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Recent arrests in a mistaken killing point to the perilous presence of gangs The order was clear: Kill the guy in the Astros jersey. But in a case of mistaken identity, Jose Perez ended up dead. The intended target — the Houston-based head of a Mexican drug cartel cell pumping millions of dollars of cocaine into the city — walked away. Perez, 27, was just a working guy, out getting dinner late on a Friday with his wife and young children at Chilos, a seafood restaurant on the Gulf Freeway. His murder and the assassination gone awry point to the...

The macabre admission is just the latest indication of the depth of Mexico's drug violence. Some US observers say the cartels now pose a direct threat to the Mexican government's survival, and, by extension, a growing security threat to the US. The state prosecutors' office said it was looking into more than 450 missing persons' cases from the past eight years. The Wall Street Journal wrote in an opinion piece that the "body count" in drug-related violence in Mexico so far this year is already 354. It noted that a police commander was recently beheaded in the Mexican state of...

PHOENIX — As police approached a drug cartel's safe house in northwestern Mexico last May, gunmen inside poured on fire with powerful assault rifles and grenades, killing seven officers whose weapons were no match. Four more lawmen were wounded in the bloodbath and a cache of weapons was seized, including a single AK-47 assault rifle that authorities say was purchased 800 miles away at a Phoenix gun shop and smuggled into Mexico.

Assassinations related to drug trafficking in Mexico are on pace to pass 4,000 this year. By any count, violence in Mexico is at historical highs, and it is bad for business. Since the end of 2007, when Mexican President Felipe Calderon increased government pressure on organized crime, both the Sinaloa and the Gulf cartels have reached beyond Mexican boundaries to source supplies, secure trafficking routes and kill rivals. Heavy pressure on Colombian drug-trafficking organizations (DTOs) opened the door for Mexicans to control a greater share of the cocaine supply chain. They now control cocaine routes out of Colombia from Andean...

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 19, 2008 – The poppy trade that fuels terrorists and insurgents in Afghanistan is a problem that must be addressed but doesn’t have a military solution, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said here last night. Speaking at a dinner hosted by the Pacific Council on International Policy, Navy Adm. Mike Mullen said the narcotics trade serves as the baseline for Afghanistan’s economy. Farmers in a country that ranks among the poorest in the world, Mullen said, have little choice but to cultivate poppy to sell to insurgents, who turn profits from opium trade on...

March 25, 2008: The bonanza of captured documents from two recently killed FARC leaders, confirmed the sharp decline in FARC strength. A decade ago, FARC had nearly 18,000 fighters under arms. Now, fewer than 9,000 gunmen are out there, and many are inclined to surrender to the government, or just run away. In the last year alone, FARC lost 4,000 people (38 percent were killed, the rest deserted or were captured). This is more than double the losses of 2006. Recruiting is more difficult, largely because FARC is no longer cool, or very safe. The FARC deserters come home and...

The Colombian navy has seized two homemade submarines believed to have been built by the Farc rebel group to smuggle cocaine out of the country. The two fibreglass vessels were found in a clandestine shipyard outside the country's largest port, Buenaventura. One of the 17m (56ft) submarines was ready for launch, while the other had nearly been completed, the navy said. Correspondents say drug-traffickers are increasingly relying on the sea to avoid checkpoints and border crossings. Since 2005, the Colombian armed forces have uncovered nine homemade submarines, including a 20m (66ft) vessel on the country's Caribbean coast in August. In...

QUITO, ECUADOR — The Ecuadorean government on Friday insisted on ending a cooperation agreement with the United States that allows the U.S. military to use a coastal air force base for anti-drug operations in the Andes. -snip- ...Galo Mora, a representative of Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, told participants at a solidarity forum with Cuba. The 10-year agreement, signed by the United States and Ecuador in 1999, allows Washington to deploy up to 475 military personnel in Manta in support of counternarcotics operations.

Maoist rebels in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand have been growing opium poppies to fund their operations in the region, officials say. The rebels have a presence in 18 of the 22 districts in Jharkhand. The Maoists say they are fighting for more rights for indigenous people in at least five states, including neighbouring Bihar, which has a reputation as India's most lawless state. What began as small scale poppy cultivation in the remote areas of Chatra and Katkamsandi in Hazaribagh district two years ago has now flourished into a booming activity spread over some 20,000 acres of land...

MEXICO CITY - The Mexican government will expand its anti-drug raids to two states across the border from Texas, deploying more than 3,000 soldiers, sailors and federal police, officials said Sunday. The raids will cover Nuevo Laredo, a town across the border from Laredo, Texas, that has been bloodied by turf wars between drug gangs in recent years. Officials also said that in the two months since intensive raids began in central and western Mexico, they have destroyed almost as many opium fields as plots of marijuana, long Mexico's principal drug crop. "We have begun a frontal struggle against organized...

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...

Troops have been dispatched to the central Andean valleys of Peru in recent weeks to counter renewed guerrilla activity by re-equipped leftist rebels of the Shining Path, according to high level government officials. ... Twenty-three members of the group have been arrested since Shining Path resumed operations at the beginning of the year with a road ambush that killed eight police officers. In a videotape released at the end of last month, a hooded leader using the pseudonym of Comandante Artemio said the group would resume large-scale attacks in three months. ...Comandante Artemio threatened to renew attacks unless the government...

Federal prosecutors in Miami were prepared to indict Raul Castro as the head of a major cocaine smuggling conspiracy in 1993, but the Clinton Administration Justice Department overruled them, current and former Justice Department officials tell ABC News. The officials say Castro, as Cuban Defense Minister, permitted Colombian drug lords to pay for the use of Cuban waters and airstrips as staging grounds for smuggling runs into the United States in the 1980s and early 1990s. "It was a major investigation involving numerous witnesses that was killed at the highest levels in Washington," said a former Justice Department official...

Right poised to buck the trend in ColombiaBy Jeremy McDermott in Bogota(Filed: 27/05/2006) Colombia is set to buck the Left-ward trend in Latin America tomorrow with Right-wing president Alvaro Uribe likely to secure a second term.Mr Uribe, 53, an Oxford-educated lawyer and yoga fanatic, changed the constitution to stand a second time and all the polls suggest he is far ahead of his rivals.   Alvaro Uribe has had an average of 60pc support in every poll The key to his success is simple: Colombia is racked by a 43-year-old civil conflict, and Mr Uribe has made himself the champion...

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...

MEXICO CITY - Wracked by violent drug crime and too poor to arm its police properly, the Mexican state of Guerrero is seeking a $24 million bank loan to buy more guns and security equipment. The local government plans to use the credit, approved by its Congress, to get guns, communications gear and police cars for the most cash-strapped parts of Guerrero, one of Mexico's poorest states, the state government said on Friday. "We want to seek a credit line to acquire transportation and arms," a state government spokesman said. Guerrero, whose craggy hills hide numerous marijuana and poppy fields,...

"Washington wants to curb Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's anti-American influence by lobbying allies to try to expose any anti-democratic policies, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Thursday..." "Rep. Dan Burton, an Indiana Republican, and influential player on U.S. policy toward Latin America, said Chavez may give $50 million to the Palestinian group Hamas, which the United States considers a terrorist organization... "...Such a move would further strain deteriorating ties between the United States and one of its top oil suppliers after the countries each expelled diplomats this year in a dispute over alleged U.S. espionage. "Chavez has said the...

We are bordering on madness By Dimitri Vassilaros TRIBUNE-REVIEW Friday, February 17, 2006 Two nations are threatening American law-enforcement officers who protect this republic's southern border. Mexico is the obvious threat. The other will stun you. Men dressed as Mexican soldiers have set foot on American soil more than 200 times in the last decade. The Mexican government claims they are impersonators helping drug warlords' shipping into the United States. Whether soldiers or soldiers of fortune, Mexico has done virtually nothing to stop incursions by heavily armed forces in military-style Humvees. Mexico's inaction surely has helped embolden drug warlords salivating...

For years I have tried to warn people about the heating up of trouble spots "south of the border" ( Central & South America ), the inter-linking of terrorist groups there and elsewhere, and the Cuban/left-wing ties to all this.Here are links, pulled from other links & posts, to give you a heads-up on "what the media doesn't want to talk about...." China's Whampoa Ltd. opens port in Bahamas Unresolved Questions- the Panama canal, good, bad, or a waiting disaster?--thread II Fidel May Be Part of Terror Campaign Yes, Cuba is a terrorist nation Castro: "Iran and Cuba, in cooperation ...

MEXICO CITY Mexico says its arrested four Iraqis who were trying to sneak into the United States without the proper documents. Mexico's Attorney General's office says police -- acting on an anonymous tip -- found the four aboard a bus in the northern city of Navajoa (nav-ah-HO-. That's about 375 miles south of the Arizona border. The statement says the Iraqis were in Mexico illegally. Officials are investigating the background of the four and trying to determine how they got into Mexico. Many undocumented Iraqi nationals have been captured in Mexican territory en route to the U-S border. None have...