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TIJUANA, Mexico (Reuters) - Fourteen Mexican drug gang members were killed and eight others were injured in a gun battle near the U.S. border on Saturday, one of the bloodiest shootouts in Mexico's three-year-long narco-war. Rival factions of the local Arellano Felix drug cartel in Tijuana on the Mexico-California border fought each other with rifles and machine guns in the early hours of the morning, police said. The bodies lay in pools of blood, strewn along a road on the city's eastern limits, surrounded by hundreds of bullet casings. Many of the victims' faces were destroyed. "By the way this...

Mexican authorities have scored key victories in recent months in their ongoing campaign against the Tamaulipas-based Gulf Cartel. An increased military presence in cities along the nation's northern border has yielded numerous arrests of top organization officials and high-profile raids on drug stashes and safe houses. But there is evidence that despite their successes, the cartel and its paramilitary wing, the Zetas, are adapting. Leaders of both have moved out of once prominent hotspots and may be entering new forms of criminal and legitimate business, say law enforcement officials and analysts. "When the smoke clears and the military leaves, we...

Afghanistan to Ask NATO for Bigger Army Afghan officials will go to the NATO summit in Romania Thursday with a request: pay to increase our national Army by 40 percent. A bigger Army, Afghan officials argue, will allow the US and other coalition members to scale back in the coming years. This appeal comes amid pleas from the US and Canada for other NATO members to commit more to the Afghanistan mission, which many analysts say has floundered over the past year for lack of resources and a coherent strategy. France is expected to contribute another 1,000 forces and...

EL PASO, Texas - Mexican Consulate officials in El Paso, Texas, said Mexican drug cartels have been posting help-wanted ads in Juarez, Mexico, newspapers. The officials said publications including P.M., El Diario de Juarez and El Norte have been printing vague help-wanted ads that are designed to trick young people into smuggling drugs over the border into the United States, the Las Cruces (N.M.) Sun-News reported Friday. Mexican Consulate spokeswoman Socorro Cordova said the issue came to the attention of officials nine months ago when the family of a driver stopped at the U.S. border showed the ad to Mexican...

Murders and kidnappings on both sides of the border have significantly increased in recent years. The violence along the U.S.-Mexican border has increased so dramatically that the Juárez Mayor José Reyes Ferriz asked Mexican President Felipe Calderón to send more help as reported in the El Paso Journal. Only thirty federal officers had been sent at that time to Juárez despite repeated requests for more help. It's necessary and urgent to have agents from the federal preventive police to patrol the streets the way that we need to confront this situation," Reyes Ferriz said in a news conference. The Mexican...

Nearly 1,000 Mexican troops arrived at the international airport in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, yesterday to quell drug war violence that has surged recently in the city across the border from El Paso, Texas

CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico – The government of Mexican President Felipe Calderón on Thursday announced a military surge of more than 2,000 soldiers in this besieged border community – caught in the crossfire between two warring drug cartels. "Operation Chihuahua," named after Mexico's biggest state, nestled against New Mexico and Texas, is aimed at restoring law and order in a region that many say has grown lawless. Since Jan. 1, nearly 200 people have been killed in this city of 1.2 million. "In this fight, Chihuahua is not alone," said Mexico's interior secretary Juan Camilo Muriño, who was accompanied by the...

NEW YORK -- The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has released a new report. It warned that the axis between South American drug cartels and the Albanian mafia have reached "alarming proportions", while reports by several intelligence agencies show that Kosovo is a distribution center on the crossroads of global routes and pathways of drug trafficking. This presents reason for concern, primarily because of the new pathways of drug trafficking, and "inclusion of cocaine in the range of products offered by the groups that are active along the Balkan drug route", the UNODC annual report for 2007...

MEXICO CITY - Suspected drug cartel gunmen killed five people in an attack on a police station in central Mexico and during their subsequent escape, authorities said on Saturday. At least six masked, heavily armed men raided the police station in the town of Jerecuaro, in the state of Guanajuato, on Friday, shooting and killing two police officers and a secretary. Making their escape in sport utility vehicles, they gunned down another two police officers on a nearby highway, state authorities said. Police later found one of the gunmen dead of a gunshot wound in one of three abandoned bullet-riddled...

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexican soldiers battling a violent drug gang and corrupt local police confiscated a sport utility vehicle decked out with extras worthy of a James Bond movie. Cartel members rammed their SUV into a military truck patrolling in the state of Tamaulipas and threw a hand grenade before making their escape with the help of local police, the army said in a statement late Tuesday. Following a shootout with the gang, soldiers said they arrested four municipal police and confiscated an armored Jeep Grand Cherokee equipped with a smoke machine and spike sprayer meant to deter pursuers....

Soldiers seized assault rifles, grenades, marijuana and bulletproof vests bearing police insignia after a brief shootout in the Mexican border city of Tijuana. No one was wounded in the overnight exchange of fire with three suspects hunkered down in a house in La Mesa district, army Gen. Sergio Aponte Polito told reporters Friday. Troops seized 91 assault rifles — some with butts of gold and ivory — along with 18 grenades, the bulletproof vests and more than 880 pounds of marijuana, Aponte Polito said. The three suspects, aged 25 to 33, were arrested. The bust followed weeks of bloody confrontations...

Drug cartel hit men have killed a popular Mexican singer, along with his manager and assistant, near the U.S. border, authorities said Wednesday. Jesus Rey David Alfaro, known as the Little Rooster, is one of at least six singers of narcocorrido ballads about drug trafficking who have been slain since Mexico's drug war flared in 2006. "We believe Alfaro had links to the Arellano Felix cartel," said an official with the Baja California attorney general's office, who declined to be named. Alfaro's body was found last week covered with a blanket on the edge of the city, with rope marks...

They've already shot up his house and gunned down three cops. He urges citizens to stand with him. TIJUANA -- The bullet holes pockmarking the walls of his home were just three days old when Alberto Capella Ibarra took over the police force of this violence-plagued city. Twenty gunmen dressed in black had swarmed his yard in the middle of the night, and he'd fought them off, firing an automatic rifle. Taking office Dec. 1 as the city's secretary for public security, Capella, a longtime activist, declared war on organized crime and challenged citizens to join him in the battle....

MORELIA, Mexico -- Sergio Gómez roared into town in a big SUV, entourage in tow, pressed suits, fancy cowboy boots. Everything about him said superstar. He had an international following and a star on the walk of fame in Las Vegas. More than 20,000 fans swarmed the parking lot of this colonial city's soccer stadium to dance and hear him sing romantic "Duranguense grupero" pop songs backed by a driving drumbeat. After the show, in the small hours of Dec. 2, Sergio Gomez was kidnapped. Police found his body the next day. He'd been strangled and beaten. His face --...

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Gunmen shot a crime reporter 45 times in a Mexican town plagued by drug violence on Saturday after a high-speed chase as he tried to escape on his motorcycle. Cut off by a vehicle in Uruapan, in the state of Michoacan, Gerardo Garcia fled on his motorcycle as far as his home, where his pursuers killed him, police and a source at the newspaper where he worked told Reuters. Mexico's drug cartels are battling for control of regions key to trafficking South American cocaine and other drugs into the United States. Mexican journalists are targets of...

Informer tells of corrupt Mexico October 25, 2007 By Jerry Seper - An informant who worked for U.S. authorities for more than four years says government, police and military authorities in Mexico have been corrupted by drug smugglers, often carrying out kidnappings and killings on the orders of drug cartel bosses. The accusations are outlined in sworn testimony before a U.S. immigration judge by Guillermo Eduardo Ramirez Peyro, a former Mexican police officer who was paid $224,000 for information U.S. anti-drug agents used to convict dozens of high-ranking Mexican drug traffickers. Ramirez told U.S. Immigration Judge Joseph R. Dierkes in...

Report: This will be deadly year for Mexican drug-related crimes AUSTIN — Escalating violence from Mexico's drug cartels and deteriorating security across the border will make 2007 the most deadly year yet for Mexican drug-related crime, according to a report by a former U.S. counterterrorism agent. Law enforcement on the U.S. side of the border has trouble battling drug smuggling and the violence that spills into the United States because of poor coordination, corruption and lack of resources, said the report by the Austin consulting firm Stratfor. Fred Burton, a former State Department counterterrorism agent and now vice president for...

WASHINGTON – Rep. Tom Tancredo's charge that Mexican drug cartels are buying up legitimate businesses in U.S. cities to launder money and using some of the proceeds to win local mayoral and city council seats for politicians who can shape the policies and personnel decisions of their police forces, has been backed up by a veteran gang investigator. Richard Valdemar, a retired sergeant with the L.A. County sheriff's department and a longtime member of a federal task force investigating gang activity, went beyond the charges made by Tancredo, the chairman of the House Immigration Reform Caucus who has led the...

(Medford, Or) - Much of the day Friday, a helicopter brought out load after load of marijuana plants from hillsides in the Applegate... more than 10,000 plants, according to Jackson County Sheriff Mike Winters. Winters says marijuana retails for about 5-thousand dollars a pound, street value. He says last year his department confiscated 27.6 tons of marijuana. The grows are not just valuable. They're also dangerous. Law enforcement officers say the grow is most likely part of a Mexican drug cartel. Winters says members of the cartel will fight in a gun battle to protect their crop... and to try...

MEXICO CITY, July 13 -- The San Antonio Express-News, a 230,000-circulation daily, this week withdrew its U.S.-Mexico border reporter after learning of what appears to be an unprecedented plan to assassinate American journalists who frequently write about drug cartels in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. Sources have told several Texas newspapers that hit men from Los Zetas, a group of former Mexican military officers who operate as the Gulf cartel's assassins, may have been hired to cross into the United States and execute American reporters. Word of the threat shattered the widely held perception here that foreign journalists are somehow shielded from...

President Bush's so-called “drug czar,” John P. Walters, is scheduled to be in Shasta County Thursday to participate in the launch of Operation Alesia, a multi-agency marijuana eradication operation on public lands that began this Monday. Seventeen local, state and federal agencies are participating in Operation Alesia, which has the stated goal of “education, eradication and reclamation of marijuana cultivation sites on public lands” in Shasta County, according to a press release from the Shasta-Trinity National Forest office in Redding. In a press release from his Washington, DC, office, Director of National Drug Control Policy Walters states, “America's public lands...

SAN DIEGO -- A June 8 kidnapping in Chula Vista is raising fears that brazen crimes related to drug cartels south of the border are making their way north. Federal authorities rescued the victim earlier this month and took five people into custody, but are being especially closed-mouth about the crime because of its possible connection to drug traffickers, The San Diego Union-Tribune reported. The house where the man was held for eight days is about a mile from where Mexican-drug-trafficking suspects shot at a Chula Vista police officer in 2005 and about 3 miles from where a body was...

Mexican authorities uncover border tunnel into San Diego County By: North County Times wire services - SAN DIEGO - Mexican authorities have discovered an unfinished cross-border tunnel that extends 31 feet into San Diego County, federal officials announced today. The passageway, discovered yesterday morning, originates in Baja California and is located south of the intersection of Via de la Amistad and Enrico Fermi Drive and about a half-mile east of the Otay Mesa Port of Entry, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials. So far, U.S. Border Patrol agents have not discovered access to the tunnel on the U.S....

MEXICO CITY — Mexican police rearrested a former governor Thursday as he was released from prison with the intent of extraditing him to the United States to face cocaine-trafficking charges. Mario Villanueva, 58, who governed the Yucatan Peninsula state that includes the resorts of Cancun and the Riviera Maya from 1993 until 1999, was arrested at dawn, moments after finishing a six-year sentence here for money laundering. He faces federal charges in New York of taking part in a conspiracy to smuggle as much as 200 tons of cocaine into the United States while governor of Quintana Roo state. Much...

The severed head of a town councilman was dumped outside the offices of a newspaper in Mexico's Gulf state of Tabasco in what the paper's publishers said was an attempt to intimidate reporters. The head, left outside Tabasco Hoy's offices in Villahermosa, was wrapped in newspaper inside a cooler and left by a man who stepped out of a sport utility vehicle early Saturday, the paper said on its Web site.

GUARATINGUETA: Pope Benedict warned Latin America's ruthless drugs cartels they would face God's harsh judgement for wrecking countless lives across the region. After hearing moving stories of hardship and recovery from former cocaine and heroin addicts on the fourth day of his visit to Brazil, the Pope said drug abuse was a scourge throughout Latin America. "I therefore urge the drug dealers to reflect on the grave harm they are inflicting on countless young people and on adults from every level of society," he said in a speech to recovering addicts at the Farm of Hope (Fazenda da Esperanca)...

Severed Head Found Outside Mexican Base A severed head reportedly accompanied by a note of defiance from organized crime gangs was found outside a military barracks in Veracruz state on Saturday. The head was found in a box outside the army base in Veracruz city, just hours after the government announced it was sending troops to respond to a shooting attack. The box also held a message saying gangs would continue operating despite the presence of troops, Mexico's Reforma newspaper reported. The victim's body was found shortly afterward on a street in another neighborhood, wrapped in a sheet. On Friday,...

A former U.S. Customs agent who once snagged 8,000 pounds of marijuana and 34 pounds of cocaine being smuggled in a rail tanker car, an issue on which WND as reported before, says it is only the greed of the drug cartels that has prevented another major terrorist bombing in the United States. Darlene Fitzgerald, the author of Bordergate, is preparing to testify before Congress on May 14 in support of H.R. 985, the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, which already has been approved by the U.S. House. It would put into the law various protections for whistleblowers such as drug...

MONTERREY, Mexico — With a warning to travelers and a complaint about criminals enjoying impunity, the United States has turned up the heat on Mexican law enforcers to deliver results against organized crime in the border state of Nuevo León. For the first time, the U.S. State Department singled out Monterrey, a city with close business and tourist ties to San Antonio, in its update of its travel advisory on Mexico. State and federal authorities here responded by throwing even more police officers in jail. At least 22 officers have been taken into custody after the Monday arrests of 112...

THE scene looks chillingly familiar. A group of four men in black hoods and brandishing automatic weapons stand over a pair of terrified hostages who are being forced to “confess” their crimes. It looks like the start of another Al-Qaeda beheading video, but there is one surprising difference. The men are speaking Spanish. This is Acapulco and the ultra-violent online world of the Mexican drug cartels, who have taken their blood-soaked rivalry to the internet.

LAREDO — If the teenage hitman had stayed locked up in his concrete cell after the first murder, maybe Moises Garcia would still sing goofy Spanish songs to his son. Maybe Noe Lopez, a 27-year-old father of four, wouldn't be buried under a sapling in the city cemetery. Maybe. If a judge hadn't reduced Gabriel Cardona's bail after the second murder charge, perhaps Mariano Resendez would be close to finishing his junior year of high school. If the justice of the peace hadn't decreased Cardona's bail on another murder charge and a charge of engaging in organized crime from a...

MEXICO CITY - Mexico's attorney general on Wednesday demanded U.S. authorities do more to stop guns and drug money from heading south and fueling the drug violence in Mexico that left more 2,000 dead last year. Eduardo Medina Mora told a business forum that the vast majority of arms used by the soldiers of drug cartels, including assault rifles and grenades, are smuggled from the United States. "It's truly absurd that a person can get together 50 to 100 high powered arms, grenade launchers, fragmentation grenades, and can transport this cargo to our country," Medina Mora said. "It's a task...

LAREDO, Texas (Reuters) - Frustrated by tighter security on the U.S.-Mexico border, illegal immigrants and drug traffickers are taking it out on U.S. agents, increasingly attacking them with guns, rocks and petrol bombs. Assaults against Border Patrol officers rose 10 percent to 843 incidents in the year to September 2006 from the same period a year before, officials say. It is also a near three-fold increase from two years previously. Mexican drug cartels, locked in a turf feud and under pressure from an army crackdown, are lashing out at law enforcement officers in Texas. "The attacks against us are becoming...

(CNSNews.com) - A paid Mexican informer for the U.S. government who worked in an undercover operation targeting a major narcotics cartel allegedly went off the rails and was involved in more than a dozen murders. Amid allegations of a bungled investigation and an accompanying cover-up, at least one member of Congress is calling for hearings into the matter (see related story). Guillermo Ramirez Peyro is now fighting an attempt by the U.S. government to deport him and said he fears for his life at the hands of the cartel should he be sent back to Mexico. Statements from key players...

ACAPULCO, Mexico - More than a dozen armed assailants staged simultaneous attacks against two police stations in the Pacific resort city of Acapulco on Tuesday, killing at least seven officers. The attacks took place before noon in two neighborhoods about nine miles north of the tourist zone, said Enrique Gil Mercado, special prosecutor for the attorney general's office in the state of Guerrero, which includes Acapulco. Four officers were killed at the station in the Emiliano Zapata neighborhood, while three were killed in the Ciudad del Renacimiento neighborhood, Gil said. About eight men armed with assault weapons participated in each...

MEXICO CITY - Authorities on Wednesday announced the capture of a purported drug cartel leader, the first major drug arrest under the administration of President Felipe Calderon, who has pledged a nationwide war against the drug trade. Pedro Diaz Parada was arrested in the country's southern state of Oaxaca on Tuesday and taken to Mexico City. He faces charges of organized crime and drug trafficking, the attorney general's office said in a news release. Prosecutors say Diaz Parada founded the cartel named after him in Mexico's southeastern region. Federal police and soldiers stopped the sport utility vehicle in which Diaz...

NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico - The gunfire was deafening. Street corners all over the city were darkened by smoke from grenades and light artillery. The dead lay in pools of blood flowing into the gutters that drain into the Rio Grande. Men with automatic assault rifles stood stoic after the carnage. Then, one by one, they picked up the bodies of their victims, threw them into the back of pickup trucks and headed out of downtown. Bystanders hid inside shops, behind trash bins - wherever they could find refuge from the explosive showdown between members of rival drug cartels. "(I watched...

LAREDO — In the face of the impunity under which Mexican drug cartels operate along the border, police here secured an arrest warrant for Miguel Treviño Morales, identified as a high-ranking regional Gulf Cartel leader, in connection with a 2006 double homicide. A police official confirmed Treviño was a wanted man after his name appeared in a probable cause affidavit for another defendant in the same case. Juan "Cordless" Ramos, 24, was arrested Tuesday in Laredo in connection with the April 2, 2006, shooting deaths of Jesus Maria Resendez, 36, and his nephew Mariano Resendez, 15, just inside the city...

Reforma news agency MÉXICO, D.F. — The United States’ Drug Enforcement Administration hopes to expand border operations by creating a new division in Tamaulipas state to fight drug trafficking. DEA officials have asked the Mexican government for authorization to open offices in three cities where smuggling is most prevalent — Nuevo Laredo, Matamoros and Nogales. Tamaulipas is the location where the Gulf Cartel and a group of former Mexican Army soldiers known as “Zetas” are locked in a deadly battle over lucrative drug-smuggling routes into the United States. If the request is approved, the DEA will expand to 11 offices...

Suspected rebels in Peru have killed seven men, including five policemen, in an ambush in the country's coca-growing interior. The police convoy was attacked during a crackdown on illegal coca-growing in the second major ambush in a year. The interior ministry has not blamed any group for the attack but remnants of the Shining Path guerrilla movement are known to operate in the region. More than 20 police have been killed in ambushes in the last year. The rebel group, which led one of Latin America's bloodiest insurgencies in the 1980s and 1990s, has claimed responsibility for similar attacks. The...

MEXICO CITY — Six police officers were shot to death in an apparent ambush in a rural part of western Mexico that has been plagued by drug violence, prosecutors said Tuesday. The bullet-riddled bodies of an investigative officer, a group commander and four officers were found after a caller reported gunshots late Monday near Aguililla, a mountain town about 200 kilometers (125 miles) southwest of the Michoacan state's capital of Morelia.

A murder spree began in Tijuana, Mexico shortly after American authorities detained suspected drug kingpin Francisco Javier Arellano Félix last August. In September, 44 people were killed, including 5 police officers. Police say the killings are the result of internal strife within the drug cartels, as those in the organizations kill anyone in their way and fight for the power that was vacated upon Arellano Félix's arrest. The killings dropped a bit in October but have since intensified with 11 homicides in the first week of November. The violence has prompted the city's Secretary of Public Security, Luis Javier Algorri...

To send a chilling message to their underworld rivals, Mexican drug cartels are adopting a method of intimidation made notorious by Middle Eastern terrorist groups. Already this year, at least 26 people have been decapitated in Mexico, with heads stuck on fences, dumped in trash piles and -- most recently -- tossed onto a nightclub dance floor. "Before, they tortured the hell out of people, but they didn't throw their heads out in public," said James Kuykendall, a retired U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent. Beheadings have had a high international profile in recent years, as the tool of radical Islamist...

MEXICO CITY - The red tide of narco killings continued in the resort city of Acapulco, Mexico, this week, with the severed heads of two men discovered Friday, officials said. A day earlier, another head was found on the stairs of City Hall. All bore messages directed at the Nuevo Laredo-based Zetas, the enforcement arm of the Gulf cartel that operates along the Mexico-Texas border. The Zetas are in a vicious turf war with the Sinaloa cartel, named for the central Mexican state where it is based. The message found with the first decapitated head, discovered in a black plastic...

MEXICO CITY - Mexicans voted Sunday in a tight presidential race to decide whether their country becomes the latest Latin American nation to move to the left, choosing between a shopkeeper's son promising to save the poor and a conservative calling his rival's free-spending populism dangerous. The campaign, which exposed Mexico's painful class divisions, was the first since Vicente Fox's stunning victory six years ago ended 71 years of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. Polls predicted a close race between conservative Felipe Calderon, 43, of Fox's National Action Party, and leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, 52, a...

MEXICO CITY, June 27 (Reuters) - Gunmen killed a senior police officer in the Mexican resort of Cancun on Monday night, blowing his head open in the latest grisly assassination to hit the country. Police officials in Cancun said local police chief of staff Wilfrido Flores, 56, and his bodyguard were shot dead in their car in a busy avenue in the Caribbean resort, one of Mexico's biggest tourist pulls, just before midnight. However they played down links to a spate of similar killings in cities like Acapulco and Tijuana in a brutal war among drugs cartels and security forces....

The general who'd been in charge of Mexico's efforts to quell drug violence on the border with the United States hasn't been seen by officials here in weeks, and the program is in disarray. Drug killings are on the rise, local news outlets have been cowed into silence, and evidence is mounting that members of two warring drug-trafficking cartels have infiltrated the program's elite anti-drug forces. U.S. officials are concerned that the violence is crossing the border: Assaults on U.S. Border Patrol agents are up 108 percent this year . . . Mexican officials, recognizing the Secure Mexico program had...

Hey, look what I found. Here is a website full of illegal aliens talking about how they can pass liberal laws, get amnesty, get licenses, and taxpayer tuition breaks! Can you believe that these illegal aliens are flagrantly organizing online to push their agenda? I'm going over there to set these people straight. Anyone want to join me? This is the web page: http://www.cosaonline.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2540 This is typical of what they are saying: "Democrats always have our backs. I used to identify with the Republican party, no more. Independent from now on, and I think we would of been better off...

HARLINGEN — Gov. Rick Perry met here Tuesday with the governor of a northern Mexican state that has reeled from drug violence for years — though the past two years have been particularly bloody. They pledged coordination, and Perry shed a little light on a new operation to combat border crime. "We talked about his focus on the drug trade and those cartels, and continuing the pressure on (drug traffickers) to understand that from Brownsville to El Paso, it is a really bad place to do your business," Perry said, meeting reporters at the Harlingen Chamber of Commerce with Tamaulipas...

HARLINGEN -- Gov. Rick Perry and Mexican Gov. Eugenio Hernandez Flores were scheduled to discuss border security and drug violence at a joint appearance today. Hernandez Flores is governor of the Mexican border state of Tamaulipas, which includes the violence-plagued city of Nuevo Laredo. Perry has said U.S. border security is a federal responsibility but that the state cannot wait for Washington to direct more equipment and manpower toward the border. Border violence, particularly in Nuevo Laredo, has been blamed on cartels warring over a smuggling hub where Mexican and U.S. highways converge. In 2005, more than 170 people were...