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.

It took six months of intelligence work for the police to corner a man suspected of being one of western Mexico’s top drug bosses. But retaliation came swiftly, as his lieutenants struck repeatedly in the two days after his arrest.

Police bases across Michoacán were attacked by gunmen.

In several reprisal attacks across the western state of Michoacán this weekend, gunmen attacked federal police posts and one military base, killing three federal officers and two soldiers, the police said.

The attacks, which also injured 18 police officers, began after federal officers arrested the man accused of drug charges, Arnoldo Rueda Medina, early Saturday morning in the state capital, Morelia. The police said Mr. Rueda was one of two top operations chiefs for the drug cartel La Familia.

Michoacán, where pine-forested mountains in the east descend into a barren sierra that drops down sharply before reaching the Pacific Coast, has been a central battleground in President Felipe Calderón’s war against drug cartels.

Just days after Mr. Calderón took office in December 2006, he initiated his war by sending troops into Michoacán, where he was born and grew up.

An estimated 45,000 soldiers have now been sent around Mexico, mostly in northern and western states. In May, Mr. Calderón again made Michoacán the front line in a new phase of the drug war when federal authorities arrested 10 mayors and 17 government and police officials, accusing them of protecting drug cartels.

Security analysts have long argued that to wrest control of territory from the cartels, the government needs to prosecute the politicians who give protection.

Washington has supported Mr. Calderón’s battle, beginning with the Bush administration and continuing under President Obama. About $1.4 billion in anti-drug aid has been proposed for Mexico and Central America. But the Mexican military’s actions have also prompted a growing number of complaints of human rights violations.

On Sunday, the advocacy group Human Rights Watch sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, arguing that Mexico has not met human rights standards attached to the release of 15 percent of the funds.

Police officers arrested Mr. Rueda, and a 17-year-old caretaker, before dawn on Saturday at a safe house at the edge of Morelia. He had several houses and spent nights in them alternately.

Minutes after he was taken to the main federal police post in Morelia, gunmen threw grenades and fired at the post with high-power weapons in an effort to free him. Officers repelled the attack, and the gunmen fled.

“The arrest was clean,” said Gen. Rodolfo Cruz, a federal police commander. “Afterwards, they tried to rescue him, and that was when these clashes began.”

On Saturday, gunmen attacked federal police barracks in Patzcuaro, a colonial town outside the capital; a hotel where police are housed in the farming town Apatzingán; a police barracks in the port of Lázaro Cárdenas; a police convoy outside the farming town Nueva Italia; and a police base in Huetamo. Two other attacks took place in states just beyond the state’s border.

The federal police said that the attacks continued Sunday before dawn when gunmen fired on a hotel housing police officers in Lázaro Cárdenas. At 9 a.m., men in a truck fired on a federal police patrol in a nearby town. One gunman died and two were arrested, the federal police said.

The three police officers killed Saturday were attacked on a road near Zitácuaro, near a monarch butterfly reserve, where they had responded to an accident. Gunmen drove by in a convoy and shot the officers.

Gunmen killed the two off-duty soldiers as they returned to their barracks in the city of Zamora.

General Cruz said the gunmen exploited the element of surprise.

“The truck would pass, and they would spray bullets,” he said. “They wouldn’t stop. They wouldn’t engage. They just would shoot at the installations, throw grenades, fire high-caliber weapons, and then they would abandon their vehicles, disperse and disappear into the crowd or into the mountains.”

its mexico man

Hundreds of heavily armed soldiers set up roadblocks on major highways on Saturday in President Felipe Calderon's home state, where drug gangs have stepped up attacks on Mexican security forces.

Troops toting automatic weapons and wearing ski masks to shield their identity searched vehicles in the western marijuana-growing state of Michoacan for signs of drug smuggling after the government ordered 5,500 soldiers and police to deploy to the area by land, sea and air.

The surge, one of the biggest in the three-year drug war, came after drug gangs targeted federal police in recent days in retaliation for the capture of a high-ranking member of the local La Familia (The Family) cartel.

In a brazen move last week, the cartel dumped the tortured and blood-smeared bodies of 12 federal police in a heap by a remote highway -- the latest victims of tit-for-tat violence that has killed some 12,800 people since Calderon took office in 2006.

A video allegedly showing the policemen being stripped, beaten and executed was briefly posted on YouTube, reported El Universal newspaper.

Ten municipal police officers from Michoacan were being held in custody on Saturday, suspected of collaborating with the cartel in the murders, the Mexican attorney general's office said.

"We've reached a point where the local authorities are tapped out, and so unfortunately it's necessary to call in extra forces to try and restore the peace to Michoacan," said Gerardo Gomez, a resident of the state's capital city Morelia where suspected drug gang hit men threw two grenades into a packed crowd celebrating Mexico's independence day last September.

ENORMOUS POWER

La Familia has grown in strength to the point where it controls elements of local police and even politicians in Michoacan, which has become a flash point of violence in a raging drug war that is worrying Washington and investors.

Calderon is from the large state of sparsely inhabited mountains hiding drug farms and labs, and it was the first place he decided to send troops.

But the recent wave of revenge attacks on security forces indicates that La Familia -- which is battling the armed wing of the Gulf Cartel known as the Zetas for control of Michoacan -- has been little weakened by the military crackdown.

La Familia appears to have gained enormous power in the state. Troops rounded up 10 mayors and a string of police chiefs in May accused of working for the cartel in one of the biggest single corruption sweeps of the drug war.

The cartel follows a code of conduct that bars its members from taking drugs or drinking alcohol and has contacted the media in the past to claim its aim is to protect Michoacan from Zeta hit men.

ye the bullshit

NOGALES, Sonora — The first-ever Sonora governor from Mexico's National Action Party is vowing a firm hand against drug cartels and justice for the families who lost children in a day care fire last month.

With his election victory on July 5, Guillermo Padrés Elías broke an 80-year hold on the office by Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party, known in Spanish as Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI. Padrés' party is known in Spanish as Partido Acción Nacional, or PAN.

When Padrés — pronounced with the accent on the second syllable — takes office on Sept. 13, he'll be facing several major issues, including the investigation into the June 5 fire at the ABC day care in Hermosillo that killed 48 children; raging drug-related violence in Sonora, especially in Nogales; and a drop in tourism to Sonora.

He addressed these and other topics during an interview with the Arizona Daily Star on Tuesday in Nogales, Sonora:

Q. On his strategy to battle the drug-smuggling organizations and address increased violence:

A. Padrés said he backs Mexican President Felipe Calderón's campaign to weaken the cartels and snuff out corruption.

"We have to do it. We can't pretend they don't exist. We can't pretend they are not there.

"We are going to put more technology into our forces; we are going to train them better; we are going to pay them better ... And we are going to make sure the dark side of society is out of our police forces"

Q. On what steps he'll take to boost tourism in Sonora:

A. "We are going to put (on) a big campaign and make sure they feel safe and make sure they know they are going to be protected in any way and any sense here in Sonora. They are going to have the total backup of the state and federal government so they'll feel as safe as they feel in any neighborhood in Arizona, California or New York.

"It's a very local and very limited fight between the government and the people that are involved in organized crime, but there's no civilians being hurt and especially no tourist has been hurt."

Q. On becoming the first non-Institutional Revolutionary Party governor in 80 years in Sonora:

A. The party had been growing in power in recent years, as evidenced in the 2003 election when the PAN candidate for governor lost by only 7,000 votes, said Padrés, who was the campaign coordinator that year.

"I had a lot of experience, and I knew how to fight this battle. I knew what had to be done. The first thing we had to do was win the confidence of the people."

Q. On whether the ABC day care fire in Hermosillo influenced the July 5 election:

A. "There are no numbers, and there is no logic to that. In Hermosillo where that happened, the numbers were very inconsistent. The mayor, the one with a lot of votes, barely won in Hermosillo, and we lost all of our congressmen. So, there is no correlation with that, and there are no numbers or statistics that say that made a change . . . Maybe it had an impact on the opinion people had on the governor but not on the campaign.

"During the campaign, I made a commitment to the parents that I would never talk about that so it wouldn't become a political theme and I did that."

Q. On how he plans to bring the "justice" that parents of the children who died in the day care fire are demanding:

A . "It's an issue of will and doing it . . . The specifics of it will be known when I assume power. Right now, that responsibility is in Gov. (Eduardo) Bours' hands, and not mine. But, from the 13th of September they will see a more active government making justice."

Q. On plans to work on Arizona-Sonora relations in regards to trade and commerce:

A. Padrés said he'll build on work started by outgoing Gov. Bours, who emphasized binational relations during his six-year term.

"We are going to strengthen that. I am not going to change the things that are being done good," he said.

"la familia"

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (AFP) – An armed gang shot dead a mayor in northern Mexico, capping a vicious 48-hour period that has seen 30 people killed, including 12 police officers in the west of the country, officials said.

Hector Ariel Meixueiro, who was mayor of Namiquipa in northwestern Chihuahua state near the US border, was shot multiple times after being accosted Tuesday morning by at least 15 men carrying assault rifles, according to the state prosecutors office.

Earlier Tuesday a spokesman for Mexico's public security ministry said the bodies of 12 federal police officers were found along a road in the western state of Michoacan.

The bodies of 11 men and one woman, who had been undertaking investigative work in the area, were found stacked on top of each other and bore signs torture, said police spokesman Monte Alejandro Rubido.

Officials have attributed the killings to the powerful "La Familia" drug cartel that operates in the region and considered one of the most violent criminal gangs in Mexico.

In Ciudad Juarez, the country's crime capital, 11 other men were killed between Monday and Tuesday, local authorities said.

The city has been a flashpoint for Mexico's spiraling drug-related violence, for which President Felipe Calderon has deployed 36,000 soldiers and federal police throughout the country in an aggressive clampdown.

Last weekend, "La Familia" launched a series of attacks against police posts in Michoacan that left four people dead, including three members of the security forces and one suspected cartel hit man.

The attacks were "desperate and violent reactions" to the government's war on the cartels, Calderon said on Monday.

Authorities said the cartel attacks came in retaliation for security agents having detained top La Familia kingpin Arnoldo Rueda.

They say that Rueda, nicknamed "La Minsa" and allegedly La Familia's second in command, is a key cartel operative in charge of managing synthetic drug production and shipping marijuana and cocaine to the United States, the world's top consumer of cocaine.

La Familia, which operates mainly in Michoacan, burst into the headlines in October 2006 when an armed commando linked to the cartel entered a bar and tossed five severed heads onto the dance floor.

More than 7,700 people have been killed in drug violence in Mexico since 2008, according to government figures.

slimy judge roberts

The Senate Judiciary Committee's hearing has opened with hours of mostly self-service statements by senators before we will hear a word form Judge Sotomayor.

The most compelling statement in the morning round came from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) While a transcript of his statement was not available at this writing, he made similar remarks on the Senate floor last week.

Here is an excerpt from his July 9 speech in which he notes Chief Justice John Roberts' striking tendency toward "making law," which is supposedly a big Republican no-no.

Sen. Whitehouse:

My Republican colleagues like to suggest that judges appointed by Republican Presidents are neutral "umpires" and that judges appointed by Democratic Presidents are judicial "activists." But Chief Justice Roberts himself, who indeed raised the "umpire" metaphor at his own confirmation hearing, reveals the falsity of that comparison. Jeffrey Toobin, a well-respected legal commentator, recently described a pronounced ideological predisposition in Chief Justice Roberts.

In every major case since he became the nation's seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff.

Let me say that again: In every major case since he became the nation's seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff.

Maybe this is a pure coincidence, and maybe it is a further coincidence, to again quote Toobin, that this record "has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party." And maybe it is also a coincidence that in the Heller decision, the DC gun law case, the Roberts-led conservative bloc of the Court discovered a new constitutional right that had previously gone unnoticed through 220 years of the United States Supreme Court's history, and which just happens to appeal to the NRA and the Republican base. Perhaps that is all a coincidence. But I will confess to you, I doubt it. I think that this record goes a long way towards disproving the metaphor of the Republican judge as neutral umpire.

So let's put aside the notion that conservative men from the Federalist Society have no predispositions in legal matters but that anyone who differs from their views is the activist. That is just rhetoric, and what it's seeking to do is to normalize the right-wing activism the Republican Party has calculatedly and over many years moved onto our Court.

If you want to decide whether Judge Sotomayor has an appropriate judicial philosophy, look at her full record. Throughout her long career as a federal judge - longer than any Supreme Court nominee since the 19th century - Judge Sotomayor has, on every major issue, shown that the facts and the law drive her determination of cases. On the Second Circuit, Judge Sotomayor agreed with her more conservative colleagues far more frequently than she disagreed with them. In 434 published panel decisions where the panel included at least one judge appointed by a Republican president, she agreed with the result favored by the Republican appointee in 413 cases. 413 out of 434. That is 95 percent of the time, and it is no record of extremism. Indeed, it would seem to put her on the conservative side of the mainstream. And consider what she told Chairman Leahy: "Ultimately and completely, as a judge, you follow the law. There is not one law for one race or another. There is not one law for one color or another. There is not one law for rich and a different one for poor. There is only one law."

Furthermore, the idea that because the Supreme Court disagreed with Judge Sotomayor's Second Circuit panel decision in Ricci v. Stefano, she is somehow outside the mainstream, is patently absurd. First, four justices of the Supreme Court agreed with the Second Circuit's interpretation of the law. Are Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer outside of the mainstream? Hardly.

Second, Judge Sotomayor and her panel were faithfully applying the settled precedent of the Second Circuit when they rendered their decision - just what a circuit court judge of the United States is supposed to do. The five justices on the Supreme Court in the Ricci majority, in deciding the case, invented an entirely new test for resolving Title VII claims that, according to legal experts reported in the New York Times, "will change the landscape of civil rights law." It is hardly fair to criticize Judge Sotomayor for not applying a test that did not even exist when she decided the case. Nor for failing to venture into landscape changes of civil rights law.

In the Ricci decision and others, Judge Sotomayor's record demonstrates a long career of faithfully applying the law to the facts of the case before her - and the careful exercise of judicial discretion.

winning yet?

Three Mexican federal police officers were killed and 18 were wounded on Saturday in attacks attributed to the La Familia Michoacana drug cartel on at least six different cities, police said.

The onslaught on six federal police (PFP) bases in the western state of Michoacan was seen as retribution for the arrest on Friday of top La Familia member Arnoldo Rueda.

After the arrest, gunmen "tried to rescue him and clashes began, in which 18 PFP members were wounded," PFP regional chief Rodolfo Ruz told reporters.

The three officers who died, Cruz said, were not on base but in a vehicle close to a car crash on a road when they were attacked by an armed group traveling in a separate vehicle.

The attacks took place in the state capital, Morelia, and in the cities of Apatzingan, Lazaro Cardenas, Patzcuaro, Zitacuaro and Huetamo, while shots were also fired at two PFP locations in the neighboring southern state of Guerrero.

Michoacan state has seen clashes between local drug cartels, including La Familia, that have ties with other drug trafficking groups in northern Mexico, close to the US border.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon has deployed 36,000 troops and policemen in a bid to stem the drug violence, blamed for over 7,700 deaths in the country since 2008.

forget the firewater

Like so many Tohono O'odham tribal members lured into driving or storing loads of marijuana, Jenny Lopez got an offer from Mexican drug smugglers she couldn't refuse:

If she'd drive a car loaded with marijuana across the U.S.-Mexico border and through the Tohono O'odham Nation to Phoenix, she'd get money to buy a car, two days in Rocky Point and some cash, a Tohono O'odham police report shows.

She got her trip to Rocky Point, but her car was seized and the promise of cash evaporated on May 10 when O'odham police stopped her north of the U.S. - Mexico border and found 145 pounds of marijuana in the cushions and back seats of her 1996 Dodge Intrepid.

Police arrested Lopez, 33, and her passenger, Lucy Ann Garcia, 41, after the two admitted to knowing about the drugs. The U.S. Attorney's Office lodged felony drug charges against them that carry a maximum sentence of 20 years, although Lopez's case was later dismissed.

On a poverty-stricken reservation intersected by one of the border's busiest drug smuggling corridors, more tribal members are accepting similar offers — lured by quick, easy money and little threat of punishment, say tribal leaders.

The percentage of suspected drug smugglers arrested by Tohono O'odham police who are tribal members has increased sixty-fold in the last two decades, said Sgt. David Cray, a 19-year veteran of the agency's anti-drug unit.

Mexican drug smugglers "flash cash to them, and once they get sucked in, it's hard to get out," said Tohono O'odham Police Chief Joe Delgado.

Spurred by concerns about erosion of tribal culture and the decreasing quality of life on the Tohono O'odham Nation, tribal Chairman Ned Norris Jr. is openly discussing what he calls a crisis and soliciting more assistance from non-tribal agencies. That marks a dramatic shift from past tribal leaders who downplayed the issue.

"It's important for us to get these kind of things out on the table and accept the fact that, unfortunately, we've got people within the nation that are bought into the business of smuggling," Norris said.

Some tribal members and non-tribal law enforcement officials applaud the shift.

"There wasn't a lot of openness to help from the outside," said Anthony Coulson, head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's Tucson office. "This is a whole new paradigm for us."

But merely acknowledging the problem won't make it disappear, say tribal members. Smuggling is deeply rooted and often a family affair, making tribal members more apt to ignore it than report it.

That's a major reason it continues, said Edward Reina, Tohono O'odham Nation director of public safety.

"On all tribes, it isn't just one family, we are all related," Reina said. "Nobody wants to turn anybody in. If they do, they will not be part of the family."

After a 1999 arrest, former Tohono O'odham Nation tribal judge Mary Audrey Dolaretta Juan was convicted on drug- smuggling charges and sentenced to one year in federal prison. Juan is the sister of Vivian Juan-Saunders, who preceded Norris as tribal chair from 2003 to 2007.

This year, in March, the former judge's son, Dandrich B. Juan, 35, was arrested by Tohono O'odham police on suspicion of smuggling marijuana. Court records show it wasn't Dandrich's first arrest: In 1997, he was sentenced to 37 months in federal prison on drug charges.

The core values and culture of the O'odham are under assault, some say, with so many tribal families involved in the smuggling.

"It's a continuation of the genocide of our culture," says tribal member Ofelia Rivas, an activist for O'odham rights and resident of the small border village of Ali Ak Chin, commonly called Menager's Dam.

Evolution of smuggling

When Sgt. Cray began working on the Tohono O'odham police drug unit in 1991, an estimated 99 percent of people the unit arrested for drug smuggling were non-tribal.

Mexican drug smugglers carried drugs across the border, left them at a predetermined spot and drivers picked them up.

But as tribal police caught on and began busting them, smugglers started recruiting tribal members to store loads or drive drugs north.

Today, at least 60 percent of those arrested for drug smuggling are tribal members, Cray said. Through the first six months of 2009, 29 of the 45 arrests O'odham police made for smuggling drugs were of tribal members.

That's even higher than the statistics Chairman Norris presented in April at a Senate hearing on border violence. He said nearly 30 percent of the 534 drug cases that originated from O'odham police arrests and prosecuted by the federal government from 2004 to 2009 were of tribal members.

The jump is due to a surge in recruiting that stems from the growing number of Border Patrol agents on the Tohono O'Odham Nation and the recent construction of steel vehicle barriers that line most of the 75 miles of international border. Whereas police must have reasonable suspicion to pull over tribal drivers, they can question any non-tribal person driving on the reservation's restricted areas, which include desert roads or routes south of Arizona 86.

There's no shortage of willing drivers, tribal leaders say.

"There's so much unemployment," Cray said. "It's easy to find a driver."

Lure of money

The Tohono O'odham Nation's unemployment rate is 26 percent, and the average income is $8,100, tribal officials say.

Smugglers offer $700 to $5,000, depending on the type of load, to tribal members to either drive a load or store drugs at their home or in a shed, Norris said.

"If you don't have food on the table and somebody comes along and says drive 15 miles and make so much money, people are going to do it," Rivas said.

Tribal members who get enticed by the money range from teenagers to the middle-aged and include as many women as men. But tribal officials are most concerned about the youths who get sucked in. "It's difficult to get that culture and tradition back," Reina said.

The temptation has always been there for O'odham youths, but the volume of marijuana coming across the border now has increased the opportunity to get involved, Norris said.

Smugglers have been employing another tactic to expand their operations: getting romantically involved with tribal women and having children with them, said Delgado, the police chief. As fathers of tribal children, they cannot be kicked off the reservation and can more easily draw people into the smuggling.

In Menager's Dam, these men often coerce or threaten other family members of the women into smuggling, Rivas said.

Even when tribal members willingly become involved, they are relegated to foot-soldier roles and not elevated into key, decision-making positions within the drug smuggling organizations, said the DEA's Coulson. "They are exploited by the organization, rather than a part of it," he said.

Lack of punishment

A common strategy right now is for tribal members to drive cars not registered to them with marijuana in hidden compartments, Sgt. Cray said.

Tribal drivers don't stick out on the reservation and the drugs are more difficult to sniff out than a car full of bales — decreasing the chance of being caught.

Most importantly, the tactic provides a tailor-made alibi. Tribal members tell police it's their friend's car and they had no idea about the drugs.

Without a confession, federal prosecutors usually pass on the case, Cray said.

The U.S. Attorney's Office in Tucson takes all "viable" cases from the Tohono O'Odham Nation, said Lynnette Kimmins, chief assistant U.S. attorney in the Tucson office. "It's got to be something that can be proved in court," she said.

Of the 2,303 drug prosecutions from U.S. attorney's Tucson office from fiscal years 2006 to 2009, 16 percent originated on the Tohono O'odham Nation, she said.

If the feds pass on a case against a tribal member, the case stays in tribal court, where the the maximum sentence is one year and convictions don't show up on the national police database, Cray said.

One tribal woman has been arrested four times with marijuana in her car but refuses to answer any questions, Cray said. The U.S. Attorney's Office declines prosecution each time because she hadn't admitted to knowing about the drugs.

"We catch people two, three, four times," Cray said. "It's kind of a joke. There is no real punishment."

Solutions

Chairman Norris has recently met with officials from the Drug Enforcement Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Arizona Department of Homeland Security to get assistance in combating the smuggling.

"There has been some resistance, some hesitation from some tribal leaders to not want to take advantage of those outside resources that may be available," Norris said. "But we're at a level where we need those resources. We have to be able to do that while at the same time protecting the sovereignty of the tribal nation itself."

Outside help is fine, but the real answer is focusing on known smuggling communities and persuading residents to stop tolerating the smuggling, said David Garcia, a tribal councilman from 1995 to 2003.

"People know that it's going on, but if it's a family member or relative, nobody is going to say anything," Garcia said.

Tribal member Rivas said the drug-smuggling organizations intimidate people so they don't say anything. They used to come into Menager's Dam with weapons set up on top of their trucks, she said.

"The majority of the people will not do anything for (fear of) their own safety," she said.

Tohono police officers have been doing more outreach work in communities, including conducting open forums to talk about the smuggling.

"A lot of them are saying they are tired of this and they are reporting the violators," said Reina, the tribe's public safety director. "Without the communities' involvement, we can't do anything. They know everybody that does this."

Tohono O'odham police also work with the Boys and Girls Club in programs such as boxing and talk to graduating high school students about the dangers of getting involved in drug smuggling, Delgado said. Once a person starts, he said, it's difficult to stop.

On the day police arrested Lopez and Garcia, Garcia told them that they had driven another load of drugs across the border two days earlier.

Lopez was on release pending federal charges from that arrest when she was stopped on June 14 by a Border Patrol agent in the same area where O'odham police nabbed her the month before.

When the agent approached the truck, the criminal complaint says, Lopez said, "I don't have any drugs in the car, you can check if you want."

Agents did, and found 65 pounds of marijuana in the gas tank and spare tire of the 1997 Ford pickup she was driving.

Lopez is back in federal prison, awaiting trial on the drug charges.

what the

Tucson hospital's health-care package promises affluent Mexican women the chance to have their babies in posh surroundings with access to the latest medical equipment.

But the marketing materials leave out a key draw in the arrangement: U.S. citizenship for the newborn.

Tucson Medical Center's "birth package" gives an official nod to a generations-old practice of wealthy Mexican women coming to U.S. hospitals to give birth. Mexican families do the same thing at all local hospitals, but TMC is the only one actively recruiting their business.

The practice is legal, but offensive to some advocates of tougher U.S. immigration standards.

"What it really amounts to," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, "is buying U.S. citizenship."

"This is different from any other kind of medical treatment," said Krikorian, whose Washington, D.C.-based think tank studies the impact of immigration on the United States. "If you come for cancer treatment … there's no consequence for the United States. You pay your money, you go home."

The Mexican consul general in Tucson said parents naturally want to give their children every advantage and securing U.S. citizenship is something a small percentage of Mexican families can afford.

"This is not a new phenomena," said Juan Manuel Calderón Jaimes, who says he's seen the practice for almost 30 years. "Many families of means in Sonora send their wives here to give birth because they have the resources to pay for the services."

Expectant mothers can either schedule a Caesarean section or arrive a few weeks before their due dates to give birth at TMC. It is one of 13 packages aimed at Mexican families, some of which include a stay at a local resort and shopping excursion.

TMC's maternity package costs $2,300 for a vaginal birth with a two-day stay and $4,600 for a Caesarean section and a four-day stay, assuming no complications. That includes exams for the newborn and a massage for the new mother. There is a $500 surcharge per additional child.

"These are families with a lot of money, and some (women) arrive on private jets and are picked up by an ambulance and brought here," said Shawn Page, TMC's administrator of international services and relations. "These are families with a lot of clout."

U.S. citizenship for their children brings even more clout: the opportunity — and right — to live, work and study in the United States. Because their parents do not earn the same right, many children of such arrangements grow up in Mexico and come here as adults for school and work.

The United States recognizes the jus soli doctrine, which grants citizenship to those born on U.S. soil. Like the U.S., Mexico honors the jus sanguinis doctrine, which grants citizenship to a child based on the citizenship of the parents regardless of where the birth occurs. So a child of Mexican parents born at TMC would have dual nationality.

Array of packages

Aside from the maternity package, TMC offers 12 packages for international patients, including bone density tests, mammograms and urology procedures.

Many pair pampering with medical care.

Earlier this month, TMC launched the Mujer Sana (Healthy Woman) Health Tour Package, targeted to women 50 or older. It includes six exams at the hospital and three days and two nights at a Tucson-area resort and a shopping spree.

The hospital partnered with the Metropolitan Tucson Convention & Visitors Bureau, and the program is marketed through the visitors bureau in Hermosillo, Sonora.

"TMC has generated a package dedicated exclusively to women, something Mexico hasn't done," said Miguel Angel Partida Ruíz, director of the bureau's Sonora office.

He said the patients can bring their families and turn the trip into a mini-vacation. The MTCVB has a contract with Super Shuttle to provide transportation.

Rocío Pérez Medina, coordinator of "Vamos a Tucson" — the campaign to promote Tucson in Sonora — said the new TMC package is appealing.

Although a fixed price has not been set, the visitors bureau estimates the cost will be between $500 and $600, which includes the $150 exams at TMC.

Earlier this month, Pérez Medina reviewed the results of the exams she took in order to sample the care patients would receive.

"It is very good, very thorough," she said. The package can be purchased by one person or for groups of up to 10.

Aside from treating international patients and the local Spanish-speaking community, Page said, the goal of TMC's international program is to reach out to U.S. citizens living in Canada or Mexico to come to Tucson for medical treatment.

Health niches on both sides

South of the border, private hospitals are applying for international certification and partnering with U.S. insurance providers to cover medical costs.

Officials with the recently created Medical Tourism Cluster in Sonora say the cross-border patient phenomena illustrates the different niches.

"It's good that Mexican patients go to Arizona," said Héctor Xavier Martínez, head of the Sonora Medical Tourism Cluster. "Hopefully, we can create agreements between private hospitals on both sides of the border."

Next month, hospital officials will visit Tucson to promote Sonoran hospitals and the lower cost of medical procedures.

Among the hospitals that will participate are Hospital Cima Hermosillo, Grupo Médico San José, Clínica del Noroeste and Grupo Médico de Hermosillo.

Tourism representatives and bus and airline companies will also participate in the Tucson visit.

The cluster is also promoting the idea of building small clinics in tourist destinations such as Puerto Peñasco, also known as Rocky Point.

futile

The Southwest Border Security Initiative launched in March has led to increased seizures of drugs, guns and drug money along the U.S.-Mexico border, federal officials told a key House panel Thursday.

Marijuana seizures were 39 percent higher from March 24 through June 23 compared with the same time last year, said Kumar Kibble, deputy director of the office of investigations for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Methamphetamine seizures were up 68 percent, heroin seizures were up 48 percent, and cocaine seizures were up 8 percent, Kibble told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

At the same time, $31 million in drug money was seized, an increase of 40 percent from 2008.

Beefed-up scrutiny of vehicles heading south into Mexico has resulted in the seizure of more than 1,600 firearms and nearly 190,000 rounds of ammunition since March, said Alan Bersin, special representative for border affairs in the Department of Homeland Security.

Mexican drug cartels often buy weapons in the U.S. and take them back across the border.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced the border security initiative on March 24. It included shifting more than 360 federal officers and agents to the Southwest border.

U.S. and Mexican authorities are battling increasingly violent drug cartels, federal officials said.

Drug-related homicides in Mexico doubled from 2006 to 2007, and more than doubled again in 2008 to about 6,200, said Anthony Placido, assistant administrator for intelligence in the Drug Enforcement Administration.

"So far in 2009, there have already been about 3,500 drug-related murders in Mexico, putting the murder rate on course to exceed last year," Placido said.

The good news is that the U.S. is working closer with Mexico than ever before, Bersin said.

"We share a responsibility and a commitment to assist Mexico in defeating the criminal elements that have undermined the rule of law, and to ensure that American citizens on our side of the border remain secure from violence," Bersin said.

The U.S. can't afford to let Mexican President Felipe Calderón lose his war against the drug cartels, Placido said, warning that the resulting chaos in Mexico would threaten the security of the U.S.

"There is no country on the face of the Earth that is more important to the United States than Mexico," Placido said.

a few good dead men

MORELIA, Mexico – Police in western Mexico found four mutilated bodies in plastic bags on the side of a highway Thursday.

The officials found the bodies in the town of La Huacana after receiving reports of plastic bags leaking blood, according to a statement from prosecutors in the state of Michoacan, where the town is located.

The discovery came on the same day the federal Attorney General's Office announced the arrest of the town's former mayor for alleged ties to La Familia drug cartel.

Mario Manuel Romero Tinoco was transferred to a maximum-security prison in the Pacific Coast state of Nayarit, the office said in a statement.

In May, federal agents arrested 10 other Michoacan mayors on suspicion of protecting La Familia. Seven of the officials remain in custody.

On Wednesday, investigators found a severed head and two arms inside a plastic bag in the nearby town of Ario de Rosales, also in Michoacan.

President Felipe Calderon's home state, Michoacan is a major focus of his administration's crackdown on drug traffickers. More than 10,800 people have died since 2006, when Calderon began sending thousands of troops throughout the country to battle drug traffickers.

trying to feed her kids

TUCSON – A 24-year-old mother was arrested after officers discovered over 1,000 pounds of pot in her house.

Investigators from the Department of Public Safety and other law enforcement agencies assigned to the Tucson Counter Narcotics Alliance say they saw an individual on a bicycle who they believed had a spotting scope and was scanning the area around a trailer park in the 7700 block of South Cardinal. The person was determined to be a “lookout.”

Detectives say they saw what appeared to be a bale of marijuana taken from a shed at a property in the area. Officers followed a car from the resident and stopped the driver. John Matus, 20, was arrested after officers found a bale of pot in the car.

Detectives obtained a search warrant and went to the residence in question and found 1,100 pounds of marijuana inside the house. Gumersinda Galaz, 24, was arrested and booked into jail. She faces drug-related charges and child endangerment.

Galaz’ children are 8, 5 and 4 years old. Police are now looking for the children’s father, Jesus Erasto Martinez, so they can question him.

tunnell

NOGALES, Arizona - A resident walking near the rusted boundary fence in this Arizona border city last month reported suspicious knocking coming from an abandoned warehouse to the Border Patrol.

The agents found two men constructing the exit for a sophisticated but unfinished tunnel from Mexico. The discovery was no great surprise because authorities have been finding tunnels every two or three weeks all year.

As security tightens along the Mexico border, the twin cities of Nogales -- where stores, homes and warehouses in Mexico and Arizona lie just a few yards (meters) either side of the fence -- are in the grip of a tunneling boom.

The cities straddle a key drug trafficking route controlled on the south side by the powerful Sinaloa cartel, which smuggles billions of dollars worth of drugs including marijuana, cocaine and heroin to cities across the United States.

Border police have found 16 completed or partially completed tunnels here since October 1 last year -- a record for the city that has a checkered history of smuggling reaching back to the era of Prohibition in the 1920s and 1930s.

"Tunnels have been around since the bootlegging era but what we're seeing now is something new for everyone here," said Mike Scioli, a spokesman for the Border Patrol's Tucson sector, which hunts for the tunnels. "It's extremely challenging."

Police say most are short, shallow shafts punched into the interconnected drainage system that runs beneath the streets of the two cities, flushing storm runoff into two huge tunnels large enough to drive a truck through.

The extensive network provides a vast network of possible exit and entry points through culverts.

Less common are sophisticated galleries like the one discovered by agents in early June. It had lighting, a ventilation hose and was fitted with wooden stud walls. It extended for 48 feet on the U.S. side, and 35 feet into Mexico.

Tunneling expertise

Earlier this year, U.S. President Barack Obama pledged support to the Mexican government in its battle to curb warring drug cartels, who have killed some 2,500 people south of the border since January.

Since then, U.S. authorities have ratcheted up security along the border and at the ports of entry to target cartels hauling drugs to the United States and bulk cash proceeds and firearms headed south to Mexico.

Investigators say the digging beneath Nogales is being financed by a Sinaloa cartel offshoot run by kingpin Arturo Beltran Leyva, although the passageways themselves are built by experienced local "gateway organizations."

"Just like there's ships that smuggle in the ocean that have ship's captains who know how to do that ... (they) have an expertise in tunneling," said Anthony Coulson, the assistant special agent in charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's Tucson Office.

The tunnelers have a knowledge of the drainage networks, as well as the unmapped infrastructure including gas and water mains that lie in their way, Coulson said.

U.S. border police work closely with Mexican authorities to beat them. They rely on tips and other intelligence, as well as constant patrols of the streets and the network of drains by Border Patrol tunnel teams.

While they are finding ever more tunnels, neither police nor weary residents in Nogales have any illusion that they will stamp out the activity any time soon.

"Tunnels will be here as long as Americans have this tremendous appetite for drugs," said Ernesto Chavez, 74, who runs a stationery shop close to the downtown warehouse where the last tunnel was found.

"It's just supply and demand."