The anti-narcotics police arrived here in the heart of Colombia's cocaine industry last month to destroy the coca crop. The community was determined to save it. Roughly 1,000 farmers, some armed with clubs, surrounded the hilltop camp that police had set up in a jungle clearing and began closing in on the officers. The police started shooting. When they were done, seven farmers were dead and 21 were wounded. "Several friends and neighbors died on the ground waiting for medical assistance," said Luis Gaitan, 32, who protected himself by hiding behind a tree stump. [continues 1571 words]
An unclassified document from the Drug Enforcement Agency shows the areas of influence generated by Mexico's major criminal organizations. The "intelligence report," dated July 2015, includes three maps that show the various DEA offices around the country and the cartel-related cases they deal with; potential markets that drug cartels will exploit due to population density; and heroin deaths by state. In Texas, the many offices appear to have their time spent dealing with cases involving the Sinaloa, Gulf, Juarez, the Knights Templar, Beltran-Levya, Jalisco and the Zetas. [continues 119 words]
Families of People WHO 'Disappeared' Amid Mexico's Violent Drug Wars Are Forced to Continue the Search for Truth and Justice on Their Own, As Authorities Often Refuse to Help QUERETARO, MEXICO - Socorro Arias unlocks the door to her son's bedroom. A faintly musty smell wafts out. Other than a layer of dust, everything is just as Raymundo Isaac Rico Arias left it on Feb. 12, 2012, the day the 27-year-old teacher disappeared. A stack of Valentine's Day hearts - cut from red construction paper - lies on Rico's bed, intended as gifts for his students. Clothes are piled in the corner, along with shoes and leather belts. Marilyn Monroe smiles seductively from one wall, while a Virgin Mary statue sits on the bureau, gazing pensively in front of the mirror. [continues 3266 words]
MEXICO CITY - Two days after Jorge Antonio Parral Rabadan was kidnapped by a criminal gang, the Mexican Army raided the remote ranch where he was a prisoner and killed him. As he instinctively raised his hands in defense, the soldiers fired over and over at point-blank range. A brief army communique about the event asserted that soldiers had returned fire and killed three hit men at the El Puerto ranch on April 26, 2010. But Mr. Parral had fired no weapon. [continues 1106 words]
Kingpin's Plea With U.S. Triggered Years of Bloodshed Reaching All the Way to Southlake Zetas Saw Gulf Cartel Leader As Traitor, Declared a War That Has Killed Thousands of People A plea agreement between a Mexican drug kingpin and the U.S. government helped generate a violent split between two drug cartels that led to the deaths of thousands of people in Mexico and along the Texas border, a Dallas Morning News investigation has found. A masked gunman fired multiple times at Juan Jesus Guerrero Chapa with a 9 mm handgun through the passenger window of his Range Rover at Southlake Town Square in May 2013. Three Mexican citizens were arrested more than a year later and charged with stalking, and aiding and abetting in the hit. [continues 4074 words]
The Monstrous Cartels That Run the Narcotics Business Face the Same Dilemmas As Ordinary Firms - and Have the Same Weaknesses In April, the world's governments will meet in New York for a special assembly at the United Nations to discuss how to solve the drug problem. Don't hold your breath: Since the previous such gathering nearly two decades ago, the narcotics industry has done better than ever. The number of people using cannabis and cocaine has risen by half since 1998, while the number taking heroin and other opiates has tripled. Illegal drugs are now a $300 billion world-wide business, and the diplomats of the U.N. aren't any closer to finding a way to stamp them out. This failure has a simple reason: Governments continue to treat the drug problem as a battle to be fought, not a market to be tamed. The cartels that run the narcotics business are monstrous, but they face the same dilemmas as ordinary firms - and have the same weaknesses.In El Salvador, the leader of one of the country's two big gangs complained to me about the human-resources problems he faced given the high turnover of his employees. (Ironically, his main sources of recruitment were the very prisons that were supposed to reform young offenders.) In Mexican villages, drug cartels provide basic public services and even build churches - a cynical version of the "corporate social responsibility" that ordinary companies use to clean up their images. Mexico's Zetas cartel expanded rapidly by co-opting local gangsters and taking a cut of their earnings; it now franchises its brand rather like McDonald's and faces similar squabbles from franchisees over territorial encroachment. Meanwhile, in richer countries, street-corner dealers are being beaten on price and quality by "dark web" sites, much as ordinary shops are being undercut by Amazon. [continues 815 words]
A federal appeals court has agreed to hear oral arguments in the case of a Texan suing the Drug Enforcement Administration for using his 18-wheeler without permission for a drug cartel sting that ended in Houston with an informant fatally shot while driving the truck. A three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in New Orleans, is scheduled to take the case in February. Lawyers for Craig Patty are hoping the court will reverse a decision by U.S. District Judge Lee Rosenthal that Patty should get nothing from the DEA for secretly using his truck, which was shot with bullets, including those that killed Lawrence Chapa, who was behind the wheel. [continues 526 words]
Marijuana Legalisation Will Help Poor 'Supply' Nations An absurd status quo has held sway in Mexico, ever since the United States began to legalise marijuana, for medical, and, more recently, recreational use. The nation - encouraged by Washington - has some of the strictest drug laws in Latin America. But the vast majority of the marijuana it produces ends up in the US. So Mexican law enforcement officials - complying with the demands of their American counterparts - have been expending massive resources on preventing the growth and trafficking of a drug that is often, by the time it ends up being smoked within US borders, entirely legal. [continues 208 words]
An 8-Year-Old's Debilitating Illness Tests Mexico's Ban on Marijuana Use Monterrey, Mexico - They can tell the next one's coming when she begins rubbing her hands together, as if washing them. Her head slumps, and she looks left. She starts to flick her fingers and knead her skinny thigh. About once an hour, Grace Elizalde's brain electrifies in epileptic seizures intense enough that her brown eyes dance wildly back and forth and she spreads her arms out like a cartoon ghost. These are the big brain quakes, but there are hundreds of flash tremors each day that leave the 8-year-old Mexican girl exhausted and limp. [continues 1629 words]
A Drug Kingpin's Escape Builds to an Epic Showdown Talk about timing. Don Winslow's new novel, The Cartel, which fictionally chronicles the past decade of Mexico's brutal drug-lord wars, echoes the stunning, headline grabbing jail break from a maximum-security prison by Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, the legendary billionaire drug kingpin. Want to know why El Chapo probably won't be captured anytime soon? Never mind the evening news: Truth is in fiction. Read this disturbing and, yes, addictive epic tale instead. Within the first 70 of its 600-plus vivid pages, Adan Barrera, the fascinating, suave, drug-cartel patron - loosely based on El Chapo - escapes from his country's most secure prison to rebuild his Sinaloan drug-trafficking empire. [continues 471 words]
A Drug Kingpin's Escape Builds to an Epic Showdown Talk about timing. Don Winslow's new novel, The Cartel, which fictionally chronicles the past decade of Mexico's brutal drug-lord wars, echoes the stunning, headline-grabbing jail break from a maximum-security prison by Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, the legendary billionaire drug kingpin. Want to know why El Chapo probably won't be captured anytime soon? Never mind the evening news: Truth is in fiction. Read this disturbing and, yes, addictive epic tale instead. Within the first 70 of its 600-plus vivid pages, Adan Barrera, the fascinating, suave, drug-cartel patron - loosely based on El Chapo - escapes from his country's most secure prison to rebuild his Sinaloan drug-trafficking empire. [continues 468 words]
CULIACAN, Mexico - When Jose Antonio Sevilla and his three brothers learned that the notorious drug trafficker known as El Chapo had escaped from prison, they jumped out of their chairs and shouted with glee. "El Chapo got out! He's the greatest of them all," said Mr. Sevilla, 19, a self-professed fan of the drug kingpin, whose full name is Joaquin Guzman Loera. "He was famous before, but now he's even more famous." Mr. Sevilla, an auto mechanic, was so excited that he attended a march through the streets of Culiacan, the capital of Mr. Guzman's home state, this week to celebrate. He carried a sign that a woman gave him, which read, "El Chapo is more of a president than Pena Nieto," a reference to Mexico's president, Enrique Pena Nieto. [continues 1359 words]
Hells Angels bikers, other gangsters and convicted international smugglers work as longshoremen handling the 1.5 million containers that flow annually through Port Metro Vancouver More than two dozen of the longshoremen unloading container ships on the docks of Metro Vancouver are Hells Angels, their associates, other gangsters or people with serious criminal records, a Vancouver Sun investigation has found. The infiltration of gangsters and criminals into the port workforce is perpetuated by a longtime employment practice that allows existing union members to nominate friends, relatives and associates when new jobs become available. [continues 2762 words]
Hells Angels and others with criminal connections have a long history working at Canada's major ports, a Vancouver Sun investigation has found More than two dozen of the longshoremen unloading container ships on the docks of Metro Vancouver are Hells Angels, their associates, other gangsters or people with serious criminal records, a Vancouver Sun investigation has found. The infiltration of gangsters and criminals into the port workforce is perpetuated by a longtime employment practice that allows existing union members to nominate friends, relatives and associates when new jobs become available. [continues 2094 words]
Throughout its history, the United States' approach to controlling recreational intoxicants has varied. Up until the early part of the 20th century, drug use in the U. S. was completely unfettered - heroin, morphine and other substances were sold openly and without restriction. In fact, cocaine, various opiates and syringe kits were once available for order from the Sears & Roebuck catalog. Beginning with 1914' s Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, a slew of laws burst forth to regulate cocaine, alcohol, marijuana and other drugs of abuse. These laws were often the product of blatant racism, sensationalism and political theater, and they set the stage for current regulations that function as ham-fisted political instruments rather than data-backed guardians of public health. [continues 710 words]
President Nixon declared a "war on drugs" in 1971, but the war has in fact been raging in the United States for a century, since the 1914 passage of the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act. Johann Hari's "Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs" opens with portraits of three of its early combatants. Harry Anslinger was the zealous head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962; he kept his department well funded by inventing nightmarish visions of African Americans and Mexicans on drug-fueled rampages and, later, of Communists flooding the nation with opiates in a plot to weaken the United States. Singer Billie Holiday, a longtime heroin addict, was hounded for years by Anslinger's agents, who, in a final indignity, made sure she was handcuffed to the hospital bed in which she died of liver and heart disease at age 44. Arnold Rothstein was a fearsome mob kingpin who, during the 1920s, established a brutal reputation in order to secure control of the New York trade in prohibited alcohol and drugs. [continues 728 words]
Mexican cartels are bypassing the middleman and sending their own agents into Vancouver to arrange drug shipments and launder money. The Sun's Kim Bolan investigates. Infamous Mexican cartels like Sinaloa and La Familia have sent representatives to the Lower Mainland to broker drug deals with local gangs, The Vancouver Sun has learned. A Sun investigation has uncovered increasing links between B.C. drug gangs and the notoriously violent cartels that have wreaked havoc along Mexico's northern border. For years, local crime groups travelled south to the U.S. and Mexico to work with the cartels. Police now confirm that the Mexican crime groups have moved members north so they can be on the ground in B.C. and other parts of Canada. Calgary Police recently revealed that cartel members are also operating in that Alberta city. [continues 1761 words]
In the late 1970s and early '80s, just as this country's war on drugs was ramping up, I joined the Providence Police Department, serving five years as a uniformed police officer in the patrol division. Even then, with the lion's share of our federal drug enforcement budget devoted to treatment, I had doubts about the efficacy of a "war on drugs." The criminal justice system seemed ill-suited for addressing public health problems, and it appeared that the issue was being manipulated and exploited for political reasons. But I could never have imagined the damage this new prohibition would inflict on the fabric of our cities and on our national identity. [continues 701 words]
This month's capture of the world's most-wanted narcotics kingpin, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, will have little to no impact on the amount of drugs flowing into the U.S. across the Mexican border, experts say. Guzman's Sinaloa drug cartel - the largest in Mexico and the world - has a leadership succession plan that most likely has placed Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada at its helm. "If El Chapo was the CEO, then El Mayo was the CFO. He's certainly smart, knows the network, and will keep the supplies going," said George Grayson, a drug war expert at the College of William and Mary who has written several books on Mexican cartels. "This [arrest] may be a sharp thorn in the side of the cartel, but it's certainly not a dagger in the heart." [continues 556 words]
The arrest of the powerful and elusive Sinaloa Cartel boss Joaquin (El Chapo) Guzman will, for at least a short time, be a major notch in the belt for the government of Enrique Pena Nieto, who promised to reduce Mexico's drug violence after the carnage that took place under his predecessor, Felipe Calderon. During Calderon's tenure, nearly 60,000 Mexicans lost their lives in drug-related violence. Pena Nieto has promised to focus more attention on the economic causes of drug violence rather than just breaking the cartels, but he still likely relishes the sight of men like Guzman - or Zetas boss Miguel Angel Trevino Morales, who was arrested last summer - in handcuffs. [continues 481 words]
