tagged w/ Mexican Drug War
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Wachovia Bank aids thugs in Mexican drug wars by laundering money-$378 billion-which is over half of the entire US defense budget and yet no one was arrested.
The U.S. government won convictions against 23,506 drug traffickers nationwide during 2010, sending 96 percent of the offenders to prison, according to U.S. Sentencing Commission statistics.
Yet one of the biggest entities busted by the feds for involvement in drug trafficking last year received just a wrist-slap deal from federal prosecutors with nobody getting prison time.
During 2010, the U.S. government also won convictions against 806 persons involved in smaller-time drug-related money laundering, sending nearly 77 percent of those offenders to prison.
Yet when it came to a case involving billions of dollars in illegal drug profits, the federal government gave the same unusual wrist-slap to the same entity caught giving greed-blinded assistance to Mexican drug cartels by laundering billions of dollars in illegal profits for them.
So, what is this entity that federal prosecutors found worthy of big breaks for its laundering of billions of dollars, and for its blatant facilitating or tons of smuggled cocaine?
Meet Wachovia – once the nation’s sixth largest bank by assets and now a part of Wells Fargo Bank… a too-big-to-fail bank that for the feds is apparently too-big-to jail.
Wachovia recently completed what amounted to a year-long probation arising from a March 2010 settlement deal with federal prosecutors who were pursuing criminal proceedings against Wachovia for its facilitating of illegal money transfers from Mexico totaling $378-billion…a staggering sum greater than half of the Pentagon's annual budget, which included billions of dollars traced directly to violent Mexican drug cartels.
The record $160-million fine slapped on Wachovia under terms of that settlement deal included a $50-million assessment for failing to monitor cash used to ship into the US 22 tons of cocaine. (That fine amounted to less than two percent of Wachovia's profits during the prior year.)
Wells Fargo now owns Wachovia. Wells Fargo, federal prosecutors stress, was not involvement in the misdeeds that landed Wachovia in court, where it received a deferred prosecution deal.
More at the link.Wachovia Bank aids thugs in Mexican drug wars by laundering money-$378 billion-which... more
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On Sunday thousands of Mexicans marched in the capital, Mexico City, to demand an end to the “war on drug trafficking” launched by President Felipe Calderón. They view it is an absurd war that has cost 40,000 lives. Similar protests were held across the country.On Sunday thousands of Mexicans marched in the capital, Mexico City, to demand an end... more
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The Mexican army has ordered three junior officers and 10 soldiers to stand trial on drug trafficking and organized crime charges after they were allegedly caught with more than a ton of methamphetamines and 66 pounds (30 kilograms) of cocaine.The Mexican army has ordered three junior officers and 10 soldiers to stand trial on... more
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Her uncle, the mayor who gave her the job nobody else wanted, warned her to keep a low profile, to not make too much of being the last remaining police officer in a town where the rest of the force had quit or been killed.Her uncle, the mayor who gave her the job nobody else wanted, warned her to keep a low... more
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More people were killed in prohibition-related violence in Mexico last year than died in the war in Afghanistan, according to year-end reports from both countries.More people were killed in prohibition-related violence in Mexico last year than died... more
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No one knows how many residents have left the city of 1.4 million since a turf battle over border drug corridors unleashed an unprecedented wave of cartel murders and mayhem.No one knows how many residents have left the city of 1.4 million since a turf battle... more
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The lone police officer in the Mexican border village of Guadalupe remained missing on Tuesday, five days after reportedly being abducted by gunmen who stormed her home.
Erika Gandara, 28, was the Mexican village's entire police force in the farming communities in the valley of Juarez, the El Paso Times reports.
A spokesman for the Chihuahua state attorney general's office told the newspaper on Monday that authorities were aware of the incident involving Gandara, but there was still no official report of the kidnapping. Arturo Sandoval, a spokesman for prosecutors in northern Chihuahua state, said a search has begun for Gandara, who hasn't been since seen Dec. 23.
Sandoval said Tuesday that the search started as a missing-person case.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/12/28/lone-police-officer-mexican-border-town-remains-missing/#ixzz19V09IitHThe lone police officer in the Mexican border village of Guadalupe remained missing on... more
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MEXICO CITY (Dec. 17) -- Nearly 150 inmates escaped Friday from a state prison in the northern Mexico border city of Nuevo Laredo, and authorities said the breakout was probably helped by prison employees.
The public safety department of Tamaulipas state, where the prison is located near the border with Laredo, Texas, said 141 inmates got out through a service entrance used by vehicles, "presumably with the assistance of the prison staff."
The department said the prison's director could not be located, adding that he and other officials were under investigation.
Eighty-three of the prisoners were being held for trial or had been convicted of crimes like theft, assault and other state offenses, while 58 were being held on federal charges, which include weapons possession and drug trafficking.
Tamaulipas has been plagued by a steady wave of violence tied to turf battles between the Gulf and Zetas drug gangs, but it was unclear whether members of those groups were among the escaped inmates.
States like Tamaulipas have said in the past they are not prepared to handle highly dangerous federal prisoners, and again on Friday the state urged the federal government to take charge of such inmates.
"The state does not have the capacity to prevent them escaping," the department said in a statement.
The federal Interior Department blamed the breakout on local authorities, saying they did not properly guard the facility.
"The absence of effective methods of guarding and control by local authorities is deplorable, and it has caused frequent escapes from prisons that put the public at risk," the department said in a statement.
It called on state authorities to clean up their prison and judicial systems by increased screening and vetting of corrections officers. In past cases, prison guards - often underpaid or under threat from gangs - have been implicated in prison escapes.
Federal police and soldiers were dispatched to patrol the area, and a search for escaped prisoners was begun.
The jail break apparently occurred in the pre-dawn hours Friday.
The escape came on the same day that federal Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna addressed a graduating class of new prison guards, underlining the urgent need to professionalize correctional forces.
"We are making a historic effort to build a new prisons model, that will treat prison staff as efficient public servants," Garcia Luna said.
The new guard recruitment programs, supported in part by the U.S. government, include increased training, screening and vetting of guards.MEXICO CITY (Dec. 17) -- Nearly 150 inmates escaped Friday from a state prison in the... more
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In order to get the story of Mexican drug trafficking organizations that grow marijuana in Northern California, Vanguard executive producer and correspondent Adam Yamaguchi had to be able to keep up with an elite task force. As a self-professed adrenaline junkie, he's used to extreme physical challenges being part of his investigations.
California has become one of the leading producers of marijuana in the world--most of it produced by Mexican drug trafficking organizations. And the proceeds from marijuana have become a cash cow for traffickers, generating greater profits than cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin combined. Vanguard's Adam Yamaguchi embeds with a task force working to take down Mexican drug trafficking organizations operating in the U.S.
"Marijuana Wars," a two-part episode, premieres November 22 at 9/8c on Current TV.
"Vanguard," airing weekly on Current TV Mondays at 9/8c, is a no-limits documentary series whose award-winning correspondents put themselves in extraordinary situations to immerse viewers in global issues that have a large social significance. Unlike sound-bite driven reporting, the show's correspondents, Adam Yamaguchi, Kaj Larsen, Christof Putzel and Mariana van Zeller, serve as trusted guides who take viewers on in-depth real life adventures in pursuit of some of the world's most important stories.
For more, go to http://current.com/vanguard.In order to get the story of Mexican drug trafficking organizations that grow... more
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Adam Yamaguchi is executive producer and correspondent for Vanguard.
Here in California, as we approach election day, chatter about marijuana legalization is reaching a fever pitch. Proposition 19 -- which would legalize individuals to grow small amounts of marijuana for personal consumption -- has fluctuated up and down in opinion polls, and is very much in play in Tuesday's vote.
When Vanguard first began exploring an episode on marijuana in California, our intention was not to highlight the legalization issue. Our focus instead was on the massive business of marijuana -- demanded by America, supplied by Mexico. Whenever I speak to people about our story, I’m peppered with questions about legalization and whether that would stop the violence in Mexico. And the answer is, no one knows.
But here’s what we do know.Adam Yamaguchi is executive producer and correspondent for Vanguard.
Here in... more
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In this exclusive clip from the upcoming three-part Vanguard special, "War On the Border," correspondent Adam Yamaguchi opens a tractor-trailer filled with 27 tons of marijuana seized by Mexican authorities.
California has become one of the leading producers of marijuana in the world -- most of it produced by Mexican drug trafficking organizations. And the proceeds from marijuana have become the cash cow for traffickers, generating greater profits than cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin combined.
In the second part of "War On the Border," Adam Yamaguchi embeds with a task force working to take down Mexican drug trafficking organizations operating in the US.
"War On the Border" premieres on Current TV on Monday, November 15 at 9/8c.
"Vanguard," airing weekly on Current TV Mondays at 9/8c, is a no-limits documentary series whose award-winning correspondents put themselves in extraordinary situations to immerse viewers in global issues that have a large social significance. Unlike sound-bite driven reporting, the show's correspondents, Adam Yamaguchi, Kaj Larsen, Christof Putzel and Mariana van Zeller, serve as trusted guides who take viewers on in-depth real life adventures in pursuit of some of the world's most important stories.
For more, go to http://current.com/vanguard.In this exclusive clip from the upcoming three-part Vanguard special, "War On the... more
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On the heels of receiving the 69th annual Peabody Award and the 2010 Television Academy Honor Award, Current TV's "Vanguard" will air a three-part special on the U.S.-Mexico border issue this fall. The documentary news program, which has been lauded for its groundbreaking and in-depth approach to some of the world's most important and under-reported stories, will provide a fresh and insightful perspective on one of the nation's most complex and controversial topics. The three-part special will launch on Monday, November 15 at 9/8c, with the second and third parts airing on consecutive Monday nights in prime time.
As seen in this election year and with the controversy over the new laws passed in Arizona, the security of the U.S.-Mexico border has emerged as one of our nation's most hotly-debated issues. "Vanguard" will introduce all the players in this human drama: from the migrants making the terrifying, dangerous and illegal border crossings to the coyotes who profit from them. Additional focus will be placed on the policemen and border patrol agents trying to hold back the tide of immigrants, to the Mexican drug cartels, whose violent clashes threaten to spill over the border.
"Vanguard," airing weekly on Current TV Mondays at 9/8c, is a no-limits documentary series whose award-winning correspondents put themselves in extraordinary situations to immerse viewers in global issues that have a large social significance. Unlike sound-bite driven reporting, the show's correspondents, Adam Yamaguchi, Kaj Larsen, Christof Putzel and Mariana van Zeller, serve as trusted guides who take viewers on in-depth real life adventures in pursuit of some of the world's most important stories.
For more, go to http://current.com/vanguard.On the heels of receiving the 69th annual Peabody Award and the 2010 Television... more
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Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu said requests by Arizona law enforcement personnel and Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) for 3,000 National Guard troops along the state’s border with Mexico have been answered so far with 1 percent of that number deployed there this week.
“We have a whopping 30 [National Guard troops] this week that are showing up,” Babeu told CNSNews.com. “It’s less than a half-hearted measure designed to fail.”
But the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has placed 15 signs along a 60-mile stretch of Interstate 8 that links San Diego with Phoenix and Tucson warning travelers of drug cartels and human trafficking operations.
“DANGER – PUBLIC WARNING, TRAVEL NOT RECOMMENDED,” read the signs placed along Interstate 8. “Visitors May Encounter Armed Criminals and Smuggling Vehicles Traveling at High Rates of Speed. Stay Away From Trash, Clothing, Backpacks, and Abandoned Vehicles.”
“BLM Encourages Visitors To Use Public Land North of Interstate 8,” the signs say.
“I think the American people are outraged that we can fight wars half-way around the world, send our nation’s treasury and our most precious resources – our American heroes that serve in the military -- and yet here in our own country somehow they believe it’s okay for us not to have a secure border,” Said Sheriff Babeu.
“And that it’s okay to put up signs in my county and parts of America to surrender parts of our country to foreign born criminals,” Babeu added, “warning our own American citizens to stay out.”
In May, President Barack Obama said he would deploy 1,200 National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border to help quell the violence there, which is less than half of the 3,000 troops requested by Babeu, Cochise County Sheriff Larry Dever, Sen. McCain and Sen. Kyl for Arizona’s border during a press conference on Capitol Hill in April.
The Obama administration has said it will deploy National Guard troops to the southern border incrementally to eventually have 1,500 troops in place. In addition, $600 million in “emergency border protection funding” was approved in legislation the president signed into law in August.
Babeu said the warning signs are 70 to 80 miles from the border and just 30 miles from Phoenix, the fifth largest city in the United States.Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu said requests by Arizona law enforcement personnel... more
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This is the biggest drug war going on at the moment in Memphis. This is the results of some of the deaths that were caused in Memphis and why it's top ranked in crime polls. The link shows a map where crime is committed and also gives the drug history of Memphis. It shows the profile of who were killed and why during this war.This is the biggest drug war going on at the moment in Memphis. This is the results of... more
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On Sunday a birthday party in Mexico was attacked by gunmen killing 17 people aged between 20-38, the article says the Mexican government blames the killing of gangs in the area. The article doesn't state why the party was targeted by the shooters.
The attack took place in Coahuila where violence over drug cartels has increased from turf wars and from a government crack down on crime.
This turf war has increased violence in Coahuila, of which this latest attack is one of the most gruesome examples. The Mexican government says more than 24,800 people have died in drug-related violence"-BBCOn Sunday a birthday party in Mexico was attacked by gunmen killing 17 people aged... more
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CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — The first successful car bombing by a drug cartel brings a new dimension of terror to a Mexican border region already shocked by random street battles, bodies dangling from bridges and highway checkpoints mounted by heavily armed criminals.
The attack, seemingly lifted from an al-Qaida playbook, demonstrated once again that the cartels are a step ahead of both an already guarded public and federal police, who have recently taken over command from the military of the battle against traffickers in Ciudad Juarez, a city across the border from El Paso, Texas.
"It's a lot like Iraq," said Claudio Arjon, who owns a restaurant near the scene of the attack and was surveying the damage from behind police lines Saturday morning. "Now, things are very different. It's very different. It's very ugly."
People in Ciudad Juarez already live under siege. Like many restaurant owners, Arjon closes his business long before dark every day to avoid criminal gangs that threaten him and his clientele. Parents take separate cars to the same place so one can warn the other of dangers up ahead. Ambulance drivers and emergency room doctors come under fire from gang members trying to finish off wounded rivals.
The car bomb, which killed at least three people Thursday, was the one thing nobody was expecting. It was a carefully planned attack designed to catch the extremely wary population and security forces off guard.
A street gang tied to the Juarez cartel lured federal officers and paramedics to the site of the bomb by dressing a bound, wounded man in a police uniform and calling in a false report of an officer shot, said Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes.
Among those killed was a private doctor who rushed to the scene to help treat the wounded man. Among the injured was a local TV cameraman who had been filming the paramedics treating the man. Even in a country where beheadings and drive-by shootings are routine, they could not imagine the cartels would choose that vulnerable moment to strike.
"In all my time working, nothing like this had ever happened to me," Channel 5 cameraman Luis Hernandez said in an interview with Milenio television.
The Red Cross in Ciudad Juarez already instructs their personnel to wait until police cordon off the scene of an attack before treating the wounded – but that wasn't enough Thursday when the attackers clearly waited until everyone was in place before striking.
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Now, Red Cross officials said they were instructing their rescuers to look out for anything unusual – a parked car or an abandoned bag – that could be a bomb.
"They have to think with their heads and not their hearts," said Gilberto Contreras, the president of the Red Cross in the city.
Federal police said the bombing attack was in retaliation for the arrest earlier in the day of a top leader of the La Linea gang, which works for the Juarez drug cartel. Investigators were still trying to determine what type of explosives the attackers used.
Brig. Gen. Eduardo Zarate, the commander of the regional military zone, said as much as 22 pounds (10 kilograms) of explosives might have been used. He said it might have been detonated remotely, adding that burned batteries connecting to a mobile phone were found at the scene.
A senior U.S. law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the Mexican investigation is ongoing, said it is possible Mexican drug cartels were receiving bomb training from foreign groups – but it is just as likely they are learning on their own. "They could be looking at the Internet, and there are publications out there," he said.
There have long been indications that the drug gangs were experimenting with explosives – and steadily improving their know-how. Gunmen have stolen explosive substances from transport vehicles and private companies. In a February 2009 raid on a U.S. firm in the northern state of Durango, masked gunmen stole 900 cartridges of Tovex water gel explosives.
In March, an improvised explosive device went off without injuring anyone at a gas station in Cadereyta, a town in the northern state of Nuevo Leon.
That bomb consisted of two large cylinders filled with nails and possibly black powder – a substance easily available on the black market – according to a U.S. Bomb Data Center report. A cell phone hard-wired to a cattle prod was found at the scene.
The report said the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was helping investigate that blast and several other situations around Mexico possibly involving remotely controlled IEDs.
While Mexican federal police have training in post-blast investigations, no security force in the country has experience with patrolling cities that could be mined with car bombs or roadside explosives.
"There's no way the Mexicans are prepared for it," said Eric Olson, a senior associate at the Wilson Center's Mexico Institute. "I hate to say it but the cartels seem to have no limits to the violence and terrible things they are willing to do."
Olson said the best way for federal police to confront this new threat would be to improve their intelligence capabilities – an area he called a serious weakness.
"It requires operational intelligence. It requires 'We know this is going to happen or likely is going to happen in this neighborhood,'" he said. "That kind of refined intelligence is extremely difficult anywhere. But it doesn't seem to be available in a place like Ciudad Juarez."
The cartels, on the other hand, "have an amazing intelligence capability," he said. "They are far ahead of law enforcement. All that keeps law enforcement from getting ahead of the curve."
Mexican cartels – armed with billions of dollars and networks of informers among corrupt police forces – have long demonstrated their ability to target the highest-ranking security officials and government officials.
Last month, cartel gunmen killed 12 federal police in the western state of Michoacan. A jailed suspect later described the carefully planned ambush to police, making it clear the gang knew exactly where the police patrol was going to be and when.
And in another first, suspected cartel gunmen assassinated two candidates during campaigning last month for local and state elections, including the leading contender for governor of the northern border state of Tamaulipas. Never before had drug gangs killed such a high-ranking electoral candidate.
Reyes, the Ciudad Juarez mayor, told The Associated Press that city authorities have "started changing all our protocols, to include bomb situations," he said.
But there was little information from the federal government on what its next steps would be.
Attorney General Arturo Chavez told a news conference Friday that the nature of the explosives used in the attack was still under investigation, and that there was "no evidence anywhere in the country of narco-terrorism."
It didn't seem that way to many frightened Mexicans – or police.
"It's terrorism," a federal police officer muttered at the bombing scene Saturday.
Yuriria Sierra, a columnist for Excelsior Newspaper, questioned the attorney general's remarks: "With a population terrified to go out because they don't know if they will come home, we still can't talk about 'narco-terrorism?'"
"We don't need Al-Qaida to live in fear," she wrote.
___CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — The first successful car bombing by a drug cartel brings... more
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The bloody drug wars ravaging Mexico took a bloody turn for the worse this week.
For the first time in the decades-old battle between drug gangs and the government, a car bomb was used to kill police.
Members of a drug gang in Ciudad Juarez Thursday baited federal officers and paramedics by dressing a wounded man in a police uniform and calling the cops to say an officer had been shot.
When the officers reached the decoy cop, the gang blew up a car holding more than 20 pounds of explosives.
The fake cop, a paramedic and a federal officer died in the blast.
The La Linea gang, which was blamed for the kidnapping and killing of a U.S. consulate employee and her husband back in March, detonated the bomb, police said.
Graffiti in Ciudad Juarez supposedly posted by the gang said they would strike again.
"We have more car bombs," they wrote.
The mayor of Ciudad Juarez said his city is on alert for more attacks.
"We've started changing all our protocols, to include bomb situations," Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz told the Associated Press.
The mayor also feared that the car bombing could trigger cops to quit or retire.
He said at least 14 police officers had been killed in the last few weeks.
Ciudad Juarez is on the Mexican border with Texas, right across from El Paso and is one of the most dangerous cities in the world, with more than 4,000 people killed since 2009, according to government estimates.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/2010/07/17/2010-07-17_car_bomb_marks_new_bloody_phase_in_mexicos_war_with_drug_gangs.html#ixzz0tyKw9tOuThe bloody drug wars ravaging Mexico took a bloody turn for the worse this week.... more
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A high-profile Arizona law-enforcement officer who has been outspoken about his support for the state's controversial new immigration law is receiving death threats.
Some of the threats against Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu were from the Mexican mafia and drug cartel members.
Outside law enforcement teams brought in to investigate the threats found them credible.
Babeu was very outspoken about the need to secure the state's border with Mexico -- a known entry point to the U.S. for drug smugglers and illegal immigrant traffickers -- and supports law SB1070, which makes illegal immigration a state crime.
Despite the threats, Babeu declined a personal security detail because the county resources were already stretched.
"I understand this threat, yet I will not run in fear or change my support for SB1070 and my demands for President Obama to secure our border with 3,000 armed soldiers in Arizona and start building the fence again," he said.
"I'm always armed, and as every law enforcement member knows, we always have to be aware of our surroundings and possible threats."
Pinal County is nearly 5,400 square miles and much of the desert is known as a drug and human trafficking corridor.A high-profile Arizona law-enforcement officer who has been outspoken about his... more
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Calderon's dead-end war
Mexican President Felipe Calderon's militarized, politicized fight against Mexico's drug cartels has been ineffective
Opinion
March 25, 2010|By Jorge Castañeda
In Ciudad Juarez this month, Mexican President Felipe Calderon insisted that appearances notwithstanding, drug violence had begun to recede thanks to the yearlong presence of 10,000 Mexican troops in the border city.
Yet according to his own government's figures, there have been 536 executions in Juarez since Jan. 1, which is 100 more than during the same period last year.
And the violence is not localized to a few border towns like Juarez. Over a holiday weekend in Acapulco this month, 34 people were assassinated in drug-related incidents; nearly 20 suffered the same fate in the drug-producing state of Sinaloa; and perhaps most poignant, two graduate students from Mexico's premier private university, Monterrey Tech, lost their lives March 19, victims of crossfire as the Mexican military pursued drug cartel members at the entrance to the campus.
All in all, Calderon's war on drugs -- unleashed in December 2006, barely 10 days after he took office -- has been not only ineffective but damaging to Mexico.
Since Calderon took office, overall levels of violence have increased, and the state's territorial control is, at best, about what it was in 2006.
No area of the country has been truly recovered by the state, and those few examples of partial success (Tijuana is perhaps the most notable one) last only as long as federal troops remain.
But the Mexican army is clearly overextended: Of its 100,000 combat and patrol troops, 96,000 are on constant duty, and desertions are increasing.
So what else can Mexico do? And, because this is increasingly as much President Obama's war as Calderon's, what can Washington do?
There are at least three options, none of which is perfect but all of which are certainly preferable to a deplorable and unsustainable status quo.
The first, and most minimalist, would be to continue employing the same strategy and policy, but more quietly.
Calderon on occasion gives the impression that he is as interested in trumpeting the war as in waging or winning it (remember President George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished"?). Simply by toning down the rhetoric, lowering the priority assigned to the war and emphasizing other pressing issues such as economic growth, political reform and social policy, he might reassure the country and lessen the politicization of his confrontation with the cartels.
A second option would be to reset the entire affair and start over.Calderon's dead-end war
Mexican President Felipe Calderon's militarized,... more
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Law enforcement officers in west Texas are on guard following an alert issued by the Department of Homeland Security warning of retaliatory killings for a recent crackdown on the Barrio Azteca gang.
David Cuthbertson, special agent in charge of the FBI's El Paso division, said the paramilitary-style gang has an "open policy" to kill its rivals and may turn its sights toward local law enforcement officers.
"[They] are extremely cold-blooded and aggressive," Cuthbertson told FoxNews.com. "The killings are done really without thought and any kind of remorse."
Citing uncorroborated information, Homeland Security issued an Officer Safety Alert on March 22, advising lawmen in the El Paso sector to vary their routes to and from work and to wear body armor while on duty. The alert also suggested that officers' relatives pay closer attention to unusual activity in the area.
"The Barrio Azteca gang may issue a 'green light' authorizing the attempted murder of [law enforcement officers] in the El Paso area," the alert read. "Due to the threat, it is recommended that [law enforcement officers] take extra safety precautions."
The Barrio Azteca gang, which formed in Texas prisons in the 1980s, is a brother organization to the Aztecas gang in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, the epicenter of Mexico's violent drug war, Cuthbertson said.
He said members of the gang's "assassination teams" are thought to work for very small monthly fees. One official from the Drug Enforcement Administration has said Aztecas have been known to kill for as little as $100. Since 2006, drug violence across Mexico has claimed nearly 18,000 lives.
Eduardo "Tablas" Ravelo, the reputed boss of Barrio Azteca members living in Juarez, remains on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List, and the FBI is offering a reward of up to $100,000 for information leading to his arrest. He and other Barrio Azteca gang members serve as hitmen for the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes drug trafficking organization -- also known as the Juarez cartel -- and are responsible for several killings, according to the FBI.
The DHS warning came just days after hundreds of Barrio Azteca gang members were interviewed by officials from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and FBI following the murders of three people linked to the U.S. Consulate in Ciudad Juarez on March 13. More than 200 officers from at least 18 agencies participated in "Operation Knockdown," which resulted in at least 26 felony arrests of alleged Azteca members.Law enforcement officers in west Texas are on guard following an alert issued by the... more
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