Free Republic

A group of hippos - an unwanted legacy following the death of notorious Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar - are being sterilised. Escobar, who was shot dead by police in 1993, illegally imported exotic animals, including a male and a female hippo - dubbed the "cocaine hippos". Since then, a growing population has been taking over the countryside near his former ranch, Hacienda Nápoles. The Colombian government has so far sterilised 24 of more than 80 animals. They have been treated with a chemical that will make them infertile. Colombian environmentalists say the hippos, believed to be the biggest herd...

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — The U.S. has opened up secret communications with Venezuela’s socialist party boss as members of President Nicolás Maduro’s inner circle seek guarantees they won’t face retribution if they cede to growing demands to remove him, a senior U.S. administration official has told The Associated Press. Diosdado Cabello, who is considered the most-powerful man in Venezuela after Maduro, met last month in Caracas with someone who is in close contact with the Trump administration, said the official. A second meeting is in the works but has not yet taken place. The AP is withholding the intermediary’s name...

Four months after his brazen escape from a maximum-security prison in central Mexico, Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán may have been wounded while escaping a manhunt that has intensified in recent days. Mexican security forces, with assistance from US drug officials, tracked cellphone signals that indicated Guzmán was at a ranch near the town of Cosalá, in the mountains of Sinaloa state, according to NBC News. Mexican marines mounted a raid on the property, but they were forced to turn back when their helicopters reportedly came under fire from what are believed to be Guzmán's henchmen. The marines...

A former drug kingpin who received more than $300,000 from 2006 to 2008 to build a job-training center for people with HIV/AIDS instead used the funds to build a luxury strip club, a D.C. Superior Court jury found Monday. Cornell Jones and Miracle Hands, the nonprofit group Jones founded after serving nine years in prison on narcotics charges, falsified nine documents or statements to support grants worth $329,654, the jury decided after a four-day trial and seven hours of deliberation. Jones, once the king of the notorious Hanover Place NW open-air drug market, used much of those city funds for...

U.S. law enforcement officials expressed outrage over the release from prison of Mexican drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero and vowed to continue efforts to bring to justice the man who ordered the killing of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent. Caro Quintero was sentenced to 40 years in prison for the 1985 kidnapping and killing of DEA agent Enrique Camarena, but a Mexican federal court ordered his release this week, saying he had been improperly tried in a federal court for state crimes. The 60-year-old walked out of a prison in the western state of Jalisco early Friday after serving...

Photos of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar’s abandoned private island At the height of his power, Pablo Escobar was worth an estimated $3 billion (USD) and his Medellín Cartel controlled 80% of the global cocaine market. So he may have had a few extra dollars to throw around on a private island. In fact, many drug lords had luxurious villas on small islands off the coast of Cartagena, islands that have since been abandoned by their human occupants. Urban explorer and photographer Stefaan Beernaert, also known as Fotantje, has explored the islands off Catagena and photographed the so-called "Drug Islands."...

Barry was quite the accomplished marijuana enthusiast back in high school and college. Excerpts from David Maraniss' Barack Obama: The Story dealing with the elaborate drug culture surrounding the president when he attended Punahou School in Honolulu and Occidental College in Los Angeles. He inhaled. A lot. A self-selected group of boys at Punahou School who loved basketball and good times called themselves the Choom Gang. Choom is a verb, meaning "to smoke marijuana."

Joaquin 'Chapo' Guzman's wife, Emma Coronel, gave birth Aug. 15 to twin girls at Antelope Valley Hospital in Lancaster, according to birth records and a senior U.S. law enforcement official. ... Turns out Coronel, a 22-year-old former beauty queen, holds U.S. citizenship, which entitles her to travel freely to the United States. By being born in California, and to a mother who is an American citizen, her little girls also have U.S. citizenship. Guzman, 54, the multibillionaire fugitive head of the Sinaloa cartel, married Coronel the day she turned 18 in a lavish wedding in the highlands of central Mexico...

A peace march called by the government of a Mexican town that was the scene of a deadly gun battle between federal forces and the local cartel ended up as a rally in support of a slain drug lord. Saturday's marcha in Apatzingan, Michoacan, a stronghold of the drug-trafficking group La Familia, had been called as a demonstration for peace after a federal operation against the cartel left 12 people dead last week. Among them was purportedly one of the drug group's two top leaders, Nazario Moreno Gonzalez, also known as "The Craziest" and "The Doctor," among other names. Photographs...

Mexican soldiers captured a 14-year-old U.S. citizen suspected of being a drug gang hitman as he attempted to travel to the United States. Edgar Jimenez, known as "El Ponchis," worked for the South Pacific drug cartel in Morelos state, outside Mexico City, the army said Friday. The boy was caught late Thursday as he boarded a plane in the city of Cuernavaca in Morelos. He was travelling to the border city of Tijuana across from San Diego, California, with two of his sisters, one of whom is believed to be the lover of one of the cartel's bosses, the army...

MEXICO CITY – Federal police on Monday captured a Texas-born alleged drug kingpin who faces trafficking charges in the U.S. and has been blamed for a vicious turf war that has included bodies hung from bridges and shootouts in central Mexico. The arrest of Edgar Valdez Villarreal, alias "the Barbie," was the culmination of a yearlong intelligence operation, the Public Safety Department said in a statement. The department said Valdez was captured Monday in the state of Mexico, which borders the capital of Mexico City, but did not offer any other details. Valdez — the third major drug lord brought...

TIJUANA, Mexico – Mexico has captured a kingpin accused of terrorizing his way to the top of a gang fighting for control of key U.S. drug routes — even ordering rivals dissolved in acid. Tuesday's arrest, announced by U.S. and Mexican officials, capped a series of victories in Mexico's U.S.-backed war on narcotics. Teodoro Garcia Simental, known as "El Teo," was arrested at 5 a.m. (8 a.m. EST; 1300 GMT), said Amy Roderick, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in San Diego, California. She said she had no other details. A U.S. official and a Mexican law enforcement...

MEXICO CITY – Mexican police have captured alleged drug lord Carlos Beltran Leyva, just two week after his even more powerful brother was killed in a shootout with troops — back-to-back victories in President Felipe Calderon's drug war. The Public Safety office said in a statement Saturday night that Carlos Beltran Leyva was arrested in Culiacan, the capital of the Pacific coast state of Sinaloa, where he and several of his brothers were born and allegedly started their gang. Two weeks ago, his brother Arturo, reputed chief of the Beltran Leyva Cartel, was killed in a shootout with Mexican marines...

Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar burnt more than £1million to keep his daughter warm during a single night on the run, it has emerged. The infamous cocaine baron lit a bonfire using wads of U.S. dollars at a mountain hideout while he was being hunted by authorities, his son has claimed. Sebastian Marroqumn, who has changed his name from Juan Pablo Escobar, said his father burnt the notes when he realized daughter Manuela was suffering from hypothermia...

Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the embattled Afghan president and a suspected drug trafficker, has been on the CIA payroll for most of the past eight years, The New York Times says. The US spy agency pays Karzai for a variety of services, the newspaper said on Tuesday, such as fielding recruits for an Afghan paramilitary force operating at the CIA's direction in and around his home city of Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold. He also helps the CIA contact and sometimes meet Taliban followers. Karzai, who is said to have ties to Afghanistan's lucrative illegal opium trade, has a...

Mexican drugs kingpin Vicente Carillo Leyva arrested - jogging in park Philippe Naughton Mexican police are celebrating the arrest of one of the country's most wanted drugs barons, picked up while jogging in a park in Mexico City. Vicente Carillo Leyva, the 32-year-old heir to the Juarez cartel, was still wearing his white Abercrombie & Fitch tracksuit when he was paraded before the media in the Mexican capital yesterday. The arrest was seen as a major coup for the security forces, who are often accused of letting drugs barons operate with impunity. By a happy coincidence, however, Carrillo Leyva was...

Some 40 people have been killed in drug-related violence in the past week in Tijuana, bringing the total so far this year to more than 400. On Monday, 12 bodies were found outside an elementary school and an additional four victims were discovered in another section of the city. Nine more bodies were discovered near a day care on Thursday and two other bodies were found elsewhere.

Asking forgiveness in two nations, Mexican drug lord Francisco Javier Arellano Felix was sentenced Monday to life in prison for running a criminal enterprise and conspiring to launder money. In a letter, translated in English and read by his lawyer, Arrellano Felix asked people on both sides of the border to forgive his "wrongful decisions and criminal conduct."

The Law: We doubt anyone's facing worse charges in U.S. courts than drug lord Francisco Javier Arellano Felix. So why is the Justice Department hesitating to suggest the death penalty? To put it delicately, this guy's a monster. Apprehended in August by the Drug Enforcement Administration in international waters off Baja California, Arellano was charged in U.S. federal court in San Diego on Wednesday in a string of grotesque crimes on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border. The seven-count indictment covers crimes mostly connected to operating a continuing criminal enterprise. He's also charged with murder. But that seems only to...

Since their arrival in San Diego aboard a Coast Guard cutter two weeks ago, the accused head of the Arellano Félix drug cartel and six other men have been held in small cells on the fifth floor of a downtown jail. They can't use the phone, they can't exercise and they've only been allowed out of their cells for lawyer visits, court and a 15-minute shower once every three days, their lawyers said. “They're being treated more harshly than some of the worst convicted criminals we've had in this country,” said David Bartick, lawyer for Francisco Javier Arellano Félix, accused...