Free Republic

“They’re coming.” That’s what Miguel, a Venezuelan migrant who came to America with his wife and two daughters, told me about the gang, Tren de Aragua, earlier this year. “And they’re very bad.” The past few days have shown how far the Venezuelan gang appears willing to go. In Aurora, Colorado, Tren de Aragua has allegedly terrorized the local community. According to Mayor Mike Coffman, at least two buildings in the city “have fallen to” a group of armed men, suspected to be gang members. “This is an organized criminal effort. Whether it’s Tren de Aragua, that remains to be...

ACAPULCO, Mexico -- The dismembered bodies of two men were hung from a bridge Tuesday on a highway leading to Acapulco, the second such discovery in three days in a region where two drug lords are fighting for control of their divided cartel. The men were hung from their feet at the entrance of Chilpancingo, the city nearest to Acapulco along the highway connecting the Pacific coast resort to Mexico's capital, according to police in the state of Guerrero, where Acapulco is located. Their arms had been cut off, and a message was left threatening extortionists, kidnappers, police and the...

The largest growing criminal organization in the world has infiltrated its way into the United States, said an El Paso FBI agent. The Tren de Aragua, or the “Aragua Train,” gained notoriety after its founding in 2012 by Hector Guerrero, alias “Niño Guerrero” or Warrior Kid, in the state of Aragua located in the north-central region of Venezuela. Operating initially from Tocorón prison in Venezuela, the gang made headlines after 11,000 police officers raided the prison back in September, uncovering a zoo, nightclub, swimming pools, and a children’s playground. What they did not find was any sign of Guerrero, the...

A Bronx man has been freed on a misdemeanor charge despite allegedly being filmed beating a 53 year-old man while wearing knuckle-dusters after his friend's poor driving saw them crash their Lexus into the victim's car. Miquiel Guerrero, 23, was arrested on March 30 after he and five others surrounded the unidentified victim, 53, and his car after they crashed into each other on Exterior Street in the Grand Concourse neighborhood. A man cops say is Guerrero was then filmed brutally-attacking his victim while wearing knuckle-dusters while his posse jumped on the man's car and stole it. The van driver...

LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — Cell phone video, text messages and photos are just some of the evidence in a murder case against two teens. Police say the parents of Sierra Halseth, 16, and Aaron Guerrero, 18, told them they couldn’t see each other anymore. The teens planned on running away together to California, and then Sierra’s father ended up murdered. Video evidence shows the teens talking about a murder. “Welcome back to our YouTube channel … Day 3 after murdering somebody …,” Guerrero says into the camera in a cell phone video. The I-Team reviewed dozens of photos considered as...

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Former Mexican President Vicente Fox proposed on Wednesday the legalization of opium poppy production as a way to help end bloody turf battles fought by drug cartels in various parts of the country. Fox served as president from 2000-2006 with the center-right National Action Party but has since distanced himself from the party. In the past, he has also advocated for the legalization of marijuana. “The plants themselves are not harmful, we make them harmful, (especially) the criminals who use them for evil purposes,” Fox said at a pro-marijuana event in the capital. He also implored...

Tourists taking the ferry from this tourist town to the island of Cozumel now walk down a wharf lined with police, heavily armed soldiers and bomb-sniffing dogs. Those safeguards came after a Feb. 21 explosion ripped through one of the ferries, injuring 24 people, including five Americans. Explosives were later found on another ferry owned by the same company.

All five states -- Tamaulipas on the U.S. border and Sinaloa, Colima, Michoacan and Guerrero on the Pacific coast -- are hotspots of drug cartel activity, either hosting trafficking routes or extensive drug-crop cultivation. The new warning system designates the states as a "level 4" risk, the highest level of potential danger. Mexico as a whole has a level 2 rating, meaning Americans should "exercise increased caution" because of concerns about crime. But an additional 11 Mexican states got a level 3 warning Wednesday, which urges people to "reconsider travel" there. Mexico has 31 states in all. Those states where...

Travel Advisory January 10, 2018 Mexico – Level 2: Exercise increased caution C Exercise increased caution in Mexico due to crime. Some areas have increased risk. Read the entire Travel Advisory. Violent crime, such as homicide, kidnapping, carjacking, and robbery, is widespread. The U.S. government has limited ability to provide emergency services to U.S. citizens in many areas of Mexico as U.S. government employees are prohibited from travel to these areas. U.S. government employees are prohibited from intercity travel after dark in many areas of Mexico. U.S. government employees are also not permitted to drive from the U.S.-Mexico border to...

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico is starting to seriously contemplate the possibility that millions of its migrants could be deported, and the picture is not pretty. Under proposals put forward by President-elect Donald Trump, Mexico could see millions of people streaming back with no jobs available; the country might lose some of the billions of dollars in remittances sent home annually; and some jobless deportees could swell the ranks of drug cartels, sparking more violence. Gov. Hector Astudillo of the southern state of Guerrero considered the possible scenario over the weekend. At least a million Guerrero residents live in the...

The drug cartel in the Mexican state of Guerrero demanded from Coca-Cola one million dollars to keep their distribution center in the region. Coca-Cola refused to pay the money. The cartel retaliated and began to burn down Coca-Cola trucks. The violence got so severe that Coca-Cola removed its distribution center. This story signifies just how powerful the narco state of Mexico is becoming, even to the point of driving out major American industries. To learn more about this story, and the political significance behind it, I spoke with Jorge Vazquez Valencia, the spokesperson for the Autodefensas, a self-defense group that...

The minute they heard their son was one of the missing normalista students believed to have been killed by police in Mexico, Manuel and Hilda González got on a bus and traveled nine hours to make it here, the Raul Isidro Burgos Ayotzinapa Normal School, in the southern state of Guerrero. Their son, César Manuel González Hernández, is 19 and a second-year teaching student at Ayotzinapa, a Revolutionary-era rural teachers college known nationally for the ardently leftist politics that guide everything the students do and study. César is now among the 43 normalista students missing since September 26, when a...

MEXICO CITY — Protesters ransacked and burned government offices Monday in Chilpancingo, the capital of Guerrero state, in an explosion of outrage over the suspected kidnapping and murder of 43 students by corrupt local police. Anti-government rallies have been held in several Mexican cities since the students’ disappearance Sept. 26 and the subsequent discovery of mass graves outside Iguala, about 120 miles south of Mexico City. But on Monday, the protests turned violent.

<p>The leader of a criminal gang suspected of conspiring with Mexican police to kill 43 missing students in the violent southwestern state of Guerrero has been detained, authorities said on Friday.</p> <p>The students went missing near Iguala, Guerrero on Sept. 26 after clashing with police and masked men, sending shockwaves across Mexico and prompting thousands to march in the beach resort of Acapulco on Friday to demand answers about their fate.</p>

Dodgers prospect Alex Guerrero was the victim Tuesday of a Mike Tyson-like ear chomp by triple-A teammate Miguel Olivo, according to Guerrero’s agent, Scott Boras. Guerrero, a Cuban infielder who is in the first year of a four-year, $28-million contract, was scheduled to undergo plastic surgery to reattach the part of his ear that was bitten off by Olivo in a dugout altercation, Boras said.

Authorities have confirmed that one gunman has been wounded and that five kidnapping victims have been rescued following a Wednesday afternoon shootout in a busy downtown Reynosa shopping district. Mexico's Ministry of National Defense (SEDENA) confirmed that a shootout took place in the "peatonal" or "pedestrian shopping area" of downtown Reynosa on Wednesday afternoon. SEDENA officials reported that soldiers were in the area when they came under fire from an unknown number of men. Reynosa residents reported the gunfire on the social media network Twitter. SEDENA officials reported that shootout ended with one gunman being wounded and five alleged kidnapping...

On January 5 in El Potrero, a small town in the Mexican state of Guerrero, a man named Eusebio García Alvarado was kidnapped by a local criminal syndicate. Kidnappings are fairly common in Guerrero—the state, just south of Mexico City, is one of the poorest in the country and the site of some of the worst violence in the ongoing battle between the drug cartels and Mexican authorities. Guerrero’s largest city, Acapulco, is known to Americans as a tourist hot spot. It’s also currently the second most dangerous city in the world, according to a study released by a...

ACAPULCO, Mexico (AP) — Two decapitated bodies and scalped heads were dumped outside a Sam's Club store in Acapulco while three headless corpses were found nearby on the resort city's main tourist strip, authorities in Mexico said Saturday. The bodies discovered outside the Sam's Club were cut into more than 20 pieces, Guerrero state's Public Security Department said in a statement.

Boston Police report arresting a Roxbury teen with a bullet wound on illegal gun-possession charges yesterday after he claimed he was shot while walking home from the Ruggles T stop. Police say officers immediately noticed holes in the kid's story, starting with the fact that "the clothes he had been wearing were not wet," which they found hard to believe given yesterday's torrential downpours. Also, there was the bullet hole in his bathroom wall. And reports from neighbors who'd heard gunshots.

ACAPULCO, Mexico — Police say they found 11 bodies dumped around a southern Mexican state, including seven wrapped in plastic bags and thrown off a bridge. Guerrero state police say the bodies of five men and two women were found in a river between the Pacific resort town of Acapulco and the city of Cuernavaca. They were wrapped in bags and dumped off a bridge. The other four bodies were found in a 600-yard ravine in the Guerrero state town of Pilcaya.