Mexico attacks leave 17 dead
AFP - 45 minutes ago

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (AFP) - - Seventeen people, including a police officer, were killed in a 24-hour period in suspected drug attacks in Mexico, mainly in northern border areas, police and officials said.

Dozens have died so far this year and more than 5,300 died in 2008 as powerful drug cartels fight increasingly bloody turf wars despite a government crackdown including the deployment of some 36,000 troops.

Gunmen traveling in a truck shot dead a police officer and injured three others Wednesday in the southern state of Oaxaca, rarely touched by drug violence so far, the public security ministry said.

An armed commando flung at least two grenades at the prosecutor's office in northwestern Durango state, injuring two police guards, the state prosecutor told journalists.

Meanwhile, 10 died in the volatile border city of Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas, overnight Tuesday including a 50-year-old man shot dead with his son and a suspect killed in a shootout with police in a shop. Two tortured bodies were also thrown out of a car, police said.

Police found the stabbed body of a 22-year-old woman in a hotel in the border town of Ojinaga, and five died in Chihuahua, capital of the northern state of the same name.

http://ph.news.yahoo.com/afp/20090205/twl-mexico-crime-drugs-4bdc673.html



Mexican Drug Cartels Armed to the Hilt, Threatening National Security
Wednesday, February 04, 2009

By Matt Sanchez


Soldiers stand guard around a presentation of arms captured in arrest of Jaime Gonzalez
Duran, alias 'El Hummer' in Mexico City in November, 2008.



In November, along the border with Texas, Mexican authorities arrested drug cartel leader Jaime "el Hummer" Gonzalez Duran — one of the founders of "Los Zetas," a paramilitary organization of former Mexican soldiers who decided there was more money to be made in selling drugs than in serving in the Mexican military.

As El Hummer was being transported to the airport in an armed vehicle, his fellow cartel members launched a brazen attack against the federales.

They were armed to the teeth. Their arsenal ranged from semi-automatic rifles to rocket-propelled grenades. When the smoke finally cleared and the government had prevailed, Mexican federal agents captured 540 assault rifles, more than 500,000 rounds of ammunition, 150 grenades, 14 cartridges of dynamite, 98 fragmentation grenades, 67 bulletproof vests, seven Barrett .50-caliber sniper rifles and a Light Anti Tank (LAW) rocket.

This is modern Mexico, where the leaders of the powerful drug cartels are armed to the teeth with sophisticated weapons, many of which are smuggled over the border from the United States. It is with this array of superior weapons that drug cartels are threatening the very stability of their own country. And it's why America's outgoing CIA Director, Michael Hayden, says violence in Mexico will pose the second greatest threat to U.S. security next year, right after Al Qaeda.

"Americans are understandably focused on the flow of drugs and migrants into the U.S. from Mexico," says Andreas Peter, author of "Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide."

"But too often glossed over in the border security debate is the flow of weapons across the border into Mexico," he told Foxnews.com in a statement via the Internet.

The cartels are obtaining arms from America by using "straw man" buyers, who legally purchase weapons at gun shops and gun shows in the U.S. The weapons cross into Mexico, where border security is much weaker heading south of the border than it is going north.

Authorities don't know how many firearms are sneaked across the border, but the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) says more than 7,700 guns sold in America were traced to Mexico last year, up from 3,300 the year before and about 2,100 in 2006. Mexican authorities say 90 percent of smuggled weapons come from the United States.

In Northern Mexico, high-powered American weapons have enabled drug cartels to control whole territories. There is the Colt AR-15, the civilian version of the military M-16. And there is the "cuernos de chivo" — Spanish for goat horns . . . the 30-shot curved banana clip of the AK-47.

The AK-47, long the symbol of guerrilla revolution, is not the most accurate or technical assault rifle, but it gets the job done. It is the workhorse of drug cartels, and ammunition can come from a variety of world sources, including the United States.

And then there are the sniper rifles.

"The .50-caliber was interesting because we haven't seen that type of arm used in Mexico yet," said Scott Stewart, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer and an analyst for Stratfor, a geopolitical security firm. The .50-caliber long-range sniper rifle is incredibly accurate and dangerous; a trained operator could kill a human being with a round from well over a mile away.

For criminal cartels like Los Zetas, greater firepower means greater influence in not only the drug trade; it has enabled them to infiltrate and threaten the entire power structure of Mexico. In December, the Mexican attorney general announced the arrest of Maj. Arturo Gonzalez Rodriguez for allegedly assisting Mexican drug trafficking organizations — allegedly for $100,000 a month.

The connection between the drug cartels and the Mexican army has given cartel leaders access to military grade weapons like the high powered Five-Seven semi-automatic pistols.

A favorite with the cartels, the Five-Seven has the advantage of being light: under 2 pounds, with a 20-round clip filled with bullets the cartels call "matapolicias' — "cop killers."

"The 5.7 x 28, armor piercing (AP) rounds are not available for sale to the general public and are probably coming from the Mexican military," said Stewart who has analyzed U.S.-Mexican border security issues for half a decade.

The drug-related murder rate in Mexico doubled in 2008 from just one year before, and as the violence escalates, the power of the drug cartels has destabilized Mexican authority to the point of threatening national security.

Last week Gen. Ángeles Dahuajare announced that more than 17,000 soldiers had deserted in 2008.

"The Mexican Army is becoming a revolving door for the enforcement arm of the drug cartels; they simply pay better," Stewart said.

"If they don't get the weapons from the U.S., they'll get it from somewhere else: Brazil, Guatemala, Argentina or even former satellite state 'gray markets,'" he said.

Despite the efforts of his comrades in crime, El Hummer wound up in jail — and Mexican authorities paraded him before the media to reassure the public that they are still in control.

But that was largely for show. As long as weapons flow into Mexico, the drug cartels will be able to develop an arsenal. "Control" will be unstable, at best.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,487911,00.html


Border Proves No Obstacle for Mexican Cartels

SOLOMON MOORE

Published: Monday, February 2, 2009 at 6:01 a.m.
Last Modified: Monday, February 2, 2009 at 5:17 a.m.

TUCSON — Drug smugglers parked a car transport trailer against the Mexican side of the border one day in December, dropped a ramp over the security fence, and drove two pickup trucks filled with marijuana onto Arizona soil.

As Border Patrol agents gave chase, a third truck appeared on the Mexican side and gunmen sprayed machine-gun fire over the fence at the agents. Smugglers in the first vehicles torched one truck and abandoned the other, with $1 million worth of marijuana still in the truck bed. Then they vaulted back over the barrier into Mexico’s Sonora state.

Despite huge enforcement actions on both sides of the Southwest border, the Mexican marijuana trade is more robust — and brazen — than ever, law enforcement officials say. Mexican drug cartels routinely transported industrial-size loads of marijuana in 2008, excavating new tunnels and adopting tactics like ramp-assisted smuggling to get their cargoes across undetected.

But these are not the only new tactics: the cartels are also increasingly planting marijuana crops inside the United States in a major strategy shift to avoid the border altogether, officials said. Last year, drug enforcement authorities confiscated record amounts of high potency plants from Miami to San Diego, and even from vineyards leased by cartels in Washington State. Mexican drug traffickers have also moved into hydroponic marijuana production — cannabis grown indoors without soil and nourished with sunlamps — challenging Asian networks and smaller, individual growers here.

A Justice Department report issued last year concluded that Mexican drug trafficking organizations now operated in 195 cities, up from about 50 cities in 2006.

The four largest cartels with affiliates in United States cities were the Federation, the Tijuana Cartel, the Juarez Cartel and the Gulf Cartel.

“There is evidence that Mexican cartels are also increasing their relationships with prison and street gangs in the United States in order to facilitate drug trafficking,” a Congressional report from February 2008 stated. Intelligence analysts were detecting increased Mexican drug cartel-related activity in Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, Seattle and Yakima, Wash. — areas that used to be controlled by other ethnic networks.

Smuggling is still most conspicuous in the Southwest, which has been home to Mexican traffickers for more than two decades. From Nogales, Ariz., recently, a reporter watched as smugglers across the border, in hilltop stations, peered through binoculars at the movements of American Border Patrol agents. The agents gunned their trucks along the barrier looking for illegal crossings.

About noon, border agents saw a 60-pound bale of marijuana drop over the fence.

“That kind of thing happens every day here,” said Agent Michael A. Scioli, a spokesman for Customs and Border Protection.

For the cartels, “marijuana is the king crop,” said Special Agent Rafael Reyes, the chief of the Mexico and Central America Section of the Drug Enforcement Administration. “It consistently sustains its marketability and profitability.”

Marijuana trafficking continues virtually unabated in the United States, even as intelligence reports suggest the declining availability of heroin, cocaine and other hard drugs that require extensive smuggling operations.

By combining smuggling with domestic production, the cartels have sustained the marijuana trade despite the onslaught of enforcement actions on both sides of the border. From 2000 through 2007, Mexican authorities arrested about 90,000 drug traffickers, more than 400 hit men and a dozen cartel leaders, according to a 2008 Congressional report. The United States extradited 95 Mexican nationals last year. Seizures in the first half of 2008 outpaced the average seizure rate from 2002 to 2006.

But the price has been high. Tensions have increased among the cartels, which are warring over lucrative drug routes through Mexican border towns like Juarez, Tijuana and Nogales, Sonora. More than 6,000 people, including hundreds of police officers, were killed by drug-related violence in Mexico in 2008. United States Border Patrol agents are also reporting more violent confrontations with traffickers.

As the Mexican government and American authorities have hardened the border, drug cartels are increasing production just north of it to avoid resorting to smuggling.

Many of the largest marijuana plantations are hidden on federal and state parklands, federal authorities say. Bill Sherman, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent based in San Diego, said the authorities were also finding an increasing number of farms in Imperial and San Diego Counties, an area traffickers traditionally avoided because of the presence of border guards, various police agencies and Camp Pendleton, a Marine base.

“We’re seeing a lot more grows down here now,” Mr. Sherman said. “That is a shift.”

Drug enforcement agents uprooted about 6.6 million cannabis plants grown mostly by cartels in 2007, one-third more than the plants destroyed in 2006. In California, the nation’s largest domestic marijuana producer, the authorities eradicated a record 2.9 million plants by the end of the marijuana harvest in December.

Yet enforcement officials say they see no discernible reduction in the domestic supply. Prices have remained relatively steady even as the potency of marijuana increased to record levels in 2007, according to the National Drug Intelligence Center, a Justice Department analysis agency.

Mr. Reyes also noted that Mexican traffickers in the United States were choosing hydroponic marijuana, which is more potent, profitable and easier to hide because it can be grown year round with sunlamps. (A pound of midgrade marijuana sells for about $750 in Los Angeles, compared with $2,500 to $6,000 for a pound of hydroponic marijuana.) He noted a case last year in Florida in which Cuban growers used several houses in a single Miami tract development to supply hydroponic marijuana to Mexican traffickers.

Kathyrn McCarthy, an assistant United States attorney in Detroit, said Mexican traffickers in Michigan were trading Colombian cocaine for hydroponic marijuana from British Columbia to sell in the United States. In Washington State, now the second biggest domestic producer of marijuana, Mexican cartels are growing improved varieties of outdoor marijuana to compete with BC Bud and other potent indoor plants.

Last year, narcotics officers discovered 200,000 high-quality marijuana plants growing amid leased vineyards in the Yakima Valley. The Northwest has traditionally been the province of Asian hydroponic networks.

Despite increased planting, the cartels still rely on smuggling. Near Nogales, Ariz., Mr. Scioli pointed out several cross-border tunnels, one of which extended from the backyard of a house, under the fence and into Mexico 40 yards away. Another series of cross-border tunnels made use of existing sewer lines or drainage pipes. They were among the nine smuggling tunnels drug enforcement agents have discovered there since 2003.

Despite the fact that the authorities are discovering more marijuana production inside the United States, most of the cartels’ leadership remains in Mexico and, for now, so does most of the violence. Still, recent photographs from Mexico of the decapitated heads of Mexican policemen play in the minds of law enforcement officials on this side of the border, who are vigilant for signs of spillover.

The Mexican police in Sonora “are stuck between two warring cartels,” said Anthony J. Coulson, a federal drug enforcement agent. “The cops are being killed as pawns. They’re being used to show how much power and control the cartels have.”

Mr. Reyes, the special agent, said, “The violence is happening because of the pressure we’ve exacted, but it does not fuel any increase or decrease in marijuana.”

No one sees a quick end of the violence in Nogales, Sonora.

Sheriff Tony Estrada of Santa Cruz County said there was so much violence on the other side of the border that many Mexican police officers and politicians had become virtual refugees in Nogales, Ariz.

“The violence has left a large contingent of police on this side of the border,” Sheriff Estrada said. “The killing will stop when somebody dominates. When somebody takes control.”

http://www.gainesville.com/article/20090202/znyt02/902023014&tc=yahoo

I'm glad you posted this stuff.  Us TEXANS have some serious stuff to be concerned with.  It's getting uglier by the week down there, and it's only a matter of time before it spills over and we're left with no one guarding the borders––there's just not enough to do the job.

These fuckers play for keeps and we need to, too.  

HH

Considering your history, I have no doubt that you will all acquit yourselves admirably. It's crap that you have to though.

Its no picnic in San Diego either.

No, not at all.  I didn't mean to slight CA, NM or AZ.  We'll all get a huge dose of it and should be ready for anything that pops up.

HH

Dallas has had a strong presence of Zetas for at least the past 8 years.  They've had their share of murders attributed to them over the years. Most were executions but one, I believe, resulted from a road rage incident a year or so ago.

I'm sure they are active in the Houston area as well.  

I miss the old days when we just worried about Illeagals coming up here to steal our jobs.

We could cut those guys off at the knees by simply making those drugs legal in the US as long as they were grown/manufactured in the US.  Their market would disappear, along with their money, power and resources, within weeks.

But, we can't have that - drugs are bad.

This is our "Palistine". We need to get a wall up that runs the lenght of the border with a serious police force watching it, not this crap our goverment is doing now. Our guys are out numbered and out gunned and prosecuted if they do their job.
The southwest is going to be a full on war zone unless our goverment wakes up. You guys down that way stay safe, and vigilent.

Whats amazing to me are some of the figures regarding what we spend on the "war on drugs" versus how much tax revenue could be reaped just by legalizing some of the softer stuff and requireing a tax stamp (like with liquor or cigaretts). Im really surprised some of the more cash strapped states aren't advocating this.

I work with a number of former BP agents who have received unbelieveable offers in an attempt to get them to go back to the agency.  There have been no takers.  These are smart guys.

But, I thought the government of Mexico outlawed those guns.


How much more of this do we have to witness before someone mans up and does something about it? Why dont we take some of that pork barrel spending in this failure of a proposed bailout and put it towards some security?

I sure don't blame them!  Who the hell, in their right mind, would work for the BP?  Talk about a lose/lose deal.

HH

Classic gun control.  Take the guns from the people and they cower in fear from armed criminals.

Imagine if drug gangs killed off the police in a US town.  They would be no one to protect them from
what would happen to them at the hands of pissed off citizens.  There would be no drug dealers if
shooting one was not a punishable offence.

Gun control may be coming sooner than that.  

http://www.valleycentral.com/news/video.aspx?id=255372

Could either be closing the gun show loophole or an assault weapon ban.

When is the Harvest Season?

They are to busy in Wshington trying to figure how to pay off Acorn and rob us of our money then to do what the constitution says they are to do-"Provide for the common defense"

All of us no the answer: Put up the fence, station troops on the border, treat every illegal crossing as a foriegn invader! Wow, really tough to figure out.

They haven't stopped this because they don't want to. From the economy (that THEY wrecked) to 25,000,000 illegals in our country, to 2.6 million Americans losing their jobs (and they still allow 1.5 million foreign workers into the US during that time, the list goes on and on.

Then, if we do anything to defend ourselves, we get to go to jail and be sued by people that aren't even citizen's!

I think the day enough is enough is coming.

100% correct.

Over 200 Americans killed in Mexico since '04
State Dept.: More lives lost than in any other country outside combat zones
msnbc.com news services
updated 9:26 a.m. CT, Mon., Feb. 9, 2009

HOUSTON - More than 200 American citizens have been killed since 2004 in Mexico's escalating wave of violence, amounting to the highest number of unnatural deaths in any foreign country outside military combat zones, according to the U.S. State Department.

The deaths included a 22-year-old Houston man and his 16-year-old friend who were hauled out of a minivan and shot execution style. They also included a 65-year-old nurse from Brownsville found floating in the Rio Grande after visiting a Mexican beauty salon and a retiree stabbed to death while camping on a Baja beach, reported the Houston Chronicle in a story published Sunday, which examined hundreds of records related to the deaths.

The State Department tracks most American homicides abroad but releases few details about the deaths. Most, however, occurred in border cities, including Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez and Nuevo Laredo, where violence has spiked with drug cartel feuds in recent years.

The Chronicle analysis showed some American homicide victims were involved in organized crime. At least two dozen American victims were labeled as cartel hitmen, drug dealers, smugglers or gang members. Others were drug users or wanted for crimes in the United States.

But in at least 70 other cases, the Americans were killed in Mexico while there on seemingly innocent business: visiting family, vacationing or living and working there.

Mexican Congressman Juan Francisco Rivera Bedoya of Nuevo Leon said he believes most American victims get killed after crossing the border for illegal activities or venturing into unsafe areas.

"Tourists visiting cathedrals, museums and other cultural centers are not at risk," he said.

'Travel alerts' for border communities
The State Department last year issued "travel alerts" for several border communities, warning that dozens of U.S. citizens had been kidnapped or killed in Tijuana, though it gave no details.

"We're not trying to scare anybody off, but we sure as heck want people to be aware of the dangerous conditions that they might encounter in certain parts of the country," said former U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Tony Garza in an interview before he left his post.

Meanwhile, Mexico said over the weekend that 100 more federal police officers had been assigned to the capital's airport following a series of assaults on travelers who exchanged money.

Five of the victims have been foreigners, including a French scientist who was killed.

Federal Police official Brig. Gen. Alfredo Fregoso said the reinforcement brings to 500 the number of federal officers patrolling the airport.

Prosecutors say at least 18 people who were recently robbed outside the airport were apparently followed after exchanging money inside.

The French scientist was shot in the head last month after assailants intercepted his car and stole $6,336.

Fregoso's announcement Saturday came a day after a Colombian man became the 18th reported victim.


Gruesome deaths
Across Mexico, more than 5,000 people were killed last year, authorities report. Some of the deaths of police and other public officials have been public and gruesome, with bodies posed in public places.

The Chronicle found that among the American deaths, at least 40 were killed and had their bodies dumped in the methods favored by drug cartels.

Few of the killers are caught.

Only about 20 percent of homicides in Mexico result in arrests, the Chronicle found in its analysis of data from the Citizens' Safety Institute. The Mexico City-based nonprofit surveys prosecutors across Mexico.

Records from the prosecutor in Baja California Norte, home to Tijuana, show none of the cases from 2004 to 2006 have been closed. More than 90 Americans have been killed in the state south of San Diego since 2003.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29095730/



FBI collecting DNA in Mexico to match to missing Americans
Monday, February 09, 2009 at 9:45 a.m.

DNA samples from Mexico may help authorities identify some missing Americans.

The FBI is going to collect DNA from more than a hundred unidentified bodies found in Mexico.

The agency said it hopes to match at least some of the bodies to Americans who went missing there.

An agency spokesperson said the samples could help solve at least 35 open cases of missing Americans from Brownsville to Del Rio.

http://www.valleycentral.com/news/news_story.aspx?id=257410


Drug Cartel Wars Gripping Mexico
Heather Limestahl
Tijuana, Mexico (myfoxla.com) - Last year was Tijuana's bloodiest year with 843 people killed. The majority of the murders were tied to the drug cartel wars gripping all of Mexico. American officials believe the violence could spread north. Mexico is saying that the cartels are losing.

FOX's Jonathan Hunt reports.
Video


Mexico Drug Violence Spills Over Into U.S.
Monday, February 9, 2009 5:21 PM

Just as government officials had feared, the drug violence raging in Mexico is spilling over into the United States.

U.S. authorities are reporting a spike in killings, kidnappings and home invasions connected to Mexico's murderous cartels. And to some policymakers' surprise, much of the violence is happening not in towns along the border, where it was assumed the bloodshed would spread, but a considerable distance away, in places such as Phoenix and Atlanta.

Investigators fear the violence could erupt elsewhere around the country because the Mexican cartels are believed to have set up drug-dealing operations all over the U.S., in such far-flung places as Anchorage, Alaska; Boston; and Sioux Falls, S.D.

"The violence follows the drugs," said David Cuthbertson, agent in charge of El Paso's FBI office.

The violence takes many forms: Drug customers who owe money are kidnapped until they pay up. Cartel employees who don't deliver the goods or turn over the profits are disciplined through beatings, kidnappings or worse. And drug smugglers kidnap illegal immigrants in clashes with human smugglers over the use of secret routes from Mexico.

So far, the violence is nowhere near as grisly as the mayhem in Mexico, which has witnessed beheadings, assassinations of police officers and soldiers, and mass killings in which the bodies were arranged to send a message. But law enforcement officials worry the violence on this side could escalate.

"They are capable of doing about anything," said Rusty Payne, a Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman in Washington. "When you are willing to chop heads off, put them in an ice chest and drop them off at a police precinct, or roll a head into a disco, put beheadings on YouTube as a warning," very little is off limits.

In an apartment near Birmingham, Ala., police found five men with their throats slit in August. They had apparently been tortured with electric shocks before being killed in a murder-for-hire orchestrated by a Mexican drug organization over a drug debt of about $400,000.

In Phoenix, 150 miles north of the Mexican border, police have reported a sharp increase in kidnappings and home invasions, with about 350 each year for the last two years, and say the majority were committed at the behest of the Mexican drug gangs.

In June, heavily armed men stormed a Phoenix house and fired randomly, killing one person. Police believe it was the work of Mexican drug organizations.

Authorities in Atlanta are also seeing an increase in drug-related kidnappings tied to Mexican cartels. Estimates of how many such crimes are being committed are hard to come by because many victims are connected to the cartels and unwilling to go to the police, said Rodney G. Benson, DEA agent in charge in Atlanta.

Agents said they have rarely seen such brutality in the U.S. since the "Miami Vice" years of the 1980s, when Colombian cartels had the corner on the cocaine market in Florida.

Last summer, Atlanta-area police found a Dominican man who had been beaten, bound, gagged and chained to a wall in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood in Lilburn, Ga. The 31-year-old Rhode Island resident owed $300,000 to Mexico's Gulf Cartel, Benson said. The Gulf Cartel, based in Matamoros just south of the Texas border, is one of the most ruthless of the Mexican organizations that deal drugs such as cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine and heroin.

"He was shackled to a wall and one suspect had an AK-47. The guy was in bad shape," Benson said. "I have no doubt in my mind if that ransom wasn't paid, he was going to be killed."

In July, Atlanta-area police shot and killed a suspected kidnapper while he was trying to pick up a $2 million ransom owed to his cartel bosses, Benson said.

State and federal governments have sent millions of dollars to local law enforcement along the Mexican border to help fend off spillover drug crime. But investigators believe Arizona and Atlanta are seeing the worst of the violence because they are major drug distribution hubs thanks to their webs of interstate highways.

In fact, drug officials have dubbed Atlanta "the new Southwest border," said Jack Killorin, a former federal drug agent and director of the Atlanta region's High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area task force.

El Paso, population 600,000, is only a quarter-mile away from Mexico's Ciudad Juarez, which has seen open gun battles and 1,700 murders in the last year. But El Paso remains one of America's safest cities, something Cuthbertson said is probably a result of the huge law enforcement presence in town, including thousands of Border Patrol and customs agents.

In the past year, more than 5,000 people have been killed across Mexico in a power struggle among Mexico's drug cartels and ferocious fighting between them and the Mexican government. The cartels have established operations in at least 230 U.S. cities, according to the Justice Department's National Drug Intelligence Center.

Payne said the U.S. and Mexico are working together to pressure the warring cartels. Payne cited the extradition of high-level drug suspects _ four members of the Arellano Felix cartel in Tijuana were brought to the U.S. in December _ and the capture or killings of several other top cartel leaders across Mexico in the past year.

"We have to make sure that we attack these criminal organizations at every level so that we are safer not only in Mexico and on the Southwest border, but here in the rest of the country," Payne said.

While some Americans may feel victimized by the spillover of violence, others are contributing to it. Americans provide 95 percent of the weapons used by the cartel, according to U.S. authorities. And Americans are the cartels' best customers, sending an estimated $28.5 billion in drug-sale proceeds across the Mexico border each year.


http://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/border_spillover_violence/2009/02/09/179823.html

Texas crafts plan for Mexico collapse
"You hope for the best, plan for the worst"
By Brandi Grissom / Austin Bureau
Posted: 02/08/2009 12:00:00 AM MST

AUSTIN –– Texas officials are working on a plan to respond to a potential collapse of the Mexican government and the specter of thousands fleeing north in fear for their lives after recent reports indicated the country could be on the verge of chaos.

"You hope for the best, plan for the worst," Katherine Cesinger, spokeswoman for Gov. Rick Perry, said last week. "At this point, we've got a contingency plan that's in development."

Late last year the U.S. Department of Defense issued a report that listed Pakistan and Mexico as countries that could rapidly collapse. The report came after similar alarms sounded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and former U.S. drug czar Barry McCaffrey.

"I think their fears are well-grounded," Texas Homeland Security Director Steve McCraw told lawmakers recently at a border security briefing.

Lawmakers expressed concern that the state's southern neighbor, embroiled in drug violence and facing uncertain economic conditions, could send thousands north in search of safety.

State Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Sugarland, asked McCraw at the meeting whether Texas had a plan to cope with such a situation.

"We have a preliminary plan," McCraw said. "There needs to be one in place."

McCraw, a Perry appointee, was unavailable to comment for this story, but Cesinger said the plan was in early stages.

It now deals with only law enforcement concerns, she said, and not any potential crush of humanitarian needs the state might face if thousands of refugees flood across the border. "That might be something that comes into consideration as it's developed," Cesinger said.

Destabilization in Mexico might be only a remote possibility, but lawmakers said preparing for any potential disaster is prudent.

State Sen. John Carona, R-Dallas, said Texas should plan to deal with not only security concerns but also basic needs refugees would have for housing, health care and food.

"It seems very far-fetched that something like this could occur," he said. "At the same time, I think it would be na ve to believe it's impossible."

El Paso Democratic state Sen. Eliot Shapleigh said El Paso is already seeing refugees from the violence in Juárez.

More than 1,600 died in the drug violence there last year, and the bloodbath continues. More than 200 people have been slain so far this year.

Nearly 50 victims of the violence in Juárez were shuttled to Thomason Hospital for treatment last year. And Shapleigh said many people from Juárez who can afford to are moving north to El Paso.

Developing a contingency plan to deal with a potential Mexican downfall makes sense, he said.

"Better to investigate, examine and plan now, rather than make ad hoc decisions later," Shapleigh said.

Tony Payan, a political science professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, said Mexico is nowhere near the brink of demise.

Problems in Mexico are serious, he said, but the nodes of violence are concentrated in specific areas of the country and primarily involve the warring drug cartels.

"I am standing on campus in Ciudad Juárez now," Payan said Thursday. "Students are working, students are going to class, people are shopping."

Developing a plan to cope with a disaster south of the border was not a bad idea, Payan said.

But Texas could do more to help prevent a catastrophe in Mexico, he said, by working with state and local officials in that country to reinforce their governments.

While federal officials in the U.S. and Mexico often work together, Payan said, state and local leaders with firsthand knowledge of the problems often mistrust one another and fail to collaborate to deal with their mutual concerns.

"Often we want to solve the problems with the border as if they stopped at the international line," Payan said, "and they do not."

http://www.elpasotimes.com/ci_11655113?source

All of us in all states that Border Mexico need to be ready.
Did you all know that the Zetas were The "special Forces" of the Mexican military?  They were trained by the United States CIA....ug....again....

Why doesn't the US government have any intestinal fortitude?  How many actions has Mexico (both drug cartels and government) taken against the US or its citizens that would constitute an act of war?  
examples:- kidnap, torture, and murder a US federal agent (DEA) Kiki Rodrigues in Guadalajara where there was evidence of governemet involvement.
- Mexican military coming onto the US side or border and detaining US citizens at gun point while confiscating their guns (happened in Az.)
- Shooting at LEOs from Mexico into the US
This list could go on and on....WTF when will the US government do something?

Mexico Authorities Hunt Gangs After Mass Killings
Wednesday, February 11, 2009 5:21 PM

MEXICO CITY –– Mexican authorities found five abandoned bullet-riddled and bloodstained vehicles on Wednesday, fueling their hunt for drug gang killers following a wave of border-region slayings and clashes with soldiers that left 21 people dead, an official said.

The hours-long skirmishes around the town of Villa Ahumada on Tuesday were part of a wave of drug violence that has engulfed parts of Mexico - and has even spilled across the border - as the army confronts savage narcotics cartels that are flush with drug money and guns from the U.S.

President Felipe Calderon says more than 6,000 people died last year in drug-related violence, and U.S. authorities have reported a spike in killings, kidnappings and home invasions linked to the cartels - some of it in cities far from the border, such as Phoenix and Atlanta.

Investigators on Wednesday were searching for assailants after finding five abandoned vehicles near Villa Ahumada, where gunmen a day earlier had kidnapped nine people, starting the violence.

They executed six of the kidnap victims along the PanAmerican Highway outside of the town, said Enrique Torres, spokesman for a joint military-police operation in Chihuahua state.

Villa Ahumada is 80 miles (130 kilometers) south of the border city of El Paso, Texas.

An army convoy heading toward Villa Ahumada to investigate reports of the kidnappings Tuesday came across gunmen who had just executed the six kidnap victims, Torres said.

A shootout between gunmen and soldiers ensued in which seven gunmen and one soldier died, Torres said. Another soldier was wounded.

Soldiers rescued the three remaining kidnap victims and took them into custody for questioning, Torres said. The men say they are businessmen and were wrongly accused by their captors of belonging to the Sinaloa cartel.

In the meantime, other gunmen fled on foot as soldiers rappelled down from military helicopters to chase them through the snow-covered desert.

Further down the highway, a series of other shootouts left seven more assailants dead.

Villa Ahumada, a town of 1,500 people, was virtually taken over by drug gangs last year when attackers killed two consecutive police chiefs and two officers. The rest of the 20-member force resigned in fear, forcing the Mexican military to take over for months.

Unable to hire new recruits, the town hired unarmed residents to keep watch and alert state police about crime.

The army was patrolling the town's streets Wednesday.

Also Wednesday in the town of Reforma in Chiapas state, three suspected drug hitmen died during a shootout with police. Assailants opened fire after police raided a safe house for arms and drugs, a Reforma municipal police spokesman said. He was not authorized to give his name.

http://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/mexico_hunts_drug_killers/2009/02/11/180798.html


21 Killed in Mexican Drug Violence on U.S. Border
Wednesday, February 11, 2009 11:57 AM

A drug gang kidnapped and killed six people along the U.S.-Mexican border region, setting off gunbattles with soldiers that left 15 others dead.

The hours-long skirmishes around the town of Ciudad Ahumada on Tuesday are part of a wave of drug violence that has engulfed parts of Mexico — and has even spilled across the border — as the army confronts savage narcotics cartels that are flush with drug money and guns from the U.S.

President Felipe Calderon says that more than 6,000 people died last year in drug-related violence, and U.S. authorities have reported a spike in killings, kidnappings and home invasions linked to the cartels — some of it in cities far from the border, such as Phoenix and Atlanta.

Tuesday's bloodshed began when gunmen kidnapped nine suspected members of a rival drug gang in Villa Ahumada and executed six of them along the PanAmerican Highway outside of the town, said Enrique Torres, spokesman for a joint military-police operation in Chihuahua state. Villa Ahumada is 80 miles (130 kilometers) south of the border city of El Paso, Texas.

Assailants later released three of the men, although their whereabouts were not immediately known, Torres said.

Soldiers later caught up with the gunmen and a series of shootouts ensued, leaving 14 alleged gunmen and one soldier dead Tuesday, Torres said. Another soldier was wounded.

Villa Ahumada, a town of 1,500 people, was virtually taken over by drug gangs last year when attackers killed two consecutive police chiefs and two officers. The rest of the 20-member force resigned in fear, forcing the Mexican military to take over for months until the town was able to recruit new officers.

The town's mayor, Fidel Chavez, fled to the state capital for safety.

Also Tuesday, Tijuana city police said emergency officials responding to a report of a car on fire found a sport utility vehicle engulfed in flames and two charred bodies inside.

And in Tepotzotlan, a small town outside Mexico City, two heads in coolers were found inside a car, according to an official with the Mexico state prosecutor's office who was not authorized to give her name. The heads were accompanied by a message threatening the municipal police chief. Decapitations have become commonplace in Mexico's drug violence.

In other violence late Monday, armed men forced their way into a prison in Torreon, then killed three prisoners by beating them and setting them on fire in a bathroom. The assailants also freed nine inmates before escaping, state prosecutors said in a statement Tuesday.

Fighting between rival gangs left another two inmates dead Tuesday at an overcrowded prison in central Mexico, said Carlos Gil Abarca, a spokesman for the prevention and rehabilitation office of the Mexico state government.

http://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/border_fight_kills_21/2009/02/11/180652.html



Suspect in Border Patrol agent's slaying rearrested in Mexico
UNION-TRIBUNE
7:00 p.m. February 11, 2009

A suspected drug smuggler accused of killing a U.S. Border Patrol agent was rearrested in Mexico Wednesday morning, more than six months after Mexican officials released him due to an extradition mishap, authorities announced Wednesday.

Jesus Navarro Montes was taken into custody near Zihuatanejo, Mexico, on a warrant for drug charges. He is awaiting extradition to the United States, where he is also wanted for questioning in a Border Patrol agent's death, according to the FBI in San Diego.

Navarro is accused of running over agent Luis Aguilar with a Hummer SUV in January 2008 near the U.S.-Mexico border in Imperial County, west of Yuma, Ariz.

Border Patrol officials said Aguilar was laying spike strips across the road in an attempt to stop two vehicles suspected of entering the country illegally when one of them struck him.

Authorities believe Navarro then drove the drug-loaded Hummer to Mexicali and gave the vehicle to accomplices for safekeeping.

He was arrested and held in a Mexicali prison, only to be released in June after a Baja California judge cleared him of an unrelated migrant-smuggling charge.

Mexican officials said the U.S. government hadn't formally filed a request for his extradition on the homicide charge, so he was let go.

http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/feb/11/bn11warrant-smuggler/?metro

Mexico peso, stocks plunge on US bank rescue doubts
Tue Feb 10, 2009 4:56pm EST
(Adds closing stock prices)

MEXICO CITY, Feb 10 (Reuters) - Mexico's peso weakened sharply on Tuesday and stocks fell as investors worried that a U.S. government plan to shore up American banks might not be enough to loosen up credit and contain a deepening recession.

The peso <MXN=> MEX01 weakened 1.97 percent at the central bank's final reference, to 14.4825 per dollar, losing ground for the first time in five sessions.

The IPC stock index .MXX closed down 3.46 percent at 19,825.72 points, its steepest one-day percentage drop since Jan. 20.

The U.S. Treasury on Tuesday announced a plan to mop up money-losing assets from the weakened banking system, but analysts said investors were worried the plan might not do enough to rein in the financial crisis.

"Given how difficult the problem is, there is a lot of skepticism," said Rafael Ruizesparza, an analyst at brokerage Protego in Mexico City.

Mexico's peso has lost around a quarter of its value against the dollar since August as the global credit crisis spurred investors to dump emerging market assets.

The peso hit a record low last week on concern Mexico is being dragged into recession by the downturn in the United States, its top trading partner. This spurred the central bank to sell dollars directly to banks and brokerages for the first time in over a decade.

Mexico had sold dollars via regular auctions since October to fight currency volatility spurred by the credit crisis.

The central bank on Tuesday said it had spent a little more than $1 billion defending the peso last week. [ID:nN10287582].

It also sold $292 million on Tuesday through its auction mechanism.

An analyst from Standard and Poor's said late on Monday the interventions would not be a bad thing as long as the central bank is only trying to curb volatility, but not defend specific exchange rates. [ID:nN10308544]

The government's benchmark 10-year peso bond <MX10YT=RR> fell 1.356 points in price, pushing its yield up 22 basis points to 8.28 percent, its highest since mid-December.

In the equities market, shares in America Movil (AMXL.MX), Latin America's biggest cell phone operator, lost 2.55 percent to 21.78 pesos while its stock on Wall Street (AMX.N) shed 3.78 percent to $30.25.

Top retailer Wal-Mart de Mexico (WALMEXV.MX) shed 2.61 percent to 29.52 percent while shares in financial group Inbursa (GFINBURO.MX) dropped 5.84 percent to 31.12 pesos. (Reporting by Michael O'Boyle; Editing by Dan Grebler)

http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssInvestmentServices/idUSN1038858520090210


Mexico arrests ex-soldier in general's killing
Associated Press - February 11, 2009 8:25 PM ET

MEXICO CITY (AP) - A former soldier suspected of working for a Mexican drug cartel has been arrested for allegedly masterminding the killing of a decorated brigadier general in the resort town of Cancun.

Army Brig. Gen. Mauro Enrique Tello and two others were found dead Feb. 3 in a car outside Cancun. The resort city's government had recently hired Tello to set up an elite police force to fight drug trafficking.

Defense Department official Brig. Gen. Luis Arturo said Wednesday that authorities have arrested Octavio Almanza and six other alleged members of a group of cartel hit men called the Zetas for Tello's killing. Almanza is accused of masterminding the slaying.

Arturo said Almanza left the army in 2004 and now allegedly leads the Zetas in Cancun.

http://www.kxxv.com/global/story.asp?s=9830553

Holy Mother of ....

Do people really have to come to this site to get this news? I mean, you would think this would eclipse the BS being covered by the MSM, but I guess not.

The lack of attention is a bit surprising.  My thought is that MSM publications believe people think Mexico is messed up already, so a story about how Mexico is screwed up equates to a water=wet scoop.  I do think they're missing the severity of the issue though.





 

From time to time I come across things that I expect to see in the news, but end up having to dig for or trip over them by accident.  There is a trend.

ATF links grenades in Mexico attacks to incident in South Texas
Updated: Feb 16, 2009 10:51 AM CST
By Angela Kocherga

JUAREZ –– There is new evidence escalating drug violence in Mexico has spilled across the border into the U.S.

ATF investigators said an attempted grenade attack in South Texas has been linked to two other attacks in northern Mexico.

Late last year, attackers lobbed grenades into the Mexican Consulate and a Televisa television station in Monterrey, Mexico. Weeks ago, grenades were lobbed into a bar in South Texas.

William Newell, the Phoenix ATF Special Agent in Charge, said grenades used in the three attacks were linked to the same warehouse outside Monterrey. He said it's a growing sign that violent criminals in Mexico do not respect the U.S.-Mexico border.

Once the warehouse was raided, Mexican authorities discovered a large cache of weapons, including grenades similar to the ones used in the attacks.

Investigators suspect the explosives belonged to the Zetas, a group of paramilitary enforcers hired by the powerful Gulf Cartel.

"It's the war next door," said Newell. The ATF's Phoenix Field Office worked with Mexican investigators to trace the grenades. The agency notified law enforcement agencies along the border of the finding in a report.

"It's not isolated in Mexico. The violence is here. Those of us who work the border states know that," said Tom Mangan, with the ATF Phoenix Field Office.

Now, authorities on both sides of the border are concerned about more attacks.

http://www.kvia.com/global/story.asp?s=9851917
(Link includes video)


Mexico to lose up to 3,00,000 jobs, minister says
16 Feb 2009, 1707 hrs IST, REUTERS

PARIS: Mexico risks losing up to 300,000 jobs because of the economic crisis despite a government infrastructure spending programme that can employ  
some 750,000 people, Economy Minister Gerardo Ruiz Mateos said on Monday.

Mexico's economy is expected to shrink around 1 percent this year because of a slump in US demand for manufactured exports from cars to refrigerators, while tourism and remittances from Mexicans living abroad are also being squeezed.

"The estimation we have is between 250,000 and 300,000 people," Ruiz Mateos told reporters during a visit to Paris, in answer to a question on how many Mexicans were expected to lose their jobs during the global economic slump.

Ruiz Mateos said the government was responding in two ways, with an infrastructure spending programme and with measures to support companies to dissuade them from laying off workers.

"We will do things that the government hadn't been able to do in recent years like cleaning roads, building secondary roads, renovating rural schools, and this could provide employment, more or less, for some 750,000 people," he said.

"In parallel, we have a jobs protection programme targeted at companies that will suffer a drop in demand for their exports and we think that with that programme we will save about half a million jobs that were going to be cut."

Mexican auto production and exports nosedived by more than 50 per cent year-on-year in January, the latest sign of how the country is being hit by recession in its key trading partner, the United States.

Asked about this, Ruiz Mateos said that one positive sign was that none of the auto companies that had formally announced investment programmes in Mexico had dropped those plans.

"Ford had announced a $3.5 billion investment programme last year and that is going ahead. General Motors announced investment of $600 million in a transmission plant and that is going ahead," he said.

It is unclear how long such plans will hold up, however, given the deep crisis ripping through the US auto industry. General Motors is struggling to make deals with workers to cut costs, failing which it could be forced to consider bankruptcy.

Turning to trade matters, Ruiz Mateos said some Mexican steel producers had expressed concerns about the Buy American provision in Washington's stimulus package.

The provision requires that any public building or public works project funded by the package use only iron, steel and other manufactured goods produced in the United States.

But Ruiz Mateos said Mexico had been reassured by changes to the Buy American provision made by Congress, which stipulate that it "be applied in a manner consistent with US obligations under international agreements."

Mexico and the United States are members of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and Ruiz Mateos said that commitment by Washington ensured Mexican rights under NAFTA would be respected.

"We are satisfied with that. I think it will be a programme that will incentivise and lift the US economy and that will be a great help to overcome the global crisis," he said.

Ruiz Mateos also said Mexico and the United States would soon resolve their dispute over new US meat labelling rules, which he called "a minor problem". The rules, which are due to take effect on March 16, require that meat packages in US supermarket carry country-of-origin labels.

Canadian and Mexican officials have argued the rules would lead US meat plants and consumers to discriminate against their animals, though Canada has already dropped its complaints.  

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/News/International_Business/Mexico_to_lose_up_to_300000_jobs_minister_says/rssarticleshow/4137872.cms


Gunmen shot 12 in Mexico, including children
Sun Feb 15, 4:49 pm ET
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Suspected drug hitmen killed 12 people, including six children, in the southern state of Tabasco, which until now had escaped the spiraling violence of Mexico's drug war.

A group of armed men fired large-caliber guns at three homes in the town of Macuspana, some 20 miles from the capital of Villahermosa, killing six children and six adults late on Saturday.

A source at Tabasco's Justice Department told Reuters on Sunday that a police officer was among those shot but it was not immediately clear if the rest of the dead were his relatives.

Local media suggested the officer could have been involved in the recent arrest of drug dealers.

Unlike northern states that are home to Mexico's most vicious drug gangs, Tabasco, a green, lush state that produces bananas and oil, is not known for drug-related crimes.

Cartels had spared the families of rivals for years but an army-backed crackdown on crime has disrupted routes and made it more difficult to move drugs across the country, leading to increased violence. There were 6,000 drug killings last year.

Despite the setbacks, President Felipe Calderon has vowed to continue fighting crime.

The Mexican army, in a joint effort with the U.S. coast guard, found nearly 7 tons of cocaine on a ship off the Pacific coast, the government said on Sunday. It is one of the biggest cocaine seizures under Calderon's administration.

In October 2007, the government delivered a huge blow to drug cartels by seizing 23 tons of cocaine and in July of last year, the Mexican military found about 6 tons of cocaine in a makeshift submarine.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090215/wl_nm/us_mexico_drugs_1


Health departments fight tuberculosis on both sides of the U.S. border with Mexico
Mexican immigrants often contract the disease before entering U.S. bringing it north to cities like Chicago, officials say
By Oscar Avila and Margaret Ramirez
Tribune reporters
1:41 AM CST, February 16, 2009

REYNOSA, Mexico — A ragged-looking man takes deep breaths as a doctor listens through a stethoscope for a stubborn killer. Her verdict is good news. The medication seems to be containing his tuberculosis.

The bad news is that doctors can't keep him in this clinic a few miles from the U.S. border, just as TB patients were quarantined decades ago. They can't even keep their patient in Mexico to make sure he takes his pills and doesn't spread the contagious illness north to cities like Chicago.

So the disease festers among a population that migrates back and forth between Mexico and the U.S., even as—on a wider scale—public health officials have made great strides in defeating one of the scourges of the early 20th Century.

In the rugged terrain along the Rio Grande, this mobile population has forced public health officials to take a binational approach to the deadly respiratory disease. Texas is even taking the unusual step of sending medicines into Mexico that are paid for by American taxpayers.

Doctors want to take on tuberculosis at the border before patients migrate northward into the U.S. If they don't properly treat TB patients from the start, the disease can morph into a multidrug-resistant variety that costs 10 times more to treat.

"It is a devastating experience to watch people suffering from this disease every day, especially when there are measures to ease their suffering," said Dr. Magin Pereda, a Mexican state health official who oversees the TB program in Reynosa.

Through screening and timely drug therapy, tuberculosis cases have plummeted in the U.S., Mexico and around the world. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 13,299 cases nationwide in 2007, half the number of 1993.

But that positive trend has not reached the border, a crossroads for many patients.

The state of Tamaulipas saw TB cases rise 10 percent since 2007. The south Texas city of McAllen has TB rates nearly three times higher than the national average.

In Illinois, Mexican immigrants make up 18 percent of cases, a much higher rate than their 6 percent share of the overall population.

Those demographics mean public health has become entwined with the emotional issue of illegal Immigration. Activists and commentators raise the specter of disease to argue that the U.S. should better enforce its borders.

In a book that reached best-seller lists, conservative commentator Pat Buchanan wrote that the re-emergence of tuberculosis, malaria and "rarities of the Third World" such as dengue fever were "high among the costs of Immigration."

Many of Reynosa's cases involve Mexicans living there while planning a crossing into the U.S. Others are Mexicans who have been deported and are waiting to return to their hometowns.

Still others are living the reality that the Rio Grande Valley has known for generations: that this is one community. Many locals work in Texas and live in Mexico, or vice versa. They have relatives on both sides of the border.

As part of the binational initiative that began in the 1990s, Texas health officials exchange information with Mexican counterparts about patients they know are crossing the border so they can continue directly observed therapy—home visits in which they watch patients take their pills.

Even with that renewed attention, a troubling trend began emerging in recent years. Mexicans were developing a multidrug-resistant variation because they were not properly following the initial round of therapy.

Short on more advanced drugs, dozens were migrating northward and checking into Texas hospitals, said Dr. Brian Smith, regional director of the Texas Department of State Health Services in the border city of Harlingen.

Those patients lacked insurance, and their treatment was costing up to $250,000 each.

As a last resort, Texas officials enrolled many of those patients in their binational program and offered to send medication to Mexico if patients would stay there.

Smith acknowledged that the program could be controversial but said the several hundred thousand dollars Texas spent on the drug treatment actually saved millions in uninsured care.

"Whatever your opinion is on undocumented Immigration, we have to focus ourselves on public health," Smith said. "And if we don't treat TB the right way, society pays."

Dr. William Clapp, director of Chicago's tuberculosis program, echoed worries that TB treatment would fuel "xenophobia" against immigrants.

According to the Chicago Department of Public Health, immigrants made up 51 percent of Chicago's 258 TB cases in 2007, the first time foreign-born cases made up a majority. The largest share of those cases was from Mexico.

Immigrants are at risk because many come from countries where the disease is still fairly prevalent. Many carry the disease in a latent form that is triggered after arriving in the U.S., exacerbated by other ailments such as diabetes or by a weakened immune system related to their high workloads and low access to medical care.

In 2007, the last year for which data are available, only one of Chicago's TB cases was confirmed to be of multidrug-resistant. Clapp called the spread of that form of TB "the worst-case scenario" because of the health risks and the expense of treating it.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-mexico-tb_avilafeb16,0,6769052.story?track=rss


Top Mexico drug cop charged with working for cartel
Sun Feb 15, 10:09 pm ET
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – The former head of Mexico's special organized crime bureau has been charged with selling information to one of the country's most powerful drug cartels, the attorney general's office said on Sunday.

Noe Ramirez, who stepped down as chief of the SIEDO federal investigation unit in July last year, was detained in November for allegedly receiving $450,000 for passing secrets to the Sinaloa cartel, headed by Mexico's top drug fugitive Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman.

Mexico's police force is riddled with corruption and the arrest of the country's top drug prosecutor has been the biggest catch so far in a sweeping probe to smoke out cops and government officials working for drug smugglers.

Two other anti-drug agents were jailed in 2008 for taking bribes of up to $500,000 from the Beltran Leyva gang, which recently split from the northern Pacific Coast Sinaloa cartel.

President Felipe Calderon's two-year-old crackdown on drug cartels has sparked turf wars between rival gangs that led to the deaths of around 6,000 people last year.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090216/ts_nm/us_mexico_drugs_corruption_1


Violence rages in Mexico as 18 killed
AFP
Sunday, February 15, 2009

Eight people were shot to death outside a bar in Coahuila state early Sunday, and nine other bodies were found after a series of killing sprees in northern Mexico, local police told AFP.

"Eight people died. It took place at around three in the morning in Torreon (Coahuila)," said a police spokesperson who asked not to be identified.

"It appears that the victims were two women and six men. They were killed outside the bar when an armed gang, arriving in three trucks and began shooting at those leaving the bar," the source said.

No arrestes were made in connection with the killings, which came as nine other bodies were discovered in northern Mexico overnight.

The death toll from Mexico's brutal drug war continues to rise despite efforts by the government to quell the violence.

The federal government has deployed more than 36,000 troops to the region in an attempt to slow drug-related violence.

More than 5,300 people were assassinated throughout Mexico in 2008.

Meanwhile, on Friday a photo-journalist was killed and another was badly injured when they were shot en route to cover an automobile accident in the southern state of Guerrero.

The motive for the killing is unknown.

Mexico is considered one of the world's most dangerous countries for media workers. Five journalists were killed in Mexico in 2008 according to the Center for Journalism and Public Ethics.

http://www.globaltv.com/globaltv/national/story.html?id=1293188


U.S./Mexico border fence almost finished
Sandra Emerson, Staff Writer
Created: 02/15/2009 07:06:35 AM PST

Construction on the fence along the United States and Mexico border is wrapping up, but the work has not been warmly received by illegal-immigration experts.
More than 600 miles of the proposed 670 miles of fencing are expected to be finished by May, according to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency.

Concerns about the work include construction delays, increased costs, poor planning and a lack of all-weather roads.

"Former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff did not label this a national-security project, so as a result you had construction delays due to lack of materials, and the purchase and use of steel imported from Red China and Mexico," said Andy Ramirez, chairman of Friends of the Border Patrol.

Construction on the fence is part of the Secure Border Initiative that was launched in November 2005.

The comprehensive multi-year plan was established by the Department of Homeland Security to secure America's borders and reduce illegal cross-border activity.

As of Oct. 31, pedestrian fencing, also referred to as primary fencing, has cost on average $3.9 million per mile, according to a report issued Jan. 29 by the Government Accountability Office.

The Congressional Budget Office said the cost should be $3 million per mile. Former Rep. Duncan Lee Hunter, R-Calif., had proposed that the fence cost $3.2 million per mile.

"We stand behind those low costs set that were submitted to DHS before the fence construction project started," said Joe Kasper, press secretary to Rep. Duncan D. Hunter, R-El Cajon, Duncan Lee Hunter's son.

"Evidently, DHS has complicated the construction process and has decided not to use the most cost-effective recourses available."

The Secure Border Initiative program has received about $3.6 billion in appropriated funds to complete 670 miles of vehicle and pedestrian fencing along the 2,000-mile border.

Initiative funds totaling $393 million were allocated to SBInet, which called for the Boeing Co. - a main contractor of the entire fence project - to build a virtual $20 million fence along the southwestern border.

Last year, the project stalled due to technical problems.

If the appropriate SBI funds from fiscal 2007-08 allocated for SBInet had instead been used to construct fencing, 73 additional miles of pedestrian fencing or about 232 additional miles of vehicle fencing would have been built, according to the GAO report.

"It was a $20 million boondoggle," Kasper said. "Boeing was the manufacturer and tested the system and determined it wasn't worth moving forward with the project because it didn't provide results expected. Looking back, we wasted $20 million of time and manpower that could have been put into securing the border."

The Secure Fence Act signed into law in 2006 required that all-weather roads be built along the fence, but that has yet to be completed, officials said.

"While we needed a fence, many know it's useless without an all-weather road," Ramirez said. "Otherwise, you'll have agents unable to drive more than 15 or 20 miles per hour because they'll roll their vehicles and that is unacceptable."

Roads in the area of Otay Mountain and Tecate Peak in San Diego County are particularly dangerous, said Mark Endicott, San Diego Border Patrol spokesperson.

"In the San Diego sector, we strive to have all-weather roads parallel to the border," Endicott said. "There are some areas where terrain is rugged and treacherous."

Kasper said he sent an inquiry about the construction of all-weather roads to the Department of Homeland Security, but the agency did not respond to him.

"If the roads along the border are inadequate or poorly constructed, then they should be fixed, and we are definitely going to take a look at that," he said.

"At the end of the day, it only makes sense that you build the best road that's capable to meet border conditions. It doesn't make much sense to engineer a road that can't facilitate high speed vehicle traffic or deteriorates because of the climate."

http://www.dailybulletin.com/ci_11711003?source=rss

Check out this interactive map of the violence down there through 2008...and it's getting MUCH worse.

http://projects.latimes.com/mexico-drug-war/#/interactive-map

HH

Drug violence spins Mexico toward 'civil war'
By Arthur Brice
CNN

(CNN) –– A shootout in a border city that leaves five alleged drug traffickers sprawled dead on the street and seven police wounded. A police chief and his bodyguards gunned down outside his house in another border city. Four bridges into the United States shut down by protesters who want the military out of their towns and who officials say are backed by narcotraffickers.

That was Mexico on Tuesday.

What is most remarkable is that it was not much different from Monday or Sunday or any day in the past few years.

Mexico, a country with a nearly 2,000-mile border with the United States, is undergoing a horrifying wave of violence that some are likening to a civil war. Drug traffickers battle fiercely with each other and Mexican authorities. The homicide rate reached a record level in 2008 and indications are that the carnage could be exceeded this year. Watch a reporter duck to avoid gunfire »

Every day, newspapers and the airwaves are filled with stories and images of beheadings and other gruesome killings. Wednesday's front page on Mexico City's La Prensa carried a large banner headline that simply said "Hysteria!" The entire page was devoted to photos of bloody bodies and grim-faced soldiers. One photo shows a man with two young children walking across a street with an army vehicle in the background, with a soldier standing at a turret machine gun.

Larry Birns, director of the Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs, calls it "a sickening vertigo into chaos and plunder."

By most accounts, that's not hyperbole.

"The grisly portrait of the violence is unprecedented and horrific," said Robert Pastor, a Latin America national security adviser for President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s.

"I don't think there's any question that Mexico is going through a very rough time. Not only is there violence with the gangs, but the entire population is very scared," said Peter Hakim, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based policy center.

Speaking on a news show a few weeks ago, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called it a civil war. Birns agrees.

"Of course it's a civil war, but that only touches the violence of it," he said Wednesday. "It's also a civic conflict, as an increasing number of people look upon the law and democratic values as something that can be violated."

Hakim is not prepared to go that far.

"One has to be careful and not overdo it," he said. "Mexico is a long way from being a failed state. Mexico has real institutions. It paves roads and collects the garbage. It holds regular elections."

Enrique Bravo, an analyst with the Eurasia consulting group, points out that the violence so far is mostly affecting just drug gangs and is primarily localized along the U.S. border and Mexico's western coast.

The violence along the border is particularly worrisome, analysts say.

"The spillover into the United States is bound to expand and bound to affect U.S. institutions," Birns said.

Pastor and Hakim note that the United States helps fuel the violence, not only by providing a ready market for illegal drugs, but also by supplying the vast majority of weapons used by drug gangs.

Pastor says there are at least 6,600 U.S. gun shops within 100 miles of the Mexican border and more than 90 percent of weapons in Mexico come from the United States.

And it's not just handguns. Drug traffickers used a bazooka in Tuesday's shootout with federal police and army soldiers in Reynosa, Mexico, across the border from McAllen, Texas.

"The drug gangs are better equipped than the army," Hakim said.

Pervasive corruption among public officials is central to the drug cartels' success.

"There is so much money involved in the drug trade, there is so much fear involved in the drug trade, that no institution can survive unaffected," Birns said.

"This has really revealed just how corrupt Mexican officeholders are," Hakim said.

In one recent instance, Noe Ramirez Mandujano, who was the nation's top anti-drug official from 2006 until August 2008, was arrested on charges that he accepted $450,000 a month in bribes from drug traffickers while in office.

Such dire problems call for a new way of looking at the situation, some say.

"The unthinkable is happening," Birns said. "People are beginning to discuss decriminalization and legalization. ... There's only one thing that can be done: Take the profit out of it."

Pastor calls the problem in Mexico "even worse than Chicago during the Prohibition era" and said a solution similar to what ended that violence is needed now.

"What worked in the U.S. was not Eliot Ness," he said, referring to the federal agent famous for fighting gangsters in 1920s and '30s. "It was the repeal of Prohibition."

That viewpoint has picked up some high-level support in Latin America.

Last week, the former presidents of Mexico, Colombia and Brazil called for the decriminalization of marijuana for personal use and a change in strategy on the war on drugs at a meeting in Brazil of the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy.

"The problem is that current policies are based on prejudices and fears and not on results," former Colombian President Cesar Gaviria said at a news conference, in which the 17-member commission's recommendations were presented.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon has taken the war on drugs to the cartels and some say it's not working.

"It's as if the burden of being the main arena of the anti-drug war has overwhelmed Mexican institutions," Birns said. "The occasional anti-drug battle is being won, but the war is being lost. And there's no prospect the war is going to be won."

In the meantime, the killings will continue at a record pace.

On Wednesday, the Mexican cities of Torreon and Gomez Palacio reported at least eight shootouts involving heavily armed men.

The toll: seven dead, seven wounded.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/02/18/mexico.drug.violence/index.html?eref=rss_crime


Mexico cops on red alert
19/02/2009 12:04  - (SA)
Julie Watson

Ciudad Juarez, Mexico - Police were on alert on Wednesday after several signs appeared across this violent border city warning that more officers would be killed unless the police chief resigns, a day after the second-in-command and three other officers were slain.

Meanwhile, coroners conducted autopsies on the bodies of the four officers, including the city police chief's right-hand man, Sacramento Perez, the operations director for the 1 700-member force.

Gunmen ambushed the officers on Tuesday afternoon while they were sitting in their patrol car on a street near the US consulate. No arrests have been made.

About 50 police officers have been killed in the past year in attacks blamed on drug gangs trying to consolidate territory. Many officers have quit out of fear for their lives, often after their names have appeared on hit lists left in public in Ciudad Juarez, across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas.

At least four cardboard signs with handwritten messages appeared on the doors of businesses on Wednesday morning, warning that one police officer would be killed every 48 hours if Public Safety Secretary Roberto Orduna did not resign, said Daniela Gonzalez, a spokesperson for the state Attorney General's office.

Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz gave a news conference pledging to support Orduna, who has not made a public appearance since the killings. Ferriz put the force on "red alert" on Wednesday, meaning no officer can patrol alone in the violence-plagued city of 1.3 million.

Orduna took over the post in May after former Police Chief Guillermo Prieto resigned following the slaying of his operations director.

Children evacuated

Drug gangs have unleashed unprecedented violence since the Mexican government launched its national crackdown on organised crime in 2006. More than 6 00 people have been killed in drug violence across Mexico. More than 1 600 have been killed in Ciudad Juarez, the country's deadliest city.

In another northern border city, Reynosa, video footage aired on Wednesday showed masked policemen evacuating children from a school with some of the students wearing bulletproof vests, during an hourslong gunbattle on Tuesday that left five gunmen dead and seven police injured.

The battle lasted several hours, terrorising residents who dropped to the ground or fled indoors.

Also on Wednesday, police reported finding the bound and bullet-ridden bodies of two men in a car in the Pacific coast resort town of Zihuatanejo.

Homicide rates have soared as drug cartels battle each other and the army, and soldiers have been accused of abuses against civilians.

Mexican Economy Secretary Gerardo Ruiz Mateos on Wednesday defended the government's decision to send 45 000 soldiers across Mexico to fight the cartels. His comments came a day after hundreds of people blocked bridges to the United States to demand that the army withdraw.

Ruiz Mateos predicted that if Mexico gave up its fight against the cartels, "the next president of the republic would be a drug dealer".

He made the comments during a visit to Paris. They were broadcast in Mexico by W Radio.

http://www.news24.com/News24/World/News/0,,2-10-1462_2472424,00.html


Official: Toll understated for slain Americans
Deaths in Juarez contribute to high rate of killings in Mexico
By LISE OLSEN Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle
Feb. 18, 2009, 9:35PM

MEXICO CITY — Americans in Mexico continued to be slain at a rate of nearly one each week through the end of 2008 and there is little reason to think the violence will stop anytime soon, U.S. Embassy officials have confirmed.

In fact, the number of homicides is likely higher, because many victims die after being taken to hospitals across the border and — along with other killings — often go unreported to the U.S. Department of State, Ed McKeon, Minister Counselor for Consular Affairs in Mexico told the Houston Chronicle.

“I’m convinced the total number of deaths is very much under-reported,” he said.

In Juarez alone, the U.S. consul has estimated at least 30 Americans were slain last year in a wave of killings that took more than 1,600 lives. A 9-year-old American citizen was killed there in the first violent weeks of 2009.

A Chronicle investigation earlier this month showed at least 230 U.S. citizens have been reported killed in Mexico in recent years. Few killers get caught or convicted.

McKeon said he could think of no recent homicide case in Mexico involving an American victim where he was satisfied with the outcome of the investigation — only an estimated 20 percent of the homicide cases result in an arrest in Mexico.

After a University of Colorado-Boulder student, 21-year-old David Parrish, was robbed and killed at an ATM while spending spring break in Puerto Vallarta in 2008, police almost immediately arrested a suspect, according to U.S. and Mexican media reports.

But the suspect in that case allegedly paid to get out of jail and remains at large, U.S. officials confirmed.

Overall, the State Department’s official reports of deaths of citizens for 2008 in Mexico included 49 cases classified as homicides — about the same number as reported in 2007. McKeon said he will offer additional training this year for consular staff, who increasingly have to help U.S. families deal with killings and kidnappings in hard-hit cities such as Juarez and Tijuana.

He also proposes creating a list of resources and phone numbers for victims’ families and encouraging more State Department contact.

“It’s a little bit of a fine line” at how often you should call grieving families, he said. “Especially if there’s no news to report.”

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6270082.html


Video: What impact is Mexican violence having on Americans?
John Bolton, Karl Rove on Glenn Beck Program


Family fears violence in Mexico will spill into Texas
 Reported by: Kim Fischer
Email: [email protected]
Last Update: 9:52 am  

(News 4 WOAI) SAN ANTONIO –– Some members of Congress were in Mexico this week to see if the U.S. can help stop the violence there.

Texas congressmen Henry Cuellar and Ruben Hinojosa were part of that group. The congressmen went to observe the implementation of a new drug fighting program. Congress approved more than $460 million to help Mexico and Central America fight their drug problem.

More than 6,000 people died as a result of the violence in Mexico last year. The violence exploded again on the border Tuesday. Five people were killed and seven federal officers were wounded in a drug shootout in Reynosa, just across the border from McAllen in the Valley.

A family from Mexico who spoke with News 4 WOAI says the problem is not just drugs. They say innocent people are being kidnapped and killed.

"It's not safe to go to Mexico," explained Jose Esparza, whose family members were kidnapped. "I will never be able to go back to Mexico."

Esparza has lived in San Antonio for 3 years. But just recently, the number of people in his household grew after 3 of his siblings were kidnapped from their home in Durango, Mexico.

"We don't know where they are," Esparza said. "We don't know what's happening with them, why they took them, who took them. We don't know."

Esparza's two brothers and his sister were dragged from their home by kidnappers 17 days ago, and he says no one will help.

"If the police shut the door on you, what protection do you have?, " Esparza asked.

Esparza's mother, nieces, and nephews were in the home during the kidnapping. With no one to help, Esparza brought them to San Antonio.

Esparza says without action from the United States Government, it is only a matter of time before the violence ends up here.

"If American government doesn't do anything to protect our borders and to help Mexico with the war they are having, it's gonna come this way," added Esparza. "We're so close".

Esparza says he's now searching for a second and third job, so he can support his family members while they are here. He is trying to stay positive about the kidnapping of his siblings and praying they'll be returned unharmed.  

http://www.woai.com/news/local/story/Family-fears-violence-in-Mexico-will-spill-into/gf7xSTIcJk2BZHCR83rcDQ.cspx?rss=68


Texas Prepares For Possible Mexico Government Meltdown
David Martin Davies, Texas Public Radio

DALLAS, TX  (2009-02-19) Texas Homeland Security director Stephen McCraw says he doesn't expect that Mexico's government is going to collapse but Mexico is fighting for its survival against the well armed drug cartels.

McCraw: Are they threatening the government of Mexico? Yes. Over 2 years ago President Calderon went on a campaign after these organized crime cartels and they fought back absolutely.

Hooper: Make no mistake the cartels are not interested in running Mexico.

Karen Hooper is a Latin America analyst for Stratfor - an Austin based private global intelligence agency. She said things could get much worse in Mexico if the drug lords linked up with anti-government militants.

Hooper: While it is not necessarily in their interest to destabilize the government there are scenarios where the government could certainly loose control.

McCraw says Texas is watching Mexico while planning for the worst.

McCraw: Does that impact on Texas? Absolutely. Are we concerned about that? Yes. In fact, we have contingency plans for spill over violence in each of the five security sectors along the border.

McCraw said the state is working to contain the violence onto the Mexican side of the border and if there is a major meltdown in Mexico the state is formulating plans to deal with massive flow of refugees.

http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/kera/news.newsmain?action=article&ARTICLE_ID=1471747§ionID=1


Violence, economic woes keeping tourists away from Mexico
05:43 PM CST on Thursday, February 19, 2009
By Angela Kocherga / 11 News

Lunch and shopping in Mexico are popular pastimes on the border.  

“Nogales is our favorite border town. Everybody is so friendly. We know most all the venders,” said tourist Shelly Cook.

But lately those vendors are hurting, and drug violence is killing off business as news spreads.

“I haven’t been down shopping for a long time just because of what we heard about the shootings six months or so ago,” said Arizona resident Sharelene Reams.

Rumors of violence are not keeping Dan Manthey away.

“We did read the border areas are a little iffy, but we’ve usually found that not to be the case,” he said.

Still, plenty of Americans are staying away during what is usually the peak winter season.

In fact, Mexican merchants say sales are down by as much as 75 percent.

“The economy is very bad. We need your money,” said businessman Gabriel Lara.

Lara said that things are so bad that some shops have closed. He said that even well-known restaurants are struggling.

The economic hiccup and violence is also taking its toll on the U.S. side of the border.

Manu Naik owns a hotel in Nogales, Arizona. He says that crime is hurting his business because guests from other parts of Mexico are shying away from the border.

http://www.khou.com/news/local/stories/khou090219_jj_border-tourism-down.30bea9a3.html?npc


Reynosa neighborhood a 'total disaster' after shootout that killed six
Web Posted: 02/19/2009 12:00 CST
By Lynn Brezosky - Express-News

REYNOSA, Mexico — Mexican officials Wednesday said they were still identifying the victims of a series of gunbattles Tuesday that left several dead and more injured amid a scene of shot-out cars, homes and businesses.

Pedro Sosa López, a chief of Tamaulipas state police department, said six men were confirmed dead. One was identified as Jose Alejandro Rivera Torres, a civilian. On Tuesday, reports of injuries and deaths varied widely, with some reports of as many as 12 people killed.

Sosa said no others had been identified and that he could not confirm reports that a high-ranking Gulf Cartel boss was among those killed or possibly captured.

He said seven alleged assailants were being detained but did not have further details.

The gunfire volleys between federal police officers and suspected gang members occurred in six parts of the city and were attributed to the Gulf Cartel's struggles to maintain control of one of the key pathways for smuggling drugs into the United States.

This city is said to be key territory for the cartel's drug-smuggling organization and its assassins, the Zetas. It is across the Rio Grande from McAllen and is one of Mexico's most important manufacturing centers.

The violence involved automatic weapons and grenades and began when police stopped a vehicle at a checkpoint in an upscale neighborhood of Reynosa, witnesses said. That set off running gunbattles through the streets, with gangsters commandeering vehicles and using them to block intersections.

Witnesses said the battles raged on for more than an hour Tuesday morning. Civilians ran for cover and children crouched under desks.

“We were hearing the gunfire,” said Enrique Marquez, assistant director of a middle school near one of the gunbattles. “I was there with my microphone, telling everyone to be calm, to exit calmly.”

All got out safely, he said, but that school and at least one other remained closed Wednesday for fear of more violence.

The gunfire was over when Martin Marquez arrived to open his florist shop Tuesday, but evidence of the violence lay everywhere.

The front window was a lattice of bullet holes, broken glass filled the show room, and a mirrored door in a back room was shattered.

“We came to see this,” he said. “Total disaster.”

He marveled at the one thing that had survived unscathed — a shelf with small statues of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ.

“Not even touched,” he said.

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local_news/Reynosa_still_identifying_victims_of_deadly_border_violence.html


Gateway international bridge reopens after Matamoros gun battle
February 19, 2009 - 5:28 PM
The Brownsville Herald

An afternoon gun battle in Matamoros led to the temporary shutdown of the Gateway International Bridge late this afternoon.

Cameron County Sheriff Omar Lucio closed the southbound traffic lanes at the Gateway International Bridge and reinforced security at the other two international bridges linking Brownsville to Matamoros.

Lucio said that he decided to close the bridge following a report of a gun battle that occurred at 3 p.m. in Matamoros. The bridge was re-opened about 30 minutes later.

"There was a raid by state and federal police who were investigating warehouses in Matamoros near the Soriana by the Veterans International Bridge," Lucio said. "A gunfight ensued and the shots could be heard all the way to Gateway International Bridge."

Upon hearing the information, the sheriff set in motion a plan to protect residents on the U.S. side of the border and to prevent the violence in Mexico from spilling across the border.

Customs and Border Protection spokesman Eddie Perez said the northbound traffic continues as normal with field operations officers checking incoming vehicles.

However, because there was a state of alert, officers were seen wearing Kevlar vests and some were carrying assault rifles.

http://www.valleymorningstar.com/news/bridge_46214___article.html/international_matamoros.html


Grenade found on Reynosa sidewalk
Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 1:39 p.m.

Mexcican officials are on high-alert after authorities found a grenade on the sidewalk of a Reynosa neighborhood.

Metro Noticias of Tamaulipas is reported that the grenade was found on the sidewalk of the Colonia Jarachina Sur on Thursday morning.

Military officials quickly disposed of the grenade but it's not clear how it got there.

The city is still reeling from a string of massive protests and an armed conflict between drug gangs and soldiders.

Students from an elementary school and middle school were caught in the crossfire but not injured.

Metro Noticicas reported that widespread rumors were circulating on Thursday that Reynosa schools had been targeted by bomb threats.

The newspaper reported that many schools from elementary through college-level were emptied as a result.

http://www.valleycentral.com/news/news_story.aspx?id=262475

It feels soooo nice to have this going down on our border.  This shit better not roll into Texas.



HH

Just over the border.....



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L503F9P1OjQ



 

Wow, that's a lot of firecrackers. They're celebrating Cinco de Mayo a little early, huh?

I remember reading about warnings of a possible Mexican Revolution just before the movie "Once Upon a Time in Mexico" came out.  I'm sure the cartels would have no problem finding a crooked politician to prop up down there if they ever get the upper hand.

I applied in August after I graduated from USF.

Juárez chief quits as cartel members keep promise to kill officers

10:18 PM CST on Friday, February 20, 2009
The Associated Press

CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico – The police chief of this violent border city stepped down Friday after suspected drug cartel members carried out a threat to force his resignation by killing two law officers.

Gunmen killed a police officer and a jail guard early Friday and left notes on their bodies saying they were fulfilling a promise to kill at least one police officer every 48 hours until the city's chief of public security, Roberto Orduña Cruz, quit.

Five police officers have been killed this week in Juárez, across the border from El Paso.

Juárez Mayor José Reyes insisted that the city would not give in to the threat, but Orduña said later Friday that he didn't want to endanger more officers.

"We can't allow men who work defending our citizens to continue to lose their lives," he said. "That is why I am presenting my permanent resignation," effective immediately.

Interim chief

Authorities said an interim chief will be named quickly and a permanent replacement found in coming weeks.

The slayings Friday were the latest grim sign that criminal gangs are determined to control the police in this city of more than a million people.

Gunmen killed Officer César Iván Portillo and city jail guard Juan Pablo Ruiz before dawn Friday as they left their homes for work, city spokesman Jaime Torres said.

On Tuesday, assailants fatally shot the chief's director of operations, Sacramento Pérez Serrano, and three officers sitting with him in a patrol car near the U.S. Consulate.

More than 6,000 people have been killed in drug violence across Mexico in the past 13 months as gangs battle each other for territory and the army in the government's national crackdown.

Nearly a third of the slayings have occurred in Ciudad Juárez, and more than 50 of those were city police officers.

Many officers have quit out of fear for their lives, some after their names appeared on hit lists left in public throughout the city.

Violence also has spilled across the border into the U.S., where authorities report a spike in killings, kidnappings and home invasions connected to Mexico's murderous cartels.

"The violence is spreading like wildfire across the Rio Grande," said George Grayson, a Mexico expert at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. "It's a major national security problem for us that is much more important than Iraq and Afghanistan."

U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials have said there is a plan to bring in the military if the violence continues to grow and threaten the U.S. border region.

Robert Almonte, executive director of the Texas Narcotics Officers Association, said El Paso has been spared most of the violence but that the escalating killings in Juárez are worrisome.

"I think it's jarring. ... We can't even fathom those kinds of things happening here in the United States," he said.

A retired army major, Orduña became chief in May after the former security chief, Guillérmo Prieto, resigned and fled to El Paso after his operations director was slain.

For Orduña's protection, the city built living quarters for him at the police station so he didn't have to go home.

Police were placed on "red alert" – meaning that they could not patrol alone – after cardboard signs with handwritten messages appeared Wednesday taped to the doors and windows of businesses. They warned Orduña that an officer would be killed every two days until he quit.

Alert continues

That alert continued Friday after Orduña stepped down. Police have also been told to patrol with guns in hand.

Some Mexicans have questioned whether President Felipe Calderón's two-year crackdown on the drug gangs has justified all the killings.

But Calderón and his administration have said they have no choice but to confront the cartels.

Economy Minister Gerardo Ruiz Mateos said Wednesday that if Mexico gave up its fight against the cartels, "the next president of the republic would be a drug dealer."

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/022109dnintjuarez.3d4abdd.html


State Dept. Cites 'Large Firefights' in Travel Alert on Mexico
By William Booth
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, February 21, 2009; Page A14

MEXICO CITY, Feb. 20 –– The latest travel advisory for Mexico from the U.S. State Department will certainly not please the tourist board. Rather than a glossy brochure advertising the country's many delights, the travel alert issued Friday reads like the plot of a crime thriller.

"Recent Mexican army and police confrontations with drug cartels have resembled small-unit combat, with cartels employing automatic weapons and grenades," the advisory reads. "Large firefights have taken place in many towns and cities across Mexico but most recently in northern Mexico, including Tijuana, Chihuahua City and Ciudad Juarez. During some of these incidents, U.S. citizens have been trapped and temporarily prevented from leaving the area."

Being "temporarily prevented" from leaving a firefight is never a good thing as far as promoting tourism goes. Tourism is one of Mexico's main sources of income, and the country that sends the most tourists to Mexico is the United States.

The State Department routinely updates its assessments of hot spots around the globe, issuing official "warnings" and "alerts." Warnings are the worst, reserved for nations posing higher risks for travelers, and cover countries such as Haiti, Iraq and Congo. "Alerts," like the one issued for Mexico, do not recommend that visitors avoid an entire country but instead advise them to employ extra caution and avoid specific locales and behaviors. In Mexico, those behaviors include driving at night, buying drugs and visiting the state of Durango.

According to the alert, the threat of bodily harm is part of the ongoing drug war: "Mexican drug cartels are engaged in an increasingly violent conflict –– both among themselves and with Mexican security services –– for control of narcotics trafficking routes along the U.S.-Mexico border. In order to combat violence, the government of Mexico has deployed troops in various parts of the country. U.S. citizens should cooperate fully with official checkpoints when traveling on Mexican highways."

The alerts are a poke in Mexico's eye as well as a source of friction. As Mexican commentators point out, the country is fighting to stop drugs heading to the world's largest consumer nation –– the United States.

The department uses strong language to describe the situation in Mexico. "U.S. citizens are urged to be alert to safety and security concerns when visiting the border region. . . . While most crime victims are Mexican citizens, the uncertain security situation poses serious risks for U.S. citizens as well," the alert states. "Robberies, homicides, petty thefts, and carjackings have all increased over the last year across Mexico generally, with notable spikes in Tijuana and northern Baja California. Ciudad Juarez, Tijuana and Nogales are among the cities which have recently experienced public shootouts during daylight hours in shopping centers and other public venues."

The State Department will review the situation again in six months.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/20/AR2009022003463.html?wprss=rss_nation


Mexico tests remains for U.S. anti-kidnap expert
Fri Feb 20, 1:41 pm ET

MONTERREY, Mexico (Reuters) – Mexican police are running DNA tests on charred human bodies found in northern Mexico last week to see if an abducted U.S. anti-kidnap expert could be among them, a police official said on Friday.

Gunmen abducted Felix Batista, a Cuban-American credited with negotiating the release of hostages held by Colombian rebels in past years, in the industrial city of Saltillo, in the northern state of Coahuila, on December 10.

Police have not ruled out that Batista is still alive, but are examining the disfigured remains of 19 people found in eight shallow graves in the Coahuila desert, across the border from Texas. The graves contained severed limbs and teeth.

"These remains are of people killed by drug gangs over the past six months, that's why we are working with the hypothesis that Batista is among them," said an official at the Coahuila state attorney general's office who declined to be named.

Drug smugglers and police are killed every day in Mexico's vicious drug war. Their bodies occasionally dumped in mass graves, but Coahuila is one of the country's least violent states and "narco graves" are much less common there.

Police are following various lines of inquiry in Batista's case, the official said.

The attorney general's office said in December it suspected drug gangs who wanted to show their power were behind his abduction. The sprawling Gulf cartel and its feared "Zetas" wing of hit men run drugs through the area into Texas.

Batista, based in Miami, had been invited to Coahuila by state police to give seminars on security as the death toll in Mexico's drug war soared to 6,000 people last year. Kidnappings are on the rise across Mexico.

He apparently broke with caution by stepping outside a restaurant alone after answering a cell phone call. Police are unsure whether he was hauled into a waiting car or went willingly in a vehicle sent for him.

Batista is one of more than a dozen U.S. residents kidnapped in Mexico since October, mostly in the violent city of Tijuana, according to the FBI.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090220/us_nm/us_mexico_drugs_1


Mexico: 2008 foreign investment down sharply
Mexico says foreign direct investment drops in 2008 to $18.6 billion
Friday February 20, 2009, 9:49 pm EST

MEXICO CITY (AP) –– Mexico says foreign direct investment in the country dropped sharply to $18.6 billion in 2008, from $27.2 billion in 2007.

The decline is more pronounced because the Economy Department revised the 2007 figure upward, from the previously reported total of $23.2 billion.

The department statement Friday did not give a reason for the decline.

Much of the investment came from the United States, which contributed 45.7 percent, while 11.8 percent came from Canada and 11.7 percent from Spain.

About one-third of the investment went to the manufacturing sector, 22.9 percent went into mining and 21.4 percent was invested in the financial sector.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Mexico-2008-foreign-apf-14430786.html


Mexico: Army will stay, despite recent protests
By MARK WALSH, Associated Press Writer – Thu Feb 19, 10:39 pm ET
 
MONTERREY, Mexico – Mexico's president said Thursday the army will continue to battle the country's drug cartels, despite recent protests asking for the soldiers' withdrawal.

Hundreds of people blocked bridges to the United States in three border cities Tuesday, demanding the army leave and accusing soldiers of abuse. Both state and federal officials have alleged the protests are organized by drug gangs, noting that some of the protesters masked their faces.

In an Army Day speech in the northern city of Monterrey, President Felipe Calderon defended his decision to send some 45,000 troops nationwide to take on the drug gangs. He also called on all Mexicans to "stand behind our army's fight against this common enemy."

"When we've recovered the rule of law in areas vulnerable to organized crime, and local authorities are capable of fighting this scourge, then the army will have completed its mission," he said.

Calderon vowed "to continue fighting organized crime, without pause or mercy."

Human rights activists have accused soldiers of numerous abuses during anti-drug operations, including cases in which patrols allegedly shot and wounded civilians at military checkpoints and illegally jailed and tortured people during raids aimed at traffickers.

While Calderon's government has acknowledged some cases of army abuse, officials claim the problems have been isolated.

Calderon said Thursday that 78 soldiers have been killed in the past two years in the battle against drug cartels. Last year, more than 6,000 people lost their lives to organized crime as the powerful, well-funded cartels fought each other for territory and battled the army offensive.

The growing violence has forced some Mexicans to question the army crackdown. But Calderon says Mexico has no choice but to fight.

"Mexico faces a historic challenge in converting itself into a safe country, a country of true law and order," he said.

In the northern state of Chihuahua, gunmen shot to death a member of the town council in Guadalupe, just southeast of the border city of Ciudad Juarez. She was the second councilwoman killed this week in Guadalupe, a town where drug gangs have been active.

Patricia Guadalupe Avila was shot to death in her vehicle Thursday, just four days after fellow councilwoman Cristina Aranda was shot and died in Guadalupe, state prosecutors said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090220/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/lt_mexico_violence_13


Mexican Leader Vows to Press Fight Against Cartels
By William Booth
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, February 20, 2009; Page A12

MEXICO CITY, Feb. 19 –– Mexican President Felipe Calderón on Thursday defended the deployment of the military in his fight against drug cartels, vowing that the army would continue to patrol cities until the country's weakened and often-corrupt police forces were retrained and able to do the job themselves.

In a speech commemorating the founding of the Mexican army, Calderón suggested that drug bosses had paid marchers who took to the streets this week to protest the army's presence in a dozen cities, where soldiers man roadblocks, search houses and make frequent arrests.

Calderón, who has sent more than 45,000 troops to fight the cartels, said the military would remain on patrol until the government had control of the most violent parts of the country and civil authorities were fully able "to confront this evil." Only then, he said, "will the army have completed its mission."

Turf battles involving the drug traffickers, who are fighting the army, police and one another in order to secure billion-dollar smuggling routes into the United States, took the lives of more than 6,000 people in Mexico last year. The pace of killing has continued in 2009, with more than 650 dead, most in the violent border cities of Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana. In the past few days, a running gun battle between soldiers and gunmen through the streets of the northern city of Reynosa, captured live on television, left five people dead. In Ciudad Juarez, the assistant chief of the city police department was ambushed Tuesday and assassinated with three other officers.

For the Calderón administration, the stakes could not be higher. On Wednesday, Economy Secretary Gerardo Ruiz Mateos said the administration believed that the cartels had grown so powerful, and their penetration into society so deep, that unless they were confronted, "the next president of the republic would be a narco-trafficker."

Speaking during a visit to Paris, Ruiz said that "this is a serious problem, so serious that we had to deal with it, while the easiest thing to do would have been to do nothing, to maintain the status quo."

Although the Mexican army has been used since World War II to search out and destroy fields of marijuana in rural areas, Calderón is the first president to deploy so many troops to major cities and to place them in such a prominent law enforcement role.

"The extreme use of the military really does start with Calderón," said Roderic Ai Camp, an expert on the Mexican military and a professor at Claremont McKenna College in California. "And their use comes with some risk. The military as an institution in Mexico has a high level of confidence among ordinary Mexicans. But when the military comes into an area and the violence increases, which it has, then that confidence goes down."

Human rights monitors and defense attorneys have reported an increase in complaints about abuses by the military in its drug enforcement and police work.

The protests against the military this week, which were generally small by Mexican standards, began in Monterrey and spread to five other cities.

The newspaper Reforma reported that the army had arrested a protester in Monterrey who confessed that he and others had received 200 to 500 pesos each ($15 to $38) to shout and wave signs. Police said many of the protesters were poor women and children.

"Those who see their criminal structure weakened have tried to provoke the army's retreat," Calderón told soldiers at an army base in Monterrey on Thursday. "As cowards, they have even used women and children for their miserable goals."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/19/AR2009021903269.html?wprss=rss_world


Mexican Peso Weakens to Record Low
02/20/09 - 02:39 PM EST
The Associated Press

MEXICO CITY –– Mexico's peso has weakened to a record 14.89 to the U.S. dollar after the central bank cut interest rates less than expected.

The bank on Friday lowered its benchmark rate by 25 basis points to 7.50. It was the second time since January that the bank slashed rates to boost Mexico's sagging economy.
The peso has lost about 30% of its value against the dollar since August, boosting the costs of imports.

Mexico sends 80% of its exports to the United States and it has been pummeled by the U.S. downturn. Officials say the economy could be headed for a recession.

http://www.thestreet.com/story/10465251/1/mexican-peso-weakens-to-record-low.html?puc=_tscrss


Man Found Dead Outside Gym In Reynosa
Friday, February 20, 2009 at 9:46 a.m.
Video

REYNOSA –– Across the border in mexico things seem to only be getting worse.

On the heels of Tuesday's bloody gunbattle, a man identified as Olegario Ramos is found shot to death outside a gym in Reynosa.

Investigators found bullet casings and a handgun at the scene.

The victim had been shot at least five different times including in the head.

Authorities believe the gunman was waiting for him at the gym.

http://www.valleycentral.com/news/news_story.aspx?id=262917

Our ability to 'do something about it' died in 1992.

We simply do not have the troops to deal with the terrorist threat AND nation-rebuild Mexico.

Because that's what would be required - an invasion & occupation.

It won't...

Neither side wants a US occupation - neither side wants to change the status-quo on the US side....

'Spill over' would do exactly that...

If I wasn't someone who actually pays attention to my surroundings, I might actually believe you.  An article from 2005 when things were 'calm'...

U.S. officials say Zetas have killed in Texas
Investigators say the feared band of ex-military elite forces are operating in Texas and other parts of the United States.  

Wire services
El Universal
Domingo 20 de febrero de 2005

A team of rogue Mexican commandos blamed for dozens of killings along the U.S.-Mexico border has carried out at least three drug-related slayings in Dallas, a sign that the group is extending its deadly operations into U.S. cities, two U.S. law enforcement officials say.

The men are known as the Zetas, former members of the Mexican army who defected to Mexico's so-called Gulf drug cartel in the late 1990s.

"These guys run like a military," said Arturo A. Fontes, an FBI special investigator for border violence based in Laredo, in south Texas. "They have their hands in everything and they have eyes and ears everywhere. I've seen how they work, and they're good at what they do. They're an impressive bunch of ruthless criminals." Dallas and federal officials said that since late 2003 eight to 10 members of the Zetas have been operating in north Texas, maintaining a "shadowy existence" and sometimes hiring Texas criminal gangs, including the Mexican Mafia and Texas Syndicate, for contract killings. The Texas Syndicate is a prison gang that authorities blame for several murders statewide.

The Zetas' activities in North Texas were described in interviews with two U.S. federal law enforcement agents, two former Drug Enforcement Administration officials, a former Dallas undercover narcotics officer and two undercover informants.

"We're aware of the Zetas' threat to U.S. cities, and we consider it a growing threat," said Johnny Santana, a criminal investigator for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Office of the Inspector General. "We're conducting investigations into several cases statewide to establish evidence. We still don't have those links yet, but the telltale signs are there, and they point to the Zetas." The Zetas' presence in Dallas represents a sharp departure from standard practice for Mexican cartels, which traditionally have kept a low profile on U.S. soil and have sought to avoid confrontations with U.S. law enforcement.

The Zetas, who are accused off carrying out killings and acting as drug couriers for the cartel, are regarded by U.S. law enforcement officials as expert assassins who are especially worrisome because of their elite military training and penchant for using AR-15 and AK-47 assault rifles.

"The Zetas are bold, ruthless and won't think twice about pulling the trigger on a cop or anyone else who gets in their way," said the former Dallas narcotics officer, who asked not to be identified.

"And they like to take care of business themselves or, when forced to, hire their own assassin." Gil Cerda, a spokesman for the Dallas Police Department narcotics division, said he had personally not heard of the group and could not comment.

RISK DOWNPLAYED

Mexican authorities have downplayed the threat posed by the Zetas, saying that a major government crackdown has left the group leaderless and on the run.

José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, the country's deputy attorney general for organized crime, suggested that many of the crimes attributed to the group may have been committed by outsiders emulating the group's violent tactics. "There are many Zetas wannabes," he said.

Still, Fontes of the FBI and other U.S. law enforcement officials said the former commandos are both a potent threat and are bolder and more ambitious than their predecessors.

They are extending their reach and violence beyond the Nuevo Laredo-to-Matamoros border area into Dallas, Houston and San Antonio, where they blend into burgeoning Mexican immigrant communities, state and federal officials said.

The group may have ventured as far as Nashville, Tenn., and Atlanta, Ga., the officials said.

"These guys are anything but wannabes," said Fontes. "They're the real thing, and they're a threat to law enforcement officers on both sides of the border." Dallas and federal law enforcement officials have linked murders and drug violence in Dallas during the past 18 months to cocaine and marijuana trafficking in Laredo and Nuevo Laredo, a base of operations for the Zetas. Dallas and federal investigators have blamed at least three Dallas killings on the Zetas, and some officials said that more than a dozen violent incidents can be attributed to the group.

Federal and Dallas authorities have blamed the following incidents on the Zetas: At 1:20 a.m. on Dec. 5, a gunman stepped out of a red sports car with a semi-automatic weapon and opened fire on three suspected drug traffickers as they played pool in the open garage of a home in the 5100 block of Mimi Court in Oak Cliff. Christian Alejandro Meza, 26, alias Juan Antonio Ortega, a parolee from Wichita, Kan., who was wanted on weapons charges, died of multiple wounds to the abdomen. Two other men were severely wounded and are being held on drug charges.

Law enforcement officials said the men were attacked because they allegedly worked for a rival drug lord, Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, who escaped from the maximumsecurity Puente Grande prison in Jalisco state in January 2001, hidden in a laundry truck.

RIVAL GANG FIGHT

Guzmán is reputed to be a leader of the Juárez cartel, a rival of the Zetas' employer, the Gulf cartel, and is wanted in the United States, said Fontes, the FBI agent.

Dallas police seized 45 kilos of cocaine said to have been smuggled from Monterrey with a street value of US2.5 million and about 300,000 in cash from the Oak Cliff home and one next to it.

"The hit was a message to Chapo Guzmán, and the killer is believed to have been a Zetas member," said the former Dallas narcotics officer. "The gunman was very meticulous, didn't shoot a lot because he didn't have to." The case is under investigation, and the gunman remains at large.

On Sept. 28, police found the bodies of Mathew Frank Geisler and Brandon Gallegos, both 19 and from Laredo, in a burning 1996 Chevrolet Tahoe in a field near the corner of Morrell Avenue and Sargent Road, in the Cadillac Heights area of Oak Cliff. Both men had been shot, and the case probably involved drugs, according to police accounts.

A federal investigator said that "without a doubt" both incidents were carried out by the Zetas.

"We're seeing an alarming number of incidents involving the same type of violence that's become all too common in Mexico, right here in Dallas," said the former Dallas narcotics officer. "We're seeing executionstyle murders, burned bodies and outright mayhem. It's like the battles being waged in Mexico for turf have reached Dallas."

http://www2.eluniversal.com.mx/pls/impreso/noticia.html?id_nota=9559&tabla=miami

Men ordered detained for Reynosa violence    
Monday, February 23, 2009 at 9:34 a.m.

MEXICO CITY (AP) –– A Mexican judge ordered seven men who allegedly took part in a shootout with army troops in the northern city of Reynosa that left five dead and seven others wounded to be held for 40 days, the Attorney General's Office said Sunday.

The AG's SIEDO organized crime unit is investigating the suspects' role in the two-hour running shootout last Tuesday in broad daylight with soldiers and federal agents that featured rifles and grenades, terrifying residents of Reynosa, which is across the border from McAllen, Texas.

Five suspected gunmen were killed and seven federal agents were wounded in the shootout.

The judge's order will give prosecutors time to gather evidence against the suspects ahead of the next court appearance.

The security forces seized a 60 mm mortar, five rifle grenades, two fragmentation grenades, bullet-proof vests and two SUVs from the suspects.

The clash coincided with protests staged by hundreds of people - and allegedly paid for by the Gulf drug cartel - against the army's presence in the border city.

Reynosa is in Tamaulipas state, home to the powerful and violent Gulf cartel, which has been battling the Sinaloa cartel for control of the illegal drug trade.

http://www.valleycentral.com/news/news_story.aspx?id=263767


Drug wars, recession team up on Mexico
Published: Feb. 23, 2009 at 9:28 AM

VILLA AHUMADA, Mexico, Feb. 23 (UPI) –– The recession and warring Mexican drug cartels are teaming up to create a volatile stew of economic misery in Mexico's border areas, observers say.

Even though Mexican President Felipe Calderon has deployed an unprecedented 46,000 troops and federal police throughout Mexico, the frequency and severity of drug-related violence is increasing in border areas even as plummeting manufacturing demand from the United States has prompted layoffs there, USA Today reported Monday.

As the economy worsens and Mexican manufacturers concentrated near the border lay off more workers, some officials say the United States is in danger of seeing a mass influx of illegal immigrants seeking to escape the poverty and drug-gang violence of the region.

The mix of violence and recession has meant bad business for everybody in Villa Ahumada, Mexico, 80 miles south of El Paso, Texas, residents say. A total of 21 people were killed in the town Feb. 10 after drug gangs abducted several men and then fought a massive running gun battle with the Mexican army.

"Everyone is afraid to stop here now," taco vendor Javier Ramirez told USA Today. "Villa Ahumada, the town with no law. We've become famous."

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2009/02/23/Drug_wars_recession_team_up_on_Mexico/UPI-17671235399303/


GM to temporarily shut down 3 plants in Mexico
3 minutes ago

(AP:MEXICO CITY) General Motors Corp. says it will temporarily shut down production at three Mexican plants because of slumping demand here and in the United States.

The automaker says its plants in Silao and Toluca will freeze production for five days in March. Two production lines in GM's Ramos Arispe factory will be idle for six days in March, while the whole complex will shut down for an unusual five-day stretch during Holy Week in April.

The company previously said it would lay off 600 workers in Ramos Arispe between February and March.

Mexico's auto exports plunged 57 percent in January, while domestic sales fell 28 percent. Production plummeted 51 percent.

http://news.ino.com/headlines/?newsid=6896727376001


Changan Auto, China Carmaker, to Open Mexico Factory Next Year
By Tian Ying

Feb. 23 (Bloomberg) –– Chongqing Changan Automobile Co. said it will start making cars in Mexico next year, becoming at least the third Chinese automaker to announce plans to begin production in the Latin American country.

The carmaker and Autopark Mexico will form an assembly venture able to build as many as 50,000 vehicles a year, Zhang Baojun, a spokesman, said by phone today. The two companies will sign a formal agreement later this year, he added.

The company, the Chinese partner of Ford Motor Co., joins Geely Holding Group Co. and China FAW Group Corp. in drawing up Mexican production plans, as slowing demand and rising competition crimps profit margins at home. Chinese auto sales may rise 5 percent this year, the slowest pace in a decade, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers.

Changan Auto will make Benben minicars, Zhixiang and Yuexiang cars in Mexico, its sixth overseas plant, according to the company. The automaker will start selling cars in Mexico this year before beginning local production, Zhang said.

Geely Holding, China’s largest privately owned automaker, plans to build a factor in Mexico to make models for sales in the U.S., it said last year. FAW Group is building a $150 million factory with Grupo Elektra SAB in Mexico. The factory is due to start production in 2010 with a capacity of 100,000 cars a year.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601086&sid=a3yZu5oTJqDc


Universities: Avoid spring breaks in Mexico
by Amanda Lee Myers - Feb. 23, 2009 12:00 AM
Associated Press

Going to Mexico for spring break is practically a rite of passage for college students in Arizona, but the state's three public universities want to warn young revelers about stepped-up violence south of the border.

The University of Arizona in Tucson has issued a travel advisory urging students not to go to Mexico, and officials at Arizona State University in Tempe and Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff said they have similar plans to warn students. The schools' spring breaks fall on the second or third weeks of March.

In its notice to students, UA cited a travel alert issued by the U.S. Department of State in October warning travelers that crime rates have increased sharply in Tijuana, Juarez and Nogales - all Mexican cities that have experienced public shootouts during the daytime in shopping centers and other public places. The department warned that criminals have followed and harassed Americans driving in border areas.

Universities that warn students of violence in Mexico are providing "sage advice," said Special Agent Tom Mangan, a spokesman for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

"We have had documented violence, attacks, killings, shootouts with the drug cartels involving not only the military but law-enforcement personnel," he said. "It is indiscriminate violence, and certainly innocent people have been caught up in that collateral damage."

Mexico's drug cartels are waging a bloody fight for smuggling routes and against government forces, dumping beheaded bodies onto streets, carrying out massacres and even tossing grenades into a crowd of Independence Day revelers - an attack that killed eight people in September.

Mangan said most of the violence is taking place in border towns and along roads at night, not at most popular tourist destinations.

More than 100,000 American teens and people in their early 20s travel to resort areas throughout Mexico during spring break every year, according to the State Department.

Becca Hull, a senior at UA, said she and her friends are going to Las Vegas for spring break because of the weather and good deals they found.

She said they thought about going to Mexico but didn't want to spend the money on plane tickets or risk taking their cars there - not because they were worried about violence.

"When I think of Mexico I don't really think of the violence issue because usually when you're in a resort area or one of the hotels it's all tourists," said Hull, 22. "In my mind it never would have been a factor."

Violence also isn't a factor for UA sophomore Daniel Wallace.

He is driving with seven friends and his father four hours from Tucson to the resort town of Puerto Peñasco, also known as Rocky Point, and will spend his entire spring break there.

"I feel most of the violence is in Texas, even in Nogales, but less so on the road to Rocky Point and in Rocky Point itself," the 19-year-old said.

http://www.azcentral.com/12news/news/articles/2009/02/23/20090223springbreak0223-CP.html


Mexican police force on strike after grenade attack
23 Feb 2009 21:27:55 GMT
Source: Reuters

MEXICO CITY, Feb 23 (Reuters) - The entire local police force in a Mexican beach resort town walked off the job on Monday demanding better pay and benefits to compensate for the rising dangers they face from drug violence.

More than 300 municipal police officers in Zihuatanejo, a town on the Pacific coast north of Acapulco popular with foreign tourists, went on strike after grenades were lobbed at their offices over the weekend.

Some 6,000 people were killed last year in clashes between rival drug cartels and security forces that have escalated since President Felipe Calderon deployed some 45,000 soldiers and federal police around Mexico to clamp down on cartels.

More than 500 of those killed in last year's drug violence were police.

On Saturday, gunmen threw two grenades at the main police station in Zihuatanejo. While no one was killed, police say they are not adequately covered if a future attack is fatal.

"We are seeing a lot things here that we have never seen before. It is our job to serve the citizens, but we need assurances that our families will be protected if one of us is killed," a member of Zihuatanejo's municipal police told Reuters.

The police want to have direct talks with Calderon to request improved benefits and an increase in their roughly $350 (5,200 pesos) per month salaries before they go back to work.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N23254843.htm



Gunmen Attack Mexican Governor's Convoy
Feb 23, 2009 11:22 am US/Central

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (AP) ―  Gunman have attacked a convoy carrying the governor of a violence-wracked border state, killing one of his bodyguards and wounding two other agents.

It was not clear if the attackers were targeting Chihuahua Gov. Jose Reyes Baeza, but he canceled a trip Monday to meet with federal officials in Mexico City about security problems in his state, where hundreds have died in drug-related violence in recent months.

Baeza said gunmen in two cars fired high-powered weapons Sunday night at a vehicle two cars behind his in a convoy in the state capital, Chihuahua city. The two wounded agents were in stable condition on Monday and one of the attackers was hospitalized with a gunshot to the head. The other attackers fled.

The governor told a news conference shortly before midnight Sunday that he doesn't know if the attackers were aiming for him: "We don't want to speculate."

But rich, heavily armed gangs battling for turf on the doorstep of the U.S. narcotics market have increasingly challenged the government on all levels, even ambushing troops sent to battle the cartels.

Reyes Baeza asked federal officials to investigate because he said the assailants fired high-powered weapons that Mexican law says can only be used by the military.

The convoy attack came two days after the police chief of Ciudad Juarez, the biggest city in Chihuahua, bowed to crime gang demands to resign because they threatened to kill at least one of his officers every 48 hours.

Signs posted by unknown people appeared around the city of 1.3 million on Sunday applauding the resignation of chief Roberto Orduna while threatening to behead Mayor Jesus Reyes Ferriz and his family –– even those living across the border in Texas –– if he continues "helping you know who" –– people it did not specify.

"Perverse minds may be taking advantage of the difficult circumstances in Ciudad Juarez to destabilize and stop the government's work," said Jaime Torres, the city spokesman.

Reyes Ferriz had assured residents before Orduna quit that his government is in control of the city's 1,700-member police force, which officials have been purging of officers considered untrustworthy.

Federal officials say more than 6,000 people died in drug-related violence across Mexico last year, and no state suffered more than Chihuahua. Ciudad Juarez alone recorded 1,600 killings.

http://cbs11tv.com/local/chihuahua.mexico.juarez.2.941731.html


Mexican Oil Output Down by 9.2% in January      
Monday, February 23, 2009  

Mexican state oil monopoly Petroleos Mexicanos produced an average of 2.68 million barrels of crude oil per day in January, down 9.2 percent from the same month last year.

Pemex announced its January results on Friday, noting that for the first time the Ku Maloob Zaap heavy oil field in the Gulf of Mexico became the country's most productive oil field with an average output of 787,000 bpd.

It took over that position from Cantarell, which had been the most productive field since 1979 but continued its rapid decline, falling 38 percent to 772,000 bpd.

Natural gas production, meanwhile, climbed to a record high for a month of January to 7.09 billion cubic feet per day.

Crude oil exports for the first month of the year totaled 1.36 million bpd, down 2.66 percent relative to January of last year, while Pemex's revenues from the sale of crude to its customers abroad plunged 55.2 percent to $1.59 billion.

That was due in large part to a sharp drop in the average price of oil last month, $37.65, down from a price of $80.15 in January 2008.

Pemex produced 1.56 million bpd of petroleum products, mainly gasoline and diesel, while sales of those products, including imports, came in at a total of 1.75 million bpd, valued at 35.65 billion pesos (some $2.54 billion).

The company sold 772,200 bpd of gasoline, 329,700 bpd of which was imported.

In January, Pemex produced just over 1 million tons of petrochemical products.

President Felipe Calderon last year sought to push a controversial plan through Congress to overhaul Pemex, including allowing the cash-strapped company to take on private oil firms as full partners in the exploration and drilling of new deepwater deposits in the Gulf of Mexico.

But leftist lawmakers fiercely opposed the initial bill, claiming that the aim of the government was to privatize Pemex, created after President Lazaro Cardenas' nationalization of the oil industry in 1938.

After months of debate, a revised bill was passed that gives Pemex more freedom to undertake projects with private firms, but excludes the provisions of Calderon's original initiative that would have allowed them a stake in the oil or any eventual profits.

Pemex said in January it plans to invest a record $19.4 billion this year as part of a series of countercyclical spending programs intended to combat the global economic crisis.

The company is trying to boost production at Ku Maloob Zaap and an onshore oil project known as Chicontepec, but most analysts say it is unlikely the lower output at Cantarell –– located in the Gulf beneath Mexico's Bay of Campeche –– can be offset by higher production at other fields.  

http://www.rigzone.com/news/article.asp?a_id=73243


A Mexican kidnapping: police apathy, few answers
By ALEXANDRA OLSON
updated 6:20 p.m. CT, Sat., Feb. 21, 2009

MEXICO CITY - Manuel Ramirez carries a tattered briefcase with wrinkled court documents and photos of his daughter, now missing for four long years. He no longer wants revenge. He just wants to know what happened.

His wife, Adela Alvarado, spends her days praying. She no longer uses mascara because she is frequently on the verge of tears. She once worked as a clown at children's parties. Now, she wears her orange wig and baggy harlequin costume to draw attention in the streets when handing out fliers with her daughter's picture.

To uncover the truth, they have gone to three different police agencies, battling apathy and the suspected complicity of some officers. And still they search, despite being driven from their home by death threats.

Their daughter, Monica Alejandrina Ramirez, is among thousands of Mexicans who have simply disappeared as kidnappings multiply.

Once, mostly millionaires were targeted. But like Monica, the daughter of a government doctor, more and more victims are middle-and working class. Since citizens fear police and most crimes go unsolved, kidnappings have become an increasingly sure bet. Even the poorest people are snatched off the streets now, for ransoms as low as a few hundred dollars.

"We try to live as normally as possible but do we forget? Or suddenly say, 'Oh I don't feel as bad,' or the pain is not as suffocating? No. No. No. No," said Adela Alvarado, her eyes welling as she clutched her prayer books to her chest. "It's not like clothes that you can take on and off."

About 70 abductions are reported monthly, but the government acknowledges that many more are never logged because Mexicans believe police may be incompetent, or involved in the crime themselves. The nonprofit Citizens' Institute for Crime Studies estimates actual kidnappings are closer to 500 a month, which would make Mexico a world leader.

Most kidnap victims survive, but a growing number simply vanish, private investigator Max Morales said. He has worked on hundreds of kidnappings over the last 20 years, and says the crimes are increasingly going awry as petty thugs take up what was once the province of organized gangs.

The federal government could not provide nationwide figures on missing people, but the Mexico City Attorney General's office alone has posted more than 4,000 pictures of people reported missing in the capital in the past year who have not been found.

The Ramirezes' daughter disappeared after leaving home on Dec. 14, 2004, to turn in a university assignment. She was 19.

Scouring hospitals and posting fliers, her family feared their beloved "Ale" had been killed in an accident or robbery. They doubted anyone would kidnap the daughter of a government doctor with a $3,000 monthly salary (about 30,000 pesos at the time of Monica's disappearance).

Then Ramirez got the text message from his daughter's cell phone: "If you ever want to see Ale again, pay us 250,000 pesos," some $25,000 at the time.

Meanwhile, Ramirez had gone to the local state police office, thinking they might help.

"I was desperate. My daughter had not shown up, and they were refusing to take my statement. They sat drinking coffee, bureaucracy, I don't know," Ramirez said.

Ramirez says he never got a straight answer about the investigation. Only years later did he learn that the son of an officer from the same station was involved in her disappearance.

So Ramirez turned to the feds, hoping they would be more professional. Officers spent several weeks at their house, waiting for the kidnappers to call. And Ramirez got two more text messages — the last one read, "Do you have the money, or do you want her back in pieces?"

He left several voice messages saying he was ready to negotiate and begging them not to hurt Monica.

Nobody ever called back — Ramirez now wonders if they knew police were standing by.

Ramirez eventually turned up the first lead on his own. He went to the phone company and got records showing someone was still calling from his daughter's phone to acquaintances of Jesus Contreras, one of Monica's university friends, who had denied seeing her the day she disappeared.

Ramirez brought this information to a face-to-face meeting with Noe Ramirez, no relation, who then led the federal police's anti-kidnapping unit. If he ever acted on it, the family was never told.

"We poured out our grief, our anguish," Manuel Ramirez said. "But in the end, he brushed us off."

Later promoted to Mexico's drug czar, Noe Ramirez was fired in July and charged on Sunday with accepting $450,000 to leak details of police operations to Sinaloa drug cartel members.

"We went to the federal police thinking that it was the most professional, least corrupt institution in our country," Manuel Ramirez said. "Now we see that it was the opposite."

President Felipe Calderon has pledged to clean up the police, but expressed dismay last year, when half of the officers nationwide failed new security and background checks designed to root out corruption and inefficiency. The government also is trying to improve abduction investigations, including creating a cell phone registry to help trace phones used for ransom demands.

In the end, neither state nor federal police helped the Ramirez family. Neither agency responded to requests from The Associated Press for comment.

Ramirez didn't get results until he took the phone logs to the Mexico City police, who arrested Contreras.

Contreras confessed to sending the ransom demands and was sentenced to 21 years in prison for kidnapping, according to court documents. But he denied abducting Monica, testifying that he sent the text messages because Monica had told him her parents mistreated her, and he was angry at them.

He also admitted that he met Monica at a subway station the day she disappeared. But he claimed she was running away and got into a car after giving him her cell phone.

His conviction brought Monica's family no closer to learning her fate.

The next break came a year later, again without police help. A neighbor who worked in the prison, Rene Bravo, told Ramirez that Contreras told him he had plotted the kidnapping with another young man who lived down the street from them. That man, Marlon Gaona, was the son of an officer at the very police station where Ramirez had first reported her missing.

"I had gone straight to the wolves' den where the kidnappers were," Ramirez said.

Bravo, the neighbor, never got to tell police his story. Two months after he spoke to Ramirez, he was shot dead in the neighborhood convenience store he ran with his wife.

Mexico City police arrested Marlon Goana, who was sentenced to 21 years in prison for Monica's kidnapping last year. Bravo's daughter testified she saw him run out of the store and speed off in a car moments after her father was shot.

Marlon Goana denied everything. Court documents indicate he was convicted largely based on the third-person accounts of the prison conversation. The trial shed no more details on Monica's fate.

"This is our great anguish. I no longer want revenge. Maybe a few years ago I did, but not anymore," Ramirez said. "If they would just tell us where Monica is, we would drop everything."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29320986/

I'd want revenge till the day I died.

That's just me though.

HH

Video:  Law Enforcement Agencies Preventing Border Violence From Spilling Over
http://www.valleycentral.com/news/video.aspx?id=264115


Homeland Security official affirms Mexican drug cartel violence has spilled over into Texas
By Brandi Grissom / Austin Bureau
Posted: 02/24/2009 12:00:00 AM MST

AUSTIN –– Violence from Mexican drug cartels has spilled over into Texas, state Homeland Security Director Steve McCraw said Monday.

"Yes, absolutely it has occurred; there's no question about it," McCraw said after a hearing before the House Committee on Border and International Affairs.

McCraw answered lawmakers' questions about Gov. Rick Perry's request for another $135 million for border security operations on the same day Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott asked lawmakers for a new tool to help bring down transnational gangs that threaten border communities.

During the border committee meeting, state Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, asked McCraw whether some incidents that have been reported in the El Paso area would be considered elements of spillover violence from Mexican drug cartels.

Moody asked, among other things, if threats against American citizens, individuals seeking treatment at U.S. hospital for injuries sustained in Juárez and Mexican nationals seeking asylum would be evidence of spillover.

McCraw said yes.

"Anything that involves cartel activity that impacts Texans on this side of the border is, by definition, spillover violence," he said after the meeting.

McCraw told lawmakers, though, that Texas has a contingency plan to deal with large-scale violence and that local, state and federal agencies are working to prevent that from happening.

Earlier Monday, state Sen. Tommy Williams, R-The Woodlands, and state Rep. Aaron Peña, D-Edinburg, filed a bill they said they hoped would make doing business in Texas harder for drug cartels.

Along with Abbott, the legislators urged their colleagues to approve a bill that would give the attorney general expanded authority to seize guns, drugs and cash that are the lifeblood of human and drug smugglers.

"This bill is going to give us the ability to put these kinds of criminals out of business by taking the very thing they are trying to make," Abbott said.

Though such seizures can currently be made in criminal cases, the legislation would allow the attorney general to pursue seizures in civil court, where the burden of proof is less stringent, Abbott said.

Williams said the measure would help ensure that violence from the cartels stays south of the Rio Grande.

"The body count is stacking up along the border," he said, "and we don't want this to spill over into our state anymore."

http://www.elpasotimes.com/newupdated/ci_11770847


After threats, Juárez mayor in El Paso
By Diana Washington Valdez / El Paso Times
Posted: 02/24/2009 12:00:00 AM MST

EL PASO –– Police are investigating threats against Juárez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz, who moved his family to El Paso for safety, El Paso police Detective Carlos Carrillo said Monday.

"We received information that the Juárez mayor lives in El Paso, and that possibly they were going to come to El Paso to get him," Carrillo said. "He has not asked us for our help, but it's our duty to protect any resident of our city who may be under threat."

Juárez police said written threats against Reyes Ferriz and his family were left in different parts of Juárez after the police chief, Roberto Orduña Cruz, resigned Friday. The threats were written on the kind of banners and posters that the Juárez drug cartel has used to send messages to police and others.

Meanwhile, Mexican authorities were unraveling a shooting Sunday in Chihuahua City that killed one of Chihuahua Gov. Jose Reyes Baeza Terraza's bodyguards.

Alejandro Chaparro Coronel died while defending another state agent in a convoy. He was a commander who served on the Chihuahua state police force for 11 years.
The assailants wounded two other bodyguards, both also members of the state police.

Mexican officials said police returned fire and wounded one suspect, Eduardo Hernandez Valdez, 36. He served in the Mexican army from 2001 to 2003.

The Chihuahua governor, who drove his own vehicle with the bodyguards behind him, said earlier he did not know whether the attack targeted him or stemmed from an unrelated dispute between his bodyguards and the armed suspects.

"We cannot speculate and will comment only about what we know," the governor said.

Chihuahua state officials said they had indications that the shooting was an isolated case stemming from a disagreement between the governor's bodyguards and one of the suspects.

Officials said the bodyguards stopped one suspect's vehicle because they thought it was following the convoy. Then a second vehicle approached, from which two armed men exited and started firing at the bodyguards.

The suspects' vehicles, which were stolen, were found burned outside Chihuahua City.

Both the Juárez mayor and Chihuahua governor belong to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

Hector Garcia, the federal attorney general's regional director in Chihuahua state, said at a Monday news conference that the government will investigate any federal violations in connection with Sunday's shooting.

Garcia, who is serving his second tour in Juárez, gained notoriety in 2003 when he claimed publicly that the Juárez drug cartel had been dismantled and no longer existed.

Juárez city official Guillermo Dowell said the violence in Juárez and Chihuahua state is comparable to what occurred in Ireland and Iraq, "where people were killed not because of what they did or failed to do, but to plant terror in a city and its authorities."

He said Reyes Ferriz remained committed to fighting back with a clean and competent police force.

"The mayor's position is that the city police have to serve the public and not some organized criminal band, and he will continue to clean up the police force in a process he began since the first moments of his administration," Dowell said.

Violence against high-ranking politicians in Mexico is not new. In 2001, Patricio Martinez Garcia, then the Chihuahua state governor, survived an assassination attempt by the Juárez drug cartel and a corrupt policewoman.

FBI agents in El Paso had warned him about the cartel's plans. A Chihuahua state policewoman was charged and imprisoned in the plot.

http://www.elpasotimes.com/juarez/ci_11770841


Cartels Use Submarines to Move Cocaine to U.S.
Monday, February 23, 2009 10:33 PM

KEY WEST, Fla. - Packed with cocaine and grimly christened "coffins," sleek jungle-built submarines are steaming their way north from Colombia through Pacific waters to deliver tons of illegal drugs headed for the U.S. market.

Skimming just below the water line, with only a glimpse of a glass-enclosed cockpit or metal tubes visible from above, the semi-submersibles are the latest shipment method used by trafficking cartels to try to elude detection by authorities.

A pilot and three or four crewmen squeeze into the cramped hulls of the craft on voyages from Colombia's Pacific Coast up to Central America or Mexico, where their cargoes are offloaded for shipment to the United States, the U.S. Coast Guard says.

There is no bathroom or galley and the heat can be searing in the narrow space the smugglers share in the stern of the craft, just a few feet away from the throbbing diesel engines.

"They call it either the coffin or the tomb," said Rear Adm. Joseph Nimmich, the officer who commands the U.S. Coast Guard's Joint Interagency Task Force South.

"The intent is to be as low-profile, and to make it as difficult for us to find, as possible."

The task force Nimmich heads, an umbrella group that includes the U.S. military, Drug Enforcement Administration, FBI and CIA, focuses on monitoring and detecting drug trafficking in the Western Hemisphere.

It estimates that some 60 to 75 of the fiberglass vessels, also known as "narco-subs" and capable of carrying upward of 8 tons of cocaine when fully loaded, are built in clandestine jungle shipyards in northwest Colombia every year.

That makes the fleet big enough to handle almost all of Colombia's annual exports of cocaine, estimated by United Nations monitors to total about 600 metric tons a year.

Improving technology

Nimmich spoke to Reuters in an interview last week at a Navy dock in Key West, Fla., where one of the vessels is on display. Fifty-nine feet long and about 12 feet wide, it was caught in the Pacific Ocean with its four-man crew and a payload of about 7 tons of cocaine last September.

The "coffin" nickname for the vessels stems from the fact that some suffered catastrophic hull failures in the early stages of their development.

Nimmich said the boats, originally designed by Russian, Pakistani and Sri Lankan engineers, have become increasingly sophisticated in their seaworthiness, propulsion systems and other features.

The smuggling runs from Colombia to Mexico or Guatemala, where the cocaine is offloaded for shipment to the United States, can take up to two weeks. But that is only because the boats slow their powerful engines to a crawl during the day, to avoid detection of their wakes.

Among other new features, the vessel lashed to the dock at the Key West Naval Air Station had an underwater exhaust cooling system to help the boat, painted light gray with speckles of blue, avoid producing a heat signature that could be spotted by infrared radar systems.

"Very low technological capabilities can have a high impact on our sensor system," Nimmich said.

Until now, the vessels appear to have been used almost exclusively to run cocaine from the Pacific side of Colombia, Nimmich said. But at least one, with a very large cargo capacity and a twin-engine power plant, had been found on the eastern side of Colombia on the Guajira Peninsula, he added.

Potential for terrorist use

Recent reports of building activity in the Caribbean region have not been confirmed, Nimmich added. He said intelligence pointing to construction of at least one semi-submersible, to run cocaine to Europe out of Brazil's Amazon River Basin, could also not be confirmed, but that this would not be a surprise.

"We clearly think that there's going to be an expansion of this technology into other vectors," the admiral said. The potential for terrorist attacks using the vessels was one possibility, he added.

Some of his colleagues have voiced fears that drug smugglers could soon begin making full-fledged submarines capable of diving deep and navigating even more quietly than the current generation.

But Nimmich said such production was unlikely any time soon, even though a full-blown Russian-designed sub, capable of carrying about 150 tons of cocaine and diving to substantial depths, was found by Colombian police in a warehouse outside the Andean nation's high-elevation capital in 2000.

"The technological advances to go from a semi-submersible to a submersible are dramatic. It is not easy," Nimmich said.

In any case, the semi-submersibles may already be as good as they need to be in countering beefed-up efforts to intercept drug-laden aircraft and speedboats running out of Colombia.

For every seizure of a semi-submersible vessel — which cost about $500,000 each and are scuttled when they reach their final destinations — Nimmich said four others were likely out plowing the seas northward with impunity.

"At a very good pace this year, we are probably only about 20 percent effective in interdicting semi-submersibles at this point in time," he said.

http://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/submarines_cocaine/2009/02/23/184812.html?utm_medium=RSS


A New Way To Patrol The Texas Border: Virtually
by John Burnett

All Things Considered, February 23, 2009 · In a controversial program aimed at enhancing border security, Texas sheriffs have erected a series of surveillance cameras along the Rio Grande and connected them to the Internet.

Thousands of people are now virtual Border Patrol agents — and they're on the lookout for drug smugglers and illegal immigrants.

Robert Fahrenkamp, a truck driver in South Texas, is one of them.

After a long haul behind the wheel of a Peterbilt tractor-trailer, he comes home, sets his 6-foot-6-inch, 250-pound frame in front of his computer, pops a Red Bull, turns on some Black Sabbath or Steppenwolf, logs in to www.blueservo.net — and starts protecting his country.

"This gives me a little edge feeling," Fahrenkamp says, "like I'm doing something for law enforcement as well as for our own country."

How It Works

Online border patrolling is about as sexy as real-life police work — hours of tedium punctuated by minutes of high excitement.

On Blueservo's Web site, each camera focuses on an area that's known for illegal crossing. Next to a real-time view of a grassy meadow is the message: "Look for individuals on foot carrying backpacks." A shot of a border highway says, "If you see movement from the right to the left, please report this activity."

When a citizen spots suspicious activity, they click a button on the Web site and write a report. That message goes to the corresponding sheriff's office. The sheriff may handle the problem or call the U.S. Border Patrol.

To date, more than 43,000 people have logged on and become, as the Web site calls them, "virtual Texas deputies."

Donald Reay, executive director of the Texas Border Sheriff's Coalition, says most of the virtual deputies are in Texas, though some are as far away as Australia.

"They said in good Australian fashion, 'Hey, mate, we've been watching your border for you from the pub in Australia,'" Reay recalls.

Since the program started in November, virtual deputies have yielded four marijuana busts, totaling more than 1,500 pounds, and 30 incidents when illegal crossers were repelled.

Political Opposition

The Texas governor's criminal justice office funds the program, and it will spend $2 million in its first year.

But there is political opposition, including from state Sen. Elliot Shapleigh (D-El Paso), who calls it a "waste of money." He says border protection should be left to the government. The border cameras "invite extremists to participate in virtual immigrant hunts," he says.

Bob Parker, another online border watcher, doesn't buy that assessment.

"If they want to call that being a vigilante for reporting people illegally crossing the border, then so be it," Parker says.

Officially, the U.S. Border Patrol has no comment about the placement of surveillance cameras on private property along the international river. Privately, an unnamed veteran agent in South Texas said he's dubious of the program.

But effective or not, more than 43,000 pairs of eyes are watching the Texas-Mexico border through blueservo.net.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101050132


Wave of drug violence is creeping into Arizona from Mexico, officials say
By Randal C. Archibold Published: February 24, 2009

PHOENIX: The raging drug war among cartels in Mexico and their push to expand operations in the United States has led to a wave of kidnappings, shootings and home invasions in Arizona, state and federal officials said at a legislative hearing on Monday.

The drug trade has long brought violence to the state, which serves as a hub as illicit drugs and illegal immigrants are smuggled to the rest of the nation.

Over all, in this city and surrounding Maricopa County, homicides and violent crime decreased last year. But the authorities are sounding an alarm over what they consider changing tactics in border-related crime that bear the marks of the violence in Mexico.

A home invasion here last year was carried out by attackers wielding military-style rifles and dressed in uniforms similar to a Phoenix police tactical unit. The discovery of grenades and other military-style weaponry bound for Mexico is becoming more routine, as is hostage-taking and kidnapping for ransom, law enforcement officials said.

The Phoenix police regularly receive reports involving a border-related kidnapping or hostage-taking in a home.

The Maricopa County attorney's office said such cases rose to 241 last year from 48 in 2004, though investigators are not sure of the true number because they believe many crimes go unreported.

The violence in Mexico — where more than 6,000 people were killed in the last year in drug-related violence, double the number of the previous year — is "reaching into Arizona, and that is what is really alarming local and state law enforcement," said Commander Dan Allen of the State Department of Public Safety.

"We are finding home invasion and attacks involving people impersonating law enforcement officers," Allen told the State Senate Judiciary Committee, whose chairman, Jonathan Paton of the Tucson area, called the hearing. "They are very forceful and aggressive. They are heavily armed, and they threaten, assail, bind and sometimes kill victims."

Chief David Denlinger of the State Department of Public Safety said that while tactics like home invasions might not be new in the drug trade, "they are getting more prevalent."

"Border crimes are not just on the border," Denlinger said, pointing to posters showing weapons, drugs and people who had been held hostage.

The hearing comes at a time of heightened anxiety in the United States brought on by the escalating violence in Mexico and a federal report in December that said the Mexican cartels "maintain drug distribution networks or supply drugs to distributors in at least 230 U.S. cities."

The report from the National Drug Intelligence Center said the cartels posed "the greatest drug trafficking threat to the United States; they control most of the U.S. drug market and have established varied transportation routes, advanced communications capabilities and strong affiliations with gangs in the United States."

The violence in Mexico has come from a government crackdown on the cartels and a war among them over turf and trading routes to the United States.

Still, federal authorities have said there is no sign that the pattern of beheadings and mutilations of victims and the regular killings of law enforcement officers that characterize the violence in Mexico has arrived in the United States.

In some cases, the connection to the cartels in American cities are tenuous or not fully understood, law enforcement officials have said.

But in this border state, the anxiety is acute and the ties to drug and human smuggling strong.

The police and federal agents regularly seize large loads of cocaine, marijuana and other drugs smuggled in vehicles and sometimes on the backs of couriers and illegal immigrants linked to drug organizations.

At the same time, the vast majority of the weapons used in Mexico's drug-related killings come from the United States, and Arizona is a top exporter.

Terry Goddard, the Arizona attorney general, said his office had sought to clamp down on money wire transfers through the state that were believed to help finance the smuggling of drugs and people.

"They send us drugs and people, and we send them guns and cash," Paton said in an interview.

Paton, a Republican who favors gun rights, said he was considering the possibility of introducing legislation intended to restrict "straw purchasers," people who buy guns with legal documentation at shops and gun shows and then turn them over to drug traffickers.

Federal laws prohibit such purchases, but Paton said he believed that adding state sanctions would provide more muscle in fighting the practice.

Paton said there were already bills pending in the Legislature focusing on border crime. Prompted by the discovery of a rash of so-called drophouses in and around Phoenix, where migrants have been held against their will, one bill would increase penalties for those caught smuggling people.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/02/24/america/24border.php

Will it even be 90 days before we see this crap spill over here?  Less than that?  I hope Rick Perry is ready to react at a moment's notice.  The .gov sure won't.

HH

Look man, my hands are tied. I can't go to the academy in Artesia until the U.S. OPM finishes my background investigation and it is favorably adjudicated by the U.S. Office of the Adjudicator.

I was supposed to be sent last month with an interim security clearance but the Patrol decided to eliminate interim clearances and I have to wait.

I'm sure it will still be there, waiting for you.    

BTW, Thanks!  Keep us posted.

My mom called me this morning, I guess she heard on the news the Governor of Texas asked Obama for an additional 1,000 Border Patrol Agents?

Good news for me.

Mexico attorney general: We don't need U.S. troops to intervene in drug war
09:07 PM CST on Tuesday, February 24, 2009
By TODD J. GILLMAN / Washington Bureau
[email protected]

WASHINGTON — Mexico’s attorney general said Tuesday he sees no need for U.S. troops to intervene in his country’s war on drug cartels, nor to gear up for a spillover of violence across the border.

“I don’t see that,” Attorney General Eduardo Medina-Mora said in an interview with The Dallas Morning News. “I don’t see the U.S. military playing an active role. The size of the problem on the U.S. side is not calling for that, and certainly Mexico has enough institutional capabilities to deal with this.”

U.S. officials view the violence as a potential national security threat, and last month the Bush administration’s homeland security chief, Michael Chertoff, said Washington has drawn up contingency plans for a “surge” of both civilian law enforcement and military assets along the border.

Texas also has developed a contingency plan to cope with spillover violence. On Tuesday, Gov. Rick Perry demanded a tighter security net from Washington, saying he’s asked the Obama administration for more aircraft and “a thousand more troops” to the border.

“I don’t care whether they’re military troops, or they’re National Guard troops or whether they’re customs agents,” he said during a visit to El Paso with retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the former U.S. drug czar who warned two months ago that Mexico could soon become a “narco state.”

“I’m concerned,” Perry said in an interview, calling the city directly across the border from El Paso, Ciudad Juárez, “one of the deadliest cities on the North American continent. … Darn tootin’ it concerns us.”

The drug violence has cost more than 6,000 lives in the past 13 months, as drug gangs fight for territory and trafficking routes and battle a Mexican army crackdown. Juárez, a city of 1.3 million, has had almost a third of the killings.

Last Friday, the city’s police chief resigned after gunmen killed one of his officers and a jail guard. Three days earlier, his top deputy and three other officers were killed, and gangs had threatened to shoot a policeman every 48 hours until the chief quit.

Medina-Mora, over coffee at Mexico’s Embassy a few blocks from the White House, said there is little hope of eradicating the drug trade or ending the violence entirely.

“This is beyond our means and our capability” as long as demand for narcotics persists, he said. Rather, the goal is to regain “normality” for Mexican citizens.

“This means fragmenting and diminishing the power that these criminal groups have accumulated throughout the years, and transform it from a national security problem …to a police problem, to a public security problem,” he said.

Criminals account for nine out of 10 casualties, Medina-Mora said. Most of the others are police, though a few innocent bystanders have been killed. Beheadings of rival gang members have grown more common, and police corruption is widespread.

“The police forces of Tijuana and Juárez were in a way privatized by these criminal groups,” he said. “It’s no accident that violence is very high in those areas, where the local police force was not precisely sound, and to rebuild those forces is difficult.”

He said the violence can also be attributed to the success of Mexico’s aggressive use of Federal Police and army units to disrupt the drug trade. New U.S. figures show that the street price of cocaine has more than doubled since Mexican President Felipe Calderón took office at the end of 2006 and began the crackdown.

“We have been successful in dismantling their criminal infrastructure, building up obstacles for them to produce income,” Medina-Mora said.

The “unwanted” effects of the war on the drug trade, he asserted, will ultimately lead to an easing of violence.

“I think that this is foreseeable in the near future.” he said. “… Criminal groups that are active in this activity are in the process of breakdown.”

Last week in Paris, Economy Secretary Gerardo Ruiz Mateos said that if Calderón had not taken on the cartels, “the next president of the republic would be a narco-trafficker.”

Medina-Mora disagreed, but added: “I certainly believe that there was no choice for President Calderón but to address this in a very bold manner. The challenge from these groups to institutions, particularly local police forces, was already too big.”

He called it natural that the residents of Juárez remain frustrated with the escalating violence. But the lawlessness in border regions doesn’t mean the Mexican state is failing, as some critics assert.

“Mexico has never been a weak state. It is not today. It will not be in the future,” he said. “We do have a critical problem that needs very bold, determined action by the government, which is taking place.”

Medina-Mora said Mexicans remain frustrated with the flow of cash and guns from the U.S. drug trade — $10 billion a year and thousands of weapons, which are illegal in Mexico. He discussed that topic Monday with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and on Tuesday with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

“These groups easily get into their hands assault rifles and weapons that are coming from the U.S.,” he said, adding that although Mexico respects the rights of Americans under the U.S. Constitution, “the Second Amendment was never meant to arm foreign criminal groups.”

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/022509dnintmexico.4b7011ca.html


Mexico drug war prompts federal contingency plan
Shaun Waterman UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
Wednesday, February 25, 2009

The Department of Homeland Security has contingency plans to rush additional personnel and other resources, including the U.S. military, to parts of the southern border if law enforcement agencies on the ground are overwhelmed by spillover effects from escalating criminal violence in Mexico, department officials say.

Several border states likewise are drawing up contingency plans, amid growing concern about possible cross-border effects of the violence in Mexico, which claimed more than 5,300 lives last year - double the number in 2007.

The escalation has included videos of torture and executions posted on the Web - a tactic former officials say was likely copied from Muslim terrorists - and hours-long firefights between authorities and criminals toting large-caliber automatic weapons. A State Department travel advisory for U.S. citizens last week compared these incidents to "small-unit combat."

The DHS plan, which "does not change or supersede any existing authorities ... addresses how a number of government agencies would deploy federal resources to help state and local partners on the ground if local resources were overwhelmed," DHS spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said.

She said the agencies would include the U.S. military "as needed."

"We have been coordinating with the Department of Defense," she said.

The Department of Defense "is aware of the DHS plan," said spokesman Lt. Col. Almarah Belk. The department "has provided some information on potential DOD-unique resources/capabilities - based on historical precedent - that could be employed in support of the DHS plan, if asked."

Neither Col. Belk nor Ms. Kudwa would give specifics, but nonlethal military capabilities such as air transport are used in federal disaster response.

Ms. Kudwa said the DHS operations plan had been drawn up last summer to address "a broad spectrum of contingencies," including the possibility that the violence in Mexico might "spill over the border in such a way that it exceeds the capacity of federal, state and local law enforcement on the ground to respond."

News of the plan, first revealed last week by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, comes on the heels of the State Department warning for Americans planning to visit Mexico, and of a report from the U.S. National Drug Intelligence Center, which found that Mexican cartels "maintain drug-distribution networks or supply drugs to distributors in at least 230 U.S. cities."

Several border states also are addressing the issue, which was one of a number of concerns raised with Miss Napolitano by California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, in a meeting Monday, according to state officials.

"This is on our radar," said Jay Alan, a spokesman for the California Emergency Management Agency. He said the question had come up "not necessarily in a formal way" during discussions among the 10 states from both sides of the border - four U.S., six Mexican - who were negotiating a memorandum of understanding on emergency management.

In Arizona, Lt. James Warriner, a spokesman for the Department of Public Safety, told UPI that the violence was "definitely creeping across the border into Arizona" in the form of military-style home invasions, kidnappings and human-trafficking operations.

"There have been home invasions ... using the tactics" familiar to law enforcement because of their employment by Mexican cartels. "They are very heavily armed" and sometimes wear paramilitary-style uniforms, Lt. Warriner said.

Analysts say the extreme nature of the violence in Mexico is in part a product of the destabilizing effects of President Felipe Calderon´s use of the army and federal authorities to crack down on the cartels - which has provoked shootouts with police and escalating violence between the cartels as markets are destabilized by the removal of key players.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/feb/25/mexico-drug-war-prompts-federal-contingency-plan/


UN: Latin America needs urgent help to confront Mexican, Colombian drug cartels
By EDITH M. LEDERER , Associated Press

Last update: February 24, 2009 - 9:06 PM

UNITED NATIONS - Central American nations need urgent international help to confront the increasingly dangerous presence of Mexican and Colombian drug cartels, the head of a U.N.-backed commission investigating organized crime in Guatemala said Tuesday.

"Latin America has no time," U.N. Assistant Secretary-General Carlos Castresana warned. "This is a situation of emergency."

Mexican drug cartels are increasingly using Central American nations to move drugs, and are dealing directly with Colombian cartels to obtain cocaine, which is also produced in Peru and Bolivia.

Guatemala faces the worst problem in Central America, Castresana said.

The country, with a lightly populated, 590-mile (950-kilometer) border with Mexico, has become an important transit point for cocaine headed to the United States.

Countries which suffered from armed conflict like Guatemala, which was engulfed in civil war from 1960 to 1996, have weak institutions and need international help to confront and prosecute drug traffickers, Castresana said.

"If they are left alone, clearly they are unable to do the job by themselves," he said.

Honduras and El Salvador are in a similar situation because they have organized crime and dangerous juvenile gangs, he added.

Castresana said Guatemala faces a more dire situation because its peace agreement did not succeed in dismantling clandestine groups that permeated institutions and eventually became involved in organized crime. He said that such groups were dismantled after El Salvador's civil war.

The International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, which he leads, began operating in January 2008 under an agreement between the U.N. and the government to investigate and help dismantle violent criminal organizations believed responsible for the paralysis of the country's justice system.

Castresana said the Guatemala commission has about 20 current investigations and is prosecuting four cases with local officials, including the police kidnapping of children and corruption in the justice ministry.

He said Guatemala's justice system needs a high-security court in Guatemala City to prosecute "transnational criminals" because witnesses and court officials need protection which is unavailable in local or national courts.

The United States and several European countries have offered to modify a building to improve security, and with recent approval from the Supreme Court, Castresana said he hopes the court can start operating within a few months.

http://www.startribune.com/nation/40251427.html


Gunmen kill mayor of western Mexican town
Tue Feb 24, 10:22 pm ET

MORELIA, Mexico – Mexican authorities say gunmen shot and killed the mayor of a town in the western state of Michoacan, the latest in a string of attacks against elected local officials.

Michoacan state prosecutor Adrian Lopez says Vista Hermosa Mayor Octavio Carrillo was arriving at his home when four gunmen waiting for him opened fire.

Carrillo is the sixth elected local official killed in Michoacan since June.

Violence has soared in Michoacan, President Felipe Calderon's home state, as drug gangs battle each other for territory and intensify attacks on police.

Calderon says drug violence claimed at least 6,000 lives last year.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090225/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/lt_mexico_violence_10


U.S. arrests 700 in Mexican drug cartel raids
DEA sweeps up Sinaloa suspects in 120 cities overnight, this morning
BREAKING NEWS
NBC News and news services
updated 11 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - Federal agents have rounded up more than 700 suspects in a wide-ranging crackdown on a Mexican drug cartel operating inside the United States.

A law enforcement official familiar with the sweep said the arrests culminated in a series of Drug Enforcement Administration raids Tuesday night and Wednesday morning in 120 cities. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because authorities were still gathering evidence.

Attorney General Eric Holder plans to announce results of the crackdown on the Sinaloa drug cartel at a news conference in Washington on Wednesday at 2 p.m. ET.

Kidnappings, killings and other violence related to the cross-border drug trade have escalated as heavily armed gangs battle for turf on the doorstep of the U.S. narcotics market.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29389404/


U.S. companies stung by violence in Mexico
By MARK STEVENSON
The Associated Press
2/25/2009

MEXICO CITY — Rising violence in Mexico is forcing foreign companies to change their operating procedures and shipping routes, and to tighten security for their employees, businessmen said Tuesday.

U.S. security consultant John Baird said his family was robbed in late 2008 for the first time in the six years he has lived in Mexico. “2009 is going to be very difficult” because of rising violence and unemployment here, he added.

“I think we’re just going to have to hunker down,” said Baird, general manager of the Mexico office of the Dublin, Ireland-based security company FreightWatch Group.

He said there have been problems both with drugs stowed in freight shipments and with the army checkpoints posted to detect the drugs.

One popular highway shipping route to the U.S. border now has eight or nine army checkpoints on it. Given that checkpoints sometimes damage or delay shipments, Baird now advises U.S. companies to use another highway — one that doesn’t pass through the states of northwestern Mexico where drug cartels are battling for smuggling routes and against security forces.

Xochitl Diaz, a spokesman of Michigan-based auto parts manufacturer Delphi Corp., said one of the company’s U.S. executives escaped an attack in the border city of Ciudad Juarez in January.

A car chased the U.S. woman, cut her off, and a man carrying a pistol got out and banged on the window of her car with the butt of the pistol. The woman managed to speed off in her car and made it to the plant.

“We are asking employees to travel in daylight to the extent that they can,” Diaz said. “We are asking them to be extra cautious and to travel wherever possible in groups.”

Alberto Zapanta, the president of the U.S.-Mexico Chamber of Commerce, said the drug-related violence that cost over 6,000 lives in 2008 “is not pervasive, it’s not all over the country, it’s along the border ... there are kind of hotspots.”

But Zapanta added, “I’m not out wandering around like I used to do.” Instead, he uses secure limousines to travel from airports to hotels.

While Mexico’s drug cartels don’t appear to be targeting foreigners specifically, there is a problem with common criminals taking advantage of the atmosphere of fear created by the drug conflict to extort money or demand protection payments from companies, Interior Secretary Fernando Gomez Mont told a meeting of business people in Mexico City.

“Based on the climate of terror that exists, a bunch of smart guys are simulating extortions or saying they have ties to organized crime, to scare people,” Gomez Mont said.

“In most cases, they don’t come from organizations that are capable of inflicting harm,” he told the executives. “They are using a strategy of taking advantage of disorder.”

Companies in Mexico have reported a rising wave of such extortions, but Gomez Mont told executives not to pay such demands.

http://www.thetrucker.com/News/Stories/2009/2/25/UScompaniesstungbyviolenceinMexico.aspx

Lou Dobbs is having a segment regarding this and Holders desire to curtail our 2A right under the auspicies of helping our Mexico neighbor.  It is on tonight (CNN) 8-9 PM CST

I read a number of Mexican Newspapers everyday, and the funny part is that the Mexicans keep capturing weapons like Norinco AKs that haven't been available in the U.S. in awhile.

And, interestingly enough, when the Mexican government captures stuff and their press reports it, it usually puts name and serial number in the article.  So the article will say "one AK-47 rifle, 7.62x39 NORINCO Serial xxxxxxxx."  Another thing is that you see almost no Romainian AKs captured, which suggests to me that if the government "bought in America" theory was true, you'd see SOME Romy AKs, simply because there are probably 5 Romy AKs on the new/gun shop market for every other kind.  This is to say nothing of hand grenades, IEDs and other goodies the narcos have, but alas are unavailable at the local gun store.

While some U.S. weapons are there (paratrooper SKSs and thumbhole stock AKs for example) I find it as likely that the Chinese are selling weapons originally intended for export to the US, that got caught up in the import ban, and now there is a market for them.  I'd love to see the importation data and serials, and compare it against the captured weapons.  I'd also love to do a serial number trace on the high end stuff like USG 5.7s.

Darn, I just missed it.  I found short segments of the topics though.

Gun Rights
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2009/02/23/tucker.gun.rights.cnn

Broken Border
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2009/02/25/ldt.wian.mexican.cartels.cnn?iref=videosearch

Thanks.

Great post and articles. I love how the media here tries to tell us that it is our 2nd Amendment Rights that are causing guns to flow into Mexico and in the article an analyst says that some of it is obviously coming from the Mexican Military. Which makes sense to me as alot of the stuff they parade around is obvisouly not legal and readily available in the US.

Very useful info.  Also, if drugs can come up from South America into Mexico, why not Chinese-made weapons from say, Argentina for example?  I'm sure they have more than just Russian stock.  

Plenty of containers coming in from China directly into Mexico.  Mexico and Kansas City Southern are part of a consortium that is building a port on the Pacific.  I'll try to drag up a link.

ETA:  The warlike ordinance IS probably coming up from the south.  Remember pretty much every country between Mexico and South America, with the exception of Costa Rica, had either a full blown war or insurgency for most of the last 20 years.

Excellent points.

Mexico's Green Party Urges Death Penalty for Kidnappers  
By James Blears
Mexico City
26 February 2009
 
Violent murders linked to organized crime - in particular the drug trade - are soaring in Mexico with nearly 6,000 people killed last year, double the number for 2007. As a result, Mexico's tiny Green Party has decided to campaign for the reintroduction of the death penalty.  

The Green Party in Mexico is pressing for the death penalty for kidnappers who torture, mutilate or murder their victims. If this measure is adopted by the country's legislators, it would reverse a 2005 decision to formally scrap capital punishment. It has been almost 50 years since anyone was executed in Mexico.

More than 5,600 people were killed by drug traffickers in Mexico last year and analysts say Mexico is now the most dangerous country in the world for kidnapping. But 97 percent of the country's kidnapping cases go unsolved by police, one of the reasons many critics of the death penalty question its effectiveness in deterring crime.

But public anger is fueling the debate. A poll conducted last year found that more than 70 percent of those asked supported the death penalty.

The Green Party has launched a hot line to inform the public on the issue. It has received thousands of calls supporting the death penalty for kidnappers who brutalize their victims.  

Green Party leader Jorge Emilio Gonzalez says voters are demanding a fitting deterrent to counteract these vicious crimes.

"It is not the answer," said Jorge Emilio Gonzalez. "But it is part of the answer. It is a message that we are going strong. They are going to think twice. They know that if they get caught - in six, eight months - one year, they are going to get the death penalty."

Green Party Vice Coordinator Diego Cobo explains the legislative proposal is specifically designed to protect the kidnapping victims.

"The purpose of our proposal is not to kill criminals," said Diego Cobo. "The first purpose of our proposal is to protect the victim, to tell the criminal that if he kills his victim, he is going to be killed also. So the first effect of our proposal is the protection of the victim. The life of the victim."

College of Mexico International Studies Department Professor Lorenzo Meyer is a specialist in the history of Mexico's political development. He says Mexico's Police Forces are too corrupt, and its legal system way too fragile, to consider using the death penalty.

"In Mexico, the only people that are in jail ... well not only, but basically 95 percent, are poor," said Lorenzo Meyer. "And nobody, really nobody trusts the judicial system. So introduce the death penalty here, and you would have a lot of executions that are unfair. In the case of Mexico, it could be really criminal to introduce the death penalty with this sort of judicial system."

Lawyer Alonso Aguilar Zinser agrees with Meyer. He says the death penalty is not the way for Mexico's legal system to progress.

"Criminals are a product of the society," said Alonso Aguilar Zinser. "And something is failing in society if you have criminals. You do not have the right to have a revenge, if you have problems in society. You have to resolve the problems. Not revenge, because an eye for an eye is not the position of a modern state."

Outrage over kidnapping in Mexico surged last year after the kidnapping and murder of 14-year-old Fernando Marti. After his wealthy family paid a substantial ransom, the boy was murdered. Those subsequently arrested included the commander of a police detective unit based at Mexico's International Airport.

In the aftermath of the crime, the murdered boy's father demanded politicians do more to curb kidnapping or quit their well-paid jobs.  

Thousands of people dressed in white marched through Mexico City last year as they had during the previous administration of President Vicente Fox, but the rampant level of kidnappings has not decreased. The death penalty issue is due to be debated in Mexico's Congress in the coming days.  

http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-02-26-voa70.cfm


Mexico extradites suspected drug gang leader to US
23 hours ago

MEXICO CITY (AP) — A man accused of heading a Mexican drug trafficking gang for more than a decade has been extradited to the United States.

The Mexican Attorney General's Office says Miguel Caro Quintero was handed over to U.S. officials Wednesday in Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Texas.

The extradition brings to 195 the number of suspects sent to the United States since President Felipe Calderon took office in 2006.

Caro allegedly headed a marijuana smuggling ring from 1983 to 1994. He faces drug-running charges in Arizona and Colorado.

He is the brother of Rafael Caro Quintero, a legendary drug baron arrested in the 1980s.

U.S. Embassy charge d'affaires Leslie Bassett praised Mexico's "excellent cooperation" on extraditions.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gu7eR8Jv6L9gWR31pdpbnp62Y0vwD96IUV801


Iran eyes Mexico in deepening Latin America ties
By ALEXANDRA OLSON – 2 hours ago

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Iran is exploring ways to expand anemic trade with Mexico as part of stepped up efforts to deepen ties with Latin America, a top Iranian diplomat said Thursday.

Annual trade between Mexico and Iran is a mere $50 million, compared to $2 billion with Brazil, said Ali Reza Salari, Iran's deputy foreign minister for the Americas.

"We are here to investigate, why so low?" Reza Salari told reporters in Mexico City, where he was to meet with diplomats and business leaders. "With Mexico, there is absolutely no political problem between us. No cultural problems. It shows we have many shortcomings in our trade relations."

Iran has a deepening alliance with some leftist-led Latin American countries, based partly on mutual antagonism toward the United States. Housing projects have brought hundreds of Iranian engineers and specialists to Venezuela, and Tehran has opened new embassies in Nicaragua and Bolivia.

Deeper ties with Mexico's U.S.-friendly conservative government would necessarily be more practical in nature. Mexico has been trying to find new markets for its exports in a bid to ease economic reliance on the United States — especially since being dragged to the brink of recession by U.S. financial turmoil.

That could provide an opportunity for Iran as it seeks to ease its international isolation. Reza Salari said he sees opportunities to expand tourism and energy cooperation with Mexico, but acknowledged that such efforts are at a tentative phase.

Reza Salari said President Barack Obama's election raised hopes in Iran for better relations. But he suggested that concrete steps toward easing tensions are a long way off and complained that the Obama administration has sent mixed messages about its stance toward Iran's nuclear program.

"After President Obama, we think that the tone has changed in America," Reza Salari said. "We want to be patient, give them some more time to thoroughly investigate and see for themselves what are the real solutions for the ambiguities and the crisis."

Obama has signaled a willingness for dialogue with Tehran, particularly over its nuclear program. But Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said Thursday that the Obama government would seek to end Iran's nuclear ambitions. That immediately prompted an angry rebuke from Iran's U.N. envoy.

Iran insists its nuclear program has only peaceful energy purposes, while the U.S. and many European countries accuse it of secretly trying to build atomic weapons.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5i7EKpf5924Dc6FwfabMUqTr2M9vAD96JHEMG0


Mexican town fed up with violence turns to army
In the state of Zacatecas, residents of Villanueva demanded that the military take over. The soldiers came, but drug war violence got worse.
By Tracy Wilkinson
February 26, 2009

Reporting from Villanueva, Mexico — The people of Villanueva said they'd had enough. Men in cowboy hats, women with hand-scrawled signs, children on bikes –– they gathered outside town and blocked the main interstate highway.

"If you can't do it, quit!" they told their police force. They demanded that the army take over.

The army rolled into this town in Zacatecas state last month and ordered the police to stand down and surrender their weapons. They did.

Things only got worse. A few days later, Police Chief Romulo Madrid, a former military man said to be eager to cooperate with the army, was shot and killed outside his house at 10:30 on a bright morning. The mayor's chauffeur, a first cousin, was arrested in the shooting.

Five days later, gunmen working for a drug gang ambushed an army patrol. One soldier and four assailants were killed. Among the attackers captured was a police officer. Sources close to the military point to evidence that elements of the police force set up the army patrol.

For Mexicans to call on the armed forces, whose human rights record has been dubious at best, testifies to the firm conviction that the state and its civilian authorities, including the police, no longer protect them from the gang warfare of narcotics traffickers.

Shootings, kidnappings, extortion and threats have shattered the relative peace of Zacatecas, a central mountainous state that sends a greater proportion of its people as migrants to the United States than almost any other.

The unrest has disrupted immigration patterns, brought the local economy to its knees, destroyed small-town life and now threatens the upcoming planting season in an area that relies heavily on agriculture.

"They are impotent," Lorenzo Marquez, a merchant, said of the authorities. From the market stall where he sells cheese, sausage and jalapeno peppers, he has watched too many incidents of thugs hauling people away at gunpoint in broad daylight. "And we the people are even more impotent."

'Criminal groups'

Carlos Pinto, the powerful interior minister for Zacatecas, acknowledged that "criminal groups, every day more violent, are challenging the state."

"Our institutions are not proportionate to the needs," he said. "This problem grabbed us without our police being ready or properly equipped."

Rodolfo Garcia Zamora, a researcher at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas, says that immigration may increase from the state, and that citizens left here could take the law into their own hands.

"The threat is of social and political decomposition in Zacatecas, and in the nation, in which the authorities remain subordinated and violence is the norm," he said. "The situation has overtaken the government and its institutions."

Zacatecas has long been a corridor for smuggling routes from central Mexico northward, with the trafficking gangs from the Pacific state of Sinaloa in control of most activity. Then, several years ago, violence surged as members of the so-called Gulf cartel and their hired guns, the Zetas, began moving in to challenge their Sinaloa rivals.

Criminal opportunists move in as well, taking advantage of the fear and collapse of law and order.

The last straw

For the people of Villanueva, the last straw was the kidnapping last month of Roberto Garcia Cardenas, a retired professor in his 60s nicknamed El Pollero, the Chicken Man, for his part-time job selling chickens in the market. Garcia was also a money lender, a business that won him many properties, and many enemies.

Garcia's family was able to raise the 600,000 pesos (about $40,000) his kidnappers demanded. But when his children arrived to pay the ransom, the kidnappers seized them: a 24-year-old daughter who had given birth just a few weeks earlier, and a half-blind 17-year-old son. They sent Garcia out to gather a new ransom, this time more than 3 million pesos (about $200,000). "They threatened me and beat me," Garcia said of his kidnappers.

Garcia desperately drove through the streets of Villanueva, with megaphones on the roof of his car, offering to forgive the high interest he was charging if borrowers would pay the principal they owed. He tried to hawk some of his properties.

Eventually the children were freed in an operation that remains mysterious. The family, like most that have endured a similar ordeal, fled Zacatecas.

The Garcia story was only the most chilling in a long string of kidnappings. State prosecutor Ambrosio Romero said he registered 30 cases last year and six in January but acknowledged that far more cases are not reported. The perpetrators obtain information on their victims by surfing the Internet and often contact families in the U.S. to wire the ransom money. In some cases, kidnappers showed up with a public notary so the victim could sign over deeds to his properties.

Place of migration

For the last century or so, Zacatecas has sent tens of thousands of migrants to the United States to work, legally and illegally. They in turn send money back (about 10% of the state's GDP last year), and many eventually return to set up businesses, build homes (one story each year) and deal in property. Many ultimately retire in Zacatecas. All of that is changing.

For-sale signs are popping up everywhere; businesses such as restaurants, clothing stores and mechanic workshops are being shuttered. Many Zacatecas residents who live abroad have stopped returning. The horse tracks and dance halls that returning migrants favored have been abandoned. A public notary said her work validating business and property sales has fallen 80%. Antonio de la Torre del Rio, the mayor of Villanueva, says the construction company he owns, which was selling more than 150 tons of poured concrete a week, now doesn't sell that much in a month. According to one academic study, 75% of the towns in Zacatecas are shrinking in population.

Villanueva, with 32,000 people, was famous for musicians who congregate in the central plaza to be hired, mostly by returning migrants. But now the musicians –– norteños with their trumpets, black-suited mariachis, and the native-son tamboreros with their huge drums –– all stand around, idle and largely silent.

Jose Guardado slumped in a corner of Villanueva's leafy town square, his drum doubling as a billboard for his business. Guardado regrets his decision to move back to Villanueva after living in Washington state for 15 years; his brother Emiterio is already making plans to return to Chicago.

"People aren't coming," he said. "They're afraid of getting kidnapped, robbed, killed. The police are no help. The police and the bad guys, they're the same band."

Patronage vehicles

Mistrust of the police runs deep here and throughout Mexico. Local forces are seen as corrupt and infiltrated by drug gangs. But they also are traditional vehicles for patronage, and small-town mayors and state governors are usually loath to lose control of them.

Villanueva Mayor De la Torre initially accepted his people's clamor to hand security tasks over to the army. But he quickly changed his mind. He asked for his police to be reinstated, even though almost every member of the police force had flunked a test, administered by the army, to rate their qualifications and honesty.

De la Torre also defended his chauffeur and first cousin, arrested in the shooting of Madrid, the police chief.

Madrid was gunned down Feb. 2 as he stepped from his home. The chauffeur, Antonio de la Torre Quiroz, was arrested as a material witness and remains under investigation. Two senior government sources close to the case said they believed the man served as a lure to get Madrid out of the house. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because details of the investigation are not public.

Mayor De la Torre acknowledged that violence and fear have reached unprecedented levels. "Someone is kidnapped, and everyone says, 'Who's next?' " he said. "We can't continue this way. The town is dying."

If citizens don't trust the police, neither, it appears, does the military. An army patrol was ambushed Feb. 7 in the Zacatecas town of Fresnillo by drug-gang gunmen who attacked the soldiers from at least two flanks, killing a sergeant and leaving a colonel badly wounded. Among the attackers killed was a senior regional commander of the Zetas, and among those captured was a police officer.

Sources close to the military say that two police units meant to accompany the army patrol inexplicably missed a final turnoff along the route and were not present when the gunfire erupted.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-mexico-drugs-breakdown26-2009feb26,0,6670883.story


US cracks down on Sinaloa drug cartel as Mexico sends in the army
One of Mexico’s most feared drug cartels has been brought to its knees in the US after a sweep of 755 arrests — 52 of them this week — according to Barack Obama’s new Attorney-General.
February 27, 2009

Eric Holder, appointed America’s law chief three weeks ago, said federal agents would continue their crackdown on Mexico’s cocaine, marijuana, Ecstasy and methamphetamine trade until all of the country’s ruthless and politically connected smuggling organisations were wiped out.

Within hours of the announcement, Mexico said that it was sending another 5,000 troops into the lawless border town of Ciudad Juárez, where 250 people have been murdered by cartel hitmen this month alone, and where a recent emergency meeting of top-level Cabinet ministers was disrupted by a bomb scare. Juárez is located directly across the border from El Paso, Texas.

Critics argue that by waging war against the cartels the US is simply raising the price of narcotics — thus making the trade more lucrative and exacerbating the violent competition over smuggling routes. Nevertheless, the Justice Department said that it remained confident that its strategy would continue to produce results.

“These cartels will be destroyed,” Mr Holder told a press conference on Wednesday when he revealed the details of Operation Xcellerator, launched in 2007 and aimed primarily at Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel. “They are a national security threat,” he said of the group, based in the northwestern state of the same name. “They are lucrative. They are violent. And they are operated with stunning planning and precision.”

The Sinaloans were blamed for provoking a turf war in 2005 when they tried to take over territory in northeastern Mexico controlled by the rival Gulf cartel. The effort failed and the Sinaloans later split into two factions. One is headed by Joaquín “Shorty” Guzmán — Mexico’s most wanted criminal — and the other by his former enforcers, the Beltrán Leyva brothers.

When Mexico’s President Calderón came to power two years ago he tried to stop the turf war with a massive military intervention but this ultimately only worsened the violence.

Eduardo Medina Mora, the Mexican Attorney-General, said yesterday that his country had spent $6.5 billion over the past two years fighting drug gangs who have a combined annual turnover of $10 billion. Over 1,000 people had been killed in drug violence so far this year, he added.

Many poor Mexicans turned to petty crime to support themselves as they lost their jobs with the cartels, resulting in a nationwide spate of robberies and kidnappings. More than 6,000 Mexicans were killed as a result of the chaos last year, with the cartels using everything from political assassinations to beheadings and acid baths to terrorise and intimidate their rivals.The dumping of headless or tongue-less corpses, sometimes near tourist resorts, or in one case next to a school playground, has become almost a daily occurrence. The US intensified its own campaign against the cartels when the violence began to spill over into cities such as Phoenix, Arizona.

Since Operation Xcellerator began, about 70 distribution hubs and cells across 26 US states have been shut down, resulting in the seizure of 12,000kg of cocaine, 7,250kg of marijuana, 544kg of methamphetamine and 1.3 million Ecstasy pills.

US cocaine prices have more than doubled while purity has fallen by more than a third — both measures of the drug’s increasing scarcity. Methamphetamine prices have also risen.

The Americans and the Mexicans have been astonished by the wealth and the sophistication of the cartels which, in many cases, have access to the very latest in military-grade weaponry, including .50-calibre heavy machineguns, anti-tank rockets, grenade launchers and mortars.

In many cases police forces within Mexico must become subsidiaries of a cartel or face annihilation. Many Mexicans blame this state of affairs on the US: it is Americans who buy the drugs, they say, and thus give the cartels money. It is Americans they blame for the “iron river” of arms that flows south of the border, where gun-control laws are much stricter.

According to a recent investigation by The New York Times, there are 6,600 licensed gun dealers on the northern side of the US/Mexico border, many of them operating out of their own homes.

“We can move against the most outrageous purveyors of arms to Mexico but the characteristic of the arms trade is it’s a parade of ants — it’s not any one big dealer, it’s lots of individuals,” the attorney-general of Arizona, Terry Goddard, said. “That makes it very hard to detect because it’s often below the radar.”

It is partly in response to such concerns that Washington has pledged $1.6 billion in equipment and training assistance to Mexico over the next three years to address the problem.

Mr Holder has said also that the Obama Administration will push for renewing a ban on assault rifles. “I think that will have a positive impact in Mexico,” he said. The ban was enacted under President Clinton but expired during the Bush Administration amid heavy pressure from American gun-rights advocates.

Lords of cocaine

— The Mexican Government has identified seven drug cartels operating in the country, the biggest ones being Gulf, Sinaloa, Juárez and Tijuana. Several work together within an alliance called “the Federation”

— The cartels have been linked to human and arms trafficking, car theft and kidnapping

— Cartel bosses employ individuals and gangs of enforcers, known as sicarios. The Gulf and Sinaloa cartels have highly organised groups working for them, respectively, the Zetas and Negros. The Zetas are effectively a private army, with many members having deserted from the Mexican paramilitary

— Mexico's cartels have become more powerful since the demise of Colombia's Cali and Medellín cartels in the 1990s

— President Calderón has said drug violence is a threat to the Mexican state. Since taking office in December 2006 he has sent 24,000 soldiers and federal police to nine states to combat the cartels

— Mexico's most wanted fugitive is Joaquín “Shorty” Guzmán, head of the Sinaloa cartel

— In 2008 5,800 died in Mexican drug wars

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article5811885.ece


Brownsville police warn residents not to take urban myths received through e-mail too seriously.
February 23, 2009 - 9:27 PM
By Ildefonso Ortiz, The Brownsville Herald

While some tidbits of information may be harmless, there are some that deal with public safety and may give readers wrong information or create a false sense of security, said Brownsville police spokesman Sgt. Jimmy Manrrique.

Some of the most popular e-mails circulating talk about kidnapers, drug dealers, Zetas (a criminal organization of military-trained drug dealers), gangs, serial murderers, rapists, etc.

Opening a new e-mail sometimes becomes a scary experience for Nydia Alvarez, a 19-year-old college student.

"I don't know what to think," Alvarez said. " I read them and I get scared. I know there are a lot of things going on along the border so I think it's true."

One e-mail that particularly ruffled the student deals with a luxurious sports utility vehicle stopping at a light and not moving forward when the light turns green. When the driver of the vehicle behind doesn't honk, the SUV occupants get out and give the driver $100 for not honking. They further tell the driver that they had made a bet and if the driver had honked they would have killed him.

"I don't know if it's true or not, but why chance it?" Alvarez said.

There are variations to the myth; one e-mail says the bet was made in Brownsville or McAllen, while others place it in Matamoros, Reynosa and Tijuana. The money paid off from the bet varies in amounts, depending on the version of the e-mail and the currency varies from pesos to dollars.

Manrrique said he hasn't seen or heard anything similar to the story in the e-mail from the law enforcement community in the area.

"This is a highly unlikely scenario," he said. "They are myths. This is just like the gang initiation myths from the 90s where they would drive with their lights off and shoot at the first car that flashed their lights. Not true."

According to local anthropologist Antonio Zavaleta, the alarming e-mails are just the next step in the history of lore.

"E-mail is the medium of the present, especially with the young generations," Zavaleta said. "In the past, urban legends were passed on by word of mouth. They were oral; that's what created myths, heroes and monsters."

As technology advanced, urban myths were printed and spread through books and poetry; today, legends are spread through the Internet, the anthropologist said.

"I don't think anything has changed. Simply the method has been transferred," Zavaleta said. "The stories or the genre is the same; what changes are the characters."

In the past, villagers would talk about Robin Hood, a thief who would give money to the poor, the anthropologist said. Nowadays, they talk about Pablo Escobar, a Colombian drug lord who became a folk hero in his country, or about the Zetas, he added.

"There's a whole mythology and a lore created around Zetas because the average person doesn't know who they are," Zavaleta said. "They know them by reputation. In 1910, we heard corridos (historical stories told in song) about Pancho Villa. Today there are corridos and e-mails about Zetas."

Alvarez has received other e-mails that provide her with tips for survival that focus on fighting off predators. However, police said such information can be misleading.

Readers should research the validity of the e-mails they are receiving; Snopes.com is a good Web site, said police Cmdr. Robert Avitia.

The scenarios presented in some e-mails are highly unlikely since criminals typically look for money or property and they're not serial killers or rapists searching for a victim, Manrrique said.

"A serial killer or rapist has a ritual that he uses to find his victims, " he said. "These crimes are so rare because they are not crimes of opportunity; they are planned with anticipation. The average victim would not be targeted this way."

One e-mail tells readers to strike attackers with the elbow since it's the hardest part of the body.

While the elbow is very hard, the extent of the damage depends on the victim's reaction skills, body composition and training, Manrrique said.

"Criminals are opportunists, they will probably not go after you if they think you can take them," he said.

Another popular myth tells readers that if a mugger asks for a wallet or purse, do not hand it over; throw it away and run.

"These days if a criminal wants it they won't ask for it. They will take it," Manrrique said. "If given the choice, I would probably take out the money and hand it over. You don't want to give away your social security card or your other valuable info."

Individuals need to exercise caution; however, they should not live in a constant state of fear, police said.

"They can use serious Internet sites to follow up on many of these myths and determine if they are true or not," Manrrique said. "Most of them are not."

http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/news/residents_95152___article.html/brownsville_seriously


Mexico's Calderon vows to win war on drugs by 2012
By TRACI CARL, Associated Press Writer

MEXICO CITY – President Felipe Calderon vowed Thursday to win the war against the world's most powerful drug gangs before his term ends in 2012, and disputed U.S. fears that Mexico is losing control of its territory.

In interviews with The Associated Press, Calderon and his top prosecutor said the violence that killed 6,290 people last year — and more than 1,000 in the first eight weeks of 2009 — is a sign that the cartels are under pressure from military and police operations nationwide, as well as turf wars among themselves.

"To say that Mexico is a failed state is absolutely false," Calderon said. "I have not lost any part — any single part — of Mexican territory."

Calderon, a Harvard-educated conservative, said smuggling cannot be eliminated as long as Americans continue to use drugs, but believes he can beat back the cartels by 2012 to a point that the army and federal police can withdraw and leave the problem in the hands of local law enforcement.

Calderon easily switched between English and Spanish in an hourlong interview at the colonial National Palace. Sitting in a chair decorated with Mexico's national symbol — an eagle perched on a cactus devouring a serpent — he was relaxed and jovial.

Mexico had bristled when the U.S. Joint Forces Command put it on par with Pakistan, saying both were at risk of "rapid and sudden collapse." That and other reports have put a global spotlight on Mexico's growing violence and pressured Calderon to change tactics. He said Thursday that wasn't an option.

"Yes, we will win," he said, "and of course there will be many problems meanwhile."

Calderon sent the army and federal police out into drug strongholds on his first day in office in December 2006, promising to turn a tide in a war that was seeing increasingly brazen tactics such as beheadings, assassinations and the attempt to control local governments.

Since then, Mexico has spent $6.5 billion on top of its normal public security budget, but that falls short of the $10 billion Mexican drug gangs bring in annually, Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora said in another interview Thursday.

But violence has increased, more than doubling in 2008. Medina Mora said that does not reflect the drug gangs' power; "It is reflecting how they are melting down."

As proof, he said street prices of cocaine in the United States have doubled in the last three years, while purity has dropped by 35 percent. He said the government has crippled Mexico's methamphetamine trade by banning precursor chemicals.

Medina Mora predicted Mexico is "reaching the peak" of the violence, adding that the government's goal is to make smuggling through Mexico so difficult that the drug gangs are forced to look elsewhere.

"We want to raise the opportunity cost of our country as a route of choice," he said.

Even as he spoke, five more suspected drug killings were announced by authorities in the Pacific coast state of Guerrero. The men were shot Wednesday night.

Medina Mora said 90 percent of the dead are involved in the drug trade, while only 4 percent are innocent bystanders. The rest — some 800 to date — are police officers and soldiers.

Both Calderon and Medina Mora called on the United States to do more, by stopping the flow of powerful U.S. assault weapons and mountains of drug cash into Mexico. Calderon, whose government has arrested more than 25 high-level officials for suspicion of taking drug bribes, also called for the United States to purge its own corrupt officials.

"I'm fighting corruption among Mexican authorities and risking everything to clean house, but I think a good cleaning is in order on the other side of the border," he said.

Calderon applauded cross-border efforts that the U.S. said culminated this week with the arrests of 755 Sinaloa cartel members and seizure of $59 million in criminal proceeds in the United States. But he acknowledged that Mexico cannot be the top U.S. priority, saying President Obama would help Mexico most by fixing his own economic crisis.

He expressed optimism that Obama will improve relations in the region, saying Latin American leaders have high expectations for his first trip to the region at the Summit of the Americas in April.

"President Barack Obama has a tremendous opportunity to recover the leadership of the United States," he said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090227/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/lt_mexico_drug_battle_9


Senate panel to examine violence on Mexico border
Thu Feb 26, 2:45 pm ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A U.S. Senate panel said on Thursday it will examine rising violence along the U.S.-Mexico border, days after the U.S. government warned travelers about the growing risks and to take precautions.

The U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee said it will hold two hearings over the coming weeks on how the two governments were addressing the situation and determine what are the potential implications for increased terrorist activity.

"The recent escalation of violence along the southern border demands our immediate attention," said Senator Joseph Lieberman, the chairman of the panel. "We must assess border security programs and plans in place and we must review the readiness of federal, state, and local law enforcement."

The committee will hold one hearing on March 25 in Washington and a second one the following month in Arizona.

The U.S. State Department on February 20 issued an updated travel alert cautioning American citizens traveling to Mexico and citing increased violent activity by drug cartels.

"Some recent Mexican army and police confrontations with drug cartels have resembled small-unit combat, with cartels employing automatic weapons and grenades," the State Department said.

The department said numerous crimes including homicides and carjackings had increased along the border over the last year.

The Senate committee said it may also look into whether there is merit to deploying National Guard to the border, fencing issues and potential mass migration from Mexico.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090226/pl_nm/us_usa_mexico_1


Border Violence
By Jackie Diaz
Thursday, February 26, 2009 at 6:49 p.m.

BROWNSVILLE –– Despite repeated warnings of violence across the border the gateway International Bridge in Brownsville has a steady flow of traffic.

"They may not be the target but sometimes when people are shooting each other, once the bullet leaves the barrel you never know where it’s going to end up and it can hit an innocent bystander; which has happened before." says Cameron County Sheriff Omar Lucio.

"I’m just not scared it doesn't happen like everyday,” Brownsville resident Adrian Perez
Brownsville resident

His sister, Alejandra Perez, says they go to Matamoros to visit with their mother...

“I go once a week every weekend,” Brownsville resident Alejandra Perez

These siblings say they've been going to Mexico for the past two years and they haven't seen any changes.

“I see much more news about the violence in Matamoros but I’ve never pumped into it myself,” said Alejandra Perez

But not everyone feels the same way Action 4 caught up with several winter Texans who say off camera how the recent violence is making them think twice about crossing over.

“Better safe than sorry, so until things settle down a little bit its Brownsville,” said Winter Texan, Aldan Moore

As for the siblings they say no matter how bad the violence gets in Matamoros they will never stop going to visit their mother.

http://www.valleycentral.com/news/news_story.aspx?id=266064