Posts Tagged ‘drug gangs’
Mexico’s President begs the United States — No more weapons!
Sign made from 3 tons of crushed guns
Mexico’s president called on U.S. officials to stop gun trafficking across the border Thursday, saying the move would be the best thing Americans could do to stop brutal drug violence.
“The criminals have become more and more vicious in their eagerness to spark fear and anxiety in society,” President Felipe Calderon said. “One of the main factors that allows criminals to strengthen themselves is the unlimited access to high-powered weapons, which are sold freely, and also indiscriminately, in the United States of America.
Speaking in Ciudad Juarez, the border city across from El Paso, Texas, that has become Mexico’s murder capital, Calderon said a dramatic increase in violence in Mexico was directly connected with the 2004 expiration of the U.S. assault weapons ban…
…Calderon stood in front of a massive new sign, constructed with tons of decommissioned arms. “NO MORE WEAPONS,” the sign said — in English. Americans on the other side of the border are the intended audience, Calderon said…
Out of 140,000 weapons Mexican authorities have seized since Calderon declared a crackdown on cartels at the beginning of his presidency, 84,000 were high-powered assault weapons, Calderon said.
More than 47,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence in Mexico since December 2006, according to government statistics.
Calderon’s plea for Americans to reduce drug consumption is laughable, of course. We have been a society based on mood-altering chemical dependency for decades. It starts with cigarettes and coffee, marches on through beer and hard liquor into prescription goodies all too easily accessible through your friendly family doctor. Symptomatic treatment is the watchword of America’s pharmaceutical industry.
Can we modify such dependencies? Of course. Many advocate a healthier lifestyle – in the face of politicians and flunkies who say pizza is a vegetable and sex education is a sin. We have to get past the profit cronies to even begin to have a voice in this land.
Meanwhile, there’s nothing wrong with symptomatic solutions to drug gangsters across the border, drug gangsters who leak their wars and profiteering across that border every hour of the day. Who stands in the way? Right-wing plutocrats in the arms industry and their flunkies in the NRA and both wings of political hacks – for a start. Even the mildest attempts to police guns trafficked across the border are shut down by sophistry and campaign dollars, lobbying and coercion.
Mexican coppers stored drug gang kidnap victims in their jail
Several police officers in northern Mexico allowed a violent drug gang to hold kidnap victims in the local jail while ransom payments were being negotiated…
Four police officers from Juárez, a suburb of the city of Monterrey, are being held pending further investigation, said Jorge Domene, the security spokesman for Nuevo León state.
The scandal came to light this week when state and federal police freed two kidnapping victims from jail cells in Juárez. Investigators believe that the victims were abducted by the extremely violent Zetas cartel and that the officers were working for the Zetas, Domene said…
Domene noted that last weekend, the Nuevo León attorney general’s office detained 73 local policemen from a half dozen communities in the state who confessed to having performed various services for gangs, including spying, acting as lookouts, and carrying out killings and kidnappings…
The most scandalous case of prison corruption came to light in July 2010, when an investigation revealed that guards and officials at a prison in the northern city of Gómez Palacio had freed inmates belonging to a gang, lent them guns and sent them off in official vehicles to carry out drug-related killings, including the massacre of 17 people earlier that year.
The guards allowed the inmates to return to their cells after the killings so that they would be safe from reprisals, authorities said at the time.
“We have barely been in time to put the brakes on organised crime in the first stages, but in some towns, in some areas of the country, they have infiltrated authorities in a practically symbiotic relationship,” President Felipe Calderon said during a speech to members of the business community on Thursday.
With friends like these…
The old saw is as true as ever. Calderon’s speech is a farce. From here it sounds like he’s repeating truisms that the average 6th-grader could have presented as analysis of Mexico’s corrupt interrelationships between government, police and gangsters. 10 years ago. 20 years ago.
No “reforms” have been passed by their Congreso. State and local governments most often manage those relationships by bribery, kickbacks and protection payoffs – rather than by housecleaning and prosecution. Force of arms is the only solution attempted by the Calderon government. Half-measures at best.
Drug gangsters in Mexican jailbreak — guards leave with them
Another superlative job of guarding the prison – afterwards
About 60 inmates tied to the Zetas drug trafficking organization broke out of a Nuevo Laredo prison Friday, leaving seven members of a rival gang dead in their wake.
The late-morning escape is the latest violent episode in a prison that was the site of a massive breakout last year and where the Zetas execute with impunity those who displease them.
Five guards also are missing from the Centro de Ejecución de Sanciones No. 2, known by its acronym CEDES, where 151 inmates escaped in December.
After that escape, the prison’s warden went missing. His replacement was stabbed to death in March during a confrontation in the prison…
“The situation is currently under control and the facts are being investigated in a coordinated manner with local and federal authorities,” according to the news release from the state of Tamaulipas.
RTFA for details. Frankly “coordinated manner with local and federal authorities” probably is an accurate description of how the jailbreak was designed and implemented.
Mexican history would say that is so.
More than 40 dead in 24 hours of violence in Mexico
El Sabino Gordo bar where 20 were killed
Authorities in the northern Mexican city of Torreon said Saturday that they found 10 “mutilated” bodies inside the back of a truck…
The seven men and three women appear to have been killed several days ago in various locations outside the city and then later brought in, Notimex reported.
The news agency said authorities also had reports of human heads, found throughout Torreon, but it was not immediately clear whether those heads belonged to the bodies in the truck.
Separately, gunmen entered a downtown bar in the northern Mexican city of Monterrey and shot 20 people dead, police told the state-run news agency Saturday.
A preliminary investigation suggests that attack was sparked by a dispute between organized crime groups for control of the El Sabino Gordo nightclub, where drugs are allegedly sold, said Jorge Domene Zambrano, a public safety spokesman.
In a third incident, the bodies of 10 men and a woman were found Friday afternoon on the eastern outskirts of Mexico City, a Valle de Chalco municipal government official said in a statement.
The public security official, Javier Garcia, said the victims — all of whom were in handcuffs and bound with tape — had been shot.
Nationwide, there have been some 35,000 drug-related deaths since President Felipe Calderon began a crackdown on the cartels in December 2006, the Mexican government says.
So, uh, what numbers are meaningful? These deaths are generally characterized as being members of drug gangs – killing each other off. How much of the nation’s population is working for these gangs?
The numbers don’t seem to diminish. The killings don’t seem to slow down, week by week, month by month. I don’t have a personal stake in the slaughter in Mexico except when it slops over into New Mexico – which happens often enough to be accepted as part of the “local” drug scene.
Is Calderon’s war on gangs an effective weapon? If so – when is there to be a qualitative change?
Teacher sings to her schoolchildren during shoot-out in Mexico
Teacher Martha Rivera Alanis was awarded a certificate for showing “outstanding civic courage” for her steady performance during a gunfight in the northern industrial hub of Monterrey.
As Miss Rivera Alanis proudly held up the framed certificate outside the local Governor’s office she said she was not concerned with fame – only the safety of her 5- and 6-year-old pupils. “Of course, I was afraid, but I tell you, my kids get me through it,” she said following the private ceremony.
Miss Rivera Alanis used her cell phone to tape the video, in which she is heard coaxing her 15 pupils to lie flat on the floor…
Then, loud bursts of gunfire break out, which local paramedics later confirmed were the sound of gunmen killing five people at a taxi stand a block from the school…
In the video, the teacher tries to take the children’s minds off the gunfire, leading them in a song from television show Barney & Friends.
“If the rain drops were chocolate, I would love to be there, opening my mouth to taste them,” the class sang as they hugged the floor at the Alfonso Reyes school.
“My only thought was to take their minds off that noise,” she told reporters Monday. “So I thought of that song…”
A mother of two children, she said her young students had set an example for the rest of the city. “I’m going to carry on, of course it is possible,” she said. “If my 5- and 6-year-olds can do it, it is up to the rest of us to carry on.”
What a terrible life. What courage and love.
Drug gangs “self-rule” Mexican prisons
SALTILLO, Mexico — The Zetas have the run of the prison in this industrial city 190 miles southwest of Lardeo, Texas, in what is known as autogobierno or self-rule. It dates back decades and forms of it exist in correctional facilities the world over.
But self-rule has become more of a problem in Mexico recently as prison populations swell with suspects detained in the ongoing crackdown on organized crime and the country’s drug cartels seize power behind bars.
The most recent prison report from the National Human Rights Commission shows self-rule on the rise. Drug cartels and their affiliated gangs are among those increasingly seizing control, say prison observers…
Security experts such as Vicente Sánchez, professor at the College of the Northern Border in Tijuana, say self-rule exists mostly in state-level facilities. It took hold over the past four decades due to corruption, neglect and underfunding, he says, as prison mafias got involved in everything from peddling drugs to charging for the right to sleep on bunks.
“It’s an expression of the enormous corruption that there is in these kinds of public security fields,” he says.
David Ordaz, investigator at the National Criminal Sciences Institute, of the Attorney General’s Office says the cartels want to maintain their status and replicate power structures formed on the outside. Gustavo de la Rosa Hickerson, ombudsman for the Chihuahua State Human Rights Commission in Ciudad Juarez, says that wardens have cut deals with prison mafias over the years – mafias now controlled by the cartels.
Self-rule, he says, “Means having total control over an inmate population,” along with “the ability to communicate with the outside without restrictions…”
Los Zetas…now operate stores and charge the inmates to use workshops. They even opened a strip joint that serves shots of whiskey under the Los Zetas brand.
Does anyone think the war on drug gangs will get anywhere when the rest of the corrupt infrastructure of Mexico remains untouched? Time in prison is spent resting up for the return to action.
U.S. extends travel warnings to five more Mexican states
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission
The U.S. State Department has broadened its travel warning on Mexico to include parts of five additional states, including a highway where suspected drug gangs shot two U.S. customs officials in February.
The warning advises U.S. government personnel and American citizens to defer nonessential travel in certain parts of Jalisco, Nayarit, San Luis Potosi, Sonora and Zacatecas.
It outright bans U.S. employees from travelling to Colotlan and Yahualica, two cities in the central-west state of Jalisco near the Zacatecas border due to increasing drug gang violence.
“Concerns include roadblocks placed by individuals posing as police or military personnel and recent gun battles between rival transnational criminal organizations involving automatic weapons,” the State Department warning said.
The restrictions were added to a previous warning against travel throughout the states of Tamaulipas and Michoacan and to parts of the states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Durango and Sinaloa.
Gunmen shot dead an unarmed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent and wounded another on February 15 on a highway in San Luis Potosi in a daylight attack that outraged U.S. officials and put a strain on join U.S.-Mexican efforts to battle drug cartels…
The latest warning also provides more specific information on travel in northern Mexico where drug gang wars have been most violent, naming cities and towns that require particular caution. For example, it says U.S. government officials are required to travel only in armoured vehicles and in daylight hours in Sinaloa parts of the city of Nogales…
More than 36,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence in Mexico since President Felipe Calderon launched a military-led crackdown on drug gangs in 2006. Mexico last month revealed that it is allowing unmanned U.S. drone aircraft into its airspace to hunt for drug traffickers.
Finally convinced the snowbird section of our extended family to stop traveling much into Mexico during their winter stay along the border. There are a couple of places they will slip over the border for daytrips, essential errands. But, the range of safe travel continues to diminish month-by-month even for old hands.
Mexico confirms U.S. drones in flyovers against drug gangs
Mexico has admitted that American unmanned drones operate over its territory, but denied that it constitutes a violation of its sovereignty.
Har. Send a copy of that memo to Pakistan!
U.S. Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicles have been used to collect intelligence and track drug traffickers, but only under Mexican supervision, according to a statement by the technical secretariat for the Mexican National Security Council.
“Each of these actions is undertaken with full respect to the law,” the statement says…
The flights had been kept secret “because of legal restrictions in Mexico and the heated political sensitivities there about sovereignty,” The New York Times reported.
1. So what changed?
2. When will the joint committee supervising the flights ask that they be armed with missiles?
Mexican city sets a new 3-day murder record – 53 dead!
A lone man walks along the empty downtown streets of Ciudad Juarez
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission
Fifty-three people were killed in a 72-hour span in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, making it one of the deadliest three-day periods in recent memory…
Among the dead were four police officers from three different agencies, Arturo Sandoval said…
The bloodshed started on Thursday with 14 people killed, including a municipal police officer.
Friday was the most violent day, leaving 20 people dead. A municipal police officer was killed by an assassin who belonged to a band of carjackers. Hours later, a state police investigator was executed on his drive home.
On Saturday, a highway police officer was killed by a driver who confronted the patrolman after the officer gave him a ticket. The officer was shot 10 times at close range in the middle of the afternoon. In all, 19 people were killed that day in separate shootings throughout the city.
Juarez is one of Mexico’s deadliest cities and an epicenter of drug cartel violence. The Juarez cartel and the Sinaloa cartel are fighting a bloody turf war in the region for lucrative smuggling routes, and for drug-dealing territory in the city.
The sudden spike in violence left the city morgue overwhelmed. There were issues with where to store the bodies…
Logistics is a bear isn’t it.
Brazil arrests 35 – mostly coppers – in raid on Rio corruption
At least 35 people, mostly Rio de Janeiro police officers, were arrested on Friday on suspicion of colluding with drug gangs as the Brazilian city attempts to clean itself up before hosting the 2014 World Cup and the Olympic Games two years later.
It was one of the biggest operations against police corruption in the city, which is gradually overcoming a reputation for crime and violence. Rio police have long been accused of corruption and of covering up their violent tactics in the city’s hundreds of slum areas that are often controlled by drug traffickers…
Hundreds of officers took part in the operation, code-named “Guillotine,” seeking the arrest of 45 people, including 32 police officers. By Friday evening, 27 police officers had been arrested, investigators said.
The investigation began in 2009 when a planned police operation in a slum had to be aborted after details of the raid were leaked to drug traffickers, officials said.
Police officers targeted in the operation were also suspected of running protection rackets for illegal gambling, leading militia groups and taking bribes from traffickers.
One of the suspected leaders of the scheme, former police commander Carlos de Oliveira, was suspected of charging drug chiefs $60,000 a time in exchange for information about police operations. Oliveira, who turned himself in to investigators, had since left the police to join the city government.
Har! Corruption suspect leaves police force – to join city government. Sounds like a few places I’ve lived in the good old USA.
