As Mexico Descends into Brutality and Lawlessness, the Government Istelf Has Become a Tool of the Drug Lords The target of the raid was the narcotraficante known as "El Conejo" - the Rabbit. In keeping with his stature as the main supplier of cocaine to one of Mexico's most powerful drug cartels, the Colombian was throwing a lavish party at a sprawling mansion on the south side of Mexico City. As always, there would be plenty of high-end prostitutes, who served a dual purpose: They not only made money for Conejo while they were working, they could also be sent back to Colombia loaded down with the cash from his drug trafficking - by some accounts as much as $40 million in profits every month. [continues 6293 words]
Americans are under attack not in some foreign province but in their very homes and neighborhoods. Brutal drug cartel violence that wracks Mexico is increasingly seeping over the border into U.S. jurisdictions. In Phoenix, armed extortionists are kidnapping Americans from their homes and cars. In Southern California, citizens have been abducted by armed gangs linked to the Tijuana drug rackets. And in Texas, Gov. Rick Perry is requesting an additional $135 million for border security to stem transnational gangs that threaten communities across the Mexican border. [continues 154 words]
AUSTIN -- The state and federal governments have prepared contingency plans to deal with "spillover violence" from across the border as Mexican troops clash with ruthless drug cartels terrorizing the United States's southern neighbor. "Anything you can think of that's happened in Mexico, we have to think could happen here," said Steve McCraw, Gov. Rick Perry's director of homeland security. "We know what they're capable of." A crackdown by Mexican President Felipe Calderon has turned the City of Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, into a war zone as federal troops battle feuding cartels. [continues 1578 words]
Illegal Drugs Are Causing Havoc Across the World. Over Four Articles, We Look at Attempts to Curb Supply and Cut Demand, Beginning in Mexico IN RECENT months Mexicans have become inured to carefully choreographed spectacles of horror. Just before Christmas the severed heads of eight soldiers were found dumped in plastic bags near a shopping centre in Chilpancingo, the capital of the southern state of Guerrero. Last month another three were found in an icebox near the border city of Ciudad Juarez. Farther along the border near Tijuana police detained Santiago Meza, nicknamed El Pozolero ("the soupmaker") who confessed to having dissolved the bodies of more than 300 people in acid over the past nine years on the orders of a local drug baron. [continues 2921 words]
Mexico Imagine if murders in Philadelphia tripled. Imagine if they quadrupled. Imagine living in Juarez, Mexico. With a population about the same as Philadelphia's 1.4 million, Juarez had 1,600 murders last year; Philadelphia had 332. Last month, Juarez had more than 80 murders. If you think that sounds like a war zone, you would be right. Juarez is on the front lines of the so-called war on drugs. That multi-decade misadventure has filled U.S. prisons with thousands of drug-law violators, but hasn't done enough to stem our demand for drugs. [continues 519 words]
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." [continues 812 words]
EL PASO - Gov. Rick Perry said he wants 1,000 troops to help guard the Texas-Mexico border, and for the U.S. to fund strong security measures to fight the Mexican drug cartels that have spread violence and fear in Mexico, including Juarez. "We're (also) asking the (Texas) Legislature for $135 million for border security - to go after transnational gangs, for technology and aviation assets, and for 1,000 troops," said Perry at a news conference Tuesday at the Chamizal National Memorial. [continues 615 words]
Mexican Cartels Wage a War of Unprecedented Violence That's Spreading into the USA VILLA AHUMADA, Mexico -- It was 3 a.m. when Griselda Munoz says she got the first terrifying phone call: "Mom, there are people all over, and they're shooting!" A convoy of gunmen had invaded the ranch where her son, Jorge Marrufo, 32, was working. As shots crackled in the background, he told her he was running into the desert to hide in the sagebrush. Before dawn, another call: "If anything happens to me, tell my kids I love them." [continues 2576 words]
With Drug-Fueled Violence and Corruption Escalating Sharply, Many Fear Drug Cartels Have Grown Too Powerful for Mexico to Control. Why Things Are Getting Worse, and What It Means for the United States. Detective Ramon Jasso was heading to work in this bustling city a few days ago when an SUV pulled alongside and slowed ominously. Within seconds, gunmen fired 97 bullets at the 37-year-old policeman, killing him instantly. Mr. Jasso had been warned. The day before, someone called his cellphone and said he would be killed if he didn't immediately release a young man who had been arrested for organizing a violent protest in support of the city's drug gangs. The demonstrators were demanding that the Mexican army withdraw from the drug war. The protests have since spread from Monterrey -- once a model of order and industry -- to five other cities. Drug Wars in Mexico [continues 2918 words]
"You hope for the best, plan for the worst" 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." [continues 569 words]
More About The Ongoing Violence In Juarez EL PASO -- A chorus of current and former U.S. officials are sounding alarms about Mexico, warning the war-zone conditions in cities like Juarez could lead to the government's downfall. These voices include the Joint Forces Command, ex-CIA Director Michael Hayden, former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff, as well as ex-U.S. drug czar Barry McCaffrey. Last Tuesday, Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also said he was concerned about escalating border violence. [continues 1989 words]
Now that the war in Iraq is won, President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton need to turn to the most significant terrorist threat facing the United States. And it's not Afghanistan. It's Mexico. Mexico is creeping closer to becoming a narco-state. President Felipe Calderon is the latest in a series of Mexican chief executives to take on the country's five major drug criminal syndicates. Two years into his campaign, he's been extraordinarily effective. Yet his success against the Gulf cartel, one of the most powerful, has contributed to Mexico's instability. [continues 597 words]
Law Enforcement South Of The Border Is Badly Outgunned. A murder in the Mexican state of Chihuahua last week horrified even hardened crime stoppers. Police Commander Martin Castro's head was severed and left in an ice cooler in front of the police station in the town of Praxedis with a calling card from the Sinoloa drug cartel. According to Mexico's attorney general, 6,616 people died in drug-trafficking violence in Mexico last year. A high percentage of those killed were themselves criminals, but many law enforcement agents battling organized crime were also murdered. The carnage continues. For the first 22 days of this year the body count is 354. [continues 658 words]
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - In this carnage-racked border city of 1.3 million, more than 80 murders have been clocked in the past three weeks, and kidnappings, extortions, robberies and rapes further bedevil an already rattled population. So far, the new year looks to be bringing as much if not more havoc than the last. The demons are loose. "Walking in the streets of Juarez is an extreme sport," said political scientist Tony Payan, an expert on border violence, repeating a grim quip making the rounds. [continues 791 words]
President-elect Barack Obama met Monday with Mexican President Felipe Calderon to discuss bilateral issues of major importance for the two countries. In addition to NAFTA and immigration policy, Mexico's ongoing plague of prohibition-related violence was high on the agenda. More than 5,400 people were killed in the violence last year, and more than 8,000 in the two years since Calderon ratcheted up Mexico's drug war by sending thousands of troops into the fray. The multi-sided conflict pits rival trafficking groups -- the so-called cartels -- against each and the Mexican state, but has also seen pitched battles between rival law enforcement units where one group or the other is in the pay of the traffickers. [continues 1153 words]
Before you venture into Mexico's Ciudad Juarez, brace yourself to hear Texans tell you that you're crazy. Visiting friends in neighboring El Paso, Texas, a few days before Christmas, I was immediately warned, "Don't even think about going into Juarez." Just across the shallow creek known as the Rio Grande from El Paso, one of the safest cities of its size in the nation, Juarez is a city under siege, the worst victim of Mexico's growing wars between drug cartels. [continues 665 words]
Before you venture into Ciudad Juarez, brace yourself to hear Texans tell you that you're crazy. Visiting friends in neighboring El Paso a few days before Christmas, I was immediately warned, "Don't even think about going into Juarez." Just across a shallow creek, known as the Rio Grande, from El Paso, one of the safest cities of its size in the nation, Juarez is under siege, the worst victim of Mexico's growing wars between drug cartels. The tragedy is etched in daily headlines. The day I arrived, two Mexican police offers were ambushed, shot to death while sitting in their patrol car. Just another bloody day in Juarez. [continues 634 words]
EL PASO -- Mexico is one of two countries that "bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse," according to a report by the U.S. Joint Forces Command on worldwide security threats. The command's "Joint Operating Environment (JOE 2008)" report, which contains projections of global threats and potential next wars, puts Pakistan on the same level as Mexico. "In terms of worse-case scenarios for the Joint Force and indeed the world, two large and important states bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse: Pakistan and Mexico. [continues 317 words]
Before you venture into Ciudad Juarez, brace yourself to hear Texans tell you that you're crazy. Visiting friends in neighboring El Paso a few days before Christmas, I was immediately warned, "Don't even think about going into Juarez." Just across the shallow creek known as the Rio Grande from El Paso, one of the safest cities of its size in the nation, Juarez is a city under siege, the worst victim of Mexico's growing wars between drug cartels. [continues 675 words]
Murders across Mexico more than doubled last year to more than 5,600. That's more than the total Americans lost so far in the Iraq war. Most of those murders have been happening in border towns. More than 1,600 were killed in Juarez, Mexico's fourth-largest city, with a population of 1.7 million. The bloodbath of unspeakable brutality includes kidnappings and decapitated bodies left in public places as a grisly form of advertising. "There have already been 20 murders in Juarez this year," Beto O'Rourke, a member of El Paso's City Council, told me in a telephone interview this week as President-elect Barack Obama met with Mexico's President Felipe Calderon Monday. "That doesn't include the kidnappings and extortions." [continues 364 words]
