Free Republic

SELLS, Ariz. – The reputed head of Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel is threatening a more aggressive stance against U.S. law enforcement, instructing associates to use deadly force, if needed, to protect increasingly contested trafficking operations, authorities said. Such a move by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, Mexico’s most-wanted man, would mark a turn from the cartel’s previous position of largely avoiding violent confrontations north of the border – either with American law enforcement officers or fellow traffickers. Local police and federal agents in Arizona said they recently have received at least two law enforcement alerts focused on Guzman’s reported orders that...

American Indian Officers Use Traditional Methods of Tracking to Try to Capture Drug Smugglers TOHONO O'ODHAM NATION, ARIZ. -- In an era of unmanned drones, night-vision goggles and wireless sensors, Sloan Satepauhoodle scours the desert along the Mexican border for drug smugglers in the old ways. She is a tracker, a former Secret Service agent and customs inspector in Washington who traded in her desk and computer to work "intel" in the desert, employing sign-cutting -- or tracking -- skills once used by her Kiowa ancestors to hunt animals. Satepauhoodle (pronounced SAY-paw-who-dle) roams this vast Indian reservation in a four-wheel-drive...

WASHINGTON: An elite group of Native American trackers is joining the hunt for terrorists crossing Afghanistan's borders. The unit, the Shadow Wolves, was recruited from several tribes, including the Navajo, Sioux, Lakota and Apache. It is being sent to Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to pass on ancestral sign-reading skills to local border units. In recent years, members of the Shadow Wolves have mainly tracked smugglers along the US border with Mexico. But the Taliban's resurgence in Afghanistan and the US military's failure to hunt down Osama bin Laden - still at large on his 50th birthday on Saturday - has prompted...

SELLS, Arizona (Reuters) - An elite group of Native American trackers that use skills handed down from the ancestral hunt is being tapped to play a larger role in securing the United States' borders. ADVERTISEMENT Little known outside law enforcement circles, the Shadow Wolves have hunted drug and human traffickers on a lonely stretch of the Arizona-Mexico border southwest of Tucson since the 1970s.In an age of unmanned aerial surveillance drones, video cameras and electronic sensors on the borders, the 14-member unit uses age-old "sign cutting" techniques to follow foot, horse and vehicle trails for miles across the cactus-studded wastes...

Congressman Steve King has just returned from a five-day trip to Arizona's border with Mexico. "It was a real eye-opener," King says. "One cannot get a feel for this without going down there and being in it." King has been advocating construction of a fence along the U.S./Mexico border, and King says the drug trade he witnessed just reaffirmed his belief that a fence is what it will take to stop the flood of immigrants crossing the border. "This is my second trip down to the border but this is the one that I learned the most at and the...