"President vows to help Mexico fight drug cartels" May 03, 2013
MEXICO CITY — Acknowledging uncertainty ahead, President Obama said Thursday that the United States would cooperate with Mexico to fight drug-trafficking and organized crime in any way Mexico’s government deems appropriate. President Enrique Pena Nieto of Mexico emphasized that the security relationship must be expanded to focus on trade and commerce.
That is ironic considering it is the U.S. government that is the largest drug-trafficking racket around.
Appearing with Pena Nieto at a news conference, Obama recommitted the United States to fighting the demand for illegal drugs in his country and the flow of illegal guns across the border to Mexico, even as the southern neighbor rethinks how much access it gives to American security agencies.
They were rethinking access even back then, huh?
‘‘I agreed to continue our close cooperation on security, even as the nature of that cooperation will evolve,’’ Obama said. ‘‘It is obviously up to the Mexican people to determine their security structures and how it engages with other nations — including the United States.’’
Obama’s remarks come as Pena Nieto, in a shift from his predecessor, has moved to end the widespread access that US security agencies have had in Mexico to help fight drug-trafficking and organized crime.
So much for the the latest sign of improved cooperation with the United States.
The White House has been cautious in its public response to the changes, with the president and his advisers saying they need to hear directly from the Mexican leader before making a judgment.
How come no one likes us anymore?
Pena Nieto, speaking at the news conference in Spanish, downplayed the notion that the new arrangement would mean less close cooperation with the United States. ‘‘There is no clash between these two goals,’’ he said.
He just doesn't want U.S. drug agents and assets that have "infiltrated" -- let's just say it, work for -- the drug cartels blowing the whistle on Mexican operations and alerting their a$$ets.
The two leaders met Thursday on the first day of Obama’s three-day trip to Mexico and Costa Rica.
How many greenhouse gases did this trip spew into the atmosphere?
Seeking to put a new spin on a long-standing partnership, Obama is promoting jobs and trade — not drug wars or border security — as the driving force behind the US-Mexico relationship.
Is he?
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"Obama urges Mexico to take ‘its rightful place in the world’" by Julie Pace | Associated Press, May 04, 2013
SAN JOSE, Costa Rica — President Obama on Friday cast Mexico as a nation ready to take ‘‘its rightful place in the world’’ and move past the drug battles and violence that have defined its relationship with the United States. He then headed to Costa Rica to prod Central American leaders to tackle those same issues more aggressively.
Obama’s three-day visit to Mexico and Costa Rica is his first to Latin America since winning a second presidential term in an election in which he gained the support of Hispanic Americans by a large margin. His trip is being followed with great interest by Hispanics in the United States as well as in Mexico, Central America, and farther to the south.
But not by me.
In Mexico in particular, he tried to set a new course for ties between the United States and its southern neighbor, eagerly promoting Mexico’s improving economy and its democracy.
‘‘A new Mexico is emerging,’’ Obama told a crowd of young people during a speech at Mexico City’s grand National Museum of Anthropology. ‘‘Mexico is also taking its rightful place in the world, on the world stage. Mexico is standing up for democracy not just here in Mexico but throughout the hemisphere. Mexico’s sharing expertise with neighbors across the Americas. When they face earthquakes, or threats to their citizens, or go to the polls to cast their votes, Mexico is there helping its neighbors.’’
Despite Obama’s rosy portrayal, Mexico’s high poverty rates have barely budged in recent years.
Yeah, he's good at shoveling the old mierda.
Its economy grew by only about a 1 percent rate in the first three months of 2013 and is not creating anywhere near the 1 million jobs annually it needs to employ young Mexicans entering the workforce.
Sound familiar, Americans?
Without jobs or opportunities to study, many young people have become easier prey for recruitment by drug cartels.
In AmeriKa it is the military that recruits them.
The president conceded his own country’s role in the troubles that have plagued Mexico, acknowledging that most guns used to commit crime in the country come from north of the border.
Related: Fast and Furious Forgotten
A key cause for Mexico’s violence is the demand for illegal drugs in the United States, Obama said, though he reiterated his opposition to legalization of such drugs, which some Latin American leaders have urged.
Related: Holding On to the Joint
Ah, the sweet stench of gringo hypocrisy.
Still, Obama pressed for the United States and Mexico to move beyond the ‘‘old stereotypes’’ of Mexico as a nation consumed by sensational violence and of the United States as a nation that seeks to impose itself on Mexico’s sovereignty.
I already have.
‘‘In this relationship, there’s no senior partner or junior partner,’’ he said. ‘‘We are two equal partners.’’
The president has a domestic political incentive for trying to change America’s perception of Mexico. As Washington debates overhauling the nation’s immigration laws, Obama wants to convince the public and lawmakers that Mexico no longer poses the illegal immigration threat it once did.
While the prospects for immigration reform by Congress remain uncertain, the president indicated that he was optimistic the United States will change its patchwork laws this year.
Well, I was told it was pretty much dead, but then the agenda was revived the last few days.
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"President Obama highlights Latin America ties
SAN JOSE — Wrapping up a three-day trip to Latin America, President Obama on Saturday emphasized the ‘‘enormous importance’’ the United States places on its trading relationships with countries in the region and said improving those ties will help them compete in the world. ‘‘If we do not have effective integration in our hemisphere, if we don’t have the best education systems, the best regulatory systems, if we don’t coordinate our activities, then we’re going to fall behind other regions in the world,’’ Obama said (AP)."
Speaking of trade:
"Companies move to escape violence
MORELLA — The economic development secretary of the western Mexican state of Michoacan said two major firms have decided to relocate their distribution centers to escape violence. Ricardo Martinez said yogurt maker Dannon and drug maker Grupo Casa Saba have moved to Queretaro and Jalisco states respectively. The PepsiCo subsidiary Sabritas, was the target of fire bombings in Michoacan last year, apparently by a drug cartel (AP)."
"4 shot to death in Mexico City gym" by Adriana Gomez Licon | Associated Press, June 08, 2013
MEXICO CITY — Two masked gunmen stormed into a gym yelling ‘‘everyone hit the floor’’ and opened fire, killing four people in a tough Mexico City neighborhood that is home to the area’s biggest black market, authorities said Friday.
Maybe it was the Tsarnaev brothers.
Mexico City Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera said preliminary investigations indicated the killings were part of a ‘‘personal grudge’’ between the killers and the victims, and he denied that the kind of large-scale drug cartel executions that have bloodied other parts of Mexico have arrived in Mexico City.
‘‘I don’t have any indication of any cartel in Mexico City,’’ Mancera told the Televisa television network. ‘‘It’s not a cartel. What we have in Tepito is an upswing in violence, and an upswing in some gangs.’’
Tepito is the main clearinghouse for millions of dollars of contraband, from guns and drugs to counterfeit handbags that come through Mexico City.
A dozen people from the same neighborhood disappeared nearly two weeks ago from an after-hours bar in a posher part of the city several miles away.
Three people have been detained in the case, but there is still no sign of the 12.
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I think they found them:
"Mass grave found near Mexico City" by Adriana Gomez Licon and Mark Stevenson | Associated Press, August 23, 2013
TLALMANALCO, Mexico — Mexican authorities said Thursday that they have found a mass grave east of Mexico City and are testing to determine whether the grave holds some of the 12 people who vanished from a bar in an upscale area of the capital nearly three months ago.
At least seven badly decomposed corpses have been recovered so far from the grave in Tlalmanalco, Mexico City prosecutor Rodolfo Rios told reporters. He said the victims cannot be identified so far based on clothing, nor can they tell the cause of death.
‘‘We will look at DNA tests that have been taken . . . to confirm or discard scientifically if the bodies found are the people who disappeared from the bar,’’ Rios said.
Rios said there were more bodies and the work would continue in an area near Rancho La Mesa Ecological Park in the state of Mexico.
The young bar-goers vanished from the after-hours Heaven club at midday on May 26, a block from Mexico’s leafy Paseo de Reforma, the city’s equivalent of the Champs-Elysees.
Not midnight?
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Where they moved:
"US working to keep Mexican cartel agents off home turf; Emboldened drug operatives setting up shop" by Michael Tarm | Associated Press, April 02, 2013
CHICAGO — Mexican drug cartels whose operatives once rarely ventured beyond the US border are dispatching some of their most trusted agents to live and work deep inside the United States — an emboldened presence that experts believe is meant to tighten their grip on the world’s most lucrative narcotics market and maximize profits.
Related: Drug Cartels Doing Cold War Spying
They even have a leftover arsenal!
If left unchecked, authorities say, the cartels’ move into the American interior could render the syndicates harder than ever to dislodge and pave the way for them to expand into other criminal enterprises such as prostitution, kidnapping-and-extortion rackets, and money laundering.
Cartel activity in the United States is not new. Starting in the 1990s, the syndicates became the nation’s number one supplier of illegal drugs, using unaffiliated middlemen to smuggle cocaine, marijuana, and heroin beyond the border or to grow pot in the country.
On federal land? WhyTF are they spying on the rest of us then?
But a wide-ranging Associated Press review of federal court cases and government drug-enforcement data, plus interviews with many top law enforcement officials, indicate that the groups have begun deploying agents from their inner circles to the United States.
Cartel operatives are suspected of running drug distribution networks in at least nine nonborder states, often in middle-class suburbs in the Midwest, South, and Northeast.
‘‘It’s probably the most serious threat the United States has faced from organized crime,’’ said Jack Riley, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Chicago office.
The cartel threat looms so large that one of Mexico’s most notorious drug kingpins — a man who has never set foot in Chicago — was recently named the city’s “Public Enemy No. 1,” the label assigned to Al Capone.
See: Illinois Cold Case: The 21st-Century Capone
The Chicago Crime Commission, a nongovernment agency that tracks crime trends in the region, said it considers Joaquin ‘‘El Chapo’’ Guzman even more menacing than Capone because Guzman leads the deadly Sinaloa cartel, which supplies most of the narcotics sold in Chicago and in many cities across the United States.
Sinaloa must be the current CIA favorite then.
Years ago, Mexico faced the same problem — of then-nascent cartels expanding their power — ‘‘and didn’t nip the problem in the bud,’’ said Jack Killorin, head of an antitrafficking program in Atlanta for the Office of National Drug Control Policy. ‘‘And see where they are now.’’
Coming to AmeriKa!
Riley sounds a similar alarm: ‘‘People think, ‘The border’s 1,700 miles away. This isn’t our problem.’ Well, it is. These days, we operate as if Chicago is on the border.’’
Border states from Texas to California have long grappled with a cartel presence. But cases involving cartel members have now emerged in the suburbs of Chicago and Atlanta as well as Columbus, Ohio, Louisville, Ky., and rural North Carolina. Suspects have also surfaced in Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania.
Mexican drug cartels ‘‘are taking over our neighborhoods,’’ Pennsylvania’s attorney general, Kathleen Kane, warned a legislative committee in February. State Police Commissioner Frank Noonan disputed her claim, saying cartels are primarily drug suppliers, not the ones trafficking drugs on the ground.
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Time to make some busts:
"Mexican drug kingpin’s arrest may bust cartel" by Michael Weissenstein and Olga R. Rodriguez | Associated Press, July 17, 2013
MEXICO CITY — The capture of the notoriously brutal Zetas leader Miguel Angel Trevino Morales represents a serious blow to Mexico’s most feared drug cartel, but experts cautioned that taking down the group’s command structure is unlikely to diminish violence in the border states where it dominates through terror.
I see drug cartels act just like governments.
Trevino Morales, 40, was captured before dawn Monday by Mexican marines who intercepted a pickup truck with $2 million in cash in the countryside outside the border city of Nuevo Laredo, which has long served as the base of operations for the Zetas.
The "former" government commandos drug cartel?
The truck was halted by a marine helicopter, and Trevino Morales was taken into custody along with a bodyguard, an accountant, and eight guns, according to government spokesman Eduardo Sanchez.
It was the first major blow against an organized crime leader by the administration of President Enrique Pena Nieto, which has struggled to drive down persistently high levels of violence. Experts on the Zetas said the arrest could leave behind a series of cells scattered across northern Mexico without a central command but with the same appetite for kidnapping, extortion, and other crimes against innocent people.
Is it just coincidence that the bust comes after the spying revelations?
‘‘It’s another link in the destruction of the Zetas as a coherent, identifiable organization,’’ said Alejandro Hope, a former member of Mexico’s domestic intelligence service. ‘‘There will still be people who call themselves Zetas, bands of individuals who maintain the same modus operandi. There will be fights over illegal networks.’’
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The arrest of Trevino Morales means the gang has become ‘‘a franchise operation, not a vertical organization,’’ said George Grayson, an expert on the Zetas and a professor of government at the College of William & Mary.
It's now like a fast-food joint?
The Zetas leader and his alleged accomplices were flown to Mexico City, where they are expected to eventually be tried in a closed system that usually takes years to prosecute cases, particularly high-profile ones.
Trevino Morales, known as ‘‘Z-40,’’ is uniformly described as one of the two most powerful cartel heads in Mexico, the leader of a corps of special forces defectors who went to work for drug traffickers, splintered off into their own cartel in 2010, and metastasized across Mexico, expanding from drug dealing into extortion, human traffickin, and other activity.
Related: Mexican Oil Siphoning Story Stinks
"Former" government commandos, huh?
Along the way, the Zetas authored some of the worst atrocities of Mexico’s drug war, leaving hundreds of bodies beheaded on roadsides or hanging from bridges and earning a reputation as perhaps the most terrifying of the country’s numerous ruthless cartels....
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Related:
"Mexican navy captures drug kingpin" New York Times, September 14, 2012
MEXICO CITY — In a major strike against one of the largest drug-trafficking organizations, the Mexican navy said Thursday that it had detained one of the most sought-after drug kingpinsin Mexico and the United States, Jorge Eduardo Costilla Sanchez, the top leader of the Gulf Cartel....
The arrest gives Mexican forces a notable victory in their battle against drug-trafficking leaders, days ahead of Mexican Independence Day celebrations, and presents another blow to the Gulf Cartel.
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"Alleged Mexican cartel leader seized" Associated Press, September 28, 2012
MEXICO CITY — Mexican marines acting on US intelligence seized the leader of a breakaway faction of the hyperviolent Zetas cartel, officials said Thursday, proclaiming the third such arrest in a month as a victory for a binational strategy focused on removing the leadership of Mexico’s powerful organized crime groups.
Every now and then they sacrifice one of their own to make it look like they are making progress.
Every now and then they sacrifice one of their own to make it look like they are making progress.
Ivan Velazquez Caballero, known as ‘‘El Taliban,’’ was seized in the northern city of San Luis Potosi, the Mexican navy said. He is the 24th of Mexico’s 37 most-wanted alleged cartel leaders to be killed or captured under President Felipe Calderon, who escalated the war on drug gangs days after taking office and who ends his term in two months.
The Mexican Taliban? SIGH!
The Mexican Taliban? SIGH!
Calderon has been praised by the United States but heatedly criticized inside Mexico for an excessive focus on using armed force and arresting gang leaders.
Critics say his approach splintered cartels into dozens of smaller factions, increasing the competition among them and fueling a brutal war for control of smuggling routes before Mexico had an adequate law enforcement and justice system in place.
"US knew of Mexican cartel leader’s killing" October 14, 2012
MEXICO CITY — US officials say the United States knew that Mexican marines had killed the head of the widely feared Zetas drug cartel before the body was stolen in a predawn raid from a Mexican funeral home. One official says the US independently verified the identity of Zeta founder and leader Heriberto Lazcano, killed in a shootout last Sunday afternoon in a northern Mexican town, before his body was stolen Monday (AP)."
Another Al-CIA-Duh ghost?
Another Al-CIA-Duh ghost?
"Kingpin’s release is bitter reminder" by Michael Weissenstein | Associated Press, August 18, 2013
MEXICO CITY — On a sunny winter morning in 1984, two young American couples dressed in their Sunday best walked door to door in the western Mexican city of Guadalajara, trying to spread their faith as Jehovah’s Witnesses. Hours later they disappeared.
The next month a US journalist went out with a friend at the end of a yearlong sabbatical writing a mystery novel. The two men also vanished.
Within 10 days, Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique ‘‘Kiki’’ Camarena was kidnapped too, then tortured and killed by Mexico’s most powerful drug cartel, setting off one of the worst episodes of US-Mexico tension in decades. As DEA agents hunted Camarena’s killers, witnesses told them that the cartel had mistaken the other six Americans for undercover agents and killed them just like Camarena.
Cartel leader Rafael Caro Quintero walked free this month, 12 years early, after a local appeals court overturned his sentence for three of the murders. For the United States and Mexico, Caro Quintero’s secretive, pre-dawn release has set off a frantic effort to get the drug lord back behind bars. For the families of the six Americans slain before Camarena, the decision has awakened bitter memories of the brutality that ushered in the modern era of Mexican drug trafficking.
‘‘I just never imagined that this would happen, that Caro Quintero would be walking around free at the age of 60,’’ said journalist John Clay Walker’s widow, Eve, who lives in Atlanta. ‘‘There’s probably not been a day in the last 30 years that I haven’t missed my husband and wished that he was here to see the girls grow up.
‘‘It was tough to do it alone but I kind of had the consolation of knowing that the responsible people were in prison and that they would stay there.’’
Walker was 37 when, according to some witnesses, he and his friend Alberto Radelat, a dentist from Fort Worth, Texas, walked into ‘‘The Lobster,’’ a high-end Guadalajara seafood restaurant where Caro Quintero and his companions were holding a private party. Others have said Walker and Radelat were kidnapped off the street by Caro Quintero’s men as the cartel hunted for DEA agents behind an aggressive US push against large marijuana-growing and smuggling operations.
Are you sure it wasn't a CIA rendition?
Walker and Radelat’s bodies were found a little more than five months later in a park outside Guadalajara. Walker’s wife Eve helped identify the bodies.
Under intense US pressure, Caro Quintero was arrested along with the two other heads of their Guadalajara-based drug organization, splitting the monolithic cartel into smaller groups, including the Sinaloa cartel that has come to dominate Mexican drug trafficking along the Pacific Coast.
Caro Quintero was sentenced to 40 years in prison for the murders of Camarena, Walker, and Radelat, among other crimes.
On Aug. 7, however, a three-judge federal appeals court in the western state of Jalisco found that he should have been tried in state, not federal, court, and vacated his sentence. The United States has issued a new arrest warrant for Caro Quintero’s arrest, and Mexico’s federal court says it is trying to find him again. Both governments say they disagree with the court decision and some US officials believe corruption is a likely explanation for the otherwise inexplicable ruling.
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A Catholic by birth, Benjamin Mascarenas became a Jehovah’s Witness through conversion and met his wife Pat at a church function. They did janitorial work in Reno, Nev., before moving to Guadalajara, where they house-sat for a wealthy acquaintance. Dennis and Rose Carlson moved from Redding, Calif., in a church effort to spread their faith....
Why do they smell like spies or agents to me, with the religion being the non-official cover?
The Jehovah’s Witnesses inadvertently knocked on capo Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo’s door as they proselytized Dec. 2, 1984, said agent Hector Berrellez, who ran the Los Angeles-based operation going after those involved in Camarena’s murder. Believing they were undercover agents, the capos had their underlings capture and kill them, Berrellez said.
See: Don't Knock on Doors in North Carolina
The bodies of the two couples were never found.
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Related:
"Second Mexican drug lord expects to be freed
MEXICO CITY — Defense attorneys believe freedom is imminent for Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, a second member of the trio of Mexican drug kingpins responsible for the 1985 slaying of Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique Camarena, one of the capo’s attorneys said Saturday. Mexican drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero’s conviction and 40-year sentence were overturned last week on procedural grounds by a three-judge appeals court, which said he should have originally been prosecuted in state instead of federal court. Also imprisoned in the Camarena case is Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo. Fonseca Carrillo’s attorney, Jose Luis Guizar, said his team had filed an appeal based on the same procedural grounds used by Caro Quintero, and expected him to be freed within 15 days (AP)."
Also see:
Drug lord may soon be free, his lawyers say
3 snared after 132 escape jail in Mexico
Informants On the Other Foot
Why the Drug War Never Ends
Because it is good for banks!
