Global News Journal

The murky deaths of Mexico’s kingpins

Mexican drug baron Tony Tormenta died in a hail of grenades and gunfire on Nov.5 on the U.S. border, a victory for U.S.-Mexico efforts to clamp down on the illegal narcotics trade. Or did he?

Five days after the Gulf cartel leader’s death at the hands of Mexican marines in Matamoros, no photographs of his body have surfaced. At the navy’s only news conference, there was never any clarification about the whereabouts of his body. Mexico’s attorney general’s office did say on Wednesday that his body was handed over to his wife and daughter on Tuesday. The navy has declined to comment.

It was a similar story with the death of top Sinaloa cartel trafficker Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel in July. The only photograph of the body was leaked to a magazine days after his killing by the Mexican army in western Jalisco state.

In a country where few Mexicans believe in their government, President Felipe Calderon is asking people to take his word that these powerful, billionaire drug lords have, in fact, died.

Over the past five years, Tony Tormenta (Tony Storm) has been repeatedly reported killed and arrested, only to re-emerge weeks later.

Some Mexicans refuse to believe that drug baron Amado Carrillo Fuentes, who used fleets of jets to fly Colombian cocaine to the U.S. border, died during plastic surgery in a Mexico City hospital in 1997. He is still out there trafficking drugs, they say.

When marines killed kingpin Arturo Beltran Leyva in December, the navy did hand out photos of his bloodied, bullet-ridden body, but first they covered his body in wads of cash — a failure of basic human respect that brought widespread criticism.

Numbed by Ciudad Juarez’s endless killings, Mexico shrugs off teen party deaths

The people of Ciudad Juarez are starting to lose all hope. When gunmen burst into a birthday party on Friday and killed 14 people, the horrific act should have at least shocked Mexican authorities into action. But even the sight of blood running out of a suburban patio, the broken chairs and the party-goers’ bodies slumped on the concrete have become all too familiar in the desert city across from El Paso, Texas.

It was at the start of 2010 that another, gruesomely similar shooting was warning enough that the city was spiraling toward criminal anarchy.

In January in a working class neighborhood just blocks away from Friday’s shooting, gunmen killed 15 people, again mainly teenagers, at a party. Back then, just like on Friday, a nearby federal police checkpoint seemed to turn a blind eye to what was going on and did nothing to stop the killers.

At the very least in January, the mother of one of the slain teenagers had the chance to vent her anger in person at Felipe Calderon, the conservative president who launched Mexico’s drug war four years ago. The Mexican leader was sufficiently moved by the January killings to fly to Ciudad Juarez and there, amid national outrage, he announced a plan to rebuild the broken, dirty mess of the city that was once lauded as a poster child for free trade, with its factories producing fridges and television for U.S. consumers.

Poverty, joblessness and a lack of a future for the young, it was rightly said, were the sources of much of the drug gang warfare that has broken out in Ciudad Juarez since 2008.

That reconstruction has included thousands of education grants, parks and community centers, hospital beds and giving almost 140,000 more people access to free medical care. There is even a sports field dedicated to the teenagers killed in January. But most of the streets of Ciudad Juarez are still folorn and many in the downtown that once catered to free-wheeling American tourists are filled with crumbling buildings. Childrens’ playgrounds lie abandoned, covered with graffiti. Killers are still at large.

Residents say that after eight months, a new federal police operation to fight drug gangs, and hundreds more murders, Calderon’s plan has failed. It’s hard to disagree.

Adios to Mexico’s marijuana haul

The black smoke could be seen across Tijuana as Mexico’s biggest-ever marijuana haul went up in flames.

The equivalent of more than 250 million joints were soaked in gasoline and set on fire, with the smell of the drug soon overpowering the acrid smell of the fuel.

It took soldiers 10 hours to assemble all the bales for incineration, 134 tonnes in all, wrapped in packets all marked for their respective U.S. dealers, including some with Homer Simpson logos. They were seized across the city in homes and trucks, a public relations victory of sorts for President Felipe Calderon and his drug war. 

The marijuana took two days to burn.

Still, private estimates put Mexico’s annual marijuana production at 7,000 tonnes, so there are either going to be a lot more bonfires, or, more likely, a lot smoke ups north of the border still to come.

In Mexico’s richest city, drug violence grows and candles burn in protest

The thousands of flickering candles run on and on along Monterrey’s main pedestrian thoroughfare, a spontaneous tribute to a 21-year-old university arts student shot dead by a drug hitmen who was chasing after an off-duty prison guard last week.

Even as busy shoppers bustle past, people are coming to Plaza Morelos to place the candles one after the other in the downtown of Mexico’s wealthy northern city in a rare public showing of anger, sadness and frustration at Lucila Quintanilla’s death and the spiraling drug violence across the city.

It was a Wednesday night like any other when hundreds of workers, shoppers, families and street vendors were wandering up and down Plaza Morelos in the warm autumn evening when a gunman pulled up in a black SUV and shot six times into the crowd. He missed his target, a guard at a Monterrey prison, and instead shot dead Quintanilla, who was chatting to her boyfriend on her cellular phone as she was out shopping. The boyfriend heard her die.

The hitman escaped, but the city, once lauded as a Latin American success story for its safe streets and growing middle class, cannot escape the trauma of the growing drug violence. Alongside many of the candles on the Plaza Morelos lie hand-written messages. “My son was kidnapped on June 23, 2010. We’ve been through three months of pain and desperation and the authorities don’t do anything,” read one. “How many more innocents have to die?” reads another.

Quintanilla’s blood stained the street for days before water from a nearby building’s dripping airconditioning unit washed it away. Monterrey seems determined not to forget this time, and mourners on the Plaza Morelos say they want the line of candles to reach the city’s cathedral and run on and on. “Silence is complicity with organized crime,” said one woman holding up a sign in protest.

In Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez, new police are charged with stopping the violence

It is difficult to imagine things getting much worse in Ciudad Juarez, the manufacturing city across from El Paso that has become one of the world’s most dangerous places. Extortions, beheadings, bombs in cars, daylight shootouts and kidnappings are all daily fare in the border town once better known as a NAFTA powerhouse and party zone for fun seeking Americans. Even the Mexican army stands accused of abusing the trust citizens once placed in it, carrying out possibly hundreds of wrongful arrests and illegal house raids.

Things are so bad that business leaders are calling for a state of emergency to be called in the city on the Rio Grande with nighttime curfews in a bid to control the violence.  Around 10,000 businesses have closed in Ciudad Juarez over the past two years. A military-enforced curfew doesn’t resound much with residents who want the thousands of troops sent in by President Felipe Calderon to leave town for good. More than 6,700 people have died in drug killings since the army arrived in early 2008 and locals say the army-led crackdown on gangs has only provoked more violence across the city and its surrounding Chihuahua state.  (Click here for full Mexico drug war coverage)

The latest initiative implemented by Chihuahua state Governor Cesar Duarte, who took office for a six-year term this week, is to create a new, state-wide police force dissolving notoriously corrupt local cops. It fits in with Calderon’s plan to send a constitutional reform to Congress soon to give governors more power over the police in cities and towns where local mayors run the municipal police. The thousands of disparate municipal police forces across Mexico are the most ineffective and corrupt, seen as an outdated model unfit to fight drug gangs.

But things don’t look promising. Many mayors across Mexico are against the reforms and in Chihuahua, where the reform is going ahead, many of the same corrupt officers are being absorbed into the new force, despite promises of tough checks on dishonest police. Several officers accused of allowing criminals to steal 69 weapons from Chihuahua police headquarters last week were included in the new Chihuahua force.

The federal police are hardly setting an example either. In August, some 450 federal agents held a public protest to denounce their superiors that they say force them on pain of death into the drug trade. “They sell as foot soldiers to the drug gangs. Why isn’t the violence stopping? Just take a look at our bosses,” an agent told Reuters who declined to be named.

Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez, the world’s most violent city?

By Julian CardonaCiudad Juarez, a Mexican town on the U.S. border where daylight murders and beheaded bodies have become the norm, could be the world’s most violent city.

With 130 murders for every 100,000 residents per year on average last year, the city of 1.6 million people is more violent than the Venezuelan capital Caracas, the U.S. city of New Orleans and Colombia’s Medellin. That is according to a study by the Mexican non-profit Citizen Council for Public Security and Justice, which presented its report to Mexico’s security minister at a conference this week.

The fight between rival drug cartels over Ciudad Juarez’s local drug market and smuggling routes into the United States broke out at the start of last year and continues to intensify.Reliable global crime statistics are hard to pin down and a study last year by Foreign Policy Magazine placed Caracas as the world’s top murder capital, also with 130 murders per 100,000 residents. (The Mexican study disputes that and puts the Caracas figure at 96).But Ciudad Juarez’s rising murder rate, currently at about 250 per month, appears to put it well ahead of other notorious world crime capitals such as South Africa’s Cape Town, Moscow, Baghdad, and Papua New Guinea’s capital Port Moresby, according to the Mexican and Foreign Policy studies.In fact, in Ciudad Juarez during the first day of the conference where the Mexican study was presented, eight people were murdered in the city’s streets, including a prosecutor, a lawyer, two policewomen, a clown performer and a gardener.Ciudad Juarez, a manufacturing city across from El Paso, Texas, already has a stained history with the unsolved murders of hundreds of young women in the 1990s.Perhaps most worryingly is not that 10,000 troops and elite police stationed there have failed to stop the drug violence, but that local officials say they have everything under control.Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz says the city’s fight against drug violence is “a successful process that the world can learn from.” Chihuahua state Governor Jose Reyes Baez, who has long bemoaned the media focus on drug violence in Ciudad Juarez, says that troops can gradually leave as newly-trained police take over. The army denies any scaling back in its deployment.

U.S. border agents under fire as Mexican smugglers fight back

Gunmen shot and killed U.S. Border Patrol agent Robert Rosas in California near the U.S.-Mexico border fence on July 23, the first such fatal shooting in more than a decade. In rugged desert where people smugglers and drug traffickers roam, Rosas was tracking a suspicious group of people near the rural town of Campo, about 60 miles (97 kms) east of San Diego.

After radioing for backup, he got out of his vehicle and started to follow members of the group as it split up. He was attacked, robbed of his weapon and shot several times in the head and abdomen.

Mexican police have rounded up five suspects believed to be coyotes, or people smugglers, and drug gang members, although the FBI, which is heading the investigation, considers the case unsolved.

While it unfolds, the probe into the murder of 30 year-old Rosas, father of two small children and whose memorial service is on Friday, is a test for U.S.-Mexican cooperation. Both countries are at pains to show a unified alliance in the drug war, underscored again by U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske’s visit to Mexico this week.

But Rosas’ murder is also a warning that Mexican organized crime is increasingly undaunted by U.S. law enforcement. In Mexico, well-armed drug cartels take on the army at will. Mexico’s escalating drug war has killed some 12,800 people since late 2006, when President Felipe Calderon launched his army-backed crackdown on cartels.

Time to go after the drug money

Drug violence in Mexico is intensifying even by traffickers’ barbaric standards.

In recent days, heavily armed hitmen launched coordinated attacks on federal police stations in western Mexico and dumped the semi-naked, bloodied bodies of 12 federal agents by a mountain highway, killed two U.S. Mormons in their Mexican community and killed a mayor in a northern ranching town.

A surge of 10,000 troops and federal police in Ciudad Juarez has failed to stop the killings there, which are in fact higher than last year when there were only a handful of soldiers on city streets.

President Felipe Calderon says the violence is a sign the drug gangs are weakening, but with 12,800 drug war deaths since he took office and reports of rights abuses by soldiers, calls are growing for a change of strategy.

Those making the calls include senators from Calderon’s own party, opposition politicians, security analysts, Mexico’s Human Rights Commission and international rights groups. But few if any are coming forward with proposals because the police forces that would replace the soldiers on Mexico’s streets are corrupted and a drive to clean them up could take years. For now, Calderon is sending 5,500 more troops and police to his home state of Michoacan to stop the flare-up there.

One thing Calderon could do to weaken traffickers is to go after their cash. That could have a domino effect on cartels’ power to buy guns and to corrupt officials. Headline-grabbing army operations may seem more impressive than the behind-the-scenes work of tracing money laundering, but U.S. anti-drug officials say it is key to Mexico’s success.

from Photographers Blog:

Nobody to trust in Mexico’s north

The first version of the killings came from Mexico City media. “Massacre in Tamaulipas State,” said the news anchorman. Seventy-two corpses had been discovered on a ranch in San Fernando municipality, all showing signs of a mass execution.

News of executions, macabre assassinations and kidnappings are commonplace in northern Mexico, but this headline was not. With journalists’ reflexes we began to plan a trip to what suddenly became the bloodiest theater in the drug war. In the past two months a candidate for governor was gunned down, two mayors assassinated, grenades exploded on city streets and the cousin of a media mogul kidnapped. In one weekend 51 people had been murdered in infamous Ciudad Juarez.

My editors asked me if I wanted to go to Ciudad Victoria, where the government announced it would send the 72 bodies for identification. I knew the routine. In less than an hour I was headed out the door to the airport with my equipment and a hastily-packed suitcase, just as my youngest daughter arrived from school.

“Where are you going Papá?” she asked. “Can you take me with you?” My daughter is still a child.