Monday, November 14, 2011

DeMint, Vitter & Sessions to Offer Bill to Stop Obama Administration from Suing States Over Enforcement of Immigration Laws - United States Senator Jim DeMint

DeMint, Vitter & Sessions to Offer Bill to Stop Obama Administration from Suing States Over Enforcement of Immigration Laws - United States Senator Jim DeMint

The Mexican Drug Cartels In MEXIFORNIA - Formerly the American State of California



WHY NARCOmex LOVES OBAMA’S OPEN BORDERS WELCOME MAT: IT’S GOOD FOR THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS!

ACCORDING TO CA ATTORNEY GENERAL KAMALA HARRIS, NEARLY HALF OF ALL MURDERS IN CA ARE BY MEXICAN GANGS! WHAT ELSE DO YOU NEED TO KNOW? DID YOU VOTE TO EXPAND THE LA RAZA OCCUPATION?
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"Gang members do not heed borders," he said. "Gang members move here but do not cut their ties."
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latimes.com
Mexican cartels setting up shop across U.S.
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Frediberto Pineda, a member of the Sinaloa cartel, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for heading a cocaine operation in South Carolina's capital. Similar outposts have popped up in Seattle, Anchorage and Minneapolis.
By Richard A. Serrano, Washington Bureau

April 17, 2011

Reporting from Columbia, S.C.

The house on Knightner Road is small, blue and white, with a stone front porch and a string of Christmas lights still hanging. Here, crack cocaine was sold to drive-up customers a few miles from the state Capitol in Columbia.

The one on Pound Road in rural Gaston, just south of Columbia, is a brown-and-white trailer, with a gravel driveway and woods out back. Here, federal law enforcement officers surprised Frediberto Pineda, who had 10 kilos of cocaine worth $350,000 in his possession.

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CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR characterizes Mexican occupied Los Angeles as “the Mexican gang capital of America.”


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MARIA THE LOCAL MEXICAN DRUG DEALER… SHE’S JUST DOWN THE STREET FROM YOU AND YOUR CHILDREN!

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“From the house, Maria "Chata" Leon, an illegal immigrant, her family and associates controlled drug and gang activity on the street for years, police said.”

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From the Los Angeles Times
Avenues gang bastion is demolished
City officials tear down the Satellite House on Drew Street, from which Maria Leon's family allegedly controlled gang and drug activity in Glassell Park. Residents say the area has gotten safer.
By Sam Quinones

February 5, 2009

The two-bedroom stucco house at 3304 Drew St. in Glassell Park was once the center of one of the most menacing drug marketplaces in Los Angeles.

From the house, Maria "Chata" Leon, an illegal immigrant, her family and associates controlled drug and gang activity on the street for years, police said.

During at least two raids at the house, according to court documents, officers found guns and drugs as well as surveillance cameras, laser trip wires and a shrine to Jesus Malverde, a Mexican folk hero whom drug traffickers have made their patron saint.

Known as the Satellite House, for the enormous black satellite dish that once stood in the driveway, the home "was a terrifying monument to the power of the Avenues gang" that dominated the two blocks of Drew Street, said City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo.

But all that was history Wednesday morning.

As police and city officials looked on, a Caterpillar excavator took a bite out of the roof, then ate its way through the rest of the structure, and a half-hour later the Satellite House was rubble.

In 2007, Delgadillo's office -- using its TOUGH program to go after houses used as gang hangouts -- won a lawsuit to close the house as a public nuisance.

When the owners -- who city officials allege are straw men covering for Leon and her family -- didn't make repairs, the city's Building and Safety Commission approved plans to demolish it.

Eusterbio Renteria watched the destruction of the house that he said was the source of much family pain. "They should have done this 10 years ago," said Renteria, who has lived on Drew Street since 1972 and watched two of his sons join the gang, using the house as a hangout.

His son Carlos is in prison. According to a law enforcement report, he was heard on a surveillance tape requesting that a friend send him a photo of the Satellite House because he wanted to tattoo it on his body.

A few yards away, Los Angeles Police Officer Steve Aguilar also watched the demolition.

"It feels good," said Aguilar, who patrolled Drew Street for five of its worst years and recently became a detective in another part of the city. "It's been a long time in the making."

The 12-square-block enclave around Drew Street was among the city's most dangerous for years, police said.

Hooded gang members lurked behind parked cars and on apartment balconies, police and residents said. At night, tires squealed and gunshots echoed while neighbors huddled in their homes.

Some years, the street accounted for up to 20% of the violent crime in the 30-square-mile Northeast Division, police said.

For such a small area, Drew Street absorbed more than its share of city resources.

Police used special task forces, undercover drug operations and constant patrols to attack the gang problem. Drew Street's graffiti-scarred trees were regularly trimmed to give cops better visibility. Graffiti removers visited daily, to negligible effect. Street lights were covered with bulletproof glass.

Still, a stubborn culture of criminality reigned, largely because of a web of families from Tlalchapa, Guerrero, in the Tierra Caliente, a region of Mexico known for its violence. Police estimate that members of dozens of these extended families belonged to the Avenues gang and had built a network that proved hard to dismantle.

The neighborhood drew wider attention after a wild shootout between police and gang members last February.

The incident started when a car full of Drew Street gangsters allegedly shot and killed a former Cypress Park gang member outside an elementary school. Police later spotted the car on Drew Street. Maria Leon's son, Daniel, fired an assault rifle at the officers, who fatally shot him. Two others were arrested and charged with murder.

Since then, police and other law enforcement agencies have focused intensely on Drew Street.

In April, Maria Leon was arrested by federal agents and charged with illegally re-entering the country. The mother of 13 had previously been convicted of felony drug, firearms and child endangerment charges in three separate cases dating back to 1992.

In June, hundreds of heavily armed police and federal agents stormed into the neighborhood and arrested 28 people in an attempt to root out the Avenues gang members who had ruled the area with near-impunity.

A sweeping indictment named 70 defendants -- mostly connected to the Drew Street clique of the larger Avenues gang. Of those named, 26 were already in custody.

In December, suspected members of the Drew Street clique, Guillermo Hernandez, 20, and Carlos "Stony" Velasquez, 24, Leon's nephew, were arrested and charged with the Aug. 2 killing of Juan Abel Escalante, a Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy who lived in Cypress Park.

Residents and police say things have calmed down considerably on Drew Street.

But neighbors are still afraid to talk openly for fear of retaliation.

"It's notable how it all got better," one resident said. "You don't see the guys in the street. There's no races, no noise at night. That anxiety, that desperate feeling of wanting to leave -- it's gone."

Violent crime -- which includes homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault -- has dropped significantly in recent years, according to LAPD statistics. On Drew Street and the immediate surrounding neighborhood, the number of violent incidents has fallen from 98 in 2000 to 26 last year.

Recently, police solved a robbery of a nearby store largely based on information collected from residents. "That wouldn't have occurred a year or two years ago," said Capt. Bill Murphy of the Northeast Division.

Teachers at nearby Fletcher Drive Elementary School find their students better rested now that gunshots and police helicopters don't wake them at night, said Maria Manzur, the school's principal.

"There's a more calming effect throughout the school," she said.

On Wednesday, police and city officials were eager to cast the drop in neighborhood crime and the demolition of the Satellite House as a sort of Drew Street victory.

But some residents fear that the gang culture hasn't been entirely uprooted in a neighborhood crowded with apartments and poor people.

They also fear that police will eventually be drawn elsewhere.

But Police Chief William J. Bratton tried to allay those fears Wednesday. His department is hiring 1,000 new officers, he said, and many are expected to be placed in highly stressed neighborhoods such as Drew Street.

"We have never left," he said. "We're here to stay."

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THE LA RAZA OCCUPATION OF MEXIFORNIA

SMALL TOWNS, BIG GANGS TAKE OVER CENTRAL VALLEY OF CALIFORNIA


Law enforcement officials are trying to crack down on the urban problems that have begun to spread into the Central Valley.
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By Tim Reiterman
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer February 24, 2008 DELANO

Here in the birthplace of Cesar Chavez's nonviolent farm labor movement, a 14-year-old who aspired to become a policeman is cut down by gunfire on his front porch. In the farm town of Merced, billed as the gateway to Yosemite, an armed gang member shoots an officer after a vehicle stop -- the first police slaying in the city's 118-year history. And in Red Bluff, which prides itself on its Victorian homes, rodeos, hunting and fishing, a teenage gangster pumps seven bullets into another high school student outside a party. Along the 450 miles of the Central Valley, an explosion of gang violence in recent years has transformed life on the wide, tree-lined streets of California's agricultural heartland. As jobs and relatively affordable housing in the fast-growing region have attracted families from the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas, law enforcement officials say, some have brought gang ties with them, aggravating the valley's home-grown street crime. "What we are seeing is a migration of gangs from larger cities . . . to more rural areas," said Jerry Hunter, who oversees state Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown's anti-gang units. "The gang activity . . . is a huge crisis for those communities." The spread of gang violence has strained police resources and rendered some playgrounds and streets off limits. Bullets have shattered the peace in parks and strip malls. Some graffiti cleanup crews in Stanislaus County have bulletproof vests or police escorts. Lifeguards in Turlock no longer sport traditional red or blue swimwear -- those gang colors might provoke gunfire. Schools in many places have adopted anti-gang dress codes, and rumors of impending gang attacks sometimes scare students from classes. Fear has silenced witnesses to gang crimes. Up and down the valley, task forces have been formed as evidence mounts that street hoodlums are committing homicides, robberies and car thefts and trafficking in drugs. Some communities have taxed themselves to pay for more police. Local, state and federal sweeps have produced thousands of arrests -- but tens of thousands more gang members remain on the streets, authorities say. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has appointed former Sacramento U.S. Atty. Paul Seave as his anti-gang chief, hoping to improve the effectiveness and collaboration of state agencies that spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year to prevent and combat gang violence. And Brown has declared the gang problem a top priority, likening it to domestic terrorism. His office is providing local agencies with expertise, intelligence and agents for raids. The Central Valley contains eight of the 22 counties that had the most gang-related homicides in 2005 and 2006, Seave said. And annual California Department of Justice figures show that the number of valley gang killings has accelerated, as has the number of law enforcement agencies reporting such crimes. In 1997, 50 gang-related homicides were reported, compared with 80 in 2006, the most recent year for which statistics are available. Gang violence came with startling brutality to the Tehama County town of Red Bluff, at the northern reaches of the Sacramento River. After a 17-year-old Sureño gang member repeatedly shot a 16-year-old Norteño gang member outside a house party, rumors of an attack on a local high school caused many students to stay home. The young gang member was sentenced last year to 25 years to life in prison for the 2006 shooting. "This is a small town, and . . . we're not used to those types of things happening," said Greg Ulloa, the county's juvenile probation chief. "But it is getting worse." The lower end of the valley has long been known as the Mason-Dixon Line of California's major Latino gang rivalry. But now clashes between the Sureños, or southerners, and the Norteños, northerners, have migrated through the state. "In the eastern part of the county, families are moving in from the L.A. basin," said Kern County Sheriff's Sgt. Mike Whiting. The gang members who come with them, he said, "are small fish there, but they can be bigger fish here." The North-South conflicts are particularly pronounced in Delano. It is territory claimed by the Norteños, whose traditional strongholds are farming communities and who have adopted as their insignia a version of the United Farm Workers Union's Aztec Eagle symbol. But the town has Sureños too and is only seven miles from that gang's turf in McFarland. One night last year, 14-year-old Steven Fierro, a freshman at Delano's Cesar Chavez High School, was standing outside his tidy tract home with his older brother and two of his brother's friends when they were strafed by rifle fire from a car. Steven was killed and the others wounded in what police say is an unsolved shooting rooted in the gang rivalry. Steven's mother Isabel keeps a small, candlelight shrine inside her front door to remind her of a son she describes as good-hearted, loving and not a gang member. He wanted to be a policeman, she said, and hoped to buy a bigger house and nice car for his mom, who works in a horticultural facility. She left Steven's room untouched -- with his video games, baseball photos and paintball gun. "Maybe this way I'm thinking he has gone off to school and will be back," she said, weeping. "The same night they killed my son, they killed me also." Police, school officials and community groups say gang violence cannot be curtailed without prevention and intervention. Some towns teach parents to be on alert for signs, such as red or blue clothing, shoes and handkerchiefs, that their children might be drifting toward gangs. Other towns have stepped up recreational activities to keep youngsters busy. Even when law enforcement agencies record successes against a gang, members often move elsewhere, as some may have done after crackdowns on Fresno's Bulldogs gang. It has an estimated 6,000 members. Police in nearby Selma are now seeing Bulldogs, with their dog-paw tattoos, standing on street corners literally barking warnings when squad cars approach. There have been drive-by shootings in midday, and police say one crime witness was wounded by gang members who shot through her front door. The rise of gang violence "has caught us off guard and shocked our community," said Selma Police Chief Tom Whiteside, noting that the town of about 24,000 had five gang homicides in the last three years. "Today, gang crime is probably No. 1 on everyone's radar screen in the valley." Selma voters overwhelmingly approved a half-cent sales tax in November that will allow its police force to nearly double in the next decade. The Bulldogs have adopted the red theme and menacing mascot of Cal State Fresno's athletic teams, sometimes blurring the visual lines between gang members and others. "An Hispanic group occasionally will be in a compromising position at a mini-market or walking down the street . . . because they are wearing . . . Bulldog-related clothing," said Fresno Police Sgt. Bill Grove. "It poses problems for law enforcement as well. . . . We come into contact with known gang members and they claim they are just fans of the teams." University officials say they will not surrender their mascot to gangs. "By changing our name, it would reward them," said Paul Oliaro, vice president for student affairs. A striking case of mistaken identity visited Atwater, 200 miles to the north. A Fresno State student, home for the weekend several years ago, was jogging in her red school T-shirt when someone yelled at her for wearing Norteño colors and fired five shots from a car, narrowly missing her. "Gang members do not heed borders," he said. "Gang members move here but do not cut their ties."



From the Los Angeles Times


MEXICO UNDER SIEGE

Drug crackdown has little effect on money laundering

In many cases, the network that turns ill-gotten gains into legal tender, crucial to operations and lavish lifestyles, continues to spin unhindered.

By Tracy Wilkinson

December 22, 2008

Reporting from Mexico City — For a B-team, Los Mapaches sure seemed to be living it up. The soccer club from the small town of Nueva Italia in western Mexico had the finest vehicles, new uniforms every game and unusually high salaries.

Little wonder, then, when the team's owner was arrested and accused of laundering millions of dollars for one of Mexico's most powerful drug gangs.

The team was one of many covers, federal prosecutors allege, that Wenceslao Alvarez, alias El Wencho, used to hide and move millions of dollars for the so-called Gulf cartel.

In the Mexican government's bloody, 2-year-old war on drug traffickers, one component of the trade remains largely untouched: money laundering. The network that helps turn ill-gotten gains into legal tender is a crucial linchpin that enables traffickers to live large, expand their operations deep into the U.S., pay off cops and politicians and buy increasingly sophisticated weaponry.

"You can arrest thousands of [traffickers] but if you don't touch the financial enterprises, the business just goes on . . . and becomes more violent," said Edgardo Buscaglia, an expert on organized crime who has advised both the United Nations and Mexican officials.

Until the government goes after traffickers' cash, Buscaglia and other critics say, the networks will continue to grow and fortify themselves, no matter how many state security forces are thrown at them.

Money-laundering is the process of concealing the origin of illicit drug profits by funneling them into businesses (legitimate or fake), real estate and financial institutions.

Estimates vary widely, but as much as $20 billion is laundered and stays in Mexico annually, with up to four times that amount continuing to other destinations, experts and Mexican officials say.

Some of the money is stuffed in suitcases and walked across the border into Mexico, or hidden in cargo containers and shipped. But investigators also suspect international courier services are moving the cash.

Banking controls are notoriously lax in Mexico, making it easier for money to be wired or deposited into accounts, then spent on goods or services. All-cash transactions are common, especially for big-ticket items such as mansions, and Hummers and armored BMWs, and to pay the legions who work for the drug mafias. The money also is increasingly being sunk into artwork, gems, gold and commodities.

Blacklisted

Every year, the U.S. Treasury Department blacklists scores of individuals and companies, most of them Mexican or Colombian, believed to be involved in money-laundering or other activities supporting drug-trafficking networks.

Rarely has the Mexican government acted on the information. Mexican authorities cannot easily confiscate traffickers' property and assets, a practice common in the U.S. and one that helped give the Colombian government an upper hand in cracking that country's cartels.

"It is a very powerful tool against narco-traffickers because it hits their interests -- their purchasing power and their ideal way of life," Colombian Vice Minister of Defense Sergio Jaramillo Caro said during a recent meeting here of Latin American public security officials. A new law that would give Mexicans that authority has been passed only in Mexico City; a national version is languishing in Congress.

The two main agencies that investigate and prosecute suspected money launderers are hamstrung and underfunded. The Finance Ministry's Financial Intelligence Unit and the attorney general's office are required to communicate with each other in writing, a clumsy process, and they are not allowed access to federal police reports, financial records or other key databases to build organized-crime cases.

The case of the Mapaches (Raccoons) was more exception than rule. Federal agents arrested El Wencho in October while he was in Mexico City at the headquarters of a top soccer club. In addition to the Mapaches, El Wencho's holdings included car dealerships, an avocado export firm, hotels and restaurants, prosecutors say.

The alleged money-laundering operation, which authorities say extended into six U.S. states and parts of Central and South America, came to light in September as part of a U.S. federal indictment that named top leaders of the Gulf cartel and led to the arrests of more than 500 people in the U.S., Mexico and Italy.

An estimated $7.6 million of El Wencho's assets were seized by U.S. authorities in Atlanta and other U.S. cities, according to a senior Mexican official who did not want to be named because such investigations are kept secret until a formal indictment is issued. Mexican and U.S. agents spent a year tracking El Wencho's movements through tapped telephones and other surveillance, the official said.

The official said the soccer team was more of a "whim" and not particularly effective at laundering large amounts of money because it was too junior. It may have been a way for El Wencho to curry favor in Nueva Italia, a typical ploy of traffickers who do good works for their hometowns as a way to buy loyalty and protection.

Shrouded in secrecy

Mexican officials say their financial system is relatively unregulated, shrouded in secrecy laws and so complex that it is difficult to penetrate. But critics wonder if politicians blanch at changing those laws because too many of the country's elite would be implicated.

They note that the interior minister, the second most powerful person in the Mexican government, once helped defend a prominent banker who was acquitted in one of the few high-profile laundering cases to reach the courts.

There is also a general, if unspoken, tolerance of laundered money among many Mexicans, who reason that if the dollars have passed through other hands, it no longer is dirty money.

"It has been relatively useless to try to determine the amounts of money being laundered in Mexico," President Felipe Calderon told Congress last month. An official report that Calderon submitted to lawmakers said the Finance Ministry had detected 60,000 suspicious financial transactions in the 12-month period ending in June. But only 0.5% ended up in court.

A handful of money exchange houses are being prosecuted, but the gradual dollarization of the Mexican economy has diminished the role of exchange houses in suspect transactions, experts say.

Five years ago, Mexican authorities arrested accused money-launderer Rigoberto Gaxiola. Yet, from prison, he continued to wash money for traffickers from Sinaloa, the cradle of Mexican drug-running, as recently as summer, U.S. and Mexican officials say. At that point, the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control blacklisted Gaxiola along with 17 associates, including his wife and three children, and 14 of his businesses. However, the Mexican government has not made further arrests, shut down the businesses nor announced any other sanctions.

Efforts to obtain comment from officials of the Financial Intelligence Unit or from investigators with the attorney general's office were unsuccessful.

U.S. officials, meanwhile, worry that money-laundering operations could have deeper security implications.

"Once you've set up the scheme, you can launder anything," a senior U.S. law enforcement official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of security concerns. "Human slavery, arms trafficking -- even terrorists."


MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com
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Canada, Mexico want to join talks on Asia-Pacific trade pact - The Hill's On The Money

Canada, Mexico want to join talks on Asia-Pacific trade pact - The Hill's On The Money

WHEN THE LA RAZA HISPANDERING OBAMA HANDED MEXICAN TRUCK DRIVERS FORMERLY PROHIBITED FROM CROSSING OUR BORDERS WITH THEIR DRUG PACKED TRUCKS, HE WAS ALSO HANDING MEXICO ANOTER DEVICE TO HAUL ILLEGALS OVER OUR BORDERS. AND THEY COME BY THE THOUSANDS EVERY WEEK TO TAKE OUR JOBS, WELFARE, BIRTH ANHCOR BABIES FOR WELFARE, AND VOTE FOR LA RAZA DEMS!

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/04/mexican-cartels-setting-up-shop-across.html

latimes.com

Mexican cartels setting up shop across U.S.

Frediberto Pineda, a member of the Sinaloa cartel, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for heading a cocaine operation in South Carolina's capital. Similar outposts have popped up in Seattle, Anchorage and Minneapolis.

By Richard A. Serrano, Washington Bureau

April 17, 2011

Reporting from Columbia, S.C.

The house on Knightner Road is small, blue and white, with a stone front porch and a string of Christmas lights still hanging. Here, crack cocaine was sold to drive-up customers a few miles from the state Capitol in Columbia.

The one on Pound Road in rural Gaston, just south of Columbia, is a brown-and-white trailer, with a gravel driveway and woods out back. Here, federal law enforcement officers surprised Frediberto Pineda, who had 10 kilos of cocaine worth $350,000 in his possession.

The unravelling of the European Union

The unravelling of the European Union

THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC MELTDOWN CAN BE SUMMED UP IN ONE WORD: BANKSTERS!

Mexican police arrest protesters in Juarez

Mexican police arrest protesters in Juarez

Saudi Arabia plays key role in US anti-Iranian alliance

Saudi Arabia plays key role in US anti-Iranian alliance

REGARDLESS OF HOW MUCH DIRTY MONEY THE SAUDIS HAVE TUCKED INTO THE POCKETS OF THE BUSH CRIME FAMILY - CARLYTLE GROUP, AND THE BILLARY HILLARY LIBRARY, THEY ARE STILL THE 9-11 INVADERS! AND STILL OUR ENEMIES!

ISN'T IT TIME WE END THE WARS TO PROTECT SAUDIS INTERSESTS AND BORDERS?

Police evict Occupy Portland protesters - BUT NOT ONE OF OBAMA'S CRIMINAL BANKSTERS ARRESTED!

Police evict Occupy Portland protesters

US authorities step up nationwide crackdown on Occupy protests

US authorities step up nationwide crackdown on Occupy protests

BANKSTERS' LOOTING AND PROFITS HAVE SOARED UNDER OBAMA'S FIRST TWO YEARS GREATER THAN ALL EIGHT OF BUSH'S!

WHAT ELSE DO YOU NEED TO KNOW?

THAT OBAMA HAS TAKEN IN MORE DIRTY BANKSTER MONEY THAN ANY PRESIDENT IN HISTORY?