Mexico's Drug War - Page 58

Washington has decided to request the extradition of Mexican drug kingpin Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán, who is now in a maximum-security prison outside Mexico City. Mexico’s Attorney General José Murillo Karam said he expects the U.S. government will ask for Guzmán’s extradition in the “next hours.” During a press conference in Mexico City on Tuesday, Murillo Karam said there will be “no problem to process the request to decide, at the right time, what would be most appropriate.”

The “right time,” according to Mexican sources, would be after Guzmán is fully prosecuted and sentenced in Mexico, where he faces eight active criminal cases. Guzmán, who topped the list of most wanted drug criminals in the world and was captured last year, would not need to finish serving his sentence in Mexico in order to be sent to the U.S., according to Mexican diplomatic sources. Therefore, if the prosecutions proceed as expected, he could be extradited as soon as this year.

Murillo Karam’s remarks represent a sharp policy about-face. In 2014 he said that Mexico had “no intention” of extraditing Guzmán because the Mexican government disagreed with U.S. prosecutors “reaching deals with criminals” as the U.S. has with several top Mexican drug lords in U.S. custody.

The formal diplomatic extradition request is expected to be submitted by the U.S. State Department to Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The State Department declined to comment as per its policy of not commenting on extraditions.

Officials in Mexico say they have found the decapitated body of a journalist who had been missing for three weeks.

Moises Sanchez was abducted from his home in the eastern state of Veracruz by gunmen on 2 January.

He reported on corruption and violence for weekly newspaper La Union in the town of Medellin de Bravo.

Veracruz is among the most dangerous Mexican states for journalists to work in, according to Mexico's National Commission on Human Rights.

(Reuters) - Argentine forensic experts have voiced serious doubts about a Mexican government probe into the abduction and suspected massacre last year of 43 trainee teachers, who officials have declared dead.

The students' disappearance on the night of Sept. 26 in the southwestern city of Iguala has triggered massive protests in Mexico. Officials say they were abducted by corrupt police officers, who handed them over to a local drug gang.

In a document published on the website of Mexican human rights group Tlachinollan, the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF), which has been working to identify remains, detailed numerous problems with the government's handling of the case as well as the conclusions it has already drawn.

Late last month, Attorney General Jesus Murillo said there was no doubt that the students were murdered and their remains incinerated and dumped into a river in the nearby town of Cocula.

So far, the remains of just one of the group has been positively identified.

The EAAF, however, said in the document that it cannot confirm the chain of custody of that student's remains and criticized the government for failing to secure the garbage dump near the river where the charred remains were found.

The document also faults the attorney general's office for faulty genetic analysis of samples from family members that would be needed to identify the remains.

It notes that human remains found at the dump include teeth fastened to a dental prosthesis. However the team's interviews with family members from all 43 students indicated that none of them had such an implant.

EAAF says the discovery strongly suggests that remains belonging to other victims are at the same site.

Former President Bill Clinton apologized to Mexico during a speech there last week for a backfired U.S. war on drugs that has fueled spiraling violence.

“I wish you had no narco-trafficking, but it’s not really your fault,” Clinton told an audience of students and business leaders at the recent Laureate Summit on Youth and Productivity. “Basically, we did too good of a job of taking the transportation out of the air and water, and so we ran it over land.

“I apologize for that,” Clinton said.

Clinton was referring to U.S. drug enforcement policy that began under his predecessors, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, who invested heavily in shutting down the Caribbean Sea as the favored trafficking route between the U.S. and South America and Central America. That effort pushed smuggling west, over land in Mexico.

Clinton made his own contribution. Opening Mexico's border with the U.S. encouraged land-based trafficking, and enforcement efforts that broke up Colombian cartels empowered Mexican drug gangs, who until then had largely been middlemen. With more power came more money. With more money came more violence.

Mexico, home to about a half-dozen extraordinarily powerful and violent cartels whose influence reaches well beyond narco-trafficking, has since the 1990s been a major focus of the U.S. war on drugs. Last month's discovery of 43 missing college students from rural Mexico, all found to have been killed and incinerated after being seized by state law enforcement, exposed a shocking level of Mexican government corruption.

The U.S. government spends roughly $40 billion to $50 billion each year fighting the war on drugs around the globe. The battle has taken a particularly devastating toll in Mexico. In recent years, at least 60,000 to 100,000 people are believed to have been murdered in Mexico, many in drug-related violence.

Despite -- or, more accurately, as a result of -- years of fighting against the narco-traffickers, 90 percent of the cocaine that arrives in the U.S. travels through Mexico and Central America, according to a recent State Department report. Cartels also continue to deliver a significant amount of heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine into the U.S.

"Of course, one wishes he and his counterparts would have done the right thing when they wielded the power to do so," Daniel Robelo, research director at the anti-drug war advocacy group Drug Policy Alliance, wrote in a blog post responding to Clinton's remarks. "But it’s better to apologize than pretend he did nothing wrong at all. Yet we need much more than apologies -- especially from those who currently hold office, or who might in the near future."

While Clinton expanded the drug war during his presidency, it’s not the first time he has criticized it since leaving office. In an interview for the 2011 documentary “Breaking The Taboo,” chronicling drug policies around the globe, Clinton flatly said the policy was a failure.

MEXICO CITY, Feb 27 (Reuters) - Mexico has captured the country's most wanted drug lord still at large, Servando "La Tuta" Gomez, police said on Friday, in a boost for President Enrique Pena Nieto as he grapples with grisly gang violence.

Gomez, 49, was the prime target of Pena Nieto's drive to regain control of Michoacan, a violent western state wracked by clashes between Gomez's Knights Templar cartel and heavily-armed vigilantes trying to oust them.

His arrest comes a year after the capture of Mexico's most notorious drug lord, Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, the head of the Sinaloa Cartel, one of the most powerful drug smuggling gangs in the world.

It also comes as Pena Nieto seeks to quell outrage over violence, impunity and corruption in Mexico after the abduction and apparent massacre of 43 trainee teachers by corrupt police in league with gang members.

A police spokesman said federal police captured Gomez in Morelia, Michoacan's state capital, after months of intelligence work. "He will be brought to Mexico City in the coming hours to make a declaration."

Gomez was arrested at a house without any shots being fired, local media reported.

Last week, police seized many properties in that area and arrested a handful of people connected to La Tuta. Local media reported that earlier operation had led to the arrest of the drug boss.

MEXICO CITY — The leader of the Zetas — a Mexican criminal group notorious for its brutal murders — was arrested Wednesday without a shot fired in northern Mexico, as the authorities toppled yet another kingpin in a long and aggressive campaign against the group.

Federal police officers and soldiers swooped in on the leader, Omar Treviño Morales, known as Z-42 in the group’s militaristic system of code names, in San Pedro Garza García, an affluent suburb of Monterrey, Mexico, a business and industrial hub.

Mr. Morales, 38, had not led the group for long. In July 2013, his brother, Miguel Angel Treviño Morales — considered one of the gang’s most ruthless enforcers — was arrested just a year after taking over from another top leader, Heriberto Lazcano. Mr. Lazcano died in a shootout with the Mexican Navy in October 2012 and grew more infamous after his body was snatched from a funeral home afterward.

The upheaval at the top is meant to disrupt, if not dismantle, the Zetas, who earned a reputation for beheading and dismembering enemies and leaving body parts in public places, sometimes with warning messages nearby. Mexican officials have linked them to the massacre of 72 migrants in northeastern Mexico in 2010 and a 2011 arson attack on a Monterrey casino that left 52 dead, among other mass killings.

The Zetas have been among the largest and most well-known gangs, and Mr. Morales’s arrest came as President Enrique Peña Nieto was on a state visit to Britain promoting Mexico as transforming and open to foreign investment.

But a number of security analysts are skeptical that such high-profile arrests will change the criminal landscape much because so many of the large groups have splintered and created new gangs just as dangerous.

Mexican security officials stated they have captured Jesus Salas Aguayo, the man who has been running the Juarez drug cartel after the arrest of Vicente Carrillo Fuentes in 2014.

As reported by The Associated Press, National Security Commissioner Monte Alejandro Rubido announced the alleged cartel leader was captured on Friday in the municipality of Villa Ahumada, an area which is about 75 miles south of the border city of Ciudad Juarez.

Rubido further informed that one of Salas Aguayo's bodyguards was killed, and another one was arrested.

Illustrating the captured man’s alleged connection to drug related crime, Rubido pointed out on Sunday that Salas Aguayo has been tied to a 2010 car bombing in Ciudad Juarez as well as a 2012 bar attack that ended in the deaths of 15 people. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's website says Jesus Salas Aguayo is wanted for possession, distribution of narcotics, and for conspiracy.

Violence in the western Mexican state of Jalisco on Friday killed at least seven after the military launched an operation targeting a drug cartel.

Jalisco Gov. Aristóteles Sandoval said that the violence was a reaction to the federal government's Operation Jalisco, "an operation to get to the bottom of and to be able to arrest all the leaders of this cartel, of this organization."

Sandoval did not name the cartel, but authorities have been locked in an increasingly bloody battle with the Jalisco New Generation cartel. Last month, cartel gunmen killed 15 state police officers in an ambush. It was the bloodiest single attack on Mexican authorities in recent memory.

Jalisco State spokesman Gonzalo Sánchez told Mexican cable news channel Milenio TV that a police officer was killed in one of the clashes around the state in the community of Autlán, about 120 miles southwest of Guadalajara.

Gunmen fired at a military helicopter, forcing it to make an emergency landing about 150 miles southwest of Guadalajara, the state capital. Three soldiers were killed in the attack.

Twelve others — 10 soldiers and two federal police officers — were also injured and three soldiers remained missing, according to a statement from Mexico's defense ministry.

MEXICO CITY, May 22 (Reuters) - At least 39 people were killed on Friday in western Mexico during a fight between suspected gang members and security forces, two government officials said, the latest bloodshed in an area that has been plagued by violent drug gangs.

The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said 37 civilians had been killed in the clash near to Tanhuato in the state of Michoacan, near the border with Jalisco, a region home to Mexico's second-biggest city, Guadalajara.

One official said two police had been killed in the shootout, while the other said three had died.

Jalisco, one of the engines of the Mexican economy, is the base of the Jalisco New Generation cartel, which has become a major headache for President Enrique Pena Nieto this year.

The cartel has killed at least 20 police since March and on May 1, the gang shot down an army helicopter in southwestern Jalisco, killing six military personnel.

In a series of concerted attacks that day, the gang also set vehicles, banks and gas stations ablaze around Guadalajara.

Mexico is not burning, the country’s Interior Minister Miguel Ángel Osorio assured citizens last month in response to pre-election violence that saw at least three candidates murdered by mid-May. But flaming government buildings and a mounting body count have defied Osorio in the run-up to Sunday’s midterm elections, in which 500 congressional seats and nine governorships are at play.

Since Osorio’s declaration, at least four more candidates from various political parties have been gunned down as dozens of criminal gangs coerce candidates in a battle to control local terrain and drug-trafficking routes. At least 20 additional candidates have been intimidated out of the running. The drug-fueled violence has coalesced in recent days with violent protests in Mexico’s southern states, as teachers opposed to education reform, joined by parents of the missing 43 students in Guerrero state, have blocked highways, sabotaged would-be voting stations and burned thousands of ballots.

“These are the dirtiest elections since the advent of democracy in Mexico,” Raúl Benítez, a security expert at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, told Reuters this week.

Simmering grievances that arose out of 2014 education reforms have spurred a section of Mexico’s teachers union, the National Coordinator of Educational Workers (CNTE), to intensify its protests this week. The group has ransacked government buildings and faced off against police in the southern states of Guerrero and Oaxaca — all with the hope of disrupting elections. CNTE on Wednesday won a partial concession from the government of President Enrique Peña Nieto when it agreed to suspend teacher evaluations, a key provision of educational reform.

But that has done little to douse protests. Recent demonstrations, Mexico analysts say, are a result of an endemic disillusion in Mexico’s southern states with the corruption that steers the country’s main political parties, including Peña Nieto’s governing Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

Just last week, Peña Nieto signed an anti-corruption measure that will assign a special prosecutor to rein in corruption and will bolster oversight of public officials. That includes subjecting politicians to audits of public finances. Critics, however, pounced on the measure for having few teeth. Elected officials accused of corruption, they point out, will continue to benefit from immunity from prosecution. And the measure does not tackle the problem of low rates of prosecution for corruption.

It’s been over eight years since former Mexican President Felipe Calderón declared an offensive on the country’s drug trafficking organizations that left over an estimated 100,000 people dead on both sides.

In the coinciding years, a slew of drug cartels have risen to prominence to fill power vacuums left following the death or capture of their counterparts. But now, according to a high-ranking Mexican official, there are two cartels operating in the country: the stalwart Sinaloa cartel and the newer Jalisco-New Generation cartel.

Tomás Zerón, the director of the Criminal Investigation Agency (AIC) within Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office (PGR), said in an interview with Mexican newspaper Proceso that these two crime groups are the only two "operating and functioning" in Mexico, as the death and capture of other high-ranking cartel figures have severely splinted or completely disintegrated various other drug-trafficking organizations.

While the Sinaloa cartel has not been immune to attacks from the Mexican government – Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, the most wanted drug trafficker in the world, was arrested in 2014 – the cartel has maintained a more organized, almost corporate structure that has kept it running even as one or another of its leaders is either arrested or killed.

The Jalisco-New Generation cartel is one of the new breeds of organized crime groups cropping up across Mexico in the wake of the government's war against the old guard of cartels – the Zetas, the Gulf and Sinaloa cartels, to name the largest. New Generation, which formed in 2010 following the splintering of the Milenio Cartel, was first established with the express purpose of countering the Zetas, Now, it has begun targeting Mexican security forces and many observers say that this dicey tactic could lead to its quick demise.