Eideard

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Soldiers in Mexico have seized $15.3 million in cash, believed to belong to the country’s most wanted drug lord, Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman.

The security forces said they found the money when they searched a car in a well-to do neighbourhood of Tijuana, on the US-Mexico border. They said the money was being taken to a safe house used by Shorty Guzman and his gang, the powerful Sinaloa cartel.

It is the second largest cash seizure since Felipe Calderon became president.

Defence Ministry spokesman Gen Ricardo Trevilla said the find was made during a “surprise operation” in the Cumbres de Juarez neighbourhood of Tijuana, in Baja California state.

He said the soldiers found $15.35m in cash, 3kg of cocaine, four weapons, and jewellery inside the car…

He did not say what led the troops to the cash. No arrests were made.

No arrests were made? No idea who the car belonged to? No search of nearby houses?

Are we to think the drogas drop a car full of cash and coke blocks away from easy access?

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Mexican security forces seized at least 105 tons of marijuana bound for the United States in the border city of Tijuana on Monday, by far the biggest such bust in Mexico in recent years.

The drugs were seized by soldiers and police officers in predawn raids in three neighborhoods, Gen. Alfonso Duarte Mujica of the army said at a news conference. The raid followed a shootout with gunmen in a convoy of vehicles, he said, and 11 people were arrested. Soldiers in masks displayed the marijuana, which was found wrapped in 10,000 packages and carried an estimated street value of about $340 million, according to General Duarte. He said the marijuana would be incinerated immediately after the weighing and counting were completed.

The raid began when Tijuana municipal police officers on patrol came under fire from the gunmen in the convoy, General Duarte said. A police officer and a suspect were wounded.

The army and state police sent reinforcements, and the suspects led the security forces to the neighborhoods where the marijuana was found in tractor-trailers and houses.

Let’s see. 5-day supply for the whole United States. So, if California didn’t get their share, that would leave enough for the rest of the country for a couple of months.

Lots of medical savings in Tijuana

A Tijuana woman has been charged with stealing $250,000 from an elderly California woman she was caring for, Orange County prosecutors have announced.

Susana Duran, 38, faces charges including felony forgery and 149 counts of using a debit card without authorization.

Duran allegedly used the debit card and forged checks to siphon off funds from the bank account of the 92-year-old Newport Beach woman she had been caring for since January 2008…

Duran was tripped up after she called in sick and the fill-in caregiver showed the victim a bank statement that had arrived in the mail and listed some of the withdrawals.

Har! Let’s fit all the stereotypes while we’re about being a crook.

You get hired as a caregiver – probably because you work for cheap compared to a citizen. You steal everything that ain’t nailed down. And then – you get caught because you felt like goofing off and called in sick.

You get the idea…

They have heard of people tunneling under it, scaling it and, on the Mexican side, defacing it. But it is not often, law enforcement authorities say, that people try to rip apart the border fence to sell it.

That appears to be the motive that led to the arrest this week in Tijuana, Mexico, of six people who, the authorities there say, were caught shearing off chunks of the metal plate fence to sell as scrap.

The case began Monday afternoon when United States Border Patrol agents spotted a group tampering with the fence on the Mexican side just over a mile west of the San Ysidro port of entry, in an area where smuggling of drugs and people is common, said Mark Endicott, a Border Patrol spokesman in San Diego…

The next afternoon, another group in the same area could be seen next to the fence “attempting to dismantle it,” Mr. Endicott said. Again, they were approached, again rocks sailed over the fence, and again the Mexican police were called. The Border Patrol later learned that six people were apprehended…

Tijuana police told local reporters there that the men were planning to sell the torn-off fence parts. The police said the men had used a soldering tool to cut off parts of the fence, which perhaps unknown to the culprits, is itself scrap. That part of the fence is made of recycled steel landing mats from the Vietnam War era, Mr. Endicott said.

I always wondered if the wall might be stolen as soon as we install it?

Daylife/AP Photo by Guillermo Arias

Mexico arrested its head of Interpol on Tuesday for allegedly working for a powerful drug cartel and sent the military to take over police duties in the city of Tijuana in another step to flush out corrupt law enforcement.

Ricardo Gutierrez was Mexico’s representative to Interpol, the world’s largest international police force, and the latest top police officer to be locked up on suspicion of working for drug traffickers.

In October, two leading anti-drug agents were jailed for taking bribes of “up to $450,000 a month” from the Beltran Leyva crime group to leak intelligence about police operations.

The Beltran Leyva brothers recently split from the Sinaloa drug cartel run by Mexico’s most wanted man, Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman, and also were bribing Gutierrez, prosecutors said.

Political life continues its exciting pace in Mexico.

The authorities in the Mexican border city of Tijuana have found 16 bodies in 24 hours, in what police believe is part of a wave of drug-related murders.

Twelve of the bodies were found on a patch of wasteland near a school just before it opened. Most showed signs of having been bound and tortured.

A wave of murders linked to the drug trade has claimed the lives of more than 3,000 people in Mexico this year.

City officials suspended lessons at the school near where the bodies were found.

Wasn’t that thoughtful? Cripes, I know you can’t turn around a century of corruption, cronyism and crime in a few years; but…

Is this where the United States is headed?