Eideard

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…

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.

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.

Mexican marines found 72 dead bodies at a remote ranch near the U.S. border, the Mexican navy said on Wednesday, the biggest single discovery of its kind in Mexico’s increasingly bloody drug war.

The marines came across the bodies of 58 men and 14 women on Tuesday at the ranch outside a town near the Gulf of Mexico in Tamaulipas state, some 90 miles from the Texas border, after a firefight with drug hitmen in which three gunmen and a marine died, a spokesman for the navy said.

One suspected trafficker was arrested, the navy said, and several escaped in SUVs.

“The bodies were dumped about the ranch and were not buried. We are still investigating how long they had been there,” the spokesman said. He declined to give more details.

Marines guarding a nearby checkpoint reached the ranch after a wounded man approached them and asked for help. The soldiers came under fire as they neared the ranch, the navy said in a statement.

After the firefight, marines seized assault rifles, bullets, uniforms and vehicles from the ranch — including one with forged army license plates…

Tamaulipas has become one of Mexico’s bloodiest drug flashpoints since the start of the year as rivals from the Gulf cartel and a spinoff group, the Zetas, fight over smuggling routes into the United States…

The Zetas were members of Mexico’s elite special forces trained to fight drug cartels, but they switched sides in the 1990s and became one of the country’s most feared gangs led by Heriberto Lazcano, known as “The Executioner.”

Of course, the Zetas are one of the most dangerous groups of criminals in Mexico. Like the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan, they were trained to a large extent by the United States.

Great job of qualifying recruits, guys.

Mexican criminal gangs during the past two years have stolen $1 billion in oil from the country’s state-run oil company.

Using a fleet of stolen tanker trucks, miles of rubber hose and high-tech drills, the notorious gang known as the Zetas have established sophisticated operations to siphon off petroleum from the state-run Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, robbing the Mexican treasury of revenues, The Washington Post reported Sunday.

The Zetas, many of whom are former Mexican soldiers, have graduated from their roles as enforcers for drug cartels to running their own criminal enterprises in the oil-rich states of Veracruz and Tamaulipas, the newspaper said.

“The Zetas are a parallel government,” Eduardo Mendoza Arellano, a federal lawmaker who heads a national committee on energy, told the Post. “They practically own vast stretches of the pipelines, from the highway to the very door of the oil companies.”

Free enterprise – in parallel with politics and corruption. And power.

Our politicians fritter around trying to differentiate these gangsters from Al Qaeda – for example. Neither is more or less religious than the other. In truth.