Mexico's Drug War - Page 59

The kingpin slipped out of the prison through a tunnel more than 1.5 km (1 mile) long which led to a building site in the local town,

Beneath a 50 cm by 50 cm gap in the shower area, guards found a ladder going down some 10 meters into the tunnel, which was about 1.7 meters high and 70-80 centimeters wide.

Last Saturday night at 8:52 p.m., Joaquín Guzmán Loera, better known as “El Chapo,” was seen for the last time inside a maximum-security prison in central Mexico. The country’s most notorious drug kingpin of the last two decades, El Chapo built a multi-billion-dollar narcotic enterprise and was regularly ranked among the 500 most influential persons in the world by Forbes. He was last spotted as he went to take a shower; security cameras never caught sight of him again. His escape challenges the credibility of Mexican authorities, especially President Enrique Peña Nieto.

The details of his breakout are still emerging, but what we know is unnerving. El Chapo escaped through a mile long tunnel whose construction, some estimates say, must have generated debris to fill up almost 350 trucks and taken almost a year to complete. The tunnel had electricity, ventilation and a motorbike specially adapted to transport the hardware needed for its construction. The prison is located near the industrial city of Toluca and close to a military base. It is hard to believe that he acted alone or that no one noticed the unusual activity in the prison surroundings. Instead, Chapo likely used the most influential coin in Mexican politics to escape: bribery.

This is not the first time El Chapo broke out of a maximum-security prison. In 2001, he left Puente Grande prison in western Mexico hidden in a laundry cart pushed by an accomplice. After that escape, he evaded authorities in the mountains of Sinaloa until last year when he was captured again amid huge fanfare by President Peña Nieto’s government. Back then, the government portrayed the arrest as an inflection point in the country’s long march to a rule of law-abiding state. Some U.S. authorities, fearing a new escape, reportedly suggested to their Mexican counterparts to extradite El Chapo to a U.S. prison. Mexican authorities dismissed the idea saying it was a matter of national pride to judge him at home. Jesus Murillo Karam, then Mexico’s attorney general, half-joked that the extradition would happen in three or four hundred years. ¨It would be unforgivable if El Chapo escapes again,” Peña Nieto said in February 2014.

Last week much of the public conversation in Mexico focused on the president’s state visit to France. Peña Nieto’s entourage numbered more than 300 people, including 40 high-level government officials. When news of the escape broke, every single high-level security official was on his way to Paris. As the news spread in Mexico, opposition leaders demanded the president return immediately and lead the unfolding security crisis. Peña Nieto refused to do so, arguing that his visit to France was of “historical” importance. He also hopes to attract French investments and create jobs back home.

However, it is unclear how the news will affect the perception that foreign investors have of the country. Chapo’s escape underscores that Mexican institutions are still weak and that the rule of law is a mirage. It will be a tough sell for Peña Nieto to convince foreign investors to bet dollars in a country where stability, let alone freedom from corruption, is still an abstract goal.

After Chapo’s escape, Mexican authorities deployed security forces to capture him. However, if history is of any guide, it is a hard bet to think that El Chapo will be captured anytime soon. In Mexico the line between criminals and politicians is blurry and Chapo’s network of influence likely reaches the highest levels of government. Some reports claimed that he had escaped in a small helicopter, thus violating the prison’s no-flying zone.

Chapo’s disappearance also calls into question Peña Nieto’s strategy in the war on drugs. Peña’s approach has not changed much from the open war that former President Felipe Calderón started nine years ago. The strategy is centered on the neutralization, whether by arrest or death, of drug lords, with the idea that the whole cartel will crumble after its head is severed. However, experience has shown that after a drug lord is killed, factions inside the cartel fight for control, unleashing violence of such intensity that municipalities are unable to stop. In some municipalities, police forces work for the cartels. Additionally, the strategy has failed to reduce consumption among addicts, whose purchases fund the power of the cartels.

MEXICO CITY — Hours after the world’s most infamous drug lord, Joaquín “Chapo” Guzmán Loera, escaped Mexico’s highest security prison over the weekend, the United States offered everything it has — Marshals, drones, even a special task force — to help find and recapture the kingpin.

But the Mexicans have kept the Americans at bay, without giving an answer on the extra help, according to Mexican and American officials. They say the delay has confounded law enforcement agencies on both sides of the border and undermined efforts to recapture Mr. Guzmán, the billionaire head of the Sinaloa Cartel, before his wealth and global connections help him disappear.

“We can’t really understand why they are refusing to give an answer,” said one Mexican official, who works in the country’s security apparatus but was not authorized to speak publicly about his government’s deliberations. “We’re just on standby.”

Mexico’s hesitations over the American offer reflect years of strain between the two countries as their ambitious joint effort against the cartels has waned, with a drop in extraditions to the United States, divided priorities on the ground in Mexico and financing for shared projects in decline.

Mexico’s interior secretary, Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, said Monday night that the two countries were already cooperating, just as Mexico worked closely with Guatemala to secure its southern border. But at a news conference about the search for Mr. Guzmán, who absconded through an elaborate tunnel dug 30 feet beneath his prison shower, Mr. Osorio Chong made clear that no additional American assistance should be expected.

“We are not going to do something new beyond what we have already been doing,” he said.

Mexican and American officials said that the manhunt is now being shaped by some of the same struggles over speed, control and sovereignty that led Mexico to resist extraditing Mr. Guzmán to the United States after his arrest in a joint sting operation in early 2014.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) first warned Mexican authorities 16 months ago that plots to break drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman out of prison were afoot, documents revealed Monday.

The documents obtained by the Associated Press, show that drug agents first got information in March 2014 that various Guzman family members and drug-world associates were considering "potential operations to free Guzman." A U.S. official briefed on the investigation told the AP that the Mexican authorities were alerted about the plots. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to disclose details.

Late Monday, Mexico Interior Secretary Miguel Angel Osorio Chong said that authorities were never informed "in that respect," referring to previous escape plans. He added that U.S. counterparts also said they didn't know where the escape information in the AP story came from.

The search for 43 missing college students in the southern state of Guerrero has turned up at least 60 clandestine graves and 129 bodies over the last 10 months, Mexico's attorney general's office says.

None of the remains has been connected to the youths who disappeared after a clash with police in the city of Iguala on Sept. 26, and authorities do not believe any will be.

On Sunday, a few hundred people led by parents of the missing youths marched in Mexico City to call for justice in the case. Demonstrations have been held on the 26th of each month since the incident.

The number of bodies and graves found from October to May could possibly be higher than in its report, the attorney general's office said, because its response to a freedom of information request from The Associated Press covers only those instances in which its mass grave specialists got involved.

Federal authorities began turning up unmarked graves after beginning an investigation into the disappearance of the 43 young men following the confrontation between students and police that resulted in six confirmed deaths in Iguala, a municipality of 120,000 people 160 miles south of Mexico City.

The government of President Enrique Peña Nieto has said the students were detained by local police and handed over to a drug cartel, which killed and incinerated them at a garbage dump. Their remains were allegedly put in garbage bags and dumped in a nearby river.

(CNN)When he felt authorities weren't doing enough to protect his hometown, he organized more than 100 women to police the streets.

When 43 students went missing in a controversial case that drew global attention to Mexico's struggles with violence and corruption, he led search parties trying to find them.

And when more families in his state came forward reporting that their loved ones had disappeared, he organized searches for them, too.

Saturday night, investigators in Mexico's Guerrero state say Miguel Ángel Jiménez Blanco was found dead inside a taxi he owned, with two gunshot wounds. Authorities haven't said whether there are any suspects in the slaying.

Jiménez was a vocal leader of citizen self-defense groups in Guerrero and a sharp critic of local officials, who he accused of hiding evidence tied to the students' disappearance.

Last week, Jiménez told CNNMexico that more than 100 bodies had been found in hidden graves in the area since October, decrying what he called a worsening security situation.

He said he'd recently started driving a taxi to make ends meet. After years of working to clean up the streets, he said he was once again worried about safety.

EL CALVARIO, Mexico — With her nimble hands, tiny feet and low center of gravity, Angelica Guerrero Ortega makes an excellent opium harvester.

Deployed along the Sierra Madre del Sur, where a record poppy crop covers the mountainsides in strokes of green, pink and purple, she navigates the inclines with the deftness of a ballerina.

Though shy, she perks up when describing her craft: the delicate slits to the bulb, the patient scraping of the gum, earning in one day more than her parents do in a week.

That she is only 15 is not so important for the people of her tiny mountain hamlet. If she and her classmates miss school for the harvest, so be it. In a landscape of fallow opportunities, income outweighs education.

“It is the best option for us,” Angelica said, leaning against a wood-plank house in her village, where nearly all of the children work the fields. “Back down in the city, there is nothing for us, no opportunities.”

A member of a community defense force in Petaquillas, Mexico. The groups have sprung up in Guerrero State as a response to corruption and police inaction in the face of gang violence.

As heroin addiction soars in the United States, a boom is underway south of the border, reflecting the two nations’ troubled symbiosis. Officials from both countries say that Mexican opium production increased by an estimated 50 percent in 2014 alone, the result of a voracious American appetite, impoverished farmers in Mexico and entrepreneurial drug cartels that straddle the border.

Abusers of prescription pharmaceuticals in America are looking for cheaper highs, as a crackdown on painkiller abuse has made the habit highly expensive. And the legalization of marijuana in some states has pushed down prices, leading many Mexican farmers to switch crops. Cartels, meanwhile, have adapted, edging into American markets once reserved for higher quality heroin from Southeast Asia while pressing out of urban centers into suburbs and rural communities.

On August 31 2015 03:45 xtorn wrote:
i found this documentary to be quite mindblowing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xfz-1Az0qp4

In the mountains of Mexico’s northern state of Sinaloa, where many of the country’s most notorious drug lords were born and bred, many call him el viejón, the old guy. It is a term of endearment for Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, the world’s most wanted criminal and leader of the powerful Sinaloa drug trafficking cartel.

When last month he spectacularly escaped through a tunnel from what was supposed to be Mexico’s most secure prison, after his arrest in February last year, Guzmán was either 58 or 60 years old, depending on the source. In spite of his advanced age, he still commands significant fear and respect in the state where he was born.

But ‘El Chapo’ (‘Shorty’), as he is more widely known for his short and stocky posture, has also become somewhat of a relic. Many consider him to be one of the last traditional Mexican drug lords still alive and at large in a criminal underworld increasingly dominated by ruthless killers.

Guzmán rose to prominence in the 80s and 90s in a crime scene far less turbulent than it is now. First operating as a member of the then all-powerful Guadalajara Cartel, Guzmán slowly but surely carved out his criminal empire by trafficking drugs to the United States. He gained a reputation as a drug lord who would sooner corrupt than kill.“Chapo has always been more diplomatic in conducting his business”, says Raúl Benítez, a political scientist and security expert at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). “He guarantees his operations by doing business with politicians to secure trafficking routes and businessmen to launder money.”

That modus operandi used to be the norm in Mexico, but times are changing. When former president Felipe Calderón declared war on organized crime in December 2006, seven major cartels controlled the country’s lucrative drug trafficking routes to the U.S. Calderón’s administration deployed thousands of soldiers and federal police to hunt down the leaders of those groups. Known as the ‘Kingpin Strategy’, it was aimed at toppling the cartels’ structures by cutting off the head of the snake and is largely continued by Calderón’s successor Enrique Peña Nieto.

When Peña Nieto entered office in 2012, his administration compiled a list of 122 priority targets among the country’s crime lords. Only 30 of them remain at large now. According to both Mexican and U.S. authorities, most major crime groups in Mexico have now either collapsed or fractured. But with their demise, scores of smaller gangs have filled the vacuum, employing younger and far more violent gangsters than Chapo and his peers.

“As cartels are splintering, the armed wings are taking over”, says Mike Vigil, former Chief of Operation of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). “The new narcos are mostly sicarios, hitmen, and all they know is violence. The drug trade is transforming from a business of traffickers to a business of killers.”

Indeed, violence in Mexico appears to be on the rise again. More than 100,000 people are estimated to have been killed in the often brutal gangland warfare waging for almost a decade now. And even though the number of killings went down somewhat in 2013 and 2014, more than 8,000 people were killed in the first six months of 2015—30 per cent more than in the same period last year. Most experts say the fragmentation of the underworld is to blame.

i found this documentary to be quite mindblowing

nice post, thanks