Mexico captures leader of bloody drug gang
Mexico has captured the leader of a drug cartel that has waged a bloody turf war near the U.S. border, the government said on Monday.
Attorney General Daniel Cabeza de Vaca said the arrest of Ricardo Garcia Urquiza, a surgeon known as “The Doctor,” was a mortal blow to the Juarez cartel, a loose affiliation of drug gangs from the western state of Sinaloa prone to bloody feuding.
“This drug trafficker is probably one of the most important to be arrested in history,” Cabeza de Vaca said. “Not only are we detaining an important drug trafficker, but the criminal organization is being dismantled.”
Garcia was arrested earlier this month in Mexico City while making a drug deal, the attorney general’s office said. Ten other members of the group have been arrested recently.
Although he was not well known and is not listed among international fugitives, Cabeza de Vaca said Garcia was Mexico’s main “businessman” in a vast network of drug production and smuggling stretching from Colombia, through Central America and Mexico to the United States.
More: today.reuters.com
Drug gangs corrupt Mexico's elite "FBI"
Despite a five-year battle that has put several top Mexican drug capos behind bars, the cartels' power and reach is so great that they can still corrupt elite police at will to stay ahead of the law.
Faced with rampant police graft when he took office in 2000, President Vicente Fox founded a crack unit modeled on the FBI to hunt down ruthless traffickers grown rich hauling cocaine, marijuana and amphetamines over the U.S. border.
This week the attorney general's office released a report showing that far from being incorruptible, 1,493 officers of the new Federal
Mexico drug prosecutor shot dead in ambush
Unidentified gunmen shot and killed a federal drug prosecutor in this industrial city, the latest in a surge of shootings linked to organized crime in northern Mexico, police said on Tuesday.
Hitmen strafed Miguel Angel Esquivel's car as he drove through the outskirts of Monterrey, in northeast Mexico, at around midnight on Monday, killing him instantly, the state prosecutor's office said.
More than 1,000 people, most in northern and western Mexico, have been murdered this year in a brutal battle between rival cartels for control of the cross-border trade with the United States in cocaine,
Mexico arrests 8 agents in filmed drug execution
Mexico said on Thursday it had arrested 10 people, including eight federal agents, in the kidnapping of four suspected drug gang hitmen and the filmed execution of at least one of them.
The case has thrown the spotlight on the often cosy relations between Mexican authorities and organised crime. Drug gangs routinely bribe police, officials and judges to protect them or carry out their dirty work.
Four men, beaten and bruised, were shown on a homemade DVD confessing to being members of the infamous Gulf Cartel of drug traffickers. One of them was then
California drug busts soar despite Mexico crackdown
Mexican drug cartels are sending ever greater quantities of narcotics through border crossings in southern California, despite a Mexican government crackdown and a bloody feud between rival drug gangs.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection sources said late on Monday that seizures of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and amphetamines at five border crossings in the state jumped nearly 50 percent to 140,384 pounds (63,677 kg) in the nine months to June over the same period a year earlier.
The surge comes despite a clampdown on drug gangs by the Mexican government, which has sent hundreds of troops
Mexico holds ex-army Guatemalans
A group of armed Guatemalan men held in Mexico on suspicion of aiding drug gangs had been trained by an elite soldiers' unit, officials say.
At least four in the group of seven men detained had been in the Guatemalan army, Mexico's attorney general said.
Mexican authorities are investigating whether the heavily-armed group had entered the country to fight alongside a local gang of drug smugglers.
Mexico is battling a surge in violence blamed on competing drug gangs.
The seven men were arrested by Mexican authorities near the Guatemalan border on 10 September.
They were carrying six
Past examples of Mexico's Catholic Churc
A Mexican bishop's acknowledgment that drug traffickers often make church donations is only the most recent example of Catholic Church links to organized crime. Among others:
_ 1997: A priest at Mexico City's Basilica of Guadalupe, a shrine to Mexico's patron saint, the Virgin of Guadalupe, is criticized for speaking admiringly of charitable donations made by two known drug traffickers. His comments spark suspicions over possible drug-tainted donations to the church, which church leaders deny.
_ 2002: A former Mexican attorney general publishes book accusing churchmen of acting as intermediaries between the government and a major narcotics
Mexico-US border violence claims 4 more lives
Drug-related violence on the Mexico-US border claimed four more lives Monday to bring this year's toll to 125, police reported.
The victims, including a US citizen, were killed in clashes between drug-trafficking groups.
Police found the scorched bodies in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas. One of the slain apparently suffered a coup de grace before being sprayed with fuel and burned. It was typical of killings by drug pushers in gang fighting, according to Eduardo Anaya, an official of the regional attorney general's office
Mexico Update No Survivors In Mexican Police Copter Crash
"They All Died In The Line Of Duty"
The Mexican government helicopter previously reported missing by Aero-News has been found. It crashed west of Mexico City, striking a piney mountainside at 11,200 feet in what appears to have been controlled flight. There was a postcrash fire.
All nine aboard the aircraft died, including Public Safety Secretary Ramon Martin Huerta, Federal Preventive Police Commissioner Tomas Valencia, other officials, and the two-man flight crew.
The helicopter was not an Mi-17 as Aero-News speculated, it was a Bell 412.
The aircraft was taking the VIPs to La Palma maximum-security
Mexico's 'methamphetamine kings' sent to jail
A Mexican court handed down prison sentences on Thursday to two brothers convicted of leading a gang that controlled much the country's black market amphetamine trade.
Prosecutors say a cartel run by the Amezcua brothers, known as the "Methamphetamine Kings" in criminal circles, used laboratories in the Pacific states of Colima and Jalisco to produce narcotics for export to the United States.
Jose de Jesus Amezcua was sentenced to 28 years in jail, while his brother Adan was handed nine and a half years, the attorney general's office said.
An increasing trade in methamphetamine, known as "meth"
Deaths mounting on Mexico’s border security watch
A multimillion-dollar border security program launched in June has realized measurable results, but critics say it has failed to prevent more than 100 deaths since its inception as rival drug cartels fight for dominance along the country’s northern border.
Mexican President Vicente Fox initiated the Mexico Seguro or Safe Mexico program June 11 to address public safety concerns along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Since January, more than 800 have been killed in drug-related violence on the Mexican side of the border with almost daily killings and no arrests reported in Nuevo Laredo.
Although Matamoros and Reynosa have seen
