Mexico's Cartels Number One Threat To US, Mexico's drug wars spread violence

Mexico's drug wars spread violence to U.S.
The drug violence that has left about 4,000 people dead in Mexico this year also is leaving a trail of slayings, kidnappings and other crimes in at least 195 U.S. cities, including Seattle, according to federal authorities.

By Richard A. Serrano and Sam Quinones

Los Angeles Times


SAN DIEGO — The drug violence that has left about 4,000 people dead in Mexico this year also is leaving a trail of slayings, kidnappings and other crimes in at least 195 U.S. cities, including Seattle, according to federal authorities.

The involvement of the top four Mexican drug-trafficking organizations in distribution and money-laundering on U.S. soil has brought a war once dismissed as a foreign affair to the doorstep of local communities.

Residents in Lilburn, Ga., an Atlanta suburb, awoke to the trans-border crime wave in July, when federal and state police officers surrounded a two-story colonial home, ordered neighbors to lock their doors and flushed out three men described as members of a Mexican drug cartel. One was captured after he tried to slip down a storm drain. Another was caught in the ivy in Pete Bogerd's backyard, two doors away.

"It blew us away," Bogerd said. "I didn't know we had that many cops."

Police later hauled out a 31-year-old Dominican who for nearly a week had been chained and tortured inside the basement, allegedly for not paying a $300,000 drug debt.

Several dozen suspects since have been charged with moving drugs and money for Mexican traffickers through Atlanta, which has emerged as an important hub for narcotics markets in the East.

Few regions of the nation have been immune — even Anchorage reported activity by the Tijuana drug cartel led by the Arellano Felix family, according to federal law-enforcement agencies.

In suburban San Diego, six men believed to be part of a rogue faction of the Arellano Felix organization have been accused in connection with as many as a dozen murders and 20 kidnappings over a three-year span.

In October, three armed men disguised as police officers broke into a Las Vegas home, tied up a woman and her boyfriend and abducted her 6-year-old boy.

Authorities said the men were tied to a Mexican drug-smuggling operation and were trying to recoup proceeds allegedly stolen by the child's grandfather. The boy, Cole Puffinburger, was found unharmed three days later.

Federal authorities have charged his grandfather, Clemons Fred Tinnemeyer, with racketeering, after he allegedly mailed $60,000, believed to be drug proceeds, from Mississippi to Nevada. Police continue to search for the kidnappers.

In September, authorities announced that 175 alleged members of Mexico's Gulf cartel had been rounded up across the country and abroad. Of those, 43 had been active in the Atlanta area, they said.

All told, authorities in that 18-month investigation have arrested 507 people and seized more than $60 million in cash, 16,000 kilograms of cocaine, half a ton of methamphetamine, 19 pounds of heroin and 51 pounds of marijuana.

In a separate operation, federal authorities in Atlanta last month announced indictments against 41 people they said were trafficking drugs and laundering money for Mexican cartels. Among those were a former deputy sheriff from Texas who was stopped on a Georgia highway with nearly $1 million in cash in his pickup.

The footprints of Mexican smuggling operations are on all but two states, Vermont and West Virginia, according to federal reports. Mexican organizations affiliated with the so-called Federation were identified in 82 cities, mostly in the Southwest, according to an April report by the National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC), an arm of the Justice Department.

Elements of the Juárez cartel were identified in at least 44 cities, from West Texas to Minneapolis. Gulf cartel affiliates were operating in at least 43 cities from South Texas to Buffalo, N.Y. And the Tijuana cartel, active in at least 20 U.S. cities, is extending its network from San Diego to Seattle and Anchorage.

Many cities, including Seattle, showed evidence of multiple cartels, according to federal, state and local law enforcement.

Already this year, federal agents in Western Washington have taken down two drug-distribution rings with ties to cartels in Mexico, according to court records.

In May, Drug Enforcement Administration agents arrested 17 people connected to a cocaine-distribution ring in Burien. The ring was based out of a Mexican restaurant and was moving as much as 36 pounds of cocaine a month, said Arnold Moorin, the special agent in charge of the DEA's Seattle field office. Agents also seized more than $200,000 cash and guns in the raid.

In September, Moorin's agents "dismantled" a large-scale drug operation tied to the Sinaloa cartel, seizing $1 million in cash, more than 150 pounds of cocaine and 30 pounds of methamphetamine. The ring had been distributing drugs in Idaho and Washington for years, according to agents.

Chuck Miller, an NDIC spokesman, said it remained difficult to determine why and how the cartels chose specific urban regions.

"It could be one of them may know someone in one part of the country and have established routes for up there," Miller said. "It could be geographic locations that are operating in Mexico or adjacent to other areas. Or there could be affiliations with individuals residing in specific locations."

In one case in San Diego, a rogue faction of the Arellano Felix operation moved into Southern California in 2002 and began kidnapping and shaking down people believed to be working as smugglers and launderers for Mexican traffickers.

Officers believe the group, known as Los Palillos, or the Toothpicks, killed a dozen people, committed as many as 20 kidnappings and trafficked methamphetamine to Kansas City, Mo., to finance its war with the cartel in Tijuana — all from a base in San Diego County.

The group was shut down by authorities last year.

Cartel members also have pleaded guilty in federal court this year as part of a murder-for-hire and kidnapping ring that stretched from the Rio Grande to North Texas.

Several men and two teenage boys on this side of the border were killed as part of a war that pitted the Gulf cartel against the Sinaloa cartel over the lucrative drug trafficking to North Texas and beyond. Hit men were paid in drugs and cash to help carry out the slayings, according to documents.

Seattle Times staff reporter Mike Carter contributed to this report.

This post has been edited by GangstersInc on Jan 22 2009, 03:07 PM

Drug cartels allegedly bribing way into courtrooms
The Associated Press
2008-12-07 22:14:56.0
Current rank: Not ranked

MCALLEN, Texas - The case of a South Texas paralegal who allegedly leaked information to members of a violent drug cartel is highlighting fears that smuggling networks are using bribes to reach into the U.S. halls of justice.

Federal authorities allege that Joel Carcano Jr., a college-educated paralegal, unlawfully provided confidential court information to the Texas Syndicate drug mafia. Carcano maintains his innocence and the government has not given detailed information about the alleged leak.

But the case underscores the threat posed by violent gang members who are willing to bribe their way inside the U.S. justice system, according to The (McAllen) Monitor, which reported on the case in Sunday's editions.

"There's a lot of money in the drug business," said Jack Wolfe, a criminal defense attorney and former federal prosecutor. "Sometimes, I think the temptation may be too much for some people."

Corruption within the legal profession in the United States is not commonplace, but over the past decade there have been instances of malfeasance among a small group of probation officers, lawyers and court staff.

A probation officer who worked in the federal courthouse in McAllen pleaded guilty in April to taking $5,000 in bribes to provide sealed records to an undercover agent. The agent was posing as a member of a Mexico-based smuggling operation.

In the late 1990s, there were also corruption cases in South Texas involving a former assistant district attorney and a juror selected in a drug trafficking case.

"It's always been a bit of an issue, but never a chronic problem," said Eric Reed, who prosecuted a jury-tampering case as a former assistant U.S. attorney. "But situations like these are always a concern - especially where violence is already a big part of the allegations."

In the Carcano case, prosecutors allege that the paralegal helped the violent Texas Syndicate identify one its own gangsters as a source of information being provided to the government. A grand jury last year linked members of the cartel to six murders and multiple drug deals over the past eight years.

Carcano worked as a legal assistant for the firm representing gang member Marcelino "Mars" Rodriguez Torres, who then decided to cooperate with federal authorities. Rodriguez' body, shot and badly burned, turned up weeks after his decision to become a federal witness.

Carcano's lawyer, Ralph Martinez, denies his client sought to help drug traffickers by giving them confidential information.

"(Carcano) was manipulated and used," he said, according to The Monitor. "He's not in a gang. He's college-educated. He's got small children. He's not the type of person that's going to get himself involved with these types of people."

Martinez also said the information about Rodriguez' participation in the case as a witness was available in a plea agreement and could have been easily obtained by reviewing public documents.

Laura Zuniga: Mexican Beauty Queen Arrested In Gun-Filled Truck

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/12/23/l...u_n_153217.html

http://www1.pressdemocrat.com/article/20081224/API/812242233

Killers carve 'Z' in Mexican drug war

Agence France-Presse
First Posted 11:06:00 12/27/2008

Filed Under: Illegal drugs, Crime


MEXICO CITY -- A major Mexican drug lord's ex-fiancée was killed and a rival drug cartel carved its signature on her body, local press reported Friday, citing official sources.

A body found on December 17 in a car trunk was identified as that of Zulema Yulia Hernandez, former companion of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, the leader of the powerful Sinaloa cartel who escaped prison in 2001.

The letter "Z" was carved into her skin and marked several times elsewhere on her body, in what is believed to be the signature of the "Zetas" gang, an armed branch of the Gulf cartel at war with the Sinaloa cartel.

The group was created in the 1990s by retired army officers and defectors.

No official confirmation could be obtained midday Friday.

Hernandez, 35, met Guzman in prison, after she was also sentenced for drug trafficking with the Sinaloa cartel.

Feuding drug cartels have engaged in a brutal battle for dominance, with more than 5,300 people killed this year across Mexico.

The rampant violence comes despite the deployment of some 36,000 troops across the country.

Mexican Drug Traffickers Now ‘Greatest Organized Crime Threat’ to U.S.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
By Ryan Byrnes

Marijuana plants being grown in a house in Tijuana, Mexico, on Thursday, Jan. 15, 2009. Special forces soldiers found some 170 marijuana plants and detained a suspect. (AP Photo/Guillermo Arias)

(CNSNews.com) - Mexican drug trafficking organizations are now the greatest organized crime threat to the United States, according to a recent report released by the U.S. Department of Justice.

The National Drug Threat Assessment for 2009, released last month by the Justice Department’s National Drug Intelligence Center, says Mexican drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) operate in more than 230 cities across the United States.

These drug syndicates not only smuggle drugs across the U.S.-Mexico border, they also produce drugs here in the United States. Their smuggled products include cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines and marijuana, and their domestically produced products include methamphetamines and marijuana.

The power of the Mexican DTOS in the U.S. is growing as they expand into new markets, the threat assessment said.

“Mexican DTOs represent the greatest organized crime threat to the United States,” said the threat assessment. “The influence of Mexican DTOs over domestic drug trafficking is unrivaled. In fact, intelligence estimates indicate a vast majority of the cocaine available in U.S. drug markets is smuggled by Mexican DTOs across the U.S.–Mexico border.

“Mexican DTOs control drug distribution in most U.S. cities, and they are gaining
strength in markets that they do not yet control,” the threat assessment said.

“Mexican DTOs control a greater portion of drug production, transportation and distribution than any other criminal group or DTO,” the assessment said. “Their extensive drug trafficking activities in the United States generate billions of dollars in illicit proceeds annually.”

The Mexican groups often work with urban gangs and outlaw motorcycle groups (OMGs) inside the United States. “Mexican drug traffickers affiliated with the Sinaloa, Gulf, Juárez, and Tijuana Cartels maintain working relationships with at least 20 street gangs, prison gangs, and OMGs that operate in urban and suburban communities throughout the country,” said the threat assessment.

The activities of the Mexican drug syndicates, other drug-crime organizations and their customers result in a wide array of crimes.

“The violence, intimidation, theft and financial crimes carried out by DTOs, criminal groups, gangs and drug users in the United States pose a significant threat to our nation,” the threat assessment concluded.

More than 1.8 million drug-related arrests took place in the U.S. in 2007 and about 52 percent of federal prisoners were sentenced for drug-related offenses.

The marijauna is not a problem, how they deal it and kill over it is. Also it gives them a way in to other crimes. It's not just Mexico, sooner or later they will unite with Salvadorians, Columbians, Equadorians, and other Latin gangs. In the late 1980's New York was hit with a massive, large scale, shoplifing and truck theft crime wave, commited by a group of gangs from Equador. They were pulling up to trucks and just unloading them in braod daylight, often in sight of driver of truck, who was too outnumbered to do anything. This was going on right in Manhattan. Everyone on street not having cell phones back then helped the thieves. Newpapers buried story after Latin groups in New York complained. That was 20 years ago, think how much those groups have grown since?

Top Mexico cops charged with favouring drug cartel
MEXICO CITY, Jan 25 – President Felipe Calderon’s war on drug trafficking has led to his own doorstep, with the arrest of a dozen high-ranking officials with alleged ties to Mexico’s most powerful drug gang, the Sinaloa Cartel.

The US praises Calderon for rooting out corruption at the top. But critics say the arrests reveal nothing more than a timeworn government tactic of protecting one cartel and cracking down on others.

Operation Clean House comes just as the US is giving Mexico its first installment of $400 million in equipment and technology to fight drugs. Most will go to a beefed-up federal police agency run by the same people whose top aides have been arrested as alleged Sinaloa spies.

“If there is anything worse than a corrupt and ill-equipped cop, it is a corrupt and well-equipped cop,” said criminal justice expert Jorge Chabat, who studies the drug trade.

US drug enforcement agents say they have no qualms about sending support to Mexico.

“We’ve been working with the Mexican government for decades at the DEA,” said Garrison Courtney, spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration. “Obviously, we ensure that the individuals we work with are vetted.”

Agents who conduct raids have long suspected Mexican government ties to Sinaloa, and rival drug gangs have advertised the alleged connection in banners hung from freeways. While raids against the rival Gulf cartel have netted suspects, those against Sinaloa almost always came up empty – or worse, said Agent Oscar Granados Salero of the Federal Investigative Agency, Mexico’s equivalent of the FBI.

“Whenever we were trying to serve arrest warrants, they were already waiting for us, and a lot of colleagues lost their lives that way,” Salero said.

The US government estimates that the cartels smuggle $15 billion to $20 billion in drug money across the border each year.

Over the last five months, officials from the Mexican Attorney General’s office, the federal police and even Mexico’s representatives to Interpol have been detained on suspicion of acting as spies for Sinaloa or its one-time ally, the Beltran Leyva gang. An officer who served in Calderon’s presidential guard was detained in December on suspicion of spying for Beltran Leyva.

Gerardo Garay, formerly the acting federal police chief, is accused of protecting the Beltran Leyva brothers and stealing money from a mansion during an October drug raid. Former drug czar Noe Ramirez, who was supposed to serve as point man in Calderon’s anti-drug fight, is accused of taking $450,000 from Sinaloa.

Most of such tips are coming from a Mexican federal agent who infiltrated the US embassy for the Beltran Leyva drug cartel. No such infiltrators have been found for the Gulf cartel, which controls most drug shipments in eastern Mexico and Central America. Sinaloa controls Pacific and western routes.

The DEA’s Courtney agrees that there has been a greater crackdown on the Gulf Cartel in both the US and Mexico, with more than 600 members of the gang arrested in September. But he declined to answer questions about Mexico favoring Sinaloa.

Calderon has long acknowledged corruption as an obstacle to his offensive, which involved sending more than 20,000 soldiers to battle drug trafficking throughout the country. The US aid plan includes technology aimed at improving the way Mexico vets and supervises police.

The president vows to create a “new generation of police,” consolidating agencies under Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna, who heads all federal law enforcement.

That’s what worries Granados Salero and other agents. So many of Garcia Luna’s associates are under suspicion of Sinaloa ties that many wonder how he could not have known.

Calderon has publicly backed Garcia Luna, calling him “a man of great capacity.”

“Obviously, if there was any doubt about his honesty, or any evidence that would call into question his honesty, he would certainly no longer be the secretary of public safety,” the president said recently.

But some see the alleged Sinaloa ties with Garcia Luna’s lieutenants as an old tactic used widely under the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ruled Mexico for 71 years with a tight fist. Officials in the past preferred to deal with one strong cartel rather than many warring gangs – what Calderon faces now. More than 5,300 people died in drug-related slayings in 2008.

“I fear that Secretary Garcia Luna ... is working on the idea that once one cartel consolidates itself as the winner, that is, Sinaloa, the violence is going to drop,” said organised crime expert Edgardo Buscaglia, who tracks federal police arrests and has studied law enforcement agencies’ written reports.

Garcia Luna has denied being involved in corruption. He has acknowledged that authorities in the past chose the path of managing cartels. But in an interview with the newspaper El Sol, he said that approach only strengthens the gangs in the long run.

Others say the high number of Sinaloa infiltrators is a reflection of the two cartels’ very different styles.

The Gulf cartel is led by military-trained hit men so violent that they reportedly planned to attack even US law enforcement agencies.

“They don’t necessarily try to build networks of corruption. They prefer networks of intimidation,” said Monte Alejandro Rubido, who leads Mexico’s multi-agency National Security System.

Sinaloa, on the other hand, appears to use bribery and infiltration at least as much as its gunmen. Cartel leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman bribed his way out of a Mexican prison in 2001, provoking suspicions the government was on his side.

Many Mexicans worry about giving so much money and power to a still corrupt force. Of more than 56,000 local and state police officers evaluated between January and October last year, fewer than half met the recommended qualifications, Calderon reported to Congress in early December. No similar numbers are available for federal police.

Agents like Granados Salero wonder who is in charge of police integrity.

“We agents find out about a lot of things,” he said, “but who can we turn to?” – AP

Corrupt U.S. dealers arm Mexican drug cartels
Authorities estimate 95 percent of cartels' weapons illegally smuggled

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28880483/

U.S. Government Crisis: Mexico Drug Cartels: Are they Number#1 Organized Crime Threat in America?

Part one of a continuing series on U.S. and International Drug Trafficking.

By Clarence Walker, Investigative Crime Journalist

The U.S. government is on the defensive. There's a major crisis threatening America's security. This diabolical threat do not involve foreign terrorists, chinese spys, Al-Qaeda; nor the Russian Mafia. This unrelenting threat comes from major narco gangsters known throughout the U.S. and South America as Mexican drug traffickers. On December 15th 2008, the U.S. government declared that Mexican drug traffickers who join forces with other street-level gangs, the Italian Mafia, and other crime groups to smuggle drugs across the border have become the biggest organized crime threat to the National Security in America. "Mexican drug organizations represent the greatest organized crime threat in America", the report stated. "The influence of Mexican drug trafficking is totally unrivaled".

"In an age when we are increasingly concerned about the spread of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction....it is imperative that we support and strenghten government institutions, particularly those of our immediate neighbors", says DEA intelligence Chief Anthony Placido. As Colombia's Medellin and Cali Cartels slowly diminished from power the Mexican drug syndicates now dominate the drug trafficking industry.

National Drug Intelligence Center, further reported, Mexican National Drug Intelligence Center, further reported, Mexican cartels are "the predominate smugglers, transporters and wholesale ditributors of cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamines and heroin into the United States".

It is no secret, government officials say, "that drug cartels based in Mexico are the most dangerous and politically connected crime syndicates in the Western hemisphere and eventually will spread their power bases across the globe". In addition to drug trafficking violence criminal groups in Mexico has kidnapped dozens of American citizens for ransom.

These citizens were visiting the country as tourists and in some cases they were killed if no money paid on time for the ransom and the FBI along with Mexico authorities have failed to locate several Americans kidnapped by criminal organizations.

FBI Director Robert Mueller described Mexican cartels, and other gangs based in the U.S. as "more organized, more violent and widespread than ever".

The Department of Justice estimated there are approximately 30,000 gangs with more than 800,000 members in the U.S. that pose a growing threat to the safety and security of Americans.

Mexico Drug Underworld

According to Council on Foreign Relations, DEA, FBI, and numerous newspapers stories, Mexico's drug cartels has waged a fierce, well organized battle with the Mexican government.

When Mexican President Felipe Calderon took office in 2006, his first order of command was to utilize thousands of federal troops to crack down on drug trafficking and the violence connected with the illegal industry. Despite Calderon's hard-line approach dead bodies kept piling up.

For example, in 2007, more than 2,500 drug-related deaths in Mexico were reported and in 2008 the total increased to 5,300 - more than all the deaths reported from the Iraq war- as the cartels engaged in ongoing battles amongst each other for what authorities say is an approximate $15-$30 billion a year drug trade.

Murders and ongoing gun battles in the Mexico drug trade is nonetheless a symbol of gangsters carrying out dirty business. Experts and law enforcement have applauded judicial reforms imposed by the Mexican government as a positive step in the right direction, but warily cautioned that reforms must take time to be effective.

When asked if his country had become a 'failed state', Mexico's Ambassador to the U.S., Arturo Sarukhan, told reporters recently that "such a characterization was a very irresponsible remark".

He insisted that "corruption is being challenged and infiltrators into law enforcement and government agencies are being rooted out."

Cocaine Trafficking

Approximately 90 percent of the cocaine smuggled into the United States is trafficked through Mexico, according to the State Department's 2008 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report.

Mexico drug trade is exclusively controled by cartels along the southeast coast. Three major groups identified are the Sinaloa Cartel, the Gulf Cartel, and the Tijuana Cartel. Other cartels are:(1) Los Zetas (2) Beltran Leyva (3) Carillo Fuentes aka Juarez cartel. (4) Arellano Felix organization Of 41 major drug trafficking organizations based in Latin America identified by DEA(Drug Enforcement Organization)16 are located in Mexico state. Other factors DEA reported are: (1) Mexican Cartels "control drug distribution in most U.S. cities and currently gaining strength in markets they do not yet control", the report discovered. (2) Mexican Cartels supplied drugs to approximately 230 U.S. cities between January 2006 and April 2008. (3) U.S. officials also alarmed about illegal meth use, although importation restrictions stemmed the meth flow from Mexico in 2007 and 2008. (4) Organized Mexican and Colombian drug traffickers earned between $18 billion and $39 billion in wholesale profits.

Drug Trade Violence

Violence in Mexico's drug underworld reached epidemic levels beginning in 2006 and thereafter the carnage of violence reached its highest peak. Cartel gangsters are notoriously known for decapitating the heads of rivals and informants and innocent bystanders are often killed in crossfires.

Other sadistic tactics the narco gangsters use to murder victims are: Physical beatings, torture, bodies dumped on streets or vacant lots; bodies that are strangled, including multiple gunshot wounds to the body and head; decapitated heads placed on fence posts for public inspection and bodies dipped in acid.

On September 6, 2006, masked gunmen barged into a nightclub in the Michoacan area, firing guns into the ceiling. And in a grisly display of intimidation the gangsters rolled five decapitated heads onto the dance floor. They left a sign among the bloody carnage that said: "The family doesn't kill for money. It doesn't kill women or innocent people, only those who deserve to die. Know this is divine justice".

In other acts of sadistic violence the drug cartels utilized tactics oftenly used by foreign terrorists by using a video to record masked killers cutting off the heads of captured informants and rivals. Once the recording of the decapitations were done the killers would distribute the videos to the public obviously to invoke fear into rival cartels and government officials.

Government Crackdown

Upon taking office in December, 2006, President Felipe Calderon employed approximately thirty thousand troops to work with the police in nine states, including Michoacan, Guerrero, and the Golden Triangle of Sinaloa, Durango, and Chihuahua.

These military groups eradicated crops, developed intelligence, conducted raids, interrogated suspects and recovered tons of drugs and related contrabands.

These efforts, according to experts, "succeeded in generating a temporary sense of improved citizen security", writes Maureen Meyer of the Washington office on Latin America in a 2007 briefing paper.

Ultimately, Meyers pointed out, such efforts have faltered in the face of basic laws of drug supply and demand", she said. Government officials has reported signs of progress, but violence is still on the rise and high-level government officials are targeted.

Among thousands killed in the drug-related war approximately 450 government officials were casulties including police officers, soldiers, prosecutors, and the assistants to elected government officials.

According to a 2008 poll in Mexico's City's Reforma Newspaper, 53 percent of Mexicans think the government is losing the fight against the drug cartels. It took decades for the law to destroy the American Mafia. Lets hope the same fate will someday destroy drug traffickers.

http://www.newcriminologist.com/article.asp?nid=2112

Mexican drug violence spills over into the US
By ALICIA A. CALDWELL – 16 hours ago
AP

Just as government officials had feared, the drug violence raging in Mexico is spilling over into the United States.

U.S. authorities are reporting a spike in killings, kidnappings and home invasions connected to Mexico's murderous cartels. And to some policymakers' surprise, much of the violence is happening not in towns along the border, where it was assumed the bloodshed would spread, but a considerable distance away, in places such as Phoenix and Atlanta.

Investigators fear the violence could erupt elsewhere around the country because the Mexican cartels are believed to have set up drug-dealing operations all over the U.S., in such far-flung places as Anchorage, Alaska; Boston; and Sioux Falls, S.D.

"The violence follows the drugs," said David Cuthbertson, agent in charge of the FBI's office in the border city of El Paso, Texas.

The violence takes many forms: Drug customers who owe money are kidnapped until they pay up. Cartel employees who don't deliver the goods or turn over the profits are disciplined through beatings, kidnappings or worse. And drug smugglers kidnap illegal immigrants in clashes with human smugglers over the use of secret routes from Mexico.

So far, the violence is nowhere near as grisly as the mayhem in Mexico, which has witnessed beheadings, assassinations of police officers and soldiers, and mass killings in which the bodies were arranged to send a message. But law enforcement officials worry the violence on this side could escalate.

"They are capable of doing about anything," said Rusty Payne, a Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman in Washington. "When you are willing to chop heads off, put them in an ice chest and drop them off at a police precinct, or roll a head into a disco, put beheadings on YouTube as a warning," very little is off limits.

In an apartment near Birmingham, Ala., police found five men with their throats slit in August. They had apparently been tortured with electric shocks before being killed in a murder-for-hire orchestrated by a Mexican drug organization over a drug debt of about $400,000.

In Phoenix, 150 miles north of the Mexican border, police have reported a sharp increase in kidnappings and home invasions, with about 350 each year for the last two years, and say the majority were committed at the behest of the Mexican drug gangs.

In June, heavily armed men stormed a Phoenix house and fired randomly, killing one person. Police believe it was the work of Mexican drug organizations.

Authorities in Atlanta are also seeing an increase in drug-related kidnappings tied to Mexican cartels. Estimates of how many such crimes are being committed are hard to come by because many victims are connected to the cartels and unwilling to go to the police, said Rodney G. Benson, DEA agent in charge in Atlanta.

Agents said they have rarely seen such brutality in the U.S. since the "Miami Vice" years of the 1980s, when Colombian cartels had the corner on the cocaine market in Florida.

Last summer, Atlanta-area police found a Dominican man who had been beaten, bound, gagged and chained to a wall in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood in Lilburn, Ga. The 31-year-old Rhode Island resident owed $300,000 to Mexico's Gulf Cartel, Benson said. The Gulf Cartel, based in Matamoros just south of the Texas border, is one of the most ruthless of the Mexican organizations that deal drugs such as cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine and heroin.

"He was shackled to a wall and one suspect had an AK-47. The guy was in bad shape," Benson said. "I have no doubt in my mind if that ransom wasn't paid, he was going to be killed."

In July, Atlanta-area police shot and killed a suspected kidnapper while he was trying to pick up a $2 million ransom owed to his cartel bosses, Benson said.

State and federal governments have sent millions of dollars to local law enforcement along the Mexican border to help fend off spillover drug crime. But investigators believe Arizona and Atlanta are seeing the worst of the violence because they are major drug distribution hubs thanks to their webs of interstate highways.

In fact, drug officials have dubbed Atlanta "the new Southwest border," said Jack Killorin, a former federal drug agent and director of the Atlanta region's High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area task force.

El Paso, population 600,000, is only a quarter-mile away from Mexico's Ciudad Juarez, which has seen open gun battles and 1,700 murders in the last year. But El Paso remains one of America's safest cities, something Cuthbertson said is probably a result of the huge law enforcement presence in town, including thousands of Border Patrol and customs agents.

In the past year, more than 5,000 people have been killed across Mexico in a power struggle among Mexico's drug cartels and ferocious fighting between them and the Mexican government. The cartels have established operations in at least 230 U.S. cities, according to the Justice Department's National Drug Intelligence Center.

Payne said the U.S. and Mexico are working together to pressure the warring cartels. Payne cited the extradition of high-level drug suspects — four members of the Arellano Felix cartel in Tijuana were brought to the U.S. in December — and the capture or killings of several other top cartel leaders across Mexico in the past year.

"We have to make sure that we attack these criminal organizations at every level so that we are safer not only in Mexico and on the Southwest border, but here in the rest of the country," Payne said.

While some Americans may feel victimized by the spillover of violence, others are contributing to it. Americans provide 95 percent of the weapons used by the cartel, according to U.S. authorities. And Americans are the cartels' best customers, sending an estimated $28.5 billion in drug-sale proceeds across the Mexico border each year.

Mexico gun fights leave 21 dead

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/7882653.stm

Published: 2009/02/11 10:25:19 GMT

Reputed Mexican druglord extradited to Colorado
By Howard Pankratz
The Denver Post

Posted: 02/27/2009 11:40:54 AM MST
Updated: 02/27/2009 03:09:09 PM MST


The former leader of a Mexican drug cartel has been extradited from Mexico to Denver to face charges, including racketeering and narcotics trafficking, the U.S. Justice Department said today.

Miguel Caro Quintero was the purported leader of the now-defunct Sonora Cartel, a Mexico-based drug-trafficking organization that funneled tons of marijuana into the United States during the 1980s and 1990s, according to federal investigators.

Caro Quintero made his initial appearance in U.S. District Court in Denver late Thursday.

A federal indictment alleges that the cartel funneled marijuana from Mexico to a farm near Longmont and a house in Westminster, which the cartel used as marijuana storage and distribution facilities. The cartel also allegedly bought numerous vehicles from Colorado dealerships, which they used to transport the marijuana.

Large quantities of marijuana were distributed by the ring in Colorado, California, Illinois and New York, according to federal investigators.

At one point, said investigators, the cartel had more than $1.5 million in its possession in Boulder.

Caro Quintero and his older brother, Rafael Caro Quintero, were identified as significant foreign narcotics traffickers under The Kingpin Act in June 2000.

Prior to his extradition, Caro Quintero had served a prison sentence for drug-related crimes in Mexico.

Rafael Caro Quintero was accused of being the mastermind behind the kidnapping and murder of Drug Enforcement Agency Special Agent Enrique Camarena in 1985 and was prosecuted by the Mexican government.

"The extradition of former kingpin Miguel Caro Quintero, who reigned with impunity for too long, is a victory for the citizens of both the United States and Mexico," said DEA Acting Administrator Michele Leonhart. "After serving time in a Mexican prison, Caro Quintero will now answer for his crimes with the one consequence kingpins fear most — extradition to the United States."

The case in Colorado is being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Denver.

Caro Quintero also faces charges in Arizona.

From The Times
March 11, 2009

Mexican Army seizes drug trade suspects at Tijuana mob dinner
James Bone in New York
An army raid on a banquet for alleged gangsters scooped up 58 suspects including the musicians and a key figure in Mexico's deadly drug wars.

Ángel Jácome Gamboa, a lieutenant for a top crime boss battling for control of drug-trafficking routes into the United States, was among the people rounded up at a banquet hall in the border town of Tijuana.

Police accuse Mr Gamboa of killing 12 police officers in the Rosarito Beach resort, a popular spring break destination.

Mexico has been gripped by drug violence as rival cartels fight for control of the lucrative trade. Drug violence claimed an estimated 6,290 lives last year, double the toll in 2007. .

Since taking office in December 2006 President Calderón has sent almost 40,000 troops to the 12 worst-hit of Mexico's 31 states, particularly along the US border.

The operation has failed to stem the violence, which has been marked by dozens of beheadings and mutilated bodies dumped by the roadside.

Tijuana, just across the border from the US city of San Diego, has been particularly hard hit because it is on the route into California, where drugs command a higher price.

The city recorded 843 murders in 2008, more than double the 376 in the much larger city of Los Angeles.

Police blamed the surging murder rate on a battle between Mexico's Arellano Félix drug cartel and a breakaway faction led by Teodoro García Simental, known as El Teo.

Police arrested recently a “disposal expert” for the El Teo faction who allegedly got rid of hundreds of bodies by dissolving the corpses in vats of acid. The suspect, Santiago Meza López, who received a $600-a-week (£440) retainer, was dubbed El Pozolero, or “The Stewmaker”.

This month the US Justice Department took the unusual step of urging college students to avoid Tijuana and nearby Rosarito Beach during next month's spring break.

The US Joint Forces Command has warned that Mexico is at risk of rapid and sudden collapse. “Any descent by Mexico into chaos would demand an American response based on the serious implications for homeland security,” the Pentagon study said.

The Tijuana raid on Sunday was one of the biggest army-led operations in Mexico's drug wars in recent months.

Police said that Mr Gamboa, the reputed crime boss of the Rosarito Beach area, was found with a gold-plated 9mm pistol that had an image of Mexico's Death Saint on one side and the words “El Teo” on the other.

The raid led to the arrest of eight state police agents - including two at the party - who are suspected of working for the drug gang.

The operation also led to the release of a kidnap victim, with an amputated little finger, who was being held at a safe house.

Violence continued to rage elsewhere in Mexico, however, with the discovery of five male heads in separate ice coolers near a road in the western state of Jalisco yesterday.

The police chief of Pungarabato in the Pacific coast state of Guerrero was shot repeatedly at the wheel of his red Mustang on Monday and five other men were also gunned down in the mountainous zone known as the Tierra Caliente.

A police commander in the southern state of Michoacán was also shot dead outside the police headquarters in the city of Zamora. The commander had transferred to Zamora from the violence-ridden city or Uruapan just two days earlier.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/worl...m=1236861137783

Mexico's most wanted man Joaquin 'Shorty' Guzman makes Forbes Rich List
From correspondents in Mexico City

THE Mexican Government has condemned Forbes Magazine for putting the country's most wanted man, a violent drug lord, on its annual list of the world's richest people.

Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman made the prestigious business magazine's list for the first time on Wednesday, sharing the 701st spot with $US1 billion in assets. The amount was based on his estimated share of drug shipments to the United States.

Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora accused US-based Forbes of coming to the defense of a criminal and said it was "deplorable" for the publication to compare Guzman with honest and law-abiding business people.

Guzman, who is just 5 feet tall (1.55m), escaped from prison in 2001 and set off a wave of killings across Mexico in an attempt to dominate the country's highly lucrative drug trade into the United States.

"I will never accept that a criminal be lauded as someone important, even by a magazine such as Forbes," Medina Mora said.

In an apparent reference to Guzman's inclusion in the Forbes rankings, Mexican President Felipe Calderon accused foreign magazines of "praising criminals".

Forbes was not immediately available for comment.

The magazine calculated that Guzman and his cartel likely grossed 20 percent of proceeds laundered by Mexican and Colombian drug traffickers smuggling into the United States in 2008 - enough to give him a fortune of at least $1 billion.

But Mr Mora dismissed the figure. "Forbes' work is baseless and lacks all methodological rigor. It is utterly speculative," he said.

Guzman, 51, believed by officials to change his cell phone each day to avoid tracking, is often compared to the late Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, whom Forbes said amassed a $3 billion fortune before he was killed by police in 1993.

Guzman's ability to elude capture for eight years is an embarrassment to the Mexican Government, which is battling to stamp out a wave of drug-related violence that has spread across the country.

Some 7000 people have been killed since the start of last year as rival gangs fight each other and Mexican security forces.

Guzman's enforcers from the cartel in the Pacific state of Sinaloa are considered to be among the most vicious hitmen.


Rich ... Joaquin "Short" Guzman, pictured in 1993, is believed to change his cell phone each day to avoid tracking

El Chapo

Attached Image (Click thumbnail to expand)

Joaquin Guzman Loera: Billionaire Drug Lord

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8...1884982,00.html

Tijuana: Caught in the cocaine crossfire

Drug wars are ravaging northern Mexico, leaving 6,500 dead. Worst-hit is Tijuana, once a top spot for American tourists and now the scene of sickening violence. Guy Adams reports from the front line


Wednesday, 18 March 2009


AP

Santiago Meza is arrested by federal agents in January. Number 20 on the FBI most wanted list, Meza allegedly helped a drug cartel dispose of victims by dissolving them in acid


Jose Luis Coca was cooking tacos on a corner of Insurgentes, one of the main roads into central Tijuana, when the shooting began. Four carloads of gangsters, with AR15 assault rifles, opened fire on a rival gang gathered in front of his stall. Within minutes, 400 rounds had racketed the night sky, and 16 people lay dead or dying.


Mr Coca survived by lying face down on the pavement, and crossing his fingers. His taco stand still bears witness to the lucky escape, eight bullet holes in its pockmarked frame. "One missed my head by maybe 10 centimetres," he says. "It went so close I could feel it. Every day since, I thank God for protecting me."

That was in September. Since then, Mr Coca has done an awful lot of thanking God. In November, two men were murdered outside a seafood restaurant 100 yards away, this time in daylight. Last month, he saw the driver of a Ford Explorer dragged from his vehicle at the local traffic lights, frogmarched to the nearby river, and dispatched with a single shot to the back of the head.

Such tales have become common in Tijuana, a ramshackle border city on the front line of a bloody drug war sweeping Mexico's northern frontier. Violence between rival groups of organised criminals has been bubbling there for years, but has now reached epidemic levels. To the consternation of the world, a staggering 6,500 people were murdered in Mexico last year, including hundreds of soldiers and policemen.

Many of the dead have been decapitated, or publicly tortured. Hundreds of innocent bystanders, like Mr Coca, have been caught in the crossfire. "I've been working this spot for 20 years," he says. "Lately, I've learned not to mess with anybody. When people come here drunk, and ask for free food, I just say, 'OK, you can pay next time'. You get into an argument with these guys, they'll just kill you. This is the reality of life now: say the wrong thing to the wrong person, and you're a dead man."

The violence has left Mexico, a nation that boasts the world's twelfth largest economy, in danger of being declared a "failed state". Tourism, one of its largest industries, has collapsed. Whole regions are under the control of drug cartels, and hobbled by rampant corruption. Two months ago, the US Joint Forces Command declared that, after Pakistan, it was the world's most likely nation to suffer a "rapid and sudden collapse".

Last week, President Barack Obama had a request from the Texas Governor, Rick Perry, to station National Guard troops along the border. On Friday, the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, said she was planning an urgent diplomatic visit, to discuss the soaring violence with the government of President Felipe Calderon.

Barry McCaffery, a former "drug tsar" for Bill Clinton, said: "The dangerous and worsening problems... fundamentally threaten US national security. We cannot afford to have a 'narco state' as a neighbour."

Tijuana's problems stem from an accident of geography. A sprawling, seedy, and crowded city jammed up against the US border at the top of Baja Mexico, it represents prime real estate for anyone wishing to smuggle some of the 350 metric tonnes of cocaine that find their way into the United States each year. Since 2006, rival gangs have been battling for control of these drug routes. They are well-funded – the cocaine industry in the US is worth $5.5bn (£3.9bn) a year – ruthless, and care little for human life. More than 800 people were killed on the streets of Tijuana last year, from a population of 1.5 million. This gave the city a worse murder rate than Baghdad.

The killings are often sickening. A few weeks back, the decapitated heads of three policemen were left in an icebox by the side of a road. Days earlier, police near Tijuana had arrested Santiago Meza, a local drug baron's "fixer" known as El Pozolero ["The Soupmaker"]. He confessed to having dissolved more than 300 murder victims in acid over nine years.

"In the past, the gangs had rules," says Victor Clark Alfaro, a local human rights lawyer. "They respected families. They didn't kill children. But those rules have changed. Now they don't respect anything. They'll kill anybody, and decapitate them, or cut the body, to send a message to society."

The breakdown in law and order stems from the 1980s and 1990s, when the US launched a crackdown on Colombian drug cartels, allowing Mexican syndicates to emerge in their place. Soon these groups controlled almost nine-tenths of America's entire supply of cocaine from South America. For many years, Mexico's cartels were largely left to get on with business, on the basis that they killed only their own kind. But the arrival of multi-party democracy to in 2000 – for 70 years, Mexico had been a one-party state – led to government crackdowns on their trade. These had some success. The Arellano Felix cartel, which for years controlled a north-west portion of the country, has lost most of its leaders, including, most recently, Eduardo Arellano Felix, one of the seven brothers who founded the organisation. He was captured in October, after a shootout at a house overlooking the city, which last week was still derelict, and riddled in bullet holes.

Unfortunately, when you arrest one drug baron, you do not kill off the trade. Instead, you create a vacancy, and a turf war. Most of the recent violence across Mexico, and in Tijuana in particular, has involved remnants of the Arellano Felix cartel battling rivals from the so-called Sinaloa syndicate, and Gulf Cartel, both keen to move in on the patch.

The impact of this war is visible throughout Tijuana, where army units patrol the streets day and night, and civilians think twice about venturing out after dark. In almost every neighbourhood, gangland territories are marked by shoes dangling from electricity wires hanging across streets.

"Three shoes stands for 'El Teo', who is from the Sinaloa family," says Jorge Ramos, a security guard at a bank outside the city's notorious red-light district. "Five means 'Felix'. Seven stands for 'Sinoloa'. You learn to read the signs. Ending up on the wrong street can mean trouble."

Efforts to halt the violence are not helped by rampant police corruption. The cartels, with their 2,500 per cent profit margins, are not short of bribe cash. Forbes magazine revealed that Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, head of the Sinaloa cartel and Mexico's most wanted man, was worth a cool $1bn, making him 701st in its league of the world's richest men.

Local politicians describe Tijuana's police as institutionally corrupt. "I'm firing about 400 of my 1,600 police officers," the city's mayor, Jose Reyes, said in a recent documentary, Narco War Next Door. "They failed a lie-detector test in which we specifically asked if they were involved in corruption related to organised crime."

Violence is also fuelled by a flow of guns and ammunition over the border from the US, from states such as Texas, where assault weapons can be sold to anyone passing a rudimentary background check. In a desperate effort to stem the tide, one of the army bases in central Tijuana offers to exchange illegal firearms for money or food, no questions asked.

And while the US consumers created the market for the drugs that has caused this war, US politicians are also unwittingly providing many of its footsoldiers. Every day, buses arrive in Tijuana carrying hundreds of illegal immigrants, rounded up for deportation from America. Impoverished and desperate, many are immediately recruited by cartels.

"These people have nothing to lose," says Victor Clark Alfaro, who works with deportees. "They speak English, and many were in gangs in the US, so they know the business of drugs and they have contacts on the US side, so they become a cheap labour force for organised crime."

It is not as if Tijuana is exactly brimming with other opportunities. Though only 25 of the city's 800-odd murder victims last year were classed as innocent bystanders, the US State Department has advised its citizens against travelling south of the border. US Marines at Camp Pendleton, a base north of San Diego, are banned from crossing the border on leave. This has crippled the local economy, which for years relied on free-spending Americans visiting to stock up on cheap liquor and pharmaceuticals. In Rosalito Beach, a resort containing a seedy mixture of tattoo parlours, hotels, and chemists, the streets are deserted, despite the imminent "Spring Break" which normally brings tens of thousands of visitors. "This is my livelihood," says Christian Roza, owner of Dulceria Ayala, a sweet store. "It's safe in this town. Look at the place. Have you seen anyone killed here?"

The Mexican government insists that it is winning the war on drugs, and is deeply critical of what it sees as sensationalist reporting by Western media and governments. President Felipe Calderon condemned Forbes for including "El Chapo" in its rich-list. "Magazines are not only attacking and lying about the situation in Mexico, but also praising criminals," he said.

But Mr Calderon's best hope may lie in simple economics. "Wars are expensive," says Bruce Bagley, an expert on drug-trafficking from the University of Miami. "The violence has made it more costly to run drugs over the Mexican border, so more cocaine is coming through Haiti or Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico. Mexico's share of the market is down from 90 per cent to nearer 65 per cent." Dr Bagley believes the drug war has three possible outcomes. "Either one cartel emerges and takes over everything, with the government turning a form of blind eye. Or there'll be an internal agreement between cartels to stop fighting. Or the cocaine industry totally atomises with drugs entering the US from different routes."

Whatever the ending, for Mexico's tourist guides and taco-stall owners alike, it cannot come soon enough.

Edwin Gonzalez
LA Foreign Policy Examiner

How the United States can help Mexico win the drug war without financial assistance (part 1 of 2)
March 19, 1:37 AM · 1 comment
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Mexican soldier on top of a man.
The United States could take two major steps to help the government of Mexico to fight the drug cartels without giving financial assistance that would do nothing.

The first is to reform the drug laws in the United States where the demand for illegal drugs and be effectively eliminated. The second is to curb the sales of weapons from the United States to Mexico.

These two steps can help prevent the Mexican government from becoming a failed state that could later spill across the border. In the first part of this series, I will focus primarily on drug laws.

The executive and the legislative branches of the United States should reform some of the drug laws in the United States. The government of Mexico blames the demand for drugs in the United States as one of the causes of the violence from the cartels, and they’re right. The United States could do its part to reduce the demand for illegal narcotics.

The drug war in Mexico is playing out very similar to the war between gangsters during prohibition during the 1920’s. Al Capone and other mobsters fought wars killed hundreds and even thousands of people in the streets of Chicago and New York among others.

The power of the mobsters did not diminish until the end of the Prohibition in the 1930’s. The mafia was still around, but not in the same capacity as they were during the prohibition.

The United States should take similar steps to end the drug war as they did during prohibition.

Without a doubt, marijuana should be legalized. The penalties for the use of marijuana are more damaging to user then the effects themselves. The legalization of marijuana will help to reduce the demand for other harder more addictive drugs as well.

Either way, legalization would greatly reduce the ten billion dollar annual revenue for the Cartels. The United States would no longer need to send 1.4 billion dollars which will do nothing to stop the hundred thousand soldiers now under the command of the drug cartels.

Behind the Scenes: Kidnappings, Mafia, Cartels


NBCSanDiego.com
updated 6:45 a.m. ET March 20, 2009


The San Diego F.B.I. office and its efforts to fight border violence are the focus of a documentary that aired on Discovery Channel.

The documentary follows San Diego agents as they deal with border issues like kidnapping, the Mexican Mafia, Drug Cartels and Internet crimes against children.

The film makers got a behind the scenes look at how the F.B.I. operates in San Diego.

"We gave them access to a lot of things you wouldn't normally see and I think because of that the viewers will get some real insight on how the F.B.I. works," Special Agent in Charge Keith Slotter said.

The two hour long documentary mostly focuses on border issues. It also provides criminal profiles including one about a man called the "Stew maker". Slotter says the Stew maker worked for drug cartels and his job was to make people disappear by dipping their bodies in barrels filled with chemicals.

"It's a very disturbing piece," he said. But Slotter says the point of the documentary isn't to disturb viewers. "It'll be, I hope, enlightening, at least a bit clearer on the issues border cities like San Diego face."

The documentary aired at 8 p.m. on Wednesday and at midnight on Thursday on Discovery Channel.

Senators say border crime fight needs more money

By EILEEN SULLIVAN and DEVLIN BARRETT
25 March 2009

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration's beefed-up efforts to fight violence on the Southwest border is not the last word, the head of the Homeland Security Department reassured senators clamoring for more money and people to combat drug trafficking.

Several senators questioned whether the administration's plan can be successful without more resources. The administration announced Tuesday that it was sending hundreds of federal agents, along with high-tech surveillance gear and drug-sniffing dogs to the Southwest border.

It was largely relying on existing funds and resources at the departments of Homeland Security and Justice for the increased effort. It also includes $700 million that Congress has already approved to support Mexico's efforts to fight the drug cartels.

"I believe this will be an ongoing issue," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.

The border security initiative, which expands on efforts begun during the Bush administration, is aimed at drug traffickers who have wreaked havoc in Mexico in recent years and are blamed for a spate of kidnappings and home invasions in some U.S. cities.

"I think you're going to need more resources to get the job done," Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., told Napolitano. Lieberman said he plans to ask the Senate Budget Committee to include an additional $380 million toward this Southwest border plan in the 2010 federal budget.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., echoed Lieberman's push for more money.

"I can't think of a better use of our time and public dollars," Graham said.

Among the moves the government is making:

_Sending about 350 additional personnel from the Homeland Security Department for a host of border-related work, including doubling the border enforcement security teams that combine local, state and federal officers.

_Adding 16 new Drug Enforcement Administration positions in the southwestern region. DEA currently has more than 1,000 agents working in the region.

_Sending 100 more people from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to the border in the next 45 days.

_Boosting the FBI's intelligence and analysis work on Mexican drug cartel crime.

_Increasing the inspection of rail cargo heading from the U.S. into Mexico and putting X-ray units in place to try to detect weapons being smuggled into Mexico.

At a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, lawmakers urged FBI Director Robert Mueller to do everything he can to combat the drug cartels operating across the border, including pursuing the illegal sales of firearms.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said the U.S. shared some of the blame for the violence in Mexico since so many of the weapons used in the crimes are bought in the United States.

"I think we bear some moral responsibility to slow this flow of guns into Mexico," said Durbin, citing one estimate that roughly 2,000 guns move from the U.S. to Mexico every day. U.S. government officials estimate the number is much smaller, perhaps hundreds a day.

After the Homeland Security hearing, Lieberman told reporters he thinks ATF should also get more money and people. He said the agency should be inspecting every licensed firearms dealer on the Southwest border.

ATF officials say there are roughly 6,700 federally licensed firearm dealers along the Southwest border, and in the 2008 budget year, they inspected 1,884 dealers, or about 28 percent.

The agency plans to inspect all Southwest border dealers within a three-year period.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Suspected drug lord arrested in Mexico

Story Highlights
Suspected principal operator for Beltran-Leyva drug cartel in Mexico captured
Four bodyguards arrested in addition to Hector Huerta Rios
Mexico offers rewards for information leading to capture of drug cartel operatives
Huerta's capture the third major arrest announced in past week

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas...iref=newssearch

Wanted U.S. marshal's body found in Mexico

Story Highlights
Marshal's body found in border town of Juarez, Mexico

U.S. Marshals Service has no comment on cause of death

Marshal had been accused of theft of public property, service spokesman says

By Doug Gross
CNN

(CNN) -- The body of a fugitive U.S. marshal has been found in the city of Juarez, Mexico, according to the U.S. Marshals Service -- the latest discovery in a wave of violence that has gripped towns along the U.S.-Mexican border in recent months.

The body of Deputy Marshal Vincent Bustamante -- who faced federal charges of stealing weapons and other government property -- was found in Juarez on Wednesday, said Marshals Service spokesman Jeff Carter.

Bustamante appeared to have been shot in the back of the head, a federal law enforcement source said.

Chihuahua state police said the body had multiple wounds to the head -- apparently consistent with an execution-style shooting, according to Edgar Roman, a reporter with XHIJ television in Juarez. Watch where the U.S. Marshal's body was found »

Bustamante, 48, was charged with stealing U.S. government property including Glock and Ruger handguns, a shotgun and a pair of binoculars, according to court documents.

According to the federal source, who was not authorized to speak about details of the case and asked not to be named, a pawnshop owner became suspicious when Bustamante attempted to pawn a shotgun and called the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The source said Bustamante would buy back items he had pawned on his pay days and return them.

Bustamante's attorney, Mike Torres, said a warrant was issued for Bustamante's arrest after he failed to appear at a court hearing last week.

He said Bustamante was a 17-year veteran of the marshals and a former El Paso Police officer who lived in El Paso with his wife and two children.

"He was a familiar face around the federal courthouse here," Torres said. "I'm very shocked by this and very saddened.

"He had a lot of friends and a lot of people that cared about him."

Carter said Bustamante was on administrative leave from the marshals and had been required to turn in his gun and badge.

He said Bustamante had not been in Mexico on marshals business and that all of the weapons he was charged with stealing had been recovered.

Carter said Bustamante was on "modified status" with the marshals, meaning he had been required to turn in his gun and badge outside of his official work hours.

"What I can tell you is that the U.S. Marshals Service is saddened by the death of Deputy Bustamante and our thoughts and prayers are with his family," he said.

Carter said U.S. marshals are working with the FBI and Mexican authorities to investigate the death. He said an autopsy will be conducted in Mexico, and another may be conducted once Bustamante's body is returned to the United States.

Juarez, which sits across the border from El Paso, Texas, has become one of the major battlegrounds as drug cartels fight both each other and Mexican authorities. The conflict has made violence increasingly common in Juarez, Tijuana and other Mexican border towns.

More than 400 deaths in the region have been attributed to the fighting this year.

CNN's Anderson Cooper, Emily Robards and Devon Sayers contributed to this report.

All About U.S. Marshals Service • Mexico


Links referenced within this article

Watch where the U.S. Marshal's body was found »
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U.S. Marshals Service
http://topics.edition.cnn.com/topics/U_S_Marshals_Service
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http://topics.edition.cnn.com/topics/Mexico


Find this article at:
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/US/03/26/marsh...lled/index.html

Kidnappings are still on rise in Arizona and other border areas. Tuscan had almost no such crims, same for Scottsdale, now they have close to 20 a month. A gunfight was shown on CNN, a homeowner shooting at four guys who parked in his driveway, and jumped out of car with masks on faces, automatic rifles in hands.

Mexicans are blaming United States, as usual. One claim is guns come from America, so America is at fault. However guns also come from almost every country in world, so I disagree on that point.

In 1980's the Columbian groups were shooting up New York, in one killing they killed a wife and baby of their target, on purpose, and right on street. That led to increased crackdown.

Since the American media have jumped on this subject it will be certain the US government will do its utmost best to tone these drug Cartels down. They will not succeed in shutting them down though. Just like the Camorra in Napels, the Cartels are a good job supplier to many Mexicans. These wars against the state can only occur when the criminal group has achieved amazing power. Things will quiet down, but it is way too late to stop the drug trafficking into the US. The war on drugs is lost. I've read that since the war drug violence and drug use only increased.

Legalize cannabis and tax it like alcohol and tobacco.

Vicente Carrillo Leyva number 2 in the Juarez cartel caugt.

Mexican police have arrested one of the country's most-wanted alleged drug traffickers, authorities have said.

Federal police said they arrested the suspect, Vicente Carrillo Leyva, while he was exercising in a park near his home in Mexico City.

He is believed to be the deputy leader of the Juarez cartel and is accused of money laundering and cocaine smuggling.

Mexico's authorities are battling a wave of violence by drug gangs fighting over smuggling routes to the US.

'Businessman'

After his arrest, Vicente Carrillo Leyva - still in his sports gear - was paraded in front of the press.

He appeared to be resigned to his fate, the BBC's Stephen Gibbs in Mexico City says.


See the Mexican cartels' main areas of influence

Mr Carrillo Leyva is understood to have been living under a false name in one of the capital's wealthiest suburbs, telling anybody who asked that he was a businessman, our correspondent says.

The Juarez cartel - also known as the Carrillo Fuentes organisation, after Mr Carrillo Leyva's late father - is active in the border town of Ciudad Juarez.

The authorities are offering rewards of up to $2m (£1.37m) each for information leading to the arrest of the drug lords and their lieutenants.

It was not immediately known if any money has been paid after Mr Carrillo Leyva's arrest.


'America's appetite'

The arrest came hours before US and Mexican security officials were to discuss new strategies for staunching the flow of drugs north into the US and the smuggling of guns and money south into Mexico.

Late last month the Mexican government published a list of the country's most-wanted drug kingpins.

Another suspected cartel figure, Hector Huerta Rios, was arrested on 25 March in the northern city of Monterrey.

He was accused of being the main operator in the north of Mexico for the Beltran Leyva cartel, whose base is on the Pacific coast.

Some 8,000 people have died in the past two years, as drug gangs fight for territory amid government crackdowns.

On a visit to Mexico last week, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said America's appetite for drugs and its inability to stop arms crossing the border were helping fuel the violence.

Mexican drug cartels spreading roots in Atlanta
When dealers move in, violence follows, authorities say
By Dahleen Glanton | Tribune correspondent
March 29, 2009
ATLANTA — On the outside, the modest three-bedroom brick-sided home on Village Green Court in Lilburn looked no different than many other houses in the middle-class suburban neighborhood.

But when police were called to the rented house in one of Gwinnett County's oldest communities last month, they found a scene that has become familiar in the Atlanta area since Mexican drug cartels began setting up shop in well-established communities, in the midst of unsuspecting neighbors.

"We found a dead body in the living room and a dead body in the den. The floor was covered with kilo wrappers [for drugs] and there was a money-counting machine set to count hundred-dollar bills," said Gwinnett County District Atty. Danny Porter, who spends much of his limited resources on drug-trafficking cases. "There were mattresses on the bedroom floor, a pickup in the garage and big buckets of charcoal placed throughout the house to absorb the odor of cocaine."

The Obama administration announced plans last week to shore up efforts along the Southwest U.S. border and send agents to Mexico to try to dismantle drug cartels responsible for thousands of murders, beheadings and kidnappings there. Meanwhile, law-enforcement officials in the U.S. are waging their own battles to crack down on drug-related crimes that have spread to cities and small towns across America.



The Mexican drug cartels have set up networks in at least 230 cities, including Chicago, according to the Justice Department's National Drug Intelligence Center.

Atlanta, with its prime location for easy distribution, has become a major hub for drug trafficking by the cartels and a principal distribution center for wholesale-level cocaine, methamphetamine and marijuana to the eastern United States, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officials said. In 2008, Atlanta led the nation with $70 million in confiscated cash, according to the DEA. That is more than double the $32 million seized in Chicago in 2008.

" Atlanta is like 'Miami Vice' in the 1980s," said Patrick Crosby, spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Georgia. "We ship more cocaine to Florida than we get from Florida."

Mexican cartels have replaced Colombian ones as the primary distributors of cocaine, transporting drugs into the Atlanta region from California, Texas and Mexico, the DEA said. They have set up stash houses for cash and drugs in suburban and rural communities, operated by mid-level leaders who oversee multimillion-dollar operations, officials said.

"We are a great distribution center because you can get anywhere east of the Rockies in a day's drive," said David Nahmias, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia.

The cartels often set up shop in places such as Gwinnett County, where the Hispanic population has grown from 64,137 in 2000 to 132,123 in 2007, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Here, the young men who have come to America to distribute drugs blend in with the law-abiding citizens, day laborers and workers who migrated here for jobs in construction, the poultry plants and the farming industry.

"Money goes to the stash house normally [located] in a middle-class suburban neighborhood. It's very non-descript and you never thought it would be there in a million years," said Rodney Benson, head of the DEA's Atlanta office. "That's where the money is counted and the balance sheets are reconciled. Then it's methodically placed in heat-sealed plastic to prevent tampering, labeled and given back over to the transportation specialists whose job is to take that money across the Southwestern border to Mexico and the cartel leadership."

Porter said he isn't sure how the president's incentives will help counties such as Gwinnett, where prosecutors are increasingly handling drug-related cases while being mandated to take one-day-a-month furloughs because of state budget cuts.

Unlike the Colombian drug dealers known for their flashy cars and Miami Beach mansions, the Mexican traffickers prefer to conduct business quietly—until violence erupts. Local officials said they want to make sure that the vicious crimes occurring in Mexico do not make their way to their towns.

Last May, authorities arrested the suspected leader of one of the most dangerous Mexican organizations, the Gulf Cartel, after authorities responded to reports of a kidnapping in his Lawrenceville neighborhood. Authorities found $7.6 million in cash and 12 kilograms of cocaine in the modest two-story home 20-year-old Edgar Rodriguez-Alejandro rented in Gwinnett County.

Last week, three men pleaded guilty to holding drug dealer Oscar Reynoso hostage in the basement of a house in a middle-class neighborhood in Lilburn. Reynoso, 31, had been lured to Atlanta from Rhode Island, chained to a wall and tortured for a week because he owed the cartel $300,000, the DEA said. Reynoso also has pleaded guilty to drug charges.

"What we always hear from neighbors is, 'We never saw them or talked to them,' " Porter said. "They maintain the yard and keep to themselves."

dglanton@tribune.com

Savvy youngsters give drug cartels a new face
April 09 2009 at 12:21AM

By Mica Rosenberg

Mexico City - Shunning the gem-studded pistols and gold chains flaunted by their fathers, a savvy new generation of drug smugglers is moving up the ranks of Mexico's cartels wielding college degrees and keeping low profiles to outsmart police.

The fashionably-dressed sons of two prominent drug bosses were recently arrested in smart Mexico City neighborhoods, suspected of laundering money for the Juarez and Sinaloa cartels while moving seamlessly among the country's elite.

They typify a new wave of leaders of Mexico's warring drug cartels, whose turf wars killed 6 300 people in 2008. Often the urbane offspring of cartel founders, they bring a clean-cut management style to the murky multibillion dollar enterprise.







"These people are usually better prepared, better educated and very useful for the cartels because they're professionals," said political analyst Jorge Chabat.

"They're harder to identify because they don't look like typical drug traffickers," he said. "You can't detect them by saying 'Oh look, he has a big truck with wide tires and automatic weapons, gold chains, snakeskin boots and a big belt buckle and dark glasses.'"

President Felipe Calderon has put dozens of top traffickers behind bars, along with thousands of low-level hitmen and drug runners, in an army-led war on cartels that has Washington worried about a possible spillover of violence.

For years the classic image of a Mexican drug baron has been of a macho gunslinger who revels in an ostentatious lifestyle of bad taste. But that may be changing.

Vicente Carrillo Leyva, the suave 32-year-old son of legendary drug lord Amado Carrillo Fuentes, was nabbed last week while jogging in a park near his house in the capital's most exclusive district and paraded in front of news cameras in a slick white Abercrombie and Fitch sweatsuit and trendy specs.

His late father was known as the "Lord of the Skies" for flying jets full of cocaine to the United States in the 1990's. A high-living patriarch, when he died he was building himself an extravagant four-level palace in the Mexican border city of Nogales with soaring white domes and a 12-foot exterior wall.

Carrillo Leyva, nicknamed "The Engineer", grew up among a wealthy elite, was educated abroad and enjoyed frequent trips to Europe. He reportedly speaks English and French well and had invested in a high-end boutique selling Versace clothes.

Neighbors said he lived a low-profile life.

"No parties, no noise; these neighbors were very discreet. The young man went out running in the morning and his wife was very nice," a local resident told El Universal newspaper.

Also captured this month, Vicente Zambada, 33, the son of Sinaloa cartel boss Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada, lived a little larger, with luxury cars and five armed bodyguards.

But in his toned-down outfit of jeans, pressed shirt and jacket, he was undistinguishable from the young professionals who crowd Mexico's upscale bars and restaurants.

"The older guys, their fathers, lived on the border and they often did the rough work of smuggling drugs and exterminating enemies," said Tony Payan, a drug trade expert at the University of Texas in El Paso.

"These younger guys found it very comfortable to just move into the more financial part of the organisation to try to legitimise the business," he said.

Young drug gangsters dubbed 'narco-juniors' first appeared in the 1990's when the Arellano Felix clan in Tijuana recruited their sons and daughters and affluent friends to run drugs and carry out killings. Zambada and Carrillo Leyva, more educated and refined, went straight to leadership roles.

The new style does not mean the young drug barons are less ruthless or protected from the violence. Heavily armed gunmen killed the son of Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, Mexico's most-wanted man, outside a shopping mall in 2008.

While they may not kill rivals themselves, they will order hits to stay ahead and are respected within the organizations, analysts say.

The new generation poses a challenge to Mexico's ill-equipped, badly paid and often poorly educated police, since sophisticated intelligence is needed to catch them.

"They are paying a lot of attention to developing their top brass," said Mexican security expert Alberto Islas. "We are not out-gunning them and we are not out-smarting them. I think that's why we are losing this war." - Reuters

20 year old girl caught hiding weapons for Beltan Leyva Cartel.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/...rcraft-gun.html

Mexico Says 8 Killed in Attack on Prison Convoy

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: April 19, 2009
Filed at 9:12 p.m. ET

MEXICO CITY (AP) -- In the latest of a series of brazen, drug-related attacks, gunmen ambushed a prisoner transfer convoy in western Mexico, killing eight officers in a failed attempt to free a high-level cartel member, police said Sunday.

At least 20 assailants launched a running gun battle Saturday against the dwindling column of vehicles escorting nine prisoners as it raced between an airport and penitentiary in the Pacific coast state of Nayarit, police said.

As their comrades lay dying in a string of bullet-riddled pickups, part of the convoy stopped and turned to fight off the attackers, said Gen. Rodolfo Cruz, head of support operations for the Federal Police.

''The rest of the convoy stopped and opened fire on the attackers, who fled in all directions when they saw their attack being repulsed,'' Cruz said. The fallen officeers ''gave the most sacred thing a human has, their lives.''

Police called it a well-planned attack intended to free Jeronimo Gamez, cousin of Arturo Beltran Leyva, the reputed leader of one of Mexico's most powerful cartels. Gamez was arrested in Mexico City in January and was being moved to a prison in Nayarit's capital city, Tepic.

Officers managed to deliver Gamez and eight other detainees to the prison despite the attacks which began just outside the airport. Photos showed battered police pickup trucks with shot-out windows, crumpled fenders or bullet holes and blood stains from the fallen police.

Four federal police officers, two federal investigative agents and two prison employees died in the attack. There was no immediate information on the number of injured or wounded and no reports of deaths or arrests among the attackers.

Prosecutors accuse Gamez of acting as Beltran Leyva's representative in negotiating drug deals with Colombian traffickers.

The attack came three days after a bold assault on an army patrol in the nearby state of Guerrero, where 15 assailants and one soldier died, and just a day after officials reported 12 people dead across the state of Michoacan, including three who were beheaded.

The assaults by emboldened, heavily armed cartels bracketed the first official visit Thursday by U.S. President Barack Obama, who vowed to step up enforcement of laws banning the transfer of guns across the U.S.-Mexico border.

Mexico has suffered a continuing wave of drug-related violence, killing more than 10,650 people since 2006, when Calderon sent 45,000 troops to directly confront the traffickers.

As if to illustrate the scale of the drug war being fought in Mexico, federal police staged a massive operation using 400 federal officers, two Blackhawk helicopters and an airplane to raid a baptismal party being held Saturday by alleged members of the Familia Michoacana cartel.

Police detained 44 people, including a man allegedly in charge of recruitment for the Michoacan-based gang.

Federal police commissioner Rodrigo Esparza said that suspect Rafael Cedeno claimed to have trained 9,000 recruits for the cartel in 2008, hinting at the gang's size and power.

True to the gang's quasi-moralistic tone -- it has claimed in the past to oppose common crime -- Cedeno claimed the training involved instilling ''moral and ethical values'' in recruits, including family unity and shunning alcohol and drugs.

Many of the people attending the baptism party at a Morelia resort were released, and the other 43 people were being held based on their presumed involvement in the drug gang.

The White House on Wednesday added the Familia Michoacana to the U.S. government's blacklist of drug syndicates, known commonly as the Drug Kingpin Act.

U.S. officials say the gang moves massive amounts of cocaine from Colombian drug dealers. Esparza said Cedeno was also in charge of shipping methamphetamine precursor chemicals through Pacific coast ports and oversaw hit squads in the region to fight off the rival Gulf cartel.

Mexican Prosecutors Train in U.S. for Changes in Their Legal System

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/25/us/25prosecute.html?_r=1

Gregorio Sauceda Gamboa, alias «El Goyo» is captured.

MATAMOROS, Mexico (Reuters) - Mexico captured a suspected leader of the ruthless Gulf cartel who is wanted in the United States, the latest arrest in its army-led war against drug gangs, the government said.

Police and soldiers on Wednesday caught Gregorio Sauceda, a former policeman turned drug smuggler who had a $2 million reward on his head, in a house in the border city of Matamoros near Texas, along with his wife and an arsenal of weapons that included a rocket launcher, the public security ministry said.

Sauceda, 44, is considered to be a founder of the Gulf cartel's brutal armed wing, the Zetas, which is notorious for beheading rival smugglers. He was flown to the capital, Mexico City, after his arrest.

The capture scores another point for conservative President Felipe Calderon, who has put dozens of traffickers behind bars in a high-stakes war on drug cartels whose turf wars have killed some 2,000 people this year.

Mexican drug gangs killed some 6,300 people, mainly rivals and police, across the country last year and Washington is worried the violence could be spilling over the border.

Sauceda briefly took over the running of the Gulf cartel after soldiers arrested gang leader Osiel Cardenas at a party in Matamoros in 2003 and was one of its most violent hitmen, the ministry said.

Cardenas was extradited to the United States in 2007.

In the past few weeks soldiers have also captured Vicente Carrillo Leyva, the 32-year-old son of legendary drug lord Amado Carrillo Fuentes, and Vicente Zambada, the son of Sinaloa cartel boss Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada.

U.S. President Barack Obama praised Calderon's drug war in a visit to the Mexican capital this month and has pledged more support in cracking down on the southbound flow of weapons and cash that fuel the cartels in Mexico.

Mexican cartels funneling shipments to Italian mafia through Texas
• Europe-bound cocaine shipments move through Dallas
• Drugs command higher prices on the continent
McClatchy newspapers guardian.co.uk,
Wednesday 22 April 2009 15.28 BST Article history

Mexican drug traffickers are funneling cocaine to Italian organised crime, and some shipments are moving through Dallas.

"We've got some of the major cartel members established here dealing their wares in Europe," said James Capra, head of the US Drug Enforcement Administration's Dallas office.

Experts say warring cartels battered by unprecedented US and Mexican government crackdowns are increasingly looking to Europe as an expansion market. Across the Atlantic, demand for cocaine is high and prices are up. A kilo sold for $20,000 in Dallas is worth up to three times as much overseas, experts say.

Mexican cartel operatives in north Texas "are dealing with Italy, Spain, you name it," he said. "They can operate their logistical center from here and coordinate between Mexico, Central America and Europe."

Italian capos are venturing to north Texas to get in on the action, says one mob expert.

"Places like Houston and Dallas are where these criminal organisations are most likely to invest their money," said Antonio Nicaso, an internationally recognised author and lecturer on Italian organized crime. "This is the right time, with the recession going on."

Dallas has long been a recognised distribution hub for drugs smuggled up the Interstate 35 corridor from Laredo. From here, narcotics head out across the country to Atlanta, Chicago, New England and elsewhere.

The revelation that the cartels are forming alliances with Italian syndicates came last year when the DEA revealed that the Mexican Gulf cartel, which supplies Dallas with cocaine, was working with New York associates of the powerful Italian 'Ndrangheta mafia.

Last August, the DEA arrested a Dallas County jailer accused of tipping off drug dealers to what appeared to be a small-time local narcotics conspiracy. The jailer, Brenda Medina Salinas, has pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing. As others pleaded guilty and court documents piled up, it became clear that the drug pipeline in that case reached all the way to Europe and the clandestine world of the Camorra.

The Naples-based Camorra traces its roots to the 16th century. Ruthlessly violent when they need to be, Camorra members often smuggle behind quiet business fronts. They're known to work across ethnic and political lines.

Relatively little is known about the local Camorra associate, other than that he had ties to Dallas, Houston and Mexico.

The Camorra associate was not charged in the case because agents had not developed enough information to nab him when they were forced to act because of Salinas's leaking information to co-conspirators.

Agents learned the Camorra associate's name last May. That's when DEA agents monitoring a meeting between him and his local contacts asked Dallas police to pull over the Camorra associate's car and check his identity.

He had just met with Higinio "Gino" Hernandez, a 30-year-old flooring installer from Carrollton, and Altin Kore, a 32-year-old Dallas man also charged in conspiracy. Kore is charged in the case but is a fugitive. Hernandez has pleaded guilty.

The DEA began investigating the Hernandez network after being tipped by Italian authorities in the fall of 2007. Their wiretaps on Camorra associates in Italy revealed a Dallas cocaine supplier.

Higinio Hernandez was close to his brother Henry "Tito" Hernandez, 34, of Dallas, who has also pleaded guilty. A third brother, Luis, 35, has been charged but is a fugitive.

Henry and Higinio worked for years as flooring installer subcontractors for Carpet One in Southlake.

"They were leading a double life," said prosecutor Ernest Gonzalez in Plano. "They were doing flooring by day, and at night they were conducting these drug transactions."

It was obvious to those around them that laying floors was not their only source of income.

When they were arrested last fall, federal agents seized Higinio's Cadillac Escalade and Lexus IS30, as well as Henry's Escalade.

Henry and Luis kept snapshots of themselves partying in limos with friends, booze and women. They also had dealings in Cuba, authorities say.

"They didn't hide their money," Gonzalez said.

Authorities say Higinio's supplier in Mexico was half brother Rodolfo Lopez, 35, another fugitive charged in the case.

While living in the US, Lopez forged the relationship with the Camorra associate and dealt with cocaine producers in Colombia and elsewhere, authorities say. Lopez eventually relocated to Mexico, where authorities say he directed shipments to his brothers in Dallas.

From Dallas, the cocaine was taken to Houston, where the Camorra associate operated a scented candle export business. It took about a month for the cocaine, smuggled amongst the candles, to make the voyage across the Atlantic to Italy.

Major ports attract Italian organized crime syndicates, which operate in at least 19 US cities, according to the US justice department's latest Drug Threat Assessment.

The Hernandez case is considered somewhat of an anomaly among law enforcement. Federal agents for years have said that the mafia has no significant grip here.

Still, after a lull, mob influence nationwide seems to be increasing, experts say. Much of their work is partnering with the Mexican distributors and Colombian producers and supplying Europe with cocaine.

It's a good time to expand to Europe, as crackdowns on both sides of the US-Mexico border have made smuggling cocaine into Texas increasingly difficult. In the past year, authorities have arrested more than 500 Gulf Cartel and 750 rival Sinaloa Cartel members here and in Mexico.

Extraditions of Mexican narcos to the US for prosecution are on the rise under president Felipe Calderon, who has deployed military troops to quell violence in border towns.

Still, a downside to dabbling in international markets is the increased scrutiny by a larger net of law enforcement agencies - which is what stopped the Hernandez ring.

Last spring, DEA agents in Dallas learned that a meeting was to take place between Higinio and the Camorra associate. On May 15, agents set up surveillance at a Chili's restaurant in Dallas.

It was not a pleasant meeting for Higinio. DEA agents were watching as the Italian poked a finger in his chest. The cocaine they were selling wasn't pure enough, he told Hernandez. Customers were complaining.

After the meeting, Higinio reached out to his brother, Henry, to see if his own supplier, Moises Duarte, could get purer powder.

But agents were forced to swoop in before any more cocaine made it to Italy.

The reason: Brenda Salinas. The 23-year-old befriended Henry Hernandez and Duarte on the club scene in Dallas, and eventually dated both men.

As a jailer with Dallas County, she had access to law enforcement databases. In July, when agents learned that she was feeding both men information, DEA agents felt they had to act. They arrested Duarte and set up stings on his cohorts.

So far, nine defendants - including Salinas - have pleaded guilty. Among them is an Albanian financial consultant from Dallas. He has ties to an ex-stockbroker being investigated by the US Securities and Exchange Commission in connection with an alleged pump-and-dump stock scam.

According to the DEA, the investigation is ongoing.

Disorder From South of The Border

The violent war between Mexican drug cartels, law enforcement, and the military is spilling over the border into the United States, and communities all across the country are working to adapt. More and more innocent Americans are being murdered at the hands of drug cartels, and this week, America's Most Wanted is going inside the fight.

“AMW has focused on this story for years,” says AMW producer Evan Marshall, who worked on the story. “But recently, the acts of unbelievable violence committed by and at the behest of drug cartels is on the uptick and are being done in a more public forum.”

Law enforcement sources say the problem is two-fold: not only have innocent people been killed after being mistaken for rival drug dealers, but more and more Americans are being seduced into service by the promise of fast cash.

With these young foot soldiers already working in the U.S., cartel leaders have been able to orchestrate domestic assassinations without ever stepping on American soil.

“Physically crossing the Rio Grande is no longer an issue,” Evan says.

Since the border states of Texas and fall into Evan’s region, he had a big part in producing this week’s show.

Last week, Evan traveled to the border community of Sierra Vista, Ariz. to chronicle Customs and Border Protection's fight on land and in the air.

“I got to see all the toys they use in their job, from Predator UAV planes to Blackhawk helicopters,” Evan said. “Of course, the highlight was spending two nights in the air in the Blackhawks. Those machines are amazing.”

Check out video of the aerial assault at AMW.com, and tune in Saturday night for more on the violence – and what you can do to help stop the cartels.



With Border Violence Spreading, Thugnapping Is Arizona’s Growth Industry

Meanwhile, Arizona’s largest city, Phoenix, faces a different epidemic: the Valley of the Sun has recently become the kidnapping capital of the U.S., at a rate of roughly one kidnapping per day.

But Phoenix police say that due to the nature of the kidnappings, many crimes go unreported, and that figure could actually be two or three times higher.

“The problem is confined almost entirely to criminals kidnapping other criminals and extorting money from one another,” says AMW’s Los Angeles senior producer, Van King. “Often times, the victims and their families don’t want help from authorities for fear of having their own criminal activities exposed.”

While many of the victims are criminals themselves, cops say the kidnappings have taken place in public places in broad daylight, often in full view of innocent bystanders.

“Not only are they creating a threat to public safety, but they are contributing to another revenue stream that provides huge motivation for even more crime in our cities,” Van says. “It’s a problem we should all take seriously.”

To combat this alarming new trend, the fifth-largest city in the United States has formed a special unit of detectives focusing on kidnapping and home invasions. Following suit, the FBI, ATF, and ICE teamed up with the Phoenix P.D. to form a special task force, called “HIKE,” to take on this type of crime.

For this week’s show, Van and his crew went to Phoenix to ride along with HIKE as they broke up an alleged kidnapping ring in Phoenix.

“I have the utmost respect for the Phoenix P.D.” Van says. “They run a tight ship and are extremely dedicated and professional.

After taking down seven suspects involved in a kidnapping ring, Van and the squad went back to the station where they shared an observation that’s little known outside of the law enforcement community.

“All of the suspects were placed in separate interview rooms and placed on camera,” Van said. “While they waited for cops to come interview them, my crew and I noticed on the monitors that all but one of the suspects had fallen fast asleep.”

When asked about it, the cops said the subtle detail often ends up being surprisingly significant.

“In their experience, ‘the guilty always sleep,’” Van says. “It turns out after interviewing all of the suspects, the only one the cops did not charge was the guy who never slept. Perhaps it was just a coincidence, but interesting nonetheless.”

Two suspected Phoenix kidnapping ringleaders remain on the lam. They will be profiled on this Saturday’s show, but for more on the epidemic, log on to AMW.com right now.

Suspected drug gang frees 59 from Mexico prison
May 17, 2009, 5:39 am
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ZACATECAS, Mexico (Reuters) - Suspected members of a Mexican drug cartel disguised as federal police entered a state prison in the northern state of Zacatecas on Saturday and freed 59 inmates, police and army officials said.

Most of the prisoners who escaped are believed to be members of the armed wing of Mexico's Gulf Cartel, one of the country's most powerful criminal organizations.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon has staked his presidency on crushing the drug gangs that killed 6,300 people last year across Mexico . The United States is increasingly alarmed by the violence and concerned the fighting could spill across the border.

Zacatecas has so far seen little of the drug-related violence that has rocked other northern states.

The early morning jailbreak was carried out by heavily armed men dressed in the uniform of an elite federal police force.

The men, who arrived in 15 vehicles and a helicopter, gained entry into the prison after claiming they had been ordered to transfer a prisoner to another location, state police officials said.

When the Cartels have ammassed this much power, and when there is so much corruption...it is a very difficult battle to win.