When you're addressing a crowd, there are those not-so-subtle indicators that your message is not getting through. For me, the hint came when, during a recent talk in which I declared my support for the Mexican drug war, a woman in the audience yelled: "Sellout!" It was startling but also refreshing. As a Mexican-American, I'm often accused by the right wing of being -- as one reader put it the other day -- a "pro-illegal-alien opinion writer." It was a nice change of pace to have someone on the left wing accuse me of not being supportive enough of a liberal cause. It tells me that I'm just where I need to be. [continues 627 words]
The violence to the south of the American border took another gruesome turn this weekend when authorities discovered a site with 49 headless and otherwise mutilated bodies. The discovery was made near the town of San Juan, near the Texas border. A welcome sign near the site reportedly was tagged with the saying "100% Zeta," referencing one of Mexico's most powerful drug cartels. The discovery is both sad and scary because of the violence on display and the tie-in to the drug trade. Unfortunately, the United States contributes greatly to the power of the Zetas and other cartels because of the appetite in this country for illegal mind-altering drugs. [continues 319 words]
Mexico's organized crime groups often leave multiple bodies in public places as warnings to their rivals, and authorities said at least a few of the latest victims had tattoos of the Santa Muerte cult popular among drug traffickers. The bodies of 43 men and six women were found in the town of San Juan on the non-toll highway to the border city of Reynosa about 4 a.m., forcing police and troops to close the highway. Nuevo Leon state security spokesman Jorge Domene said at a news conference that a banner left at the site bore a message with the Zetas drug cartel claiming responsibility for the massacre. [continues 353 words]
Houstonian, Who Has No Secrets to Trade, Is Doing More Time Than Drug Lords FORT WORTH - The U.S. government didn't offer a reward for the capture of Houston grandmother Elisa Castillo, nor did it accuse her of touching drugs, ordering killings, or getting rich off crime. But three years after a jury convicted her in a conspiracy to smuggle at least a ton of cocaine on tour buses from Mexico to Houston, the 56-year-old first-time offender is locked up for life - without parole. [continues 729 words]
Thursday marked World Press Freedom Day, a UN-declared event meant to underscore the connection between journalism and democracy. It also highlights the very real dangers journalists face reporting the news in the world's hot zones. These days, one of the worst places to be a journalist is Veracruz, Mexico. There, on World Press Freedom Day, the dismembered bodies of three photojournalists -- Gabriel Huge, Guillermo Luna and Esteban Rodriguez -- were found in a shallow waterway in the Mexican port city. The body of Luna's girlfriend, Irasema Becerra, was found not far from them. Mexican prosecutors said the victims showed signs of being tortured and that their bodies had been dismembered. The killings were likely committed by organized drug cartels that have terrorized the region for years. [continues 369 words]
Mexican Cartel Chieftain Arrested Near Denver Told of Mass Slayings, Former Colleagues Police and federal agents pulled the car over in a suburb north of Denver. An FBI agent showed his badge. The driver appeared not startled at all. "My friend," he said, "I have been waiting for you." And with that, Jesus Audel Miramontes-Varela stepped out into the arms of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Over the next several days at his ranch in Colorado and an FBI "safe house" in Albuquerque, the Mexican cartel chieftain was transformed into one of the FBI's top informants on the Southwest border. [continues 1039 words]
Three Central American Leaders Fail to Agree on Changing Their Laws, Possibly Including Legalization. A conclave of Central American presidents meeting in Guatemala to discuss a major overhaul of their drug laws - including legalization or decriminalization - failed to arrive at a consensus Saturday and agreed to meet again soon in Honduras. Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina had invited five counterparts to discuss what he described as growing frustration with Washington's anti-drug policy, which many in the region say is exacting too high a price in crime and corruption. [continues 557 words]
TULTITLAN, Mexico - After giving up trying to find a job in his native Honduras, metalworker Maynor Gutierrez decided to try to get to the USA. He never made it past a shelter for illegal immigrants in Mexico. Poverty, crime and corruption have overwhelmed Honduras, a fledgling democracy engulfed in political chaos and designated the murder capital of Latin America. Little has improved under President Porfirio Lobo, who took over after his predecessor was removed on charges of subverting democracy. The turmoil has prompted many Hondurans to flee north. [continues 737 words]
On New Year's day, six bodies were found in different parts of Mexico, a relatively peaceful day, if Mexican newspaper La Reforma's usually more metronomic 'Ejecutometro' (execution meter) is considered. Revered Mexican author Carlos Fuentes, a man noted for coy narrative ('to be interpreted by the reader with no endorsement from the teller', according to the New York Times), recently addressed the issue of drugs. He was, for once, quite forward. 'Sometimes we win, sometimes they win', stated the former diplomat. While there have been slight improvements in infamous areas such as Ciudad Juarez, the corpses hanging from bridges, a cartel signature, are spreading into other areas. Areas near Mexico City, once thought to be an oasis for diplomats, corporations and the wealthy, such as Acapulco and Cuernavaca, have suffered recently. A burned out vehicle containing two decapitated bodies was discovered at the entrance to an expensive Mexico City shopping centre. [continues 1031 words]
Businessman, Now in U.S. Custody, Accused of Playing Middleman A Mexican businessman is in U.S. custody, accused of money laundering and serving as a liaison between drug cartels and powerful politicians, including a former governor who allegedly received millions of dollars in exchange for protecting the criminals, according to a 14-page court filing in Texas. Four confidential informants told the Drug Enforcement Administration that Antonio Pena-arguelles was paid millions by leaders of the Gulf cartel and the Zetas to help influence politicians, including Tomas Yarrington, the former governor of Tamaulipas state, which borders Texas. [continues 592 words]
Deadly Cocaine Trade Reaches New Depths It might have been a spaceship from some distant galaxy - that's how incongruous it seemed - but it was just a submarine, somewhere in the South American jungle. When it was discovered by law-enforcement agents in February 2011, the vessel was perched in an improvised shipyard, hidden amid the coastal woodlands of western Colombia. Twenty-one metres long and constructed mainly of fibreglass, the craft had room for a six-member crew and 6,435 litres of diesel fuel. It was equipped with bunk beds, a ballast mechanism, a global positioning system, a 346-horsepower diesel engine, "scrubbing" devices to clean the air, a conning tower and a periscope with a night-vision camera. [continues 4905 words]
Trumpets and trombones blast across a rodeo ring where women in miniskirts dance with men in cowboy hats and gold chains. Some fans try to climb onto the stage while others whoop to the deafening music and sing along to an outlaw ballad about one of the most-wanted criminal suspects in North America, an alleged drug kingpin. "We take care of El Mayo "Here no one betrays him... "We stay tough with AK-47s and bazookas at the neck "Chopping heads off as they come [continues 1031 words]
Casualties of the Mexican Drug War While Cartel Violence Has Spread into the U.S., It Hasn't Reached Jackson County, Sheriff Says Margarita Castillo worries that members of her family who remain in Mexico could get caught in the crossfire of a war raging between two rival cartels who are fighting over the lucrative drug smuggling route to the Western United States. Castillo, who owns La Placita, an eight-store mini-mall on West Main Street in Medford, said the cartels have put law-abiding, hard-working Mexican citizens at risk because of the violence ripping across the nation. [continues 1085 words]
HIDALGO, Texas - Clyde knows a thing or two about men hiding. If there's someone squatting in the bush near the Rio Grande, the 5-year-old gelding will prick up his ears, give a snort and stop in his tracks, despite gentle rib kicks from his rider. If people make a run for the river, he'll crash through brush and branches after them. Or he could be quiet as a breath and walk right up to a circle of unsuspecting smugglers. [continues 786 words]
A colonel who fought drug lord Pablo Emilio Escobar and the Medellin cartel in Colombia said the current war against cocaine is nothing like it was in the 1970s and '80s. In an exclusive interview at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation Thursday at Fort Benning, Col. William A. Galindo said through interpreter Ana Brewington that the impact of cocaine in Colombia and the United States has declined due to the presence of the police force and law enforcement. Galindo, an instructor at the institute for the last 18 months, has served in the Colombian Army since age 15 and has more than 30 years of service. The war against cocaine has taken him to jungles, remote villages and urban areas to combat the manufacturing and trafficking of the drug. [continues 692 words]
WASHINGTON --- American law enforcement agencies have significantly built up networks of Mexican informants that have allowed them to secretly infiltrate some of that country's most powerful and dangerous criminal organizations, according to security officials on both sides of the border. As the United States has opened new law enforcement and intelligence outposts across Mexico in recent years, Washington's networks of informants have grown there as well, current and former officials said. They have helped Mexican authorities capture or kill about two dozen high-ranking and midlevel drug traffickers, and sometimes have given American counternarcotics agents access to the top leaders of the cartels they are trying to dismantle. [continues 1265 words]
Several Police Officers in Northern Mexico Allowed a Violent Drug Gang to Hold Kidnap Victims in the Local Jail While Ransom Payments Were Being Negotiated, a State Official Said Thursday. Hours later, the navy reported finding 32 bodies in three houses in the Gulf coast seaport of Veracruz, where just two weeks ago 35 tortured bodies were dumped in front of shocked motorists on a main avenue. The first incident appeared tied to fighting between rival drug cartels, but officials did not immediately say if Thursday's find was drug releated. [continues 549 words]
Former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper Reflects on the Violent U.S. Experiment With Prohibition, As Depicted in Ken Burns' New PBS Documentary. He Argues There Is a Compelling Parallel Between The Damage Done by the 18th Amendment and the Current U.S. War on Drugs. KEN Burns' new documentary on alcohol prohibition, premiering on PBS Sunday, reportedly begins with a Mark Twain quote: "It is the prohibition that makes anything precious." As a retired police officer who worked to enforce today's prohibition - - the "war on drugs" - I think it's a lesson we would do well to remember. [continues 647 words]
Before we destroy the Mexican government and bring narco-terrorism to our own cities by our ruinous drug policies (which make their distribution the most lucrative occupation in the Western Hemisphere) we should have a real debate (not sound bites) on legalization. The cancer of the cartels and Zetas will not stop at the Rio Grande; indeed it is daily seeping further into this country. Consider the following: After a delicious San Antonio supper of enchiladas smothered in chili con carne and onions, I had a dream wherein I was allowed to read a story from the Jan. 24, 2018, Express-News: [continues 496 words]
Ease of Production, High Demand Make Pot a Sure Bet for Gangs MEXICO CITY -- But for its problematic pedigree, Mexico's marijuana might be hailed as a marketing miracle. The much-maligned weed has suffered decades of punishment -- burned, poisoned, ripped from the earth by its roots. Customers have been jailed, suppliers battered by literally cutthroat competition. Better products from Colombia, California and countless suburban back-rooms have somewhat eroded its popularity. Governments refuse to make it honest. Yet, this pot has persevered. Production grows, quality improves and exports northward hum along. Despite decades of U.S. officials' efforts against it, Mexican marijuana remains widely available, frequently used and commonly disregarded as a danger. [continues 860 words]
Urban gun battles drive schoolchildren to the floors of their classrooms and entire villages into flight; noncombatants die in the crossfire; others, unfortunate enough to cross paths with pitiless irregulars, are hacked to death or beheaded. The national economy falters because of the rising chaos and uncertainty. Tensions rise along the border of a neighboring nation as some seek to escape the violence any way they can. This is not a description of a social meltdown occurring in faraway North Africa. This is the meltdown occurring in North America, at your doorstep. Mexico, a major economic and political partner of the United States, is entering the fifth year of a deadly struggle between the U.S.-subsidized forces of law and order and the ruthless armies of drug cartels and crime syndicates. The violence has claimed the lives of almost 40,000 people, and each week it seems to cross a new threshold of depravity. Not too long ago the discovery of a mass slaying in the Mexican State of Tamaulipas, south of the border near El Paso, Tex., caused shock on both sides of the border. Such reports have become all too regular. [continues 635 words]
A RECENTLY arrested leader and founder of Mexican drug cartel Los Zetas says the group gets their drugs in Guatemala and their weapons are smuggled from the US across the Rio Grande. Rejon Jesus Enrique Aguilar, also known as "El Mamito", was arrested on July 3 in a district near the Mexican capital. "We buy (narcotics) in Guatemala," Aguilar said in a video. "It is not reliable (buying from) the Colombians," he added. The authorities declared Guatemala's Peten department, on the border with Mexico, under siege in May after the slaughter and beheading of 27 people. The crime was attributed to Zetas. [continues 182 words]
Fighting among the Zetas gang and other vicious drug cartels led to the deaths of more than 40 people whose bodies were found in three Mexican cities over a 24-hour span, a government official said. At least 20 people were killed and five injured when gunmen opened fire in a bar late Friday in the northern city of Monterrey, where the gang is fighting its former ally, the Gulf Cartel, said federal security spokesman Alejandro Poire. Eleven bodies shot with high-powered rifles were found earlier on Friday, piled near a water well on the outskirts of Mexico City, where the gang is fighting the Knights Templar, Poire said. [continues 477 words]
You will hear the voice of my memories stronger than the voice of my death -- that is, if death ever had a voice. - -- Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo This is how Mexican investigators believe gangsters murdered business student Juan Francisco Sicilia: Two of his friends had been assaulted in Cuernavaca, south of Mexico City, by a pair of policemen moonlighting as muggers for the Pacifico Sur drug cartel. The friends reported the criminal cops, who panicked and asked their mafia bosses for help. On March 27, eight Pacifico Sur thugs, including a crazed psychopath called El Pelon (Baldy), abducted the two accusers, as well as Juan Francisco and four other buddies, from a bar. They were bound with packing tape, tortured in a safe house and suffocated to death. Their bodies were found the next day outside the city. [continues 3361 words]
10 people decapitated, 20 slain in bar shooting Mexican authorities sent in an extra 1,800 police Saturday to fight the country's gruesome and deadly drug war, with at least 41 people slain over the weekend including 10 who were decapitated. The 1,800 federal agents were sent into Michoacan state on Saturday, in a battle there mainly with the Knights Templars, a splinter group of the La Familia drugs cartel. The reinforcements were backed by 170 vehicles, 15 ambulances and MI-4 and Black Hawk helicopters, the Public Safety office announced. [continues 355 words]
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is meeting in Guatemala this week for talks with the presidents of Central America, Mexico and Colombia on security assistance to Central America that will focus on the most serious problem facing the region: drug trafficking. As Mexico has interrupted transit routes across its territory and along its coasts, drug cartels have been moving into Guatemala and countries to the south. A particularly heinous manifestation of this shift in activity was the killing of 27 people in northern Guatemala last month, a crime for which Mexico's "Zetas" openly took credit. [continues 563 words]
MEXICO CITY - As authorities lauded the capture this week of Jose de Jesus Mendez, leader of Mexico's vicious La Familia Michoacana drug cartel, the country was faced with a familiar problem: The top kingpin of a drug cartel had fallen, but the violence he spawned had not. On Thursday, police found a man who had been dragged, tortured and killed on the outskirts of a rural town where the cartel has a strong presence. A day earlier, another man was found dead not far from where Mr. Mendez was held with a message on his chest to Mr. Mendez, likely from enemy drug traffickers. [continues 794 words]
Los Zetas Extend Brutal Reign South, As U.S. To Offer More Antidrug Aid SANTA ELENA, Guatemala-El Peten province, a vast stretch of wilderness in northern Guatemala known for its rainforests and stunning Mayan pyramids at Tikal, is fast becoming a stronghold for a notoriously bloodthirsty Mexican cartel. Last month, soldiers entered a cattle ranch in El Peten to find the remains of a brutal human slaughter: Twenty-seven bodies strewn across the property and a pile of heads thrown over a fence. On a wall was a message written in blood and signed "Z200," a moniker authorities say belongs to a local wing of Mexico's Los Zetas. [continues 1140 words]
MEXICO CITY-Federal police captured the chief of Mexico's La Familia drug cartel Tuesday, dealing another blow to a gang that lost its founding leader just months ago and is now torn by a bloody internal feud in its home state of Michoacan. Police captured Jose de Jesus Mendez, known by his alias "El Chango," or the Monkey, in the central Mexican state of Aguascalientes without firing any shots, Alejandro Poire, Mexico's national security spokesman, said in a statement. [continues 458 words]
Six Young Women Among Suspected Members of Brutal Zetas Arrested In Police Shootout Dwarfed by surrounding reporters and with her head bowed to avoid the television cameras, the slender 16-yearold hesitated slightly before she answered the question. "I'm a hit woman," she said. Maria Celeste Mendoza was among six suspected teenage gang members arrested this week by police after a shootout with authorities in central Mexico, one of the growing ranks of young people working for the country's drug cartels. [continues 468 words]
Some stories make it to the front pages of our newspapers and we cannot ignore their importance. Take for instance the victory by leftist Ollanta Humala in Peru's presidential election Sunday. That is unquestionably a new challenge for U.S. foreign policy in the region. Then we have those stories that seldom make it to the front pages but are brought up often enough that we know that the United States has a problem. The violence in Mexico is a perfect example. With 40,000 dead since December 2006, the United States is conscious of a looming problem on its border. [continues 352 words]
They are known as "Las Barbies," "Las Tinkerbells" and "Las Reinas." But the images they evoke in the criminal underworld in Mexico are far from those of innocent dolls, bells and queens. According to intelligence reports, the terms are used by drug-trafficking organizations for "mujeres sicarias" -- hit women. Then there are the "Radieras" and the "Halconeras." They act as lookouts, manning radios at strategic points on the roads and who, like hawks, watch the activity of Mexico's federal police, military and marines in order to alert the cartels. [continues 1457 words]
Renowned poet Javier Sicilia has begun a citizen's protest against Mexico's war against drugs that will visit flashpoints across the country. Our correspondent is in the caravan, talking to residents along the way. The Caravan for Peace heads into Monterrey " en route to its final destination, Ciudad Juarez" and the streets are deserted. It is late at night and Monterrey empties out around 7p.m., now that crime has spiked. You can't fault residents for shuttering their windows and closing doors, since the city, the industrial hub of the country, has become another flashpoint in Mexico's fight against drug cartels. [continues 512 words]
MEXICO CITY -- Rhino trucks, narco tanks, Mad Mex-inismos? No one can agree on what to call the armored monster vehicles that Mexican criminal groups have been welding together in recent months, but this much is clear -- they are building more of them. Over the weekend, Mexican authorities found two more of these makeshift road warriors in Tamaulipas, the same northern border state where the first armored vehicle appeared in April after a battle between the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas gang. In the latest case, the Mexican Defense Department said, the armored trucks were found in a metalworking shop in Camargo, which also held at least two other partly modified monsters and 23 additional trucks. [continues 220 words]
BOGOTA, Colombia-Mexico's biggest cartels are expanding their operations throughout Central and South America, gaining power as they diversify and consolidate in new regions but also exposing themselves to new challenges, according to top law-enforcement officials. Cartels like the Sinaloa gang and the Zetas are sending more operatives to South America than ever before, seeking to fill the void left by the demise in recent years of powerful Colombian drug organizations. "There are more Mexican drug-cartel emissaries in South America than in any other time in the history of Mexican cartels and drug operations," said Jay Bergman, Andean regional director for the Drug Enforcement Administration, in an interview this week. [continues 530 words]
Why Is A Supposed "Failed State' Prospering? Last week, gun battles between warring drug cartels in the central Mexican state of Michoacan lasted three days, brought down a police helicopter, caused a small flood of refugees, and took an as-yet undetermined toll in lives. It's almost a surprise the story made the news at all. "The conflict was slow to get out because local media in states like Michoacan have largely stopped covering the carnage on orders from drug gangs," reported The Journal's David Luhnow and Jose de Cordoba on Friday. More than 20 reporters have been killed in Mexico since the drug wars began in earnest in 2006. Last year, Mexico tied Iraq, and was second only to Pakistan, in journalist fatalities. [continues 811 words]
NEAR DONNA -- A U.S. Border Patrol agent spotted the men as they approached the floodway levee under the moonlight early Friday morning. She focused an infrared telescope on the figures, tracking seven men as they marched north near Farm-to-Market Road 493 about 2:15 a.m. Friday, according to a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court in McAllen. Each person carried a large bundle with about 35 pounds of marijuana strapped to their backs. The agent quietly kept the LORIS scope focused on the figures for nearly two hours. [continues 1117 words]
The War on Drugs in Mexico, Partially Funded by Hundreds of Millions of Dollars in U.S. Government Assistance, Has Not Only Failed to Curb the Trade but Intensified Horrific Violence, Corruption and Human Rights Abuses, Writes Neal Peirce. For most Americans, the recent news of popular demonstrations in Mexico was probably a small diversion from the daily tide of bloody global reports from such faraway hot spots as Pakistan, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and Bahrain. Why worry, most of us likely concluded, if thousands of Mexicans are marching in the streets, protesting the horrific violence and high death toll in their nation's raging drug war? Isn't that their problem? [continues 769 words]
MEXICO CITY-Guatemalan soldiers searched Tuesday for the culprits of a massacre in a remote province after the country's president declared a state of siege there, a sign that Guatemala is escalating its own war against drug traffickers as violence spills over from Mexico. The measures came the day after authorities blamed a Mexican drug cartel called Los Zetas for killing and decapitating 27 people in the remote El Peten province. Under the state of siege, security forces may conduct searches and make arrests without warrants, confiscate weapons and break up groups seen as subversive. [continues 478 words]
MEXICO CITY-Guatemalan officials said Monday that Mexico's most brutal drug cartel was responsible for the killing and decapitation of at least 27 people, the country's worst massacre since the end of its civil war. Carlos Menocal, Guatemala's interior minister, blamed the Zetas, who Mexican authorities say are also responsible for much of that country's most heinous violence, including the August massacre of 72 migrants, and the deaths of at least 183 people kidnapped, killed and buried in mass graves found in the state of Tamaulipas on Mexico's gulf coast in April. [continues 537 words]
A dozen suspected Zetas drug cartel members and a Mexican marine died in a battle Sunday on an island surrounded by Falcon Lake, within sight of the U.S.-Mexico border, officials said. The Mexican naval secretariat confirmed the shootout at a Zeta encampment on an island on the reservoir used by the Zetas to stage marijuana loads to be transported by boat into the United States. The island is located less than two miles northeast of Nueva Ciudad Guerrero, Tamps., across the border from Falcon Dam. [continues 616 words]
NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico - The "police" for the Zetas paramilitary cartel are so numerous here - upward of 3,000, according to one estimate - that they far outnumber the official force, and their appearance further sets them apart. Most are teens sporting crew cuts, gold chains and earrings, with shorts worn well below the waist and cellphones pressed to their ears. These "spotters" seem to be everywhere, including elementary schools, keeping tabs on everything and everyone for the area's most dominant drug cartel. [continues 662 words]
Shallow Graves, Deepening Alarm Still No End to the Horrors OFFICIALLY, nearly 35,000 people have been killed since Mexico's president, Felipe Calderon, began an assault on his country's drug-trafficking "cartels" at the end of 2006. But the true body count will never be known. On April 6th police discovered mass graves near San Fernando, a town in Tamaulipas state near the border with the United States, which so far have yielded 183 bodies. Two weeks later hidden tombs were discovered in the north-western city of Durango from which 100 corpses have so far been extracted. [continues 360 words]
Calls for the Dismissal of Tamaulipas Officials Grow As the Body Count Reaches 177. Suitcases started piling up, unclaimed, at the depot where buses crossing northern Tamaulipas state ended their route. That should have been an early clue. Then the bodies started piling up, pulled by forensic workers from two dozen hidden graves in the scruffy brush-covered ravines around the town of San Fernando, 80 miles south of this city that borders Brownsville, Texas. At least 177 corpses have been recovered in the last few weeks, most of them, officials now say, passengers snatched from interstate buses, tortured and slaughtered. Women were raped before being killed, and some victims were burned alive, according to accounts from survivors who eventually overcame their fears and came forward. [continues 1114 words]
The editorial "'Plan Mexico'?" (Page B8, Friday) applauds the efforts of Texas Congressman Michael McCaul to paint yet another shade of lipstick on the pig we named the War On Drugs. Isn't 50 years of failed global drug war schemes enough? McCaul will ask, what is the United States' role in Mexico's war against the drug cartels? Don't bother. When we opted for prohibition of currently illegal drugs, we created the cartels and the subsequent violence. When we cast our role as response by force, as in Plan Colombia, we spread cocaine production back to Peru and Ecuador. Mexico now grows its own opium poppies. The Mexican forces the U.S. helped pay to train were hired away by the Zetas to be the killers we deplore. We have spread narco-violence throughout dozens of other countries in our hemisphere and to West Africa in previous attempts to save Mexico. [continues 165 words]
MEXICO CITY-The U.S. State Department said Wednesday it has rescinded a warning that U.S. government officials and citizens could be targeted by Mexican drug cartels in three of the country's states. State Department Spokesman Michael Toner said, "we thought it was credible information, and then it was later deemed that it was not credible enough to warrant it remaining on the website." The warning, the first indicating Americans were being targeted by drug traffickers, said U.S. officials had "uncorroborated information that Mexican criminal gangs may intend to attack U.S. law-enforcement officers or U.S. citizens in the near future in Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon and San Luis Potosi" states. Among the cities affected by the warning was Monterrey, the country's northern business hub. [continues 228 words]
Consulate Says Americans May Be Targets of Drug Gangs; 32 More Bodies Found MEXICO CITY-For the first time in Mexico's drug war, the U.S. government said its employees and citizens could be the targets of drug gangs in three Mexican states, a disclosure that could signal danger for Americans south of the border. The little-noticed warning, published last Friday in a warden's message from the U.S. Consulate General in Monterrey, said U.S. officials had "information that Mexican criminal gangs may intend to attack U.S. law-enforcement officers or U.S. citizens in the near future in Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon and San Luis Potosi." [continues 1040 words]
A Second Massacre In One Small Northern Town Dramatizes The Underbelly Of Nation Almost eight months ago, residents in the rural Mexican county of San Fernando received startling news: The bodies of 72 immigrants traveling to the U.S. had been discovered on a secluded ranch after the group had been lined up, blindfolded and shot dead. Now, the sense of horror has returned. Last week, officials said they had discovered mass graves on another secluded ranch there. Some 88 dead have been unearthed so far as forensics teams continue to dig for others. [continues 726 words]
MEXICO CITY -- They were young men, traveling by bus to work in the fields and factories of northeastern Mexico, or perhaps hoping to get across the border to a job in the United States. Somewhere along the way, they vanished. The discovery this week of 72 bodies dumped in mass graves in a no-man's-land about 85 miles south of the United States border may offer a terrible answer to the mystery of what happened to at least some of the missing men. They were forced off the buses at gunpoint, perhaps kidnapped for ransom or press-ganged into drug cartels, officials say. [continues 799 words]
MEXICO CITY-The bodies of about 60 people were found in mass graves on a ranch in northern Mexico Wednesday, marking both one of the grizzliest finds by Mexican police this year and the second time scores of dead were found in the same secluded town of San Fernando. The bodies were found in an area called La Joya in Tamaulipas state, said Ruben Dario, a spokesman for the state prosecutor's office. Eight graves were uncovered, the largest of which contained 43 people. [continues 548 words]
