Free Republic

Murders in Maravatio raise concerns about drug gangs trying to sway local races.. Two candidates for mayor in the Mexican city of Maravatio have been gunned down within hours of each other, raising worries that drug gangs are trying to influence the June 2 election. Campaigning doesn't formally begin until Friday. State prosecutors said Tuesday that Armando Pérez was found shot to death in his car just before midnight, per the AP. He was the candidate for the conservative National Action Party. Hours earlier, officials with the ruling Morena party confirmed their candidate, Miguel Ángel Zavala, was found shot to...

The December 2010 murder of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry exposed the bungled “Fast and Furious” investigation, in which agents from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed criminals to buy guns with the intention of tracking the weapons. But the agency lost most of the guns, including two that were found at the scene of Terry’s death in southern Arizona. The U.S. government has heavily pursued prosecution of the men involved in the killing. Mexico says Mexican drug gangs and former officials also participated in or failed to stop the weapons trafficking. Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office...

Gerardo Hernandez, a spy for Communist Cuba and the man responsible for the murder of four humanitarian workers (three of whom were American citizens) over international waters, was freed from prison last year by the Obama administration, due in part to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). This was revealed at a February 6, 2015, celebration of Hernandez’s release, along with two of his fellow Cuban agents (collectively known as the “Cuban 5.. At the beginning of the event, an IPS official thanked all who who took part in the 17-year campaign and singled out a number of organizations that...

The Politically Correct narrative of the Boston Marathon bombing is sinking faster than Barack Obama’s poll numbers. Remember Tamerlan Tsarnaev, aka Speedbump. The Boston Globe tearfully informed its moonbat readers that Speedbump was “a stay-at-home dad.” When he died at the age of 25, Speedbump was a “person of interest” in seven murders in Massachusetts, so apparently the stay-at-home dad got out of his (Section 8) house every once in a while. Now we find out that his 9 mm came from a “Maine gang,” two words I never thought I’d type in the same sentence. But then, Vacationland has...

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...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Treasury Department on Wednesday imposed sanctions on 54 members of two powerful Mexican drug gangs it blames for a spike in killings near the U.S. border in recent weeks. The Treasury said the actions target "principal lieutenants and enforcers" of the powerful Gulf cartel and Los Zetas, a splinter group now battling the Gulf cartel. By adding the individuals to its blacklist of "specially designated narcotics traffickers," the Treasury is banning Americans from doing business with them and seeking to freeze any assets they may have under U.S. jurisdiction. Treasury's announcement came a day after Secretary...

A recent surge in arrests and cocaine seizures in Peru points to an increased presence of Mexican drug cartels, counter-narcotics officials say. The cartels have also contributed to more drug-related violence in Peruvian cities, ports and in remote valleys in this Andean country where coca, cocaine's base material, is grown, the officials say. Peruvian claims of Mexican cartels expanding echo those by officials in other Latin American countries, from Honduras to Argentina, where Mexican gangs have supplanted once-powerful Colombian cartels as kings of the illicit-drug underworld. .... That Mexican drug lords are sending emissaries here is no surprise to Hidalgo...

A drug gang kidnapped and killed six people near a town in the US-Mexican border region, prompting a series of gunbattles with soldiers that left 15 others dead. The violence on Tuesday started when gunmen kidnapped nine alleged members of a rival drug gang in Villa Ahumada and later executed six of them along the PanAmerican highway outside of the town, 130km south of Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, said Enrique Torres, spokesman for a joint military-police operation in Chihuahua State. Assailants later released three of the men, although their whereabouts was not immediately known, Torres...

MONTERREY, Mexico (Reuters) – An American anti-kidnapping expert who was himself abducted last week in northern Mexico was likely snatched by drug traffickers seeking to protect their turf, police said on Tuesday. Gunmen hauled Felix Batista into a white SUV outside a restaurant last week in the relatively safe industrial city of Saltillo in Coahuila state, where he was giving seminars on security to police and business people. Batista, a Cuban-American from Miami who is credited with negotiating the release of people abducted by Colombian rebels, was snatched when he stepped outside the restaurant after answering a cell phone call,...