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 Investigation Agency – or around one-in-five of the force – are under investigation for committing crimes.
Eight agents were arrested on kidnapping charges in August after investigators found a copy of a homemade DVD showing four battered and bloody men confessing to being members of the Gulf cartel of drug traffickers. One of the traffickers was then executed with a bullet to the head.
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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
Mexico's most wanted man may be in Guatemala-police
Mexico's most wanted man, drug lord Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, may have entered neighboring Guatemala where police are searching for him, authorities said on Friday.
"We have not yet determined if he is here, but we have evidence that leads us to believe he is inside our territory," Guatemala's anti-drug police chief Adan Castillo told a news conference.
Guzman has been sought in Mexico since he escaped from a high-security jail in 2001. He has engaged in a fierce war with rival drug barons that has killed more than 1,000 people this year.
The United States is
The government has assigned bodyguards to at least seven federal judges and magistrates after death threats were made against them in recent weeks, an official who oversees the federal judiciary said Wednesday.
Some analysts said the announcement, which comes after high-profile killings of police officers and prison workers, shows that Mexican drug gangs are launching an all-out assault on the government and civil servants, as they did in Colombia.
Elvia Diaz de Leon, head of the Federal Judicial Council, said the judges under threat are overseeing cases involving drug gangs.
"Today we have seven or eight cases of threats against circuit judges and
Mexico now doubts detaineees were members of elite force
Mexican officials are continuing to investigate seven Guatemalans detained while carrying prohibited firearms.
But Mexican authorities today said they now do -NOT- believe the men are former members of an elite Guatemalan counterinsurgency unit.The men, who face charges of weapons trafficking, were caught near the Guatemalan border on September tenth.Officials say the men had six large-caliber rifles and about 16-hundred rounds of ammunition.Authorities earlier said the men might be former "Kaibiles," an elite Guatemalan paratrooper unit, and that they had arrived to work with Mexican drug traffickers. Copyright 2005 Associated Press. All
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
Five men executed on Mexico drug war Pacific coast
Gunmen bound and blindfolded five men in a quiet Mexican coastal village before shooting them dead early on Sunday, police said, in the midst of an escalating struggle for territory between drug gangs.
The victims were found naked and surrounded by spent bullet casings from high powered automatic weapons in the center of tiny Coyuquilla Norte, a local police chief said.
At about 5 a.m. residents said they heard a shoot-out, he said. The bodies were found surrounded by about 30 bullet casings.
The police chief, who asked not to be named,
Mexico police score rare win in soccer coach rescue
Berated for endemic corruption and their failure to defeat drug cartels, Mexico's police basked in a rare victory against organized crime on Thursday after the bloodless rescue of a kidnapped soccer coach.
Federal agents sprung Ruben Omar Romano, the Argentine coach of leading team Cruz Azul, from captivity in a house in the crime-ridden neighborhood of Iztapalapa on Wednesday night, without a shot being fired. Seven people were arrested.
Romano, who was being held for a $5 million ransom that was never paid, spent two months blindfolded in the house after being seized
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
Purged Police Return to Mexico Streets
Police officers returned to the streets of this violent city on the U.S.-Mexico border, almost six weeks after the entire force was pulled off the beat for drug testing and background checks in an effort to weed out corruption.
About a third of Nuevo Laredo's 700 police officers were fired in the anti-corruption drive, most for failing to take drug tests, said Daniel Pena, the mayor of this city across the border from Laredo, Texas, that has become battleground for gangs vying to control cocaine and marijuana smuggling routes.
Pena gave a symbolic order for
MEXICO CITY - Five years after a historic election triumph, Mexican President Vicente Fox remains popular despite a slow economy and his failure to beat violent drug gangs on the U.S. border.
A poll by the Reforma newspaper released on Thursday gave Fox a 61 percent approval rating, his highest in more than two years.
Fox has fallen short of promises to create millions more jobs and spur economic growth since he ended 71 years of one-party rule in 2000.
And while Fox claims to be winning the war on narcotics traffickers, drug-related killings have blighted northern Mexican cities.
But the former Coca-Cola executive
