Thursday, December 17, 2009

OPEN BORDERS WITH NARCOmex: MEXICAN DRUG LORD SHOT BY 200 MEX NAVY

OBAMA’S OPEN DOOR POLICY TO MEXICANS, MEX GANGS, MEX DRUG CARTEL IS FOR THE ILLEGALS’ VOTES, AND TOO KEEP HIS PAYMASTERS ON WALL STREET HAPPY AND GENEROUS!

“NO CORPORATE PROFIT CAN BE HIGH ENOUGH! NO WAGE CAN BE LOW ENOUGH!” THE LA RAZA DEMS - BUILDING THE MEXICAN WELFARE STATE OFF THE BACKS OF THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS!

Lou Dobbs Tonight
Monday, September 28, 2009
And T.J. BONNER, president of the National Border Patrol Council, will weigh in on the federal government’s decision to pull nearly 400 agents from the U.S.-Mexican border. As always, Lou will take your calls to discuss the issues that matter most-and to get your thoughts on where America is headed.
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Mexican navy kills top cartel kingpin in shootout
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Two hundred sailors raided an upscale apartment complex and killed a reputed Mexican drug cartel chief in a two-hour gunbattle, one of the biggest victories yet in President Felipe Calderon's drug war.
Arturo Beltran Leyva, the "boss of bosses," and three members of his cartel were slain in the shootout Wednesday in Cuernavaca, just south of Mexico City, according to a navy statement. A fifth cartel member committed suicide during the shootout.
Cartel gunmen hurled grenades that injured three sailors, the navy said. An Associated Press reporter at the scene heard at least 10 explosions.
During the gun battle, sailors went door-to-door to evacuate residents of the apartment complex to the gym, according to a woman who said she was speaking by cell phone to her husband inside. She would not give her name out of fear for her safety.
Beltran Levya is the highest-ranking figure taken down under Calderon, who has deployed more than 45,000 troops across Mexico to crush the cartels since taking office in December 2006. Mexico's navy often has been used in the battle as well. The offensive has earned Calderon praise from Washington even as 14,000 people have been killed in a wave of drug-related violence.
Speaking from the Copenhagen climate summit, Calderon called the raid "an important achievement for the government and people of Mexico."
The last time Mexican authorities killed a major drug lord was in 2002, when Ramon Arellano Felix of the Tijuana Cartel was shot by a police officer in the Sinaloa resort of Mazatlan.
Beltran Levya was one of five brothers who split from the Sinaloa Cartel several years ago and aligned themselves with Los Zetas, a group of former soldiers hired by the rival Gulf Cartel as hit men. The split is believed to have fueled much of the bloodshed of recent years.
One of the brothers, Alfredo Beltran Leyva, was arrested in January 2008.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration says the Beltran Leyva cartel is key in the importation and distribution of tons of cocaine in the United States, as well as large quantities of heroin. Mexico considers the group one of its six major cartels.
The Mexican government had listed Arturo Beltran Leyva as one its 24 most-wanted drug lords and had offered a $2.1 million reward for his capture.
Born in the Pacific coast state of Sinaloa, the Beltran Leyva brothers worked side by side with Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, before they broke away after Gulf Cartel leader Osiel Cardenas was arrested in 2003. They soon seized the lucrative drug routes in northeastern Mexico.
U.S. officials say the Beltran Leyva Cartel has carried out heinous killings, including numerous beheadings. The gang also has had great success in buying off public officials, police and others to protect their business and get tips on planned military raids.
The U.S government added Beltran Leyva and his cartel to the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act last year, a movement that denied him access to the U.S. financial system.
The state of Morelos, where Cuernavaca is located, and neighboring Guerrero have seen a spike in violence in recent months, with dozens of people killed. Some of the mutilated bodies have appeared with pieces of paper signed "boss of bosses," Beltran Leyva's nickname.
Mexican authorities have been steadily closing in on the Beltran Levya over the past year, raiding lavish parties thrown by cartel leaders even while they were on the run.
In one of the biggest blows to the gang, several top federal law enforcement officials were arrested in late 2008 for allegedly protecting and leaking confidential information to the cartel. They included former Mexican drug czar Noe Ramirez.
On Friday, sailors raided a party at mansion in the mountain down of Tepotzlan, near Cuernavaca, where they killed three alleged Beltran Leyva cartel members and detained 11.
They also detained Ramon Ayala, a Texas-based norteno singer whose band was playing at the party, on suspicion of ties to organized crime. His lawyer, Adolfo Vega, denied Ayala had ties to the Beltran Leyva gang, saying the singer didn't know his clients were drug traffickers.
In May, soldiers arrested one of Beltran Leyva's lieutenants, Rodolfo Lopez Ibarra, as he stepped off a plane in the northern city of Monterrey — fresh from a baptism party hosted by Beltran Leyva himself in Acapulco.
Months earlier, soldiers had arrested the deputy police chief of the resort town of Zihuatenejo who was allegedly protecting 14 Beltran Leyva members at a cock fight.
Mexico's drug gangs have fought against Calderon's crackdown with brutal attacks against security forces.
On Wednesday, the severed heads of six state police investigators were found on a public plaza in the northern Mexican state of Durango
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A TIMELINE OF VIOLENCE

President Felipe Calderon's crackdown on Mexican drug traffickers, launched in December 2006, has become more violent in recent months. Notable incidents:
Aug. 16, 2008 Gunmen attack a party in the northern city of Creel, killing 14 people, including a 16-month-old toddler who was in his father's arms. The Chihuahua state prosecutor calls it a "settling of accounts" by drug traffickers.
Aug. 28 Police find 11 headless bodies near Mrida, on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. All the corpses were handcuffed. One was nude and showed signs of torture.
Sept. 12 Police find 24 bodies, 15 of them decapitated and many with signs of torture, in a forest west of Mexico City. Most have gunshots to the head.
Sept. 15 Attackers throw grenades into the crowd at an Independence Day celebration in the central city of Morelia, hometown of President Calderon. The blasts kill seven people and wound 103.
Oct. 1 Eight bodies with gunshots to the head are dumped next to an elementary school in Tijuana. A note, apparently directed to a rival drug gang, says: "Here are your people, 'Bricklayer.' Come get them!"
Dec. 21 The heads of eight soldiers and a former state police commander are found next to a Sam's Club in the western city of Chilpancingo. A note says, "For each one of mine you kill, I'll kill 10 soldiers."
Dec. 29 Sixteen bodies are dumped in vacant lots in Tijuana, 12 in one lot and four in another.
Jan. 24, 2009 Police in Tijuana arrest Santiago Meza Lopez, who state prosecutors say disposed of more than 300 bodies for drug traffickers by dissolving them in caustic soda. Mexican newspapers dub him "The Stewmaker."
Feb. 3 A newly retired army general and his two bodyguards are tortured, killed and dumped near the resort city of Cancun. He is the highest-ranking soldier killed since Calderon's offensive began.
Feb. 10 A drug gang's attack on the northern town of Villa Ahumada and an ensuing battle with soldiers kills 21 people.
Sources: USA TODAY research based on police reports, Mexican army, Mexican attorney general's office, news reports



Enlarge
By Chris Hawley, USA TODAY

Mexican investigators collect evidence after a desert gunbattle near Villa Ahumada on Feb. 13, days after one of the bloodiest episodes yet in Mexico's drug war.


TOURISM ALERT

The State Department issued a new travel warning for Mexico on Friday, urging Americans to use caution not just in border areas but also in tourist resorts because of increasing violence.
The department's statement said millions of Americans visit Mexico safely each year, but that robberies, homicides, petty thefts and carjackings are rising.
Dozens of U.S. citizens have been kidnapped in recent years, the statement said, and many of the cases remain "unresolved."
Some Americans have been trapped temporarily in border cities during battles between the Mexican military and well-armed drug gangs that "have resembled small-unit combat," the department said.
The report identified crime hot spots including Ciudad Jurez; Tijuana, across the border from San Diego; Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Texas; and Nogales, across the border from Nogales, Ariz.
The Associated Press






Mexican drug gangs wage war
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By Chris Hawley, USA TODAY
VILLA AHUMADA, Mexico — It was 3 a.m. when Griselda Munoz says she got the first terrifying phone call: "Mom, there are people all over, and they're shooting!"
A convoy of gunmen had invaded the ranch where her son, Jorge Marrufo, 32, was working. As shots crackled in the background, he told her he was running into the desert to hide in the sagebrush.
Before dawn, another call: "If anything happens to me, tell my kids I love them."
A CLOSER LOOK: Reporter Chris Hawley on Villa Ahumada
Later that day, Munoz found her son at a morgue with his skull caved in and four bullet holes in his chest. He was among 21 people killed Feb. 10 in this town near the U.S. border after drug gangs abducted several men, then fought a massive running gunbattle with the Mexican army — one of the bloodiest episodes yet in Mexico's war on drugs.
Prosecutors are trying to determine whether Munoz's son was an innocent bystander or involved with the gangs. Either way, Munoz attributes his death to the unprecedented combination of drug-related violence and economic misery that is ravaging northern Mexico — and showing signs of spreading into the USA.
"He never caused any trouble for anybody. But in this town, you never know who's going to decide you're a problem," Munoz said. "This is a town without laws."
That's literally true — the entire police force of Villa Ahumada, a community of 10,000 people 80 miles south of El Paso, deserted its posts last May after drug gangs executed the police chief and two officers. The crime wave, plus the crippling recession that has rippled here from the USA, has caused the town's export factories — possibly the only source of reputable, steady employment — to slash production.
"It's just one thing after another," says Villa Ahumada's mayor, Fidel Chavez. "First the economy, and now this."
The story is similar across much of Mexico's 2,000-mile-long northern border: a wave of beheadings, grenade attacks and shootouts as drug cartels battle each other for supremacy and lash out against Mexican President Felipe Calderon's drive to destroy their smuggling operations. The death toll from drug-related violence in Mexico last year surpassed 6,000, more than double the previous year, raising questions about whether Calderon's government can prevail against a brutal and often better-armed enemy without additional help from the U.S. government.
"People are scared, and they have reason to be," says Michael Shifter, a Latin America specialist at Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think tank. "The economic crisis is just going to aggravate the situation. It's very hard to imagine how things will get better in the short term."
That's bad news in broad swaths of the USA, where Mexican drug gangs have extended their operations to at least 230 cities from Texas to Alaska, according to a recent Justice Department report. Police in Atlanta and Phoenix, both major drug transit points, have blamed a wave of kidnappings on the spreading turf war among the cartels. Drug-related violence has become ever more brazen and frequent, including a rise in attacks on Border Patrol agents.
In both Mexico and the USA, most of the victims have been linked to the cartels. Nevertheless, several travel agencies, colleges (including the nearby University of Texas-El Paso) and even the U.S. military have discouraged travel to Mexico's border areas as spring break approaches — resulting in a loss of crucial tourism dollars that could make the Mexican economic crisis even worse.
More than 329,000 jobs have been lost in Mexico since June, the government says; that translates to as many as 30% of Mexican adults who are unable to find full-time work.
Rene Jimenez Ornelas, an expert on crime at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, is among those who say unemployment could push more Mexicans into the ranks of the narcos. The gangster lifestyle has been glamorized by television shows and songs called narcocorridos, and it is a powerful temptation for many youths.
"What organized crime mostly has on the front lines are people who need to eat," Jimenez Ornelas said. So the cartels "have an 'army' available — not all of them, of course, but enough to have a good-sized force at their service."
Prime smuggling territory
The violence is devastating towns and families. Three days after the gunbattle that claimed Jorge Marrufo, his mother sobbed as pallbearers lowered his casket into the ground.
The family set up a huge cluster of palm fronds and flowers, and erected a simple wooden cross. There was a rattle as the first shovelfuls of sand and pebbles hit the casket — after that, nothing but the sound of weeping and shifting sand.
Three days later, tragedy struck again — Jorge's cousin, Alfonso Marrufo, was found dead, his body pumped full of AK-47 and 9mm bullets, outside a house in town.
At first glance, it's not clear what's worth fighting for in Villa Ahumada. There's not much here besides a few water towers, a railroad track and several roadside burrito stands. A street sweeper machine roams the few paved streets, fighting a losing battle against the sand that collects in drifts along the curb. The only landmark is a small clock tower, which is stuck at 8:39.
Look at a map, though, and the town's importance becomes more apparent. Villa Ahumada sits astride Highway 45, a spur of the Pan American Highway and a straight shot to Guatemala, Panama and other points south.
To the west, dirt roads snake through the desert, providing a way around the military checkpoints on the highway. To the east, another web of trails leads to the desolate, and lightly patrolled, scrubland of West Texas.
This is prime smuggling territory.
Enrique Torres, a spokesman for the Mexican army, says two of Mexico's most powerful gangs — the Sinaloa and Juarez cartels — battle for control of Villa Ahumada. "It's considered a key location," he says.
In a microcosm of the struggle being played out across Mexico, the fight for Villa Ahumada has intensified after the Juarez cartel's No. 3 leader, Pedro Sanchez Arras, was arrested last May. The Sinaloa gang, based on Mexico's Pacific coast, has been vying for its rival's turf ever since, leading to incidents such as those that killed the Marrufos, Torres says.
In an effort to stop the violence, Calderon has deployed 46,000 troops and federal police throughout Mexico — an unprecedented law enforcement commitment that surpasses the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.
Despite its numbers, the army has no investigative powers to probe drug gangs' activities and root out kingpins. Federal agents are spread thin, and there have been numerous incidents in which local Mexican police have been co-opted by the cartels.
On a recent morning, a USA TODAY reporter came across the aftermath of a gunbattle in the desert north of Villa Ahumada. Three bodies lay in the sand. Army Humvees and helicopters combed the desert for anyone who may have gotten away.
Hours earlier, an army patrol had come across a Toyota SUV picking its way through the wilderness, Maj. Gerardo Arce said. Suddenly, the doors popped open and gunmen opened fire with AK-47s. The troops returned fire, killing all three.
Inside the SUV was an arsenal worthy of any commando unit: hand grenades, a .50-caliber sniper rifle, helmets, bulletproof vests, combat fatigues and radios.
Such firepower illustrates why townspeople see only one real authority. "The gangs know everything. They're always watching," says Sandra Munoz, Jorge Marrufo's niece. "They'll even mark your house, as a warning."
'The town with no law'
Shifter says the recurring pattern of Mexico's drug war — one cartel is weakened, only to be replaced by another — shows the need for President Obama to seek solutions beyond the $400 million in mostly military aid the United States gave Mexico last year.
Options include more drug prevention and treatment programs to try to curb demand for illegal drugs in the USA, and cracking down on the flow of arms from the USA into Mexico. "It's hard to call the drug policy a successful policy," Shifter said.
Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the anti-drug czar in the Clinton administration, warned last month that Calderon's government was in danger of losing control of some areas and that millions of Mexicans could seek refuge from the violence in the USA. Recently departed CIA director Michael Hayden has said Mexico ranked alongside Iran as a top security risk to the United States.
Calderon has rejected such talk, saying his government is firmly in charge and casting Mexico's drug war as a "historic challenge of truly becoming a country of law and order."
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency has credited his actions with a steep reduction of cocaine supply in many U.S. cities. Calderon says the vast majority of those killed have been drug gang members, and his approval rating remains high at about 60% — a broad enough mandate to keep pursuing the cartels for now, Shifter says.
The unknown factor is how bad the economy will get — and how that could change Calderon's plans.
The border region has been particularly hard hit by plummeting manufacturing demand from the United States, which receives 90% of Mexico's exports. At a plant run by Quality Coils S.A., which makes components for Delphi auto parts and Motorola cellphones, the payroll has dropped from 240 a year ago to 180 workers — and they work only three days a week, says personnel manager Florentino Flores.
The situation is similar across town at the Lear plant, where workers sew seats for Ford Fusion cars. In November, the plant began cutting workers, then workdays.
"There's just no work for us, I guess," says employee Juan de la Torre, whose hours were cut.
Nationwide, Mexico's exports to the United States fell 15% in December compared with the year before. Money sent home by migrants living in the USA, a crucial income source for poorer families, also fell 3.6% last year — the first annual decline in a decade. Overall, the Mexican economy could shrink by 1.5% this year, according to Morgan Stanley bank, breaking a string of years of moderate growth.
"Markets are just now beginning to think through the costs associated with this rise in organized crime," says Gray Newman, Morgan Stanley's chief economist for Latin America.
The mix of violence and recession means bad business for everybody. On Highway 45 just outside town, Javier Ramirez sits under the corrugated metal roof of his taco stand, waiting — in vain — for customers.
"Everyone is afraid to stop here now," Ramirez says. "Villa Ahumada, the town with no law. We've become famous."
'You can't trust anybody'
Even the dead here aren't allowed to rest in peace.
Days after Jorge Marrufo was buried, the lock on the cemetery gate was smashed. Someone drove back and forth over Marrufo's grave, splitting the wooden cross in two and scattering the flowers.
Then they tossed an empty beer can on the wreckage.
Later that morning, Griselda Munoz, his mother, came to the cemetery with other relatives to mend the cross and collect as many undamaged flowers as they could. They shoveled the sand back into a mound, moistened it with water and put the flowers back.
Munoz says the army killed her son after mistaking him for one of the traffickers. She says that just before he was killed, Marrufo called her and said soldiers were coming down the highway. "I'm all right," she says he told her. That was the last time she heard from him.
The federal attorney general's office originally listed Marrufo as one of the gunmen. But on Wednesday a spokesman for the federal attorney general's office, Angel Torres, said investigators were not sure of his role that night and had not determined how he died. Forensic experts were examining weapons to determine who killed Marrufo, Torres said.
Chavez, the mayor, says he believes Marrufo was killed by drug gang members dressed in fatigues. The soldiers wear masks to protect their identities, and traffickers often wear fatigues, so they are hard to tell apart, he said.
"There's no one to go for help around here," Munoz said. "You can't trust anybody to protect you."
Whoever killed Marrufo, many here fear their business in Villa Ahumada isn't finished. As Marrufo's family prepared to leave the gravesite, an unfamiliar SUV rolled slowly into the cemetery and parked behind some tombs.
Munoz shot a worried glance at the SUV and hurried to her car. The family drove out together, for safety, and left the broken flowers in a heap next to Marrufo's grave.
Hawley is Latin America correspondent for USA TODAY and the Arizona Republic

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