Drug war ravages Mexico border city, upsets U.S.
The first victim of the day was bound with duct tape, tortured and shot once in the back of the head. His body was then stuffed in the trunk of a Buick Century, doused with gasoline and set ablaze.
A second was found burned beyond recognition, propped up on a makeshift pyre of blazing car tires on the outskirts of this sweltering city on Mexico’s border with the United States.
The two killings on Friday brought the murder toll to 119 this year in Nuevo Laredo, and the mayhem has put a strain between Mexico and Washington.
Most of the dead are victims of an all-out war between powerful drug gangs from western Sinaloa state and the local Gulf cartel for control of a route bringing cocaine from Colombia and heroin and marijuana from Mexico into Texas.
Scared local residents have watched the pace of killings accelerate since January. One placed a flickering candle at the site of the first murder on Friday just a few blocks south of the Rio Grande, then retreated indoors.
More: alertnet.org
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
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 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-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
Four police dead in shootout in Mexico border city
Suspected drug hit men on Tuesday killed four policemen in a shootout in this crime-ridden Mexican city on the U.S. border, police and witnesses said.
One of the dead was the second-in-charge of a state police force sent to Nuevo Laredo last year by President Vicente Fox's government to help end a drug feud, the sources said.
The killings took place in broad daylight on a busy highway leading to the airport in Nuevo Laredo, across the Rio Grande from Laredo, Texas.
The policemen and their attackers fought for 15 minutes in a shootout that
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
N. Mexico upsets Florida; Utah rallies for big win
Florida traveled all the way from the swamp to the desert only to get blown out by New Mexico's best night of basketball this season.
Jana Francis scored a career-high 25 points on 10-of-14 shooting and the 11th-seeded Lobos got off to a strong start in an 83-59 romp over the fifth-seeded Gators on Saturday night in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. (Related: Game report)
Katie Montgomery matched her career best with 21 points, 14 in the first half when she made four of five three-pointers to help the Lobos to
Collaborator of Mexico Drug Lord Sentenced
An alleged cohort of imprisoned drug lord Osiel Cardenas was sentenced Thursday to 44 years in prison on drug-related charges, authorities said.
Adan Javier Medrano was convicted of smuggling drug money from the United States into Mexico and distributing cocaine north of the border, the federal Attorney Generals Office said in a news release.
Medrano served as a gunman for Cardenas Gulf Cartel, which moved tons of cocaine and marijuana into the U.S., and was in charge of drug-related activites in Chiapas state and Guatemala, the release said.
More:
Mexico extradites drug lord suspect
Alleged drug kingpin Francisco Rafael Arellano Félix was extradited to the United States on Saturday to face drug charges, becoming the first major Mexican drug lord suspect to be sent north for trial.
Mexicos extradition of the man who is suspected of having once run the Arellano Félix drug clan was a victory for U.S. officials, who have been pushing Mexico to send them more drug lords.
Arellano Félix was loaded into a helicopter in Matamoros, then flown across the border and handed over to Texas officials in Brownsville after serving a 10-year sentence in Mexico. He will
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
