Free Republic

MEXICO CITY – Gunmen killed eight youths and a police chief and took dozens of restaurant patrons hostage for hours in two attacks in the drug gang-ridden state of Sinaloa, officials saidSunday. A group of hitmen sprayed four cars with bullets on a busy street in the city of Guamuchil in the early hours of Sunday, killing five young men and three female minors, a police source told Reuters. Advertisement In an earlier attack on Saturday, six other armed men caused pandemonium in the Pacific port city of Mazatlan by taking refuge in a shopping mall to escape security forces...

NEW YORK (AP) - Hundreds of angry people marched through Harlem on Saturday after the Rev. Al Sharpton promised to "close this city down" to protest the acquittals of three police detectives in the 50-shot barrage that killed a groom on his wedding day and wounded two friends. "We strategically know how to stop the city so people stand still and realize that you do not have the right to shoot down unarmed, innocent civilians," Sharpton told an overflow crowd of several hundred people at his National Action Network office in the historically black Manhattan neighborhood. "This city is going...

TIJUANA, Mexico – A key hitman for Mexico's Arellano Felix drug cartel was arrested on Saturday in this crime-ridden border city, in another coup for President Felipe Calderón's clampdown on traffickers. After an anonymous tip-off, soldiers stormed a house and arrested Alfredo Araujo Avila, also known as Popeye, Tijuana's military chief Gen. German Redondo told reporters. “He is considered one of the most dangerous hitmen of the Arellano Felix cartel,” Gen. Redondo said. Araujo Avila had dodged arrest for a decade in Tijuana, which is just over the U.S. border from San Diego. He is wanted in the United States...

Aucayacu - Peru's brutal rebel movement, the Shining Path, long thought to be all but extinct, is on the warpath again, boosted by an alliance with drug traffickers. Its Maoist guerrillas almost vanished after the capture of their founder and leader, Abimael Guzman, in 1993, with only a few hundred left sheltering in remote highlands. But those mountains are now the setting for a dramatic growth in cultivating coca to produce cocaine, and veteran fighters are now serving new masters, the drug barons. The Shining Path once forced the whole country to its knees in a war that claimed 70,000...

Lima, Oct 18 (EFE).- Peru's Abimael Guzman, the founder of a Maoist guerrilla movement-cum-death cult that sometimes dynamited the bodies of just-murdered functionaries and hanged canines from lamposts as warnings to "capitalist dogs," also had his soft, sappy and romantically poetic side. The man known by his fanatic followers as "President Gonzalo" revealed some of his secrets in a hand-written ode dedicated to his wife, who died in 1988 under mysterious circumstances. A video seized in 1992 by the security forces, after Guzman's arrest, shows the wake of Augusta La Torre, better known as "Comrade Norah" and the Shining Path's...

MEXICO CITY — Reputed drug kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman has launched a bloody offensive to control drug smuggling along the entire U.S.-Mexico border, Attorney General Daniel Cabeza de Vaca said today. Mexico's top law enforcement official said Guzman was behind a wave of violence that has killed hundreds of suspected smugglers, hit men, police, soldiers and civilians along the 2,000-mile border. "Definitely, he is the most active man in his group. He is trying to fight for the border corridors, trying to control places like Culiacan just like the rest of the communities of Sinaloa (state), and the border...