Free Republic

Ukraine counterintelligence investigates presence of sicarios on front line. [Spanish word for a hitman or a hired killer, especially in Latin American and Mexican drug cartels.] Ukraine's domestic intelligence suspects Spanish-speaking volunteers of infiltrating the International Legion to train in flying FPV drones. [First-Person View drones.] Some are reportedly linked to cartels and have been recruited through private military companies.

RIO BRAVO — Empty cocaine packages littered the tall grass like candy wrappers along the bank of the Rio Grande in El Cenizo, a small but growing city 15 miles southeast of Laredo. On closer inspection, each of the 30 or so packages revealed layers — foil, plastic kitchen wrap and brown packing tape. Two large flour sacks were discarded nearby, each with a car seatbelt ingeniously tied diagonally across it for no-hassle transporting. The drugs were long gone, their wrappings not just evidence of a successful crime but another artifact in an outdoor museum of discarded clothes, inner tubes...

Officers outgunned by criminals from Mexico, he testifies MISSION - Drug and smuggling gangs controlling Mexican border territory are proving an increasingly violent and sophisticated threat to Texas border law enforcement, Zapata County Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzales told a state Senate committee Wednesday. "The weapons we possess are like water guns compared to what they have," Gonzales said. "They're trying to scare us away from the border." Gonzales, representing the Texas Border Sheriffs' Coalition, was one of more than a dozen witnesses to testify before the Committee on Transportation and Homeland Security. The panel was in South Texas for a hearing...

RIO GRANDE CITY — As a county jail officer in a remote stretch of the Texas-Mexico border, Gilberto Hernandez Jr., worked and lived in a risky environment because of the inmates he came in contact with. Hernandez, 26, added to his exposure by routinely crossing the border on weekends to cruise the streets of Miguel Alemán and nearby Ciudad Mier, his birthplace, in the big, black Chevrolet pickup that he kept shiny. A dual citizen, he was like many South Texans who enter Mexico as casually as if it were the same community rather than another nation. Hernandez also had...

Due to the continuing traffic in illicit drugs, and to a lesser extent to the squalid business of transporting illegal immigrants into this country, stories of violence from the U.S.-Mexico border are far from uncommon. Last week, however, brought one such story that was deeply disturbing both in the ruthless mindset it revealed and in the message it sent to all who continue to combat border violence, expose those responsible for it, and attempt to end it. The story was stark and appalling: Robert Mora, 42, the editor of the Nuevo Laredo daily newspaper La Manana, was killed after arriving...