Mexico officers wary of crossing drug cartels
On the front lines of the drug cartel wars, feigned ignorance can be bliss.
In an environment in which speaking too boldly against drug traffickers can prove deadly — an outspoken police chief was killed here in June only hours after taking office — local authorities prefer to lower their voices.
So it’s not surprising that officers for Tamaulipas state and this border city had mixed feelings about legislation submitted to Mexico’s Congress last week designed to give them more authority in the fight against “narcos.”
One of the proposals would allow them to investigate drug offenses and arrest drug dealers, which to date has been the sole jurisdiction of federal authorities.
Local police commanders say they want to prove their forces are capable of the expanded responsibilities — but signaled they want to avoid potentially deadly confrontations with drug cartels.
More: mysanantonio.com
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
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
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 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's problems now our own
When two Arizona Border Patrol agents were shot by suspected drug smugglers in June, the attack was widely believed to have been perpetrated by deserters from the Mexican military.
U.S. officials say highly trained former military servicemen calling themselves the Zetas have become deadly players in cross-border drug-trafficking, leaving a trail of bodies in their wake.
The Zetas are suspected in connection with numerous kidnappings and murders in both countries – including at least three deaths in Dallas and, in Mexico, the killing of former Nuevo Laredo police chief Alejandro Dominguez, who was shot to death just
Chacon urges Mexico to focus on its own anti-drug efforts
Mexican authorities should be focusing more on anti-drug efforts in their own territory than worrying about the amount of illegal drugs smuggled into Mexico from Venezuela, a top government official said. “If they were to finish off the large drug cartels, no drugs would be flowing into Mexico,†Interior and Justice Minister Jesse Chacón said Tuesday.
Last week, Mexican prosecutors announced heroin shipments entering Mexico from Venezuela had doubled in the last year, and suggested that corrupt Venezuelan airport workers may be letting the drugs through.
The amount of heroin seized by law
Mexico to Let Police Pursue Drug Smugglers
Mexico changed its constitution on Monday to allow state and local police to pursue drug traffickers, removing a major stumbling block in anti-drug efforts that had long been the exclusive realm of federal officers.
The measure is part of a package of bills that includes the possibility of using millions of dollars in seized drug money to fund rewards for the capture of traffickers; the blocking of cell phone calls from inside prisons and the registration of bulletproof cars frequently used by drug traffickers.
``We are multiplying our power in an extraordinary way,'' Eduardo
Mexico: Plainclothes police gunned down
Four plainclothes police officers were shot and killed in the notoriously violent border town Nuevo Laredo by unknown gunmen, El Universal reported Friday.
The officers -- members of the intelligence branch of the Mexican Federal Preventative Police -- had their vehicle sprayed with gunfire, said witnesses.
Nuevo Laredo, along the U.S. border, is a known crossroads for drug smuggling from Mexico into the United States and has been the scene of several police killings in recent months.
More: news.monstersandcritics.com
U.S. teen sentenced in Mexico to two years in prison for police officer killings
A judge sentenced a U.S. teenager Wednesday to two years in prison for being an accomplice in the June killings of two traffic officers in this border city.
Bryan Torres, a 17-year-old boy from El Paso, Texas, was found guilty of stealing some of the officers' belongings and of helping his 19-year-old friend Daygoro Rivera move the bodies.
Torres has maintained he was sleeping when the officers were shot.
Rivera confessed to killing the officers because he didn't have money to pay a bribe to the officers so
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
