Free Republic

Murders in Maravatio raise concerns about drug gangs trying to sway local races.. Two candidates for mayor in the Mexican city of Maravatio have been gunned down within hours of each other, raising worries that drug gangs are trying to influence the June 2 election. Campaigning doesn't formally begin until Friday. State prosecutors said Tuesday that Armando Pérez was found shot to death in his car just before midnight, per the AP. He was the candidate for the conservative National Action Party. Hours earlier, officials with the ruling Morena party confirmed their candidate, Miguel Ángel Zavala, was found shot to...

A group of armed men took over the station of TC Televisión, in Guayaquil, Ecuador at 2 pm local time. They attempted to take the staff inside hostage. Ecuador’s national police have already taken the TV station back, as shown in an announcement with pictures of the attackers in cuffs on the ground. The attack comes amidst President Daniel Noboa’s crackdown on organized crime. He is under two months into his term, though the president had committed to oppose drug cartels from the start.

The December 2010 murder of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry exposed the bungled “Fast and Furious” investigation, in which agents from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed criminals to buy guns with the intention of tracking the weapons. But the agency lost most of the guns, including two that were found at the scene of Terry’s death in southern Arizona. The U.S. government has heavily pursued prosecution of the men involved in the killing. Mexico says Mexican drug gangs and former officials also participated in or failed to stop the weapons trafficking. Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office...

Chinese "money brokers," working for Latin American drug gangs, are quickly displacing Mexican and Colombian money launders. With burner phones and Chinese banking apps, the gangs are "moving vast sums quickly and quietly." As a result, they are taking over the movement of dirty cash, especially in Mexico. For instance, one Chinese ring, based in Guadalajara, worked for the Sinaloa Cartel and other drug gangs. Criminals from China, in the words of federal prosecutors, "have come to dominate international money laundering markets." "I look at this hemisphere as the front line of competition," said Admiral Craig Faller, the commander of...

....So, we have a truly diverse, when it comes to ancestry, history of domestic street mob violence. Through our first 200 years as a nation, it may be that people who felt unrepresented by the results at the ballot box eventually turned to street violence. It appears, however, that the class makeup has shifted, starting with the late 1960s radical college student movement. Instead of poor and working-class men alone, it appears that there has been a shift towards people with more resources, including more ability to network, coordinate, and travel greater distances in support of street violence and threats....

Criminal networks with Latin American roots, such as MS-13 and the 18th Street gang, are using the administration's open-door policy at the border to slip in recruits that are causing a huge spike in murder and violence throughout the nation, according to an immigration expert. Testifying Thursday at a House hearing on the border surge of young Latinos, the expert said, "Established gangs have been able to transfer an unknown number of experienced foot soldiers from Central America to help colonize new criminal territory in the United States." Jessica M. Vaughan, the policy director for the Center for Immigration Studies,...

members of the Arizona National Guard, including military recruiters were discovered working as “muscle” and “traffickers” for Mexican drug gangs .. About 12 National Guard were identified as suspects in one of the FBI’s biggest government corruption cases ever, which was almost totally ignored by government officials in Washington and major national news outlets On Friday in federal court, a non-commissioned officer (non-com) with the border-state Arizona’s Army National Guard was sentenced to federal prison for his role in protecting drug traffickers by using his military position to provide security for shipments of cocaine being transported from Mexico into the...

The Department of Homeland Security quickly denied claims on Friday from a watchdog group that the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) has militants stationed in Juarez, Mexico who plan an 'imminent' attack against the United States. A DHS spokesman was bewildered, telling MailOnline that 'we are aware of absolutely nothing credible to substantiate this claim' made by Judicial Watch, a center-right group. 'In Mexico?' the official said on the phone. 'I haven't seen that at all.' An hour before Judicial Watch's report surfaced, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said publicly that his agency and the FBI 'are unaware...

MS-13 Known for their identifying tattoos and violent mottos like “Mata, roba, viola, controla” (“Kill, steal, rape, control”), members of MS-13 are known for executing their victims with machetes and blunt objects like baseball bats. (CNSNews.com) - Reports show thousands of unaccompanied illegal alien minors, some of them identified as obvious gang members by U.S. Border Patrol agents, have been transferred to several of the largest metropolitan areas in the United States, including Baltimore, Los Angeles, New York City, Houston and the Washington, D.C. area – cities that all rank among the top strongholds of the Latin American gang Mara...

Yes, this is OHIO. Full title: Ohio Sheriff Bills Mexico for Illegals in His Jail – FBI Warns Him Mexican Drugs Cartels Will Kill Him He sent a letter to Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto charging him for the cost of each illegal alien housed in his jail. According to Sheriff Jones, "We've had horrendous crimes here in this community. We had a senior citizen, an elderly lady, molested by a teenager that came over from Mexico. We had another one molested – an eight year old girl. We've had drugs pouring in, more so than before the government said...

Young daughter in hand, Isabel Aguilera recounts the mayhem that stalked these streets. Here they dragged a father from the breakfast table, shooting him dead outside in front of his family. There they came for a shopkeeper, gunning him down behind the counter. Yonder they snuffed two brothers after pulling them from their beds before sunrise. “They were people from outside,” Aguilera, 38, said of the killings that recently swept like cholera through Riveras del Bravo, a teeming sprawl of Mexico’s working poor. “They wanted to inject power, fear.” These thousands of matchbox houses once ranked among Earth's deadliest patches...

Investigators are still looking for the person who opened fire during the 4/20 celebration at Denver’s Civic Center Park. ... Leon Kelly, leader of an anti-gang organization, says the shooting during the 4/20 rally was predictable. He says tensions in gang neighborhoods are already high and they spilled over in the park. He says the violence wasn’t between rival gangs. Kelly says the shooting was violence between members of the same gang and Denver investigators agree. “Over the last number of months you had friction between in-house battles, Crips on Crips,” Kelly said. Nobody was seriously injured in the shooting,...

LAWBREAKERS, LAWMAKERS: In some parts of Chicago, violent street gangs and pols quietly trade money and favors for mutual gain. The thugs flourish, the elected officials thrive—and you lose. ... both law enforcement and gang sources say, is that some politicians ignore the gangs’ criminal activities. Some go so far as to protect gangs from the police, tipping them off to impending raids or to surveillance activities—in effect, creating safe havens in their political districts. And often they chafe at backing tough measures to stem gang activities, advocating instead for superficial solutions that may garner good press but have little...

Mexico has belatedly discovered that its criminal syndicates have become so powerful that they directly threaten the state. In fact, Mexico hovers on the brink of becoming a narco-state. Its criminal syndicates control the Mexican side of the Texas/Mexico border and the smuggling of drugs and illegal immigrants into Texas. Their influence and reach have crossed the Rio Grande River in ways that many politicians and media prefer to not acknowledge. Caught in this crossfire are ranchers trying to protect their property and their way of life. Here are some of the problems they face daily. The criminal organizations To...

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.

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...

Violence continued Wednesday in Matamoros as a grenade was thrown at city hall and a local university was shut down because of a threat of some type of attack. Also, the Mexican navy announced the arrest of 30 Gulf Cartel members during operations conducted Monday and Tuesday throughout the state of Tamaulipas. As disturbances continued to plague Matamoros, panic ripped through downtown around 9:30 a.m. when a grenade was thrown at city hall, injuring two people. Federal police and the military cordoned off an area six blocks wide around the main plaza at the intersection of Calle Sexta and Morelos....

<p>Eight people were killed when a gang burned down a bar in the resort city of Cancun early on Tuesday.</p> <p>At least 10 armed men attacked the Castillo del Mar, a nightclub outside the city's main tourist area, threatening patrons and then lighting the building on fire...</p>

SAN FERNANDO, Mexico – Two cars exploded early Friday in a northern state where officials are investigating the killing of 72 Central and South American migrants, while a prosecutor investigating the massacre has disappeared. The prosecutor, Roberto Jaime Suarez, disappeared Wednesday in the town of San Fernando, where the bodies of the migrants were found, the Tamaulipas state attorney general's office said in a statement. A transit police officer in the town is also missing. President Felipe Calderon, speaking during a forum on security, said Suarez, a Tamaulipas state prosecutor, was involved in the initial investigation of the massacre, which...

EDINBURG — Six people accused of a February drug-related slaying faced capital murder charges Thursday morning. The sextet of suspects are allegedly part of a local drug smuggling group that ordered a hit of one of their own after he allegedly stole a load of marijuana delivered to a customer in February, investigators said. Hidalgo County sheriff's deputies found Gilberto Aguilar beaten and shot to death on Feb. 6 in a remote field north of Palmview. Investigators believe Aguilar was kidnapped, beaten with brass knuckles and fatally shot after he stole a load of marijuana. Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Treviño...