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Tijuana, Mexico, Jun 21 (EFE).- The decapitated bodies of four people, including three police officers, were found Wednesday in northern Mexico near the U.S. border, authorities said. The four individuals went missing Tuesday night and on Wednesday morning their bodies were found wrapped in blankets in the Pacific coast city of Rosarito and their heads in bags in Tijuana, said Rosarito police chief Valente Montijo. He identified the dead as police officers Ismael Arellano Torres, Jesus Hernandez and Adrian Ventura, and civilian Fernando Aguilar, a Mexican-American resident of Arizona. According to Montijo, the cops and the other man - who...

Mexican drug cartels operating in cities in the U.S. are buying up legitimate businesses to launder money and using some of the proceeds to win local mayoral and city council seats for politicians who can shape the policies and personnel decisions of their police forces, according to Rep. Tom Tancredo "The Tijuana-based Felix drug cartel and the Juarez-based Fuentes cartel began buying legitimate business in small towns in Los Angeles County in the early 1990s," "They purchased restaurants, used-car lots, auto-body shops and other small businesses. One of their purposes was to use these businesses for money-laundering operations. Once established...

NOGALES, Mexico - Patricia Lopez's journey toward a better life in the United States ended with a nighttime robbery, a twisted ankle and a Border Patrol escort to the frontier — where she was dumped at dawn without a peso in her pocket, 1,575 miles from home. She's far from alone: Nearly 1 million people, many of them penniless, were turned back across the border last year, and analysts fear that tougher new U.S. border enforcement will inundate border towns with the desperate and the destitute. Migrant shelter directors are scrambling for funds and considering hiring more staff to keep...

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Workers clearing piles of garbage from a beach in Acapulco found an unpleasant reminder of the seamier side of Mexico's Pacific resort, which has seen dozens of murders this year -- a decomposing human head. The head washed in from the ocean and appeared to be that of a man around 40 years old, Reforma newspaper said on its Web site on Wednesday. The head was discovered by state workers cleaning the beach. Police believe the slayings are related to drugs trafficking. In April suspected drug gang hitmen decapitated two policemen and placed their heads outside...

LAS VEGAS - Mayors from more than 200 U.S. cities urged President Bush and Congress on Monday to pass comprehensive immigration reform, including a guest worker program, but they could not agree on a proposal to build a 300-mile fence along the border. The U.S. Conference of Mayors declined to back a resolution opposing the fence, which would be built along the Rio Grande river in Texas. Critics said the fence would harm relations between the U.S. and Mexico. Virginia Beach, Va., Mayor Meyera Oberndorf said the fence would be "un-American." "We've always had open borders between Mexico and Canada,...

WESLACO — It’s a horrific, perhaps all-too common scenario. Masked men armed with high-powered weapons storm a home and often gag and beat the homeowner — or anyone — in sight. Most perpetrators know exactly what they are looking for: sometimes large amounts of cash, sometimes bundles of drugs. Other times, in stranger-to-stranger invasions, perpetrators target homes in affluent neighborhoods that appear to hold valuables inside. Since last July, there have been eight reported cases of home invasions — seven of them violent. In half of the reported cases, there was some type of relationship between the victim and the...

Police enraged by the kidnapping of six officers club unarmed detainees. A bloody battle between steelworkers and police leaves two miners dead. Drug lords post the heads of decapitated police on a fence to show who's in charge. Less than two months before Mexicans elect their next president, many fear the country is teetering on the edge of chaos a perception that could hurt the ruling National Action Party's chances of keeping the presidency and benefit Mexico's once-powerful Institutional Revolutionary Party, whose candidate has been trailing badly. Some blame President Vicente Fox for a weak government. Others say rivals are...

By Steve Holland and Randall Palmer CHICHEN ITZA, Mexico, March 30 (Reuters) - Mexican President Vicente Fox played tour guide to U.S. President George W. Bush at ancient Mayan ruins on Thursday before holding talks to urge him to push through long-sought U.S. immigration reform. Hosting a North American summit, Fox planned to offer tighter border controls and incentives to lure some illegal immigrants home, a pledge meant to help Bush convince a skeptical Congress to let more Mexicans work legally in the United States. Bush and Fox, joined by new Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper at Mexico's rowdy beach...

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico's president will approve a law that decriminalizes possession of small amounts of marijuana, cocaine and other drugs to concentrate on fighting violent narco gangs, the government said on Tuesday. President Vicente Fox will not oppose the bill, passed by senators last week, presidential spokesman Ruben Aguilar told reporters, despite likely tensions with the United States. "The president is going to sign that law, there would be no objection," he said. "It appears to be a good law and an advance in combating narcotics trafficking." The approval of the legislation, passed earlier by the lower house...

I find it incredible that the Mexican Congress passed legislation that would make it legal to possess, carry and use small amounts of heroin, cocaine, marijuana and other drugs. Mexican Vicente Fox must sign off on it for the proposal to become law, and some think he will. Now I know that a proposal that may or may not be approved does not have a lot to do with immigration. But talk about sending the wrong signals. Mexico desperately wants a guest-worker program. It wants the U.S. to ease immigration laws to make it easier for its citizens to escape...

Drug limits List of maximum allowable drug quantities approved for personal use by Mexico's Congress:Opium: (raw, to be smoked): 5 grams Heroin: 25 milligrams Marijuana: 5 grams Cocaine: 500 milligrams LSD: .015 milligrams MDA: 200 milligrams MDMA (Ecstasy): 200 milligrams Mescaline: 1 gram Peyote: 1 kilogram Psilocybin (concentrate, pure, active ingredient): 100 milligrams Hallucinogenic mushrooms (raw, off the farm): 250 milligrams Amphetamines: 100 milligrams Dexamphetamines: 40 milligrams Phencyclidine (PCP, or Angel Dust): 7 milligrams Methamphetamines: 200 milligrams Nalbuphine (synthetic opiate): 10 milligrams Psilocybin (concentrate, pure, active ingredient): 100 milligrams Hallucinogenic mushrooms (raw, off the farm): 250 milligrams Amphetamines: 100 milligrams...

TULTITLAN, Mexico (AP) -- Considered felons by the government, these migrants fear detention, rape and robbery. Police and soldiers hunt them down at railroads, bus stations and fleabag hotels. Sometimes they are deported; more often officers simply take their money. While migrants in the United States have held huge demonstrations in recent weeks, the hundreds of thousands of undocumented Central Americans in Mexico suffer mostly in silence.

CANCUN, Mexico -- Mexican President Vicente Fox said his government was preparing to extradite at least 24 drug traffickers to the United States, but he ruled out using police to stop migrants on Mexico's side of the border. Speaking to reporters in Cancun, where he was meeting with President Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Fox said Thursday he couldn't release the names of the traffickers facing extradition, and warned they might react violently to the prospect of being sent abroad. "This will be punishment for them because we'll take them out of Mexico so they stop operating," Fox...

NUEVO LAREDO - Acting on direct orders from President Vicente Fox, soldiers took up positions along international bridges from here to Matamoros, searching nearly every vehicle headed into the United States. At the Juarez-Lincoln Bridge and International Bridge I, the armed soldiers dressed in camouflage fatigues were stopping vehicles according to an undisclosed random pattern. The searches will be conducted around the clock for an unspecified length of time, and all drivers using the bridges in either direction are asked to slow down as they approach the checkpoints. Identified as the "Frontera Segura" program, it's designed to help curb the...

Mexico's Defense Secretary said on Friday that officials have identified men dressed in military garb who helped drug traffickers in Hudspeth County in January. And he says they are not soldiers. Gerardo Clemente Vega told a Mexico City news conference the men involved in the January 23rd border incident are Jose Rodolfo Escajeda Escajeda, Alonso Escajeda Candelaria, Jaime Fernandez Jurado and Cesar Gandara. The four are still at large. Vega says Escajeda Escajeda has been linked to drug traffickers in Chihuahua. Hudspeth County Deputies spotted three vehicles driving in the United States along I-10, and began a chase which led...

A federal task force seized arsenals of illegal weapons and homemade bombs in Laredo, Texas, in connection with a Mexican drug trafficking battle, authorities said Friday. The feds captured more than 30 homemade bombs, grenade components, assault weapons, silencers, machine gun assembly kits, bulletproof vests, police scanners and cash, Julie Myers, assistant secretary of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in a statement. Two of the bombs had been completed and others were under assembly, said officials from the task force that involved Immigration and Customs Enforcement, FBI, local authorities and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Authorities...

An American law enforcement officer and news crew in Texas have witnessed another armed incursion into the United States by men dressed in Mexican army attire, the second such incident in just two weeks. The deputy and news crew were on the scene Tuesday night to film a segment about last week's incursion, when the law officer noticed more "soldiers" emerge from a clearing on the U.S. side of the border. "They are doing the classic thing, flanking around each side of us and actually coming up into the U.S. and trying to figure out what we are doing; they...

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."

Expect more violence as officers move into more areas along the border, said the national chief of CBP Border Patrol during a Saturday visit to Laredo. Chief David Aguilar visited Laredo to address concerns raised by recent instances of violence against Border Patrol agents. He said assaults on agents in the Laredo sector are occurring at a record pace. As more agents get assigned to the border, the Border Patrol is taking control of areas that have been historically used by criminal gangs who are reluctant to give them up, Aguilar said. Danger to agents will continue to increase until...

"U.S. agents had been investigating the possibility of an elaborate drug-smuggling tunnel between Tijuana and San Diego for more than a year, but couldn't find it despite using military equipment so advanced it's classified" ~snip "“This tunnel beats them all,” said Michael Unzueta, special agent in charge of the San Diego office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, " ~snip "“People are always going to find a way around us,” he said."