Small War in Mexico (merged thread)

[AdamG]

Part of the solution needs to be eliminating the cancer within. Anyone care to bet as to whether these three will see hard time?

Prosecutors in Mexico have formally charged three generals and a lieutenant-colonel with having links to a drug-trafficking gang.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-19075426

Note, these are Army guys not Navy.

[AdamG]

This ought to be interesting.

In a stunning development, President-elect Enrique Pea and his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), who won control of Mexicos government on July 1st, moved to dissolve the Agencia Federal de Investigacin (AFI). Modeled after the United States FBI, the AFI was founded in 2001 to crack down on Mexico’s pervasive government corruption and drug trafficking.

Two days after the election, President-elect Pea came to the U.S. to announce that he would welcome debate on the issue of drug legalization and regulation in Mexico. In an interview by PBS News Hour, President-elect Pena clearly stated:

I'm in favor of opening a new debate in the strategy in the way we fight drug trafficking. It is quite clear that after several years of this fight against drug trafficking, we have more drug consumption, drug use and drug trafficking. That means we are not moving in the right direction. Things are not working.

These are code words to signal the PRI intends to cut a profitable deal with the cartels to legalize drugs in exchange for collecting tax revenue on drug sales.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2...LEGALIZE-DRUGS

[AdamG]

Former Mexican governor Mario Villanueva Madrid, who attended college in Jurez, pled guilty in a New York federal court of conspiring to launder $19 million in drug bribe payments he received from the Jurez drug cartel, officials said.

Villanueva, 64, ex-governor of Quintana Roo, the highest-level Mexican official extradited to the United States, will be sentenced in October.

http://www.elpasotimes.com/ci_212284...rce=rss_viewed

[AdamG]

(CNN) -- Unknown gunmen attacked an American diplomatic vehicle south of Mexico City, injuring three people, a Mexican military official told CNN Mexico.

The motive behind the attack on the U.S. vehicle, which was on a diplomatic mission, was not immediately known.

Gunmen inside what was described as a Mexican federal police vehicle fired upon a U.S. Embassy vehicle, said the official, who declined to be named for security reasons.

The Mexican official said three Mexican marines were injured in the shooting. However, there were conflicting reports. Some Mexican reports stated that two of the injured were Americans.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/24/world/...nes/index.html

[AdamG]

(Reuters) - Mexican federal police shot and wounded two CIA operatives last week, security sources said, in an apparently deliberate attack that could hurt U.S.-Mexico cooperation in their war against drug cartels.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...87S19K20120829

[AdamG]

The ante just got upped.

The war on drugs just got a whole lot more warlike. Two hundred U.S. Marines have entered Guatemala, on a mission to chase local operatives of the murderous Zeta drug cartel.

The Marines are now encamped after having deployed to Guatemala earlier this month, and have just “kicked off” their share of Operation Martillo, or Hammer. That operation began earlier in January, and is much larger than just the Marine contingent and involves the Navy, Coast Guard, and federal agents working with the Guatemalans to block drug shipment routes.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/08/marinesvszetas/

[AdamG]

Narco version of celebrating diversity.

Mexican drug cartels are turning to a new and lucrative source of income south of the border. Smuggling drugs is making up ever smaller percentage of their business.

UTB Professor Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera is talking about the latest trend is stealing oil and other petroleum products. “They are diversifying to different activities such as extortion, kidnapping and very profitable business now is to steal oil and its derivatives including natural gas,”

http://www.valleycentral.com/news/st...1#.UEdnpZad6So

[AdamG]

You'd think Cartel leaders would insist on better nicknames.

MEXICO CITY — Mexico's U.S.-backed naval special forces have captured a man believed to be one of the two top leaders of the Gulf cartel, a drug-trafficking organization that once dominated the northeast border region but has recently engaged in devastating battles with the vicious Zeta paramilitary force, authorities said Tuesday.

Mario Cardenas Guillen, alias El Gordo ("Fatso"), was paraded before reporters in Mexico City on Tuesday after his capture Monday in the northern border state of Tamaulipas.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationwo...,3311314.story

[AdamG]

The most wanted men in Mexico are tumbling

IN MARCH 2009 the Mexican government published a list of 37 men believed to be running drug gangs. The alleged bandits were named and rewards of up to 30m pesos ($2m) each were offered for their capture. The government’s normally stodgy official gazette listed the villains by their nicknames: Monkey, Beardy, Taliban and so on. It was a risky decision: the list could have become an embarrassment if its members had remained free.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graph...8517|38060644|

[bourbon]

Originally Posted by AdamG

The most wanted men in Mexico are tumbling

.....except for the men from Sinaloa.

[AdamG]

Originally Posted by bourbon

.....except for the men from Sinaloa.

As Madonna said in her movie, "NEXT!"

MEXICO CITY -- A drug capo described by Mexican officials as "one of the most important lieutenants" for Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, the fugitive leader of the Sinaloa cartel, has been captured, the Defense Ministry announced Sunday.

Jesus Alfredo Salazar Ramirez, known as "The Doll," was taken into custody Thursday by military officials and federal prosecutors in the state of Mexico, outside the capital, according to a news release [link in Spanish]. Salazar is the alleged leader of a cell within the Sinaloa cartel known as "The Salazars" and is wanted in both the U.S. and Mexico on drug trafficking charges.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/worl...r-ramirez.html

AMERICAN elections are watched closely in Mexico, which sends most of its exports and about a tenth of its citizens north of the border. But Tuesday’s presidential contest is not the only poll that’s sparking interest south of the Rio Grande. On the same day, voters in Colorado, Oregon and Washington will vote on whether to legalise marijuana—not just for medical use, but for fun and profit. Polls suggest that the initiatives have a decent chance of passing in Washington and Colorado (Oregon is a longer shot).

The impact on Mexico could be profound. Between 40% and 70% of American pot is reckoned to be grown in Mexico. According to a recent study (in Spanish) by the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness (IMCO), a think-tank in Mexico City, the American marijuana business brings in about $2 billion a year to Mexico’s drug traffickers. That makes it almost as important to their business as the cocaine trade, which is worth about $2.4 billion.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democ...viewfromMexico

[AdamG]

14 of them, and they couldn't take out three guys? Awesome.

Almost as awesome as breaking this news at the dead end of a news cycle.

5:10PM EST November 9. 2012 - The Mexican government on Friday charged 14 federal police officers with trying to kill two CIA agents and a Mexican marine during an August ambush of an armored U.S. Embassy vehicle.

The off-duty officers, in private vehicles, attacked the agents' marked SUV with AK-47 assault rifles as they drove with a Mexican navy captain to a military training camp south of the capital, the Associated Press says. The Toyota Land Cruiser, bearing diplomatic license plates, was riddled with 152 bullets, wounding the two Americans.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/w...hicle/1695385/

[AdamG]

Members of Mexico’s most powerful cartel are selling a record amount of heroin and methamphetamine from Little Village, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. From there, the drugs are moving onto the streets of south and west Chicago, where they are sold in assembly-line fashion in mostly African American neighborhoods.

“Chicago, with 100,000 gang members to put the dope on the street, is a logistical winner for the Sinaloa cartel,” Jack Riley, the DEA’s special agent in charge of the Chicago field division, said after a tour through Little Village. “We have to operate now as if we’re on the Mexican border.”

It’s not just Chicago. Increasingly, as drug cartels have amassed more control and influence in Mexico, they have extended their reach deeper into the United States, establishing inroads across the Midwest and Southeast, according to American counternarcotics officials. An extensive distribution network supplies regions across the country, relying largely on regional hubs like this city, with ready markets off busy interstate highways.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...962_story.html

[AdamG]

Defiant former Mexican mayor killed

http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/27/world/...-mayor-killed/

(Reuters) - A leftist Mexican lawmaker on Thursday presented a bill to legalize the production, sale and use of marijuana, adding to a growing chorus of Latin American politicians who are rejecting the prohibitionist policies of the United States.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...=lifestyleMolt

[AdamG]

The Mexican military is trying to dismantle an extensive network of radio antennas built and operated by the notorious Zeta drug cartel. But the authorities haven’t had much luck shutting Radio Zeta down. Not only is much of the equipment super-easy to replace. But the cartel has also apparently found some unwilling — and alarming — assistance by kidnapping and enslaving technicians to help build it.

At least 36 engineers and technicians have been kidnapped in the past four years, according to a report from Mexican news site Animal Politico, with an English translation published by organized-crime monitoring group InSight. Worse, none of the engineers have been held for ransom — they’ve just disappeared. Among them include at least one IBM employee and several communications technicians from a firm owned by Mexico’s largest construction company. “The fact that skilled workers have been disappearing in these areas is no accident,” Felipe Gonzalez, head of Mexico’s Senate Security Committee, told the website.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012...paign=Previous

[AdamG]

"At this stage there is no official explanation for the explosion, our correspondent says."

But DEFINITELY not a criminal act. Honest. This is a country with a rule of law after all, not some failed state in the middle of a low-grade civil war. Honest.

At least 14 people have died after an explosion rocked the headquarters of state oil company Pemex in Mexico City, officials say.

More than 80 were injured in the blast, Mexican Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong said.

Emergency services are searching for people trapped in the rubble, the BBC's Will Grant reports from the scene.

Last September, 30 people died in an explosion at a Pemex gas plant in northern Mexico.

"We have 13 dead at the scene and one more at the hospital," the interior minister told reporters.

"There are more than 80 wounded and we continue to look for survivors in the debris."

The 54-floor Pemex Executive Tower, which houses hundreds of employees, is located in a busy commercial area of Mexico City.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-21288214

[AdamG]

ACAPULCO, Mexico (AP) — Hundreds of armed vigilantes have taken control of a town on a major highway in the Pacific coast state of Guerrero, arresting local police officers and searching homes after a vigilante leader was killed. Several opened fire on a car of Mexican tourists headed to the beach for Easter week.

Members of the area's self-described "community police" say more than 1,500 members of the force were stopping traffic Wednesday at improvised checkpoints in the town of Tierra Colorado, which sits on the highway connecting Mexico City to Acapulco. They arrested 12 police and the former director of public security in the town after a leader of the state's vigilante movement was slain on Monday.

http://news.yahoo.com/mexican-vigila...033530439.html

[Bill Moore]

The Mexicans are wisely considering a new approach to address the threat from the Cartels, but that is making some of our so called experts nervous. The fact remains that the current strategy is not working, so clinging to it in hopes that it will eventually work seems a little over the top.

http://http://www.washingtonpost.com...3a8_story.html

U.S. role at a crossroads in Mexico’s intelligence war on the cartels

The article points out that the new administration in Mexico is not going to focus on arresting drug kingpins due the violence that has resulted from this approach. U.S. concerns are that the new administration will seek some sort of truce of with the Cartels. One would hope there are other alternatives between continuing a failed strategy and making an under the table peace deal with the cartels.

During a meeting between Mexican and U.S. security leaders

the U.S. briefers left out the fact that most of the 25 kingpin taken off the streets in the past five years had been removed because of U.S.-supplied information, often including the location of top cartel members in real time, according to people familiar with the meeting

Also unremarked upon was the mounting criticism that success against the cartels’ leadership had helped incite more violence than anyone had predicted

Meanwhile, the drug flow into the United States continued unabated. Mexico remains the U.S. market’s largest supplier of heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine and the transshipment point for 95 percent of its cocaine.