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TIJUANA – The city's entire 2,300-member municipal police force has been ordered to turn in its weapons, leaving doubt Thursday about who would be patrolling this city of more than 1.5 million residents. The surprise directive from Mexico's Defense Secretariat comes a day after President Felipe Calderon ordered Operation Tijuana, a major offensive against organized crime in the city. More than 3,000 soldiers and federal agents are being sent to the city with the aim of tackling the city's crime problems. Federal officials were expected to conduct ballistics tests on the weapons, apparently to see if they could link any...

Jose Alonso Compean and Ignacio Ramos, were sentenced to 12 years and 11 years, respectively, in October by U.S. District Court Judge Kathleen Cardone in El Paso, Texas. The drug smuggler was granted immunity for his testimony.

MEXICO CITY — In the wake of bombings, civil unrest and potential for further mayhem, the U.S. government is advising Americans to be careful anywhere in this country. Officials cautioned late Wednesday that while U.S. citizens aren't specifically being targeted, they should be aware of their surroundings, especially when near large political gatherings. "This is not a broad brush or anything that says do not go to Mexico; we are saying to be careful in Mexico due to the potential for violence," said a U.S. Embassy official, speaking on condition of anonymity. The State Department issued a formal advisory that...

Los Angeles, CA. According to 33 year veteran gang specialist and retired L.A. Sheriff’s Sergeant Richard Valdemar, Mexican drug cartels have infiltrated city councils and political campaigns in many small cities in Los Angeles County.

Homeland Security panel also says traffickers are forming ties with U.S.-based gangs The U.S. Border Patrol and other law enforcement agencies at the U.S.-Mexico border are outgunned by increasingly ruthless and well-armed Mexican drug cartels, a new congressional report concludes. "The cartels use automatic assault weapons, bazookas, grenade launchers and improvised explosive devices," the House Homeland Security oversight subcommittee report said. "In contrast, U.S. Border Patrol agents are issued 40-caliber Beretta semiautomatic pistols." The report, scheduled to be released today by U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Austin, said drug cartels are able to break the encryptions on Border Patrol and sheriffs'...

*** NOTE*** Take your blood pressure medication before viewing this report... McCaul Releases Report on Border Violence (Tuesday, October 17, 2006) Today, U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul (TX), Chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security Subcommittee on Investigations, released a report on border violence in the Southwest. The report examines the alarming rise in the level of criminal cartel activity, including drug and human smuggling, along the Texas-Mexico border and its effects on Federal, State and local law enforcement agencies. The report also looks at what steps are being taken to counter the threat, and the significance of these issues pertaining...

CALEXICO — A U.S. Border Patrol agent fired once at a group of suspected smugglers as the group reportedly attempted to assault another agent along the New River, officials said today. No one was wounded in the shooting, Border Patrol said. One Border Patrol agent suffered an injured knee when he fell while trying to back away from the smugglers who were throwing rocks and running at the agent, officials said. The case occurred about 5 p.m. Friday near the old Vons facility in the western portion of Calexico. Supervisory Border Patrol Agent Lloyd Frers said two agents were working...

MEXICO CITY - Electoral officials said Tuesday that they will burn the ballots from the disputed presidential election despite calls from both candidates to spare them. Luis Carlos Ugalde, chairman of the Federal Electoral Institute, or IFE, said in a letter to President-elect Felipe Calderon that a 1990 law clearly called for the burning of the ballots from the July 2 election. "The IFE is obliged to destroy electoral documentation once the electoral process is concluded," Ugalde wrote. No date was set for the burning. Leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador had asked that the ballots be saved, claiming fraud...

The seven-judge panel known as the TRIFE, charged with deciding the legitimacy of Mexico's murky July 2 election and confirming the new president, is the nation's court of last resort. What the judges decree is literally the last word, the end of the line; there is no appeal. On September 5, the last day the Constitution mandated the TRIFE to rule on the most hotly contested balloting in Mexico's checkered electoral history, the judges pronounced their verdict: Outgoing President Vicente Fox's unconstitutional intervention in the electoral process on behalf of his handpicked successor, Felipe Calderón, had put the election "at...

FIVE severed human heads were thrown onto a dance floor in a crowded disco in western Mexico, officials said. Authorities blamed the grisly scene on rival drug gangs. “Hooded men dressed in black stormed into a bar, fired into the air and threw down five heads,” said Rosaura Trujillo, a spokeswoman for the Michoacan state prosecutor's office. The men also left a card with the message: “The family does not kill for money. It does not kill women. It does not kill innocents. It kills only those who deserve to die. Everyone take note - this is divine justice.” According...

MEXICO CITY -- Mexico's attorney general said the arrest a group of corrupt cops along the border with California is imminent. Daniel Cabeza de Vaca told a Mexico City news conference today the cops protected a Tijuana cartel, the Arellano Felix gang, which smuggled tons of pot, cocaine and meth into the United States. Two were already arrested Saturday and charged with taking bribes to protect the gang. The attorney general said they worked at the Rosarito police department just over the border from San Diego border. The two are accused of decapitating three of their fellow officers. The news...

Illegal marijuana production is surging on the North Coast and across the state as a result of rising dominance of Mexican crime families over the state's underground pot economy. Scores of Mexican nationals are being sneaked across the border to grow, guard and harvest marijuana gardens inside California because tightened border security has crimped smuggling of Mexican-grown pot into the state, according to local, state and federal drug agents. Mexican-controlled operations now account for as much as 70 percent of all the marijuana cultivated in the state's rural regions, including the North Coast, the agents said. Agents say tightened U.S.-Mexican...

MANAGUA, Nicaragua (Reuters) - Despite U.S. efforts to stop left-wing Nicaraguan politician Daniel Ortega from returning to power, a poll released on Tuesday showed he maintained a six-point lead over rival presidential candidates. Ortega, who headed the socialist Sandinista government in the 1980s, had the support of 29 percent of those surveyed, according to a poll by Cid-Gallup. Twenty-three percent said they backed conservative banker and former Foreign Minister Eduardo Montealegre. A June Cid-Gallip poll also gave Ortega a six-point lead. Washington, which backed Contra rebels who battled the Soviet-supported Sandinista government, has criticized Ortega as "undemocratic" and tried to...

In a large raid preceding the harvest season, the Jackson County Sheriff's Department has seized 2,500 marijuana plants with a street value estimated at up to $12.5 million. Two men found at the scattered gardens near Hyatt Lake on Monday remain in Jackson County Jail on immigration holds and the investigation is continuing, Jackson County Sheriff Mike Winters said. Officials had watched the growing operation, believed to be linked to a Mexican drug cartel, and swept in Monday to destroy it just before harvest time, sheriff's Lt. Pat Rowland said. SWAT teams from Jackson and Douglas counties and Oregon State...

The first of 6,000 National Guard troops President Bush wants to station on the southwest border will be deployed next month, assigned to fly helicopters to spot illegal aliens, lay sensors to detect their movement, and build roads and barriers to help the U.S. Border Patrol do its job. "We're trained, we're ready to do this, and we're able to do this," said Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau. But Mr. Bush's border mobilization plan is being questioned by besieged state and local law-enforcement authorities battling rapidly escalating violence by heavily armed alien and drug...

The chief law enforcement officers of several Texas counties along the southern U.S. border warn that Arabic-speaking individuals are learning Spanish and integrating into Mexican culture before paying smugglers to sneak them into the United States. The Texas Sheriffs' Border Coalition believes those individuals are likely terrorists and that drug cartels and some members of the Mexican military are helping them get across the border. Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez of Zapata County, Texas told Cybercast News Service that Iranian currency, military badges in Arabic, jackets and other clothing are among the items that have been discovered along the banks of the...

LAREDO - Local sheriffs this morning testified in front of a congressional subcommittee of potential vulnerabilities to terrorism along the Southern Border. "There is an infrastructure in place just waiting to be exploited," Webb County Sheriff Rick Flores told members of the House International Relations Subcommittee on International Terrorism and Nonproliferation. Flores and Zapata County Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez shared stories about hunters being surprised by black-clad gunmen, a Starr County jailer who was found executed in Mexico, and Iraqi dinars found on a ranch trail as part of the divisive testimony. Congressional Democrats accused the Republican-dominated subcommittee of playing politics...

Police on Monday found a decapitated body wrapped in a blanket and a human head stuffed in a plastic bag along a road outside Monterrey. Police patrolling the area found the body, which has not been identified, and two notes to reputed drug lord Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán of the Sinaloa cartel, said Marcelo Garza, director of investigations for Nuevo León. One note read, "These are the ones who are killing in Laredo and also in Guadalajara under the orders of Efraín, El Beto y El Pipo. They are El Chapo´s people." The second note accused the government of protecting...

Hitmen strafe two women with machine guns, severed heads are dumped in garbage bags near the U.S. border and outside public offices in Acapulco, a police chief is gunned town in a Caribbean tourist resort. The grisly murders, all in the past week, are among the latest in an increasingly savage and spectacular wave of drug gang violence sweeping across Mexico as the country heads to the polls in a presidential vote on Sunday. The dead are victims of an all-out war between rival gangs for control of the multibillion-dollar cocaine, marijuana and amphetamine trade to the United States which...

Acapulco, Mexico, Jun 30 (EFE).- This world-renowned resort city on Mexico's Pacific coast is being repeatedly shocked by the discovery of menacingly placed human heads separated from slain individuals linked to drug-trafficking or the fighting of that crime. Authorities found Friday two human heads in front of a government office and later located the headless bodies in a vacant lot in Acapulco, the scene in recent weeks of clashes between drug traffickers and police. The two heads were found before dawn outside the offices of the Finance Secretariat of the Guerrero state government in the vicinity of La Garita, authorities...