Eideard

Guns, marijuana and cocaine seized during Operation Pipeline Express
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

At least 70 suspected drug smugglers with alleged ties to the powerful Sinaloa cartel have been arrested in Arizona, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials.

The massive take-down of the drug trafficking network in Arizona included arrests of Mexican and U.S. suspects who allegedly smuggled more than 330 tons of illegal narcotics a year through Arizona.

More than 20 federal, state and local law enforcement agencies were involved in the 17-month multiagency investigation called Operation Pipeline Express. Speaking at a news conference Monday in Phoenix, law enforcement officials said the organization was responsible for smuggling more than $33 million worth of drugs a month…

Officials say the ring, organized around cells based in the Arizona communities of Chandler, Stanfield and Maricopa, used backpackers and vehicles to move loads of marijuana and other drugs from the Arizona-Mexico border to a network of “stash” houses in the Phoenix area. After arriving in Phoenix, the contraband was sold to distributors from multiple states nationwide.

Law enforcement officials seized thousands of pounds of marijuana, cocaine and heroin in a series of raids. They also seized more than 100 weapons, including multiple assault rifles and ammunition.

Authorities say the organization has been around for at least five years. According to a news release, officials say they “conservatively estimate the ring has smuggled more than 3.3 million pounds of marijuana, 20,000 pounds of cocaine and 10,000 pounds of heroin into to the United States, generating almost $2 billion in illicit proceeds.”

Most folks who feel – as I do – that drug use should be decriminalized, managed through price-fixed clinics still have nothing but contempt for the slimy gangsters who run the import business for American habits and addiction.

Throw away the key.

A migrant farm worker from Mexico who died in 2010 was the first human ever to die in the US of rabies transmitted by vampire bat, health officials say.

The 19-year-old died last August about three weeks after he was bitten on the heel by a vampire bat while sleeping in the Mexican state of Michoacan.

Doctors in the US state of Louisiana, where he went to work on a sugar cane farm after the bite, diagnosed rabies. He had no known vaccination against the disease, US health officials reported.

According to a report in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly, a publication of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the unnamed worker was bitten on the left heel by the bat on 15 July 2010. He departed for the US 10 days later, arriving at a sugar cane plantation in Louisiana on 29 July.

The next day he went to hospital, complaining of fatigue, pain in his left shoulder and numbness in his left hand, which he attributed to overwork. He was transferred to hospital in New Orleans, where his condition deteriorated rapidly until he died on 21 August.

A post-mortem examination showed that he had been infected with a variant of rabies that comes from vampire bats…

“This is the first reported death from a vampire bat rabies virus variant in the United States,” the CDC reported. But the study notes that vampire bats are the leading source of rabies infection in Latin America.

Two questions come to mind: As a matter of practice, was he here legally? How much bureaucratic make-work between Louisiana and the Feds at the CDC was there – that this took a year to make it into the Scientific literature much less the public eye?

A special unit of airport screeners, charged with detecting suspicious behavior, engaged in racial profiling so frequently at Newark Liberty International Airport that their resentful colleagues called them “Mexican hunters,” according to an internal federal report.

Officially known as behavior detection officers, or BDOs, the screeners were supposed to focus on
nervous, erratic or evasive gestures or speech and other indicators to single out passengers for extra scrutiny, but instead they concentrated on whether Mexican or Dominican passengers had proper visas or passport stamps, the report said — all at the direction of their managers.

If not, those passengers would be subjected to bag searches, pat downs, questioning and referrals to immigration with bogus behaviors invented by the screeners to cover up the real reason the passengers were singled out.

“It became a joke in the unit, these individuals were called the great Mexican hunters,” Newark BDO Paul Animone told investigators, according the report. “I did not agree or did not go along with these types of referrals, but if I was teamed up with one of these BDOs, I would go along with the referral and perform the bag check. When I disagreed with these referrals and brought it to the attention of the BDO managers, I was told by the BDO managers that I was not a team player…”

Å report said Mexican and Dominican passengers were singled out for scrutiny of their travel documents as an easy way to drive up the number of referrals by Newark’s BDO unit so that it would appear productive, even though the officers’ real job was to look for behavior that might indicate a security threat…

What motivated the practice? The same sort of mechanical job rating that afflicts many bureaucracies. They needed sufficient numbers to prove they were doing something valid and valuable – regardless of final determinations. So, they picked on a couple groups of inbound passengers less familiar with language and procedures, assigning “suspicious” actions to everything from bewilderment to speaking Spanish – therefore prompting special searches and investigation.

Good old-fashioned self-serving sleazy behavior.

Gonzalo Esquivel said to be a leader in Nuestra Familia cops a free ride

The authorities in California announced…the arrest of more than 100 people suspected of being gang members in the largely agricultural Central Valley, the latest sweep by law enforcement to stem what they call a growing — and international — menace in the nation’s most populous state.

The announcement, made by California’s attorney general, Kamala D. Harris, capped raids on Tuesday in six towns, many of which have long struggled with gang-related crime.

“This operation was a success,” said Ms. Harris, standing at City Hall in the small farm city of Los Banos, about 120 miles southeast of San Francisco. “And this operation will bear its fruit in terms of public safety for the Central Valley and throughout the state of California.”

The investigation, called “Red Zone,” was conducted over several months and aimed at the leadership of two gangs: Nuestra Familia, a Mexican-American prison-based gang that operates in detention facilities across the state, and the Norteños, which the authorities say often acts as the Familia’s street-level arm…

“This is part of what we’re seeing in terms of the changing face of crime,” Ms. Harris said, adding that the emphasis was going from “purely drug enforcement” to being “equally about gangs, equally about guns, equally about drugs.”

Large amounts of narcotics, firearms and cash were seized in the Central Valley raids, including methamphetamine and crack cocaine and five assault rifles. Charges included assault, mayhem, gun possession and attempted murder.

Throw away the key!

Crystal Dillman and her fiance Luís Ramírez

Three former Pennsylvania police officers went on trial this week on charges of obstructing justice in the beating death of a Mexican immigrant in 2008, a prosecution that Hispanics have come to view as a national test case for treatment of Latinos.

The federal case against the former officers, Matthew Nestor, Jason Hayes and William Moyer, began with the killing of Luís Ramírez, 25, an undocumented Mexican immigrant who was beaten and kicked to death in July 2008 by a group of young white men in the central Pennsylvania town of Shenandoah.

The case became a cause célèbre for Latinos who argued that the two main defendants, Brandon Piekarsky, a member of a high school football team, and his friend Derrick Donchak, got off with light sentences in a state trial in 2009. They were acquitted of the most serious charges and convicted of simple assault, a misdemeanor.

After mounting criticism from state officials, federal prosecutors pressed civil rights charges against the two men, and in October, they were convicted of a hate crime. The men, who are 19 and 20, face a maximum of life in prison when they are sentenced on Jan. 24.

In federal court on Thursday in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., prosecutors argued that the police officers, who are charged with conspiracy, making false statements and obstruction of justice, misrepresented facts during their investigation because they had personal connections to the families of the accused. Mr. Nestor, the chief of police at the time, had vacationed with Mr. Piekarsky’s mother, according to the indictment. Mr. Hayes, a patrolman, was dating her, and the son of Mr. Moyer, a lieutenant, played on the same football team as those accused in the beating. All have since left the police department…

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which circulated a petition in 2009 calling for the Justice Department to bring federal charges in the case, welcomed the trial.

“This trial sends a strong message that hate crimes and those who attempt to cover them up, including law enforcement officers, will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” said Gladys Limón, a staff lawyer for the fund.

RTFA for brief details. Wander back through Google-time and you’ll find more coverage – and damned little done by the local PD.

“Protect and Serve” does not ask the question “which neighborhood and whose friends” get protected and served?

Federal authorities were investigating Friday the circumstances of a drone that crashed in El Paso, Texas, this week, which U.S. officials said originated in Mexico.

But Rocio Torres, a spokeswoman for the Mexican attorney general’s office, disputed that the drone belonged to that country…

But U.S. National Transportation Safety Board spokesman Keith Holloway said he believed that the drone “was owned by the government of Mexico, and I think they were the operators…”

The crash of an unmanned aerial vehicle from Mexico would be a first on U.S. soil, said U.S. Customs and Border Protection Special Operations Supervisor Ramiro Cordero.

Holloway said the craft was an Orbiter Mini UAV designed by Aeronautics Defense Systems, whose website describes it as “a compact and lightweight system designed for use in military and homeland security operations” and “the ultimate solution for over-the-hill reconnaissance missions, low-intensity conflicts and urban warfare operations.”

“I guess we are investigating, but we don’t know what we’re going to do with the information at this point,” Holloway said.

Unmanned drones are routinely used by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to look for illegal immigration on the U.S.-Mexico border.

I wonder what the Mexican government is using theirs for?

Phoenix Police S.W.A.T. officer stands in front of the drop house
Daylife/Ross D. Franklin /AP Photo used by permission

It could have been mistaken for a day care center, with so many children of all ages inside. But the authorities said that the crowded house in a working-class neighborhood here was really a drop point for a human-smuggling operation and that the 10 children, ages 2 to 17, were illegal immigrants being held for ransom.

The mother of three of the girls — a Salvadoran women who is living legally in Northern California — alerted the authorities to the operation late last week when she told the F.B.I. that smugglers had threatened to rape and kill her daughters if she did not pay $10,000. The girls are ages 12, 14 and 15.

The police in Phoenix found the house, on South Seventh Street, and raided it on Thursday night. They found what has become an all too common sight in Phoenix: a large group of migrants being held against their will.

This time, though, most of those inside were crying babies and scared teenagers from Mexico and Central America, all but one of them unaccompanied by an adult…The smugglers had refused to release them, even though their families had paid thousands of dollars to get them into the United States, until more money was handed over.

“We haven’t seen anything like this before,” said Capt. Fred Zumbo, who leads the Arizona Department of Public Safety’s illegal immigration task force. “Imagine what these children went through.”

The authorities arrested a man and a woman, Jaime Cruz Gutiérrez, 44, and Olga Marino Fuentes, 41, both Mexican citizens, on charges of kidnapping, extortion and smuggling humans for a profit.

The depths plumbed by the cultures of crime around the world have no bottom. Whether Sudanese bandits, Afghan warlords, Salvadoran gangbangers or Mexican human smugglers – there is no shame, no humanity, no respect for life and individual freedom.

They deserve to lose nothing less than what they are willing to take from every other human being.

A Mexican drug gang is hiring pretty young women to carry out killings to surprise its enemies, a suspected member of the vicious La Linea gang said in a video.

Around 30 women aged between 18 and 30 years have learned in recent months to carry out killings accompanied by hitmen, and most have killed people, suspect Rogelio Amaya said during a interrogation by federal police. The video of the interrogation was made public on Tuesday.

“They’re pretty, good-looking, to help mislead opponents,” said Amaya, the suspected member of a gang of enforcers for the Juarez cartel in the country’s most violent city of Ciudad Juarez.

The women operate in the same way as men and carry both light and heavy weapons, the suspect said.

The revelations came as Mexico’s drug battles leave a trail of blood and fear across the country, particularly in Ciudad Juarez.

At least 18 suspected drug-related deaths were reported between Monday and Tuesday in Ciudad Juarez.

Right. I do not visit Ciudad Juarez – for any reason – anymore.

Pay someone you don’t like to cross the Rio to shop for you.

In the first public incident of its kind, cartels are making direct death threats to U.S. law enforcement officials in Nogales, Arizona, the police chief there told CNN Monday…

The threats began less than two weeks ago, after off-duty police officers from the Nogales police department seized several hundred pounds of marijuana from a drug smuggling operation they stumbled upon while horseback riding in the eastern fringes of Nogales, the chief said.

The smugglers in the incident managed to flee into Mexico before they could be detained.

Home free!

“We are taking the threats very seriously,” Kirkham told CNN. “We have received information from informants who work in Mexico that the drug cartel running that operation was unhappy about our seizure. They told our informant that they understand uniformed police officers have a job to do, but anyone out of uniform who gets involved in their operation will be targeted.”

“America is based on freedom. We’re not going to be intimidated by the threats, but we are taking them seriously. I’ve told my officers if they venture into that area off duty to be armed,” Kirkham said.

I presume someone will pass that suggestion along to ordinary civilians as well as off-duty police officers. Seems reasonable to me.

The Republican nominee for a New Mexico congressional seat suggested during a radio interview that the United States could place land mines along the Mexican border to secure the international boundary…

Mullins says border security came up during a radio interview last month, when he was campaigning for the GOP nod to run against Rep. Ben Ray Lujan, D-N.M.

Mullins subsequently won the Republican primary June 1.

In the May 18 interview with KNMX radio in Las Vegas, N.M., Mullins says the U.S. could mine the border, install barbed wire and post signs directing would-be border jumpers to cross legally at designated checkpoints.

He explained Monday it was a suggestion he’d heard while campaigning.

It’s not often I get to vote against a thoroughly dislikable right-wing nutball. The Republicans – half the time – don’t even try to run candidates in northern New Mexico. Down in Albuquerque with military bases and war-lover retirees they have a constituency. Up here, folks are construction workers, hotel employees, subsistence farmers – ordinary folks or part of the arts-and-crafts crowd attracted by living in a beautiful place.

But, the wingnut right-wing that controls what’s left of the Republican Party is beyond belief. This is the kind of crap they come up with all the time.