a littli bit

hree separate traffic stops on Friday by the DPS near Tucson resulted in the seizure of about $1 million worth of drugs, according to the state agency.

At about 9 p.m., a canine officer stopped a tractor-trailer rig on eastbound Interstate 10 about 15 miles east of Tucson.

The officer’s dog alerted to the smell of drugs and the officer found 39 bales of marijuana in the trailer, the DPS said in a news release. The drugs weighed about 950 pounds.

The driver, a man from Connecticut, was arrested.

At about 2:15 p.m., another DPS canine officer stopped a mini-van for a moving violation on westbound I-10 near Eloy. The officer’s dog alerted to the possible smell of drugs in the van.

The officer searched and found 16 packages hidden inside the mini-van, the Department of Public Safety said.

One package contained one pound of black tar heroin, the release said.

Three contained a total of seven pounds of cocaine and 12 other packages contained 19 pounds of methamphetamine. Two people in the van were questioned and then released pending further investigation.

At about 9 a.m., another officer stoped a Dodge pickup truck on I-10 near Marana. A canine was used and the dog alerted the officer to the possible presence of drugs.

The officer searched the vehicle and found four fire extinguishers.

A total of nearly 9 pounds of methamphetamine was found in the four fire extinguishers, according to the DPS. The driver was arrested.

that's the answer

CUIDAD JUAREZ, MEXICO - Mexican army special forces paratroopers were among more than 4,000 soldiers who arrived in Juárez during the weekend as part of a surge in the federal government's effort to battle a crime wave sparked by warring drug cartels. Lines of army transport trucks, pickups and Humvees rolled onto city streets Sunday afternoon as the final convoy with nearly 1,500 troops arrived, Enrique Torres, a spokesman for Joint Operation Chihuahua, said. There are now more than 7,000 soldiers and 2,300 federal police in Juárez as part of Joint Operation Chihuahua, the federal crackdown on crime. "Military personnel will directly attack crimes such as kidnappings, extortion and robberies that have increased recently as well as inhibit the murders in the city," a news statement issued by Joint Operation Chihuahua said. The latest military deployments, all out of Mexico City, were the Second Brigade of Military Police, the Sixth Brigade of Light Infantry and the Special Group of Paratroopers. The paratroopers will be commanded by Mexican army Brig. Gen. Pedro Escalera Cobián, who arrived in Juárez during the weekend, Torres said. Since late 2007, paratrooper units have improved the government's capability to combat gangs of drug cartel enforcers formed by ex-soldiers such as the infamous Zetas of the Gulf cartel, El Universal newspaper reported last summer. Night assaults, hostage liberation, urban raids and small unit combat have been part of the intensified training. The presence of soldiers and federal police has visibly increased in Juárez in recent weeks following meetings between local leaders and national security officials. Numerous checkpoints dot city streets and Juárez television stations are airing public service ads advising motorists on how to handle the checkpoints. When approaching a checkpoint, motorists should slow down, turn on the vehicle's interior light, roll down windows, and the driver should place both hands at the top of the steering wheel where they are visible from the outside, the ads say. Residents are also advised to carry identification. Military officials are expected to take command of the city police on Monday and later of transit police and the municipal Cereso prison, officials said. During the increase of federal forces, killings in Juárez have slowed but continue. The unidentified remains of seven men and two women were found partially buried during the weekend in the desert south of the city. There is speculation the grave is linked to the arrest last week of a police captain and two officers accused Army soldiers arrive to patrol Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, Sunday, March 15, 2009. Ciudad Juarez, a city of 1.3 million people across the border from El Paso, Texas, has been hit by a wave of drug-fueled violence, prompting federal authorities to dispatch thousands of soldiers. (AP Photo) of kidnapping victims for La Linea, as the Juárez drug cartel is also known. In other news, Juárez surgeon Manuel Antonio Sanchez Duarte was arrested on weapons charges last week after federal police found an arsenal in his medical office, federal officials said. Sanchez refused to stop when federal police tried to pull his car over on Wednesday night, officials said. Police said they found a sawed-off shotgun and a .45-caliber handgun in Sanchez's vehicle. On Thursday, federal police used a search warrant to raid Sanchez's office where they located several weapons, including a submachine gun, a rifle, three .22-caliber handguns and an antique-style pistol. Police also seized boxes of ammunition and items to make gun silencers. Crime scene investigators also found various bullet holes on the doors and windows of the three-story building. It was not disclosed why Sanchez had the firearms.

who says crime doesn't pay

Who says crime doesn't pay? A suspected drug lord who is Mexico's most-wanted fugitive made the Forbes list of billionaires on Wednesday with a fortune described as "self made."

The magazine estimates Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman's worth at $1 billion — No. 701 on the list, right between a Swiss oil-trading tycoon and a U.S. chemical heir. Dozens of other people were also tied for the spot.

It is unclear what Guzman thinks of the distinction. Forbes senior editor Luisa Kroll notes that "unfortunately ... Guzman could not be reached for comment."

Often described as Mexico's most powerful cartel kingpin, Guzman has been on the run with a $5 million reward on his head since 2001, when he escaped from prison apparently hidden in a laundry truck.

At the time, he was serving more than 20 years for criminal association and bribery. Mexican officials say he leads the Sinaloa drug gang, though Guzman has never been convicted on drug trafficking charges.

The government had no immediate comment on the listing, which includes an old photo of Guzman taken under police custody while wearing rumpled prison clothes unbefitting the world's alleged 701st-richest person.

Guzman, 54, is not the first drug trafficker to make the list; Forbes says Colombian cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar was once included, before dying in a shootout with the South American nation's security forces in 1993.

"El Chapo," whose nickname refers to his short, stocky build, has been enjoying a bit of notoriety lately. Telemundo, the No. 2 Spanish-language television network in the United States, announced last year that it is working on a new docudrama based on Guzman's life.

Forbes cited estimates that Guzman and his operation likely grossed 20 percent of the $18 billion to $39 billion in drug revenues that Mexican and Colombian traffickers laundered last year — "enough for him to have pocketed $1 billion over his career and earn a spot on the billionaires list for the first time."

That figure, Kroll said, "is a conservative estimate based on the information we have."

bullsh%t

Headless bodies in Tijuana, kidnapped children in Phoenix and shootouts on Vancouver streets: The unwanted byproducts of progress in the Mexican drug war.

While the headline-grabbing chaos creates the appearance of a drug trade escalating out of control, evidence suggests Mexico's cartels are increasingly desperate due to a cross-border crackdown and a shift in the cocaine market from the U.S. to Europe.

Those pressures are forcing Mexico's criminal networks, once accustomed to shipping drugs quietly and with impunity, to wage ever more violent battles and diversify into other criminal enterprises, including extortion and kidnapping for ransom.

"This is not reflecting the power of these groups," Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora said. "This is reflecting how they are melting down in terms of capabilities."

HIGHER STREET PRICES

As evidence of that pressure, the U.S. government says the amount of cocaine seized on U.S. soil dropped by 41% between early 2007 and mid-2008. Reduced supply is said to have raised street prices by nearly a third to about $125 a gram and lowered purity by more than 15%. Both the U.S. and Canadian governments are even seeing prolonged shortages of cocaine.

"The reason you see the escalation in violence is because U.S. and Mexican law enforcement are winning," Garrison Courtney, spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration, said yesterday. "You are going to see the drug traffickers push back because we are breaking their back."

The trouble for Mexico's illicit trade began when the 2001 terror attacks prompted heightened border security. President Felipe Calderon upped the ante by confronting the cartels on his first day in office two years ago, sending 45,000 soldiers and police to battle the cartels across the country.

Improved cooperation with the U.S. led to the recent arrests of 755 Sinaloa cartel suspects in U.S. cities and towns as small as Stowe, Iowa. Mexican authorities, meanwhile, rooted out more than two dozen high-level government security officials, including Mexico's former drug czar.

These successes come with a cost: skyrocketing violence in Mexico, with more than 1,000 people killed in the first eight weeks of '09; more than 560 kidnappings in Phoenix in '07 and the first half of '08, and more than two dozen shootings so far this year in Vancouver, B.C.

A December report by the Justice Department says Mexican cartels already pose "the greatest organized crime threat to the United States."

However, Calderon says he won't back down until Mexico's drug cartels are no longer a national security threat. His goal is to attain that by the time he leaves office in 2012.

"Yes, we will win," he said, "and of course there will be many problems meanwhile."

refrigerated

Five men's heads were found in ice chests at the side of a road leading to Guadalajara in central Mexico, authorities said.

Authorities said the gruesome find could be an signal of stepped-up fighting among drug cartels for domination in the central Mexican state of Jalisco, near Sinaloa, where the Sinaloa cartel is located, CNN reported Wednesday.

Discovered Tuesday beneath a tree along the road, each head was in a separate ice chest with eyes taped shut, police said. The tops of the ice chests had messages such as, Like these, I am going to finish everyone.

Police in the municipality of Ixtlahuacan del Rio were told of the find, the prosecutor's office said in a statement.

The eyes of the victims were taped shut and the heads had been severed a few hours before they were found, the statement said. The men were thought to be between the ages of 30 and 45.

just in case

The state and federal governments have prepared contingency plans to deal with spillover violence from across the border as Mexican troops clash with ruthless drug cartels terrorizing Mexico.

"Anything you can think of that’s happened in Mexico, we have to think could happen here," said Steve McCraw, Gov. Rick Perry’s director of homeland security. "We know what they’re capable of."

A crackdown by Mexican President Felipe Calderon has turned Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, into a war zone as federal troops battle feuding cartels.

Thousands of soldiers and agents have surged into the border city in the government’s latest effort to free Mexican citizens from a daily spectacle of assassinations, kidnappings and beheadings ordered by rival drug czars.

McCraw predicted that the violence in Mexico "will get worse before it gets better."

Mexico’s active-duty armed forces number more than 130,000 and are being aggressively used to combat the cartels. But U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, told reporters last week that Mexico’s two largest drug cartels have fielded a combined army of 100,000 foot soldiers to battle not just government forces but also one another.

Potential threat

The state’s contingency plan was developed under the umbrella of Operation Border Star, a multiagency law enforcement offensive led by Perry’s homeland security office. The plan, which has not been released publicly, envisions scenarios of violence, such as kidnappings or a takeover by hit squads, with a corresponding response by law enforcement, McCraw said.

While declining to elaborate on specifics for security reasons, McCraw called it a "very aggressive plan to deal very quickly with all threats that might be posed."

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has also prepared contingency measures to respond to cross-border violence, agency spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said. Like the state plan, the federal response "contemplates a number of contingencies that could result from violence" in Mexico, Kudwa said.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, interviewed last week on PBS’ NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, said the grisly murders and kidnappings that are signatures of the Mexican drug wars haven’t made their way north.

"But let’s be very, very clear," she said. "This is a very serious battle. It could spill over into the United States. If it does, we do have contingency plans to deal with it."

Fears of instability

A Defense Department study raising the possibility that the narco-violence could undermine the Mexican government has also prompted fears of a mass migration of refugees that would require a large-scale humanitarian response.

The U.S. Joint Forces Command, in a speculative assessment of global security threats, said Mexico and Pakistan "bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse."

"The Mexican possibility may seem less likely, but the government, its politicians, police and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and pressure by criminal gangs and drug cartels," the report said. "How that internal conflict turns out over the next several years will have a major impact on the stability of the Mexican state.

"Any descent by . . . Mexico into chaos would demand an American response based on the serious implications for homeland security alone," the report said.

Retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who was director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy under President Bill Clinton, said in a report last month that Mexico is "fighting for survival against narco-terrorism" and that the country’s worsening problems threaten U.S. security.

"In the next eight years, the violent collection of criminal drug cartels could overwhelm the state and establish de facto control over broad regions of northern Mexico," McCaffrey’s report said. "A failure by the Mexican political system to curtail lawlessness and violence could result in a surge of millions of refugees crossing the U.S. border."

Contingency plan

Perry and others disagree with the speculation that Mexico is on the verge of collapse, pointing out that the country is a robust trading partner and that the government is aggressively battling the cartels.

But state Sen. John Carona, R-Dallas, chairman of the Senate Transportation and Homeland Security Committee, said: "Talk of a collapse of the Mexican government is very, very premature and, at this point in time, unlikely. However, I think that for Texas to be responsible to its citizens, it has to consider a contingency plan were conditions to worsen in Mexico. There is no question that any type of upheaval in Mexico would lead to more people from Mexico coming across the border illegally in large numbers."

A state response being prepared by the governor’s office, he said, would include medical treatment, food, shelter and other assistance "for people that are fleeing their country out of concern for themselves or the lives of their families." The response would also likely deal with economic disruptions along the border, he said.

McCraw, interviewed last week, confirmed that the governor’s office has plans to deal with a migration surge resulting from "any calamity" but said there is no indication that Mexico is vulnerable to collapse. Planning for a migration influx, he said, is separate from the contingency plan for spillover violence.

"Do we plan for mass-migration scenarios?" he asked. "Of course.  . . .  But the scenarios could be a natural disaster, pandemic flu, serious problems in South America, Central America. The state of Texas prepares for all scenarios . . . for all hazards, all threats."

A look at the problem

Operation Border Star, which has evolved from three previous operations since 2005, is designed to dismantle smuggling and present a show of force all along Texas’ 1,254-mile border with Mexico.

Commanded from the Department of Public Safety headquarters in Austin, the operation includes DPS troopers, the Texas Rangers, the U.S. Border Patrol, the Coast Guard, local sheriffs and police, and other state and federal agencies. Over the past four years, Perry’s office says, serious crime along the border has dropped by 65 percent.

The Legislature authorized $110 million for Border Star in 2007, and Perry is asking for $135 million from the 2009 Legislature. Perry is also supporting legislation sponsored by Carona to crack down on transnational gangs operating on the Texas side of the border in collaboration with the cartels in Mexico.

The Mexican drug wars claimed more than 5,700 lives in Mexico in 2008, including 1,600 in Juarez, where the Sinaloa and Juarez cartels are battling for supremacy. About a half-dozen cartels are rooted in Mexico, accounting for an estimated $27-billion-a-year business through the smuggling of drugs and human cargo.

In turn, McCraw says, bulk cash, weapons and stolen vehicles flow back into Mexico from the United States to fortify the illicit operations.

Violence on the Texas side of the border hasn’t risen to the level that would trigger full-scale use of the contingency plan, McCraw said.

But a shootout in Reynosa and protests on international bridges Feb. 17 sent Border Star command posts into a "hot loop" alert to escalate monitoring and intelligence activities before returning to normal 24 hours later, McCraw said.

This report includes material from The Monitor in McAllen.

Any type of upheaval in Mexico would lead to more people from Mexico coming across the border illegally in large numbers."

why ?

are the drug cartel's using the tactics that will eventually cause the united states government to really clamp down.The united states will not tolerate the uncontrollable violence that is happening right at her front door. The cartels are going to eventually going to have to sit down and work out a agreement with their rival's or consolidate into a conglomerate because when bodies start piling up heat starts coming down on the groups that are responsible just like miami ,florida after "la madrana"started killing anyone she pleased thats when the fed's really threw money and manpower against the medillian cartel .they should look at what happend to the colombian's before the destroy their business and mexico in the process

it's all our fault?

Mexico blames Americans for arming the world's most powerful drug cartels, a complaint supported Friday by a U.S. government report that found nearly all of Mexico's escalating drug killings involved weapons from north of the border.

President Felipe Calderon told The Associated Press that his police and soldiers are dangerously outgunned because U.S. authorities are failing to stop the smuggling of high-powered weapons into Mexico. His attorney general called for more aggressive prosecutions of gun smugglers, saying that the U.S. constitutional right to bear arms doesn't protect them.

"The Second Amendment was not put there to arm foreign criminal groups," Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora told the AP on Thursday.

Calderon has complained for two years that the U.S. isn't carrying its weight in the cross-border drug war, despite that American drug users ultimately finance the cartels.

"I'm fighting corruption among Mexican authorities and risking everything to clean house, but I think a good cleaning is in order on the other side of the border," Calderon said.

President Obama's administration is responding. On Wednesday, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder promised to enforce a long-ignored ban on importing assault weapons, many of which are re-sold illegally and smuggled into Mexico to resupply the cartels.

Calderon said Holder's announcement is "the first time . . . in many years that the American government is starting to show more commitment."

When the U.S. enforced the assault weapons ban, only 21 percent of the weapons Mexico seized from traffickers were assault rifles, Medina Mora said. Today, more than half are, and Mexican law enforcement officials are paying with their lives - some 800 have been killed in the past two years.

Drug-related killings claimed 6,290 lives last year in Mexico - more than double the 2007 toll, and more than 1,000 have been killed so far this year, he said.

Both Calderon and his top prosecutor said the U.S. should aggressively enforce gun laws and pressure sellers to keep weapons in the hands of law-abiding citizens.

Their complaints were supported by a U.S. State Department report Friday that weapons bought or stolen in the U.S. were used in 95 percent of the killings.

The report also said cartels are increasingly carrying out contract killings inside the United States, part of a wave of violence that also includes a sharp rise in kidnappings in Phoenix.

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