MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com
*
Go to http://www.MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com
MEXICAN TERRORIST AND THE MEX DRUG CARTELS COMMIT AS MANY MURDERS AS MUSLIMS TERRORIST OVER THERE. BEHEADINGS ARE TYPICAL OF BOTH TERRORIST GROUPS. AND YET, OBAMA HAS DONE NOTHING BUT FIGHT AGAINST BORDER SECURITY, AS HE HAS HIS LA RAZA PROPAGANDA MINISTER, JANET NAPOLITANO LIE THROUGH HER BIG LA RAZA MOUNT ABOUT HER DEPT. of Homeland Security = Pathway to Citizenship’s TRUE EFFECTIVENESS.
*
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.
*
Obama Quietly Erasing Borders (Article)
Article Link:
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=240045
WND Exclusive PREMEDITATED MERGER
Obama quietly erasing borders
Dem administration advancing 'North American Union' agenda
Posted: December 15, 2010
10:20 pm Eastern
By Jerome R. Corsi
© 2010 WorldNetDaily
NOGALES, AZ - DECEMBER 10: U.S. agricultural inspector Mike Ollman questions a motorist entering the United States at the U.S.-Mexico border crossing on December 10, 2010 at Nogales, Arizona. Despite Arizona's tough immigration enforcement laws, thousands of Mexican citizens have permits to work in the U.S. and commute daily from their homes across the border in Mexico. Border crossings, known as ports of entry, are run by the U.S. Office of Field Operations, which is part of the department of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Port personnel are the face at the border for most visitors and cargo entering the United States and are authorized to stop, question, search and examine everyone entering the country. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)
Acting quietly, below the radar of U.S. public opinion and without congressional approval, the Obama administration is implementing a key policy objective of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, or SPP, to erase the border with Mexico and Canada.
The administration is acting under a State Department-declared policy initiative described in a March 23 fact sheet titled "United States-Mexico Partnership: A New Border Vision."
"Mexico and the United States have a shared interest in creating a 21st century border that promotes the security and prosperity of both countries," the State Department declared. "The U.S. and Mexican governments have launched a range of initiatives that challenge the traditional view of 'hold the line' and are developing a framework for a new vision of 21st centuryborder management."
At the same time, CTV News in Canada has obtained a draft copy of a declaration between the U.S. and Canada entitled "Beyond theBorder: A Shared Vision for Perimeter Security and Competitiveness," to be implemented by a newly created Canadian-U.S. "Beyond the Border Working Group."
Get "The Late Great USA" and find out how America is giving away its sovereignty
The two documents strongly suggest the Obama administration is pursuing a stealth bureaucratic methodology to establish a common North Americanborder around the continent, encompassing the U.S., Canada and Mexico, while simultaneously moving to erase the borders between the U.S. and Mexico as well as between the U.S. and Canada.
Under the Bush administration's SPP, the U.S., Mexico and Canada organized some 20 different "shadow government" bureaucratic working groups composed of agency heads and undersecretaries in the three nations. The groups span a wide range of policy areas, from e-commerce, to aviation policy, toborders and immigration, trilateral travel, transportation, energy, environment, food and agriculture, health and financial services.
WND has reported since 2006 that a blueprint published in 2005 by the Council on Foreign Relations entitled "Building a North America Community" called for the establishment of a common security perimeter around North America by 2010 to facilitate the free movement of people, trade and capital between the three nations of North America.
In his 2001 book, "Toward a North American Community," American University professor Robert Pastor, a co-chair of the CFR blue ribbon committee that authored "Building a North American Community," called for the creation of a North American Commission, a North American Parliament, and a North American Court on Trade and Investment.
The language of the documents declaring "A New Border Vision" with Mexico and Canada could easily have been lifted directly from the CFR report or Pastor's book.
The 2005 CFR report "Building a North American Community" called on page xvii of the Foreword for the "establishment by 2010 of a North American economic and security perimeter, the boundaries of which would be defined by a common external tariff and an outer security perimeter."
CTV News reported that the language of the draft agreement specified that "A New Border Vision" for the U.S. and Canada would involve "a perimeter approach to security, working together within, at, and away from theborders of our two countries in a way that supports economic competitiveness, job creation and prosperity, and in a partnership to enhance our security and accelerate the legitimate flow of people and goods between our two countries."
Similarly, the U.S. State Department fact sheet calling for "A New Border Vision" with Mexico specified five areas of "joint border management, co-responsibility for cross-border crime, and shared commitment to the efficient flow of legal commerce and travel," namely: enhancing public safety, securing flows of people and goods, expediting legitimate commerce and travel, engaging border communities, and setting policy.
Under "setting policy," the State Department fact sheet with Mexico called for achieving rapid policy change through "an agile inter-agency process within each country as well as a means by which both governments can easily coordinate at a bi-national level."
This provides additional support for the conclusion that the bureaucratic "working groups" established under SPP in the Bush administration will continue to operate under Obama administration.
CTV News reported that the draft declaration of "A New Border Vision" with Canada similarly also specified a cross-border policy agenda, including:
* An integrated cargo security strategy;
* A joint approach to port and border security and screening;
* Cross-border sharing of information between law enforcement agencies;
* A closer working relationship between the two militaries in the event of emergencies;
* A new level of collaboration on preventing and recovering from counter attacks.
Affirming the continuance of the working group process, the draft declaration with Canada specifies the U.S. and Canada "intend to address threats at the earliest point possible, including outside the perimeter of our two countries."
The origin of the SPP can be traced to a trilateral summit meeting in Waco, Texas, March 23, 2005, between President George W. Bush, then-Mexican President Vicente Fox and then-Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin.
At the end of the Waco summit, the three leaders simply declared that the U.S., Mexico and Canada were now in the Security and Prosperity Partnership, without the signing of any international agreement between the three countries or the ratifying of any trilateral treaty by the U.S. Senate.
The SPP in the administration of President Bush appeared designed to replicate the steps taken in Europe over a 50-year period following the end of World War II to transform an economic agreement under the European Common Market into a full-fledged regional government, operating as the European Union, with its own currency, the euro, functioning as the sole legitimate currency in what has become known as "the eurozone."
The concern was that under the SPP, the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, could evolve into a regional government, the North American Union, with a regional currency, the Amero, designed to replace the U.S. dollar, the Mexican peso and the Canadian dollar.
WND has reported analysts have believed the North American integration plan will proceed incrementally, largely below the radar, since the SPP was declared "dead" by one of its chief architects, American University Professor Robert A. Pastor, who for nearly 15 years has been a major proponent of building a "North American Community."
*
Al Qaida affiliates still at fore of threats to U.S.: Clapper
Jonathan S. Landay
McClatchy Newspapers
last updated: February 10, 2011 12:09:37 PM
WASHINGTON — Terrorism, the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and espionage, especially cyber attacks and the theft of U.S. technology, are the leading U.S. national security threats, the top U.S. intelligence official said Thursday.
Delivering the U.S. intelligence community’s annual threat assessment to Congress, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper said the country faces “numerous” other “potential dangers over the long term."
“It is the multiplicity and interconnectedness of potential threats — and the actors behind them — that constitute our biggest challenge,” Clapper said in the report submitted to the House Intelligence Committee.
Testifying before the committee, Clapper was flanked by the heads of other U.S. intelligence agencies, including CIA Director Leon Panetta.
Clapper said that the al Qaida leadership based in Pakistan’s tribal region bordering Afghanistan has been “damaged” by U.S. counter-terrorism efforts.
But, he continued, Osama bin Laden’s inner circle and affiliated groups in the Middle East and North Africa will remain “at the forefront of our national security threats over the coming year,” plotting attacks on the U.S. homeland and targets overseas.
Apparently referring to the deaths of operatives in U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan’s tribal areas, Clapper said that, “In light of the loss of experienced personnel, we judge that it (al Qaida) will seek to augment sophisticated plots by increasing its operational tempo with smaller, simpler ones to demonstrate its continued relevance to the global jihad.”
He warned that al Qaida “affiliates” in North Africa, Somalia and Yemen “probably will grow stronger” in the absence of “more effective and sustained activities to disrupt them.”
“The result may be that regional affiliates conducting most of the terrorist attacks and multiple voices will provide inspiration for the global jihadist movement,” Clapper said.”
Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, the Yemen-based group behind the failed 2009 Christmas Day bombing of an airliner over Detroit and last year’s foiled plot to ship bombs disguised as printer cartridges to the United States, “is increasingly devoted to directing and inspiring attacks on the U.S. homeland and other targets in the West, he continued.
In a related development, Clapper said that “a small, but growing number of Americans have become involved in the global jihadist movement” over the last five years, many of them inspired by extremist propaganda on the Internet.
“They have occupied a variety of roles with extremist groups overseas, such as foot soldiers and front line combatants, operational planners, propagandists, attack operatives for Homeland plots, and even senior leaders, with some American extremists combining multiple roles,” he said.
“American extremists will likely remain a small part of the jihad, but play a disproportionately large role in the threat to US interests because of their understanding of the U.S. homeland, connections to compatriots back in the United States, and relatively easy access to the homeland and potentially to US facilities overseas,” he warned.
Clapper indicated that U.S. intelligence analysts don’t believe that Iran has begun developing a nuclear weapon yet.
“We assess that Iran is keeping open the option” by forging ahead with its uranium enrichment program in defiance of U.N. Security Council demands to suspend the effort, he said.
“We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons,” said Clapper. There is “a real risk,” he warned, that Iran’s refusal to halt its program “will prompt other countries in the Middle East to pursue nuclear options.”
Although North Korea has twice tested nuclear devices during the last six years, Clapper said that the U.S. intelligence community assessed that it “would consider using nuclear weapons only under certain narrow circumstances.”
The United States “remains the highest priority intelligence target” for many foreign intelligence services,” Clapper said. “The cyber environment provides unprecedented opportunities for adversaries to target the U.S. due to our reliance on information systems.”
*
latimes.com
Surge of immigrants from India baffles border officials in Texas
Thousands from India have entered Texas illegally from Mexico in the last year. Most are Sikhs who claim religious persecution at home.
By Richard Marosi and Andrew Becker
February 6, 2011
Reporting from Harlingen, Texas Thousands of immigrants from India have crossed into the United States illegally at the southern tip of Texas in the last year, part of a mysterious and rapidly growing human-smuggling pipeline that is backing up court dockets, filling detention centers and triggering investigations.
The immigrants, mostly young men from poor villages, say they are fleeing religious and political persecution. More than 1,600 Indians have been caught since the influx began here early last year, while an undetermined number, perhaps thousands, are believed to have sneaked through undetected, according to U.S. border authorities.
Hundreds have been released on their own recognizance or after posting bond. They catch buses or go to local Indian-run motels before flying north for the final leg of their months-long journeys.
"It was long … dangerous, very dangerous," said one young man wearing a turban outside the bus station in the Rio Grande Valley town of Harlingen.
The Indian migration in some ways mirrors the journeys of previous waves of immigrants from far-flung places, such as China and Brazil, who have illegally crossed the U.S. border here. But the suddenness and still-undetermined cause of the Indian migration baffles many border authorities and judges.
The trend has caught the attention of anti-terrorism officials because of the pipeline's efficiency in delivering to America's doorstep large numbers of people from a troubled region. Authorities interview the immigrants, most of whom arrive with no documents, to ensure that people from neighboring Pakistan or Middle Eastern countries are not slipping through.
There is no evidence that terrorists are using the smuggling pipeline, FBI and Department of Homeland Security officials said.
The influx shows signs of accelerating: About 650 Indians were arrested in southern Texas in the last three months of 2010 alone. Indians are now the largest group of immigrants other than Latin Americans being caught at the Southwest border.
The migration is the "most significant" human-smuggling trend being tracked by U.S. authorities, said Kumar Kibble, deputy director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. In 2009, the Border Patrol arrested only 99 Indians along the entire Southwest border.
"It's a dramatic increase," Kibble said. "We do want to monitor these pipelines and shut them down because it is a vulnerability. They could either knowingly or unknowingly smuggle people into the U.S. that pose a national security threat."
Most of the immigrants say they are from the Punjab or Gujarat states. They are largely Sikhs who say they face religious persecution, or members of the Bharatiya Janata Party who say they are targeted for beatings by members of the National Congress Party.
But analysts and human rights monitors say political conditions in India don't explain the migration. There is no evidence of the kind of persecution that would prompt a mass exodus, they say, and Sikhs haven't been targets since the 1980s. The prime minister of India, Manmohan Singh, is a Sikh.
"There is no reason to believe these claims have any truth to them," said Sumit Ganguly, a political science professor and director of the India Studies Program at Indiana University.
Some authorities think the immigrants are simply seeking economic opportunities and are willing to pay $12,000 to $20,000 to groups that smuggle them to staging grounds in northern Mexico. Kibble said smugglers may have shifted to the Southwest after ICE dismantled visa fraud rings that brought Indians to the Northeast.
Many Indians begin their journey by flying from Mumbai to Dubai, then to South American countries such as Ecuador or Venezuela, according to authorities and immigration attorneys. Guatemala has emerged as the key transit hub into Mexico, they said. The roundabout journeys are necessary because Mexico requires visas for Indians.
They sneak across the dangerous Guatemala-Mexico border and take buses or private vehicles to the closest U.S.-Mexico border. Mexican organized crime groups are suspected of being involved either in running the operations or in charging groups tolls to pass through their territory.
The Indians usually wade across the Rio Grande, and then are shuttled from stash houses to transportation rings that take them north. David Aguilar, deputy commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security, said he believed a high percentage were caught as soon as they crossed the river.
"We very intensely interview, look at their backgrounds, check them against any watch list," Aguilar said, adding that although India is not considered a "special interest" source country for terrorists, the undocumented immigrants are scrutinized as if it were.
The detainees eventually claim asylum. In January, immigration court calendars at the area's two main detention facilities were full of the common Indian surnames Patel and Singh, and attorneys and judges struggled to keep up. Some attorneys had failed to file the necessary forms; interpreters were not always available. Judge Keith Hunsucker said more immigration judges would soon be assigned to handle the increased workload.
Many detained immigrants clear the first hurdle toward a full asylum hearing by convincing asylum officers they have a "credible fear" of persecution if they return to India. They can then post a bond and move anywhere in the United States as long as they agree to appear for their next court date.
Not all show up, however. "That's why I won't take their cases anymore," said Cathy Potter, a local immigration attorney who helped about 20 Indians get freed on bond last year. "It undermines my credibility. I don't want anything to do with this."
It is not clear how many Indians have been granted asylum or deported; immigration officials did not fulfill requests for that information. Judges and attorneys appear to be toughening up, however. Bond amounts have risen sharply in recent months, and attorneys say asylum claims are increasingly being rejected.
Judge William Peterson raised doubts during a recent hearing when a 27-year-old Punjabi woman said she had been beaten and raped, her sari ripped off by several attackers. The petite woman, her long hair in a ponytail, said she was targeted because her husband was a driver for National Congress Party officials.
"I haven't heard you tell me anything that you did on behalf of the party that would irritate these people," Peterson said at the hearing held by video conference.
"We used to give help to the poor. They did not like that," she said. Peterson rejected her claim for a finding of "credible fear," deeming her story inconsistent with statements she had made to an asylum officer. "They're going to kill me. They're going to rape me," she pleaded, wiping away a tear.
But hundreds of immigrants have persuaded asylum officers and judges to grant credible-fear findings, clearing the way for bond hearings.
Hunsucker, an immigration judge at the Port Isabel Detention Center near Brownsville, set bond amounts ranging from $15,000 to $40,000 for 10 Indians one recent morning.
Most said they had relatives or friends in the U.S. willing to sponsor them, though the judge raised concerns about some. In one case, a young man said his sponsor was his cousin, a woman. But the faxed identification document of the cousin showed a picture of a man with a beard. The bond was set at $15,000.
Once released, the immigrants are transported to the Greyhound bus station in downtown Harlingen. One recent evening, 10 Indians crowded around pay telephones and the bus counter, struggling with limited English skills to arrange travel.
One young man paid for a $204, two-day bus ride to New York City. When the clerk asked his name, he handed over his detention center ID wristband.
A young man wearing a turban asked the clerk for information on the next bus to Indiana. He spoke broken English and later tried to provide details about his journey, but other immigrants nudged him to keep quiet. The trip was worth it, he said, adding, "I'm happy, because it's safe" in the U.S.
Outside, motel operators offered to shuttle the men to their nearby quarters. Shoving matches between motel operators have broken out in recent weeks as they compete to fill their $44-per-night rooms with immigrants.
The Indians are largely unseen in the towns along the Rio Grande Valley, where they disappear into detention centers, stash houses or motel rooms. Some Sikhs have been confronted by locals alarmed by the sight of people wearing turbans, motel workers say.
Federal agents investigating human-smuggling rings have visited at least one motel, America's Best Value Inn in Raymondville, workers said. General Manager Kevin Patel denied any wrongdoing.
He houses about 20 Indians per week, he said, shuttling them to and from the bus station and printing out airline boarding passes. He serves them meals in his motel apartment, often the first Indian food they've had in months, he said.
One recent guest, Bharat Panchal, 37, said he was released from detention in late January after friends posted his $20,000 bond. India had become dangerous, he said, because of political unrest in his home state of Gujarat. He was flying later that day to Los Angeles to live with a friend, he said.
Patel said the sudden appearance of Indian immigrants in southern Texas baffled him.
"When they first showed up, I scratched my head a little bit," Patel said. But he has opened his doors and makes the immigrants feel at home.
"They need a place to stay," he said. "They need food. They speak my language, so of course, as a human being, I can help them out."
*
FROM JUDICIAL WATCH
http://www.JUDICIALWATCH.org
Radical Muslim Cleric Slips into U.S. Through Mexico
Last Updated: Tue, 02/01/2011 - 12:29pm
A radical Muslim cleric banned from two different countries snuck into the United States through Mexico, affirming several reports that Middle Eastern terrorists regularly enter the country through the porous southern border.
The Tunisian imam (Said Jaziri), who has an international criminal past, paid $5,000 to get smuggled across the border near San Diego, according to a local newspaper that says it all went down just a few weeks ago. Jaziri only got caught because firefighters in the area tipped off the U.S. Border Patrol after they saw him and a Mexican man get into a car trunk in a renowned smuggling pickup area.
A Tijuana-based smuggling cartel had escorted Jaziri and a Mexican illegal immigrant over the border fence near Tecate, according to authorities cited in the story. Once on the U.S. side, they walked in the night to a spot where drivers routinely pick illegal aliens up for smuggling runs into San Diego. Jaziri evidently told authorities that he flew from Africa to Europe then to Central America and Chetumal, Mexico where he took a bus to Tijuana.
Jaziri was deported from Canada a few years ago and from France sometime in the 1990s, after serving a prison sentence for participating in a fundamentalist attack on a person who was accused of closing down a prayer room. Jaziri once led the largest mosque in Montreal, where he advocated Islamic law, known as Sharia. A few years ago he called for the death of a Danish cartoonist that drew pictures of the prophet Mohammed.
Incredibly, a growing number of Islamic extremists like Jaziri are slipping into the U.S. through Mexico. Just a few months ago a veteran federal agent announced that The U.S. Border Patrol has captured thousands of people who have been classified as OTM (Other Than Mexican) along the 2,000-mile southern border and many are from terrorist nations like Yemen, Iran, Sudan, Somalia and Afghanistan. The feds call them SIAs (Special Interest Aliens) and the government doesn’t want Americans to know about them.
This has been going on for some time. In fact, in 2007 the top Homeland Security official in Texas confirmed that terrorists with ties to Hezbollah, Hamas and Al Qaeda had been arrested crossing into the state through the Mexican border. A few years ago the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) revealed details of how Islamic terrorists and violent Mexican drug gangs have long teamed up to successfully penetrate the U.S. as well as finance terror networks in the Middle East.
*
THE REASON NAPOLITANO HEADS THE DEPT of HOMELAND SECURITY = PATHWAY TO CITIZENSHIP… IS BECAUSE SHE’S A LA RAZA PARTY MEMBER AND ADVOCATE FOR OPEN BORDERS LIKE OBAMA, AND HIS NEW CHIEF OF STAFF, J.P. MORGAN BANKSTER AND OPEN BORDERS ADVOCATE
FROM JUDICIAL WATCH
Napolitano Touts “Unprecedented” Border Security Plan
Last Updated: Wed, 02/02/2011 - 12:31pm
In a perpetual state of denial, Janet Napolitano insists that security along the Mexican border has been strengthened “in a way that many would not have thought possible,” even as drug-cartel violence reaches epic proportions and routinely spills into the U.S.
The delusional assessment from the nation’s Homeland Security chief comes just a few months after her equally infuriating estimate that the southern border “is as secure as it has ever been.” Napolitano made that assertion in September, as violence escalated along the Mexican border and overwhelmed federal agents got attacked by heavily armed drug smugglers. In fact, days before Madam Secretary made that brilliant statement, Border Patrol agents came under siege during a bust that netted half a ton of U.S.-bound marijuana.
As the crisis worsens, Napolitano continues to paint a rosy picture that certainly diminishes her credibility as the top official responsible for keeping the nation safe. During a speech at a Texas university this week she said that the Obama Administration’s “unprecedented effort” to intensify southwest border security “is working” and that the nation’s “partnership with Mexico is strong.” The U.S. government has given Mexico more than $1 billion in the last few years to combat drug violence, though its worst than ever.
Napolitano did acknowledge that there are still “challenges” and that she’s “deeply concerned about the drug cartel violence taking place in Mexico.” That’s probably because the sophisticated operations have taken over northern portions of the notoriously corrupt Latin American country and the U.S. is feeling the spillover effects.
In fact, Mexico’s most violent region (Ciudad Juarez) borders El Paso and the situation is so serious that bullets from shootouts among rival smugglers regularly spill into the city, once ranked among the nation’s safest. One example took place a few months ago when a myriad of bullets fired into El Paso, striking City Hall and a public university building. The local sheriff says the gun battles are breaking out everywhere but his hands are tied because he’s legally forbidden from intervening in another country’s war.
Napolitano agrees that the U.S. must guard against such “spillover effects,” but insists that it “is inaccurate to state, as too many have, that the border is overrun with violence and out of control.” That statement is often made to “score political points,” Napolitano says, and it is “just plain wrong.” To assure that our southern neighbors get the speech, the Department of Homeland Security has posted a Spanish version on its web site.
*
*
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment