Mama, don't let your babies grow up to be narcotraffickers.
That's the sad lament now being sung by the reputed boss of La Linea which serves as an enforcement crew for the Juarez drug cartel across the border from El Paso, TX.
Jose Antonio Acosta Hernandez a/k/a "El Diego" was arrested last week by Mexican federal police, and he's spilling his guts and expressing remorse for the innocents killed in the ongoing turf war against the Artistas Asesinos crew from the Sinaloa cartel as reported by Daniel Borunda for the El Paso Times.
Among those murdered under El Diego's watch were American consulate employee Lesley Ann Enriquez and her husband El Paso sheriff's deputy Arthur Redelfs who were gunned down in March 2010 under the mistaken belief that the couple were working for the Sinaloa cartel: "I called our partners, the Aztecas. ... They had made the determination to kill them thinking they were part of the opposing side. Afterward, we learned they had nothing to do with it."
In Mexico's northern state of Chihuahua there are at least 14,000 armed soldiers from the rival Juarez and Sinaloa cartels battling with each other in its two main cities -- the state capital Chihuahua and Ciudad Juarez -- for control over the smuggling routes into Texas as reported by Fox News Latino.
Meanwhile, in the northern state of of Coahuila, navy marines have seized a cache of weapons -- 204 rifles, 11 handguns, 17 grenades and 29,600 rounds of ammunition -- from Los Zetas as reported by The Associated Press: it was the third such seizure in Coahuila since last Friday.
Drug-related violence continues to roil Mexico, and in the most recent shocker "around 30 armed men stormed a drug rehabilitation centre and gunned down 19 people and wounded four others" in the capital city of the northern state of Chihuahua as reported by Alex Watts for Sky News:
They arrived in six trucks at around midnight and opened fire on patients and staff on the second floor of the Templo Cristiano Fe y Vida (Christian Faith and Life Temple). * * * Officers believe the centre was housing members of the Los Mexicles gang, which is at war with the Los Aztecos gang, when it was attacked.
Over the last two years half a dozen rehabs have been targeted in Mexico by drug gangs, and there are varying explanations for this phenomenom as reported by Jason Beaubien for NPR:
You've got a couple of things going on. One, people who are in the cartels who've got a drug problem and they need to get cleaned up, some of them are now getting sent into rehab because their problem is so bad that they can't function. And then you've got - also you've got people who are going in who've been dealing, who've, you know, have got debts, they've got people who are angry at them, they want to get their lives straightened out, they're also going in. And then there's also speculation that the cartels are coming into these facilities and trying to recruit people, sometimes forcibly, to work for them, to become their mules, to move product for them. Just in this attack in Chihuahua city, the gunmen left a note saying that the victims were - they called them pigs, rats and killers. And it's the same language that the cartels use when they kill their rivals. And so it's clear that there's this sense of this rivalry is now also playing out inside these drug rehab centers.
Meanwhile, in Ciudad Madero in the northern state of Tamaulipas, police found 20 corpses -- some bearing signs of torture before execution -- after a clash between rival drug gangs as reported by Xinhua, and the linked article contains a graphic photo of the gruesome discovery. Of course, the violence in Mexico probably doesn't disturb many Americans who are numbed by all the drugs supplied to them by the cartels. The druggie motto: kill the people, not the high!
The Mexican drug cartels have supply lines, distribution networks and operational cells in 250 cities across the United States, and they're getting a little help from their friends -- prison gangs connected to the Mexican Mafia -- with the dirty work as reported by Christopher Sherman for The Associated Press:
When Mexican drug traffickers need someone killed or kidnapped, or drugs distributed in the United States, they increasingly call on American subcontractors - U.S.-based prison gangs that run criminal enterprises from behind bars, sometimes even from solitary confinement. Prison gangs have long controlled armies of street toughs on the outside. But in interviews with The Associated Press, authorities say the gangs' activity has expanded beyond street-level drug sales to establish a business alliance with Mexican cartels. "They'll do the dirty work that, say, the cartels, they don't want to do" in the United States. "They don't want to get involved," said a former member of Barrio Azteca, a U.S. prison gang tied to Mexico's Juarez cartel. * * * The latest annual National Drug Threat Assessment, released in February by the Justice Department, said prison gangs were operating in all 50 states and were increasing their influence over drug trafficking along the U.S.-Mexico border. * * * Sometimes they get help from corrupt court or prison employees.
Reminiscent of Chicago's infamous St. Valentine's Day massacre, several armed men lined up eight individuals -- including two minors -- against a wall outside a bar in Juarez, Mexico and opened fire killing them as reported by the Latin American Herald Tribune: "A group of armed men arrived at approximately 4:00 a.m. at the Bar Aristos in downtown Ciudad Juarez, located across the border from El Paso, Texas, grabbed eight men who were drinking, lined them up in front of a wall in the parking lot and shot them, the AG’s office spokesmen said, citing eyewitness accounts." Earth Times reports that "according to media reports, the dead were apparently members of the Los Aztecas gang, with ties to the Juarez drug cartel."
During a parole hearing held Friday morning at the Federal Training Centre in Laval, Caruana, 65, finally acknowledged that he and his younger brother Alfonso were part of the Sicilian Mafia, a extremely rare admission among those who are part of the secretive society that originated in Italy and, over the past century, carried over to countries like Canada and the U.S.
Caruana's candor failed to move the Nationale Parole Board, and it turned him down for full parole; however, he has been on day parole for the last 19 months:
His parole officer, Julie Dubois, told the board that Caruana leads a very isolated life, restricted to his work at a centre that distributes food for needy people in St. Jérôme, part of his day parole, and his family. Caruana walks with a cane. His movements are limited by diabetes and a right hip that he damaged while behind bars at a penitentiary in Ontario. He said he now regrets being behind bars when all three of his children married and all five of his grandchildren were born.
"This investigation has brought focus to an international South Asian organized crime group that has exploited a number of Canadian truck drivers in facilitating cross border drug trafficking."
The reform process must speed up rather than slow down. We need a consensus in Bulgaria that treats the fight against high-level corruption and organized crime as issues of national importance. We don't see yet the level of results we would like to see.
Bulgaria was stripped last month of EU funds, and risks losing more: "Analysts said Bulgaria may lose more EU cash because deeper reforms are unlikely under today's government, which has struggled to cut links between some officials and organized crime gangs."
The U.S. territory police officers, all members of an extradition unit, are among six people indicted on charges including conspiracy and weapons possession related to drug trafficking. * * * The raids took place in and around the Puerto Rican capital of San Juan. * * * The island's 8,000-strong police force is reeling from accusations of corruption. In June, federal authorities charged six officers with planting evidence and building false cases against people in a northwest coastal town.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said U.S.-Mexican partnership is indispensable in breaking the "power and impunity" of drug gangs, whose internecine warfare on the Mexican side of the border this year has claimed more than 1,000 lives. Foreign Secretary Espinosa said the Merida program, launched by President Bush and Mexican President Felipe Calderon in March of last year, has raised joint anti-drug cooperation to unprecedented levels. * * * "This is an initiative that presents a great opportunity so that, together, Mexico and the United States can be more effective in addressing what is a shared threat and that is trans-national organized crime. The drug market leads to crimes in money-laundering, in pre-cursor chemicals, in weapons trafficking, in corruption, and a growing level of violence that affects our societies on both sides of the border," she said.
Feuding drug-trafficking groups and the federal government's military crackdown against organized crime have left 5,376 dead this year. Nowhere has the bloodletting been worse than in Ciudad Juarez, a sprawling border city that has registered more than 1,350 slayings in 2008, about a fourth of the country's total. The city's main drug-smuggling group, known as the Juarez cartel, is battling with rival traffickers from the northwestern state of Sinaloa for a piece of the lucrative drug trade into the U.S. The gangland-style violence has left almost no corner of Ciudad Juarez untouched. Drug-related slayings take place in houses, restaurants and bars, at playgrounds and children's parties, and in car-to-car ambushes. * * * The killings here are carried out in a style best described as baroque, with bodies hung headless from bridges, stuffed upside down in giant stew pots, lined up next to a school's playing field. Often, they are accompanied by taunting, handwritten messages, the hit man's equivalent of an end-zone dance.
