news that i need

http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/33766/20100709/drug-war-hits-mexicos-richest-city-and-hurts-industry.htm

2010-07-09T21:30:00.000-07:00

http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/33766/20100709/drug-war-hits-mexicos-richest-city-and-hurts-industry.htm

altar,sonora

2010-07-05T21:32:00.001-07:00

Very few residents dare to drive on one of the roads out of this watering-hole for migrants, fearing they will be stopped at gunpoint. They worry they will be told to turn around after their gas tanks are drained or, worse, be kidnapped or killed.

A shootout that left 21 people dead and six wounded on the road last week is the most gruesome sign that a relatively tranquil pocket of northern Mexico is quickly turning into a hotbed of drug-fueled violence on Arizona's doorstep. The violence in recent months is grist for supporters of the state's tough new law against illegal immigration, who are eager to portray the border as a lawless battlefield of smugglers both of drugs and humans.

Nogales, the main city in the region, which shares a border with the Arizona city of the same name, has had 131 murders so far this year, nearly surpassing 135 for all of 2009, according to a tally by the newspaper Diario de Sonora. That includes two heads found Thursday stuffed side by side between the bars of a cemetery fence.

The carnage still pales compared to other Mexican border cities, most notably Ciudad Juarez, which lies across from El Paso, Texas, which had 2,600 murders last year. But the increase shows that some small cattle-grazing towns near Nogales are now in the grip of drug traffickers who terrorize residents.

The violence is concentrated in a few villages in the mountainous desert area of Rio Altar, which, until recently, drew tourists for its handsome churches, its river, a tilapia-filled lake and cooler temperatures. The roads wind through mountains of mesquite trees and saguaro cactus.

That's where Thursday's pre-dawn shootout occurred, just 12 miles (19 kilometers) south of the border, on a deserted stretch between the villages of Tubutama and Saric. Eight vehicles and numerous weapons were found in what authorities described as a confrontation between rival gangs competing for drug and immigration routes into the U.S.

The windows and panels of some vehicles were painted with X's in white shoe polish, said Fernando Pompa, a police officer in Altar who visited the scene. Bullet casings littered the pavement.

The territory is disputed between Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, who heads the Sinaloa cartel, and the Beltran Leyva cartel, whose leader, Arturo Beltran Leyva, was killed in a shootout last December with Mexican marines in Cuernavaca, south of Mexico City.

Locals trace the wave of violence to the arrest in February of Jose Vazquez Villagrana, nicknamed "El Jaibil," or "The Wild Boar." Vazquez, reported to be an ally of Guzman, was captured by federal police in the nearby town of Santa Ana.

Many people have fled in the last few months, said one resident whose family has longtime roots in a village near the shootings. He asked that his only his first name, Luis, be published because he fears for his safety. His relatives abandoned their homes this spring to join him in a larger city where he lives.

"This began like a cancer in the finger and now it is spreading to other parts of the body," he said, noting that it seems as if the government has no control to stop it.

Luis said schools closed early this year without explanation. Soft-drink vendors and electricity meter readers refuse to come.

Tubutama, a village of about 1,500 people with no hotel, restaurant or gas station, canceled its annual town fair last month for the first time in memory. The move came after the town's comptroller and director of public works were murdered.

Journalists who cover the small villages stopped visiting several months ago, saying it is too dangerous.

"If no one puts a stop to this, these will become ghost towns," said Jose Martin Mayoral, editor of Diario del Desierto, the newspaper in Caborca.

Despite its small size, many motorists used to pass through Tubutama because it is a hub for local roads. Now they drive longer distances on a toll road.

"It's very dangerous," said Alvaro Celaya, 57, a taxi driver in Altar, which sits just outside the danger zone. "No one will take you there anymore."

Altar, a town of about 10,000 people with a yellow-domed Roman Catholic church in its central square, has been spared the violence but is only about 15 miles (24 kilometers) from Tubutama. The town's economy was booming a few years ago with taxi drivers, restaurants and lodging houses that catered to migrants preparing to cross the U.S. border illegally in the Arizona desert.

Now, a scarcity of jobs because of the U.S. economic downturn is keeping illegal immigrants away, causing Altar to fall on hard times as well.

Ana Maria Velasquez, who volunteers at the church, said there used to be 50 candles on an altar to the Virgin of Guadalupe, each left by a migrant as a good-luck ritual before crossing the border. On Sunday, there was only one.

"The migrants sustained this town," said Velasquez, 29. "Now that the flow is down, we're very bad off economically."

On many afternoons, Altar police set up checkpoints to warn residents on the road to Tubutama that it is a risky trip, said Pompa, the police officer.

More than 23,000 people have been killed in Mexico's drug violence since President Felipe Calderon launched an all-out offensive on cartels in 2006.

Despite its proximity to Arizona, the increase in drug-fueled violence in this region has not spilled across the border — nor has it in El Paso or San Diego, across from Tijuana, Mexico.

Tony Estrada, the sheriff of Santa Cruz County, Arizona, said last week's shootout unnerved some people in his jurisdiction, which includes Nogales, Arizona.

"They don't want this happening in their backyard," he said. Everyone is just kind of on alert and watchful of what happened over there and hoping the violence will stop."

Estrada, echoing the view of many in Mexico's Rio Altar area, believes the violence will continue until one cartel assumes control or the warring factions broker a truce.

"These groups are battling for this area and you know it's going to continue," he said. "There's going to be retaliation for this."

headless

2010-07-05T21:28:00.001-07:00

Police have found the decapitated bodies of three men inside a burned-out car in the drug gang-plagued Mexican state of Sinaloa. The heads had been put on the vehicle's hood.

The Sinaloa state attorney general's office says one of the burned bodies was in the driver's seat, another in the back seat and the third was in the trunk.

Investigators found the car Monday in the city of Angostura, near the Pacific coast.

The office's statement provided no information on possible suspects or the motive for the killings.

Sinaloa has long been considered the home state of many of Mexico's most powerful drug lords.

to the polls

2010-07-05T21:26:00.000-07:00

After a Super Sunday of elections across Mexico that was widely seen as a test for the 2012 presidential race and the nation's future, the winner turns out to be _ well, not really anyone.

President Felipe Calderon's party is weak, the left is in collapse and the Institutional Revolutionary Party that is on a tentative path to recapture the presidency it held for 71 years was shown to be vulnerable. Drug cartel intimidation dissuaded many from voting at all.

The mixed outcome in elections across 15 states showed no party has won the faith of Mexicans desperate to bring their country out of a quagmire of economic stagnation and relentless gang wars that have killed more than 23,000 people since Calderon took office three years ago.

Calderon's conservative National Action Party won not a single state on its own, and lost two it had held, according to results Monday, and needed desperate alliances with leftists to wrest strongholds from the old ruling party.

That party, known as the PRI, demonstrated it remains Mexico's most important political force, won nine of 12 governorships Sunday.

Still, that was no change from the number it had before the ballot. And its defeat in three longtime bastion states indicated many Mexicans are still repulsed by the party that ruled through patronage and corruption from 1929 to 2000 _ a system that Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa once called the "perfect dictatorship."

Sunday's elections also displayed the intimidating power of drug cartels in the most embattled states. Only a third of voters showed up in the country's most violent state, Chihuahua, where drug gangs hung four bodies from bridges on election day. Less than 40 percent voted in Tamaulipas, where gubernatorial candidate Rodolfo Torre was assassinated last week.

It's not where Mexicans thought they would be when National Action's Vicente Fox ousted the PRI in 2000 and promised a new era.

"I still remember the celebration when Vicente Fox won the presidential elections 10 years ago. It was as if Mexico had won the World Cup," Mexican political scientist Leo Zuckerman wrote Monday in Excelsior newspaper. "Where are we 10 years after the historic triumph of Fox?"

"I see multiple threats to democracy, which has not yet consolidated itself in Mexico. I think organized crime is the biggest challenge," he said. "The stamp is very clear: crime has exercised its veto power over the power of the vote."

The PRI, a party that was created by the nation's rulers to tame the complex forces of the Mexican Revolution, was widely seen as doomed after its loss to Fox, and it was a battered afterthought in the 2006 presidential election, when Calderon narrowly defeated a resurgent leftist Democratic Revolution Party.

Four years later, Calderon's approval ratings are slumping amid mass shootings, corruption scandals and kidnappings that remind Mexicans daily of the resilient power of drug cartels he has vowed to defeat.

"He has reverse coattails," said George Grayson, a Mexico expert at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. "The economy is quite weak ... and the narco-traffickers have been on a binge."

Democratic Revolution _ the PRI's biggest competitor for the working class vote _ has largely imploded amid internal wrangling, four years after nearly winning the presidency. It lost the only state it controlled on its own among the 12 up for grabs Sunday.

In a sense, the left and right are back to where they were in the days of PRI rule: forced into uncomfortable alliances to tackle a powerful opponent. In 1988, National Action joined leftist parties in protesting the allegedly fraudulent presidential victory of Carlos Salinas.

On Sunday, neither the left nor the right were able to beat the PRI alone.

Democratic Revolution joined Calderon's party to win Sinaloa and Puebla behind coalition candidates who only recently bolted from the PRI. A similar coalition won in Oaxaca behind a minor-party candidate who quit the PRI a decade ago.

Though the results were largely due to local issues and local scandals, they were a blow to the PRI's hope that Sunday would help propel it back to the presidency. The party had ruled those states for 80 years.

Many saw the result as evidence that voters are skeptical about PRI promises that it has learned from its past mistakes and abandoned the strongman politics that kept in power for so long.

In Sinaloa, the cradle of Mexican drug trafficking, PRI candidate Jesus Vizcarra long faced allegations of ties to the cartel led by Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, Mexico's most-wanted drug lord. The newspaper Reforma recently published a photograph of Vizcarra attending a party years ago with El Chapo's No. 2, Ismael Zambada. Vizcarra, the mayor of state capital Culiacan and a distant relative of slain drug trafficker Ines Calderon, dodged questions about whether Zambada is the godfather of one of his children, saying only that he had never committed a crime.

In the heavily indigenous state of Oaxaca, outgoing Gov. Ulises Ruiz alienated many voters with his heavy handed approach to a five-month deadly uprising in 2006 over allegations that he stole his election victory.

In Puebla, the outgoing PRI official was widely ridiculed as "Precious Governor" because of a sycophantic comment made during a leaked conversation he had with a local businessman who complained about a reporter who was crusading against child molesters. Puebla police later seized the reporter in another state and hauled her halfway across Mexico. She was eventually freed.

"To a large extent this gives some breathing room to President Calderon, who expected to be faced with a resurgent PRI," said Andrew Selee, director of the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson's Mexico Institute.

Voter turnout was robust in Sinaloa and Oaxaca and very low in two states where the PRI easily won: Chihuahua and Tamaulipas. National Action leaders touted this as a promising sign, insisting the PRI can only win where turnout is low.

"We won in places where people came out and voted," said Jose Sacramento, the defeated National Action candidate for governor in Tamaulipas, where the PRI fielded the brother of its assassinated candidate.

But then, what's the party plan for states where Calderon has failed to root out the cartels since launching his drug war at the end of 2006? In Tamaulipas, party leaders said they couldn't even find candidates who dared to run for mayor in some gang-plagued towns.

"It was an election that began with blood and ended with blood and that was a factor because citizens were afraid to participate," Sacramento said.

___

furry little things

2010-07-05T08:31:00.000-07:00

executives of a Los Angeles toy company - including two from the San Gabriel Valley - were arrested Friday for their alleged part in a scheme to launder almost $9 million for drug cartels in Mexico and Colombia using teddy bears and Topo Gigio mouse dolls.

Meichun Cheng Huang, 57, of Irvine, a co-owner of Angel Toy Corp.; Ling Yu, 52, of Arcadia, CEO and co-owner of the company; and company accountant Xiaoxin "Judy" Ju, 48, of San Gabriel, were arrested on federal charges at the downtown business on Alameda Street, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

"It's no small irony that a multi-million-dollar company which promoted itself as retailer of cuddly stuffed animals was allegedly acting as a financial linchpin for drug trafficking operatives in Colombia and Mexico," said ICE Director John Morton.

"It may be a toy company, but we believe these defendants' pursuits were anything but child's play," he said. "Businesses that launder profits for drug trafficking organizations should be on notice there will be a high price to pay for helping further these dangerous criminal enterprises."

According to an indictment, Huang and Yu directed their Colombian and Mexican clients to drop cash off at the company's Los Angeles headquarters or deposit it directly into the company's bank accounts.

After receiving the money, Angel Toy executives allegedly wired it to China to purchase stuffed animals and dolls, according to ICE.

toys were subsequently exported to Colombia, where an associate apparently arranged for their sale, ICE said.

The Colombian pesos generated by those sales were then used to reimburse Colombian drug traffickers, a money-laundering process known as a "black market peso exchange," said state Attorney General Jerry Brown, whose office investigated the case along with ICE.

"This sort of scheme does go on in other contexts, but linking teddy bears to the drug business -- that's one for the record books," the Democratic gubernatorial candidate said.

"The money goes to China, the toys go to Colombia, and the profits go to drug cartels in Mexico and Colombia."

The drug proceeds, which were allegedly laundered through numerous cash deposits in the United States, were returned to clients when the stuffed animals and dolls were exported to the foreign countries and sold to generate local "clean" money, according to ICE.

Today's arrests stemmed from a five-count indictment that charged five defendants, including the co-owners of Angel Toy Corp., and Jose

Leonardo Cuevas Otalora, 50, a Colombia-based businessman who allegedly oversaw the importation of the toys into his country, prosecutors said. The fifth defendant in the case is Angel Toy Corp. itself.

Immigration officials were working with the Colombian National Police and the U.S. Department of Justice to arrest Otalora, according to ICE.

The indictment also seeks the forfeiture of more than $8.6 million dollars, which is the amount of money allegedly laundered over a four-year period, from 2005 to 2009.

Topo Gigio was a character on a children's puppet show on Italian and Spanish television in the early 1960s and began famous worldwide when the cute rodent appeared on "The Ed Sullivan Show." Topo Gigio remains a Latino cultural icon.

goin to the polls

2010-07-04T22:35:00.000-07:00

Suspected drug hitmen in Mexico killed a top prosecutor, murdered 21 people in a shootout and dumped a severed head outside the house of a mayoral candidate days before elections, authorities said.

The violence unfolded in two states just south of the U.S. border and was the latest sign that Mexico's drug war is growing more intense.

Gunmen killed Sandra Salas, a deputy prosecutor for the northern state of Chihuahua in Ciudad Juarez across from El Paso, Texas, Wednesday night as she was being driven by bodyguards, a spokesman for the prosecutor's office said.

Then Thursday, unidentified men also left a head outside the house of the favorite for Ciudad Juarez mayor, Hector Murgia, who is running for Mexico's main opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, before the vote in 12 states Sunday.

President Felipe Calderon is under mounting pressure to control escalating drug violence that worries Washington and that is scaring off tourists and forcing some U.S.-owned factories to freeze investment plans.

Two drug gangs rumbled on a desert highway early on Thursday in a shootout that left 21 people dead in the northern state of Sonora, said Jose Larrinaga, a spokesman for the state prosecutor's office.

"It happened 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the U.S. border," Larrinaga said.

Larrinaga said investigators don't know what triggered the shootout, but the country's cartels routinely battle for the smuggling routes used to get cocaine into the United States.

Mexican authorities are on high alert after hitmen dressed as marines ambushed and killed the front-runner candidate for governor in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas Monday, in the worst sign so far of political intimidation by smuggling gangs.

Murguia, a former Ciudad Juarez mayor, faces accusations from rival politicians and rights groups of being in the pay of the city's powerful Juarez cartel, which is fighting the Sinaloa alliance for control of trafficking routes in a battle that has killed some 5,700 people in the city since 2008.

More than 26,000 people have died in drug violence across Mexico over the past 3 1/2 years.

Calderon has repeatedly vowed to stick to his military-backed anti-drug strategy, relying on thousands of troops across the country to curb the power of drug cartels.

Adding to a climate of violence ahead of the elections, a mayor in the southern state of Oaxaca was killed along with another local official Wednesday. The state prosecutor's office said the attack on Nicolas Garcia, mayor of the coastal town of Santo Domingo de Morelos, was likely a robbery.

http://www.reuters.com/places/mexico

2010-07-04T22:34:00.000-07:00

http://www.reuters.com/places/mexico

tax dollars at work

2010-05-29T23:07:00.000-07:00

Americans on the American side of the U.S. Mexican border are in much danger today from newly trained Mexican drug traffickers, who according to the highest level of the Mexican military reveals that Mexican Drug Cartels (MDC's) are currently training Mexican smugglers in the art of military tactic's. These trainees often referred to by many as coyotes are very important to the drug trade. These coyotes are believed to be responsible for the tons of illegal drugs being clandestinely smuggled into the United States from Mexico on a daily bases. As a result of this new level of training it is putting many average Americans in crave danger and right here at home.

A high ranking Mexican Army commander who insists on remaining anonymous has told the U.S. Border Fire Report that Mexican coyotes are now being trained by the Mexican Drug Cartel known as the Los Zetas and are operating in the deserts of Arizona. These highly trained former Mexican Army solders who themselves went through some of the best and latest U.S. Army training at the American tax payers expense now are passing this training onto the front line drug smugglers that guide these drug loads and human beings into the states mainly through our southern border with Mexico. They're known as "Los Zetas

See video's at: http://www.secureborderintel.org/TusconSector-armedescorts.html

This new breed of coyote now operate as a fine tuned military unit. I was able to make contact and talk with one of these new Zetas coyote smugglers. The deal was, if I would agree to not take any photo's or know his real name he would talk with me.

So I'll call him Juan. Juan told me that he had been guiding people into the USA for years and said he made a good living for him and his family of 7 kids and a wife. He said he was approached a couple of years ago by a Los Zetas officer who offered him military training and lots more money. Juan said that he picked 5 of his best workers who over the years had help him with his guiding business and they all went to a Zetas's camp for 9 weeks of training. He says " that he now makes much more money" he went on to say with this new training and man power he's able to bring many more people and loads of drugs into the US via the U.S. Mexican border. He said that where he once was paid 100 U.S. dollars per person (Illegal Alien) and 500 per pack mule (drug carrier) He now makes much more than that.

He confided that he and many others now as Los Zetas's operatives run five (5) man armed squads who lead both people who want to come to America and drug smuggling mules across the Arizona desert. " One of the members of his team runs point, two or more on each side of the group when possible or otherwise imbedded within the middle range of the group. Another brings up the rear as a tail gunner each carrying an AK 47 and the tail gunner packing a M-60 machine gun and or a 12 gouge riot shot gun. The groups range in size from 4 or five to a hundred or more per trip.

He, told me "that the weapons are used to guarantee the success of the operation". He said "there are many dangers I and my men can face in route, me and my men have used our weapons to protect the group against Rattle Snakes and even Bear attacks" 06/08/09 - 10 second video - bear on trail. But later he admitted that the main reason for having the weapons is to protect the drugs, mainly from competing drug gangs who from time to time they encounter. According to him many of the roaming gangs are looking for a fast and easy load of drugs, But also there are competing drug cartel gangs who are also trained and will try to take our loads and who want to operate on our turf. "But now we are much better prepared to deal with this and other threats that we may have to face on every trip." I asked, if and when he encounters American law enforcement would he and his men fire their weapons at them? He told me that that was not likely to happen because the routes he uses are not paroled by American authorities. He claims that this is possible because some high U.S. Government people is paid by the Zetas to not be in the area at certain times during his operations. He said " we take additional precautions to prevent that from happening". "We post our own people all along the route to I 8 and near the transfer points on the highway mile markers. We place our spotters on high ground and fly ultralight aircraft, both have communication equipment, radio's and through away cell phones. They are paid to watch for authorities and intruders, such as gangs, dangerous animals, American tourist, hikers, campers and all others who may be in the area."

Arizona estimates that there are up to million tourist known as snow birds who migrate to Arizona to winter each year, spending upwards of $1 billion dollars. Many of those snow birds camp, play and recreate on and near the dangerous U.S. Mexican Border in southern Arizona. Just like birds flying south for the winter, human residents of cold climates desire to escape the cold climates for a life of leisure. Most are unaware of the many dangers that the Mexican smugglers pose to there safety. There are signs posted on much of the Government lands warning visitors to the dangers that they my face if encountered by these dangerous smugglers. Juan, told me he is retiring, that he has made a lot of money in the last couple of years and he is going to leave his business to one of his younger associate operative from which he expects to receive payments from him for years to come. Juan is moving his family to Colorado to live the American dream.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) considers Los Zetas to be the most dangerous drug-trafficking organization in Mexico. Its members earned a reputation as super-gangsters adept at paramilitary-style ambushes and bold jailbreaks.

On the Texas-Mexico border, the Zetas are mythic, their crimes chronicled in the media and memorialized in narco-ballads.

They are the most feared, most emulated criminals in Mexico.

"They are a formidable criminal organization," says Anthony Placido, the DEA's chief of intelligence. "They're heavily armed with .50-caliber sniper rifles and heavy and light military-grade ordnance."

"They are every bit as ferocious and as capable as a military force as some of the rumors believe them to be," Placido says.

Originally, there were 31 Zetas — elite army counter-narcotics commandos who defected to work as enforcers for the Gulf Cartel. The name came from their radio code, the letter Z.

But after the 2003 arrest of Gulf crime boss Osiel Cardenas, "the lion wised up and now controls the handler," as one observer put it.

The Zetas have morphed into their own cartel. Their zone of influence ranges from the lower Texas border, south along the Atlantic and Caribbean coastal states of Mexico, through Chiapas and all the way into Guatemala, where they trans-ship South American cocaine to Mexico.

But their base remains the charmless industrial border cities in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas.

Nuevo Laredo, in Tamaulipas, is the most important trade border crossing in Latin America — and it is Zeta territory.

From 2004 to 2007, the Zetas fought a savage turf war — which included bazooka and grenade attacks — against interlopers from the Sinaloa Cartel and others.

Zetas are now operating along the U.S. Mexican border from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean.

These newly trained Zata solders are currently enjoying a free rain to enter this country unmolested by American authorities throughout the American Southwest where American Indian reservations, U.S. Military lands, National Parks, Monuments and U.S. forest lands are being penetrated and used by these smugglers, particularly in south central and south eastern Arizona and along the southern New Mexico border with old Mexico.

There are many gaps in the border that are not being effectively protected by American law enforcement and that at least in part is the reason concerned Americans have in the past formed minute man groups, armed themselves and patrolled the U.S. Mexican border and attempted to divert human and drug trafficking. In the past U.S. Army troops and National Guard units where also placed on the border. The U.S. has increased the numbers of the U.S. Border Patrol and Homeland security have beefed up border checks of travelers entering and exiting our country at known check points along the more than 2000 mile border with Mexico. Even with the billions of dollars having been spend on drug interdiction over the years as part of the war on drugs, the war on drugs is a failure.

People being smuggled into the U.S. in the truck loads: Most are from Mexico. Central America, South America and even from China and the Middle east. Photo by SBI. Go to: http://www.secureborderintel.org/Camera1-016.html

judge James Gray of Orange County California who has studied and worked with drug issues for years says "tens of billions of tax payer dollars have been spent on the War On Drugs and that so called war on drugs has failed."

According to long time border observer Glen Spencer "A massive number of people illegally enter the USA every day by simply walking unchallenged across our southern border. In the 1952 miles of border from California to Texas they use literally thousands of trails and paths, ever changing their routes to avoid detection. Cartel involvement has brought increased organizational skills to smuggling operations and, contrary to government claims, only a very small percentage are apprehended. Accurate statistics are impossible to gather, but the true numbers are staggering, and the general public remains largely uninformed. "

Now there are new groups forming and establishing their own organizations to monitor the situation on our southern border, one of these groups call themselves "Concerned Citizens" I recently had the opportunity to visit this low profile group as they organized monitoring and listening posts east of Gila Bend Arizona on and near I 8 a major U.S. highway that they claim is a transfer point of illegal aliens and loads of drugs on that highways many marker posts where they contend loads of human and drugs enter the U.S. through drug trafficking corridors originating in Mexico.

According to the Concerned Citizens of Arizona they want to alert the public to a new citizen activist opportunity to help them observe and report the daily invasion across our southern border with Mexico.

Daniel Webster said "This is not a Minuteman or extremist group sponsored event - just a call to action by a group of "Concerned Citizens".

If you and or your group is interested you can contact them through e-mail: dtfsdf@oco.net

Concerned Citizens report that DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano and the other race baiting, ethnocentric anarchists want the people of America to believe the border is under "operational control". Nothing could be further from the truth says an organizer with the new group of "Concerned Citizens" and they have already have to deployed. They hope to video tape and educate Americans about the real threat to National Security and our public safety.

Concerned Citizens has a full blown showing of people who have come out and are enjoying our federal lands. This is people coming together to help AZ Governor Jan Brewer and the people of Arizona to bring attention to the need for National Guard on our southern border.

The group is in support of Jan Brewer signing SB1070 and say they want to help educate the public. they say "It´s time to bring back the" Minuteman Type Lines"

The group points out that there are 30 miles of area in a straight line that they cover. They say that there propose is doing what they do best..... "DETERRENCE BY PRESENCE"

The operation was kicked off and started operations 15 May the operation is expected to least at least 2-3 weeks.

The locations of deployment is: Interstate 8, 45 miles south of downtown Phoenix

where they have placed multiple camps at major choke points.

This I-8 corridor is very active and "VERY DANGEROUS", there is a very good chance you will see "ARMED DRUG LOADS"!! moving through the area. This opp "IS NOT" for 1st timers, we are ready and at the top of our game with all the necessary gear for this type of opp and for being self sufficient for desert camping! Interstate 8, MM 141 - Freeman Exit

With that said, the biggest thing we can do on this opp is to be seen by the public on I-8 so we will be posting on every mile

marker (that's were all the action is anyway) for a 30 mi. stretch. We provide maps/intel/phone numbers and radios on site as, there should be 2 vehicles & 4 people min. per mi. marker for safety.

To the Concerned Citizens that are working I-8 and to those in the future thank you for supporting Arizona.

Concerned Citizens continue to do the job the Federal Government won't do by securing the border south of Phoenix along Interstate 8. What we are having to do now is what should be done by Congress by putting Troops on the border.

The area south of Interstate 8 between Gila Bend (Junction 85 & I-8) and Casa Grande (Junction I-8 & I-10) is a major smuggling corridor.....drugs, IAs, weapons..... We´ve seen it all. This is approximately a 60 mile stretch, but not all that distance is active with smuggling. The traffic comes up through the Tohono D' O'dham Reservation day and night.

The fact that load vehicles use I-8 to enter this area, pick up their loads and leave the area makes them vulnerable to detection. Load areas on I-8 are typically one of the following: dirt roads, major washes and/or mile markers. Mile markers are used a "waypoints" by the load vehicles, so this also makes them vulnerable to detection.

Bottom line, if we had enough dedicated individuals "camped out" on the entire known active load up points on I-8, we could effectively shut this area down. A lot of recon has been completed in this area so we know this is doable.... just a matter of enough dedicated individuals.

This IS a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area and is potentially very dangerous so participating individuals who need to be prepared to defend tthemselves.

t Abandon items found on the smuggling routes lift there by the smugglers and cleaned up by the Concerned Citizens. Photo By Concerned Citizens.

A long list of items, including abandoned vehicles, can be attributed to illegal aliens/ drug smugglers that traverse the desert. Items such as used needles, drug paraphernalia, plastic grocery bags, paper products, empty water containers, blankets, bakpaks, clothing, used disposable diapers, sanitary napkins, etc are among things you might run across. The heaps of litter long forgotten by those forging ahead come at a great cost to those who must bear the responsibility of cleaning it up. Each illegal alien leaves an average of 8 pounds of trash at layover and pickup areas. Statistics from the Border Patrol Tucson Sector report approximately 500,000 illegal aliens apprehensions in that sector for 2009. Conservatively, the Border Patrol apprehends 1 in 5 illegal aliens so that means 2, 500,000 illegal aliens leaving 20 million pounds of trash every year in the Arizona Desert !

Many argue the government is not doing its job when it comes to securing the border especially with surveillance pictures snapped in March of heavily armed drug runners in a remote desert area near Casa Grande.

Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu says "it's a known corridor for drug and human smuggling and it's same area where Deputy Louis Puroll was shot during a gun battle with six smugglers, "he unloaded upon the suspects that were firing on him that were trying to kill him."

Puroll was shot in the side and he believes he shot one of the suspects. Sheriff Babue says this latest round of border violence underscores the dangers his deputies face every day, "literally what it appears to be squad size elements using para military tactics that are either escorting largely drug loads or illegal's."

http://www.theunion.com/article/20100519/NEWS/100519679/1066&parentprofile=

2010-05-29T23:01:00.000-07:00

http://www.theunion.com/article/20100519/NEWS/100519679/1066&parentprofile=

sb 1070

2010-05-19T20:00:00.001-07:00

1. It requires police officers to determine the immigration status of everybody they arrest before that person is released.

• The law says: "Any person who is arrested shall have the person's immigration status determined before the person is released. The person's immigration status shall be verified with the federal government pursuant to 8 United States code section 1373(c)."

• What that means: This could mean lots of extra work for local police officers, who have to make the initial determination and then contact federal agents for verification, said Raymond Michalowski, an Arizona regents professor of criminology at Northern Arizona University. The law does not spell out how the determination and verification must be done.

Police officers almost always get identification from people they arrest, but most police departments don't use that information to check everybody's immigration status, he said.

"This becomes a very large, unfunded mandate for police departments," Michalowski said.

2. During any stop, detention or arrest, a police officer must try to determine a person's immigration status if the officer has reason to suspect the person is here illegally. An exception exists if making that determination might obstruct an investigation.

• The law says: "For any lawful stop, detention or arrest made by a law enforcement official or a law enforcement agency of this state or a law enforcement official or a law enforcement agency of a county, city, town or other political subdivision of this state in the enforcement of any other law or ordinance of a county, city or town of this state where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien and is unlawfully present in the United States, a reasonable attempt shall be made, when practicable, to determine the immigration status of the person, except if the determination may hinder or obstruct an investigation."

• What it means: The language - which was changed Thursday night to clarify lawful contact - effectively makes checking immigration status a "secondary enforcement" akin to the state's seat-belt laws, said Paul Senseman, the governor's spokesman.

The law doesn't force officers to go out looking for illegal immigrants, only to call immigration officials to determine the status when the officer develops a reasonable suspicion, Kris Kobach, a University of Missouri at Kansas City law professor who helped draft the bill, said in an interview with National Public Radio.

Kobach was Attorney General John Ashcroft's chief adviser on immigration law and border security from 2001 to 2003. He did not return phone calls from the Arizona Daily Star for this story.

He wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times that the law will most likely come into play after a traffic stop.

"A police officer pulls a minivan over for speeding. A dozen passengers are crammed in. None has identification. The highway is a known alien-smuggling corridor. The driver is acting evasively. Those factors combine to create reasonable suspicion that the occupants are not in the country legally," he wrote.

It's unclear if the law requires this determination to be made by a federal agent in person or over the phone.

The change in wording from "lawful contact" to "lawful stop, detention or arrest" would appear to exempt victims and witnesses from the law, but the statute still dictates a significant change in traditional priorities of law enforcement agencies, said Gabriel "Jack" Chin, of the University of Arizona's James E. Rogers College of Law. Chin has been reading statutes for 25 years and an article he co-wrote was mentioned five times in a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, Padilla v. Kentucky, regarding the rights of illegal immigrants.

It will force officers to inquire about the immigration status of everyone they stop, detain or arrest, if there is a reasonable suspicion they are illegal immigrants, rather than focusing on determining the immigration status of people who have committed serious crimes or investigating more serious crimes, as they do now, Chin said.

"Police have to have priorities," Chin said. "They can't enforce every law against everybody. They have to decide what is most important and focus on that. Traditionally, they have focused on the most serious crimes."

The language also leaves much to the discretion of individual officers, which means it could be implemented quite differently by agencies and within agencies, regents professor Michalowski said.

And he's not sure the clarification in wording will help with the damage that might have already been done in terms of losing trust in immigrant communities that now fear any contact with police could lead to deportation.

"Once widespread fear has been created as it has in Latino communities in Arizona, a few minor word changes will not get the genie back into the bottle," Michalowski said.

Many law enforcement leaders have expressed concern that the law will discourage illegal immigrants from reporting crime to police for fear of deportation. That could diminish public safety for all residents if, for instance, a murderer or rapist is on the loose.

A Tucson police officer filed a lawsuit Thursday challenging the bill on this basis, claiming the legislation would hinder investigations in Latino neighborhoods.

3. People who officers suspect are here illegally must show one of four approved identification cards to prove they are in the county legally.

• The law says: "A person is presumed to not be an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States if the person provides to the law enforcement officer or agency any of the following:

• A valid Arizona driver license.

• A valid Arizona non-operating identification license.

• A valid tribal enrollment card or other form of tribal identification.

• If the entity requires proof of legal presence in the United States before issuance, any valid United States federal, state or local government issued identification."

What that means: If you are worried you might raise the suspicion of an officer because of your ethnicity or accent, it's best to carry your Arizona driver license or other documents that show you are here lawfully, immigrant advocates say.

Although a citizen or legal resident cannot be convicted under the new law, carrying proper ID will help to avoid having to go to jail while your immigration status is confirmed, Chin said.

But Kobach downplayed the need for anybody to carry identification in The New York Times op-ed.

"Arizona's law does not require anyone, alien or otherwise, to carry a driver's license," he wrote. "Rather, it gives any alien with a license a free pass if his immigration status is in doubt. Because Arizona allows only lawful residents to obtain licenses, an officer must presume that someone who produces one is legally in the country."

4. In a change made Thursday night by the bill's sponsors, the law prohibits police from using race to establish reasonable suspicion that someone is here illegally. The original bill prohibited using "solely" race.

• The law says: "A law enforcement official or agency of this state or a county, city, town or other political subdivision of this state may not consider race, color or national origin in implementing the requirements of this subsection except to the extent permitted by the United States or Arizona Constitution."

• What that means: The bill's sponsor, Rep. Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, said the original provision was relevant because 90 percent of people in the country illegally are from Mexico and Latin America. But after the change, he said the provision is probably unnecessary, as the U.S. Constitution already precludes racial profiling. What the change does, Pearce said, is remove a target for foes, both those in court and those criticizing the measure in speeches and demonstrations.

In The New York Times op-ed, Kobach wrote, "The Arizona law actually reduces the likelihood of race-based harassment by compelling police officers to contact the federal government as soon as is practicable when they suspect a person is an illegal alien, as opposed to letting them make arrests on their own assessment."

But Chin and Michalowski said the word alteration doesn't change the fact that this is a racial-profiling law. Michalowski said the removal of "solely" was a "public-relations" maneuver that likely won't change anything.

"With or without that one word the law increases the number of instances in which officers inclined to racially profile can do so," Michalowski said.

5. The law makes it a state crime to transport, conceal, harbor or shield illegal immigrants. There is an exception for child-protective-services workers, first responders, ambulance attendants and emergency medical technicians.

• The law says: "It is unlawful for a person who is in violation of a criminal offense to:

"1. Transport or move or attempt to transport or move an alien in this state, in furtherance of the illegal presence of the alien in the United States, in a means of transportation if the person knows or recklessly disregards the fact that the alien has come to, has entered or remains in the United States in violation of law.

"2. Conceal, harbor or shield or attempt to conceal, harbor or shield an alien from detection in any place in this state, including any building or any means of transportation, if the person knows or recklessly disregards the fact that the alien has come to, has entered or remains in the United States in violation of law.

"3. Encourage or induce an alien to come to or reside in this state if the person knows or recklessly disregards the fact that such coming to, entering or residing in this state is or will be in violation of law."

• What that means: The passage is borrowed from federal law and only applies to people who know or recklessly disregard the fact that the person is an illegal immigrant, Kobach told The Arizona Republic.

But Michalowski said the law puts friends and family members of illegal immigrants in danger of violating the law when they are together. The law "makes citizens and legal residents criminals for providing aid to these family members and friends," he said.

"There is nothing in SB 1070 that says the law cannot be turned on them if they initiate contact with or are questioned by police in relationship to some other criminal matter," he said.

Those scenarios probably wouldn't put somebody at risk, Chin said, but he's not sure because of the inclusion of the exceptions.

6. The law makes it a state crime for illegal immigrants to work in Arizona.

• The law says: "It is unlawful for a person who is unlawfully present in the United States and who is an unauthorized alien to knowingly apply for work, solicit work in a public place or perform work as an employee or independent contractor in this state."

• What that means: This is the most clearly written part of the statute and what should be the headline of any story about the new law, Chin said.

This makes any illegal immigrant who is working or trying to get work - for example, by showing up at popular gathering spots for day laborers - at risk of being arrested by an Arizona law enforcement officer. This is a big change, because previously, a non-citizen did not commit a state crime by working or seeking work, Chin said.

7. The law also makes it a state crime for somebody to stop on the street and pick up somebody for work, although it may be hard to prove - and because of the way the law is written this may still be OK as long as the driver pulls off the road first.

• Passage: "It is unlawful for an occupant of a motor vehicle that is stopped on a street, roadway or highway to attempt to hire or hire and pick up passengers for work at a different location if the motor vehicle blocks or impedes the normal movement of traffic. … It is unlawful for a person to enter a motor vehicle that is stopped on a street, roadway or highway in order to be hired by an occupant of the motor vehicle and to be transported to work at a different location if the motor vehicle blocks or impedes the normal movement of traffic."

• What it means: This is an attempt to make it a state crime to hire day laborers, but the way it's written it may be hard to prove without getting a confession, Chin said. As written, it seems to only make it illegal to block traffic in the street, Chin said.

felipe

2010-05-18T10:00:00.001-07:00

Calderon will be only the second foreign leader, after India's prime minister last November, to be received at the Obama White House with a state dinner, building on ties forged during Obama's two official visits to Mexico.

Trade between the two countries surpasses $1 billion dollars a day, with Mexico sending more than 80 percent of its exports to the United States. The U.S. government is funneling hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to help Mexico equip its security forces to fight powerful drug cartels.

Yet Arizona's new law to tackle illegal immigration, called "discriminatory" and "backward" by Calderon, has strained a bilateral relationship marked by regular ups and downs.

"We are bringing our protest to the United States government, during my state visit and in front of the U.S. Congress," Calderon told Reuters in an interview last week, ahead of his meeting with Obama on Wednesday.

The new Arizona law, which comes into force in July, will require police to check the immigration status of people they suspect are in the country illegally.

Calderon's government has issued a travel warning for the state, signaling Mexicans citizens could be harassed by law enforcement officials there.

Obama has vowed to tackle comprehensive immigration reform. A major overhaul looks unlikely this year as Washington has been bogged down with health care and financial regulation, but the Arizona crackdown has turned attention back to the issue.

"Immigration has exploded back onto the agenda. I don't think, in the context of planning the state visit, that was anticipated," said Eric Farnsworth, vice president at the Council of the Americas in Washington.

"Both governments at the national level agree that (the Arizona law) is not the right approach. You're going to have both presidents stand shoulder to shoulder talking about the need to address immigration," he said.

FOCUS ON DRUG WAR

Obama and Calderon will also discuss cooperation to crush drug gangs whose escalating turf wars and battles with federal forces in Mexico have killed some 23,000 people since Calderon took office in December 2006 and launched an army offensive.

The apparent abduction on Friday of a prominent ruling party politician and former presidential candidate has alarmed Mexico, with many reading it as an ominous sign drug cartels or other organized crime groups may be targeting the government.

The spiraling violence worries foreign investors and makes some tourists nervous about visiting Mexico, and drug-related abductions have spilled over to the U.S. side of the border.

Most of a $1.4 billion aid package for drug-fighting gear pledged by the U.S. government in 2007 has been slow to arrive, but the State Department told Reuters recently that three Black Hawk helicopters will be delivered in October.

The United States is also trying to stop the southbound flow of cash and guns that end up in the hands of drug hitmen, said Daniel Restrepo, Obama's top advisor on Latin America.

Calderon recently praised Obama's efforts to curb drug consumption in the United States, the No. 1 market for illegal drugs like Colombian cocaine smuggled north via Mexico.

Restrepo said climate change and trade issues will also be on the agenda for Wednesday's meeting.

Mexico is waiting for the United States to unveil a plan to let Mexican trucks circulate again on U.S. roads, which could end a dispute that prompted Mexico last year to slap duties on $2.4 billion worth of U.S. goods.

methadone pt 2

2010-05-18T09:56:00.001-07:00

Methadone is a rigorously well-tested medication that is safe and efficacious for the treatment of narcotic withdrawal and dependence. For more than 30 years this synthetic narcotic has been used to treat opioid addiction. Heroin releases an excess of dopamine in the body and causes users to need an opiate continuously occupying the opioid receptor in the brain. Methadone occupies this receptor and is the stabilizing factor that permits addicts on methadone to change their behavior and to discontinue heroin use.

Taken orally once a day, methadone suppresses narcotic withdrawal for between 24 and 36 hours. Because methadone is effective in eliminating withdrawal symptoms, it is used in detoxifying opiate addicts. It is, however, only effective in cases of addiction to heroin, morphine, and other opioid drugs, and it is not an effective treatment for other drugs of abuse. Methadone reduces the cravings associated with heroin use and blocks the high from heroin, but it does not provide the euphoric rush. Consequently, methadone patients do not experience the extreme highs and lows that result from the waxing and waning of heroin in blood levels. Ultimately, the patient remains physically dependent on the opioid, but is freed from the uncontrolled, compulsive, and disruptive behavior seen in heroin addicts.

Withdrawal from methadone is much slower than that from heroin. As a result, it is possible to maintain an addict on methadone without harsh side effects. Many MMT patients require continuous treatment, sometimes over a period of years.

Methadone maintenance treatment provides the heroin addict with individualized health care and medically prescribed methadone to relieve withdrawal symptoms, reduces the opiate craving, and brings about a biochemical balance in the body. Important elements in heroin treatment include comprehensive social and rehabilitation services.

Availability of Treatment

About 20% of the estimated 810,000 heroin addicts in the United States receive MMT (American Methadone Treatment Association, 1999). At present, the operating practices of clinics and hospitals are bound by Federal regulations that restrict the use and availability of methadone. These regulations are explicitly stated in detailed protocols established by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Additionally, most States have laws that control and closely monitor the distribution of this medication.

In July 1999 the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) for the use of methadone. For the first time in more than 30 years, the NPRM proposes that this medication take its rightful place as a clinical tool in the treatment of the heroin addict. Instead of its use being mandated by regulations, programs will establish quality assurance guidelines and have to be accredited. The proposed new system will allow greater flexibility by the treating physician and ensure appropriate clinical management of the patient's needs. This proposed change in policy would eliminate most of the current regulations and allow greater clinical discretion for treatment by the physician. Accreditation establishes a clinical standard of care for the treatment of medical conditions. In the foreseeable future, clinic and hospital programs would be accredited by a national and/or State accrediting body. Responsibility for preventing the diversion of methadone to illicit use will remain with the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Is It Safe?

Like any controlled substance, there is a risk of abuse. When used as prescribed and under a physician's care, research and clinical studies suggest that long-term MMT is medically safe (COMPA, 1997). When methadone is taken under medical supervision, long-term maintenance causes no adverse effects to the heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, bones, blood, brain, or other vital body organs. Methadone produces no serious side effects, although some patients experience minor symptoms such as constipation, water retention, drowsiness, skin rash, excessive sweating, and changes in libido. Once methadone dosage is adjusted and stabilized or tolerance increases, these symptoms usually subside.

Methadone is a legal medication produced by licensed and approved pharmaceutical companies using quality control standards. Under a physician's supervision, it is administered orally on a daily basis with strict program conditions and guidelines. Methadone does not impair cognitive functions. It has no adverse effects on mental capability, intelligence, or employability. It is not sedating or intoxicating, nor does it interfere with ordinary activities such as driving a car or operating machinery. Patients are able to feel pain and experience emotional reactions. Most importantly, methadone relieves the craving associated with opiate addiction. For methadone patients, typical street doses of heroin are ineffective at producing euphoria, making the use of heroin less desirable.
Figure 1. Bar graph showing outpatients methadone pre- and posttreatment statistics

Benefits

Evidence shows that continuous MMT is associated with several other benefits.

*

MMT costs about $13 per day and is considered a cost-effective alternative to incarceration (Office of National Drug Control Policy, 1998a).
* MMT has a benefit-cost ratio of 4:1, meaning $4 in economic benefit accrues for every $1 spent on MMT (COMPA, 1997).

* MMT has a significant effect on the spread of HIV/AIDS infection, hepatitis B and C, tuberculosis, and sexually transmitted diseases (COMPA, 1997). Heroin users are known to share needles and participate in at-risk sexual activity and prostitution, which are significant factors in the spread of many diseases. Research suggests that MMT significantly decreases the rate of HIV infection for those patients participating in MMT programs (Firshein, 1998).

MMT allows patients to be free of heroin addiction. The National Institute on Drug Abuse found that, among outpatients receiving MMT, weekly heroin use decreased by 69%. This decrease in use allows for the individual's health and productivity to improve (Office of National Drug Control Policy, 1998a). Patients were no longer required to live a life of crime to support their habit, and criminal activity decreased by 52% among these patients. Full-time employment increased by 24%. In a 1994 study of drug treatment in California, researchers found that rates of illegal drug use, criminal activity, and hospitalization were lower for MMT patients than for addicts in any other type of drug treatment program.

The Drug Abuse Treatment Outcome Study (DATOS) conducted an outpatient methadone treatment (OMT) evaluation examining the long-term effects of MMT (Hubbard et al., 1997). The pretreatment problems consisted of weekly heroin use, no full-time employment, and illegal activity. Results of the 1-year follow-up showed a decrease in the number of weekly heroin users and a reduction in illegal activity after OMT. There was no significant change in unemployment rates.

A Review

MMT is one of the most monitored and regulated medical treatments in the United States. Despite the longstanding efficacy of MMT, only 20% of heroin addicts in the United States are currently in treatment. The National Institutes of Health Consensus Development Conference on Effective Medical Treatment of Heroin Addiction concluded that heroin addiction is a medical disorder that can be effectively treated in MMT programs. The Consensus panel recommended expanding access to MMT by increasing funding and minimizing Federal and State regulations. Further research must be conducted on factors leading to heroin use and the differences among various users and their ability to end opiate addiction before the demand for heroin addiction treatment can be effectively met by increased MMT availability.

zetas

2010-05-17T13:04:00.000-07:00

The border town of Reynosa, in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, is under siege.

There's a three-way street war between the Mexican authorities and two drug cartels competing for the lucrative routes north into McAllen, Texas. With eight journalists having been abducted, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, citizens have taken matters into their own hands.

Meet the mayor risking his life to stop the violence spilling over the border.
Cellphones and social media such as Twitter are now their tools and their source of information.

"Shooting on the road MTY – Victoria," read one tweet.

"Situation of risk in the area of Col. Achilles Serda, Plaza. Unexploded ordinance. TAKE PRECAUTIONS," read another.

Aldo Mendez, 29, a construction manager living with his family in Reynosa, is an active Tweeter. "There are many combat confrontations between the army and the drug cartels," Mendez told ABCNews.com. "So what can we do?" he asked. "There is no info on the primetime news, local or national."

The U.S. Consular office in Reynosa was shut down in late February after reports of gun battles breaking out in the streets. The office was reopened 10 days later. In April, the U.S. Consulates in Nuevo Laredo and Piedras Negras, border towns west of Reynosa, were shut down for two days after a grenade was thrown over the U.S. Consulate fence in Nuevo Laredo. There were no injuries, but some damage was reported.

A Warden's message, information released on the U.S. Consulates website in Monterrey, said: "Some recent confrontations between Mexican authorities and drug cartel members have resembled small-unit combat, with cartels employing automatic weapons and grenades."

That message reflects the changing nature of this violence.

Bruce Bagley, Latin American affairs expert and chair of the international department at the University of Miami, has studied Mexican drug cartels and says they're fighting to take control of a $15-16 billion trade.

"We have seen Tijuana percolate up, Mexicali percolate up, and certainly El Paso Juarez percolate up -- Reynosa is one more," Bagley told ABCNews.com.

Referring to the Reynosa situation, he said, "The Zetas have been the architects of all this."

The Zetas are a cartel, many of whose members were once special forces working for the government.

sinaloa

2010-05-17T12:59:00.001-07:00

Internal documents from one of Mexico’s largest and most profitable drug trafficking cartels help explain why the group’s leader remains at large, nearly a decade after he boldly escaped from a maximum-security prison by hiding in a laundry cart.

Some of the people who are supposed to be pursuing him are apparently on his payroll.

The paperwork, recovered by the Mexican authorities from a suspected associate of the drug don, Joaquín Guzmán, show that he has a sophisticated counterintelligence operation and that he is a master at buying off top police officers and soldiers with his ample drug profits.

The documents, leaked to Mexico’s Reforma newspaper, were recovered from a Hummer last year that the authorities said belonged to Roberto Beltrán Burgos, who is suspected of being a lieutenant of Mr. Guzmán’s.

The papers, including some internal government documents and ledgers written in code, strongly indicate that Mr. Guzmán — who goes by the name El Chapo, or Shorty — knows about the deployment of law enforcement officials beforehand, has the cellphone numbers and e-mail addresses of many of those pursuing him and regularly pays off people on the inside.

Mr. Guzmán makes heavy use of land routes to get cocaine, marijuana and other drugs to the United States, but court records also revealed by Reforma indicate that he is exploiting Mexico’s Atlantic and Pacific coastlines as well, with confederates working at numerous strategic ports.

“As these documents show, it’s clear that he has informants at various levels of law enforcement,” said Malcolm Beith, a journalist who has a book coming out on the hunt for Mr. Guzmán called “The Last Narco.”

“Obviously, he has information leaked to him before any raid,” Mr. Beith said. “He has so many levels of protection.”

Despite President Felipe Calderón’s aggressive antidrug offensive, Mr. Guzmán’s Sinaloa Cartel continues to dominate the market, and much of its top leadership remains intact. That has led to suggestions by some critics that the government has gone easy on Mr. Guzmán’s operation, an accusation Mr. Calderón forcefully denies.

“It’s absolutely false,” the president told reporters in February. “I can state clearly that the government has attacked without favor all criminal groups in Mexico without taking into consideration whether it is the cartel of so-and-so or what’s-his-name. We’ve fought them all.”

As evidence, Mr. Calderón points to members of Mr. Guzmán’s operation who have been killed or captured, including Vicente Zambada, the son of one of the cartel’s top leaders, who was recently extradited to the United States. But critics point out that with tens of thousands of arrests over the last three years, other cartels have suffered far more detentions than the traffickers in Sinaloa.

Some of those involved in the hunt for Mr. Guzmán say it is not a lack of effort that has stymied their efforts. Rather, they say, his infiltration of communities is so extensive that even when surprised he can find a way to escape. And the documents indicate that he is not surprised all that often.

Mr. Guzmán does not give interviews, although one of his fellow leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel, Ismael Zambada, known as El Mayo, recently spoke to Proceso, a Mexican newsmagazine. Julio Scherer García, its editor, described a series of cloak-and-dagger interactions with middlemen that eventually led him to a mountain hideaway, where Mr. Zambada awaited him.

“The problem with the drug business is that it involves millions,” Mr. Zambada was quoted as saying. “How do you beat that? As for the bosses, jailed, dead or extradited, their replacements are standing by.”

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/lt_drug_war_threatened_elections

2010-05-15T21:50:00.000-07:00

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/lt_drug_war_threatened_elections

the gospel

2010-05-14T19:42:00.000-07:00

Religion

In the history of the world, nothing has been the catalyst of more grief, hatred, war, and crime than religion. Religion allows a person to hate, kill, torture, or steal, while allowing him to recuse himself of all blame. Religion causes people to break the laws of ethics and morality in the name of a god.

Religion dulls the mind and weakens the senses. It makes "God did it" seem like a reasonable answer to anything at all, squelching questions of why, and how, and when, and replacing these questions with repeated mantras and prayers to nobody.

Religion is exquisitely profitable, with most adherents tithing a portion of their income. The churches, synagogues, and mosques, which do little to serve their community outside of "outreach programs" (marketing and recruiting), pay almost no taxes.

Religion spreads like disease through societies, rarely coexisting with pre-existing mythologies, rather preferring to conquer or be conquered. Religion is anything but tolerant.
religion is ridiculous. Mythology and religion are synonymous, and none is better than another. Religion is malicious, malevolent, and unworthy of respect.

2010-05-13T09:41:00.003-07:00

(2/2) it serves no purpose other than to reinforce ones political ideology people who use these outlets as their news source should not be allowed to vote.

2010-05-13T09:41:00.001-07:00

(1/2) people who get their news from Glenn Beck,Rush Limbaugh,Keith Olberman, newsmax, the nation,etc should learn to not waste their time on such garbage as

2010-05-12T04:45:00.003-07:00

(6/6) the heroin via Afghanistan and the weed domestically but if a fence is built the cartels will simply tunnel under

2010-05-12T04:45:00.001-07:00

(5/6) business. And if American's had their supply of drugs cut off from Mexico and had to pay triple for them,well then the coke would flow through the gulf

2010-05-12T04:44:00.007-07:00

(4/6) Sinaloa cartel does not want the violence to spill over the border a high ranking member of the cartel explained to me why that would be bad for

2010-05-12T04:44:00.005-07:00

(3/6) I have never experienced rampant corruption I was caught by a Nogales cop with cocaine,heroin,and 4 lbs of weed it cost me 50 USD and I kept the dope.the

2010-05-12T04:44:00.003-07:00

(2/6) does this sound for headline "violent crime at lowest level since 1971" would not be of much interest. The situation on the Mexican side is another story

2010-05-12T04:44:00.001-07:00

(1/6) The media makes it seem that the border is a lawless violence plaged region where bandits operate with impunity because if they reported the truth how

2010-05-11T13:03:00.005-07:00

(3/3) Clinic's , medical marijuana dispensaries and high class brothels...("n")

2010-05-11T13:03:00.003-07:00

(2/3) political power to impose their beliefs onto people who live in reality as for all the mosques,temples,and churches they would make great Methadone

2010-05-11T13:03:00.001-07:00

(1/3) Today and people take the message of Christ and live in their life and not to use the bible as a excuse to be a ignorant,intolerant GROUP who uses their

2010-05-11T12:54:00.009-07:00

(6/6) hell for doing so .I hope that within the next Couple of generations all repressive organized religions will no longer be the imminent danger that it

2010-05-11T12:54:00.007-07:00

(5/6) hell is delusional.there is no doubt in my mind that god exists but he doesn't care if little johnny masturbated last night nor does he send people to

2010-05-11T12:54:00.005-07:00

(4/6) our youth but to anyone who thinks along the lines that science is the Work of Satan and god is going to send people who doubt that Jesus was his son to

2010-05-11T12:54:00.003-07:00

(3/6) statements in which he said that Islam is a wicked and evil religion which is true and obvious.what's needed is more doubt and to instill good morals in

2010-05-11T12:54:00.001-07:00

(2/6) kill him for doing so and I don't have time to write about their treatment of women.Franklin Graham was disinvited from a pentagon speaking due to his

2010-05-11T12:53:00.001-07:00

(1/6) With Islam I find it the most ridiculous of the big 3.If a christisan woke up on Sunday and saw his neighbor mowing his grass I seriously doubt he would

2010-05-11T12:34:00.001-07:00

(5/5) research and of course abortion and anyone who does not share their view is looked upon with utter contempt and with passionate hatred.

2010-05-11T12:33:00.007-07:00

(4/5) country should be.In the U.S. The republican party is the evangelical christian's servants cutting funding for scientific research projects stem cell

2010-05-11T12:33:00.005-07:00

(3/5) together they want to use their numbers in order to influence political servants to shape policy and pass laws that suits their version of how the

2010-05-11T12:33:00.003-07:00

(2/5) establishments in the modern world "organized religion".whatever ones spiritual beliefs should in no way be infringed upon however once the masses get

2010-05-11T12:33:00.001-07:00

(1/5) Usually I copy and paste articles or editorials that I find interest in instead of doing that I wanted to write about one of the most dangerous

christian nation

2010-05-09T22:35:00.000-07:00

Americans don’t need the government to tell them when or how to pray.

Americans have the right to pray for whomever they want and in what manner they like. But we don’t need an officially designated government proclamation to do that. Our people are free to engage in worship whenever they want. Allowing government to set aside certain days for prayer and worship implies that the state has some say over our religious lives when it does not. It is simply not the business of government to advise when, if and how people pray.

The U.S. Constitution mandates separation of church and state. This means it is the job of religious leaders, not government officials, to call people to pray. Americans are free to heed or ignore such prayer requests as they see fit. The NDP is problematic because it presumes that Americans should take direction on their religious lives from the government. It suggests that they will engage in certain religious activities because the government recommends they do. People do not need government directives to pray or take part in any other form of worship.
The National Day of Prayer has been hijacked by the Religious Right, which uses it to promote religious bigotry.

In recent years, most NDP activities have been coordinated by the “National Day of Prayer Task Force,” an organization based in Colorado Springs and run by Shirley Dobson, wife of Religious Right radio broadcaster James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family.

Despite its official-sounding name, the NDP Task Force is a private group with no connection to government. Nevertheless, the organization has taken the lead in sponsoring Prayer Day events in many cities and states. The Task Force is exclusionary and does not permit participation by non-fundamentalist Christians. The materials it distributes promote a rigid fundamentalist outlook not shared by most Americans.

On the NDP’s Web site, volunteers are required to sign a statement of faith reflecting fundamentalist tenets, list church affiliation and provide clergy references. Volunteers are ordered to make sure no non-Christians speak at NDP events. (Non-Christians may only attend as long as they agree to remain silent.)

“The National Day of Prayer Task Force was a creation of the National Prayer Committee for the expressed purpose of organizing and promoting prayer observances conforming to a Judeo-Christian system of values,” reads the Web site. “People with other theological and philosophical views are, of course, free to organize and participate in activities that are consistent with their own beliefs.”

But even this is not accurate. The use of the term “Judeo-Christian” is deceptive. In fact, the Task Force promotes Christian fundamentalism at every turn. There is nothing “Judeo” about the Task Force’s outlook. Volunteers are told, “In both public and private life, we ask that you demonstrate the commitment you have made to Jesus Christ in the following areas: spiritual maturity, emotional stability, healthy personal relationships, financial responsibility, and a stable living situation.”

Volunteers, says the Task Force, must show “a passionate devotion to advancing Christ’s Kingdom and the cause of prayer in our nation.” They are required to affirm that they will “ensure a strong, consistent Christian message throughout the nation” and must endorse a statement reading, “I commit that NDP activities I serve with will be conducted solely by Christians while those with differing beliefs are welcome to attend.”

The Task Force’s Mission Statement reads that it seeks to “communicate with every individual the need for personal repentance and prayer, mobilizing the Christian community to intercede for America and its leadership in the seven centers of power: Government, Military, Media, Business, Education, Church and Family.”

The group’s “Vision and Values” include: “foster unity within the Christian church” and “publicize and preserve America’s Christian heritage.”
The National Day of Prayer has become a vehicle for spreading misinformation about American history and society.

In years past, the Task Force has used the NDP to promote bogus “Christian nation” history and advocate for erroneous claims that fundamentalist Christians are being persecuted in the United States or denied their right to spread their faith.

The NDP Web site sells a school curriculum called “Drive Thru History” that promotes a bogus version of American history promoted by David Barton, a Texas Religious Right activist who argues, against all evidence, that the United States was founded as a “Christian nation.”

NDP materials also recycle fallacious Religious Right attacks on public schools. The NDP Web site criticized public schools for advocating such things as “pluralism, ‘tolerance,’ and the rejection of absolute truth.”

It goes on to assert, “While the textbooks used in colonial days promoted a faith-based worldview, today’s curricula are replete with materials that accept and, in some cases, even condone, immoral activities and lifestyles. Meanwhile, revisionist teachings about our country’s founding remove any reference to the Christian underpinnings that have long set our nation apart and helped it thrive.”
The National Day of Prayer is not historical.

The NDP is of recent vintage. It was created by Congress in 1952. The scheduling of the event used to change, but it was codified by Congress in 1988 (after pressure from the Religious Right) as the first Thursday in May.

Prior to 1952, some presidents issued proclamations calling for days of prayer – but not all did. Thomas Jefferson refused to issue such proclamations, observing, “Fasting & prayer are religious exercises. The enjoining them an act of discipline. Every religious society has a right to determine for itself the times for these exercises, & the objects proper for them, according to their own particular tenets; and this right can never be safer than in their own hands, where the Constitution has deposited it.”

Acting at the behest of Congress, James Madison issued a few prayer proclamations during the War of 1812 but later wrote that he regretted the move. Governmental religious proclamations, Madison observed, “seem to imply and certainly nourish the erroneous idea of a national religion.” He warned that there would always be a tendency “to narrow the recommendation to the standard of the predominant sect.”

President Andrew Jackson opposed these proclamations as well. Asked to issue one in 1832, Jackson refused, writing, “I could not do otherwise without transcending the limits prescribed by the Constitution for the President and without feeling that I might in some degree disturb the security which religion nowadays enjoys in this country in its complete separation from the political concerns of the General Government.”
The National Day of Prayer Is Unnecessary.

America does not need an official, government-mandated “National Day of Prayer.” Religious individuals who feel strongly about the country are free to pray for it at any time. They do not need to be directed or encouraged by government.

Government should refrain from sponsoring religious worship. It would be best if the National Day of Prayer were ended entirely. If that is not possible, the event, at the very least, should be pried free from the suffocating grasp of the Religious Right.

amen

2010-05-09T21:48:00.001-07:00

Atheism and Agnosticism
First published Tue Mar 9, 2004

The main purpose of this article is to explore the differences between atheism and agnosticism, and the relations between them. The task is made more difficult because each of these words are what Wittgenstein called ‘family resemblance’ words. That is, we cannot expect to find a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for their use. Their use is appropriate if a fair number of the conditions are satisfied. Moreover even particular members of the families are often imprecise, and sometimes almost completely obscure. Sometimes a person who is really an atheist may describe herself, even passionately, as an agnostic because of unreasonable generalised philosophical scepticism which would preclude us from saying that we know anything whatever except perhaps the truths of mathematics and formal logic.

* 1. Atheism
* 2. An Adequate Concept of God
* 3. Agnosticism
* 4. The Ethics of Belief
* 5. The Grey Area: Example of the So-called Fine Tuning of the Fundamental Constants of Nature
* 6. Philosophical vs. Pragmatic Reasons for Preferring the Term ‘Agnostic’
* Bibliography
* Other Internet Resources
* Related Entries

1. Atheism

‘Atheism’ means the negation of theism, the denial of the existence of God. I shall here assume that the God in question is that of a sophisticated monotheism. The tribal gods of the early inhabitants of Palestine are of little or no philosophical interest. They were essentially finite beings, and the god of one tribe or collection of tribes was regarded as good in that it enabled victory in war against tribes with less powerful gods. Similarly the Greek and Roman gods were more like mythical heroes and heroines than like the omnipotent, omniscient and good God postulated in mediaeval and modern philosophy. As the Romans used the word, ‘atheist’ could be used to refer to theists of another religion, notably the Christians, and so merely to signify disbelief in their own mythical heroes.

The word ‘theism’ exhibits family resemblance in another direction. For example should a pantheist call herself an atheist? Or again should belief in Plato's Form of the Good or in John Leslie's idea of God as an abstract principle that brings value into existence count as theism (Leslie 1979)? Let us consider pantheism.

At its simplest, pantheism can be ontologically indistinguishable from atheism. Such a pantheism would be belief in nothing beyond the physical universe, but associated with emotions of wonder and awe similar to those that we find in religious belief. I shall not consider this as theism. Probably the theologian Paul Tillich was a pantheist in little more than this minimal sense and his characterising God as the ground of being has no clear meaning. The unanswerable question ‘Why is there anything at all?’ may give us mystical or at any rate dizzy feelings but such feelings do not differentiate the pantheist from the atheist. However there are stronger forms of pantheism which do differentiate the pantheist from the atheist (Levine, 1994). For example the pantheist may think that the universe as a whole has strongly emergent and also mind-like qualities. Not emergent merely in the weak sense that a radio receiver's ability to receive signals from distant stations might be said to be emergent because it is not a mere jumble of components (Smart 1981). The components have to be wired together in a certain way, and indeed the workings of the individual components can be explained by the laws of physics. Contrast this with a concept of emergence that I shall call ‘strong emergence’. C. D. Broad in his Scientific Thought (Broad 1923) held that the chemical properties of common salt could not even in principle be deduced from those of sodium and chlorine separately, at the very time at which the quantum theory of the chemical bond was beginning to be developed. Though the mind has seemed to some to be strongly emergent from its physical basis, it can be argued that developments in the philosophy of mind, cognitive science and neuroscience favour weak emergence only.

One strong form of pantheism ascribes mental properties to the cosmos. If the weak sense of emergence was adopted we would be faced with the question of whether the universe looks like a giant brain. Patently it does not. Samuel Alexander asserted, rather than argued, that mentality strongly emerged from space-time, and then that at some future time there will emerge a new and at present hardly imaginable level which he called ‘deity’ (Alexander 1927). It is hard to tell whether such an implausible metaphysics should be classified as as pantheism or as theism. Certainly such a deity would not be the infinite creator God of orthodox theism. A. N. Whitehead, too, had a theory of an emergent deity, though with affinities to Platonism, which he saw as the realm of potentiality and therefore he connected the atemporal with the contingent temporal deity (Whitehead 1929). Such views will not deliver, however implausibly, more than a finite deity, not the God of core theism. God would be just one more thing in the universe, however awesome and admirable.

The weak form of pantheism accepts that the physical universe is all and eschews strong emergence. Sometimes the weak form of pantheism is rhetorically disguised as theism, with God characterised as ‘absolute depth’ or some equally baffling expression, as by Paul Tillich. At any rate, whether or not we accept pantheism as a sort of theism, what we mean by ‘atheism’ will vary according to what in the dialectical situation we count as theism.
2. An Adequate Concept of God

This brings us naturally to the question of what we might consider to be an adequate concept of God, whether or not we wish to argue for the existence of such a being. Some profound remarks were made on this by J. N. Findlay in his article (‘Can God's Existence be Disproved?’ (Findlay 1949). The heathen may worship stocks and stones but does not see them as merely stocks and stones. More and more adequate conceptions of God still portray God as limited in various respects. A fully adequate conception of God, Findlay said, would see God as not only unlimited in various admirable properties but also as a necessarily existing being. Thus ‘There is one and only one God’ would have to be a logically necessary truth. Now logic, he held, is tautologous and without ontological commitment. So God's necessary existence would have to be something different from logical necessity. The trouble is how to see what this could be.

It might be replied that there are non-trivial necessary existential propositions in mathematics, such as ‘There are infinitely many primes’ which implies of course ‘the number 7 exists’. (We can ignore the unhelpful ‘Something exists’ which is allowed by standard first order logic purely for convenience as few would need to apply logic to discourse about an empty universe for which in any case there are separate rules for determining validity or otherwise.) It is well known that Frege in his Foundations of Arithmetic claimed to reduce arithmetic to logic. However in effect he was using a free logic without ontological commitment. Claims to reduce set theory (and so analysis) to logic are of course even more problematic. Would it help towards an adequate conception of God if we said that God has the sort of existence or non-existence that prime numbers have? One might say ‘not much’. In any case it is dangerous to talk of types of existence because it treats existence as though it was a property. At the time that he wrote his article Findlay was following the logical positivist line that logic and mathematics are alike tautologous. In the case of mathematics this can be seriously questioned. Also most theists would say that prime numbers are too abstract to be compared to God, though perhaps not John Leslie who has argued that God is a principle that brings value into existence (Leslie 1979 and 1989). We are still left with Findlay's challenge as to what a conception of God as a necessary being could be.

One thing that will not differentiate the theist from the atheist is to say that God, if he exists, is necessary in the sense of not being dependent on anything else for his existence. The atheist will say that the universe fits this bill because the universe contains everything that there is and so is not caused by anything else. It is indeed hard to see what an adequate conception of God and his necessary existence could be. For the purposes of this article, let us explore what the relations and lack of relations between atheism and agnosticism could be. Here we shall neglect the requirement of necessary existence and in a later section we shall consider the case of a posteriori arguments for the existence of a mind-like creator of the universe. Of course without the requirement of necessity it raises the intelligent child's question ‘Who made God?’ Still, this might be regarded as inevitable but excusable in an a posteriori argument in which the hypothesis of a purposive creator is put forward and claimed to be justified much in the manner of any scientific hypothesis.
3. Agnosticism

Though there are a couple of references in The Oxford English Dictionary to earlier occurrences of the word ‘agnostic’, it seems (perhaps independently) to have been introduced by T. H. Huxley at a party in London to found the Metaphysical Society, which flourished for over a decade and to which belonged notable thinkers and leaders of opinion. Huxley thought that as many of these people liked to describe themselves as adherents of various ‘isms’ he would invent one for himself. He took it from a description in Acts 17:23 of an altar inscribed “to an unknown God”. Huxley thought that we would never be able to know about the ultimate origin and causes of the universe. Thus he seems to have been more like a Kantian believer in unknowable noumena than like a Vienna Circle proponent of the view that talk of God is not even meaningful. Perhaps such a logical positivist should be classified as neither a theist nor an atheist, but her view would be just as objectionable to a theist. ‘Agnostic’ is more contextual than is ‘atheist’, as it can be used in a non-theological way, as when a cosmologist might say that she is agnostic about string theory, neither believing nor disbelieving it. In this article I confine myself to the use of ‘agnostic’ in a theological context.

Huxley's agnosticism seems nevertheless to go with an extreme empiricism, nearer to Mill's methods of induction than to recent discussions of the hypothetico-deductive and partly holistic aspect of testing of theories. Though we might not be able to prove the existence of God might we be able to disprove it? Many philosophers hold that the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient and good God is empirically refuted by the existence of evil and suffering, and so would be happy to be called atheists rather than agnostics.Of course the existence of a non-benevolent creator God would not be so refutable and atheism would have to depend on arguments other than that of the mere existence of evil. More commonly the theist will continue to include benevolence in the concept of God and attempt to deal with the problem of evil with the help of various auxiliary or even ad hoc hypotheses or considerations, much as a scientist may attempt, often successfully, to shore up against empirical refutation a previously well tested theory. Bayesian considerations may determine rationally, though roughly, the appropriate degree of belief or unbelief.
4. The Ethics of Belief

It is therefore useful, at this point of the discussion, to consider some contentions brought forward by the mathematician W. K. Clifford in his well known paper ‘The Ethics of Belief’ first published in 1877 (Clifford 1999). It might be said that beliefs are not actions and so are not subject to our will, but Clifford gave good examples of how we can induce expedient or comforting beliefs in ourselves. Of course we might also think of the argument of Pascal's wager where he advises the doubter in the Christian religion to frequent the company of priests and other committed Catholics, to avoid reading sceptical books, and to use holy water and other psychological expedients, so as to induce in himself belief in the Catholic faith. Clifford gives some telling examples of how we can induce in ourselves beliefs which run counter to the evidence before us. One is of a ship owner who makes a fortune by transporting emigrants in old and unseaworthy ships. He toys with the idea that he should not allow one such ship to sail, and instead to have it overhauled and refitted. He talks himself into allowing the ship to sail. He reflects that up to the present the ship has survived bad storms. If religious he may turn to Providence. Spurred on by greed and self-interest he induces in himself the comfortable conviction that all will be well, but in fact the ship and all aboard are lost. We can agree that the ship owner's action in inducing the optimistic belief was morally highly reprehensible. Clifford makes the further remark that even if by good luck the ship did reach port we should still regard his optimistic belief as morally reprehensible. In fact, Clifford urges, it is always reprehensible to believe on insufficient grounds.

Clifford was not a philosophical sceptic about induction . He was an empiricist who assumed the uniformity of nature, belief in which was justified by the success of science and so, as he thought, not contrary to his own prohibition. Philosophers may think this too quick. However he rightly was not inclined to say, as a naïve follower of K. R. Popper might, that scientific theories can only be refuted, never established. It would surely be absurd to say that we now know no more than Galileo did. Alan Musgrave has astutely remarked that even if we agree that the fact that a theory has so far survived severe tests does not provide a reason for the hypothesis, nevertheless it does provide a reason for believing the hypothesis (Musgrave 1974). Philosophers of science now put more stress on the hypothetico-deductive method, in the partially holistic nature of theories, and the way in which justification of theories depends on the coherence of our beliefs. Science can even improve its own methodology, so that the nature of science is well captured by Neurath's simile of scientists as like sailors on a boat which they build and repair while still at sea. Clifford's contention about the reprehensibility of believing without or against the evidence still stands. Thus there are people who believe the Old Testament literally and with whom it is impossible to talk about biological evolution or modern cosmology. They often say explicitly that they will read and believe only what they find it comforting to read and believe.

To give a correct and fully general account of the nature of justified belief is difficult and inevitably controversial. Furthermore, though the notion of knowledge as justified true belief runs up against ingenious counterexamples proposed by Edmund Gettier (Gettier 1963) , nevertheless for the present purpose of distinguishing atheism from agnosticism it is good enough to treat knowledge as at least justified true belief. Clifford was of course concerned with the ethics of belief, not of knowledge, and indeed the latter does not make much sense, since ‘know’ is a success word. Later we shall look at the question of whether we should say that an atheist is someone who claims to know that there is no God or someone who at any rate believes this.

Clifford goes on to say that even if the ship in his example had by good fortune not foundered in the storms and high seas, or perhaps by good fortune encountered only calm seas and pleasant winds, the ship owner's cultivation of his unreasonable and dishonest belief would still have been dishonourable and reprehensible. Here he speaks like a virtue ethicist but the view can be consequentialist, since Clifford stresses that although some may derive comfort from their credulity, this credulity would tend to spread or be reinforced and so would in general have unfortunate consequences. Of course that there is no evidence for God's existence is not necessarily evidence for God's nonexistence, though it might be if we had reason for thinking that if God existed there would be evidence for this. However this may be, Clifford was adamant in describing the consequential evils of believing without evidence. Indeed he cast his net widely when he said that it is not only the leaders of men who have the duty of proportioning belief to evidence. ‘Every rustic’, he says, ‘who delivers in the village alehouse his slow, infrequent sentences, may help to kill or keep alive the fatal superstitions which clog his race’.

It is undeniable that many, perhaps most, theists do not even attempt to reconcile their belief in God or in the tenets of a particular religion with philosophical arguments or with plausibility in the light of total science. On the other hand many scientists, especially some physicists and cosmologists, and some philosophers, do claim to believe in God because of evidence, namely, because of the fact that there are simple laws of nature and even more so on the apparent so-called ‘fine tuning’ of the fundamental physical constants which will be discussed shortly. Perhaps, however, most theists believe in God simply because their parents and teachers have told them that he exists. And perhaps the parents and teachers believe in God because of what their parents and teachers told them. Must we always refuse to believe because of authority? Obviously not. Science is an interactive social phenomenon and depends heavily on testimony, as indeed does our commonsense and historical knowledge. We can think of the scientific community as a vast interconnected brain. Bits of scientific testimony can be checked and experiments repeated. Clifford gives the example of a chemical fact for which, being no chemist himself, he relies on the testimony of a chemist. He knows nothing against the chemist's character and he knows the professional training of the chemist. Though he has never himself verified the chemical proposition or even seen an experiment which verified it, nevertheless , Clifford says, the proposition is never beyond the reach of experimental checking. Also the experiment may have been actually performed by his informant, though the informant may just have relied on other well credentialled chemists.

It could be contended that Clifford was too verificationist here. Beliefs can be very conjectural but arguably plausible in the light of our more directly tested scientific hypotheses. There is perhaps a grey area between well tested or testable science and purely transcendent theology and metaphysics. Let us turn to consider an already mentioned example of this.
5. The Grey Area: Example of the So-called Fine Tuning of the Fundamental Constants of Nature

The fundamental physical and cosmological constants seem to be finely tuned (in a sense that does not immediately imply the existence of a fine tuner) so that if they were even quite slightly different in relation to one another a universe such as ours with galaxies, stars, planets, life and minds could not have existed. Not only is the range of suitable variation very small in the case of individual pairs of constants, but this is so for many such pairs, and so the a priori probability of a universe like ours is (to speak loosely) almost infinitesimal. Some philosophers, theologians, and (in their less professional moments) physicists and cosmologists have seen this fact of the very small prior probability of a universe like ours as indicating a use of scientific method as a route to theism. (See some of the articles, pro and con in Manson 2003.) The probability of the fine tuning is raised by the hypothesis of a creator God arranging the constants so as to permit the evolution of life and consciousness in which it is assumed that God has an interest.

Suppose that we judge hypothesis h to provide the best explanation (supposing it true) of empirical or already accepted facts e . If so we think it rational to believe h or at least to take it very seriously. In mainstream science if an hypothesis is accepted as the best explanation (where ‘best’ can include various virtues such as simplicity and comprehensiveness as well as a certain empirical adequacy) there is a good hope that in the future fresh independent tests of the hypothesis may be possible so that the hypothesis may become part of mainstream science. The fine tuning argument for theism seems to be one that must be left as without prospect of becoming part of mainstream science. Nevertheless it is not clear that a philosopher or theologian who supported her belief in theism by such an argument to the best explanation would be ipso facto reprehensible or dishonourable in the way that Clifford thought. She does think that she is arguing from evidence, namely the fine tuning. A follower of Clifford might object if there was no philosophical discussion of rival explanations or of the application here of Bayes' theorem in the theory of probability. But as with most philosophical disputes the issues are complex and there may be trading off of rival plausibilities and implausibilities.

This is no place to try adequately to discuss the fine tuning argument but let us consider two questions. One is about the type of argument that is put forward. The other is the issue of partial belief. The fine tuning argument has the merit of having the form of a perfectly normal pattern of scientific argument. Thus to some extent it may appeal to those who think of plausibility in the light of total science as a main pointer to metaphysical truth. After all, it will be contended, scientific method is the only reliable and indubitably successful and self-correcting method of attaining knowledge (pure mathematics perhaps excepted). In the fine tuning argument God is postulated to explain the fine tuning. It is asked how else a universe like ours (suitable for life and consciousness) could have arisen. Various objections could be made. The Bayesian argument is from the very easily proved equation which says that if h is a hypothesis, e the evidence, and k the relevant background information, then the probability of h given e & k is equal to the probability of e given h & k divided by the probability of e given k. The ‘e given k’ in the denominator reflects the fact that antecedently surprising evidence is best, as is the case with the fine tuning argument, and the ‘given h & k’ in the numerator reflects the fact that the antecedent probability of e given the hypothesis and the background assumptions should be high or near one, as is usually the case in argument to the best explanation. Should such an argument make us espouse theism? Not necessarily, because h, the theistic hypothesis might be so initially implausible that though e, the fine tuning, increases the probability of h, it increases it to only a small value.

In assessing the plausibilities it is worth recalling that the fine tuning appeals to God's purposes, should he exist, and to his supposed interest in minds and particularly in consciousness. This might strike some of us as anthropocentric, or in view of the probability of life and consciousness elsewhere in the universe, perhaps psychocentric. Of course science has got less and less anthropocentric and perhaps psychocentricity might have lost its attractions also. In prescientific ages we appealed to the purposes of ancestors or gods, and small children seem naturally to be satisfied with explanations in terms of purpose. Similarly a saddle between hills has been said to be a tribal ancestor's fish weir, though perhaps this is not believed too literally. Yet a neuroscientific account of a particular purpose must be extraordinarily complex involving of millions or tens of millions of neurons and their multiple interconnections. Appeal to God's purposes might well conceal even more complexity. Thus the contemporary form of the teleological argument, from the fine tuning, though unaffected by the Darwinian theory as Paley's was, makes a departure from scientific methodology. Perhaps Plato's Socrates in the Phaedo may have to some extent set science off on the wrong track when he extolled purposive explanations at the expense of physical ones. Still the fine tuning argument with its argument to the best explanation and with its holism is in some ways closer to scientific method than the very restrictive though salutary empiricism of Mill and Huxley and probably Clifford.

In the light of these considerations let us consider the appropriateness or otherwise of someone (call him ‘Philo’) describing himself as a theist, atheist or agnostic. I would suggest that if Philo estimates the various plausibilities to be such that on the evidence before him the probability of theism comes out near to one he should describe himself as a theist and if it comes out near zero he should call himself an atheist, and if it comes out somewhere in the middle he should call himself an agnostic. There are no strict rules about this classification because the borderlines are vague. If need be, like a middle-aged man who is not sure whether to call himself bald or not bald, he should explain himself more fully. This of course assumes that, unlike Huxley, he does not wish to use ‘ism’ words at all. Gilbert Ryle once wrote an article against, though not absolutely against, ‘ism’ words (Ryle 1935), but here he was mainly objecting to schools of philosophy as were common in Germany, so that people would attach themselves too blindly to some great figure in the past, or to some influential contemporary professor. Sometimes , at least in social contexts, it can be misleading not to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ if some believer asks “Are you an atheist?’ Forthrightness can override a too precious concern for complete accuracy.

Here it has been assumed that Philo regards ‘God exists’ (vagueness apart) as an intelligible sentence to which truth or falsity can be ascribed. If he thinks that the conception of deity is so obscure or so permissive that no truth value can be ascribed to ‘God exists’, perhaps he should extend the notion of ‘atheist’ to cover his position also. “Agnostic’ might suggest that there is something to be agnostic about.

In the above discussion I have used the argument from the fine tuning as an example of something in the grey area between science and metaphysics. There may be other plausible arguments for theism that Philo could consider, and together with further applications of the Bayesian formula the plausibility might be increased in every case. Nevertheless it still might be quite small even in toto. I am assuming that all the arguments are from plausibility considerations and so can reinforce one another. Of course if the arguments fail because of faults in pure logic, then they do not reinforce one another. The conjunction of several logically bad arguments is indeed no better than one logically bad argument.

Even if various philosophers or theologians use the word ‘God’ in different ways are such that their words are quite unintelligible then they can hardly be said to defend theism. As I have suggested, a logical positivist such as the young A. J. Ayer (Ayer 1936) would have at least been less misleading if he called himself an atheist rather than an agnostic. He neither believes nor disbelieves in God, like the agnostic, but he does not think, as I take it that someone who called himself an agnostic would, that God either exists or does not exist but he does not know which.
6. Philosophical vs. Pragmatic Reasons for Preferring the Term ‘Agnostic’

As was hinted earlier, a person may call herself an agnostic, as Huxley did, because of questionable philosophical motives. Huxley thought that propositions about the transcendent, though possibly meaningful, were empirically untestable. We have seen that it is unclear that the conclusion of the fine tuning argument is untestable. One can at least compare it with other and non-theistic hypotheses. Thus there are conjectures that there are many universes, so many of them that is not surprising that there should be some among them in which the constants of physics allow for the possibility of life, and if so our universe must be one of them. Some cosmologists give independent grounds for thinking that new universes are spawned out of the back of black holes. Others think that there are independent grounds for thinking of a single huge Universe that has crystallised out into various universe sized regions each with randomly different values for the fundamental constants. Some such speculations get some support (it has been suggested) from string theory. Though such speculations are at present untestable and should be taken with a grain of salt, one or another may well one day be absorbed into a testable theory. It must be left to cosmologists and mathematical physicists to go into the pros and cons here, but they are mentioned here to indicate a grey area between the testable and the untestable.

Some scientists when canvassing these issues of philosophical theology may prefer to call themselves ‘agnostics’ rather than ‘atheists’ because they have been over impressed by a generalised philosophical scepticism or by a too simple understanding of Popper's dictum that we can never verify a theory but only refute it. Such a view would preclude us from saying quite reasonably that we know that the Sun consists largely of hydrogen and helium. When we say ‘I know’ we are saying something defeasible. If later we discover that though what we said was at the time justified, it nevertheless turned out to be false, we would say ‘I thought I knew but I now see that I didn't know’. Never or hardly ever to say ‘I know’ would be to deprive these words of their usefulness, just as the fact that some promises have to be broken does not deprive the institution of promising of its legitimacy.

Another motive whereby an atheist might describe herself as an agnostic is purely pragmatic. In discussion with a committed theist this might occur out of mere politeness or in some circumstances from fear of giving even more offence Samuel Butler, though a complete unbeliever in the doctrines of Christianity, in the preface to one of his books Erewhon Revisited(Butler 1932) described himself as the broadest of broad churchmen. That is, I take it that broad churchmen often were unbelievers, but treated the doctrine as mere myth suitable for literal consumption by the local yokels in the interests of social stability. It is unclear to me whether or not Butler was sympathetic to a very abstract sort of theism. Some may call themselves ‘agnostics’ rather than ‘atheists’ merely because they are equally repelled by the fanaticism associated with some forms of theism and by the boring obsessiveness of what Hilary Putnam has called ‘the village atheist’. (Contrast, however, Clifford's view of the matter and also the example of the radical and intellectual tinker, Mr. Shaw, in Butler's powerful novel The Way of All Flesh.) Still, these considerations are perhaps more a matter for sociologists than for philosophers.

chapo guzman

2010-05-08T15:56:00.000-07:00

As a public safety chief was riding home last weekend after an evening of political schmoozing at the state fair, a stolen tractor-trailer burst onto the highway -- and another high-profile ambush began with a blast of light.

They were lobbing grenades at her.

Over the next six minutes -- as the official, Minerva Bautista, screamed into a police radio, "They're killing me!" -- up to 40 heavily armed commandos unleashed more than 2,700 rounds at her three-vehicle convoy of armor-plated sport-utility vehicles. Some of the weapons were capable of penetrating a vehicle's engine block or knocking down a helicopter.

Mexico's crime syndicates appear to be escalating their attacks against the state, according to law enforcement officials. No longer content to fight police officers and soldiers when confronted with arrest, the drug organizations are increasingly targeting police commanders and public officials.

"In the last few weeks, the dynamics of the violence have changed," said Interior Minister Fernando Gómez-Mont, the country's top security official. "The criminals have decided to directly confront and attack the authorities."

More than 22,700 people have been killed in drug-related violence since President Felipe Calderón began his battle against the powerful drug cartels in December 2006, according to a confidential government report. Mexican officials stress that the overwhelming majority of the dead were gangsters killed over turf or for revenge. Yet Calderón recently revealed that more than 1,100 of those killed were soldiers, police officers and officials.

Violence against Mexican authorities has been sensational but relatively rare in the past three years. But according to news and police reports, Mexico has entered an especially deadly period, with scores of attacks against police officers and government officials across the country.

In Ciudad Juarez, which is across the border from El Paso and is considered the capital of drug violence, gunmen ambushed two police vehicles at a busy intersection last week, killing seven officers and a 17-year-old passerby. Six of the police officers killed were federal officers; their colleagues now live in a hotel protected by armed guards and a wall of sandbags. Twenty-nine police officers have been killed in Juarez this year.

A week ago, gunmen raided the customs office at an international bridge that links Camargo, Mexico, to Rio Grande, Tex., forcing officials to close the border crossing for several hours.

The same day, in La Union, in the state of Guerrero, assailants threw grenades at offices of the state ministerial police.

In the sleepy little farm town of Los Aldamas in Nuevo Leon state, the police chief was dragged from his home and killed alongside two deputies last month. Earlier, the police chief in a nearby town was decapitated.

The assistant police chief in Nogales, Sonora, and his bodyguard were killed in late March in a barrage of fire from AK-47s.On March 30, dozens of gunmen mounted coordinated attacks across the states of Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon, targeting two army garrisons and touching off firefights that left 18 of the attackers dead.

"I believe that the number of attacks has increased, and now they are more selective attacks, on command centers, and the most obvious reason is they are trying to intimidate those leaders who try to combat organized crime and also to frighten the rank and file so they don't act," said José Luis Piñeyro, a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico who studies the military's fight against crime.

The attack on Bautista, which occurred in the state of Michoacan less than a mile from the crowded fairgrounds, was both brazen and sophisticated, Mexican law enforcement officials say.

"What we saw at the scene was a carefully planned trap," said Jesús Montejano Ramírez, the state attorney general. "The sheer number of people involved in the attack and the precision with which it was carried out are clear signs that we are dealing with organized crime."

One of the grenades landed on the floorboard of the SUV carrying Bautista, but it did not explode.

"For me, this is a miracle," said Bautista, 37, after she was released from hospital this week, barely able to walk because of shrapnel wounds.

"It's a mix of emotions," she said, "among them a feeling of powerlessness to prevent what is going on. But we have to do something to stop it."

Two of her bodyguards and two bystanders died in the ambush. Nine people were injured. One SUV in Bautista's convoy burned at the scene and, a week later, remnants of melted tires still charred the highway. Nearby, four withered flower wreaths rattled in the dry wind.

None of the bodyguards returned fire, nor did Bautista.

Gómez-Mont, the interior secretary, said a little-known group called La Resistencia, or the Resistance, carried out the ambush. The group is employed by La Familia, which controls vast swaths of Michoacan, smuggling drugs to the United States and operating clandestine methamphetamine factories in the forests.

Other possible scenarios have emerged in the news media in Michoacan. One theory holds that the attack was so sophisticated that it must have been the work of another cartel, the paramilitary-style Zetas. Another hypothesis is that the attack came about because criminals were unhappy that Bautista had fired the director of state police.

Shortly before the attack, Bautista had warned that Mexico would not win the fight against the drug cartels with bigger weapons or more police -- but with social and economic development. This week she was unsure whether she would continue as Michoacan's public safety secretary.

never ending cycle

2010-05-08T15:39:00.001-07:00

Mexico's drug violence that has killed some 23,000 people could rage until 2014 judging by past anti-crime fights in Italy, Colombia and the United States, the government said on Tuesday. Mexican Security Minister Genero Garcia Luna told the Reuters Latin American Investment Summit in Mexico City that the country could not expect a quick victory in the army-backed drug fight launched by President Felipe Calderon in late 2006. "In every case, the average (time taken to control organized crime) is between six and eight years," Garcia Luna said in his headquarters in the Mexican capital. "In the case of Italy, in the case of Colombia, New York and Chicago, the curve was six years on average ... in Italy it lasted almost seven years," he said. With strong support from Washington, Calderon has sent more than 70,000 soldiers, elite navy units and federal police across Mexico to fight powerful drug cartels fighting over lucrative smuggling routes into the United States. But despite record drug seizures and arrests, violence has escalated to horrifying levels, and once-quiet manufacturing and colonial tourist towns feel terrorized by daylight shootouts between rival gangs and the army. Some companies are freezing investment along the U.S. border, local business leaders say. Severed heads and bodies hung from bridges are becoming commonplace from Mexico's Caribbean to its northern border with the United States. A spate of civilian killings, including infants caught up in shootouts between troops and hitmen, has hurt support for Calderon's drug war. The killing of three people linked to the U.S. consulate in Ciudad Juarez in March provoked outrage from President Barack Obama, whose administration is providing Mexico with millions of dollars in anti-drug war equipment and police training. Garcia Luna said the government is doing all it can to protect the economy from any drug war impact. "Mexico is working forefully and institutionally so people keep investing in Mexico," he said. He said a decision to switch control of security operations to the federal police and away from the army in Ciudad Juarez was bearing fruit despite a surge in violence in April, with killings spiking to 20 a day in the city across from El Paso, Texas. "We've had federal police (in control) in Ciudad Juarez for almost 20 days ... and we are beginning to see signs of improvement in public security," Garcia Luna said. Garcia Luna said a major priority was still the cleaning up of Mexico's notoriously corrupt and poorly-paid police forces that often work with drug gangs. He said he aimed to eliminate Mexico's 2,000 municipal forces that are ill-equipped to deal with heavily armed drug hitmen and create a unified police force based on officers from the country's 32 states

spot on

2010-05-08T15:37:00.000-07:00

Mexico City's leftist mayor, Marcelo Ebrard, said on Tuesday he would take the army off the streets and find other ways to tackle drug trafficking should he win the 2012 presidential election. Ebrard, who has not formally declared his candidacy for the left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, said Mexico was on the wrong track in its spiraling drug war. "Sending the army to do police work is a bad idea," Ebrard said at the Reuters Latin American Investment Summit. "I would substitute the army for a strong state police force with a well-defined plan to invest (in it)," said Ebrard, 50, a former police chief who has pushed policies for his city such as gay marriage and abortion rights. President Felipe Calderon, a conservative, made weakening drug gangs his first priority on taking office in late 2006 and deployed tens of thousands of security forces across Mexico. But grisly drug killings have surged to nearly 23,000 deaths over his term, sullying Mexico's image abroad and worrying foreign investors and tourists. Calderon and his party are sinking in the polls before the 2012 election as the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, that ruled for seven decades until 2000 enjoys a rebound. The PRD, divided since losing the 2006 election to Calderon by a slim and disputed margin, is trailing in third place. Allegations of rights abuses by soldiers are rife as heavily armed troops carry out household raids and set up intimidating military checkpoints. A spate of civilian killings, including infants caught in the cross-fire of shootouts between troops and drug gunmen, has dented support for Calderon's drug fight. Ebrard said having soldiers on the street sent the wrong message and provoked an atmosphere of violence. "If you tell the country it is at war, violence will increase. I would not call for war because war means a suspension of rights." Ebrard said his ideas for an anti-drug agenda would include promoting investment along the U.S.-Mexico border -- where violence has started to scare away businesses -- focusing on manufacturing green technologies. Ebrard has worked to meet environmental goals with city projects to expand public transport, like a rent-a-bicycle system to push pedaling as alternative to gridlocked traffic. LEFT NEEDS TO UNITE The left's chances of winning in 2012 look dim given its deep divisions. The PRD's popularity has been hit hard by a drawn-out squabble to choose the party's leadership. Ebrard has emerged as a new face of Mexico's left after Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador alienated moderate voters with rowdy protests claiming fraud after his 2006 defeat. Painting himself as a more modern leader, Ebrard hinted that if he were to run in 2012, it would be on a more investment-friendly platform, seeking to use free-market profits to invest in social programs. Lopez Obrador has said he wants to run again for president but Ebrard says the left can win only if it unites behind one candidate. "Of course you cannot have two leftist candidates," he said, adding in English: "That is a march of folly."

methadone

2010-05-08T15:29:00.000-07:00

Abstract

The institution of methadone maintenance as a treatment modality for heroin addiction in the mid-1960s was part of the growing medicalization of social problems in the United States.The definition of deviance as "sickness" rather than "badness" set the stage for America's first harm-reduction strategy.By the 1970s methadone maintenance was seen as a way to reduce drug-related crime, and federally funded programs proliferated.Accompanying methadone's phenomenal expansion was increased regulation, bureaucratization, and criticism. The early 1980s brought the Reagan era, fiscal austerity, the new "just say no" abstinence morality, and demedicalization of methadone maintenance.By the time needle-sharing was recognized as a major contributing factor in the spread of HIV, methadone had been transformed into a largely fee-for-service, short-term, begrudgingly tolerated treatment modality.Ironically, while other countries were able to use methadone to curb the spread of AIDS, the United States refused to facilitate its expansion, and in fact impeded it.To the frustration of proponents and consumers, this original harm-reduction tool, with the potential to impact the epidemic, was demedicalized and remains marginalized.

Introduction

The institution of methadone maintenance treatment in the United States represented a culmination of the increased medicalization of social problems in American society during the first half of the twentieth century.Drug technologies had been developed that would alleviate all forms of pain, which had been defined by Americans as uniformly intolerable (Illich 1976). During the 1950s deviant behavior was redefined not as "badness" but as disease, and addiction was redefined as an illness that could be treated with advancing medical technologies (Conrad & Schneider 1980).The rehabilitative ideal became the dominating solution to the crime problem, as thousands of offenders were reformed in a myriad of programs (American Friends Service Committee 1971).

In the mid-1960s, Drs. Vincent Dole and Marie Nyswander began to report on their initial findings in their research with methadone maintenance treatment (Dole & Nyswander 1965). Their findings constitute the basic ideology behind the proliferation of methadone maintenance: methadone could relieve the metabolic disorder created by opiate addiction, and with doses high enough to block the physical craving for heroin, the individual would be immune to its euphoric effects.Thus, methadone users would be in a favorable position to break their ties with heroin and go on to become productive members of society.As such, methadone maintenance was the original form of drug harm reduction in the United States.

Although the findings of outcome of the early proponents of methadone were tentative, "the media immediately heralded it as the long-awaited 'medical breakthrough,' labeling methadone a 'Cinderella drug' which could be economically applied to hundreds of thousands of addicts, and, in short order, solve the narcotics problem" (Newman 1977:xix).With the methadone breakthrough, heroin addiction was further defined as a medical (as opposed to a social) problem, and the addict became a patient.

Having transformed heroin addiction into a treatable disease, and with proclamations about its salvation to society and the addict alike, methadone maintenance spread.Programs began to open officially in 1963 with Dole and Nyswander's original two patients.In March of 1965, the expanded program moved into an open ward of Beth Israel Hospital (in New York City), with six patients; by 1968 there were 1,139 patients.

In the 1970s and 1980s, methadone providers and patients struggled with definition, implementation, and ultimately survival.This article looks at the first two decades of methadone treatment.During the 1970s the use of methadone expanded greatly.In the early 1980s, the Reagan morality and fiscal austerity created a treatment method that was viewed largely as containment of the addict population.Finally, in the post-AIDS late 1980s methadone became almost fully demedicalized, precisely at a time when medical treatment was needed most.

The 1970s: Methadone Expands and Comes Under Attack

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the use of methadone expanded rapidly.The spirit of rehabilitation laid the foundation for the growth of the treatment of deviant behavior, including drug abuse, using the medical model.Three other variables entered into the picture that made more efficient control of drug abuse seem imperative.First, crime statistics indicated that the growing crime rate could be accounted for in large part by drugs and drug-related activities.It was heroin addicts who were to blame for much of the burglary and petty theft that had reached epidemic proportions.Second, widespread drug addiction in Vietnam servicemen, who were becoming veterans, was alarming.Finally, the growing use of illicit substances (though, paradoxically, not opioids) by middle-class, White youths (who saw themselves as part of the "hippie" movement) redefined drug abuse as having reached epidemic proportions.Conrad and Schneider (1980:135) noted that "the late '60s and early '70s marked a rise in public concern with 'the drug problem,' especially heroin addiction.Writers in the professional and popular media were declaring a virtual 'heroin addiction epidemic' in America."

By 1972, drug abuse was proclaimed "the major domestic crisis facing the nation " by the president of the United States (Nixon 1972).In the spirit of crisis with which Nixon characterized the drug problem, treatment in various forms proliferated: the drug-free therapeutic community, outpatient detoxification, and methadone maintenance.

By 1971 the estimated number of methadone patients nationwide had jumped to 25,000 (Brecher 1972).Accompanying this expansion was increased criticism, regulation, and bureaucratization.Perhaps topping the list of criticisms was that maintenance was the equivalent of substituting one drug for another, and patients "never got off." Ironically, methadone was initially attractive because it was an opioid substitute, and maintenance was recommended for this chronic relapsing condition.Methadone also came under attack due to diversion of the drug. This was another ironic criticism, since the diverted methadone was going largely to heroin addicts and other methadone patients.The idea that novices would become addicted to their first opioid through diverted methadone (on the schoolyard) proved completely unfounded.Even patients criticized methadone, claiming that "it takes your heart' (Hunt et al. 1985), that it had a host of side effects (Rosenbaum & Murphy 1987); and that it tied them to the clinic (Rosenbaum 1981).Despite the criticism, extensive research continually found that methadone was expedient.It worked to reduce drug related criminality in patients and stabilized their drug habits.In short, as one of the early study participants stated, "methadone removes the issue of drugs from my life."

In response to methadone's criticisms came the "regulatory counterattack" in 1973 (Dole, as cited in Courtwright, Joseph & Des Jarlais 1989).Indeed, clinics had to comply with a complex set of rules governing admission to treatment, attendance, dose level, take-home doses, urinalysis, and record-keeping methods.If they did not comply with "the regs," they were out of business.From the perspective of clinic staff as well as patients, this hardly felt like traditional delivery of medical services.It became clear that the proliferation of clinics in the 1970s had much more to do with stopping crime than the well-being of heroin addicts.Indeed, increased regulation moved methadone further away from a purely medical treatment.As Zweben and Payte (1990:594) commented: "Programs quickly learned that survival depended on the condition of the records and not the patients....There has been considerable speculation as to the motivation or purpose for the regulations that represented an unprecedented intrusion into the practice of medicine.Some think there was a sincere intention to ensure quality care, others that the process was one of political compromise, and still others that the intention was to discourage the growth of this unpopular form of treatment.Evidently some provisions were made in the absence or disregard of scientific clinical investigations and experience."

The Early 1980s: The New Morality, Fiscal Austerity and Just Say No (To Methadone)

The New Morality and fiscal austerity of the Reagan administration had major implications for methadone treatment.Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign and the emphasis on zero tolerance of illegal drugs ushered in an era (extending to the present) in which abstinence was seen as the only viable perspective and form of drug abuse treatment.

The fiscal austerity of the early 1980s meant a general scaling back, and often the elimination, of social programs that had been instituted in the 1960s and 1970s.Funding for methadone maintenance programs began to dry up, experiencing a 30% decline between 1976 and 1987 (Gerstein & Harwood 1990).As a result private, fee-for-service clinics proliferated.

The original definitions of the nature of methadone maintenance treatment were further compromised in an effort to cut costs.If there were to be time limits in treatment, a new ideology had to be constructed.Hence there was a shift in protocol from lifelong to time-limited treatment.Methadone was seen as a means to an abstinent end rather than an end in itself.

The message was clear: methadone would be begrudgingly tolerated.The government would no longer pay for it, however; nor would they allow a methadone user to remain in a program indefinitely.This message led to a further demedicalization (what other medical regimen has a built-in time limit?) and increased demoralization of treatment staff as well as patients.Clinic staff were unable to act as medical personnel.With payment of fees and the movement away from a medical definition of addiction, the nomenclature changed."Patients" were increasingly called "clients" in an effort to upgrade their status as consumers.A well- meaning gesture, it was hollow and ultimately counterproducdve.None of the regulations changed that would empower clients, and they had gained no increases in decision making vis-a- vis their own treatment.However, the shift in titles had the negative effect of moving methadone treatment even further away from the practice of medicine.As Kahn (1992:282) remarked: "It is common for counselors to interchange the terms 'client' and 'patient'. . . . This may inadvertently contribute to negative perceptions.The term 'patient' refers to someone manifesting an illness requiring expert care, and is more consistent with efforts to counteract the view of the heroin addict as a criminal with character defects"

By the mid-1980s methadone had moved, essentially, from a medical treatment to the containment of addicts, just as the criminal justice system had moved from rehabilitation to containment of "the rabble" (Irwin 1985).Methadone treatment was infused with the Reagan (abstinence) morality: dose levels were restricted despite evidence that treatment was more effective at higher levels (Ball & Ross 1991; Caplehorn & Bell 1991; Hargreaves 1983); time in treatment was limited despite research findings insisting that longer treatment stays produced better results (Hubbard et al. 1989; Simpson & Sells 1982; Cushman 1981; McGlothlin & Anglin 1981; Simpson 1981, 1979; Dole & Joseph 1978; Stimmel et al. 1978), and private fees were instituted despite evidence that addicts needing methadone could not afford to pay for it (Rosenbaum, Murphy & Beck 1987).Just as with other programs for the poor, the message was clear:it was no longer acceptable for lower-class people and their problems to be subsidized by the government.

The Mid-1980s: Enter AIDS

In the mid-1980s it was discovered that HIV could be and was being transmitted through blood by the sharing of injection equipment.Intravenous (IV) drug users became the second largest group to be infected by HIV, which causes AIDS, and their numbers were growing quickly.It became obvious that a key method to stop the spread of the virus through drug users was to (1) educate IV drug users to clean their injection equipment, (2) use clean needles, or (3) stop using needles.Regarding the latter, methadone maintenance was seen as an already-in-place method to accomplish the cessation of needle use.Indeed, methadone maintenance clients have demonstrated a lower seroprevalence rate (Siddiqui et al. 1993; Novick, Joseph & Croxson 1990; Weber et al. 1990; Hartel, Selwyn & Schoenbaum 1988; Abdul-Quadar et al. 1987).When countries all over the world expanded programs in an effort to slow the spread of AIDS, stubborn morality and fiscal shortsightedness prevented the United States from utilizing methadone maintenance as a harm-reduction strategy (Nadelmann et al. 1994).

There was an effort by providers to reinstitute the original definition of addiction as a disease that would require lifelong treatment.This effort was consistent with the "recovery" movement of the late 1980s, in which everything from alcohol problems to food abuse to gambling to relationship dependency was defined as a disease (Peele 1989).Whereas medicalization has proliferated in the form of defining so many problems and habits as diseases, the most popular solution has been the 12-Step programs.However, methadone maintenance, though a tried form of treatment for one of the oldest acknowledged diseases, has been systematically excluded as a viable option because its ultimate goal is not abstinence.Pragmatism, once again, was cast aside for morality.

Funding was cut, and although providers begged for increased client access to maintenance, the continuation of defunding made methadone inaccessible at $350 per month to the very people who needed it most (Rosenbaum, Murphy & Beck 1987).

Morality Frustrates America's First Harm-Reduction Effort

The War on Drugs initiated by the Reagan administration in the 1980s has Americans even more conflicted and inconsistent about drugs than ever.Even in the face of the AIDS epidemic, harm-reduction efforts-such as needle exchange, marijuana for the relief of nausea associated with AIDS and chemotherapy, and methadone for cessation of needle use-have been met with a stubborn moralistic resistance.Despite extensive research demonstrating its efficacy, as well as its legal status, methadone has been treated as an illicit drug and caught in a moral rather than medical debate (Newman & Peyser 1991:120): "The reality is that those who reject methadone treatment have been unresponsive to intuition, empiricism, pragmatism, and scientific data.The reason seems clear ... the controversies over methadone treatment stem almost entirely from philosophical differences-objections to the substitution of one drug for another-and not from doubts about the pharmacological safety and efficacy of methadone. . ."

Methadone maintenance has been a frustrating experience for nearly everyone concerned with it: clinic staff, clients themselves, and researchers.Staff physicians and counselors in methadone programs consistently express exasperation at attempting to treat a medical problem with extensive regulatory mechanisms that more often than not interfere with sound medical treatment (Payte 199 1; Zweben & Payte 1990).It is also difficult to practice medicine with the stigma attached to methadone, since that stigma ultimately extends not only to clients, but clinic staff as well.As Newman said (as cited in Kahn 1992): "There is no other medication (methadone) ... that physicians rely on for which maximum dosages have been decreed.... Physicians in no other medical practice are constrained by law from treating more than a designated number of patients....." For this reason, some physicians have simply abandoned methadone treatment (Payte 1991).

Methadone users have been victims of the political and social maneuvering of the past 20 years.Initially they expected a medical treatment that would allow them to function without having to procure an illegal drug (heroin) on a daily basis in order to feel normal.With the introduction of extensive regulations they found that being on methadone was no picnic (Rosenbaum In press; Rosenblum, Magura & Joseph 1991).Methadone users also felt stigmatized by the negative definitions of maintenance (Rosenbaum In press; Murphy & Irwin 1992).They were in a perpetual state of identity "limbo." Ultimately, their real-life struggles are the most frustrating (Rosenbaum, Irwin & Murphy 1988).The conditions experienced by clients have been exasperated by the demedicalization of methadone treatment and its progressive marginalization.

Finally, those in the field of treatment research have learned that sometimes policy has little to do with science.Research findings largely in support of methadone maintenance as an effective harm-reduction treatment are widely acknowledged in the drug abuse field.The National Institute on Drug Abuse, now a part of the National Institutes of Health, has funded methadone research for over two decades, and instituted policy consistent with the findings of their grantees.Nonetheless, to add to the frustration of researchers, state and federal bureaucracies often ignore such policy positions.Instead, they opt for cost-cutting, politically expedient, but ultimately counterproductive means for dealing with drug abuse.

Perhaps, with increasing international adoption of harm-reduction strategies and a shift in focus from a criminal justice to a public health view of drug use, methadone maintenance will become remedicalized in the United States.Some providers believe methadone maintenance has been reintroduced and is already becoming less marginalized because of the AIDS epidemic (Zweben & Sorenson 1988).Perhaps the Clinton administration's new drug control strategy emphasizing prevention and treatment will mean that methadone can once again be used as it was designed by Drs. Dole and Nyswander: as a medical tool to reduce the harms of addiction and abuse.

only took a year

2010-04-21T10:31:00.001-07:00

General Motor Co. has repaid the $8.1 billion in loans it got from the U.S. and Canadian governments, a move its CEO says is a sign automaker is on the road to recovery.

GM CEO Whitacre will formally announce the loan paybacks Wednesday at the company's Fairfax Assembly Plant in Kansas City, Kansas, where he will also announce that GM is investing $257 million in that factory and the Detroit-Hamtramck plant, both of which will build the next generation of the midsize Chevrolet Malibu.

GM got a total of $52 billion from the U.S. government and $9.5 billion from the Canadian and Ontario governments as it went through bankruptcy protection last year. The U.S. considered as a loan $6.7 billion of the aid, while the Canadian governments held $1.4 billion in loans.

The U.S. government payments, made Tuesday, came five years ahead of schedule, and Whitacre said they are a sign that the automaker is on its way toward reducing government ownership of the company. The payments on the Canadian loans were also made Tuesday.

GM hopes to repay the remaining $45.3 billion to the U.S. government and $8.1 billion to Canada, money it received in exchange for large stakes in the company. The U.S. government now owns 61 percent of the company and Canada owns roughly 12 percent. GM plans to repay both with a public stock offering, perhaps later this year.

''Nobody was happy that GM needed government loans -- not the governments, not the taxpayers and, quite frankly, not the company,'' Whitacre wrote in an op-ed article that appeared on The Wall Street Journal's Web site Tuesday night. ''We believe we can best thank the citizens of the U.S. and Canada by making sure that their investments are hard at work every day, building high quality, fuel-efficient vehicles.''

The factory investments in Kansas and Michigan will not create any new jobs, but will preserve jobs at both plants. The Kansas plant, which employs 3,869 workers, also builds the midsize Buick LaCrosse luxury sedan. The Detroit-Hamtramck plant, which has 1,048 employees, now builds the Cadillac DTS and Buick Lucerne large sedans and is gearing up to make the Chevrolet Volt rechargeable electric car.

During the financial crisis that led to GM filing for bankruptcy protection last year, the automaker closed 14 factories and shed more than 65,000 blue-collar jobs in the U.S. through buyouts, early retirement offers and layoffs. The company now employs about 40,000 hourly workers in the U.S.

Preserving jobs at the two GM plants won't help the nation's unemployment picture, but it won't make it worse.

Employers nationwide in March added 162,000 jobs, the most in three years. But the pace of the economic recovery and job creation won't be robust enough to quickly drive down the unemployment rate. It's been stuck at 9.7 percent for three months, close to its highest levels since the 1980s.

GM had made about $2 billion in loan payments to the U.S. government and $384 million to Canada in December and March, and had promised to repay the full loans by June. But company officials have said its cash flow, mainly from the sales of newer models, has been better than expected, allowing it to make the remaining $5.8 billion in payments early.

Repaying the loans has been a top priority for Whitacre.

GM officials say the company's public stock offering will take place when the markets and the company are ready. They will not predict how much of the remaining government debt will be repaid from the stock offering, but said it likely will take years for the governments to divest themselves fully.

The stock offering hinges on GM posting a profit, which Whitacre has said could come this year. GM lost $3.4 billion in the fourth quarter of 2009 on revenues of $32.3 billion.

After the event at the Kansas City plant on Wednesday, Whitacre is scheduled to fly to Washington, where he will meet with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other lawmakers.

cash

2009-12-29T19:59:00.001-08:00

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

2009-12-29T09:21:00.000-08:00

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

2009-10-31T07:01:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-18T10:30:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-01T11:39:00.000-07:00

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.

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.

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

2009-09-25T21:22:00.001-07:00

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

2009-09-23T19:15:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-21T20:55:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-11T16:48:00.000-07:00

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.

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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

2009-08-11T20:34:00.000-07:00

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.

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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

2009-08-07T12:44:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-06T09:27:00.001-07:00

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

Shared via AddThis

2009-07-30T11:31:00.001-07:00

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

2009-07-30T11:17:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-24T13:17:00.001-07:00

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

2009-07-22T21:28:00.001-07:00

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.

2009-07-20T03:21:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-07-20T03:17:00.001-07:00

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

2009-07-19T10:29:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-19T08:01:00.000-07:00

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"

2009-07-14T19:42:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-13T18:18:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-07-12T16:12:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-12T05:09:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-10T23:01:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-10T22:53:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-09T20:41:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-02T21:51:00.001-07:00

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

2009-07-02T20:28:00.000-07:00

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."

one for the government

2009-06-28T11:24:00.000-07:00

Mexican soldiers have captured a suspected drug cartel operator with a list of the names of local police officers who apparently received payoffs, the army said Saturday.

A statement said Omar Ibarra was caught Friday on a street in the northern city of Monterrey. It said he possessed the names of 33 policemen in the wealthy suburb of San Pedro Garza Garcia "who presumably received money from this individual."

San Pedro officials were not immediately available for comment.

Ibarra also had two hand grenades, two packages of marijuana and a 9-mm submachine gun with a silencer, the army said. One of his alleged accomplices was also captured with marijuana, cocaine and a gun, the statement said.

In the western state of Michoacan, gunmen opened fire on a car carrying two forensic investigators, killing one — a chemist — and wounding the other, a doctor.

The attack occurred Saturday in the city of Zamora, state prosecutors said in a statement.

Also on Saturday, nine men and two women were ordered to stand trial on organized crime and money laundering charges. They were arrested in the border city of Reynosa in March on suspicion of stealing oil from state-owned pipelines and smuggling it across the border to sell it to U.S. refineries.

Four of the suspects, including, a former local leader of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, were also charged with selling stolen goods.

The Attorney General's Office said the gang allegedly worked with the drug cartel hitmen known as the Zetas in the scheme to take oil and natural gas from the state-owned oil monopoly Petroleos Mexicanos.

And in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz, a women and her 3-year-old son were shot to death by unidentified assailants on a highway.

Witnesses told state prosecutors that armed men fired on the car from a moving vehicle; the victim's daughter and another woman were wounded in the attack.

Drug gangs are known to operate in Veracruz, where police reported that 51 central American migrants were found on a train along with 12 suspects who the migrants said had robbed, extorted and beaten them. The suspects and some of the train's crew were detained for questioning.

The migrants told police in the town of Las Choapas that the suspects — two Mexicans and 10 Central Americans — had thrown a woman and two children off the train, presumably to their deaths.

Drug gangs have also been known to prey on Central American migrants seeking to reach the United States.

same old bullsh&*

2009-06-14T09:31:00.000-07:00

Today, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, U.S. Department of Homeland Secretary Janet Napolitano, and Director of National Drug Control Policy Gil Kerlikowske released President Obama’s strategy to stem the flow of illegal drugs and their illicit proceeds across the Southwest border and reduce associated crime and violence in the region.

The National Southwest Border Counternarcotics Strategy directs Federal agencies to increase coordination and information sharing with State and local law enforcement agencies, intensifies national efforts to interdict the southbound flow of weapons and bulk currency, and calls for continued close collaboration with the Government of Mexico in their efforts against the drug cartels. The strategy is an important component of the Administration’s national drug control policy and complements the Administration’s comprehensive efforts to respond to threats along the border.

“Drug trafficking cartels spread violence and lawlessness throughout our border region and reach into all of our communities, large and small,” said Attorney General Holder. “By focusing on increased cooperation between the U.S. and Mexican governments as well as enhanced communication within U.S. law enforcement agencies, the National Southwest Border Counternarcotics Strategy we introduce today provides an effective way forward that will crack down on cartels and make our country safer.”

“The President’s counternarcotics strategy will play a critical role in our efforts to stop cross-border drug trafficking and violence,” said Secretary Napolitano. “The plan calls for tougher inspections, more enforcement personnel and close coordination with our partners in Mexico as we work across Federal, State and local governments to achieve safety and security in our communities. Together, we will continue to reduce the flow of illegal drugs across the Southwest border and ensure that those who ignore our laws are prosecuted.”

“Under President Obama’s leadership we have designed a new plan to pull together the capabilities not only of Federal agencies, but also state, local, and tribal law enforcement officials,” said Director Kerlikowske. “This new plan, combined with the dedicated efforts of the Government of Mexico, creates a unique opportunity to make real headway on the drug threat. At the same time, we are renewing our commitment to reduce the demand for drugs in the United States, which will support this effort. The National Southwest Border Counternarcotics Strategy will improve the safety of communities on the border and throughout our Nation.”

National Southwest Border Counternarcotics Strategy Objectives

Enhance intelligence capabilities associated with the Southwest border.
Interdict drugs, drug proceeds, and associated instruments of violence at the ports of entry, between the ports of entry, and in the air and maritime domains along the Southwest border.
Ensure the prosecution of all significant drug trafficking, money laundering, bulk currency, and weapons smuggling/trafficking cases.
Disrupt and dismantle drug trafficking organizations.
Enhance counterdrug technologies for drug detection and interdiction along the Southwest border.
Enhance U.S.-Mexico cooperation regarding joint counterdrug efforts.

The Director of National Drug Control Policy will oversee the implementation of the strategy, in coordination with the Department of Homeland Security, Office of Counternarcotics Enforcement, and the Department of Justice, Office of the Deputy Attorney General. The Director will also ensure that the strategy is coordinated with other border related efforts, including the Merida Initiative, led by the State Department, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Southwest border operations plan.

oh wonderful

2009-05-24T11:25:00.000-07:00

NOGALES, Ariz. — Amped up efforts to stop guns and cash from entering Mexico and fueling drug cartels could have an unintended effect on Americans: longer waits in southbound lanes at the border.

Most ports don't have much room for such inspections, putting U.S. and Mexican customs officials in a bind. If they keep traffic moving, it will be tough to make the new inspections effective. If they conduct checks thorough enough to find guns and illegal cash, it might slow traffic.

U.S. and Mexican officials insist their operations won't slow motorists. U.S. Customs and Border Protection says it won't conduct around-the-clock checks or check every last person, and Mexican customs says it will take only eight seconds to check each vehicle that comes through. But, at ports with just one or two southbound lanes, those plans may still cause delays.

"We're very concerned," said Maria Luisa O'Connell, president of the Phoenix-based Border Trade Alliance. "The challenge is the lack of infrastructure and space."

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers, who have typically devoted nearly all of their time to inspecting traffic coming into the U.S., are now — at the behest of President Obama — diverting significant time to what's leaving the country. Using traditional questioning, mobile X-ray trucks and currency- and weapons-sniffing dogs, officers are now conducting daily outbound inspections.

The Mexican government has also pledged to increase traditionally lax inspections by subjecting every car to an eight-second inspection starting sometime this year, said Andrés Ruiz Manriquez, administrator for Mexican Customs in Nogales. That would mark a huge increase from the 10 percent of cars they now check. Keeping traffic moving

Armando Goncalvez, U.S. Customs and Border Protection acting port director in Nogales, acknowledges that limited space at ports such as the Dennis DeConcini Port of Entry in downtown Nogales hinders what they can do. But he says there's no need for travelers or border residents to worry about lines or traffic congestion.

To keep things moving, the agency uses a strategy called pause and search, which means conducting southbound checks for a few hours at a time rather than all day. That keeps smugglers on their heels, Goncalvez says.

"We find that is more productive because once we're out there, everyone knows we are out there and they'll just wait us out," Goncalvez says. "So we try to be unpredictable."

Southbound inspections on a recent day show how the tactics can be tailored to each port.

The DeConcini port in central Nogales has eight lanes coming into the U.S. and two going into Mexico. It is surrounded by bustling city on all sides and a busy intersection 200 yards north of the border.

On this day, two customs officers stopped only vehicles that looked suspicious, allowing a slow flow of cars to continue. There was no backup.

The Mariposa port in western Nogales has only two outbound lanes but is surrounded by canyons and open space and is nearly two miles from the closest busy intersection north of the border.

There, officers stopped each car for a second or two and pulled over suspicious-looking cars. They were scanned by a mobile X-ray machine and sniffed by drug-, currency- and weapons-detection dogs in a pullout lane.

The two lanes of traffic heading into Mexico backed up 200-300 yards. Mexico's actions are awaited

So far, increased inspections haven't hurt Nogales, Ariz., said Nogales Police Chief William Ybarra.

That doesn't mean he's not worried about busy holiday weekends or — perhaps more importantly — what will happen when Mexican customs begins its increased inspections. Mexican customs has vowed to inspect more cars coming into the country and send equipment such as weight machines and license-plate readers, but that push hasn't started.

When it does, pharmacy manager José Trejo said it won't help sales, which have already fallen 70 percent since December. "It will affect us," Trejo said in Spanish. "Increasing inspections will cause even fewer people to come."

The southbound checks — coupled with the passport requirement that goes into effect on June 1 and the increased forms of security that have been on the rise since Sept. 11, 2001 — have made day trips for shopping and lunch in Nogales a lot more taxing on visitors, Trejo said.

That drop in visitors is the very reason some Nogales, Sonora, merchants say the inspections won't cause long lines or hurt tourism.

"It won't affect us because nobody comes anymore anyway," Jesús Delgado, manager of a downtown Nogales, Sonora, curio shop, said in Spanish. Inspections proceed

A pair of Customs and Border Protection officers stand amid traffic in southbound lanes heading into Mexico at the Mariposa Port of Entry, pausing each car to ask a few questions.

About 20 Pima County sheriff's deputies stand around, observing, as part of their training.

The federal government's push includes freeing overtime funds for local police and county sheriff's deputies to help out and conduct the inspections. Nogales police and Santa Cruz County sheriff's deputies have already been trained, and Pima County sheriff's deputies were receiving training last week to conduct random, unannounced southbound inspections at the Sasabe and Lukeville ports, said Lt. Jeff Palmer, who oversees the Pima County sheriff's Border Crime Unit. Closer scrutiny

Most cars are waved through, but five — an old Ford pickup with furniture crammed in the bed, a white BMW 3231, a green Ford Expedition, a Chevrolet pickup with a grill and refrigerator in the bed, and a green minivan with five large suitcases tied to the roof — are directed into the pullout lane.

After the occupants get out and stand against a nearby chain-link fence, a Pima County sheriff's deputy guides his drug dog around each vehicle. The dog scratches at the back of the BMW, announcing an odor. Then, a white government van with no windows — the agency's backscatter mobile X-ray — slowly drives down the row of cars.

The X-ray also detects something abnormal in the BMW, and officers call over a Customs and Border Protection dog from Miami that is trained to sniff out cash and weapons.

The occupants of the four other vehicles are allowed to leave, and Customs and Border Protection officer José Rivera lets the dog, a 2-year-old Belgian Malinois named Athego, thoroughly sniff the interior and exterior. Rivera and Athego have been in Arizona for two months and will be here through the end of July as part of the increased southbound enforcement efforts.

After an extensive search — including opening and inspecting a bag of pinto beans and a can of coffee — officers find nothing. They let the three women in the BMW be on their way, and they ask the officers on the line to pull over five more cars.

Unearthing guns isn't easy, even at the ports. From the beginning of fiscal year 2009 — Oct. 1 — through March 20, officers had seized 21 weapons, compared with 51 the year before and 25 in 2007. They have more success with money. This fiscal year through March 20, officers have seized $3.85 million during southbound inspections at Arizona ports, already more than the $1.1 million seized in all of fiscal year 2008. Traffic and tourism

U.S. officials are also inspecting people walking into Mexico. Mexican officials still will stop only people flagged by their stoplight system.

The eight-second inspection on all vehicles will include weighing cars to see if they are unusually heavy and running license plate numbers through a database of suspicious vehicles, both tools long used by U.S. officials but new to Mexico.

They are already doing this at the port in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, across from Brownsville, Texas, but no date has been set for Sonoran ports, said Mexican Customs' Ruiz.

"It will be implemented in a way that doesn't create traffic jams," Ruiz said in Spanish.

Diverting officers from regular inspections to southbound checks is bound to increase the already lengthy wait to get back into the U.S., said the Border Trade Alliance's O'Connell.

The Alliance has requested that U.S. Department of Homeland Security bring the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives into the mix and develop a plan that conducts smart — rather than frequent — outbound inspections.

"Stopping every truck is not the most effective way," O'Connell said.

Goncalvez said they'll get more officers to staff the additional requirements.

Alicia Martin, co-owner of La Roca restaurant in Nogales, Sonora, said she is confident southbound inspections would be quick and efficient and doesn't worry about them. Her main concern, she said, is the long lines back into the country, both on foot and on wheels.

Others weren't so confident. Increased inspections will delay crossings and keep some people away, said pharmacy manager Trejo.

Clyde and Shirley Thomas and their grown daughter, Terri Hamstra, walked across the border into Nogales last week to have lunch at La Roca and do some shopping to celebrate Shirley's birthday. While Hamstra and Shirley Thomas said the inspections don't bother them, Clyde disagreed.

"For me, it would be bothersome," said Clyde Thomas, who lives in Chicago but spends part of the year in Tucson. "If there are a lot of people, there would be a holdup."

Shirley had a different take:

"If you are honest, you have nothing to worry about. And if you are coming to shop, you shouldn't be in a hurry."

Contact reporter Brady McCombs at 573-4213 or bmccombs@azstarnet.com.

27 Comments on this story

not possible

2009-05-14T23:24:00.000-07:00

President Felipe Calderon on Thursday urged Mexico's most violent drug-ridden city to clean up its corrupt police department, warning the deployment of thousands of troops on its streets was not permanent.

Calderon sent 10,000 troops and federal police to Ciudad Juarez, located across the border from El Paso, Texas, in March to stop a surge in killings between rival gangs.

The troops' arrival brought about a temporary dip in murders but now violence is increasing again.

"We all know that (the army's presence) cannot and should not be permanent. So I call on local authorities to accelerate this process" of cleansing the police, Calderon told soldiers in a heavily guarded visit to Ciudad Juarez.

Calderon's government says Mexico may need to keep troops on streets across the country for several more years, but rooting out police corruption is urgent since corrupt police openly aid gangs, undermining army operations.

Mexico's most-wanted man Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman is fighting the dominant Juarez cartel and its wing of corrupt police, La Linea (The Line), for control of Ciudad Juarez, which sits on a prized smuggling route into Texas.

Calderon has staked his presidency on crushing the gangs that killed 6,300 people last year. The violence worries Washington, spilling into border cities like Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona.

President Barack Obama praised Calderon's drug fight in a visit to Mexico last month. U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told Congress recently border violence was calming, but questioned how long the reduction would last.

Three U.S. citizens were found tortured to death over the weekend in the border city Tijuana across from southern California, prosecutor Fermin Gomez told reporters on Thursday.

Police believe the two men and a woman, all in their 20s, were working for drug gangs, Gomez said.

Mexico's drug war death toll is around 2,300 people so far this year, slightly higher than the same point in 2008, even as the army makes historic seizures of weapons and cash and arrests top cartel leaders.

Finally the truth

2009-04-26T03:09:00.000-07:00

Tucson, Arizona | Published: 04.26.2009

If you're not a criminal, you don't need to worry about the much-discussed spillover of violent crime from Mexico's drug wars.

That's the unanimous opinion of 10 Southern Arizona law-enforcement officials interviewed by the Arizona Daily Star in the last two weeks.

"The average individual has nothing to fear in regard to what has happened," said Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada.

"Generally speaking," Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik agreed, "it's criminals killing criminals."

While police officials are increasingly cautious because of the paramilitary and violent nature of the Mexican drug cartels, most doubt there will be cross-border spillover of the war between drug cartels and the Mexican government that has claimed thousands of lives in Mexico during the last two years.

"Spillover crime would be bad for business," Douglas Police Chief Alberto Melis said. "And they're businessmen."

Conspicuously absent are the mass killings that have defined the Mexican drug wars. The two cities called Nogales offer a stark example: Last year there were a record 116 homicides in the Mexican city, but in its Arizona sister city there were none.

Some crimes have escalated in Southern Arizona: home invasions targeting traffickers, kidnapping of people involved in the smuggling. But nearly all perpetrators and victims in the surge are involved in smuggling.

These types of crime — not a new surge in cartel-war violence — have been cited as evidence of a spillover in recent congressional hearings and news reports.

For example, The New York Times reported on March 22 that rising home invasions in Tucson show a spillover of violence from Mexico's drug wars. But Tucson Assistant Police Chief Roberto Villaseñor said that's not so.

"The arrests we've made on home invasions, not one of them is an active cartel member from Mexico," Villaseñor said. "The majority of them, upwards of 90 percent of them, were local criminals."

Still, Southern Arizona police welcome the attention paid to border-related crime, even if some of the concern seems exaggerated. That's because it means money.

"I've told my people let's put in for everything we can because we have to ride the wave," Estrada said. "Finally, some recognition and some funding is coming down here to the border." Santa Cruz County crime

In the early-morning hours of April 11 west of Nogales near Bartolo Canyon, two or three masked men dressed in black and carrying AK-47-type assault rifles stole $500 from a group of 19 illegal immigrants.

Reports of armed robberies such as this one have risen in Santa Cruz County from three in 2007 to 10 in 2008 — and eight through the first quarter of 2009, Estrada said.

Santa Cruz County has seen the residual effects of drug cartel activity in Mexico for years in the form of armed robberies and assaults among criminals, Estrada said.

But, he said, "The drug war pushed it up to a higher level. It added more gas to the fire. It added another ingredient to what was happening along the border and that was an increase in violence and competition."

In Pima County, home invasions have increased. The Pima County Sheriff's Department reported 56 in 2008, up from 39 and 44 the previous two years, said Lt. Michael O'Connor. In Tucson, 34 home invasions were reported from Jan. 1 through April 24, 2008, compared with 33 for the same period this year.

The robberies and home invasions share two characteristics. One, direct links to the drug cartels are tenuous; and two, nearly all of the victims are either criminals or people being smuggled.

So far, the chance of criminals hitting the wrong house is very low, O'Connor said. More than 95 percent of the home invasions they investigate are bad guy on bad guy, he said.

Some neighborhood-association presidents in Tucson said they have seen increasing violence in their areas. But despite occasional rumors of connections to Mexico, it is connected to local gangs.

"We do see a lot of violence, a lot of shootings, a lot of drug violence," said Beki Quintero, president of the Sunnyside Neighborhood Association. "We really don't know if that's a direct cause or link" to violence in Mexico, she said.

The assertion that law-abiding residents are safe but that police need more resources to fight the increasing threat from the drug and people smugglers can seem contradictory.

"We walk a fine line in that we agree this is a serious problem, the influx of narcotics, the effect of the cartels in a general sense on our community," said Villaseñor of the Tucson police. "We also don't want to portray it that we have these hordes of invading cartel members attacking our community members, because that's not the case." Spillover contingencies

While law enforcement largely discounts the danger to average residents, it is nevertheless mounting precautionary defenses.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security had local law enforcement make contingency plans last year in the case of a spillover.

The perceived threat of Mexican drug cartels has escalated in the last two decades as they've become what many label paramilitary organizations. The National Drug Intelligence Center has identified the cartels as the top organized-crime threat in the United States.

That, say officials, is what makes it necessary to prepare.

Tables have turned since Nogales, Ariz., Police Chief William Ybarra was a rookie in the 1980s.

"Back then, we had the training, we had the bulletproof vests, we had the armament, we had the communications and numbers," Ybarra said.

"It's turned. They have the high-caliber military weapons, they've got the unlimited cash flow to buy bulletproof vests.

"They have grenades; we run from grenades."

During the April 20 Senate committee hearing in Phoenix on border violence, Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., compared the Mexican drug cartels to Islamic terrorist organizations and warned that the cartels have the money, the weapons, the networks and the "utter disregard for human lives" to mount an attack.

Arizona Sens. John McCain and Jon Kyl and Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer have requested that the National Guard be sent to the border because of the violence.

But Mexican drug traffickers are unlikely to cross the border with guns blazing — the sort of attack that soldiers on the border could stop, said former Douglas Mayor Ray Borane, who served as a border-issues aide to former Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano.

"They want to depict the situation as one where you could be literally invaded," he said. "That's unreality."

If the Mexican drug wars spur violence in the United States, Borane said, it likely will come in the form of a phone call from a Mexican drug trafficker telling an associate in some U.S. city to go after another U.S. drug dealer.

"The Army can't stop the telephone call to Phoenix," he said.

The real deterrent for the cartels is fear of U.S. law enforcement and prison time, said Lee Morgan, a retired U.S. Customs agent long stationed in Douglas.

"Our law enforcement system is honest and it works. In Mexico it's mostly corrupt," he said.

That doesn't stop border police chiefs from worrying.

"If we didn't take it seriously, we would be fools," said Sahuarita Police Chief John Harris. Bolstering cops on border

Melis, the Douglas chief, has seen little violence of any sort in the quiet border town. There have been no reported murders for several years, and Melis doesn't expect that to change — even as drug-cartel violence surges on the other side of the line.

"I'm concerned because it's my job to be concerned," Melis said. "It's my job to worry about things so others don't have to."

One possible benefit to the special attention to border violence is money, border experts and law-enforcement officials said.

Like so many police chiefs along the border, Melishopes to get federal money to bolster his force from 37 officers to 42.

He's not alone.

Villaseñor, the assistant Tucson police chief, said problems connected to drug trafficking aren't new, or even caused by the Mexican drug wars, but Tucson police will accept help fighting them.

"We need assistance with that," Villaseñor said. "We never turn our nose up at any assistance."

Ybarra, from Nogales, called federal funds paramount to their work and said he sees increased attention on border violence as an opportunity for more funds.

"Without the federal government's attention and involvement and commitment, there is no way we could handle this on our own," Ybarra said.

Dupnik used the Senate hearing in Phoenix to pitch an idea for a task force to slow the flow of guns, cash and ammunition south into Mexico.

"We don't get a chance to talk to the people who are in control of our government and our country," Dupnik said. "It was a tremendous opportunity."

Miguel Levario, an assistant professor of history at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, says he thinks news reports are exaggerating the threat from Mexico for an age-old reason: Fear sells.

"The New York Times is one example I've been using," Levario said, citing the March story from Tucson headlined 'Mexican Drug Cartel Violence Spills Over, Alarming U.S.' "They use that headline, then they say in the article that we can't really link the drug violence we're seeing in the cities to the violence in Mexico."

Borane, of Douglas, agreed.

"The media can make or break an issue. They keep using the word spillover, spillover. It's so trite. They keep putting that issue in the minds of the American public," he said.

Here is what Southern Arizona police officials said about the perceived spillover of violence from Mexico's drug wars:

Tony Estrada, Santa Cruz County Sheriff.

Santa Cruz County has not seen the gruesome attacks common in Mexico.

"We are not having the beheadings and putting people in acid and doing the killing, we are not seeing that violence, it's not to that level," Estrada said. "But, it's here. It's a spillover."

"We have had this spillover for years," Estrada said. "Anything that results in these crimes as far as I'm concerned is a spillover. It's a result of what is being orchestrated on the Mexican side to move these drugs, to move these people."

But he says it's not impacting ordinary citizens.

Larry Dever, Cochise County Sheriff

There are more bandits ripping off loads of people and drugs in the county and they don't hesitate to use violence to further their cause.

"In that sense, I guess you could say it's spillover," Dever said "As far as the execution-style stuff going in Mexico and the running gunbattles in the street that they have on a regular basis, we haven't seen any of that yet."

Clarence Dupnik, Pima County Sheriff

Dupnik calls the perception of a spillover of violent crime media-produced.

That's not to say there's not fallout from the activity in Mexico, he said.

"All the drug trafficking violence that we have in this country is somehow mostly related to Mexico. So, did it spill over here? How did that all evolve? That's a difficlut question to dissect with any specificity. But spillover recently? No."

Ritchie Martinez, of the Arizona Department of Public Safety and the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area task force

Martinez says one of the dangers of the surge of violence in Mexico is the degree to which law enforcement officers are targeted there, or even seem to be involved as attackers.

"Most of those assassinations or rip-offs in Mexico, those people are dressed up like military or law enforcement," he said.

The targeting and apparent involvement of law enforcement may make it more likely that criminals with connections in Mexico target police in the United States, he said.

"We're looking for any indications of threats to police officers," said Martinez, who is a criminal intelligence analyst supervisor for DPS. "It's a much more threatening environment in law enforcement."

Donna De La Torre, retired director of field operations in Arizona for Customs and Border Protection

De La Torre, who oversaw Arizona's eight ports of entry for 12 years until retiring in 2007, said there has always been an element of danger at the ports, but it has only rarely come to fruition.

"We always prepared for it. It didn't seem to be the more organized, systematic, brazen determination that we see right now on the border. It would emerge here, it would emerge there. Everyone always had to be on their guard."

Ray Borane, former mayor of Douglas and adviser to Gov. Janet Napolitano on border affairs

Borane, who grew up in Cochise County, follows Mexico closely. He's observed the federal government's increased efforts to stifle drug cartels but noticed that local efforts against the cartels are hit and miss.

"I really don't know how succesful they're going to be in Mexico… That thing has grown into such a monster that it's going to take plenty to dismantle it over there.

"You never know who you're dealing with" in Mexico, Borane said. "That's what makes it so difficult. You never know if you're dealing with somebody who's sincere in dealing with the problem."

He noted that flare-ups of conflict tend to occur where officials are making a sincere effort to stifle criminals. That makes life dangerous for Mexican municipal officials.

Borane said many of the mayors and police chiefs of Agua Prieta, Sonora, have lived in Douglas while in office.

"They'll tell you it's for the education of their children, but it's really for their safety."

making a big brew ha ha

2009-04-20T20:45:00.001-07:00

Arizona's governor and two U.S. senators urged the federal government on Monday to send hundreds of additional troops to secure the porous Mexican border, along which ruthless drug cartels are waging bloody turf wars.

The violence has gained high-level attention in both the United States and Mexico in recent months, amid concerns that it is bleeding into U.S. border states.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer asked for 250 more National Guard troops to secure the desert state's border.

"We need additional National Guard ... if we don't secure our border ... we are at ... risk," the Republican governor told a Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs meeting in Phoenix.

President Barack Obama visited Mexico last week and pledged to help President Felipe Calderon in his fight against the cartels, who killed 6,300 people in Mexico last year.

Obama's administration recently announced additional funding and federal agents to curb border crime, and has said it is considering plans to send troops, probably National Guard reserves, in case of a broad outbreak of violence.

Arizona Senator John McCain, a Republican defeated by the Democrat Obama in the November 2008 presidential election, also called on Washington to allocate additional resources including troops to the border.

"Additional federal action is urgently needed, and failure to do more puts at risk the security and safety of our citizens each and every day," McCain told the hearing.

Senator Jon Kyl, another Arizona Republican, said resources including Border Patrol check points on highways and greater resources for the justice system in the state were also needed. "It is a whole system that needs to be properly resourced," he told Reuters before the hearing.

Brewer wrote to Defense Secretary Robert Gates to request additional troops earlier this year, but the request was denied. The state has 150 troops deployed in support roles, she said.

In 2006, former President George W. Bush sent National Guard troops to the border states as part of a temporary operation to boost security. The operation ended last year.

running things?

2009-04-19T06:55:00.000-07:00

Eight Mexican law enforcement officers were killed Saturday in a brazen attack on a police convoy transporting an important drug suspect to a prison in western Mexico.

Gunmen killed four federal police officers, two federal investigative agents and two prison employees in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the transfer, the Public Safety Department said.

"They fulfilled their duty with professionalism, commitment and dedication," the department said of the fallen officers.

The assailants have not been identified, but the department said the attack appeared to have been an attempt to free a top lieutenant of the Beltran-Leyva cartel named Jeronimo Gamez, who was arrested on the outskirts of Mexico City in January.

Gamez was taken from Mexico City to an airport in the Pacific coast state of Nayarit, and from there was being transported overland to a prison in the state capital, Tepic.

Police said gunmen in three vehicles opened fire shortly after the police convoy left the Nayarit airport.

Gamez and eight other suspects were successfully delivered to the prison.

Prisoners in Mexico are often transported in convoys of regular SUVs, pickups or buses accompanied by heavily armed officers. Federal police do have armored trucks for prisoner transports, but it was unclear whether such vehicles were used in the Saturday convoy.

Prosecutors say Gamez is a cousin of Arturo Beltran Leyva, one of Mexico's most powerful drug lords.

They have accused Gamez of acting as Beltran Leyva's representative in negotiating drug deals with Colombian traffickers.

More than 10,650 people have been killed in drug violence in Mexico since President Felipe Calderon sent out 45,000 troops in 2006 to directly confront the traffickers.

the real enemy is the mexican government

2009-04-11T06:50:00.000-07:00

Thousands of soldiers have smothered drug violence in Mexico's bloodiest US border city but police corruption and complaints of rights abuses could hurt their early successes.

Drug killings have plunged by 80% in Ciudad Juarez, a desert city on the border with Texas, since President Felipe Calderon sent in 10,000 soldiers and federal police at the start of March, the state attorney general's office says.

After taking control of city police forces in one of Mexico's biggest operations in years, masked and camouflage-clad soldiers now stand guard outside banks and supermarkets and patrol the streets in convoys.

But with such a large army presence, complaints of human rights abuses are growing and there are signs that ruthless drug hitmen driven out of the city are taking their turf wars further south in Mexico, stretching President Felipe Calderon's nationwide army-led crackdown.

The Zetas, the armed wing of the Gulf drug cartel, are trying to muscle in on smuggling routes in the western state of Jalisco and killed a state prosecutor this month, police say.

In Ciudad Juarez, people who lived in fear of encountering decapitated bodies dumped on streets or hung from bridges are emerging from their houses and the local economy is showing signs of life.

"Things are improving. It was so chaotic before," said waitress Diana Castaneda, referring to the 1,600 drug killings in the city last year. "People are coming again from El Paso."

In another boost to Calderon's more than two-year-old drug war, police caught a leader of the Juarez cartel, Vicente Carrillo Leyva, in Mexico City on April 1.

Calderon, a conservative who took power in late 2006, is staking his presidency on stemming the drug violence that killed 6,300 people last year and is worrying Washington.

US President Barack Obama will visit Mexico this month, and is sending high-tech gear and hundreds more agents to the border to fight the smuggling of drugs, weapons and cash.

Despite the sharp fall in murders, Ciudad Juarez residents worry the violence will return if troop levels drop.

Major troop deployments in other drug hotspots such as Tijuana, across from California, have given brief respites from the mayhem, but murders have escalated as soldiers moved elsewhere to fight the cartels on other fronts.

Women mistreated

Reviving old concerns about rights abuses in the drug war, Mexico's human rights commission accuses soldiers and federal police of committing abuses by clumsily targeting women and children in house raids and at military checkpoints.

"I saw how federal police opened a woman's shirt and checked her bra (for drugs) in the middle of the street, in front of many people and surrounded by armed soldiers," Gustavo de la Rosa, a Ciudad Juarez-based human rights commissioner for the surrounding state of Chihuahua, said.

At other checkpoints, soldiers have held up traffic to search groups of school children and their mothers, leaving many crying, de la Rosa said.

Federal police officers and an army spokesman consulted by Reuters denied any wrongdoing. "There are some colleagues doing bad things, but they are few. Most of us are dedicated to protecting our citizens," said one federal policeman.

But local used car dealers say federal police started running protection rackets as soon as they arrived last month.

"They asked for the vehicle papers and told us they were going to confiscate them if we didn't get a thousand dollars together within an hour," said a salesman who declined to give his name because of threats from police about the incident.

Endemic police corruption is a big problem for Calderon's drug war as cops openly aid traffickers and work as hitmen.

Mexico's army is seen as mostly uncorrupted by cartels and federal police are better paid and better equipped than the country's often overweight and incompetent patrol officers.

Calderon's government has promised to cleanse police forces and eventually take the army off the streets, but federal police have faced constant corruption allegations.

In early 2007, federal cops were caught on police cameras extorting money from tourists at road checkpoints in Tijuana.

"What's missing is a social policy," said Hugo Almada, a sociologist in Ciudad Juarez, pointing to poor education and a lack of employment prospects. "Ten thousand soldiers and police can have a temporary impact on crime, but not on the social reality. We may win a savage war and gain an empty victory."

Kidnappings, armed robberies and disappearances of young women are still going on right under soldiers' noses, carried out by small gangs working out of cars, said Daniela Gonzalez, a spokeswoman for the Chihuahua attorney general's office.

to serve and to steal

2009-04-10T23:39:00.000-07:00

A former South Tucson Police Lieutenant who pleaded guilty in January to embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from the department, was sentenced to 33 months in federal prison today.

Richard Garcia admitted to stealing $560,000 from the South Tucson Police Department between 2004 and 2007. He said it was to feed a gambling habit.

In May, FBI agents served search warrants at South Tucson City Hall, STPD, and Garcia's West side home.

Garcia was the second highest ranking officer in South Tucson, when the department fired him last June.

He has 30 days to either report to the prison directly or come to federal court and be remanded into custody of the federal marshals.

going home

2009-04-10T23:11:00.001-07:00

U.S. immigration police deported a former drug cartel kingpin to Mexico, where he was wanted on charges related to organized crime and drug trafficking, authorities said on Friday.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency said federal agents in El Paso, Texas, handed Jose Manuel Garza Rendon, 56, to Mexican authorities at a bridge over the border with Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, early on Friday.

Garza Rendon, a high-ranking member of Mexico's Gulf cartel, was deported after serving a nine-year sentence in federal jail in west Texas for conspiracy with intent to distribute marijuana, the agency said in a news release.

Mexico's attorney general informed the agency that Garza Rendon had been wanted in Mexico since 2002 for organized crime, attempted murder and possessing firearms used exclusively by the Mexican army.

Curbing drug cartel violence is a top concern for authorities in both the United States and Mexico, where warring traffickers killed 6,300 people last year.

The U.S. government announced plans last month to help Mexican authorities combat the gangs south of the border, as well as stepping up efforts to choke off the southbound flow of U.S. guns and smuggling profits to the cartels.

Garza Rendon was one of 11 men named in the Mexican arrest warrant. Among the others is Osiel Cardenas Guillen, the boss of the Gulf Cartel who was extradited to the United States last year to face drug charges, U.S. immigration said.

Goddard issues dire warning at border meeting

2009-04-10T22:17:00.000-07:00

State Attorney General Terry Goddard warned of "gunfights in the streets of Tucson" if the U.S. doesn't get a handle on well-funded, highly organized Mexican drug cartels that have ramped up violence along the border.

"The cartels are totally integrated, with arms-, money-, drug- and human-smuggling all a part of their business operations," Goddard said Tuesday after a three-hour, closed-door meeting with 60 law enforcement officials. "On the U.S. side, there has been a fractured response. This (meeting) will give us a more effective response."

Tuesday's meeting in Tucson involved high-level representatives from local, state and federal agencies, including the State Department, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Homeland Security.

Officials were short on specifics, but agreed it was helpful to meet face-to-face with others seeking to stop drug- and human-smuggling going north across the U.S.-Mexico border and the flow of cash and weapons going south.

The meeting was convened by U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, who called it "a milestone."

Sahuarita police chief John Harris said he believed that now that he has met the other actors in the border-control effort, it will be bring more effective cooperation in the future.

As an example of the utility of the meeting, Pinal County officials learned they could turn over an expensive drug-disposal problem to the federal government, Harris said. As local police confiscate increasing amounts of drugs, especially bulky marijuana, they have discovered it is expensive to get rid of it. They learned Tuesday that the Drug Enforcement Agency will take it away.

More typically, it is local agencies that have to bear the costs of border enforcement, which is officially a federal responsibility. Pima County Attorney Barbara LaWall said the U.S. Attorney's office has dumped a large number of drug cases onto county officials, costing taxpayers and overloading local officials.

One small remedy on the way is additional resources coming to federal prosecutors that will allow them to stop dumping cases involving smaller amounts of drugs onto local court systems.

"Hopefully that will ease up on the cases that we had to prosecute that should be in the jurisdiction of the United States' Attorney's office," Cochise County Attorney Edward G. Rheinheimer said.

Giffords said the nation is beginning to focus on border security and "this is an opportunity to capture the nation's attention as bills move through Congress" that would bring more resources to the border.

Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik noted for the first time in memory, a president of Mexico, Felipe Calderon, appears to be serious about battling drugs.

Giffords said pending legislation might bring more technology to the border but did not talk about comprehensive immigration reform.

Harris and others said the spillover of violence from the border is already occurring, with a border-related shooting within a mile of Sahuarita in the past two years. Chases have caused damage and injury and cost law enforcement agencies resources throughout the region.

Another new program that may help reduce border violence is an overall economic aid program for Mexico that might help stabilize the country's reeling economy and which includes a program to help border officials inspect vehicles entering their country and detect guns and money.

David Johnson, Assistant Secretary for the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, said that pilot program is only operating in the Rio Grande area across from Texas, but may develop into a way to slow the flow of guns and cash headed south in other areas.

2009-04-05T10:22:00.000-07:00

President Felipe Calderón of Mexico, during an official visit to London, said his country and the United States would work as partners in the fight against violent drug cartels but would not conduct joint military operations against them. Sharing of intelligence will continue, he told reporters, but American forces will not be conducting raids with their Mexican counterparts on Mexican soil. Mexicans have expressed alarm that the presence of more American soldiers at the border would adversely affect their country’s sovereignty.