War on illegal drugs

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Burned corpses in Mexican street...

Charred bodies found on Tijuana street
7 July `08 - State attorney: Men shot dead early Monday morning and their corpses set on fire; The execution-style killings marked a resurgence in violence between cartels; 10 decapitated bodies, including Monday's victim, have been found

Police on Monday found six charred bodies on a Tijuana street following a bloody weekend that left 14 people dead. Assistant Baja California state attorney Salvador Ortiz said the six unidentified men were shot dead early Monday morning and their corpses set on fire. The state attorney's office also reported another eight men killed over the weekend in separate attacks. The execution-style killings marked a resurgence in violence between feuding Tijuana drug cartels.

"It's a situation that obviously worries us," Ortiz said, counting up the weekend's toll on his fingers while speaking to reporters outside the city police station. One of burned bodies had been handcuffed, while others had their heads wrapped in plastic bags, Ortiz said. Ortiz said investigators still do not know if the weekend killings were related to the burned bodies. A Tijuana police officer is the chief suspect in a triple shooting over the weekend.

Also Monday, police in the Pacific coast state of Sinaloa found the decapitated body of a man wrapped in a tarp and dumped on a street in the city of Culiacan. The head and a threatening note were found nearby inside a plastic bag, said a state police official on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak about the case.

Ten decapitated bodies, including Monday's victim, have been found throughout Culiacan in the past week. President Felipe Calderon has deployed 25,000 soldiers across the country to wrest back territory from drug gangs, which have responded with bold attacks on the military and police. More than 4,000 people have been killed in turf wars, assassinations and shootouts since December 2006, when Calderon took office.

Source

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Kids caught up in drug war...

More kids caught in Mexico drug-war crossfire
Jul 10, `08 - Twelve-year-old Alexia Belen Moreno was afraid living in her father's house in Ciudad Juarez, where drug cartels are fighting a bloody war. She begged to move in with her mother just across the border in El Paso, Texas. Her parents agreed - but asked her to stay a few more weeks to finish school.

Three days later, Alexia was shot in the head blocks from her home in broad daylight. Authorities believe she was caught in the crossfire when gunmen killed two men riding with her in a car. Alexia's death is part of an alarming trend of children dying in Mexico's drug wars. Mexican officials say they don't track the number of child deaths from drug-gang violence. But newspaper tallies find nearly 50 kids have been killed this year - and a code of ethics in which hit men took care to avoid harming children appears to be evaporating.

In one of the more brazen cases, gunmen targeting a Tijuana police commander in January also killed his wife and 11-year-old daughter. In the same month in the same city, a 4-year-old boy died when his parents, mistakenly identified, were attacked. In the northern city of Fresnillo last month, a 13-year-old boy was killed in a shootout. In Ciudad Juarez, details are murky of Alexia's death. Authorities haven't even determined the identities of the slain men with whom Alexia and two friends were riding on June 10, although they believe they were involved in the drug trade.

The other children ran to safety but are too afraid to talk with reporters or investigators. Alexia's family is also in hiding and has refused to cooperate with police. Her parents' only public remarks came at the girl's funeral. Lorena Melendez Torres said her daughter had asked to move to El Paso the Saturday before she was killed. "The only thing I want is justice, justice for my daughter. She was so innocent. She was just a child," Melendez said.

More My Way News - More kids caught in Mexico drug-war crossfire

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Cops Fear Calif. Isle Is Turning Gangster Paradise...

Paradise Lost? Gangs Flood Island Resort
July 11, 2008 - Trouble in paradise? Cops on resort island off coast of California says gang is taking root

It seems even 22 miles of open ocean might not be keeping gangs off Catalina Island, a mist-shrouded outpost of Los Angeles County best known for its Hollywood history and crystal-clear harbors. Deputies on the isle say a fledgling gang called the Brown Pride Locos has gotten a foothold among the beaches, coves and tourist shops. A stabbing, burglaries and graffiti are being blamed on the gang, and deputies last month surprised teenagers practicing moves with knives on a dark bluff above Avalon's crescent-shaped bay.

A swift crackdown has netted at least six arrests and led to a pair of police raids — but it has also caused an uproar in the tiny community, where residents leave their doors unlocked and putt around in golf carts. Locals insist that LA's corrupting influences could never penetrate their paradise, where the stars of Hollywood's golden age frolicked and where dozens of classics, such as "Mutiny on the Bounty" and parts of "Jaws," were filmed.

Deputy David Mertens, a six-year gang enforcement veteran from Los Angeles, is trying to gain the upper hand before the violence escalates. "Before I transferred here, I came to do my interview and I was shocked," said Mertens, who was brought in with a new commander late last year. "I could not believe all these gangsters walking around and all these drug deals going on right in the open."

Mayor Bob Kennedy, a scuba shop owner who never locks his truck and doesn't have a house key, acknowledges that some teens on the island heckle tourists, smoke marijuana and do some tagging. But he worries that overzealous policing — and the gang label — could empty the daily ferries that bring as many as 15,000 visitors to the island on summer weekends. Catalina is accessible only by private plane or boat. A strict limit on cars means most residents cruise Avalon's 2 square miles by foot, bike or golf cart.

More ABC News: Paradise Lost? Gangs Flood Island Resort

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Mexican violence killin' kids...

Mexico gunmen kill youths, take hostages
Sun Jul 13, 2008 - Gunmen killed eight youths and a police chief and took dozens of restaurant patrons hostage for hours in two attacks in the drug gang-ridden state of Sinaloa, officials said on Sunday.

A group of hitmen sprayed four cars with bullets on a busy street in the city of Guamuchil in the early hours of Sunday, killing five young men and three female minors, a police source told Reuters. In an earlier attack on Saturday, six other armed men caused pandemonium in the Pacific port city of Mazatlan by taking refuge in a shopping mall to escape security forces after they shot dead local police chief Sixto Escobedo when he resisted their attempt to kidnap him.

The attackers, dressed in police uniforms, took some 40 people hostage in a restaurant inside the mall while they negotiated their escape with police. Drug gang killings in Mexico have soared to unprecedented levels, with some 1,700 people dead so far this year, as an army-led crackdown intensifies turf wars between rival gangs, whose hitmen are increasingly taking their battles public with daylight shootouts in busy streets.

President Felipe Calderon began his crackdown in late 2006 but opinion polls show many Mexicans worry he is failing to gain the upper hand on cartels, who have grown bold enough to post threats or recruiting advertisements on street banners. Hitmen, who are known to sometimes don police gear, often dump bodies with torture marks or severed heads in public, and while the vast majority of the victims are drug gang members, a few dozen civilians have been killed in street battles.

More Mexico gunmen kill youths, take hostages | International | Reuters

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Benedict Arnolds of the war on drugs...

Drug smugglers bribing U.S. agents on Mexico border
Tue Jul 15, 2008 - U.S. Border Patrol agent Reynaldo Zuniga was arrested last month lugging a bag of cocaine up from the Rio Grande, one of a growing number of law enforcement officers accused of taking bribes from drug gangs.

Former colleagues say Zuniga used to wait until agents in the south Texas town of Harlingen were distracted with paperwork, then slip down to the river and help smuggle in drugs from Mexico. The increasing use of bribes by Mexican drug cartels to corrupt U.S. agents comes as Washington is sending $400 million to help Mexico's army-led war on the trafficking gangs, whose brutal murders have surged to unprecedented levels.

"Zuniga was a good agent and a hard worker. I can't understand why he would do this. We're supposed to be protecting our borders," said Border Patrol agent Daniel Doty, a former colleague. Data on agents convicted of graft are not made public, but the U.S. government is probing hundreds of border corruption cases where a decade ago it saw a few dozen a year. The FBI-led Border Corruption Task Force says it is busier than ever.

"We've seen a sharp increase in investigations along the border over the past three years," said Andy Black, who oversees the San Diego task force, near the busy border crossing of San Ysidro. "We are talking about a minority of agents but they are a very significant threat, a weak link in efforts to secure the border."

More Drug smugglers bribing U.S. agents on Mexico border | International | Reuters

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Drug scene getting more violent...

Deported Gang Members Learned Gun Skills in US
Thursday, July 24, 2008 – Deported criminals are more violent after learning how to use semi-automatic weapons while in the United States, said an official from a Maryland company with a workforce that is 60 percent Hispanic.

Myles Gladstone, vice president of human resources at Miller & Long, a concrete construction firm with headquarters in Bethesda, Md., was speaking at a roundtable discussion hosted by the Americans Society and Council of the Americas (ASCA) on Wednesday. The company highlighted its Hispanic Integration Initiative, a project aimed at engaging private sector businesses in helping immigrants assimilate into the workplace. Gladstone said he makes frequent trips to Central America to help relatives of employees.

“The situation, particularly in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador is getting worse because of our unemployment here,” Gladstone said. “Because a lot of gang members are being sent back and being deported, and guess what? They’re going back, the difference from when they were there before but now they are going back, they know how to use semi-automatic weapons because they learned up here. And now they are back there and there is no work.” Gladstone said these criminals are even more dangerous after spending time in the United States.

“They become much more proficient at being criminals after their experience here,” he said. Gladstone was joined at the roundtable by Susan Minushkin, deputy director of the Pew Hispanic Center, who spoke about the center’s research on the social and demographic characteristics of Hispanics in the United States, including figures that show those living here number 46 million, a population that has tripled since 1980 and is predicted to triple again by 2050.

More CNSNews.com - Claim: Deported Gang Members Learned Gun Skills in US

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Mexican cops killin' each other...

Cop killed by hitman colleague
July 31, 2008 - A MEXICAN police officer working as a hit man for drug gangs killed one of his police colleagues in the violent border city of Ciudad Juarez.

Francisco Ventura was shot and killed by gunmen in two vehicles as he drove home early on Wednesday in the city, across the US border from El Paso, Texas. Federal police arrested three men following the shootout, including the police officer accused of leading the gunmen. Police declined to give more details but Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes said the discovery of a police officer working as a hit man showed the urgent need for a "total cleansing" of the city's police force.

"We know there are officers who are in the pay of organised crime and that is why we need to flush out bad police," Mr Reyes said. Despite the deployment of 3000 troops and federal police in Ciudad Juarez this year, more than 550 people have been killed in drug violence in the city, Mexico's most lethal front in a drug war that has killed 1900 people nationwide in 2008.

In July alone, 127 people have been killed in drug-related violence. Daylight gun battles have erupted on city streets and buildings set on fire as Mexico's most-wanted man, Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, fights drug baron Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, boss of the Juarez cartel, for control of Ciudad Juarez and its lucrative smuggling corridor into the US.

Cop killed by hitman colleague | NEWS.com.au

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Mexico's Drug Cartels Take Barbarous Turn: Targeting Bystanders
Wednesday, July 30, 2008; In Sinaloa, Carnage Brings Widespread Terror

The three teenagers started their big weekend singing "Happy Birthday" to the parish priest. The next day, they prayed for hours with their church youth group, then went on to a quinceañera, Mexico's archetypal 15th-birthday celebration. As the party wound down, they talked their parents into letting them go for a late-night cruise down the main drag in Guamuchil, a Saturday night ritual in this sleepy market town, friends and family say.

During that cruise, investigators believe the teens inadvertently blocked drug cartel assassins in hot pursuit of their enemies. Once police arrived in the wee hours of July 13, the assassins were gone but the three teens and a 12-year-old girl who was riding with them lay dead in their cars. Four others -- another teenager and three adults -- were dead in nearby cars. There were 539 bullet casings on the ground. The killings here -- a massacre of eight people who were not suspected of drug-trafficking ties -- punctuated a vicious turn in Mexico's drug war, a savage conflict between rival cartels and the federal government that has taken more than 7,000 lives in the past 2 1/2 years.

In the past, cartels have killed their rivals, as well as police and public officials. Occasionally even family members have been slain. Yet in recent weeks, an increasing number of innocent bystanders have been gunned down by suspected drug cartel hit men here in Sinaloa, a cartel stronghold on Mexico's Pacific coast, as well as in the brutally contested drug corridors along the U.S. border. In most instances, investigators believe, the victims were merely at the wrong place at the wrong time, gunned down by assassins who were once known for their precision but have now taken to wildly spraying bullets. The effect of the carnage has been widespread terror and a society afraid to demand justice.

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Crack bad for women...

Smoking Crack May Speed up HIV in Women
August 6, 2008 - Large Study Shows Female Crack Users Are Hit Hard by HIV

Women infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, who use crack cocaine risk deterioration in their immune status, development of "AIDS-defining" illnesses, and death from AIDS-related causes, even if they adhere to potent combination antiretroviral therapy used to treat HIV infection. The findings stem from a study of 1,686 HIV-infected women, 29 percent of whom used crack cocaine during the study period (April 1996 to September 2004). According to Dr. Judith A. Cook from the University of Illinois at Chicago and colleagues, 419 women died during the study period; 47 percent of these deaths were related to AIDS, 33 percent were not related to AIDS, and 20 percent were "indeterminate."

Results showed that persistent crack cocaine users were over three times as likely as non-crack users to die from AIDS-related causes. Among all 1,686 women, 32 percent were found to have a newly acquired AIDS-defining illness during the study period; significantly higher proportions of intermittent (42 percent) and persistent crack cocaine users (39 percent) reported a new illness during this time than did non-users (28 percent), according to the researchers.

Intermittent and persistent crack users in active and abstinent phases also showed greater decline in immune function and higher blood levels of HIV. This is the first study, the researchers say, linking use of crack cocaine in a large, national cohort of HIV-positive women to subsequent deterioration in immune status, failure of suppress the virus, development of AIDS-defining conditions, and death due to AIDS-related causes. "Our findings," Cook said, "suggest that a multi-pronged research agenda is needed to understand the effects of crack cocaine on HIV disease progression."

More ABC News: Smoking Crack May Speed up HIV in Women

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Druglords makin' our national parks dangerous...

Mexican cartels running pot farms in U.S. national forest
August 8, 2008 -- Drug czar stands in pot garden: "These aren't Cheech and Chong plants"; Authorities say Mexican drug cartels send illegals to grow marijuana in forest; $1 billion worth of marijuana plants destroyed in Sequoia National Forest, cops say; "They're willing to kill anybody who gets in their way," drug czar says

Beyond the towering trees that have stood here for thousands of years, an intense drug war is being waged. Illegal immigrants connected to Mexico's drug cartels are growing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of marijuana in the heart of one of America's national treasures, authorities say. It's a booming business that, federal officials say, feeds Mexico's most violent drug traffickers. "These aren't Cheech and Chong plants," said John Walters, director of the National Drug Control Policy. "People who farm now are not doing this for laughs, despite the fact Hollywood still thinks that. They're doing it to make a lot of money."

Walters spoke from a "marijuana garden" tucked deep into the Sequoia National Forest, a two- to four-hour hike from the nearest road, far removed from the giant sequoias the region is best known for. Ten thousand marijuana plants, some 5 feet tall, dotted the mountainside's steep terrain amid thick brush, often near streams. This garden's street value is an estimated $40 million, authorities said. Walters clutched three plants he said were worth $12,000 on the streets. "This is about serious criminal organizations," Walters said. "They're willing to kill anybody who gets in their way. They're taking money back to those who kill prosecutors, judges and law enforcement."

Over the past eight days, a federal, state and county law enforcement initiative called Operation LOCCUST has eradicated 420,000 marijuana plants here worth more than $1 billion on the street. By comparison, authorities eradicated 330,000 plants over the six-month growing season last month, said Lt. Mike Boudreaux of the Tulare County Sheriff's Department. Authorities have arrested 38 people and seized 29 automatic weapons, high-powered rifles and other guns, Boudreaux said.

More Mexican cartels running pot farms in U.S. national forest - CNN.com

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Aussies seize awesome haul...

Australian police claim 'world's largest seizure of ecstasy'
Fri Aug 8,`08 - Australian Customs and police said Friday they had seized 4.4 tonnes of ecstasy tablets worth nearly 400 million dollars, describing it as the biggest haul of the illicit drug anywhere in the world.

Police said the seizure of the drugs, which were concealed in tins of tomato shipped to Australia from Italy, had resulted in the arrests of 21 people across the country beginning in pre-dawn raids. Authorities had worked for more than a year to track the syndicate behind the drugs after Customs discovered the ecstasy hidden inside some 3,000 tins, each weighing about 1.5 kilograms (3.3 pounds), in June 2007.

Customs officials replaced the ecstasy with an inert substance and monitored the consignment but the arrests were brought closer two weeks ago when a coffee bean shipment carrying 150 kilograms of cocaine was detected in Melbourne. Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty said the drugs were part of a global syndicate and the seizures would be "a major disruption to transnational organised crime, both in this country and abroad."

The ecstasy haul, estimated to be worth at least 440 million dollars (394 million US) had been kept secret until now to allow the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and Customs to carry out their investigations. "There have been 185,000 telephone intercepts in this operation, there have been 400 members of the AFP deployed to this operation, there have been 10,000 hours of surveillance deployed to this operation to find the perpetrators of this world's largest seizure and importation into our country," Keelty said.

Keelty said Australian and European police were attempting to stop the syndicate from trafficking and that search warrants had already been issued in Belgium and the Netherlands. "It is classic organised crime and we have done our best to shut down the syndicate," he told reporters. Keelty said the syndicate was allegedly still able to traffic drugs even though it had lost the massive 4.4 tonne shipment, underlining the apparent demand for illicit substances in Australia.

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