Mexico's Drug War - Page 20

Thirteen soldiers in Mexico have been charged with drug trafficking after they were allegedly found in possession of almost a tonne of the synthetic drug methamphetamine and 30kg of cocaine.

Methamphetamine is a highly addictive stimulant often made in home labs.

A military commander said the soldiers had been transporting the drugs to Tijuana, on the US border.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon has deployed around 50,000 soldiers to help fight his war on drugs.

The military commander in Tijuana, Gen Alfonso Duarte, said the accused had been transporting the drugs by land from the capital, Mexico City, to Tijuana.

The Mexican Ministry of Defence said it would not tolerate such acts and announced that the men would be brought before a military court.

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico – A 20-year-old woman who made international headlines when she accepted the job as police chief in a violent Mexican border town received death threats and is now in the U.S., a human rights advocate said Friday amid speculation that she is seeking asylum.

Chihuahua state Human Rights Commission official Gustavo de la Rosa Hickerson said Marisol Valles Garcia's relatives and friends told him that she had received telephone threats last weekend.

A local official accompanied the 20-year-old police chief this week to the international bridge connecting El Porvenir to Fort Hancock, Texas, he said.

Local media have reported that Valles Garcia is seeking asylum in the United States, but officials in the town of Praxedis G. Guerrero denied that.

City council spokesman Jose Flores said Valles Garcia asked for a leave of absence, but planned to return to work Monday.

Both Flores and de la Rosa Hickerson said they had tried to contact Valles Garcia since the rumors began circulating Thursday but she was not answering her cell phone.

CULIACAN, Mexico – Gunbattles between rival gangs killed 18 people in a northeastern Mexican town Monday, a day after seven police officers and an inmate died in an ambush of a convoy transporting prisoners in western Mexico.

The fighting in the town of Abasolo erupted Monday morning and left at least 18 people dead, the Tamaulipas state government said in three-sentence statement that offered no details. The shooting came a month after shootings in the nearby town of Padilla also killed 18 people, several of them innocent bystanders.

Tamaulipas has been wracked by a turf war between the Zetas and Gulf cartels, and information on violence in some of the smaller towns is notoriously scarce. Often official confirmation does not come for hours or days, leaving residents to cower in their homes and communicate through social media.

Tamaulipas residents sent Twitter messages about Monday's shootings hours before the government confirmed the bloodshed. Some tweets warned people to stay indoors and others demanded official information. Under constant threat from drug gangs, the Tamaulipas state media often ignore drug-gang violence completely.

In northwestern Sinaloa state, meanwhile, gunmen swarmed a convoy transporting two prisoners, shredding three police vehicles with bullets and killing seven officers and one inmate, Sinaloa state Attorney General Marco Antonio Higuera said Monday. Six officers and the second inmate were wounded.

Attackers traveling in about 20 vehicles caught the police convoy in a crossfire Sunday near the city of Guasave, Sinaloa state Attorney General Marco Antonio Higuera said.

MEXICO CITY – The Mexican government said Wednesday it has allowed U.S. drones to fly over its territory to gather intelligence on drug traffickers, but insisted the operations were under its control.

The country's National Security Council said in a statement that the unmanned aircraft have flown over Mexico on specific occasions, mainly along the border with the U.S., to gather information at the request of the Mexican government.

The flights expand the U.S. role in the drug war, in which Americans already have been training Mexican soldiers and police as well as cooperating on other intelligence.

"When these operations are carried out, they are always done with the authorization, oversight and supervision of national agencies, including the Mexican Air Force," the council said.

It said Mexico always defines the objectives, the information to be gathered and the specific tasks in which the drones will be used and insisted that the operations respected Mexican law, civil and human rights.

The drones "have been particularly useful in achieving various objectives of combating crime and have significantly increased Mexican authorities' capabilities and technological superiority in its fight against crime," the council said.

The drone operations, involving U.S. military aircraft, were first reported Wednesday by The New York Times.

MEXICO CITY – Mexican authorities detained an in-law of top drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman who allegedly ran a transnational drug operation that reached as far as Ecuador, federal police said Wednesday.

The suspect, Victor Manuel Felix, is both an in-law of Guzman, the head of Mexico's Sinaloa cartel, and the godfather of one of the drug lord's children. He is know by the nickname "El Senor," roughly "Mister" or "The Man."

Ramon Pequeno, the head of anti-drug operations for Mexico's federal police, said Felix ran a financial network for the Sinaloa cartel, Mexico's most powerful gang.

Pequeno said eight other people had been detained in Mexico along with Felix in raids in three Mexican states that began last week. He said the raids also netted about a half ton of cocaine.

Authorities in Ecuador said they conducted raids on a half dozen properties in that South American country, acting on information provided by Mexican authorities.

The raids in Ecuador resulted in the detention of nine suspects there — four Ecuadoreans, two Colombians and three Mexicans. More than 4.1 metric tons of cocaine also were seized, said Col. Rodrigo Suarez, the operations director of Ecuador's national police.

MEXICO CITY – Most of Mexico's largest news media outlets agreed to a set of drug-war reporting guidelines Thursday, promising not to glorify drug traffickers, publish cartel propaganda messages or reveal information that could endanger police operations.

The voluntary, self-policed guidelines are the first of their kind in Mexico, where more than 35,000 people, including at least 22 journalists, have been killed in drug-related violence since the government stepped up its offensive against cartels in late 2006.

"We in the news media should condemn and reject the violence arising from organized crime," the agreement said. It also vowed to "ignore and reject any information coming from criminal groups with the purpose of propaganda."

Mexican drug cartels frequently leave messages or banners next to the bodies of their victims, often with misspelled, obscene threats to authorities or rival gangs, and some media outlets in Mexico already have a policy of not reporting those messages.

MEXICO CITY – About 230,000 people have been displaced in Mexico because of drug violence, and about half of them may have taken refuge in the United States, according to a new study.

The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre based this week's report on studies by local researchers, saying that the Mexican government does not compile figures on people who have had to leave their homes because of turf battles between drug gangs.

"Independent surveys put their number at around 230,000," according to the global report's section on Mexico. "An estimated half of those displaced crossed the border into the United States, which would leave about 115,000 people internally displaced, most likely in the States of Chihuahua, Durango, Coahuila and Veracruz."

While that number is far below the estimated 3.6 to 5.2 million displaced by decades of drug- and guerrilla-war violence in Colombia, the report suggested that people who had to flee drug violence in Mexico have received little support.

Mexican Attorney General Arturo Chavez has resigned from his key post in the fight against drug trafficking.

President Felipe Calderon accepted the resignation on Thursday and nominated 41-year-old lawyer Marisela Morales to take over, the first woman to hold the post if she is approved.

"I have to withdraw from this important position to deal with strictly personal and urgent issues," said Chavez 18 months after he took the job amid widespread skepticism for his weak image in a country fighting a drug war.

Calderon, who nominated 41-year-old lawyer Marisela Morales to take over, lauded Chavez's role in a crackdown on organised crime launched at the start of his presidential term in late 2006.

The departure came three weeks after the release of a 2009 US diplomatic cable by whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks in which US embassy officials found Chavez's appointment to be "totally unexpected and politically inexplicable."

MEXICO CITY – Gunmen shot up a bar and then threw in fire bombs, killing three men and two women in the northern border city of Ciudad Juarez, an official said Saturday. The deaths came a day after a shooting attack on another bar in the city caused 10 deaths.

A motive had not been determined and it was unclear if the victims died of bullet wounds, burns or smoke inhalation, Chihuahua state prosecutors' spokesman Arturo Sandoval said. He said the bodies were charred by the fire started by the gasoline bombs at the Barritas bar late Friday

Sandoval said police found .223-caliber shell casings at the scene, a type frequently used by gunmen for drug gangs.

Some 6,000 people have died in drug cartel turf battles the past two years in Ciudad Juarez, which sits across the border from El Paso, Texas.

About 24 hours before the bloodshed at the Barritas bar, three car loads of gunmen attacked the El Castillo bar in Ciudad Juarez, killing 10 people. Authorities said at least 130 shots were fired.

VERACRUZ, Mexico – A clash between police and suspected cartel gunmen killed six officers in Mexico's southeast, just hours before a shootout between soldiers and gunmen in Acapulco on Monday left three people dead and ended in a fire that destroyed a supermarket, movie complex and stores in a shopping center.

The worst bloodshed was in the town of El Higo in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz — near the violence-wracked state of Tamaulipas — where municipal police officers on a routine patrol late Sunday ran into at least 20 gunmen on a dirt road and a firefight erupted.

Six officers, including one woman, died of gunshot wounds in the battle, Veracruz state interior secretary Gerardo Buganza said. The dead officers were hit by bullets from assault rifles, weapons favored by Mexico's drug gangs.

The police patrol was apparently outgunned. The officers carried only two assault rifles, two pistols and a shotgun. The attackers took the dead officers' weapons.

In the face of continued violence, the state government announced Monday that the Mexican army would establish a new base near El Higo.