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Mexico’s defense minister said Monday that the nation has deployed nearly 15,000 troops to its northern border to increase border enforcement, part of a deal to avert U.S. tariffs on Mexican goods, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP). "We have a total deployment, between the National Guard and army units, of 14,000, almost 15,000 men in the north of the country," Defense Minister Luis Cresencio Sandoval said at a Monday joint press conference with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Mexico had previously announced its plans to deploy 6,000 national guardsmen to its southern border with Guatemala, but its plans to beef...

Joseph Proctor told his girlfriend he was popping out to the convenience store in the quiet Mexican beach town where the couple had just moved, intending to start a new life. The next morning, the 32-year-old New York native was dead inside his crashed van on a road outside Acapulco. He had multiple bullet wounds. An AR-15 rifle lay in his hands.... Three soldiers have been charged with killing her son. Two have been charged with planting the assault rifle in his hands and claiming falsely that he fired first, according to a Mexican Defense Department document...

Mexican Army takes over customs operations on US border

MORELIA, Mexico — Twelve people tortured, slain and dumped along a mountain road were soldiers, a state official said Tuesday. But the army quickly denied the announcement. The bound and blindfolded bodies of 11 men and one woman were found late Monday near the town of La Huacana in President Felipe Calderon’s home state of Michoacan, which has been a center of his crackdown on organized crime. Interim Michoacan state prosecutor J. Jesus Montejano told reporters Tuesday the 12 were soldiers gathering intelligence in the state. But a Defense Department official said they were not soldiers and a statement would...

MEXICO CITY, Mexico (CNN) -- Coordinated attacks in at least eight Mexican cities killed three federal police officers and two soldiers Saturday in what officials are calling an unprecedented onslaught by drug gangs.

MEXICO CITY -- Mexican troops today seized the municipal police headquarters in the resort city of Cancun as an investigation deepened into the slaying there of a recently retired army general. Scores of soldiers backed by two armored cars took over the offices amid press reports that Cancun's police chief and other officials may be implicated in the Feb. 2 torture-killings of Gen. Mauro Tello, his bodyguard and his driver. Cancun's public safety chief and six officers from its traffic police department were removed from their posts, the mayor's office said today. Federal investigators arrrested the public safety director, Francisco...

The U.S. Border Patrol's largest union local has asked President Bush to put an end to the scores of Mexican military incursions into the United States that have put Border Patrol agents at risk of being injured or killed. "It is disgraceful that Border Patrol agents are put in harm's way and our government doesn't do everything reasonably within its power to protect us from marauding Mexican soldiers and others," said Edward "Bud" Tuffly II, head of Local 2544 of the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC) in Tucson. "Without a forceful response to these illegal incursions, an agent will eventually...

Mexican troops crossed the border into Arizona and held a U.S. Border Patrol agent at gunpoint on Sunday, according to a published report. Agents assigned to the Border Patrol at Ajo, Ariz., said the Mexican soldiers crossed the border into an isolated area southwest of Tucson and pointed rifles at the agent, who has not been identified. The Mexicans withdrew after other American agents arrived on the scene, The Washington Times reports. It’s not known why the troops crossed the border, but American law enforcement authorities have said that current and former Mexican soldiers have been hired to protect drug...

Nearly 1,000 Mexican troops arrived at the international airport in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, yesterday to quell drug war violence that has surged recently in the city across the border from El Paso, Texas

Shooting outside downtown restaurant left 6 dead, 3 wounded RIO BRAVO — The Mexican army cordoned off Rio Bravo early Friday, one day after a shooting outside a downtown restaurant left three hospitalized and six dead, including prominent political figure Juan Antonio Guajardo Anzalduá. Soldiers searched vehicles leaving and entering the city, which sits in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas across the Rio Grande from Donna(Texas). Some residents of the city said the incident has frightened them, and the residents fear violence in the city could escalate. “We are afraid. We are very scared,” one Rio Bravo woman said in...

A Texas congressman is leading discussions with the White House to develop a military plan to assist Mexico in the war President Felipe Calderón is waging against the drug cartels. Yolanda Urrabazo, spokeswoman for Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, told WND the discussions involve the possibility of utilizing the U.S. military directly in the effort in addition to providing military assistance.

Mexico takes gloves offPresident gambles with use of military in drug crackdown By Manuel Roig-Franzia, Washington Post Article Last Updated: 07/09/2007 07:25:29 AM PDT MEXICO CITY — Every Monday morning, President Felipe Calderon settles in at the head of the table in the presidential library at Los Pinos, Mexico's fortresslike chief executive's compound. Calderon presides over strategy sessions with the leaders of Mexico's army and navy, key players in the centerpiece initiative of his seven-month-old presidency: a military assault against drug cartels. No Mexican president in recent history has convened his security council with such regularity, but few of his...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A Colorado lawmaker said there was a "war" under way along the US-Mexico border and urged President George W. Bush to deploy troops there, alleging drug trafficking by the Mexican military. Republican Representative Tom Tancredo said the United States was facing "a war" with renegade Mexican troops over the long, porous border. "We have a war. We are facing a military on the other side of the border," Tancredo told demonstrators protesting illegal immigration outside the US Congress. "In other places, in other times, that would be an active war," he added, reiterating an accusation that Mexican...

In the past few days, Hudspeth County Sheriff's Department deputies and their families have received threats to stay off the Rio Grande. Sheriff Arvin West told ABC-7 Thursday morning, before departing for Houston that the Mexican military is behind all of this. Sheriff West said, "There is no doubt in my mind -- from the first time going back to a couple of years ago and every time in between --- it's the Mexican military. In a nutshell, everybody's been trying to tell everybody that they were here...they've been here ...[and] they come here quite often, regularly."

EL PASO, Texas -- Suspected drug runners dressed in Mexican military-style uniforms who were involved in an armed confrontation with Texas lawmen were using a Mexican military-issue Humvee and weapons, the Hudspeth County sheriff said Friday. "It was military," said Arvin West, whose officers were involved in the standoff. "Due to the pending congressional hearings I can't comment further." West said the determination that the equipment was military-issue came from the federal government, but he wouldn't elaborate. A U.S. Army spokesman said he could not confirm West's statement, and the Mexican Foreign Relations Department said it would have no comment....

MEXICO CITY Mexico says its arrested four Iraqis who were trying to sneak into the United States without the proper documents. Mexico's Attorney General's office says police -- acting on an anonymous tip -- found the four aboard a bus in the northern city of Navajoa (nav-ah-HO-. That's about 375 miles south of the Arizona border. The statement says the Iraqis were in Mexico illegally. Officials are investigating the background of the four and trying to determine how they got into Mexico. Many undocumented Iraqi nationals have been captured in Mexican territory en route to the U-S border. None have...

Common criminals or major diplomatic incident? Those are the two options the federal government faces if its investigation proves that reports of Mexican soldiers crossing the U.S. border protecting drug shipments are accurate. Law experts said the basic concept of international law is that every country is a sovereign nation, and that no other country can interfere or invade another's borders without permission. "The tricky question is whether they are acting in an official or unofficial capacity," said Diane Marie Amann, professor of international law at the UC Davis School of Law. "If all they are doing is being bodyguards...

With its restrictions on everything from foreign ownership of real estate to the carrying of sidearms by American drug agents assigned there, the government of Mexico has made its touchiness about its sovereignty clear time and again. But when it comes to the sovereignty of the United States of America, Mexican contempt seems to know few limits. The latest example came at 3:15 p.m. Monday, as yet another standoff between armed Mexicans and American law-enforcement officers took place in Texas at the very spot where a similar standoff (described by Paul Green in a column on the Opinion 2 page...

EL PASO, Texas - Suspected drug runners dressed in Mexican military-style uniforms who were involved in an armed confrontation with Texas lawmen were using a Mexican military-issue Humvee and weapons, the Hudspeth County sheriff said Friday. "It was military," said Arvin West, whose officers were involved in the standoff. "Due to the pending congressional hearings I can't comment further." West said the determination that the equipment was military-issue came from the federal government, but he wouldn't elaborate. A U.S. Army spokesman said he could not confirm West's statement, and the Mexican Foreign Relations Department said it would have no comment....

Border patrol agents and other law enforcement officials are angry that Mexican and some U.S. officials refuse to acknowledge that Mexican soldiers are crossing into the United States. This photo provided by the Hudspeth County Sheriff's Office shows a SUV on fire along the U.S. Mexican border Monday, Jan. 23, 2006. The SUV got stuck in the Rio Grande River, which marks the border, as it made its escape from Texas law enforcement officers. A group of men in civilian clothes began unloading packages from the SUV. They then torched the SUV, according to Rick Glancey of the Texas Border...