I keep hearing about these…MEXICAN DRUG WARS

TIME MAGAZINE, MEXICAN DRUG WARS
June 24, 2009 U.S. Teenagers: Paid Assassins In The Drug Wars Although the Obama Administration insists that drug cartel violence has not spilled over from Mexico into the United States, the paramilitary Los Zetas, an enforcement arm for the Gulf cartel, is recruiting American teenagers to do its killing on both sides of the border as reported by James C. McKinley for the New York Times: Rosalia Reta was 13 when he was recruited by the Zetas, the infamous assassins of the Gulf Cartel, law enforcement officials say. He was one of a group of American teenagers from the impoverished streets of Laredo who was lured into the drug wars across the Rio Grande in Mexico with promises of high pay, fancy cars and sexy women.  After a short apprenticeship, the young men lived in an expensive house in Texas, available to kill whenever called on. The Gulf Cartel was engaged in a turf war with the Sinaloa Cartel over the Interstate 35 corridor, the north-south highway that connects Laredo to Dallas and beyond, and is, according to law enforcement officials, one of the most important arteries for drug smuggling in the Americas.

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June 09, 2009

Federal Cops Bust Local Cops

Mexican federal police in recent days have been sweeping through local police precincts in the northern Nuevo León state to root out those allegedly corrupted by the Gulf drug cartel according to a report by David Luchnow for the Wall Street Journal:

Several dozen federal police and scores of local police squared off for several hours Monday afternoon at a busy intersection in Monterrey, aiming at each other with semiautomatic assault weapons and threatening to kill one another. In the end, no one was hurt, but images of the two forces aiming guns at each other stunned Mexicans. The standoff took place amid a crackdown on allegedly corrupt local police across the state. In the past nine days, some 78 police officers, including a local police chief, have been detained on suspicion of being in the pay of Mexico’s powerful drug-trafficking groups. Army troops and federal police have raided police stations across Nuevo León almost daily, interviewing officers and inspecting their weapons and cellphones.

February 02, 2009

News: Mexican Drug Cartels

*** The Mexican drug cartels not only continue to smuggle across the border — including using ramps to  drive their vehicles over the security fence — but increasingly are involved with extensive marijuana growing operations within the United States:

Despite huge enforcement actions on both sides of the Southwest border, the Mexican marijuana trade is more robust — and brazen — than ever, law enforcement officials say. Mexican drug cartels routinely transported industrial-size loads of marijuana in 2008, excavating new tunnels and adopting tactics like ramp-assisted smuggling to get their cargoes across undetected. But these are not the only new tactics: the cartels are also increasingly planting marijuana crops inside the United States in a major strategy shift to avoid the border altogether, officials said. Last year, drug enforcement authorities confiscated record amounts of high potency plants from Miami to San Diego, and even from vineyards leased by cartels in Washington State. Mexican drug traffickers have also moved into hydroponic marijuana production — cannabis grown indoors without soil and nourished with sunlamps — challenging Asian networks and smaller, individual growers here.

The Mexican drug cartels — including the Federation, the Tijuana Cartel, the Juarez Cartel and the Gulf Cartel — have established relationships with street and prison gangs in the United States, and they operate in 195 American cities.

*** Killings in Sinaloa for the month of January are down by 2/3 from last December, and two rival drug gangs in the state — the Sinaloa cartel and the Beltran Leyva brothers — may have reached a truce:

A truce would be welcome in Sinaloa, where ambuses, shootouts and kidnappings have occurred day and night. More than 120 people were killed in the state in December, according to Mexican news media; January looks set to end with about 40 deaths.

U.S. law enforcement is skeptical on the word of a truce, and in any event “any cease-fire could be fleeting”: “killing continues in most of Mexico; even in Sinaloa last week, a top drug-gang lieutenant and alleged money launderer, Lamberto Verdugo Calderon, was killed in a gun battle.”

*** President Felipe Calderón dispatched 45,000 military troops to battle the drug cartels upon taking office in December 2006, and Gen. Alfonso Duarte Múgica believes “this year will be decisive for the decrease of violence and kidnapping“:

Scarcely a week goes by without a major announcement: Soldiers rescue kidnap victims, detain suspect police officers, catch dangerous cartel members. Soldiers seize loads of narcotics and caches of automatic weapons, displaying them at the foot of the giant flagpole that rises from the Morelos military base near downtown Tijuana. * * * “President Calderón understood more clearly than anything the fact that if he didn’t take on the cartels, the cartels were going to be running the country in the next five years,” said Michael Braun, former operations chief for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. The military, one of Mexico’s strongest and most respected institutions, has long been known for its role in disaster assistance. Its anti-drug efforts have historically focused on eradication in drug-producing states such as Michoacan and Sinaloa. Its new role has it taking on duties traditionally carried out by civilian forces, but Duarte stressed that his troops are acting in a supportive role. This is ”a stopgap measure to enhance the capabilities of law enforcement” while the civilian agencies are rebuilt, said Arturo Sarukhan, Mexico’s ambassador to the United States. “Once these newly vetted, restructured civilian units are in place, the armed forces will be pulled out of their law enforcement role.”

*** Victor Clark Alfaro, head of the Binational Center for Human Rights in Tijuana, says the “violence by the cartels is going to continue in 2009,” and they further are expanding into other rackets:

“I don’t know who is going to win between them and against the government,” he says. “The fact is that the high levels of impunity and corruption let these people work more easily on the streets of our city.” Since the beginning of the year, dozens of people have been gunned down in Tijuana, including five police officers. And nationwide, the body count since New Year’s stands at more than 450. Clark, who’s also a lecturer in Latin American studies at San Diego State University, has studied Tijuana for decades. He says the current cartel members are younger, more brutal and more entrepreneurial than in the past. And Clark says they’re expanding beyond drugs, levying taxes on street drug dealers, running kidnapping rings and extorting “protection money” from bars, hotels and restaurants. “So they are going to the formal economy to control sectors, and to control specific sectors of the informal economy related to drug selling on the streets,” Clark says. “They are going to these economical spaces to charge taxes. It is a new phenomena in our city.”

*** Pretty young girls swoon over the drug traffickers but apparently the life of a narco wife can turn out to be a real bitch:

Young women in northwest Mexico are dazzled by the glamorous “narco wives” who laze in beauty salons, draped in designer gear as they get Swarovski crystals glued to their fingernails. Each year, dozens of teenagers compete in beauty pageants in the sun-baked hills of Sinaloa state, where their legendary good looks draw wealthy drug traffickers ready to pluck one out and spirit her off to a mountain hideout. Career prospects are few for Sinaloan girls, and landing a prominent drug trafficker means entering a world of untold riches – luxury mansions, endless spa sessions and a closet full of the priciest labels on the planet. The dangers of getting sucked into the gangland world have jumped, however, as a crackdown ordered by President Felipe Calderon has sparked new turf wars and hit men ignore old codes against slaying their enemies’ wives, girlfriends or children. In a sobering reminder of the risks they run, the reigning Miss Sinaloa beauty queen was arrested last month with her smuggler boyfriend and six other men in a truck full of guns and cash. Days earlier, a top drug boss’s former lover was found dead in a car trunk with the letter “Z” – the mark of a rival gang’s hit squad – cut into her breasts, belly and buttocks. * * * [M]ore and more women are being murdered in a drug war that killed around 5,700 people nationwide last year.

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