Free Republic

Fausta, a longtime compatriot, just posted the following missive. I am considering ceasing to blog on politics. For eight years I have posted on serious issues taking place in our hemisphere that affect our everyday lives, and, to be honest, I’ve about had it. Every post on Latin America takes time researching sources from the country in Spanish, French or Portuguese, plus English-language reports. And what for? The American media and the American public would care more if the Iranians were making deals with Martians than they care if Hezbollah makes deals with the Zetas right in our own country....

Federal authorities Thursday designated the notorious Mara Salvatrucha MS-13 as a “transnational criminal organization,” giving federal authorities more tools to fight the street gang that has its roots in Los Angeles. Under the designation, federal officials said they can now seize assets of gang members found within the United States jurisdiction. The designation is the first for a U.S. street gang. Among the organizations similarly designated are Japan’s Yakuza and Mexico’s Zetas, whose leader, Heriberto Lazcano, was killed by Mexican Marines on Sunday. An armed gang later stole his body from a funeral parlor. ... MS-13 began among El Salvadoran...

PROGRESO, Mexico (AP) — Mexico's navy said Wednesday that its personnel had no idea they had killed the leader of the country's most-feared drug cartel until after his body was stolen from a funeral home in this border town. The death of Zetas cartel leader Heriberto Lazcano, alias "El Lazca," in a gunfight with marines Sunday left a wake of fear in the small mining and farming towns that dot the northern plains of Coahuila state. Residents of Progreso said they heard a series of three loud explosions Sunday, apparently from the grenades that Lazcano reportedly fired at marines who...

MEXICO CITY - The attorney general in Coahuila said two armed gunmen stole the body one of the most infamous cartel figures in Mexico. He said the body of Heriberto Lazcano was taken from the funeral home the military was using. The Mexican military said Lazcano died in a firefight in the state of Coahuila, which is located next to Tamaulipas. According to the Mexican military, forensic experts ran several tests to verify the man killed was Lazcano. They compared his fingerprints and checked his index, middle and thumb fingers against Lazcano's criminal record. They also say they compared his...

A Zetas leader arrested in the streets of Nuevo Laredo is being accused of masterminding the Falcon Lake murder of American tourist David Hartley and the massacres in San Fernando. Mexican marines arrested Salvador Alfonso Martínez-Escobedo in Nuevo Laredo around 7 p.m. Saturday. Martinez-Escobedo, who goes by the nickname "La Ardilla" or "The Squierrel", is reported to be a regional commander for the Zetas drug cartel. Mexican Navy officials report he escaped from gun battle with marines that left one person dead in the San Agustin subdivision early Saturday morning. Marines found Martinez-Escobedo hours later in an SUV in the...

But for the first time Agent Zapata’s partner Victor Avila spoke out about the attack that left Agent Zapata dead and him wounded. His twin sister Magdalena Avila-Villalobos spoke for him in the Univision special on Fast and Furious. Avila is so scared and hurt by the attack he did not speak out until he knew he was in a secure location. No one knows for sure why Agent Zapata and Agent Avila, assigned to the US Embassy, were asked to travel on road 57, a road controlled by the Zeta Cartel and extremely dangerous. They didn’t even know why...

The city may be nearly 2,000 miles from Mexico, but the country’s drug cartels are so deeply embedded in Chicago that local and federal law enforcement are forced to operate as if they are “on the border,” according to Jack Riley, special agent in charge for the Chicago Field Division of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Because of Chicago’s location in the heart of the United States, its large Mexican population and its abundance of street gang activity, drug cartels have designated the city as one of its main hubs of operation in America, Riley told TheBlaze in an exclusive...

The Mexican armed forces have arrested 35 police officers accused of having links with one of the country's most powerful drug cartels, the Zetas. The officers were arrested in operations in the eastern states of San Luis Potosi and Veracruz. A turf war between the Zetas and rival criminal organisations in Veracruz has led to some of Mexico's worst massacres in recent years. Local police officers are often accused of ties with the drug cartels. In a statement, the Navy said the 35 people arrested "were all police officers in the Veracruz public security department and allegedly collaborated with the...

@mrubin1971Two news stories from recent weeks, if true, should raise a red flag in the United States that Iran is preparing to use Hezbollah to strike at U.S. interests in Latin America, if not in the United States itself.First, this story from the Lebanese news portal Naharnet and sourced in part to Israeli radio. The Naharnet story was taken down shortly after it appeared: Hezbollah is using a training base established by Iran in northern Nicaragua near the border with Honduras, the Israeli radio reported on Thursday [September 6]. “The area is cordoned off and there are around 30 members...

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...

MEXICO CITY — The El Manana newspaper in the northern Mexico border city of Nuevo Laredo says it will stop covering violent criminal disputes after suffering a second grenade attack against its offices in two months. Other northern Mexican newspapers have quietly adopted similar policies of not covering drug cartel violence to protect their staffs against threats and violent attacks including kidnappings and murders carried out by gangs that either don't want their activities to appear in print, or are angered by coverage of their rivals. But El Manana's announcement Tuesday was unusual because it was public. The paper did...

CIUDAD VICTORIA, Mexico — A powerful car bomb exploded outside the home of the top police official of the northern Mexico border state of Tamaulipas early Tuesday, killing two policemen and injuring four officers and three civilians. Tamaulipas state Interior Secretary Morelos Canseco said Public Safety Secretary Rafael Lomeli wasn't injured in the blast, but that three neighbors were injured by glass fragments from shattered windows. Canseco said the attack appears to be a reprisal by criminal gangs. Almost a half-dozen car-bomb attacks have occurred in recent years Tamaulipas, where the Gulf cartel is battling the rival Zetas gang, but...

He's been missing for a month but just now reports are beginning to surface of another victim to the violence in our sister city. This time it's a Texas photojournalist gone missing in Nuevo Laredo. It's our top story. The news is all over south Texas newspapers, websites and social networks. With this picture of 30 year old Zane Plemmons. He is said to be a Texas based freelance photographer whose whereabouts have unknown for a month. According to unconfirmed reports he was staying at a hotel in Nuevo Laredo before covering a shooting and never returned. Reports say the...

Lawyers representing the family of slain ICE agent Jaime Zapata say they have filed a wrongful death claim against the federal government. Zapata and Victor Avila, also a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, were forced off a Mexico highway by cartel gunmen in February 2011. Zapata was shot multiple times and killed. Avila survived the attack. The complaint alleges the agents should not have been tasked with driving through a dangerous area of Mexico to transport “sensitive equipment.” It also claims the U.S. government allowed the guns used in the attack to be smuggled into Mexico, after purchase by...

The day started as quietly as it could on a Saturday at the U.S.-Mexico border. For Maria Ortega, a quiet weekend meant a quick trip to the Walmart along Cavazos Lerma Boulevard for ingredients for her barbacoa de lenguadish that she cooks on the eve of the Sunday morning meal. On the morning of June 2, Ortega couldn’t make the trip to Walmart. The area had been cordoned off by the Mexican military, which was removing a grenade that had been thrown — but not detonated — at the nearby Televisa studios. According to a Tamaulipas law enforcement official who...

American officials are issuing an alert following the arrest in the United States of the brother of a high-ranking member of the Zetas drug cartel. According to the New York Times, federal officials arrested Jose Treviño-Morales on Tuesday morning as part of a money laundering investigation. The newspaper reported that Treviño-Morales is accused of using champion race horse ranches in New Mexico and Oklahoma to launder millions of dollars in drug money for the Zetas. The New York Times reported that Treviño-Morales is the brother of Miguel Angel Treviño-Morales, a high-ranking Zetas leader known as Z-40. The U.S. Embassy in...

WESLACO - A former Drug Enforcement Administration agent predicts an increase in Chinese immigrants crossing illegally into the Rio Grande Valley. "The Chinese organized criminals - especially when it comes to human smuggling - will team up with anybody that will assist them in transporting people from China to the U.S. via Mexico... The Zetas are well organized in smuggling people in the U.S.," says Phil Jordan, a former DEA supervisor. Agents found the connection between the two organizations by investigating the Zetas' biggest moneymaking operation - drug trafficking. "The Chinese have always been involved in precursor chemicals that are...

Violence like this along the border is getting worse and is already spilling over into the US and Texas. When will the Obama Administration and the Federal Government step up to do more to protect our own border from this escalating violence? The car bomb article today from the associated press (see below) is yet another example of this escalating violence. If you live on the border, massive gun battles and explosions can be heard on a nearly daily basis. Here are some articles I have posted about border violence just in the last year. I barely even scratch the surface: SHOCKING Texas/Mexico Border WARZONE...

The two most important criminal organizations in Mexico are engaged in all-out war, and the most spectacular battles are being fought for the cameras as the combatants pursue a strategy of intimidation and propaganda by dumping ever greater numbers of headless bodies in public view — the victims most likely innocents. No longer limiting themselves to regional skirmishes, the older, established drug-smuggling Sinaloa cartel is now fighting the brash, young paramilitary Zetas crime organization across multiple front lines in Mexico in a desperate fight, according to U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officials and security analysts on both sides of the...

MEXICO CITY — The army charged Monday that the top leaders of the hyper-violent Zetas drug cartel ordered underlings to leave 49 mutilated bodies in a northern Mexico town square, then had banners hung around the country denying responsibility in an effort to have their enemies blamed for the massacre. The allegation came during a news conference to present the alleged Zetas local leader detained in the killings, Daniel Jesus Elizondo Ramirez. He allegedly got orders from Zetas leaders Miguel-Angel Trevino Morales and Heriberto Lazcano to dump the bodies in the town square of Cadereyta in the border state of...