cash

TIJUANA, Mexico — Every day, Mexican drug cartel accomplices in the U.S. shove proceeds from U.S. drug sales into their shoes, tape it to their torsos, stash it under dashboards — or just wire it electronically to Mexico. It all adds up to $25 billion a year they smuggle out of the U.S.

This compares with just $61 million seized in the past year — the $3 million blocked in banks through a highly touted U.S. Treasury Department program aimed at starving Mexican drug cartels, the Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act, and another $58 million seized by border inspectors.

The figures suggest that authorities are halting just 25 cents of every $100 in cartel profits — money that is fueling a brutal war that has killed 14,000 people in three years.

Bundles of $100 bills that add up to billions are sneaked from the U.S. into Mexico each year and then laundered into ostensibly legitimate funds at car dealerships, banks, pharmacies, restaurants and resorts.

That money pays Mexican farmers to grow more marijuana and Colombian smugglers to sneak in more cocaine. It bribes Mexican soldiers and U.S. Border Patrol agents, and pays assassins and mercenaries to take out rival smugglers or would-be prosecutors.

"This is the brilliance of the drug cartels. They pay ordinary people to get cash across the border for them, and then easily launder it into working capital to build and expand their violent and illicit operations," said Louise Shelley, who directs the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center at George Mason University just outside Washington, D.C.

8 major cartels in Mexico

There are eight major drug cartels operating in Mexico,and their methods of moving cash south are surprisingly similar, according to AP interviews with law enforcement agents and a review of court records on both sides of the border.

U.S. dealers are given drugs on credit and, under threat of kidnapping, attacks on their families or even death, they sell their inventory and pay the smugglers back within a week or two. The smugglers then pay someone in the U.S. to drive the cash to a "stash house" near the border, typically in Phoenix, San Diego, El Paso or Houston.

There, the cash is broken into increments of $50,000 to $300,000, lowering the risk of losing an entire load in one bust, and farmed out to trusted couriers.

They use the same methods people use smuggling drugs north: Money is hidden in the floorboards of buses and inside vehicle panels, tucked behind vehicle firewalls and inside spare tires, or stashed in custom-made compartments. Couriers wearing loose-fitting clothing tape stacks of $100 bills to their bodies.

If caught by Customs and Border Protection agents, the couriers often can forfeit the money and simply drive on; Mexican officials don't normally arrest people for failing to report money coming in. For the cartels, that risk is part of the cost of doing business.

"Cartels expect that we are going to take some of that money off," said Douglas Coleman, assistant special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration in Phoenix.

In 1969, officials stopped minting $500, $1,000, $5,000 and $10,000 bills, making smuggling harder. That leaves the $100 note as the highest denomination — a packet of 100 of those bills is less than a half-inch thick and contains $10,000. One billion dollars fits squarely atop a standard shipping pallet.

Money is also wired south

The other way to get money south is to wire it.

Since 1972, the United States has implemented a series of restrictions, including a requirement that financial institutions report deposits of $10,000 or more.

Still, authorities believe some drug smugglers use U.S. banks to move their money. In a typical scheme known as "smurfing," drug smugglers break large cash loads into less conspicuous increments, deposit them into numerous bank accounts in the U.S. and withdraw from those accounts at Mexican banks.

This approach, like other money-laundering methods, has drawbacks. Deposits can't be over $10,000, smugglers have to involve lots of people, or "smurfs," and the transactions create paper trails that can draw attention.

In another scheme, smugglers give legitimate bank account holders a small cut to use their accounts to deposit in the United States and withdraw in Mexico. Smugglers also are starting to ship cash through the postal service and shipping companies, allowing them to track it from start to finish.

It's 10% of Mexico economy

Once the money gets to Mexico, the cartels put it to work. About 10 percent of Mexico's economy — the world's 13th-largest — is based on cartel operations, analysts say.

Mexican lawmakers have refused to pass anti-laundering laws such as reporting requirements when people pay cash for mansions and luxury cars or regulations for salaries paid in cash.

"In Mexico there are still some very easy ways to launder money, and there is great reluctance among lawmakers to change that," said Ramon Garcia Gibson, an expert on financial controls. "It's everywhere: Businesses that aren't doing any business except to receive cartel cash and put it in the bank."

carnage

Mexico's brutal drug war has played out all across the country. But no place has been as hard hit as Ciudad Juarez, the industrial city just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas.

Juarez is a city torn apart by more than just murder. It is a city struggling unsuccessfully to find hope in a place flooded with heavily armed security forces, but where most people say they don't feel secure.

The wave of killings that has grown steadily over the last two years has spawned a secondary crime wave of kidnapping and extortion. The violence has left the city in a state of shock.

In downtown Juarez, Diana Martinez placed a small black cross with the name of her brother on a memorial banner to the thousands of people killed since 2007.

"I think we are now living in a state of paranoia," Martinez says. "All of the inhabitants of Ciudad Juarez, even the children. It's something that's completely upturned our lives. I don't feel secure in the street or even in my house."

Her brother, Rafael, sold used cars. He was gunned down in May in what Martinez believes was a robbery.

"He was a very young man — 24 years old," she says. "He leaves behind a family and three kids. It's a tragedy just like the thousands and thousands of tragedies that are repeating here every day in Juarez."

His twins, who are turning 6 this year, still don't really understand that their father is dead, she says. Even when they go to his grave they seem to think he is away on a business trip.

Unfulfilled Promises

Officials had promised things would get better in Juarez this year. Throughout 2008, two of Mexico's most powerful drug cartels fought for control of smuggling routes into El Paso.

In 2009, the Mexican military took over the Juarez police department. President Felipe Calderon sent in thousands of federal police and soldiers to regain control of the city of 1.5 million people. But the violence has only gotten worse.

Almost 2,600 people have been killed in Juarez this year, making it the murder capital of the hemisphere and giving it a per capita homicide rate more than 17 times greater than that of Los Angeles.

"The last two years have been just unbelievable — the level of violence we are living each day. The level of violence is just incredible," says Nelson Armenta, who runs a small seafood restaurant in downtown Juarez.

After Armenta was held up twice in one month, he hired a security guard to twirl a baton in front of his restaurant.

"These young guys, you know, 17 years old carrying guns. That got us worried. That's why we got the security guard," Armenta says.

Mexican soldiers with automatic weapons also patrol in front of his restaurant. Truckloads of federal police with machine guns mounted on their pickups roll through the streets, but the violence has been increasing.

Every day, Armenta reads in the paper about businesses getting shot up or burned down for not paying bribes demanded of them.

"As a businessman, I used to be afraid. I used to be afraid that something might happen to our families — kidnap, ransoms, extortions," he says. "And we just realized that we cannot be afraid of that. I mean, it's not about religion, but it's about faith. It's about, if that happens, well the least we can do is just move on."

City Of Dreams

To Americans Juarez may look like the ugly, dusty, beat-up stepsister of El Paso. But to poor Mexicans, it's a land of promise.

For decades people have flocked to the low-paying but plentiful jobs in the border factories called maquiladoras. Each day a long-line of job seekers extends outside the state attorney general's office as people apply to undergo mandatory criminal background checks for employment.

Other enterprising souls are hawking burritos, tacos and cold drinks to the people stranded in line.

Yet at the same time that the city's murder rate has skyrocketed, so has unemployment.

Jorge Podrosa, executive director of local association of maquiladoras, says the global economic downturn hit the Juarez factories incredibly hard.

"Since 2008 to 2009, we lost around 125,000 jobs," Podrosa says. That represents an almost 50-percent decline in factory jobs, the city's main source of legal employment.

Tourism is also down, a result of tighter border controls and the bad publicity generated by the deadly drug war. The U.S. military has ordered its personnel not to enter Juarez without special permission. Despite the restriction, a U.S. airman was gunned down along with five other people in a Juarez strip club in November.

The city is trying to confront the situation. The mayor has doubled the size of the local police force. He also has opened subsidized day care centers for the children of factory workers.

'A Trash Can'

But Clara Rojas, who teaches political rhetoric at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez, predicts it will take decades for the city to recover.

The violence stems from deep social fissures, she says, and until those are fixed she predicts the killings will continue.

She traces the roots of the current violence to the murders of hundreds of women in the 1990s that are still unsolved. Most of the victims were young women, many of them factory workers or students, murdered and in some cases tortured and sexually abused.

Rojas says that impunity for that wave of killings sent a signal to the drug cartels and other thugs that Juarez is "fertile ground" for criminal activity.

"There is no way you can change anything if everybody thinks this city is a trash can for whatever they want to do," Rojas says.ca

no surely not

A former U.S. Border Patrol agent was arrested Friday and charged with accepting bribes from drug traffickers in Southern Arizona.

Federal prosecutors say Yamilkar Fierros of Tucson was taken into custody by FBI special agents.

A four-count indictment returned Wednesday by a federal grand jury alleges that Fierros accepted $1,000 for providing a drug trafficker with a law-enforcement-sensitive map of San Rafael Valley on Sept. 30. The map showed roads, trails, landmarks and terminology used by the Border Patrol to counter drug traffickers.

The indictment says Fierros accepted $3,000 on Oct. 2 for providing a drug trafficker with a list of 109 sensor locations in the Sonoita area.

CHOAS I LOVE IT

CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico — The hit men moved in on their target, shot him dead and then disappeared in a matter of seconds. It would have been a perfect case for José Ibarra Limón, one of this violent border city’s most dogged crime investigators — had he not been the victim.

ARRESTED, BUT NOT A CRIMINAL Alejandra González Licea, a linguistics professor, was held for months because the authorities mistook an uncle’s cash gift for drug profits.

Mexico has never been particularly adept at bringing criminals to justice, and the drug war has made things worse. Investigators are now swamped with homicides and other drug crimes, most of which they will never crack. On top of the standard obstacles — too little expertise, too much corruption — is one that seems to grow by the day: outright fear of becoming the next body in the street.

Mr. Ibarra was killed on July 27 in what his bosses at the federal attorney general’s office consider an assassination related to a case he was investigating. As if to prove the point, less than a month later, one of the lawyers who had worked for Mr. Ibarra also turned up dead. Two days afterward, an investigator named to replace Mr. Ibarra insisted on being transferred out of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico’s murder capital.

The current prosecutor investigating Mr. Ibarra’s cases is working anonymously, his or her name kept secret by the government.

The Mexican government knows that revamping its problem-plagued justice system is an essential part of breaking the cartels that control vast areas of Mexico. Major efforts are under way to make the judiciary faster and fairer, and the United States has contributed millions of dollars to help bring more criminals to justice.

But even with training programs by American lawyers and judges, American aid to improve forensics and screen more effectively for corruption, as well as other cross-border initiatives, the traffickers and the cumulative pressures they are putting on the judiciary are straining it as never before.

“Obviously what happened affects us,” said Hector García Rodríguez, the federal prosecutor in Juárez and the supervisor of the slain investigator. “We’re still working. We can’t stop. But we know the dangers we face.”

President Felipe Calderón points to the arrests of more than 50,000 people on drug charges since he began his antidrug offensive in December 2006. Many of the arrests appear to have come from top-notch detective work. Other suspects, though, are quietly released after they have been paraded before the news media.

The federal government refused to provide statistics on how many arrests had resulted in convictions, how many suspects were still under investigation or how many arrests had proved to be mistakes. But independent reviews by scholars suggest that only about a quarter of crimes in Mexico are ever reported and that only a small fraction ever result in convictions.

Compounding matters is the sheer number of crimes, especially murders. On a single September night in Ciudad Juárez, 18 men were shot to death in a drug treatment center near the border, more than the number of killings all year long in El Paso, just across the Texas border.

“Law enforcement is overwhelmed,” said David A. Shirk, a professor at the University of San Diego and the principal investigator for the Justice in Mexico Project, a binational research initiative. “If you have murders with 13 bodies one day and then you have 4 more the next, there’s not a lot of investigation into who pulled the trigger specifically.”

Fear Gets in the Way

One of the two dozen or so cases that Mr. Ibarra had been investigating involved the killing of a journalist, Armando Rodríguez Carreón, 40, who had produced a string of scoops as the longtime crime reporter for the newspaper El Diario. Mr. Rodríguez was shot to death last Nov. 13 as he prepared to take his 8-year-old daughter to school. She was at his side and saw her father struck by at least 10 bullets.

“It was similar to hundreds of homicides we’ve had here,” remarked Mr. García, Mr. Ibarra’s supervisor. “It was an execution.”

It is also similar in that the perpetrators remain at large. Fear prevents many cases from being solved because investigators hesitate to dig too deeply, and witnesses refuse to talk.

“Nobody cooperates with anything,” Mr. García complained. “They’re too afraid. Nobody wants to say what they saw. Nobody wants to give you a plate number.”

Mexico is promoting confidential telephone lines and rewards to encourage witnesses, but resistance lingers, especially when news reports circulate about threats made to those who do call in. And there is considerable doubt that the reward money is worth the risk.

The attacks on investigators only magnify the problem.

“If you had a difficult case, you went to him and said, ‘Ibarra, what do you think?’ ” Mr. García said. Now in trying to solve Mr. Ibarra’s murder, his colleagues wonder aloud how he might have pursued his killers, possibly four men in all, who shot him many times in the head with .45-caliber and 9-millimeter weapons.

The slain journalist’s wife, Blanca Martínez, said that she had met once with Mr. Ibarra, but that she did not think he had been murdered for closing in on her husband’s killers, despite his reputation for solving difficult crimes.

“I don’t think he was really investigating,” she said. Prosecutors had asked once to interview her young daughter, a witness, but had never followed up, Ms. Martínez said.

Pedro Torres, Mr. Rodríguez’s editor and close friend, was similarly unimpressed with the government’s effort to find the killers of his top police reporter.

Investigators waited for months before visiting the newsroom, interviewing some of Mr. Rodríguez’s co-workers and getting copies of his articles. The government has not yet established whether Mr. Rodríguez’s killing stemmed from his work as a police reporter, infuriating his colleagues, who are convinced that such a connection is clear.

“He’s the godfather of my child,” Mr. Torres said. “I’ve known him for years. They’ve never talked to me. What kind of investigation is that?”

Slipshod Investigations

One of the forensic specialists who photograph bodies, lift fingerprints and count spent bullets at Juárez homicide scenes complained that by the time he arrived at a site, significant tampering had already taken place.

“The soldiers come in and walk over everything,” complained the specialist, who spoke anonymously in an out-of-the-way steak restaurant because his supervisors had not authorized him to give an interview. “They leave their fingerprints all around. They want to know who died, so they move the body. They kick the bullets. They don’t realize they’re contaminating the crime scene.”

Thousands of soldiers, deployed by the president in his war against the cartels, patrol the streets of Juárez alongside the local police. Trained to take on enemy combatants, they are far less familiar with the sanctity of crime scenes, the rules of evidence and other basics of law enforcement.

Many police officers also meddle with crime scenes, sometimes out of incompetence, but sometimes to throw off the investigation or to enrich themselves.

“If the victim’s watch is missing, that could be important because it could mean it was a robbery,” the forensic specialist said. “But we can’t rule out that one of the police officers at the scene took it.”

The joint military-police mission now combating traffickers in Juárez presents a more positive picture. It cites the recent arrests of three men suspected of being hired killers, who in August implicated themselves and a fourth suspect in 211 homicides, an eye-popping number even in Mexico.

To trumpet the breakthrough, the government took out newspaper ads listing all the people the suspects were accused of killing. One man alone was linked to 101 murders.

The authorities said the arrests resulted from ballistics investigations, which are modern enough here in Chihuahua State that the El Paso Police Department used them for years for its own investigations. But the men also confessed to the murders, the authorities said, and questions were raised in the local news media about whether the detainees had been coerced, a frequent problem in Mexico.

“We solve our crimes with evidence, and they solve them with confessions,” said the El Paso County sheriff, Richard D. Wiles. “We have strict rules to follow on how to get confessions. The rules are looser over there.”

In a recent assessment of Mexico’s adherence to human rights, the State Department noted that 21 torture complaints and 580 complaints of cruel or degrading treatment had been made against the Mexican authorities in 2008, a significant increase from the year before.

And yet, the report said: “Since 2007, we are not aware that any official has ever been convicted of torture, giving rise to concern about impunity. Despite the law’s provisions to the contrary, police and prosecutors have attempted to justify an arrest by forcibly securing a confession of a crime.”

Without a Trace

Along the border, many victims are never found, leaving relatives — and investigators — in a state of limbo.

Fernando Ocegueda Flores, a founder of an advocacy group in Tijuana for relatives of the disappeared, felt an odd mixture of despair and relief in January, when the police announced that a suspect, Santiago Meza López, had admitted to disposing of the remains of 300 bodies for a drug cartel by dissolving them in barrels of lye.

Mr. Ocegueda thought that maybe his son, abducted in 2007, had been one of the victims of the Pozolero, a nickname for Mr. Meza that translates roughly as the stew maker. Mr. Ocegueda thought his years of trying to learn his son’s fate might end.

Federal authorities took Mr. Meza to Mexico City for questioning and began testing some remains. But the bones were so corroded by the lye that no DNA was found, the authorities have said.

Mr. Ocegueda contends that the investigators should be doing more, like digging up the yard where Mr. Meza said he had disposed of the bodies after boiling them, to search for more bones to test. The yard is guarded by the federal police, but a human jaw bone with a tooth attached and various suspicious mounds of earth were visible inside.

Frustrated, Mr. Ocegueda said that if the site was not properly investigated soon, he and other relatives planned to storm the place with shovels and begin digging themselves.

But a coroner’s investigator who has reviewed some of the remains from such barrels in other cases said the traffickers covered their tracks well.

“You can’t tell by looking that it’s a human being,” said the investigator, who was not authorized to speak publicly. “It’s a glob of something, and the DNA is gone.”

Cross-Border Police Work

Every month, law enforcement officials from both sides of the border, whether from the F.B.I. or the Tijuana police, gather to talk shop at a chain restaurant in southern California.

“Without cooperation, so many cases would sit still,” said the California investigator who convenes the sessions, Val Jimenez, executive director of the International Law Enforcement Officers Association. Cross-border policing has caught child molesters, car thieves and murderers.

It also helped solve one particularly grisly missing person case.

Daniel LaPorte, 27, disappeared after heading across the border to Baja California from San Diego last year. Eventually, his green Cadillac was found south of Tijuana, outside Rosarito Beach, with four dead people in and around it. None were Mr. LaPorte.

As the family’s private investigator looked into the case with police officers from San Diego and Baja California, a Mexican detective mentioned that a barrel apparently containing human remains had been discovered not far from the location of the quadruple homicide.

Luck played a role in identifying the remains. It had rained heavily after the barrel had been abandoned on a remote hillside, investigators said. The barrel had fallen over and some of the bones had been washed away by the rain, diluting the corrosive solution and preventing all the DNA from being stripped away. Laboratory tests conducted in Tijuana showed that the remains were Mr. LaPorte’s.

Investigators eventually determined that Mr. LaPorte had been involved in trafficking marijuana from Mexico to Rhode Island, some of it in surfboards. He had probably bought several tons of marijuana a year, the family’s investigator said.

Mr. Jimenez and some of the other law enforcement officials who work on these joint investigations are sympathetic to the policing challenges their Mexican counterparts face.

“We don’t think we’re going to die when we go to work, but over there it is a real possibility,” Mr. Jimenez said. “A lot of them want to do good police work, but there are some cases they can’t do because of the pressure of the cartels.”

Arresting the Wrong People

Alejandra González Licea said the only conceivable ties she had ever had to drug trafficking were purely academic ones. A linguistics professor who wrote her thesis on narcocorridos, the Mexican ballads that often extol the exploits of drug bosses, Ms. González found herself blindfolded and handcuffed by soldiers this year and interrogated about which drug cartel was employing her.

Her answer — the Autonomous University of Baja California — did not impress her interrogators. The professor and her husband endured months of detention before the charges were quietly dropped. The $28,000 in cash they were caught carrying was a gift from an uncle in the United States to help them remodel their home, it was determined, not illicit drug profits they were laundering.

After her initial detention, Ms. González was led to a news conference, where journalists were gathered to photograph her. She stood next to her husband and two men she did not know. On the table before them, much to her surprise, was nearly half a million dollars.

It turned out that she was being grouped with two money-laundering suspects arrested the same night with a much larger amount of cash. It would take two and a half months before a judge would throw out the case against her and her husband for lack of proof.

Mexico has approved a sweeping overhaul of its judiciary to replace its closed-door judicial proceedings with trials in which defendants like Ms. González are considered innocent until proved guilty. But revamping the system is no easy feat. It requires retraining lawyers and judges, rebuilding courtrooms and improving forensic technology, all while trying to keep on top of a flood of new cases.

Police forces are also getting an overhaul. Officers in Tijuana and Juárez, two of the most violence-prone cities, have been fired en masse after being linked to organized crime. The two federal police agencies have been reorganized under a single commander. Beyond that, a new police training institute has been established and the government has set up a national database to share information and intelligence.

Still, Ms. González, now back at her teaching job, shook her head when asked about the Mexican government’s competence. She doubts the official statistics, since she figures she was one of the 50,000 people that the president cited as drug suspects.

“They didn’t even find out that I wrote my thesis on narcocorridos,” she said of those who were prosecuting her. “Good thing they didn’t find out.”

Doing What Police Won’t

The authorities discourage civilians from investigating their own cases because of the obvious dangers involved. But many grow tired of waiting for the police and, having no luck with private investigators, conduct their own inquiries.

Cristina Palacios, president of the Citizens’ Association Against Impunity, recounted how one of her members, a Tijuana woman whose brother had been kidnapped, offered a reward herself, furious at how little had been done to investigate the disappearance.

Shadowy men contacted the woman, and she agreed to be taken away with a blindfold, Ms. Palacios said. Soon the woman found herself in a room where a man tied to a chair was being beaten by a group of men. The man confessed to killing her brother.

The next day, the woman, who declined to speak on the record about what occurred, saw in the newspaper that a body had been found. It looked like the man in the chair, Ms. Palacios said.

Mr. Ocegueda, in search of his missing son, had a similar experience. One night, in the course of his personal investigation, he allowed himself to be led away with his eyes covered and driven for about 40 minutes by a man he met who had links to traffickers.

Eventually, he was led into a home, where he said a gruff man told him, “You’re very brave to come here.”

Apparently impressed by his gumption, the man gave Mr. Ocegueda a shot of whiskey and told him that his son had been killed and would never be found. His remains had been destroyed in lye, the man said.

But Mr. Ocegueda, continuing to investigate, later found another organized crime figure, who led him in another direction. This time, he was told his son was alive and working for traffickers. Now, he does not know what to think.

“The police are supposed to be doing this, not me,” he said. “But they don’t want to investigate because they don’t want to solve these crimes. They might be killed if they find the truth. I don’t care if they kill me.”

guns for drugs

In Mexico, the government's three-year war against drug cartels has claimed more than 11,000 lives, snared thousands of alleged criminals and brought down scores of politicians.

One of the newer drug cartels being pursued by President Felipe Calderon's administration is La Familia — a group that mixes politics, spiritualism and violence in ways never before seen in Mexico.

La Familia was born in the rugged, impoverished hills of Michoacan, a southern state that stretches from the Pacific Ocean through the Sierra Madre, almost to the capital, Mexico City.

In the port of Lazaro Cardenas, vendors sell pirated movies and CDs at makeshift stalls along the main street. Further inland, methamphetamine labs and marijuana patches are tucked into the densely forested mountains. Michoacan has become a flash point in Calderon's battle against organized crime.

Recently, Mexican authorities paraded Miguel Angel Beraza Villa, known as "The Truck," before the media. Beraza is accused of being one of the top leaders of La Familia. Mexican prosecutors say he moved a half-ton of methamphetamine into the United States each month.

Miguel Angel Beraza Villa, known as "The Truck," is escorted before the media Aug. 3 in Mexico City. Mexican prosecutors say Beraza moved a half-ton of methamphetamine into the United States each month.

Miguel Angel Beraza Villa, known as "The Truck," is escorted before the media Aug. 3 in Mexico City. Mexican prosecutors say Beraza moved a half-ton of methamphetamine into the United States each month.

To arrest Beraza, heavily armed federal commandos stormed a church in a small city in central Michoacan in the middle of Mass. Two Blackhawk helicopters hovered overhead.

'The Family'

Unlike some of the Mexican cartels that have existed for decades, La Familia burst into the headlines in 2006, when one of its members threw five severed heads onto a dance floor in Morelia, the capital of Michoacan.

Tensions between the Mexican authorities and La Familia escalated this summer when the government arrested dozens of local politicians, accusing them of working for the cartel. Then, in July, cartel gunmen abducted 12 federal police officers and dumped their tortured bodies in a pile by the side of a highway.

La Familia originally claimed to be a local defense force, protecting Michoacan from neighboring drug traffickers. But it has since grown into one of the most extensive criminal enterprises in the country.

"This cartel is trying to capture the hearts and minds of the population," says Jorge Chabat, a security expert at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics in Mexico City. He says La Familia is unique in that it claims to be working for the good of the local people. The group runs ads in newspapers and leaves messages, particularly at murder scenes, declaring that it is cleaning up Michoacan.

"It combines some self-help techniques with spiritualism and some, apparently, family values and moral values — which is a kind of contradiction because these guys are very violent," Chabat says.

A soldier watches the burning of a clandestine methamphetamine laboratory, allegedly run by Mexico's "La Familia" drug cartel, July 28 near the town of Uruapan in Michoacan state, Mexico.

A soldier watches the burning of a clandestine methamphetamine laboratory, allegedly run by Mexico's "La Familia" drug cartel, July 28 near the town of Uruapan in Michoacan state, Mexico.

The cartel takes drug addicts, rehabilitates them and turns them into drug dealers. "The name, La Familia — 'The Family' — suggests that these guys are presenting themselves as some sort of moral order, criticizing the disorder that prevails in Mexican society," Chabat says.

He says they're trying to act like a government — even imposing taxes. And this is part of the reason Calderon's administration has gone after them so aggressively.

A Shadow Over The City

Michoacan has what every drug-trafficking organization in the world covets — a major transportation corridor linking the supplier of its product directly to its primary market. The port of Lazaro Cardenas is one of the largest on the Pacific Coast, and a rail line operated by Kansas City Southern runs from its modern docks all the way to Laredo, Texas.

But this isn't a normal port town. Tension is in the air here. Federal police patrol the streets in dark blue pickups. The mayor is in prison, accused of working for La Familia. The city's congressman — who happens to be the governor's brother — is a fugitive from justice.

The afternoon edition of the newspaper, La Noticia de Michoacan, spins through the presses in a small garage just off the main street. But you won't find investigative articles in this or any of the other local papers about organized crime.

Francisco Rivera Cruz, the editor of La Noticia de Michoacan, inherited the job last year when his predecessor was gunned down and dumped in a ditch. Rivera says they don't investigate issues around crime or security. And they only report information that is released by the police.

The whispered explanation for the previous editor's murder is that he moved too aggressively to cover a grenade attack on a crowd of Independence Day revelers last year. Authorities pointed fingers at La Familia, but the cartel hung up banners blaming its rival, the Zetas, for the grenades that killed eight people and injured more than 100 others.

Manuel Gutierrez, a pastor at a Pentecostal church in Lazaro Cardenas, says life in the city is difficult right now. "I don't think this is the only city, but maybe one of the most important cities because of the port," he says. "It's a really big door to the country — to Mexico."

People are afraid to go out after dark, he says, and the drug trade hangs like a shadow over the city.

Beyond Drugs

Federal prosecutors say La Familia's influence goes far beyond narcotics: The cartel dominates the sale of pirated DVDs, which are for sale everywhere in Mexico. They move migrants hoping to get into the United States. And like many other criminal groups facing cash-flow problems in the midst of the current drug war, they run kidnapping and extortion rackets.

A man who sells tamales on the street from a large stainless steel pot says he was held for four days in a house in Lazaro Cardenas. He doesn't want his name disclosed for fear of retaliation.

He says about a dozen other people were being held in the house, and his captors regularly beat them.

"You could hear the screaming of all the people," he says, "and there were two people who'd been shot dead there."

Eventually, his family came up with the 100,000 peso ransom his captors were demanding. That's about $7,500 — a small fortune for a tamale vendor.

He says "comerciantes" — people selling things on the streets — have to pay rent to the local gangs. Vendors and shopkeepers can be forced to pay anywhere from a few to hundreds of dollars a month just to stay in business.

In this way, La Familia has expanded beyond just a drug cartel. It has seeped into the economic and social fabric of Michoacan.

piling up

ice found nine bodies in nine hours Wednesday in the violence-plagued Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, including a beheaded man and four people who were shot to death in a car.

A Chihuahua state attorney general's spokesman says the victims died in five incidents Wednesday morning.

He said the bullet-riddled bodies of three men and one woman, all unidentified, were discovered in a car shortly after midnight.

About an hour later, police found the body of a man who was shot repeatedly outside a bar.

The toll rose to six just after sunrise with the discovery of a gunshot victim lying by the side of a road.

Later in the morning, police found two bodies, one beheaded, wrapped in a blanket.

The ninth victim turned up in a car.

Ciudad Juarez is Mexico's most violent city, with more than 1,600 murders this year.

my kind of treatment center

Authorities have closed 10 unregistered drug rehabilitation centers in Ciudad Juarez and say they are going after others they fear may serve as cover or recruiting grounds for drug trafficking gangs in the violence-plagued city across from El Paso, Texas.

Gunmen have slaughtered 28 people this month at two rehab centers in Ciudad Juarez in separate attacks that investigators blame on a bloody struggle between rival drug gangs.

Sergio Belmonte, the spokesman for the Ciudad Juarez mayor's office, says there is evidence traffickers are recruiting members through unregulated rehab centers.

"There are unregistered centers that they (traffickers) set up themselves, they are recruitment centers, because their most faithful soldiers are the addicts," Belmonte said. "They give them drugs, draw them together and recruit them."

Chihuahua state Gov. Jose Reyes Baeza said that while there are legitimate rehab centers, "there are others that have taken advantage of the situation to provide cover, while really doing other things."

Reyes Baeza said irregularities have been discovered in at least 12 other centers, including a lack of permits, and he pledged "we are going to close" them.

Chihuahua state authorities said records showed the center attacked on Tuesday, Anexo de Vida, had not been registered with the government and may have been operating clandestinely. Ten other centers in Ciudad Juarez have been closed for operating illegally, although police would not say whether they may have been run by gangs.

Most of those closures occurred after a Sept. 2 attack that killed 18 people at a drug rehab center, which was not among those closed for being unregistered.

Drug-rehabilitation professionals worried that authorities could exaccerbate the very social problems of addiction they are trying to fight.

"It is dangerous to demonize these centers. ... If these patients are put back on the streets, they are invariably going to return to their old behaviors," said Alonso, an employee of the Ave Fenix recovery center, where neither counselors nor addicts are identified by their last names to avoid the stigma associated with addiction.

"Instead of closing them, the right thing to do would be to train them (the centers) so they can function correctly," Alonso said.

Families have pulled relatives out of rehab centers because of the attacks. At least 41 people have been killed in attacks on Ciudad Juarez rehab clinics in the past year.

Javier, a 22-year-old drug addict, who refused to give his last name for fear of reprisals, has been in and out of rehab trying to cure a drug habit that began with marijuana at 14 and later progressed to cocaine. He is worried about the closures.

"There are rehab centers that really give you help, from the heart," he said in an interview at the city's Amarr clinic.

Authorities have blamed the latest shootings on a rivalry between the Sinaloa and Juarez cartels, although investigators have named no suspects.

The battle for both the local drug market and lucrative smuggling routes into the United States have made Ciudad Juarez the most dangerous city in Mexico, with at least 1,647 people killed so far this year.

That turf war, however, has changed since the government sent thousands of army troops and federal police earlier this year to patrol the city, Belmonte said.

Cartel lieutenants who once roamed the city in convoys of flashy SUVs, staging daylight shootouts on main boulevards, are now increasingly forced to take their battles to gritty back streets, in attacks that target lower-level operatives.

That may help explain why attacks on clinics have increased, Belmonte said.

"This is a war that was going between the commanders, the leaders, and that is why they fought it out in the streets and the shopping malls," he said.

"The joint operation has inhibited the battle they were openly fighting ... changing the method of attack," he added. "It is now directed at the base level, the dealers."

In an unrelated attack, four people – including a police officer and a 3-year-old boy – were injured when gunmen open fire on a people leaving an Independence Day parade in San Bartolo Tutotepec, a small town in the central state of Hidalgo, the state Public Safety Department said Thursday.

Police arrested a suspect in Wednesday's shooting but had not established a motive.

side effects of the drug war:corruption

As a high-ranking U.S. anti-drug official, Richard Padilla Cramer held frontline posts in the war on Mexico's murderous cartels. He led an office of two-dozen agents in Arizona and was the attache for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Guadalajara, Mexico.

While in Mexico, however, Cramer also served as a secret ally of drug lords, according to federal investigators.

Identified informants

Cramer allegedly advised traffickers on law enforcement tactics and pulled secret files to help them identify turncoats. He charged $2,000 for a Drug Enforcement Administration document that was e-mailed to a suspect in Miami in August, authorities say.

"Cramer was responsible for advising the (drug traffickers) how U.S. law enforcement works with warrants and record checks as well as how DEA conducts investigations to include 'flipping subjects,' " or recruiting informants, according to a criminal complaint filed by a DEA agent.

DEA agents arrested Cramer, 56, at his home in Arizona on Sept. 4.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney in Miami said yesterday that she could not comment, but said cases that begin with complaints usually go before a grand jury.

Cramer's duties as the ICE attache in Guadalajara included serving as a liaison with Mexican police, assisting investigations and gathering intelligence.

But the investigation revealed that Cramer also worked for "a very high-level drug lord," according to federal officials. The 26-year government veteran became a full-time adviser to traffickers after retiring from ICE in January 2007, according to the complaint.

A trafficker "convinced Cramer to retire ... and begin working directly for (him) in drug trafficking and money laundering," according to the complaint.

Cramer sold secret documents that he obtained from active U.S. agents, an aspect of the case still under investigation.

Cross-border corruption

The charges underscore the corruptive power of the cartels, which have bought off Mexican politicians, police chiefs and military commandos. Drug lords have reached across the international line with increasing ease, corrupting U.S. border inspectors and agents to help smuggle cocaine north. In 2006, the FBI chief in El Paso, Texas, was convicted of charges related to concealing his friendship with an alleged drug kingpin.

Cramer stands out because his rank and foreign post made his work especially sensitive, officials said. Stunned colleagues described him as a well-regarded investigator who spoke fluent Spanish and operated skillfully in the array of U.S. and Mexican agencies at the border when he ran the ICE office in the action-packed border zone of Nogales, Ariz., his hometown.

"It came as a complete shock," said Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada in Arizona. "I have been in law enforcement at the border 42 years and I have seen some strange things, but I have never ceased to be surprised. You have to be watchful and mindful. The cartels have touched local, state and federal agencies."

Estrada worked with Cramer and Nogales police in 1979, and encountered him periodically as Cramer rose through the federal ranks.

Job application

About five months ago, Cramer showed up at the sheriff's office in the small county on the border, Estrada said. The retired agent had returned from Mexico to his house in Sahuarita, about 15 miles south of Tucson, Ariz. He applied for a job as a county detention officer, which pays about $30,000 a year, Estrada said.

In contrast, Cramer's federal rank probably commanded a salary of between $130,000 and $150,000, plus benefits, officials say.

Estrada, surprised, told Cramer that working as a jail guard would be "quite a drop," the sheriff recalled.

"He said he wanted to keep being active, go back to his roots, keep busy," Estrada said. "So we put him through all the ropes: polygraph, background checks. We didn't find anything suspicious."

While Cramer trained at a state law enforcement academy with younger cadets, a DEA investigation of a Mexican drug ring active in Miami accelerated after more than two years in the making. Working with four informants, agents had run across evidence implicating Cramer in corruption.

Investing in coke

In 2007, a cartel informant showed agents documents - four from the DEA database, one from ICE, two from the State of California - supplied by an American in Mexico named "Richard."

Agents identified the American as Cramer and learned that he requested database checks from DEA agents in Guadalajara. Such requests often are granted as a routine courtesy among agencies, officials said. ICE had six offices in Mexico at the time, though the two-agent outpost in Guadalajara has since closed.

Agents learned that Cramer allegedly invested $40,000 in a scheme by Mexican traffickers to smuggle 660 pounds of cocaine by sea from Panama via U.S. ports to Spain. Agents tracked the shipment and Spanish police seized it in the northwest city of Vigo in June, 2007, setting off a dispute among traffickers over who was to blame for the loss.

Cramer allegedly helped the Mexican drug lord conduct an internal hunt for henchmen responsible for the bust. Suspects under surveillance in Miami declared that Cramer checked databases to unmask informants whose families would be kidnapped in retaliation.

Early in September, DEA agents traveled to Arizona and informed Estrada that they planned to arrest his new jail guard.

"It was the last person I would have imagined," Estrada said.

"I think something went terribly wrong in Mexico," Estrada said. "I'm curious to know what flipped him to the other side."

los zetas

Police say a body with both arms cut off was found dumped on a street in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas.

	Discuss
	COMMENTS (0)

Arturo Sandoval, spokesman for a regional prosecutor's office, says the victim was found late Tuesday with his severed arms crossed and placed on top of a cardboard sign on his chest. Soldiers immediately removed the sign and police have not released what it said.

Drug cartels often leave messages next to the victims they kill.

Sandoval says assailants stuffed plastic bags into the man's mouth and taped his eyes.

He says police were still trying to confirm the identification of the victim.

Ciudad Juarez is Mexico's deadliest city with more than 1,300 drug-related killings this year.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

VILLAHERMOSA, Mexico (AP) -- Two rural journalists have been arrested for allegedly working as informants for a violent drug trafficking cartel, according to courts in the southern Mexico state of Tabasco.

Newspaper correspondents Roberto Juarez and Lazaro Abreu Tejero Sanchez are being held on charges that they accepted thousands of dollars from the Zetas, a fierce drug gang aligned with the Gulf cartel, the state court system said in a news release.

The two reporters signed confessions while being question by police and prosecutors, according to the court statement on Tuesday, but later retracted them when brought before a judge.

Prosecutors say the two kept some of the money in exchange for withholding stories and sharing police information, and distributed some of it to other journalists, who may also face arrest.

Police said they learned about the payoffs, which amounted to about $4,500 a month, from a Zetas lieutenant.

The reporters work at towns near the Guatemalan border for the Villahermosa newspaper Presente, where spokespeople said no one was available to comment about the arrests.

my kind of system

The surveillance cameras captured it all: guards looking on nonchalantly as 53 inmates — many of them associated with one of Mexico’s most notorious drug cartels — let themselves out of their cells and sped off in waiting vehicles.

Enlarge This Image

YouTube

Men in police uniforms helped 53 inmates escape at the prison in Cieneguillas, Mexico, in May, as seen on a surveillance video. Escape vehicles outside the prison were marked as police cars.

The video shows that prison guards only pulled out their weapons after the inmates were well on their way. The brazen escape in May in the northern state of Zacatecas — carried out in minutes without a single shot fired — is just one of many glaring examples of how Mexico’s crowded and cruel prison system represents a critical weak link in the drug war.

Mexico’s prisons, as described by inmates and insiders and viewed during several visits, are places where drug traffickers find a new base of operations for their criminal empires, recruit underlings, and bribe their way out for the right price. The system is so flawed, in fact, that the Mexican government is extraditing record numbers of drug traffickers to the United States, where they find it much harder to intimidate witnesses, run their drug operations or escape.

The latest jailbreak took place this weekend, when a suspected drug trafficker vanished from a Sinaloa prison during a party for inmates featuring a Mexican country music band. The Mexican government is considering isolating drug offenders from regular inmates to reduce opportunities for abuse.

The United States government, as part of its counternarcotics assistance program, is committing $4 million this year to help fix Mexico’s broken prisons, officials said. Experts from state prisons in the United States have begun tutorials for Mexican guards to make sure that there are clear ethical guidelines and professional practices that distinguish them from the men and women they guard. “There’s no point in rounding all these characters up if they are going to get out on their own,” said an American official involved in the training, who was not authorized to speak on the record.

Although Mexican prisons call themselves Centers for Social Rehabilitation, “Universities of crime would be a better name,” said Pedro Héctor Arellano, who runs the prison outreach program in Mexico for the Episcopal Church.

Mexico’s prisons are bursting at the seams, with space for 172,151 inmates nationwide but an additional 50,000 crammed in. More arrive by the day as part of the government’s drug war, which has sent tens of thousands to prison since President Felipe Calderón took office nearly three years ago.

Inside the high concrete walls ringed by barbed wire, past the heavily armed men in black uniforms with stern expressions, inmates rule the roost. Some well-heeled prisoners pay to have keys to their cells. When life inside, with its pizza deliveries, prostitutes and binges on drugs and alcohol, becomes too confining, prisoners sometimes pay off the guards for a furlough or an outright jailbreak.

“Our prisons are businesses more than anything else,” said Pedro Arellano Aguilar, an expert on prisons. He has visited scores of them in Mexico and has come away with a dire view of what takes place inside. “Everything is for sale and everything can be bought.”

Guards Work for Inmates

For drug lords, flush with money, life on the inside is often a continuation of the free-spirited existence they led outside. Inmates look up to them. Guards often become their employees.

For more than a decade, Enrique, a strapping man with a faraway look in his eyes, worked in one of the roughest prisons in Mexico, imposing his will. He assigned prisoners to cell blocks based on the size of the bribes they made. He punished those who stepped out of line.

“I was the boss,” he declared. Not exactly. Enrique, whose story was corroborated by a prisoner advocates’ group, was actually an inmate, serving time inside Reclusorio Preventivo Oriente prison in Mexico City for trafficking cocaine. “It shouldn’t work the way it does,” said Enrique, now released, who asked that his full name not be published so he can resume life after his 12-year sentence.

Miguel Caro Quintero, a major drug trafficker wanted in Arizona and Colorado on charges of supplying multi-ton shipments of marijuana and cocaine to the United States, was jailed for 10 years in Mexico. Federal prosecutors accused him, like many drug lords, of continuing illegal activities from behind bars, using smuggled cellphones to maintain contact with his underlings on the outside and recruiting prisoners who were nearing the end of their sentences.

When his sentence in Mexico was up, he was sent off to the United States to face charges there, becoming one of more than 50 Mexicans, most of them drug offenders, extradited this year.

“When we keep a criminal in a Mexican prison, we run the risk that one way or another they are going to keep in contact with their criminal network,” Leopoldo Velarde, who heads extraditions for the federal attorney general’s office, said. “The idea is to stop criminals, not just jail them.”

Life in Reclusorio Preventivo Oriente prison’s Dormitory No. 9, where many top drug traffickers are held, shows the clout that influential inmates enjoy. The prisoners are a privileged lot, wearing designer clothing and enjoying special privileges ranging from frequent visits by girlfriends to big-screen televisions in their spacious cells, federal prosecutors told local newspapers after one of the inmates recently bought his way out.

Traffickers continue to run their operations through their lieutenants inside the prison as well as outside, using supposedly banned cellphones.

The government says it is moving aggressively to ship off dangerous criminals who are wanted in the United States and are likely to restart their criminal enterprises from jail. Once the legal requirements are met by both governments, the handcuffed suspects are flown by American government agencies to face trial in the United States. Usually the country that requests extradition pays expenses, but American officials said that who pays depends on individual cases.

Since Mr. Calderón came to office in December 2006, his government has surprised the United States by extraditing more than 200 criminal suspects, more than double the rate of predecessors. Based on the legal battles they begin to avoid extradition, it is clear that inmates fear going to the United States. Their support network, prison officials in both countries say, is considerably weaker there.

For years, the Justice Department lobbied Mexico to allow more criminal suspects to face trial in the United States. But until 2005, Mexican court rulings limited extradition to those cases in which neither the death penalty nor life in prison was sought, and Mexican pride about sovereignty made Mexican officials drag their feet. That changed with Mr. Calderón’s resolve to embark on a tougher drug war.

American officials say they are thrilled with the Mexicans’ more aggressive extradition policy. “The best way to disrupt and dismantle a criminal organization is to lock up its leaders and seize their money — so we will work with our Mexican counterparts to locate and extradite, when appropriate, cartel leadership to the United States for prosecution,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in July.

A Wave of Escapes

The jailbreak in May at the Cieneguillas prison in Zacatecas was just one of several escapes that showed how porous Mexican jails are. The Zetas, a paramilitary group known for its ruthlessness in protecting its drug turf, planned the escape, and have organized jailbreaks in at least four states, Mexican law enforcement officials said. Zacatecas prison has had at least three escapes in recent years.

The situation there is so bad, according to a local lawyer, Uriel Márquez Valerio, that inmates managed to invite a musical group into the prison in 2005 to celebrate the birthday of a drug trafficker, who several weeks later found a way to escape.

In recent weeks, the authorities have managed to catch three of the 53 escapees from May and have thrown 51 prison officials, including the director, into jail while the investigation into collusion in the escape continues. The prime piece of evidence against the prison employees was the surveillance system they were supposed to use to monitor inmates. The video, leaked by law enforcement officials and now available on YouTube, recorded the jailbreak in detail.

It was clearly an inside job, one that prompted Interpol to issue an international alert for 11 of the escapees, who were deemed “a risk to the safety and security of citizens around the world.”

One of the escapees, Osvaldo García Delgado, a 27-year-old trafficker with the nickname Vampire, said after he had been re-arrested that the Zetas planned the breakout. Carefully plotted for weeks, the operation was designed to release some top Zeta commanders. Scores of lower-level Zetas were taken along as well.

The Vampire told police interrogators that the prisoners were awakened early one morning and told to dress in their best clothes. He expressed surprise that the guards were doing no guarding that day but instead had become instrumental players in the escape plan.

The men carrying out the escape were dressed in federal police uniforms and drove what appeared to be police vehicles, with lights, sirens and official-looking decals affixed to the sides. There was a helicopter flying overhead as well, giving the operation the air of legitimacy. Since drug cartels frequently recruit law enforcement officials as allies, it is never clear in Mexico whether they will in fact enforce the law — or whether they are impostors.

In this case, the authorities later disclosed that the uniforms worn by the gunmen who carried out the escape were either outright fakes or outdated outfits. The vehicles, which screeched away from the scene with sirens blaring, were not actual police-issue either, the authorities said. All that said, investigators have not ruled out the possibility that corrupt law enforcement officials helped carry out the operation.

After the latest escape, federal authorities have begun interviewing prison workers to determine how Orso Iván Gastélum Cruz, who was arrested by the army in 2005, disappeared Sunday from jail in Sinaloa, where one of Mexico’s major drug cartels is based.

Last July, Luis Gonzaga Castro Flores, a trafficker working for the powerful Sinaloa Cartel, bought his way out of Reclusorio Preventivo Oriente prison, where he was described by the local media as the godfather of Dormitory No. 9, the area where many drug prisoners are kept.

Other detainees escape before ever getting to prison or while being transferred to court, often with the aid of their cartel colleagues as well as complicit guards. In March, an armed group opened fire on a police convoy outside Mexico City, freeing five drug traffickers who were being taken to prison.

The government acknowledges it does not have full control of its prisons, but it attributes part of the problem to its aggressive roundup of drug traffickers. Escapes are on the rise, a top federal law enforcement official, Luis Cárdenas Palomino, told reporters recently, because the government was locking up so many leading operatives that it was getting harder for the cartels to function.

A Space Crunch

Mexico’s prison system is a mishmash of federal, state and local facilities of varying quality. The most dangerous prisoners are supposed to be housed in maximum security federal facilities, but there is nowhere near enough space. So the federal government pays the states to take in drug traffickers and other federal prisoners in their far less secure lockups.

From August through December 2008, in the most recent statistics available, state prisons across Mexico reported 36 violent episodes with 80 deaths, 162 injuries and 27 escapes, the government said. There was no breakdown in those statistics of how much of the violence was linked to traffickers, but experts said prisoners involved in the drug trade tend to be the most fierce and trouble-prone of all.

“These are clear signals that the penal system, as it is currently organized, is not meeting its primary obligation of guarding inmates efficiently and safely while they serve their sentences,” the federal government’s recently released strategic plan on prisons said of the string of assaults and escapes.

To relieve the congestion and better control the inmates, the government is planning a prison-building spree that will add tens of thousands of new beds in the coming years. One goal, officials say, is to keep drug lords separate from petty criminals as well as the many people who have been imprisoned but never convicted, thus reducing their ability to recruit new employees.

The government is also focusing on personnel, boosting guards’ pay, putting them through a newly created training academy and screening them for corruption. Mexico recently sent several dozen of its guards to beef up their skills at the training academy used by the New Mexico Department of Corrections.

All of the trainees, even guards with 15 years’ experience, had to start with the basics, shining their boots, cleaning out dormitory toilets and listening to lectures on how conniving inmates can be in trying to win over weak-willed guards.

Some of those Mexican guards who are now active participants in Mexico’s deeply flawed penal system say they welcome the moves toward professionalism.

One prison guard acknowledged, “We have guns, but we know it is them, not us, who really control things.”

go cartel's

Today the strategy of Joint Operation Chihuahua is changing in Ciudad Juarez, where groups of soldiers who patrol the streets will stop doing so in order to devote themselves to military intelligence and policing activities.

The Chihuahua state Secretary of Public Security, Víctor Valencia de los Santos, announced that the decision was made after a meeting with federal Public Security Secretary Genaro García Luna.

He added that violent incidents with a large number of victims that have been occurring since this past June forced him to travel to Mexico City to meet with the federal secretary of Public Security.

He stated that the thousands of soldiers and municipal police have not done anything other than march through the whole city daily, and that surveillance strategy has not produced results other than "it winds up being too expensive in terms of gasoline and diesel consumption alone."

All that in addition to the costs of feeding and housing the troops that come from other parts of the country.

He said that provided that García Luna will be in Juarez next week, he will give orders to those in charge of Joint Operation Chihuahua so that beginning today that system of surveillance in the streets is ended.

He reiterated that, in the future, investigation and intelligence operations will be undertaken, mainly under the control of the Military Police, which is already in Ciudad Juarez.

Since the inauguration of Joint Operation Chihuahua in April 2008, about 1,026 soldiers, 180 tactical vehicles, and three military aircraft have participated in permanent patrols.

Moreover, 425 Federal Police, 63 agents from the Federal Attorney General's Public Prosecutor's Office, and eight from the Assistant Secretary General's Office for Specialized Investigation of Organized Crime (SIEDO) [operated in Juarez].

After the publication of Valencia de Los Santos' statements in Chihuahua press, that official elaborated, "The changes that could be made in Joint Operation Chihuahua will be made according to what is needed, but without previous notice due to the operation's strategy."

he said that it will be National Defense Ministry authorities, who are in charge of the operation, who will determine the changes and actions that will occur.

He noted that although he met with federal Public Security Secretary Genaro García Luna, he is unable to divulge the details of the meeting.

The state official reiterated that it will be military authorities who will determine if there will be changes to Joint Operation Chihuahua.

Twitter outage clamps tweets, cause 'unknown' :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Nation

Twitter outage clamps tweets, cause 'unknown' :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Nation

Shared via AddThis

The Mexican government has began a war in which it can not win.

In the Mexican state of Michoacan, La Familia, headed by purported evangelical Christian Nazario Moreno, hands out toys to children, gives money to the poor and helps build schools.

Mr. Moreno, who bans La Familia members from drinking alcohol or taking narcotics, also holds prayer and indoctrination sessions, and allegedly finances rural evangelical churches and drug rehabilitation centres across the state.

But the man known as El Mas Loco (The Craziest One) also runs a drug-smuggling operation that beheads enemies and rivals, and mows down police and army officers in a battle for power in the home state of Felipe Calderon, the Mexican President.

"They want to see themselves as Robin Hood figures," said Julian Gudino, a security consultant in Mexico City.

"Obviously this is false, but if they have that local support, they can run their trafficking business much more easily."

La Familia uses Bible scriptures and self-help slogans to inspire its traffickers and has taken over smuggling in Michoacan, just a five-hour drive from Mexico City. They have gained power despite Mr. Calderon's almost three-year assault on cartels in the state and across the country.

"I ask God for strength and he gives me challenges that make me strong," says one slogan signed "The Craziest One" and found by soldiers on a raid last year on a cartel safe house. "I ask him for wisdom and he gives me problems to resolve; I ask him for prosperity and he gives me brain and muscles to work."

After the group killed 16 police in a series of brazen attacks last week, Mr. Calderon sent 5,500 troops, elite police and navy officers to the mountainous marijuana-producing state in one of the biggest surges of the drug war.

Yesterday, helicopters whirred overhead and convoys of army trucks patrolled the state capital, Morelia‚ a city once described as the most beautiful in Mexico, as tourists sat in cafes.

Formed in the 1980s, La Familia has vowed to stop sales of the methamphetamine drug "Ice" in the state, saying it is destroying local communities. Instead, it exports all meth production to the United States.

In a call to a local TV station last week, a cartel member said its main aim was to bring order to Michoacan, help the poor with cash handouts and protect working families.

By such methods, Mr. Moreno, who has a US$2-million bounty on his head,

hopes to promote a mystique unique among Mexican gangs by claiming openly to protect locals.

As La Familia has grown to develop distribution networks in U. S. states such as Georgia, California and Illinois, it has also taken on the Gulf cartel's armed wing, the Zetas, a group from northeastern Mexico that has tried to take control of Michoacan.

In a full-page newspaper advertisement in 2006, La Familia said it was fighting back the "destructive power" of the Zetas and offering a cartel that "helps families."

Some residents in Morelia say La Familia may be the lesser of two evils.

"If the army can't stop drug traffickers, I'd rather they had an interest in our communities even if it is only to benefit their business," said Ana Tinoco, an off-duty waitress sitting by Morelia's majestic cathedral.

But La Familia is by no means a soft touch.

A fight with the Zetas for Michoacan has killed almost 300 people this year, mirroring the growing violence across Mexico. About 12,800 have died since late 2006.

Last week, as the fighting became ever more violent, the cartel dumped the blood-smeared bodies of 12 federal police by a remote highway. It was revenge for the capture of a gang leader by police.

According to an article in Time magazine last week, La Familia reserves the right to use violence against anyone who betrays them.

"Those who commit mistakes are tied up for a long time. If the mistake is grave, they are tortured. If there is loss of trust and treachery, they must die," a cartel spokesman called El Tio (the Uncle) said in a newsmagazine interview.

U. S. anti-drug experts say members of La Familia must complete a three-to six-month training camp in Michoacan run by former Mexican and Guatemalan elite soldiers. The group may also have linked up with Mexico's top drug lord, Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, to share smuggling routes over the U. S. border.

"The criminals have a very clear objective and they're not afraid of the military," said Minerva Bautista, the state police chief.

La Familia also wields great power in local politics, making the organization harder to confront.

This year, troops rounded up 10 mayors and a string of police chiefs accused of working for the cartel in one of the biggest single anti-corruption sweeps of the drug war.

expansion

Guatemalan drug boss Juan Jose "Juancho" Leon was summoned by Mexican traffickers for what he was told was business. Instead, dozens of attackers ambushed his entourage with grenades and assault rifles, killing Leon and 10 others in a brazen demonstration of power.

Mexican drug traffickers are branching out as never before — spreading their tentacles into 47 nations, including the U.S., Guatemala and even Colombia, long the heart of the drug trade in Latin America.

The expansion comes amid a military crackdown in Mexico and the arrests of major Colombian suppliers and poses a new challenge for efforts to stop the flow of drugs into the United States.

In dozens of interviews with officials and experts in seven countries, The Associated Press found that the Mexican mobs increasingly buy directly from the cocaine-producing Andes and have begun using countries as distant as Argentina to obtain the raw material for methamphetamine. Mexican gangsters have been arrested as far away as Malaysia as they seek new markets for cocaine and meth supply sources.

"There are more Mexican drug traffickers in South America today than at any time ever, period," said Jay Bergman, the Andean regional director for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

Mexico makes inroads

The United States has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to help Colombia dismantle its major cartels but may have actually helped the Mexicans gain traction in South America in the process.

In the past two years, Colombia extradited 14 warlords to the U.S. on drug-running charges and another six major traffickers have been killed or arrested. Mexican emissaries and money are flowing into the country to fill the void.

"The belief is that the Mexicans are trying to get closer to the source of supply and take over the transport," said Jere Miles, chief of the unit that tracks trade-based money laundering for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Mexican traffickers have turned up in many Colombian cities and are working to get cash in the hands of peasants to boost coca production, said Colombian police director Gen. Oscar Naranjo.

"We have evidence of Mexicans sitting in Medellin, sitting in Cali, sitting in Pereira, in Barranquilla," he told the AP.

In neighboring Peru, the world's No. 2 cocaine-producing country after Colombia, Mexican traffickers are bribing customs officials at airports and seaports and laundering money by investing in real estate. At least four major Mexican cartels now buy cocaine directly in Peru, said Sonia Medina, chief public prosecutor for drugs and money laundering.

In the last three years, 40 Mexicans have been arrested in Peru on drug-trafficking charges, mostly low-level couriers smuggling 22 to 44 pounds (10 to 20 kilograms) of cocaine in suitcases, said Col. Leonardo Morales of Peru's anti-narcotics police.

Traffickers rent homes in Lima's best neighborhoods for weeks at a time.

One suspect, Saulo Mauricio Parra Tejada, was arrested there in June after police found four suitcases with 234 pounds of cocaine in his car.

A second man with Parra commandeered a taxi and fled in a shootout with police.

"We presume he was headed for the airport," Morales said.

Drug-related killings — with the sudden appearance of Mexican cartel-contracted hit men — are also on the upswing. Three Mexicans believed involved in the drug trade and 15 Colombians were murdered in Lima in the past two years.

"When Peru's mafias dealt pretty exclusively with Colombians, you didn't see that," said Eduardo Castaneda, a Peruvian anti-drug prosecutor.

Shipping meth ingredients

Other Latin American countries have started playing a role as transshipment points for the chemicals used to make methamphetamine, a highly addictive street drug.

Mexico supplies 80 to 90 percent of the methamphetamine sold in the U.S., according to the DEA.

The drug is made from pseudoephedrine and ephedrine, commonly found in cold and flu medicines and typically obtained in bulk from India and China.

In 2007, Mexico banned the import and domestic use of both chemicals. So the problem spread abroad. Last year, the United Nations identified, for the first time, the manufacture of methamphetamine and other illicit synthetic stimulants in 10 nations, including Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Guatemala and Honduras.

In Argentina, ephedrine imports rose from 5.5 tons in 2006 to 28.5 tons the following year, according to the DEA. Half the 1.2 tons of ephedrine Argentine authorities seized last year was bound for Mexico in a shipment of sugar.

Also last year, police took down a methamphetamine lab in Buenos Aires linked to the Mexican Sinaloa cartel. In all, 23 people — including nine Mexicans — were arrested.

Court papers say the cartel exploited Argentina's lax financial oversight and plodding judiciary to set up shell companies to import ephedrine from India and China. The papers say employees then ground up the ephedrine, liquefied it and shipped it in wine bottles to Mexico.

In another case, three young entrepreneurs were found in a ditch, hands bound with plastic. Investigators say they were pumped with bullets in a gangland-style killing for crossing Mexican mobsters.

Two of them, Sebastian Forza and Damian Ferron, apparently tried to shortchange Mexicans who were buying in bulk from them.

They owned pharmacies and "adulterated the ephedrine, thinking they'd take advantage of the Mexicans' stupidity," said Tony Greco, who recently retired from the DEA after six years in Argentina.

A month later, Argentina began to tightly restrict sales of ephedrine. Greco said Mexican gangs in Argentina have since returned to trafficking cocaine from Bolivia, where the U.N. says coca production is up for a third straight year and whose president, Evo Morales, expelled the DEA last year. Greco said the cocaine is shipped from there to Europe, Africa and Asia.

In the meantime, the sale of drugs used to make meth has also spread. In Honduras, authorities seized 3.5 million pseudoephedrine pills from smugglers last year, arresting four Mexicans. In El Salvador, police are investigating the disappearance of 2 million pseudoephedrine pills from a 2008 shipment, and cough medicine purchased in bulk has been sent north. Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala have now all passed laws prohibiting most uses of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine.

Peru, where the drugs remain for sale, is among countries where traffickers routinely take a group of people, hit as many retail outlets as possible and buy the maximum amount of pseudoephedrine they can get, in what police call "smurfing."

In Malaysia, three Mexicans were arrested last year and charged with trafficking 63 pounds of meth. If found guilty, they face the death penalty.

Guatemala gets US, UN help

Guatemala is struggling to combat the Mexican crime invasion with loaned helicopters from the U.S. and organized crime investigators from the U.N. Guatemalans feel their country, wedged between Mexico and Colombia, has become like "the meat in a hamburger," then-Interior Minister Francisco Jose Jimenez said last year.

The U.S. State Department has warned that a weak criminal justice system and pervasive corruption make it difficult for Guatemala to address the rise in drug activity.

In late November, 17 people were killed in an apparent battle between Mexican and Guatemalan gangs, reportedly over a stolen drug shipment, said Guatemalan Police Director Marlene Blanco.

Four months later, police discovered a training camp for the Zetas, one of Mexico's fiercest gangs, a few miles south of the Mexican border in Ixtcan. They also found 500 grenades and thousands of bullets believed stolen from the Guatemalan army, and in mid-June, Guatemalan authorities confiscated nearly 10 million pseudoephedrine pills in a shipping container in Puerto Quetzal, Guatemala's main port on the Pacific. It was the country's biggest seizure of the substance.

President Alvaro Colom, the national police chief and the interior minister all say they have received death threats from traffickers in recent months.

Since the Juancho Leon murder in March 2008, 33 Zetas have been captured and are behind bars, said Giulio Antonio Talamont, the country's prisons chief. They include senior Zeta commander Daniel Perez Rojas, a former Mexican soldier charged with orchestrating Leon's killing.

Drug lords are infamous in Mexico for their jail breaks.

So nervous Guatemalan authorities recently doubled the number of soldiers ringing the prison where Perez, alias "El Cachetes" or "Puffy Cheeks," and the other Mexicans are held. They jam cell phone signals and periodically rotate Perez from cell to cell for extra security, Talamont said.

The authorities are so nervous that they plan to hold Perez's trial later this year in a makeshift courtroom inside the prison.

a buck or two

Mexican soldiers have arrested a suspected drug trafficker in the border city of Tijuana who was carrying jewelry, narcotics and $3.6 million in cash.

The Defense Department says Luis Ibarra belongs to a cell in charge of making and trafficking methamphetamine for alleged drug kingpin Teodoro Garcia Simental. Ibarra was detained Saturday.

Garcia Simental has been waging a bloody battle against his former bosses in the Arellano Felix drug cartel.

Meanwhile, police in Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas, say three men were killed outside a bar before dawn Monday.

Chihuahua state prosecutors spokesman Vladimir Tuexi says assailants chased the victims from the bar and shot them in the parking lot.

Mexican officials say gunmen killed five bar patrons in drug-plagued Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas.

The Chihuahua state prosecutor's spokesman Vladimir Tuexi says police Friday found the bodies in the Amsterdam bar, in a zone opular with U.S. tourists.

Elsewhere, the Defense Department says two gunmen were killed in separate attacks on soldiers in Guerrero and Tamaulipas states.

In the Gulf Coast state of Tabasco, federal prosecutors issued arrest warrants for seven police officers suspected of working for he Gulf cartel.

Drug violence has killed more than 11,000 people since President Felipe Calderon launched his drug fight in 2006.