Free Republic

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Treasury Department on Wednesday imposed sanctions on 54 members of two powerful Mexican drug gangs it blames for a spike in killings near the U.S. border in recent weeks. The Treasury said the actions target "principal lieutenants and enforcers" of the powerful Gulf cartel and Los Zetas, a splinter group now battling the Gulf cartel. By adding the individuals to its blacklist of "specially designated narcotics traffickers," the Treasury is banning Americans from doing business with them and seeking to freeze any assets they may have under U.S. jurisdiction. Treasury's announcement came a day after Secretary...

A recent surge in arrests and cocaine seizures in Peru points to an increased presence of Mexican drug cartels, counter-narcotics officials say. The cartels have also contributed to more drug-related violence in Peruvian cities, ports and in remote valleys in this Andean country where coca, cocaine's base material, is grown, the officials say. Peruvian claims of Mexican cartels expanding echo those by officials in other Latin American countries, from Honduras to Argentina, where Mexican gangs have supplanted once-powerful Colombian cartels as kings of the illicit-drug underworld. .... That Mexican drug lords are sending emissaries here is no surprise to Hidalgo...

A drug gang kidnapped and killed six people near a town in the US-Mexican border region, prompting a series of gunbattles with soldiers that left 15 others dead. The violence on Tuesday started when gunmen kidnapped nine alleged members of a rival drug gang in Villa Ahumada and later executed six of them along the PanAmerican highway outside of the town, 130km south of Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, said Enrique Torres, spokesman for a joint military-police operation in Chihuahua State. Assailants later released three of the men, although their whereabouts was not immediately known, Torres...

MONTERREY, Mexico (Reuters) – An American anti-kidnapping expert who was himself abducted last week in northern Mexico was likely snatched by drug traffickers seeking to protect their turf, police said on Tuesday. Gunmen hauled Felix Batista into a white SUV outside a restaurant last week in the relatively safe industrial city of Saltillo in Coahuila state, where he was giving seminars on security to police and business people. Batista, a Cuban-American from Miami who is credited with negotiating the release of people abducted by Colombian rebels, was snatched when he stepped outside the restaurant after answering a cell phone call,...