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<p>Back in April, 2008 I reported on how the Border Patrol was dropping it's requirement for a High School Diploma or GED, lessening training from 88 days to 55 days and basically encouraging a Border Patrol that will enable corruption and incompetence to enter the agency. Now this has proven true as arrests for corruption within the Border Patrol has skyrocketed.</p>

TIJUANA, Mexico — Seven police officers were assassinated in about an hour's time in what authorities said Tuesday was a coordinated effort that followed months of relative calm in a border city stricken by drug-fueled violence. Three officers were injured. Municipal police detained three or four people after Monday night's attacks, said Jose Manuel Yepiz, spokesman for the Baja California state attorney general's office. He did not have additional details. After four officers were killed by gunfire outside a convenience store, police scanners hummed with "narcocorridos," or drug ballads. One voice threatened over the airwaves that 30 officers would be...

Crossing a Mexican drug cartel usually comes with a price — death. On the U.S.- Mexico border, that price is being paid daily with an endless stream of execution-style slayings in a war to control drug routes to the north. As Mexican officials crack down on these cartels, violence spreads. Lives are merely the cost of doing business, and since 2007 the international press has documented more than 7,400 drug war-related murders on the border. Police are gunned down in public squares. Failed drug smugglers are tortured to death and bound from head to toe in duct tape. Enemies are...

BROWNSVILLE — A former military official brought in to purge the police force of a northern Mexico border city was assassinated early Saturday, three days after about 70 patrol officers went on strike to demand his resignation.

During his visit to Mexico last week, President Obama suggested that Americans are partly to blame for the appalling violence associated with the illegal drug trade there. "The demand for these drugs in the United States is what's helping keep these cartels in business," he said. "This war is being waged with guns purchased not here but in the United States."Obama is right that the U.S. is largely responsible for the carnage in Mexico, which claimed more than 6,000 lives last year. But the problem is neither the drugs Americans buy nor the guns they sell; it's the war on...

A brutal Maoist guerrilla group that terrorized Peru during the 1980s but pretty much disappeared when top leaders were captured in the 1990s is making a resurgence. In the latest of several recent attacks by the Sendero Luminoso, known in English as the Shining Path, 14 government soldiers were killed in an ambush this month. It was, a Sendero leader said afterward, "the strongest blow" against the government in quite a while. It also was not an isolated incident. "It's like that horror movie, 'Friday the 13th,' " said Bernard Aronson, President George H.W. Bush's assistant secretary of state for...

Last week at a news conference, Héctor González Martínez, the Roman Catholic archbishop in the state of Durango, announced what many Mexicans suspect: that "everyone knows" where the country's most wanted drug lord lives, "except the authorities." The archbishop's provocative challenge was quickly denounced as reckless talk by President Felipe Calderón's supporters, while others applauded the blunt suggestion that the federal government was either too corrupt or incompetent to capture Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, the leader of the powerful Sinaloa drug cartel. Events then took a deadly and macabre turn, as they often do in Mexico's ongoing drug war. On...

Violent Mexican drug cartels have been making headlines in recent weeks. And now comes word that the Department of Justice reports cartel organizations exist in 230 American cities. Of alarming note for Arkansans is that three cities on the list are in the Natural State: Little Rock, Fort Smith and Fayetteville. U.S. Senator Mark Pryor says coordination of counternarcotics enforcement among every level of government is critical in order to combat drug smuggling across the border and cartel infiltration of U.S. cities. He held a Senate hearing Tuesday, entitled “Counternarcotics Enforcement: Coordination at the Federal, State and Local Level,” where...

In semi-rural Hidalgo County which lies to the north of the Rio Grande River separating Texas and Mexico, Sheriff Guadalupe Trevino reckons that there are about two dozen hardcore gangs operating -- a staggering number for a county with about 750,000 people. "We have a serious gang problem here and have for a long time ... I believe we have more gangs than any other county on the border," Trevino told Reuters. The extent of the problem -- the gangs often keep their fighting among themselves -- is hard to comprehend driving past citrus orchards or down the busy roads...

Mexican drug cartels have displaced the mafia as the "number one organized crime threat" in the United States, Sen. Joe Lieberman said Monday as his Senate committee heard testimony in Phoenix on border violence. Lieberman, an independent Democrat from Connecticut, and Sen. John McCain, a Republican on Lieberman's panel, told FOX News that the United States needs to step up the fight against the drug cartels. The two senators were in Arizona, McCain's home state, to hear from local officials on their advice for dealing with the drug-fueled violence many fear is spilling across the border.

COLUMBIANA, Ala. – Five men dead in an apartment. In a county that might see five homicides in an entire year.... A type of crime, and criminal, once foreign to this landscape of blooming dogwoods had arrived in Shelby County . Sheriff Chris Curry felt it even before he laid eyes on the grisly scene. He called the state. The FBI. The DEA. Anyone he could think of. "I don't know what I've got," he warned them. "But I'm gonna need help." The five dead men lay scattered about the living room of one apartment in a complex of hundreds....

MORELIA, Mexico — Gunmen killed 12 people in different parts of Michoacan state, including three men who were beheaded, state officials said Friday. The bodies were found in a stretch of territory from the mountains to the Pacific coast that is plagued with drug cartel violence. All were killed during a 24-hour period starting Thursday, the Michoacan state prosecutor's office said. Four bodies were found stacked on top of each other in the Pacific port of Lazaro Cardenas, three without heads, the office said in a statement. The heads were in plastic bags next to the pile.

Pres. Barack Obama went to Mexico and, unlike many of his presidential predecessors, didn’t stay in a remote resort, but in the midst of Mexico City, the sprawling metropolis of 20 million. The visit — Obama’s first stop in Latin America — and the locale — the capital where an American president hadn’t visited in 12 years — sent the signal that the United States is committed to a country that is a punching bag in American domestic politics, but an indispensable ally in a region buffeted by revolutionary left-wing politics. As if to underscore the stakes, on the eve...

Arrest warrant: Deputy Ryan Huizenga had finger on trigger instead of trigger guard before he shot GVSU student Derek Copp by John Tunison | the Grand Rapids Press Tuesday April 07, 2009, 11:25 AM HOLLAND (MICHIGAN) -- Ottawa County sheriff's Deputy Ryan Huizenga, accused of shooting Grand Valley State University student Derek Copp during a drug raid, had his finger on the trigger of his .40-caliber handgun, rather than outside the trigger guard, an investigator said in obtaining an arrest warrant. "Based on my investigation, Derek Copp posed no threat to the officers, including Deputy Ryan Huizenga, and that his...

In 2006, I conducted a three-part interview with former US Border Patrol Supervisor David J Stoddard. For 27 years, David served in Calexico, California, Vermont, Yuma, Tucson Sector Headquarters and Naco, Arizona and worked in Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico and other locations. He also provided testimony about immigration reform to Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner's (R-WI) House Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims in 1999 and a Congressional subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources in 2002. With the current US-Mexico border crisis — including an actual ongoing war on our southern border — I thought it was time to...

MEXICO CITY — As Mexico suffers from an onslaught of massacres, decapitations and execution-style hits, six major drug cartels have carved up the country into fiefdoms. Like the armies of authentic warlords, the cartels attempt to completely dominate their territories, controlling trafficking routes, local drug sales and other criminal enterprises. Clashing over disputed turf, the cartels all have carried out murders on an epic scale. Sinaloa Cartel City base: Culiacan (northwestern Mexico) Kingpins: Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, Juan Jose Esparragoza (El Azul) States in sphere of influence: Sinaloa, Sonora, Durango, Morelos, Chihuahua, Baja California, Mexico City,...

- Big Hollywood - http://bighollywood.breitbart.com - The ‘America Is Arming Mexico’s Drug Gangs’ LiePosted By Dan Gifford On March 31, 2009 @ 1:41 pm In Media Criticism, Politics | 2 Comments “There is an iron river of guns that flows South into Mexico [from the United States] to supply criminal organizations on the border,” says Tom Mangan, senior special agent with Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) in Phoenix. “They are in the market for machine guns, hand grenades, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles,” he continues. That’s right. The drug gangs can’t buy that and other military...

AT least 15 people have been killed in the past 24 hours in northern Chihuahua state, local officials said, hours after US President Barack Obama said violence in Mexico has "gotten out of hand". The bodies of five men were found on Saturday in an irrigation ditch outside of Rosales, in the central part of the state, the local prosecutor's office said, adding that the bodies were apparently dumped from a pick-up truck. In Chihuahua capital, another four bodies were dumped by gunmen from a car near a petrol station, the office added. Late Saturday, three people were murdered in...

From the original 31 members, the Mexican organized criminal faction Los Zetas has grown into an organization in its own right, operating separate from the Gulf Cartel and just as violent Between the first of the year and mid-March, 2009, the Mexican criminal organization most commonly known as "Los Zetas" has been busy. Members of this group have been linked to a death threat delivered to the president of Guatemala, a grenade thrown into a bar in Pharr, Texas, the death of a high-ranking military general in Cancun, and a fair share of the organized crime-related deaths registered this year...

Jose Reyes Ferriz, mayor of the Mexican border city of Juarez, presides over what may be the western hemisphere's most dangerous town, certainly the hardest hit by Mexico's drug-war terror. Since the start of last year, Juarez has seen almost 2,000 drug-related murders. Reyes this month requested thousands of federal army soldiers to rein in the violence, which has subsided for the moment — giving him a chance to rebuild Juarez's corrupt police force. He talked with TIME's Tim Padgett this week about his police reform, drug-cartel death threats against him and comparisons of Juarez to Baghdad. (See pictures of...