Free Republic

ACAPULCO, Mexico -- The dismembered bodies of two men were hung from a bridge Tuesday on a highway leading to Acapulco, the second such discovery in three days in a region where two drug lords are fighting for control of their divided cartel. The men were hung from their feet at the entrance of Chilpancingo, the city nearest to Acapulco along the highway connecting the Pacific coast resort to Mexico's capital, according to police in the state of Guerrero, where Acapulco is located. Their arms had been cut off, and a message was left threatening extortionists, kidnappers, police and the...

The free press has all but disappeared. The news is often little more than a means of controlling the message. Entire areas of the country have experienced an information blackout. Many frightened citizens rely on bloggers, face book, twitter and text messages as their only source of news and information. Open warfare rages below the Rio Grande. The Houston Chronicle reports that. "After years of relative calm, the gangland nightmare is back-and yet, barely a single mention of the clashes here has been made by local radio and television or newspapers. The city's journalists, having lost some of their own...

SNIPPET: "MEXICO CITY -- Investigators said Saturday they have found 51 corpses in two days of digging in a field near a trash dump outside the northern city of Monterrey, as excavations continued at one of the largest clandestine body dumping grounds in Mexico's bloody drug war." SNIPPET: "The largest mass grave found in recent years was discovered in May in the southern city of Taxco, where a total of 55 bodies were dumped in an abandoned mine shaft, apparently by a drug gang."

Given the levels of illegal migration and narco-trafficking across its southern border, the State of Arizona deserves America's commendation for the remarkable restraint it has exhibited in dealing with what has become a most serious international and domestic problem. Arizona Senate Bill 1070, signed into law by Governor Janice K. Brewer on April 23, 2010, is a tiptoe exercise through an immigration minefield. In its essence, however, the law demands roughly no more of an individual than is required to open an account at the local video store. Indeed, the law presumes that one is not an alien who is...

Where was our news media? Where was our president and congress? Why does the official move from Washington go against American private citizens and their guns, and not an all out war against the drug cartels using fully automatic military weapons, hand grenades, launchers and machine-guns? Why is the president pushing for an international gun law that will bring registration and finally gun control to we American citizens? Who is for free and lawful American citizens? Where are our statesmen? Where are our patriots and where are champions for the Constitution and freedom and safety of American citizens? This is...

Boasting a population that is 97% Hispanic, more than half foreign born, and 40% illegal, the Los Angeles County, Calif., incorporated city of Maywood has achieved the Reconquista goal. It is now as lawless and chaotic as any place in Mexico. Maywood is a warning to every city and town in America. The Maywood City Council announced this week that after years of radical policies, corruption and scandal, the city was broke and all city employees would be laid off and essential city services contracted out to neighboring cities or to L.A. County government. How did this happen? Until recently,...

Iran-tied terror group Hezbollah may be colluding with drug cartels along the U.S.-Mexico border, a Republican congresswoman warned, calling on Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to establish a special task force to figure out how to "clamp down" on this "national security" threat. The Lebanon-based group has long-standing and documented ties to South America and its drug gangs, but reports have recently surfaced that it may be expanding its influence to Mexico and the U.S. border.

Iran-tied terror group Hezbollah may be colluding with drug cartels along the U.S.-Mexico border, a Republican congresswoman warned, calling on Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to establish a special task force to figure out how to "clamp down" on this "national security" threat. The Lebanon-based group has long-standing and documented ties to South America and its drug gangs, but reports have recently surfaced that it may be expanding its influence to Mexico and the U.S. border. In her letter to Napolitano, Rep. Sue Myrick, R-N.C., called on Homeland Security to find out and report more on the extent of the...

EL PASO, Texas — An alleged Mexican gang leader named to the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list may have surgically altered his face and changed his finger prints to hide his identity, federal investigators said Wednesday. Eduardo "Tablas" Ravelo was added earlier this week to the wanted list that includes the likes of Osama Bin Laden and Boston crime lord James "Whitey" Bulger. "From what I've heard, it's my understanding he may have had ... plastic surgery and manipulated his finger prints," said Samantha Mikeska, the FBI's lead investigator in a 5-year-old probe of Ravelo's Barrio Azteca gang. If Ravelo...

Homeland Security 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...

AUSTIN — Mexican drug cartel violence is not spilling into Texas, several frustrated border mayors told a state legislative committee Monday in an effort to dispel public perceptions that their communities are under siege. “For me to believe that our cities are so endangered by all this violence that we need to send the military to the border is a knee-jerk reaction,” McAllen Mayor Richard Cortez told the House Border and Intergovernmental Affairs Committee. Cortez, mayor for 19 years, said his daughter in San Antonio recently called to express apprehension about his re-election because of fears he might become an...

Reporting from San Diego -- A U.S. citizen was one of the three men who were found decapitated this week in Tijuana, Mexican authorities said Friday. The body of George Harrison, a 38-year-old former Chula Vista resident, had been dismembered and mutilated and was dumped in a vacant lot near Tijuana's beachside bullring. Harrison had several drug-related convictions in the United States and was suspected of drug trafficking in Mexico, Baja California Assistant Atty. General Rafael Gonzalez said.

HELPING OUT IS IN OUR INTEREST Today's terror in Mexico is tomorrow's terror on US soil; the violence has already started crossing the border. To protect ourselves, we must help our beleaguered neighbors decisively and effectively put an end to the rippling massacres. Violence isn't all that will cross the border - corruption will spread, too. In 2007, the DHS opened 79 investigations into border corruption in four US states along the Mexican border, more than twice the number four years earlier.

VILLA AHUMADA, Mexico – For people caught inside Mexico's drug corridors, life is about keeping your head down and watching your back, especially when the sun dips behind the cactus-studded horizon. No town knows this better than Villa Ahumada, where the entire police force quit after 70 cartel hit men roared through last spring, killing the police chief, two officers and three townspeople. Residents were left defenseless again last week when gunmen returned and kidnapped nine people, despite the soldiers manning checkpoints far outside town.

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,...

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - Shootouts involving drug gangs and police Tuesday left at least 20 alleged gang members dead and sent mourners in a cemetery fleeing from gunfire, officials said. The deaths are the latest in an upsurge of killing that has made Rio de Janeiro one of Brazil's most violence-plagued cities with an annual homicide rate of around 50 per 100,000 residents. Most of the killings have occurred in the city's more than 600 shantytowns, controlled primarily by heavily armed drug gangs. At least 14 alleged drug gang members were killed in an hours-long shootout in the Mineira...

MEXICO CITY - Police found 17 bodies stuffed in cars or dumped on streets in garbage bags across Mexico on Monday in the latest wave of violence apparently triggered by warring drug gangs. In the resort city of Cancun, the bodies of three men and two women were found in an SUV with their heads covered in tape and their hands bound behind their backs, Quintana Roo state police said. Police spokesman Antonio Coral said he could not immediately confirm the cause of death. Mexico City police found more three bodies in an SUV parked in a middle-class neighborhood in...

MEXICO CITY - Mexico's attorney general on Wednesday demanded U.S. authorities do more to stop guns and drug money from heading south and fueling the drug violence in Mexico that left more 2,000 dead last year. Eduardo Medina Mora told a business forum that the vast majority of arms used by the soldiers of drug cartels, including assault rifles and grenades, are smuggled from the United States. "It's truly absurd that a person can get together 50 to 100 high powered arms, grenade launchers, fragmentation grenades, and can transport this cargo to our country," Medina Mora said. "It's a task...