Free Republic

Mexican drug cartels are like a malignant cancer that keeps on spreading. Mexico has spent billions of dollars on its drug war to combat the power and influence of the cartels, but when you look at the statistics it seems as if little progress has been made. Considering the dramatic impact cartels have on the United Sates, America should consider if securing our border is as important to our national security as is the war we are fighting in Afghanistan. Mexico’s war on drugs has been ongoing since 2006, but the problem keeps getting bigger each year. So does the...

In recent months, labor organizations representing federal immigration agents have been among the most outspoken challengers of Obama’s enforcement campaign. In June, the American Federation of Government Employees’ National Council 118, which represents Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, issued a no-confidence vote for ICE Director John Morton, claiming he is promoting amnesty instead of enforcement because most ICE officers are unable to make immigration-related arrests on the streets, leading to “amnesty by policy.” The National Border Patrol Council adopted a similar no-confidence resolution targeting Border Patrol Chief David Aguilar. Brandon Judd, union vice president and president of Local 2544 in...

He was told there was a party at a brick house on Osborne Place, a quiet block set on a steep hill in the Bronx. He showed up last Sunday night as instructed, with plenty of cans of malt liquor. What he walked into was not a party at all, but a night of torture — he was sodomized, burned and whipped. All punishment, the police said Friday, for being gay. There were nine attackers, ranging from 16 to 23 years old and calling themselves the Latin King Goonies, the police said. Before setting upon their 30-year-old victim, they had...

President Obama's Refusal To Protect Our Borders Has Cost An American Boater's LifeMexican drug smugglers have become emboldened by the Obama Administration allowing them to operate with impunity. A Colorado couple was boating on jet skis on a large lake formed by the Rio Grande down stream from Laredo, when the husband was shot through the head and thrown from his jet ski. His wife couldn't pull him unto her jet ski and had to abandon him in a hail of gunfire. Search teams prowled the US side of the 60 mile lake but were unable to locate the...

The Battle of Juarez is showing signs that the good guys are not prevailing. The Juarez newspaper, El Diario de Juarez, has cried uncle in its mixed stance of reporting the progress of the war. In the front page editorial that appeared recently, the editor waved the white flag and asked the cartels publicly what they want from him. The murder of a photographer and another reporter in the recent past are hitting far too close to home for him to continue to be a brave purveyor of the truth. In a city ravaged by nearly 7,000 deaths since 2006...

An insight into how liberals and conservatives differ not just in politics but also ways of thinking.

Border: Remember when al-Qaida targeted tribal leaders and local officials to assert power in the Iraq War? Today, the story repeats itself on our own doorstep. But incredibly, the Beltway crowd doesn't seem to care. Mexico's war against drug and alien-smuggling cartels grows ever more similar to the horrors of Afghanistan and Iraq. Beheadings, stonings, car bombs and terrorist attacks speak to a lust for power every bit as implacable as that of the Afghanistan's Taliban or the insurgents of Iraq. The cartels may seem to be just a police problem, but Mexico's own officials know better: President Felipe Calderon...

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico – Some 230,000 people have left Ciudad Juarez, a border city that has become Mexico’s murder capital, in the past three years as the death toll from a gang war topped 7,000, a non-governmental organization said in a new report. About 124,000 people, or 53.9 percent of the total, have sought safe haven in El Paso, Texas, which is just across the border, the Ciudad Juarez Citizens Security and Coexistence Observatory said. The rest have returned to their hometowns, mainly in Durango, Coahuila and Veracruz states, to get away from the drug-related violence. “Action should be taken...

HENDERSON -- Drugs, guns, prostitutes and fraudulent Social Security and immigration green cards are believed to have been sold and traded by a Rusk County family with connections to a violent Mexican Cartel. A sizeable force of federal and state law enforcement raided a Rusk County family compound Wednesday morning after two years of investigations by multiple agencies into the Hernandez family's alleged illegal activities. Dallas Region FBI Spokesperson Mark White said there was a sizeable number of agents and other officers involved in the "no knock" warrant due to the multiple buildings and multiple families on the tract of...

(RTTNews) - A prominent newspaper in Mexico's border city of Ciudad Juarez has published an editorial requesting guidelines on media publishing from drug cartels operating in the city after one of its employees was shot dead by suspected drug operatives last week. The unprecedented editorial carried by the El Diario de Juarez newspaper on its front page on Sunday was prompted by the killing of Luis Carlos Santiago, 21-year-old photographer working for the paper, last week. Santiago and a co-worker was shot by unidentified gunmen in Ciudad Juarez on 17 September when they were sitting inside a parked car outside a...

EL PASO, Texas -- It's a grizzly Ciudad Juarez murder with a startling El Paso connection. Mexican authorities discovered a severed head on top of the trunk of an abandoned blue Hyundai Wednesday afternoon. That car, which was stolen two weeks ago in Juarez, has Texas license plates and is registered to two people who live in El Paso. ABC-7 spoke with the car owner's daughter at the family's home. They did not want to be identified. "They left us without a car just to kill somebody," she said. The daughter said she had gone to Juarez with her mother...

Trading Standards officers have claimed that the supermarket has broken 2003 regulations, which prohibit manufacturers and retailers from using excess packaging. The officers said a beef roasting joint from its Taste the Difference range was the offending item. Up until now there have only been five cases brought under this legislation, all against very small companies. Sainsbury's is the first supermarket to be prosecuted and faces a fine of between about £500 and £3,000. The case, being brought by trading standards at Lincolnshire County Council, comes amid growing concern over damage to the environment caused by excessive packaging. Chocolate manufacturers...

Maria 'Chata' Leon, mother of 13 kids, ruled over a criminal empire with connections to a human smuggling ring...Leon, the then-44-year-old mother of 13 children, and the much-feared head of a drug-dealing dynasty, was stuck in the border town of Mexicali. It was one of her children, Danny "Clever" Leon, who, wielding an AK-47, had died in the 2008 shoot-out with police, and now she wanted to attend his funeral in the United States. Eventually, she would get her way right in front of LAPD gang officers. As politicians on all sides of the political spectrum argue about illegal immigration,...

Drug-trade violence in Mexico that has left more than 28,000 people dead and hundreds of thousands more terrorized during the past four years has made an imprint on Mexican expatriates living in the Rogue Valley. "People are scared so they want to leave the country to find another place to live more freely and not be scared to go out." "When people get together, they're telling each other they are scared and hope nothing happens to their family members," Perez said through an interpreter. "The cartels have more power than the government," she said. "Everyone knows the drug cartels have...

Muslims making a spectacle of desecrating the American flag.

FRONTON - A man says a bullet from a gunbattle in Mexico hit one of his trees. "My friend was right here beside me. We could hear everything happening on the other side," said Julio Guerra of Fronton. Guerra listened to two hours of gunbattle. While it was happening in a different country, it was within a couple miles of his bedroom window. "I'm not scared," said Guerra. The Guerras have lived in Fronton for many years. He's grown accustomed to the noise on the other side of the river. "Me and my wife have been living here a long...

The bodies of the four young men were discovered early on Sunday, hung upside down by their feet from a bridge near a wealthy area of Cuernavaca, a leafy city about an hour outside Mexico City, where many of the nation's elite own homes. The victims' genitals, index fingers and heads had been cut off, according to a statement from the attorney general's office in Morelos state, which includes Cuernavaca. Their heads and genitals were found nearby, along with a handmade sign, the statement said. "This will happen to everyone that helps the traitor Edgar Valdes," the placard read, referring...

Phoenix police were called out to a fight Wednesday morning, and ended up finding a lot of weapons and drugs. Officers said they arrived at a home near 4100 North 27th Street and found 100 pounds of pot and blood stains but no people. That home led detectives to two other West Valley homes where they found another 700 pounds of marijuana, 49 AK-47s and 6 bins full of ammunition. Officers arrested four men on drug and weapons charges. Both areas have Mexican enclaves. A desert area in West Phoenix has long been a body dumping ground for drug gang...

MISSION – Reynosa cannot guarantee the safety of its visitors amid recent fighting between the military and drug smuggling groups, an official from the Mexican city said Thursday. “We don’t have the access or the resources,” Armando Zertuche Zuani, Reynosa’s secretary of economic development and employment, said in Spanish. “(Mexican President Felipe) Calderón put us in a war for which the citizens were not trained to respond. We are prepared to respond to flooding or hurricane emergencies but not a war.” Zertuche Zuani’s statements came during the Mission Chamber of Commerce’s Economic Summit 2010, in which he touted Reynosa’s economic...

Peru is set to overtake Colombia as the world's top producer of coca leaf, the raw material for cocaine. Peru's production has nearly doubled in the last decade, according to UN data. This year, it grew by about a 6.8 per cent, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime says. Curbing this figure will depend on the government's policies. Al Jazeera's Craig Mauro reports from Piura town in Peru.