Thursday, January 27, 2011

MEX DRUG CARTELS CLEANING UP ON, OVER & UNDER OUR OPEN BORDERS

LA RAZA PELOSI HAS ALWAYS VOWED THE WALL WITH NARCOMEX WOULD NEVER BE BUILT. OBAMA HAS STOPPED IT!






LA RAZA PELOSI HAS LONG HIRED ILLEGALS ON THE CHEAP AT HER ST. HELENA, NAPA WINERY!



LA RAZA FEINSTEIN HAS LONG HIRED ILLEGALS AT HER S.F. HOTEL, JUST MILES FROM HER $17 MILLION WAR PROFITEER MANSION! SHE MIGHT FACE FORECLOSURE IF SHE HAD TO PAY LIVING WAGES TO HOTEL WORKERS!



IT’S ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED AND THEIR CORPORATE PAYMASTERS HAPPY AND GENEROUS!

*



LOS ANGELES IS THE MEX GANG CAPITAL OF AMERICA. MEX GANGS HAVE NOW SPREAD ALL OVER THE STATE AND COUNTRY, AND DAILY MURDER LEGALS IN COLD BLOOD! EVEN AS WE ARE FORCED TO PAY FOR THEIR HEAVY ANCHOR BABY BREEDING!







*

Threat grows as Mexican cartels move to beef up U.S. presence

By William Booth and Nick Miroff

Washington Post Foreign Service

Tuesday, October 19, 2010; 1:36 AM

SAN DIEGO -- When a major Mexican drug cartel opened a branch office here on the California side of the border, U.S. authorities tapped into their cellphones - then listened, watched and waited.

Their surveillance effort captured more than 50,000 calls over six months, conversations that reached deep into Mexico and helped build a sprawling case against 43 suspects - including Mexican police and top officials - allegedly linked to a savage trafficking ring known as the Fernando Sanchez Organization.

According to the wiretaps and confidential informants, the suspects plotted kidnappings and killings and hired American teenage girls, with nicknames like Dopey, to smuggle quarter-pound loads of methamphetamine across the border for $100 a trip. To send a message to a rival, they dumped a disemboweled dog in his mother's front yard.

But U.S. law enforcement officials say the most worrisome thing about the Fernando Sanchez Organization was how aggressively it moved to set up operations in the United States, working out of a San Diego apartment it called "The Office."

At a time of heightened concern in Washington that drug violence along the border may spill into the United States, the case dubbed "Luz Verde," or Green Light, shows how Mexican cartels are trying to build up their U.S. presence.

The Fernando Sanchez Organization's San Diego venture functioned almost like a franchise, prosecutors say, giving it greater control over lucrative smuggling routes and drug distribution networks north of the border.

"They moved back and forth, from one side to the other. They commuted. We had lieutenants of the organization living here in San Diego and ordering kidnappings and murders in Mexico," said Todd Robinson, the assistant U.S. attorney who will prosecute the alleged drug ring next year.

The case shows that as the border becomes less of an operational barrier for Mexican cartels, it appears to be less of one for U.S. surveillance efforts. Because the suspects' cellphone and radio traffic could be captured by towers on the northern side of the border, U.S. agents were able to eavesdrop on calls made on Mexican cellphones, between two callers in Mexico - a tactic prosecutors say has never been deployed so extensively.

Captured on one wiretap: a cartel leader, a former homicide detective from Tijuana, negotiating with a Mexican state judicial police officer about a job offer to lead a death squad.

Recorded on other calls: the operation's biggest catch, Jesus Quinones Marquez, a high-ranking Mexican official and alleged cartel operative code-named "El Rinon," or "The Kidney." As he worked and socialized with U.S. law enforcement officials in his role as international liaison for the Baja California attorney general's office, Quinones passed confidential information to cartel bosses and directed Mexican police to take action against rival traffickers, prosecutors say.

He and 34 other suspects are now in U.S. jails. The remaining eight are still at large.

Investigators say it is not unusual for Mexican cartel leaders and their underlings to move north to seek refuge, or place representatives in such cities as Los Angeles, Chicago and Atlanta to manage large deliveries of drugs. But the Fernando Sanchez Organization was more ambitious. It was building a network in San Diego, complete with senior managers to facilitate large and small drug shipments and sales.

Cross-border network

The gang is an offshoot of the Tijuana cartel, led by baby-faced Fernando Sanchez Arellano, a nephew of the once fearsome Arellano-Felix brothers who ran the Tijuana drug trade for almost 20 years before they were captured or killed. The nephew's organization is a weaker syndicate, at war with itself and rivals, police say, and locked in a desperate struggle to maintain market share in the highly competitive billion-dollar drug corridor into California.

Unlike the cartel crews in Mexico, which are typically built on strong ties between families or friends, the San Diego franchise recruited from U.S.-based Latino street gangs. Some were illegal immigrants, others U.S. citizens, according to arrest warrants. Twelve of the 43 indicted have alleged gang affiliations in San Diego. Six of the 43 are current or former Mexican law enforcement officers. Eight are women.

"You couldn't pick these people out of a crowd," said Leonard Miranda, a retired captain in the Chula Vista, Calif., police department who worked on the investigation. "Some of them kept a very low profile. Their family members didn't even know."

According to the 86-page federal racketeering indictment unsealed July 23, cartel members operated stash houses, managed smuggling crews, distributed marijuana and methamphetamine, trafficked weapons, laundered money, committed robberies and collected drug debts. When people did not pay, they were kidnapped or targeted with execution on both sides of the border.

U.S. authorities say the wiretaps allowed them to foil murder plots and other violent acts. The assistant special agent in charge of the San Diego FBI office, David Bowdich, said his teams stopped the execution of two Mexican police officers. The authorities also saved a cartel associate called "Sharky" who was going to be killed because he had disrespected drug lords in Tijuana.

Troubling signs

From their apartments by the beach or cars parked at motels, the targets of the investigation talked and talked on their cellphones.

They almost always spoke in Spanish, usually in clipped code, with lots of street slang. They bought and quickly discarded the phones. Top lieutenants often employed "alineadores," personal assistants who juggled a dozen phones and took messages so that the boss would not be heard on the line. Investigators say the alleged cartel members clearly were afraid that their calls could be monitored.

And they were right. In February, the FBI secured hard-to-get "roving" wiretaps for 44 individuals that allowed investigators to track their movements via global positioning satellites.

According to U.S. law enforcement officials, the Mexican government was not involved in the investigation.

Quinones, the high-ranking Mexican official, was a close adviser to Attorney General Rommel Moreno, the top prosecutor in Mexico's Baja California state. He was arrested July 22 when U.S. agents invited him to the San Diego police department to help with an investigation. It was a setup.

"My client's gone from a cross-border international liaison officer to a guy in a 10-by-10-foot isolation cell in lockdown 23 hours a day," said his defense attorney, Patrick Hall, who described Quinones as "a normal dad with three kids, married 11 years, who lived in Tijuana all his adult life and was one of the dads out there at the Little League baseball games."

Hall said the federal agents were "reading in facts and interpretations and distortions into the true meanings of what's being said on the wiretaps."

Quinones's arrest has almost certainly dealt a blow to efforts at cross-border information sharing and collaboration, though officials on both sides played down the apparent betrayal. "Would you stop going to church just because of one bad priest?" Quinones's boss, Moreno, said in an interview in Tijuana.

But the U.S. wiretaps also detected other troubling signs of corruption.

On the day of the mass arrests, U.S. agents arranged for suspected drug lieutenant Jose Najera Gil to pick up visa documents he was seeking from the U.S. Consulate in Tijuana. But the Mexican police who were supposed to arrest him at the consulate failed to show up.

A day before the arrests, another Mexican police officer, Jose Ortega Nuvo, received a call on his cellphone, which was being tapped by U.S agents. The caller warned him that he was about to be arrested. According to court testimony, the call came from the offices of the federal police in Mexico City - a special unit vetted to work alongside agents from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

*

Mexican drug gangs gain foothold in Guatemalan jungle

Tim Johnson
McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: October 27, 2010 09:50:17 PM

EL REMATE, Guatemala — The Peten jungle, once known for its jaguars and Mayan ruins, has fallen prey to a notorious Mexican drug gang that operates from remote jungle ranches and has begun openly challenging Guatemalan security forces for control of the roads.

The struggle that's under way in this remote region could help determine the fate of Guatemala, a fragile democracy south of Mexico that's already under enormous pressure from narcotics gangs. It's certain to affect Mexico, which is struggling to maintain order against powerful armed gangs on its northern borders.

In a fierce clash that began south of the famous Tikal ruins, the drug gang known as Los Zetas, based in Mexico's northeastern border area and the Yucatan Peninsula, was able to outgun local police by deploying armored vehicles, bigger guns and far more ammunition. Then it fought a large army patrol to a draw, losing vehicles and taking wounded but apparently getting away with a stash of cocaine.

The transformation of the once-pristine jungle into a no man's land is the latest calamity to befall Guatemala, which has had a history of military domination, a 36-year civil war and a genocide conducted by the Guatemalan army against Mayan Indians some three decades ago. Although the CIA helped overthrow a government in 1952, Guatemala's newest drama is getting little high-level attention in Washington.

The recent confrontation between Los Zetas and the authorities began with a shouted warning from a bullhorn and a wrong turn.

Around midday on Oct. 5, when police stopped a convoy of 16 or so big double-cabin pickups and other vehicles a short drive south of the Tikal National Park, an amplified voice from one vehicle barked a warning:

"We are Los Zetas! Let us pass. We don't want problems."

To make their point, several men carrying assault rifles got out of the vehicles and fired hundreds of rounds into the air in a deafening display of firepower.

To describe the police as alarmed is an understatement.

"If you have an M16 rifle, and all I have is a 9 mm pistol, and you have 10 other guys behind you, I won't mess with you," said local police Sub-Inspector Oscar Bertruin, who was at the scene.

The police let the convoy pass, then called for help from the army, according to the accounts of several officers, nearly all of whom declined to give their names for fear of retaliation.

Los Zetas, a mercenary group founded by Mexican former special forces troops who broke off early this year from the Gulf Cartel in northeast Mexico, is at the top of the criminal heap. As the two groups wage a turf war in their home region, the Zetas have continued pushing into the eastern side of Central America, strengthening a cocaine pipeline from Colombia.

A larger rival Mexican cartel, the Sinaloa Federation, reportedly focuses on a corridor along Central America's Pacific coast.

The State Department's international narcotics and law enforcement chief, David T. Johnson, said in a speech Oct. 5 that 275 tons of cocaine transited Guatemala each year, nearly all of it destined for the United States.

Mexico is wary of the growing trouble on its southern frontier.

"If Guatemala goes down the drink, then Mexico is dealing with its northern and its southern borders. A major failure of democracy in Guatemala is going to directly impact Mexico City — resources, political capital, time, energy, human resources, everything — and that negatively affects the United States," said Samuel Logan, the regional manager for the Americas at iJet Intelligent Risk Systems, a consultancy on risk management based in Annapolis, Md.

From a stronghold in the Guatemalan city of Coban, the mountain capital of Alto Verapaz a little to the south, the Zetas have been pushing into the Peten, appearing sometimes in sizable numbers, maneuvering at ease and with military discipline.

"They circulate with numerous forces and carry the latest weaponry. When they use violence, no authority exists here that can control them," said Hector Rosada-Granados, a sociologist who helped negotiate the end to a 36-year guerrilla war in Guatemala in the 1990s.

The Zetas, striking up alliances with local drug clans, use a string of "narco-ranches" scattered deep in the Peten that are home to hundreds of dirt landing strips. In the remote Laguna del Tigre region, U.S. drug agents have spotted a "cemetery" where narcos abandon and torch aircraft after unloading cocaine from the Andes.

Sometimes rival gangs battle for the cocaine or underlings steal from their bosses. A 43-year-old ranch owner, Giovanni Espana, reportedly stung the Zetas that way back in June. A commando squad executed him June 26, but the missing shipment never turned up.

In early October, a Zetas contingent of some 80 to 90 heavily armed men arrived at the Espana ranch near El Naranjo, where the slain rancher's widow still resided, and used earth-moving machinery to dig for the dope. Later events indicate they might have found it.

The Zetas convoy started traveling west toward Mexico on Oct. 5, when it bullied its way past the police.

Then bad luck hit. The Mexicans got lost. At the eastern end of Peten Itza Lake, they turned up a road toward the Mayan ruins of Tikal. It was after nightfall. They turned around, and were heading down a hill at the hamlet of El Capulinar when they ran into military units backed up by police, who'd been lent army assault rifles. For 10 to 15 minutes, a full-bore battle unfolded.

Some Zetas gunmen sprayed heavy fire at the soldiers, while others launched grenades. Still others shot flares into the sky so the Zetas could see soldiers using their vehicles as parapets. As the firefight ebbed, the Zetas caravan broke through the roadblock, with vehicles peeling off two by two, some of them with tires shot out, to leave passage for key vehicles in the middle.

At least five Zetas vehicles, all apparently armored, pierced the roadblock. Police now suspect that the vehicles transported the recovered cocaine.

The soldiers managed to immobilize 11 of the Zeta vehicles. Three people are known to have died. A soldier was among the wounded. Most of the gunmen melted into the jungle.

The intensity of the battle jolted even the soldiers.

"A lot of the soldiers who were in the firefight asked to be discharged later because they were frightened," said Bertruin, the police official.

Migrant workers who clear land by slashing down forest, who've flooded to the Peten, also have found themselves dealing with criminal pressure.

"The narcos arrive at the farms and pay cash for whatever price the owner asks. If he refuses to sell, they threaten him," said Edgar Gutierrez, a former Guatemalan foreign minister. "The state (is) absent. Police, prosecutors and judges have been co-opted by the drug traffickers."

The Peten has only five legal border crossings with Mexico, Gutierrez said, but more than 100 unsanctioned crossings have opened up.

Along those dirt tracks, workers move cocaine toward Mexico on the backs of four-wheeled all-terrain buggies. Then they return to ranch jobs.

"Half the time they work as ranch hands, and half the time they offload airplanes and light torches along the sides of clandestine landing strips," Logan said.

No comments: