Free Republic

Two news reports that appeared in the Washington Times a couple of days ago.Both articles are related because both articles report on the failures of our nation to secure the borders of the United States - with devastating results.   The first of the news reports deals with how members of the extremely dangerous Mexican-based drug cartel known as "La Familia"  (The Family) have set up shop in the Washington, DC area.   Here is the excerpt from that news report I want you to pay particular attention to:   The indictment says the drug operation was tied to La Familia, a violent...

NOGALES, Ariz. - Teams of border officers combed through the Arizona desert about 10 miles north of Mexico on Thursday in search of the lone outstanding suspect in the fatal shooting of a Border Patrol agent. They were on horseback and all-terrain vehicles searching rugged, hard-to-reach spots in a mountainous area just north of Nogales in southeastern Arizona. Officers in patrol cars were searching the perimeter. The suspect could be in Mexico, or could have tried his luck in Nogales or a nearby town, but he also could be hiding behind the next bush. ...authorities have four suspects in custody...

Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu. (CNSNews.com/Penny Starr) (CNSNews.com) - Paul Babeu, the sheriff of Pinal County, Arizona, says give him half an hour, and he could tell President Obama how to secure the U.S. border with Mexico -- if only the president and other administration officials would listen to him.Babeu joked that he must be on the White House “do not call” list, even though he’s the president of the Sheriff’s Association for the State of Arizona.In an interview with Fox News on Thursday, Babeu lamented the murder of a U.S. Border Patrol agent on Tuesday at the hands...

The ever problematic nature of drug cartels and the danger they present to innocent civilians in Mexico have now led to children being taught in school how to do their best to evade bullets fired during shootouts involving the cartels.

Gunfire and roadblocks were reported Wednesday evening in Matamoros as armed gunmen with the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas organization clashed with the Mexican military in a three-way confrontation, sources stated. One of the international bridges to Brownsville was closed. Tractor-trailers were used to block off various avenues in Matamoros, including Lauro Villar, Avenida Solidaridad, Avenida del Nino and other main thoroughfares, in an effort to keep military vehicles from getting through, according to a Mexican law enforcement official who asked not to be named for security reasons. A source with the Mexican military who asked not to be named...

Thousands of Ranches Abandoned in Northern Mexico Due to Violence MEXICO CITY – Thousands of ranches have been abandoned in the northeastern Mexican state of Tamaulipas by owners who do not want to end up like Alejo Garza, a rancher who died defending his property from a drug cartel. Garza, considered by a hero by many in the region, refused to hand over his property to a drug cartel, which gave him 24 hours to leave his property. The 77-year-old rancher barricaded himself inside his house and took on 30 cartel gunmen, killing four of them and seriously wounding two...

THE Mexican Army is hunting a 12-year-old assassin who is allegedly employed by a drug cartel to torture and murder its enemies. Known simply as El Ponchis - which means "The Cloak" - the young boy has been accused of helping wage a turf war in the central Morelos state. Reports said he was paid $US3000 per murder and that he tortured his victims before killing them. He often cuts his victim's throat, leaving the head attached by just a thread. Videos of El Ponchis attacking one enemy with a stick and cutting the throat of another have appeared online,...

ZACATECAS, MEXICO (BNO NEWS) -- Three human heads were found in front of a government building on Friday in the northern Mexican state of Zacatecas, officials said. At about 6:00 a.m. local time, a group of young students were walking towards their school when they discovered the heads of three individuals in the garden in front of the government building of Chalchihuites town, about 215 kilometers from the state capital city of Zacatecas. The headless bodies were found approximately one kilometer away from the heads, in a highway. Two messages were found next to the bodies indicating that the crime...

The Mexican Army is hunting a 12-year-old assassin who is allegedly employed by a drug cartel to torture and murder its enemies, Sky News reported today. Known simply as El Ponchis — which means "The Cloak" — the young boy has been accused of helping wage a turf war in the central Morelos state. Reports said he was paid $3,000 per murder and that he tortured his victims before killing them. He often cuts his victim's throat, leaving the head attached by just a thread.

The Mexican drug wars have become an old story. Media of all types have given extensive coverage to the battles between and among criminal gangs and federal police and military. Nonetheless, the Obama Administration has continued a policy of avoiding recognition of the danger of the open warfare that exists immediately south of the United States border with Mexico. The federal and state governments of Mexico have reacted quickly to deny commentary that challenges their commitment to enforcing law and order in their jurisdictions. From Washington comes an active effort to counter any claims by local law enforcement in the...

An entire town police force has resigned in Los Ramones, Mexico following an attack by gunmen on their station. Cubachi reports: Its new headquarters was severely attacked by drug cartels. Gunmen fired more than 1,000 bullets and flung six grenades at their headquarters last night in a 15-minute shooting spree destroying six police vehicles, leaving the police station riddled with bullet holes, and murdering the police dog.

A town near drug cartel capital Juarez, Mexico, had just one applicant for police chief after a spate of killings of public officials in drug-related violence. So now the new chief in Guadalupe, a town of 10,000 residents near the Texas border, is 20-year-old college criminology major Marisol Valles García. Public officials have increasingly become the targets of assassination as Mexican cartels try to tighten their grasp on the country. Just this year, 11 Mexican mayors have been slain, including the former mayor of Guadalupe, who was killed in June. In the small town, "police officers and security agents have...

Baja California authorities seized 105 tons of marijuana Monday morning in what is believed to be one of the largest drug busts in recent Mexican history, according to Mexican authorities and media reports. About 10,000 packages of marijuana were hidden inside six cargo containers stored in a warehouse in an industrial area of the border city of Tijuana. The marijuana was discovered after police on routine patrol intercepted a convoy of vehicles escorting a tractor-trailer that had left the warehouse, officials said. After a shootout, 11 people were arrested. Police and soldiers, acting on information from the suspects, raided the...

Drug smuggling gangs in Mexico have sent well-armed assassins, or "sicarios," into Arizona to locate and kill bandits who are ambushing and stealing loads of cocaine, marijuana and heroin headed to buyers in the United States, the Department of Homeland Security has warned Arizona law enforcement authorities.

A border inspector nicknamed "Hammer" pleaded not guilty to taking bribes to help vehicles loaded with illegal immigrants and tons of marijuana get through his lane. Lorne Leslie Jones accepted more than $500,000 in bribes from January 2000 to December 2009 to allow illegal immigrants and drugs to cross into the United States from Mexico, according to an indictment unsealed Thursday. During a brief court hearing, Jones also pleaded not guilty to lying to investigators. He was arrested Sept. 30 while on the job at the San Ysidro Port of Entry. Prosecutors are seeking criminal forfeiture of $500,000 from Jones,...

Complete title: DHS Alerted Arizona Sheriffs of Mexican Drug Cartel Assassins In-State -- Set Up Signs To Warn Travelers Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu has made public an e-mail sent by the Department of Homeland Security to law enforcement officials in Arizona in May warning of Mexican drug cartel operations in the state's Vekol Valley, located about 70 miles from the U.S. border with Mexico. (CNSNews.com/Penny Starr) (CNSNews.com) – The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) warned Arizona law enforcement officials in May that Mexican drug cartels were deploying assassins to kill bandits highjacking their drug loads in the Vekol Valley,...

We can only estimate the thousands of deaths of US citizens by illegal aliens on our own soil. The media fails to report them, the government ignores them. The murder of David Hartley, on Falcon Lake in Texas and the subsequent beheading by those same cartels of the lead investigator in retaliation have thrown some attention on the threat to us all by the failed state of Mexico. The Arizona Daily Star gives us some facts. Forty-eight Americans were murdered in Mexico during the first six months of 2010 The tally doesn't include two Texans reported killed Sept. 30 in...

Mexican authorities have found the bodies of seven young men killed in three separate attacks across Tijuana -- a spate of violence that runs counter to what officials have described as an improving security situation. The bodies, two of them decapitated and strung from a highway overpass, were discovered within an eight-hour period between Sunday evening and early Monday morning, according to the Baja California state prosecutor’s office. Law-enforcement officials in Tijuana and Baja California and Mexico’s federal military have made some visible progress working together against drug-related violence afflicting several regions of the country. Brazen shootouts and gruesome killings...

Zapata County's sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez has told CBS News he has blood evidence from the lifevest of Tiffany Hartley, the wife of David Hartley, that supports her account of a pirate attack on a lake that straddles the Texas-Mexico border. CBS News correspondent Don Teague reported on "The Early Show" this evidence is in addition to witness testimony that supports Tiffany Hartley's story that her husband was shot in the head by pirates on Mexico side of Falcon Lake. David Hartley is presumed dead, and officials on both the U.S. and Mexican sides of the lake are searching for his...

SNIPPET: "A Texas college student was shot and killed in Mexico after the bus he was riding on was hijacked by suspected members of a Mexican drug cartel, The Brownsville Herald reports. Jonathan William Torres, an 18-year-old college freshman at the University of Texas at Brownsville, was killed Sept. 30 in Matamoros -- just outside Ciudad Mante in the southern part of Tamaulipas -- a university spokeswoman told the newspaper. Torres was reportedly on his way to visit family when his bus was allegedly ambushed by members of Mexican organized crime."