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]
Mexico's newest drug cartel, and certainly the most bizarre, is La Familia Michoacana, a violent but Christian fundamentalist narco-gang based in the torrid Tierra Caliente region of western Michoacan state. The group is infamous for methamphetamine smuggling, lopping off enemies' heads and limbs, and massacring police and soldiers. (Most recently, on June 14, a band of Familia gunmen ambushed a federal police convoy in Michoacan, killing 12.) Yet La Familia's leader, Nazario Moreno - aka El Mas Loco, or The Craziest One - has written his own bible, and his 1,500 minions hold prayer meetings before doing their grisly work. [continues 292 words]
Pedro Rojas is the sort of wealthy Mexican who's usually in control of his world. "I don't panic or scare easily," says Rojas, a business owner and rancher from the Mexican border city of Juarez. But last year narcos, or drug traffickers, moved into his upscale neighborhood--punks in cowboy attire and sparkling pickup trucks buying expensive homes. Rojas and his neighbors were awakened at night or horrified in broad daylight by assault-rifle fire and the screaming of tires as cars raced away after kidnappings. One afternoon, local children watched as a pickup rammed down the door of a house, sparking a gun battle that left four people dead in the street. Out at Rojas' ranch, the situation was worse. [continues 2458 words]
Beheadings and murders of police would seem like ideal grist for opportunistic news organizations. So why are some parts of the Mexican press staying silent during the recent savage fighting between drug cartels? Because they themselves are in the crosshairs. The most recent victim was the newspaper Cambio Sonora, published in Hermosillo, the capital of the state of Sonora. Violence--including two grenade attacks on its offices-- caused the newspaper to announce on May 24 that it was temporarily shutting down. Seven journalists have been murdered in Mexico since October, mostly in retaliation for reporting on the drug cartels. And two television reporters covering the crisis went missing this month. [continues 172 words]
Brutal New Drug Gangs Are Terrorizing The U.S.-Mexico Border Violent urban legend has always swirled around Mexican drug traffickers, but few of them have ever set out to build a reputation as vicious as that of Heriberto Lazcano, 28. As leader of the Zetas, a new and ruthless drug gang situated along the U.S. border, Lazcano has perpetrated crimes that range from the brutal to the bizarre. In one instance last summer, Mexican officials say, Lazcano murdered a prominent Tijuana publisher in his car in broad daylight as his two young children watched horrified from the backseat. In January the Zetas attempted a raid on a federal prison in Matamoros, Mexico, during which they allegedly blindfolded, handcuffed and shot six prison employees in the head. Lazcano's men--many of them former commandos in the Mexican military--have launched rocket-propelled grenades at police, and Lazcano is purported to have fed human victims to lions and tigers that he keeps on his ranches. [continues 1016 words]
Bolivians Oust Their Millionaire President, And The Continent Considers Taking Another Step To The Left They were the kind of ugly street scenes that few presidencies survive. All last week, thousands of poverty-stricken Bolivians protested in the capital, La Paz, and around the country, railing at President Gonzalo S=E1nchez de Lozada. S=E1nchez - or Goni, as he is called - sent the army to restore order. As Bolivian soldiers fired on demonstrators, impoverished Indian mine workers used crude slingshots to hurl lighted sticks of dynamite back at them. But they were no match for the army's tear gas and bullets, and the clashes left as many as 80 people dead. [continues 637 words]
Taking The Side Of The Coca Farmer A Maverick Politician Stirs A Continent And Puts Washington's Drug War At Risk To understand why Evo Morales has come within a llama's hair of being President of Bolivia - and why his formidable political power is giving U.S. officials fits - pay attention when he and his top advisers open their mouths. That is, see what they're chewing: coca leaves, treasured by Andean Indians like Morales as a sacred tonic and as their most lucrative cash crop but better known to Americans as the raw material of cocaine. [continues 707 words]
Mexico's Top Druglords, The Bloodthirsty Arellano Felix Brothers, Horrify Even Tijuana There are two ways to get a piece of the action at any of the big drug markets along the border: pay off--or kill off--anyone who stands in your way. But to gain exclusive control of the most lucrative gateway of all, says a veteran U.S. drug cop, a drug cartel has to pay and kill "beyond where any have ever gone before." And so few boundaries--national, moral, legal--constrain the border's worst bad guys: Benjamin Arellano Felix, 49, and his kid brother Ramon, 36. The two baby-faced playboys head the Tijuana cartel, which sits atop Mexico's $ 30 billion drug-trafficking underworld and may be the most powerful organization in the country of any kind. Each year they smuggle to the U.S. hundreds of tons of cocaine, plus marijuana, heroin and methamphetamine, ferried on ships, on planes and inside truckloads of legitimate merchandise. The Arellanos are thought to have hundreds of millions of dollars stashed away, and that's after bribing Mexican officials, cops and generals to the tune of some $75 million a year. [continues 1507 words]
