he might become an...

Mexico City (dpa) - Mexican police found five human heads Tuesday in portable coolers on a road in Ixtlahuacan del Rio, some 600 kilometres northwest of Mexico City. On the inside of the coolers' lids, two messages had been written in black ink, with threats addressed to someone that was only identified as ``Goyo,'' a spokesman for the public prosecutor's office in the state of Jalisco told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa. The authorities said the heads of the five men had been severed just hours before they were found. Police were combing the rural area where the heads were found, some...

Death froze his exhausted face. The attackers lashed or punctured nearly every part of his body. Then they cut off the dead man's head, wrapped it in a plastic grocery bag and dumped it with his body between two tractor-trailers on a city street. As with most murders in Ciudad Juarez, police found no witnesses, no weapons. Only the battered corpse on the steel coroner's table carries clues to who he was and how he died. "Every organ speaks," says Dr. Maria Concepcion Molina, who gently removes packing tape from the head of her third decapitated victim in a week....

With U.S. forces fighting two wars abroad, the nation's top military officer made an important visit last week to forestall a third. He went to Mexico. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made the trip to confer with Mexican leaders about the Merida Initiative, a three-year plan signed into law last June to flood the U.S.-Mexican border region with $1.4 billion in U.S. assistance for law-enforcement training and equipment, as well as technical advice and training to bolster Mexico’s judicial system. That’s about 100 people every week for the last 14 months. The cartels usually do...

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama was briefed Saturday by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen about the drug wars in Mexico and wanted to know how the United States can help. "Clearly one of the things the president was interested in was the U.S military capability that may or may not apply to our cooperation with the Mexicans," said a U.S. military official who requested anonymity because the discussions were private. "He was very interested in what kind of military capabilities may be applied." Mullen briefed Obama Saturday morning about discussions with Mexican military leaders about the drug...

Note: The following text is a quote: https://www.osac.gov/Reports/report.cfm?contentID=97899 YOU ARE HERE: Home > Reports > Consular Affairs Bulletins > Report Warden Message: Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, Carjacking Information CONSULAR AFFAIRS BULLETINS Americas - Mexico 26 Feb 2009 Printer Friendly Email Article RELATED REPORTS 20 Feb 2009 TRAVEL ALERT: MEXICO 17 Feb 2009 MEXICO 2009 CRIME & SAFETY REPORT: YUCATAN PENINSULA 13 Feb 2009 WARDEN MESSAGE: MONTERREY (MEXICO) EXPECTS DEMONSTRATIONS 6 Feb 2009 MEXICO 2009 CRIME & SAFETY REPORT: CIUDAD JUAREZ 4 Feb 2009 WARDEN MESSAGE: CIUDAD JUAREZ RISING DRUG VIOLENCE, CAUTION ADVISED U.S. Consulate General Ciudad Juarez issued the following Warden...

Reporting from San Diego -- A U.S. citizen was one of the three men who were found decapitated this week in Tijuana, Mexican authorities said Friday. The body of George Harrison, a 38-year-old former Chula Vista resident, had been dismembered and mutilated and was dumped in a vacant lot near Tijuana's beachside bullring. Harrison had several drug-related convictions in the United States and was suspected of drug trafficking in Mexico, Baja California Assistant Atty. General Rafael Gonzalez said.

A prison riot Wednesday near the troubled Mexican border town of Juarez has left an unconfirmed number of fatalities, news reports said. El Diario de Juarez newspaper reported 17 people were killed, including two federal agents. Ten people were wounded, the newspaper said. The tallies could not be independently verified with state and federal officials. Police official Carlos Gonzalez said the uprising occurred among members of the Aztecas drug gang housed in Module 3, according to El Diario. Some inmates were armed, the newspaper said. The prison is located in a semi-desert area 17 miles (28 kilometers) south of Ciudad...

Looks like Sheriff Arpaio must be doing something right, if the "La Raza" scumbags gathered 3000 illegals and left wing losers to march against him. Too bad old Joe didn't do a greencard raid at the rally. Read on

After two fatal tower crane accidents last year, New York City instituted a series of reforms to increase safety and oversight in the construction industry, including requiring a 30-hour class for crane operators and other workers on the safest way to raise and lower a tower crane. But some sessions of the city-mandated class are being taught by a union official who has admitted that he helped unqualified people, including organized crime figures, get into his union, according to sworn testimony and investigative reports. He and other union officials helped some of those men secure licenses to operate smaller cranes...

Mexico’s attorney general said Tuesday he sees no need for U.S. troops to intervene in his country’s war on drug cartels, nor to gear up for a spillover of violence across the border. U.S. officials view the violence as a potential national security threat, and last month the Bush administration’s homeland security chief, Michael Chertoff, said Washington has drawn up contingency plans for a “surge” of both civilian law enforcement and military assets along the border. On Tuesday, Gov. Rick Perry demanded a tighter security net from Washington, saying he’s asked the Obama administration for more aircraft and “a thousand...

Federal authorities arrested more than 750 people across the country in what they describe as "the largest and hardest hitting" operation to ever target the "the very violent and dangerously powerful" drug cartel known as Sinaloa. "International drug-trafficking organizations pose a sustained, serious threat to the safety and security as of our communities," Attorney General Eric Holder said in prepared remarks at a Washington press conference Wednesday afternoon... "As the world grows smaller and international criminals step up their efforts to operate inside our borders, [we] will confront them head-on to keep our communities safe." Through "Operation Xcellerator," authorities say...

SAN FRANCISCO -- A state legislator proposed legalizing the sale of marijuana in California, saying the plan would generate more than $1 billion annually for the cash-strapped state. Assemblyman Tom Ammiano introduced a bill Monday that would legalize possession and sales of the drug for people aged 21 and older. The legislation would impose regulations and taxation similar to those for alcohol sales. Federal law makes it a crime to possess or sell marijuana, so the measure, if passed, would likely face an immediate legal challenge. Mr. Ammiano, a San Francisco Democrat who is well known in the state as...

NUEVO LAREDO - Two men and a woman have been charged with alleged involvement in a gunbattle that occurred earlier this week between Mexican Army troops and drug traffickers, officials announced Friday. The three suspects, who officials said were detained Feb. 17, the day of the gunbattle, were presented by military authorities to the federal prosecutor's office Friday and formally accused of participating in the assault. On Tuesday, officials would not comment on the exchange of gunfire. Fernando Rodríguez López, 18, Julio César Ureste Hernández, 22, and Martha Gómez Tovar, 20, have been turned over to the federal attorney general's...

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — Police were on alert Wednesday after several signs appeared across this violent border city warning that more officers would be killed unless the police chief resigns, a day after the second-in-command and three other officers were slain. Meanwhile, coroners conducted autopsies on the bodies of the four officers, including the city police chief's right-hand man, Sacramento Perez, the operations director for the 1,700-member force. Gunmen ambushed the officers Tuesday afternoon while they were sitting in their patrol car on a street near the U.S. consulate. About 50 police officers have been killed in the past year...

Mexico has pretty much always been a rough-and-tumble place. In recent years, however, the security environment has deteriorated rapidly, and parts of the country have become incredibly violent. It is now common to see military weaponry such as fragmentation grenades and assault rifles used almost daily in attacks. In fact, just last week we noted two separate strings of grenade attacks directed against police in Durango and Michoacan states. In the Michoacan incident, police in Uruapan and Lazaro Cardenas were targeted by three grenade attacks during a 12-hour period. Then on Feb. 17, a major firefight occurred just across the...

Responding to fears of escalating violence in Mexico that could spill over the border into Texas and other states, the U.S. government has stepped up law enforcement. Border Patrol and Drug Enforcement Administration agents were sent to shore up local law enforcement, and to their credit the violence has not spread to those communities and regions. In fact, El Paso — just across the border from Ciudad Juarez, which ranks as one of the most dangerous places in the world — is ranked as one of the safest cities in the United States. Unfortunately, the stepped-up enforcement in border cities...

TABASCO, Mexico (AP) — Gunmen have killed a state police officer and 10 members of his family, including five children, authorities said Sunday. The shooting late Saturday also killed a street vendor in front of the house of state police officer Carlos Reyes, said Tabasco deputy prosecutor Alex Alvarez. Among the five children killed was a 2-year-old boy. Alvarez said three other people were wounded the attack in the town of Monte Largo, near Mexico's border with Guatemala. .... Alvarez said Reyes directed a car chase and raids on two homes on Wednesday that led to the death of three...

Phoenix police announced Wednesday that an undocumented immigrant, who's been deported twice from the country, will serve time in prison for kidnapping a 12-year-old girl. On Tuesday, a Maricopa County jury convicted Ismael Mayorquin, 47, of Kidnapping following a weeklong trail. In October of 2007, Mayorquin pulled a 12-year-old girl into a Phoenix alley, according to a probable cause statement by the Phoenix Police Department. Investigators said a man driving by saw the girl in a struggle with the suspect, confronted Mayorquin and called police. Officers arrested Mayorquin a short time later.

In the story of the emperor with no clothes, it took someone whose observations are rarely heeded -- a child -- to point out the obvious fact that no one else could acknowledge. In the case of drug policy, it takes people who are usually ignored by Washington policymakers -- Latin Americans -- to perform the same invaluable service. Last week, a commission made up of 17 members, from Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa to Sonia Picado, the Costa Rican who heads the Inter-American Institute on Human Rights, did nothing but admit the truth: The war on drugs is a...

Headline: Grenades that were used in three attacks -- the first two in northern Mexico, the last in Texas -- over the past four months all trace back to the same source, the paramilitary group known as Los Zetas. The attempted bombing in Texas occurred in January in a small town named Pharr, just outside of McAllen and Brownsville, and not all that far from the Mexican border and places like Matamoros and Monterrey. It so happens that another grenade failed to detonate in a January attack in Pharr. Three men, members of two gangs, Tri-City Bombers and the Texas...

"Mexico is being torn apart by drug gangs, often wrongly called cartels. Cartels are created to uphold prices. In the case of Mexico, it is law enforcement and the prohibition of drugs that upholds prices – and makes drug dealing irresistibly profitable." ... "Stabilized, taxed and supervised marijuana would be an advance on today's hodge podge of tolerance and intolerance. Federal law is intolerant and state law can be quite lenient. Some states tolerate personal use but cultivation is frowned on. This prohibition is expensive, ineffective and contributes to the woes in Mexico."

Street protests against the army's presence in the northern city of Monterrey were organized by drug cartels in an apparent bid to disrupt the government's anti-drug crackdown, Mexican officials alleged Friday. Gov. Jose Natividad Gonzalez of Nuevo Leon state said this week's protests have snarled traffic in Mexico's third largest city, home to 3.7 million, and "severely disrupted the lives of hundreds of thousands of citizens." Officials said Friday that the drug gangs were also responsible for the killing of the police commander in charge of investigating the protests. The army said in a statement that it had detained the...

According to ABC News, the use of kidnapping by Mexican drug cartels for ransom and revenge has spread beyond the Rio Grande and into Arizona — and the federal government has done nothing to stop it. Phoenix has become the second-worst city in the world for kidnappings, right behind Mexico City, with brutal dismemberments for those abductees who do not get ransomed quickly enough: In what officials caution is now a dangerous and even deadly crime wave, Phoenix, Arizona has become the kidnapping capital of America, with more incidents than any other city in the world outside of Mexico City...

Grenades used in three recent attacks in Monterrey, Mexico, and Pharr, Texas, all originated from the same lot delivered from South Korea... That the grenade used in the third attack reportedly came from Mexico indicates that in addition to the well-known path of weapons flowing from the United States into Mexico, arms also are flowing from Mexico into the United States. The first of the three attacks targeted the U.S. Consulate in Monterrey, Mexico. In the second incident, again in Monterrey, gunmen attacked a local TV station on Jan. 12 in an attempt to intimidate the news agency into cutting...

Just as government officials had feared, the drug violence raging in Mexico is spilling over into the United States. Investigators fear the violence could erupt elsewhere around the country because the Mexican cartels are believed to have set up drug-dealing operations all over the U.S., in such far-flung places as Anchorage, Alaska; Boston; and Sioux Falls, South Dakota. "They are capable of doing about anything," said Rusty Payne, a Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman in Washington. "When you are willing to chop heads off, put them in an ice chest and drop them off at a police precinct, or roll a...

At a time of increased violence, corruption, and financial strain, Mexico is reported to be on the verge of collapse. US troops stationed near the border are warned not to go into Mexico, 200 Americans have been killed in Mexico since 2004, and the U.S. Department of Defense recently listed Mexico second only to Pakistan as a country capable of completely collapsing. In response to what appears to be near-anarchy in Mexico, Texas law enforcement is preparing for the worst; though, officials acknowledge that preparations for a huge influx of refugees may also be necessary. The town of Juárez, Mexico,...

A federal judge sentenced a 19-year-old member of a street gang to three years in prison for possessing a firearm while illegally residing in the United States. The ruling against Marcos Ceaca-Jimenez, a citizen of Mexico, by Chief U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb was announced Friday by Erik Peterson, the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Wisconsin. In a press release from the court, Judge Crabb indicated she imposed the three-year sentence because Ceaca-Jimenez, a member of the South Side Locos street gang, was carrying a gun and ammunition March 2, 2008, while traveling to retaliate against a former...

22-year-old man from Houston and his 16-year-old friend are hauled out of a minivan in Mexico, shot execution style by thugs in a black Lincoln Continental, and left dead in the dirt. The body of a 65-year-old nurse from Brownsville is found floating in the Rio Grande after a visit to a Mexican beauty salon. An American retiree, an ex-Marine, is stabbed to death as he camps on a Baja beach with his dog. More than 200 U.S. citizens have been slain in Mexico’s escalating wave of violence since 2004 — an average of nearly one killing a week, according...

TIJUANA, Mexico (Reuters) - Mexican drug gangs near the U.S. border are breaking into police radio frequencies to issue chilling death threats to cops which they then carry out, demoralizing security forces in a worsening drug war. "You're next, bastard ... We're going to get you," an unidentified drug gang member said over the police radio in the city of Tijuana after naming a policeman. The man also threatened a second cop by name and played foot-stomping "narcocorrido" music, popular with drug cartels, over the airwaves. "No one can help them," an officer named Jorge said of his threatened colleagues...

Gangs are morphing, multiplying, and migrating—entrenching themselves not just in our inner cites but increasingly in our ever-sprawling suburbs and wide-open rural spaces. In some communities, they are responsible for as much as a staggering 80 percent of all crimes. They are selling drugs to your kids, shooting up your neighborhoods, invading your homes, robbing your banks and stores, stealing your identities and money, and sowing plenty of fear and violence along the way. There are gangs in the military…gangs in prison…gangs all over the Internet (recruiting, communicating, intimidating)…gangs on Native American reservations…and gangs on motorcycles roving the countryside. More...

MEXICO CITY — Gunmen killed a recently retired army general and two other men near the resort city of Cancún before dawn Tuesday in what authorities said was the work of organized crime. The bound body of Mauro Tello, the retired officer, and those of an army lieutenant and a civilian aide were found in a pickup about 40 miles west of Cancún. The Quintana Roo state attorney general said the men had been tortured before they died. Tello, who retired Jan. 1 and was active in police work, is one of the highest-ranking officials killed during President Felipe Calderón’s...

A state trooper who noticed a school bus on the side of a southwest Texas highway last weekend decided to stop and see if there was a problem.His superiors are glad he did.The trooper looked inside the abandoned bus along U.S. 59 in Webb County and discovered more than 4 1/2 tons of marijuana, the Texas Department of Public Safety reported today.The discovery on Saturday morning resulted in the second-largest marijuana seizure the DPS has recorded during routine traffic enforcement since 1997, officials said.

Criminal street gangs—mostly comprised of illegal immigrants—are responsible for the majority of violent crimes in the United States and are the primary distributors of most illicit drugs. The alarming, but not surprising, information is revealed in a new report published by the Justice Department’s National Gang Intelligence Center (NGIC), an FBI task force created in 2005 to curb the growing threat of violent gangs in the U.S. The NGIC teams up with state and local law enforcement agencies throughout the nation to enforce, study and intercept gangs and has published several reports documenting their activities. The agency’s latest publication has...

A yellow school bus overflowing with more than 3 tons of marijuana was found parked on the shoulder of U.S. 59 on Saturday. "It's an uncommon occurrence," said Maria Guadalupe Garza, a Texas Department of Public Safety lieutenant. "We don't see that amount of marijuana very often." Garza said that at about 8:30 a.m., a DPS trooper spotted the school bus on highway's shoulder, about four miles outside Laredo city limits. The trooper pulled up behind the bus, which was headed toward Laredo, and exited his vehicle to see if everything was OK, said Garza, of DPS' narcotics division. As...

An elderly Arlington man and his son aren't the first to run into problems with the country's legal system. ARLINGTON -- Robert Hood left for a fishing trip along the coast of Mexico, and when he finally returned, he was never the same.

La Cronica de Hoy (Mexico City) 1/28/09 Forty state of Mexico police "group chiefs" have been dismissed for failure to pass security and trustworthiness background checks. ———- Noroeste (Culiacan, Sinaloa) 1/28/09 Thirty Culiacan police officers tested positive in an exam for drug use; they have had their firearms taken away but continue on duty. They will be made to undergo a second exam to determine "the degree of intoxication." ———– Cuarto Poder (Tuxtla Gutierrez, Chiapas) 1/28/09 Twelve Cubans who attempted to pass off as Mexicans by presenting fraudulent Mexican voter I.D.'s were arrested in Chiapas by Mex. federal police. The...

President Barack Obama warmly welcomed trade union leaders into the White House as he reversed restrictions on organised labour set up by the Bush administration. Promising to "level the playing field" for workers, he offered the most pro-union sentiments heard from a US president for many years. "I do not view the labour movement as part of the problem. To me, it's part of the solution," said Mr Obama, who was accused of being a Socialist by the Republican Right during the election campaign. He was speaking at the launch of a Task Force for Middle Class and Working Families...

Which two countries offer the greatest threat to the United States? If you answered that they both must be in the Middle East, you would be only half right. You would be amazed to learn, as was I, that the second greatest threat to America comes from this hemisphere---yes, right next to us. Former CIA chief Michael Hayden told reporters in January of this year that Mexico could rank alongside Iran as a challenge for President Obama - perhaps a greater problem than Iraq. The U.S. Justice Department said last month that Mexican gangs are the "biggest organized crime threat...