An American Drug Lord in Acapulco

How a high school jock from Texas rose to the top of one of Mexico's most powerful and ruthless cartels

Excerpt:   ....a few weeks later, one of Barbie's assistants was pulled over by the police on the way to a carwash in Mexico City. Two officers jumped out of their black truck, guns drawn. "Freeze, motherfucker!" they screamed. They demanded to know where Barbie was. "Where is that son of a bitch?" one officer said. "Don't bullshit, or I'll cut off your balls and feed them to you."

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE....
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/an-american-drug-lord-in-acapulco-20110825

Am I being executed?

A Brazilian man executed by firing squad along with seven other prisoners in Indonesia on Wednesday had no idea he was about to be killed until his final minutes, the priest who counselled him has said.

Excerpt:

He was hearing voices all the time,” Burrows told Irish radio. “I talked to him for about an hour and a half, trying to prepare him for the execution. I said to him, ‘I’m 72 years old, I’ll be heading to heaven in the near future, so you find out where my house is and prepare a garden for me.’
“But when they took [the prisoners] out of the cells … and when they put these bloody chains on them, he said to me, ‘Am I being executed?’ ” Burrows said.
“I said, ‘Yes, I thought I explained that you.’ He didn’t get excited – he’s a quiet sort of a guy – but he said, ‘This is not right.’

READ MORE HERE...
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/30/brazilian-executed-by-indonesia-was-hearing-voices-all-the-time

The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think

Exceptional article...I really hope we are in the last days of the War on Drugs.

Read full article here...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-real-cause-of-addicti_b_6506936.html

The Murder and the Money Trail

Hard to find journalism this good anymore....

http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/episodes/2013-2014/the-murder-and-the-money-trail

El Chapo’s Arrest Unlikely to Break Mexican Cartel

“Sinaloa has managed to expand in such a way that the business can run itself,” said Samuel Logan, an expert on transnational crime at Southern Pulse, an investment and risk assessment firm. “The entire Mexican state could fall, and the drug trade will continue, as long as there is a demand.”

Comparing the cartel to McDonald’s, Mr. Logan said, “If the C.E.O. of McDonald’s was arrested today, you could still buy a hamburger in Tokyo tomorrow.”

READ MORE HERE...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/26/world/americas/arrest-unlikely-to-break-cartel.html?src=me&_r=0 

More stories on the Drug War here....
http://ajarnmike.blogspot.ca/search/label/drug%20war

Captured: Joaqin "El Chapo" Guzmán, Mexico's No 1 drug lord

Early on Saturday, dozens of soldiers and police officers descended on a hotel-condominium tower in Mazatlán, Mexico, a beach resort known as much as a hangout for drug traffickers as for its seafood and surf.

The forces were following yet another tip about the whereabouts of the trafficker Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as El Chapo, who, to the utter frustration of American and Mexican pursuers, had eluded such raids for 13 years since escaping from prison in a...

READ MORE HERE...
 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/centralamericaandthecaribbean/mexico/10655962/Captured-Joaqin-El-Chapo-Guzman-Mexicos-No-1-drug-lord.html


Another great article...

Mexican Kingpin El Chapo Guzman Hid In Secret Tunnels And Sewers Before Being Captured

 

A Mexican militia, battling Michoacan drug cartel, has American roots

Interesting take on the spiraling violence in Michoacan...

Many were U.S. immigrants who came back, some voluntarily but most often not, to the desiccated job market in the state of Michoacan and found life under the Knights Templar drug cartel that controls the area almost unlivable. They took up arms because they were financially abused by the extortion rackets run by the Templars. Because they had family killed or wounded by their enemies. Because carrying a silver-plated handgun and collecting defeated narcos’ designer cellphones as war booty is more invigorating than packing cucumbers. Because they get to feel, for once, the sensation of being in charge.
 
“Everybody’s with us, all the people,” said Edgar Orozco, a 27-year-old American citizen who left his job at a Sacramento body shop nine months ago to join the fight after the Knights Templar killed his uncle and cousin. “We’re not going to disarm. Never.”

Read More here...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/a-mexican-militia-battling-michoacan-drug-cartel-has-american-roots/2014/01/18/30f96894-7f92-11e3-97d3-b9925ce2c57b_story.html

Also...

Vigilantes hold Mexico town, tenuously, after driving out cartel

http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-mexico-michoacan-violence-20140119,0,154127.story#axzz2qs0NL2d1

Mexican Vigilantes Prepare for All-Out War with Cartel

In my view....this is the only way to make any change in Mexico....the government and police stopped caring a long, long time ago. 

 Police being arrested by vigilantes in Michoacan. Jan/2014

 More than 100 men entered the Nueva Italia in western Michoacan state on Sunday morning and disarmed local police.

There were exchanges of fire with gang members before the vigilantes occupied the town.
The vigilante group was set up by residents who say the army and the police have failed to protect them.

 Videos...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4YEoEfOcsY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qhj02q5KUw4 

And a good article as well...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/centralamericaandthecaribbean/mexico/10569202/Mexican-vigilantes-force-drugs-cartel-out-of-town.html

UPDATE:

A Quandary for Mexico as Vigilantes Rise

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/16/world/americas/a-quandary-for-mexico-as-vigilantes-rise.html?ref=americas&_r=0

Argentina's Slum Priests Focus on Helping rather than Converting

Truly inspiring...

Excerpt:

He has scuffed work boots and dirty nails and hears confession from dealers and hit men. When residents spot his trashed 4x4 bumping down dirt roads, they call out his nickname: "Charly!"
He spends most of his time addressing practical rather than spiritual problems. That means navigating governmental bureaucracy, helping immigrants obtain state identification cards and finding beds to get addicts off the street.

"If we don't get people a home, it's insane to think about other kinds of lives for them," Olivero said.
So far this day he had talked to the directors of two state hospitals, attended a brainstorming session with other slum priests and handed out fliers about a religious festival for the neighborhood's large community of Paraguayan immigrants.

As he left to prepare for that evening's wake for the addict, he suddenly remembered something.
"Oh," he said, bringing his hands to his head. "I have a wedding tonight!"

READ MORE HERE...
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-argentina-slum-priests-20130806-dto,0,4329979.htmlstory

Legalize Marijuana and Other Ways U.S.-Mexico Can Win Drug War

 Excerpt: "That doesn’t mean I favor abandoning the fight against los narcos. I’m just saying that if the past seven years have shown us anything, it’s that it doesn’t matter whether Peña Nieto ratchets up that fight (as his predecessor did) or dials it down, or whether Washington pumps more or less aid into it—not as long as police and judicial institutions remain dysfunctional in Mexico and demand for illegal drugs remains insatiable in the U.S. Which is why, if Obama and Peña Nieto are the smart politicos they’ve proven to be, they’ll realize that the two most important developments in the drug war over the past six months took place not during any interdiction operation but on election day last November in the U.S., and on Tuesday, April 30, in Mexico."

Read more here...
http://world.time.com/2013/05/03/how-obama-and-pena-nieto-can-win-the-drug-war/?iid=gs-main-lead

Anonymous Drug War Blogger Speaks for First Time

I wondered for a long time who was making this blog...

Anonymous author of celebrated Blog del Narco speaks for first time about the risks – and reveals she is a woman...

Read more here...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/03/mexico-blog-del-narco-drug-wars

Also check this one out...

Dying to Tell the Truth: Undercover Inside the Mexican Drug War

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/03/mexico-violent-drug-wars-book-excerpt
 

Mexico's Disappeared

The full human cost of Mexico bloody drug war during the last six years is only now becoming apparent. Nearly 70,000 people died and more than 26,000 went missing between 2006 and 2012. 

A scathing new report by Human Rights Watch casts substantial blame for the problem on the country's security forces, which it says have not only been implicated in many of the underlying crimes but have failed to adequately investigate claims by friends and family members of the victims. The result, the report says, is the "most severe crisis of enforced disappearances in Latin America in decades."

Read more here... 
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-disappeared-mexico-human-rights-watch-20130305,0,4235175.story

Cocaine Incorporated

 

Inside the Sinaloa Cartel...fascinating...

Excerpt:

In 2005, the Flores twins were flown to a mountaintop compound in Sinaloa to meet with Chapo Guzmán. The kingpin is an intimidating interlocutor; one criminal who has negotiated with him face to face told me that Chapo tends to dominate a conversation, asking a lot of questions and compensating for his short stature by bouncing on the balls of his feet. But the meeting went well, and before long, the brothers were distributing around two tons of Sinaloa product each month. 

As preferred customers, they often took Chapo’s drugs without putting any money down, then paid the cartel only after they sold the product. This might seem unlikely, given the pervasive distrust in the underworld, but the narcotics trade is based on a robust and surprisingly reliable system of credit. In a sense, a cartel like Sinaloa has no choice but to offer a financing option, because few wholesale buyers have the liquidity to pay cash upfront for a ton of cocaine. “They have to offer lines of credit,” Wardrop told me, “no different from Walmart or Sears.”  

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/magazine/how-a-mexican-drug-cartel-makes-its-billions.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Update...

No Word on Mexican drug lord Guzman after gun battle in Guatemala...

http://www.latimes.com/news/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-guatemala-shootout-guzman-20130222,0,2471988.story?track=rss

Mexican police charged in attack on CIA officers

There are two Mexicos.
There is the one reported by the US press, a place where the Mexican president is fighting a valiant war on drugs, aided by the Mexican army and the Mérida Initiative, the $1.4 billion in aid the United States has committed to the cause. This Mexico has newspapers, courts, laws, and is seen by the United States government as a sister republic.
It does not exist.

There is a second Mexico where the war is for drugs, where the police and the military fight for their share of drug profits, where the press is restrained by the murder of reporters and feasts on a steady diet of bribes, and where the line between the government and the drug world has never existed.

Mexican police charged in attack on CIA officers


Fourteen officers in Mexico’s federal police force have been formally charged with the attempted murder of a pair of American CIA operatives who were attacked in their armored SUV in August on a road south of the capital, federal prosecutors said Friday.
In a statement, prosecutors said the officers’ actions were deliberate, alleging that they “intended to take the lives of two functionaries from the United States Embassy in Mexico,” as well as a member of the Mexican navy who was traveling with them through dangerous country on their way to a Mexican military training facility.

 READ MORE HERE...
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2012/11/mexican-police-charged-cia.html

Mexican Official:  CIA "Manages" Drug War

The US Central Intelligence Agency and other international security forces "don't fight drug traffickers", a spokesman for the Chihuahua state government in northern Mexico has told Al Jazeera, instead "they try to manage the drug trade".
 
Allegations about official complicity in the drug business are nothing new when they come from activists, professors, campaigners or even former officials. However, an official spokesman for the authorities in one of Mexico's most violent states - one which directly borders Texas - going on the record with such accusations is unique.

READ MORE HERE...
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/07/2012721152715628181.html?utm_content=features&utm_campaign=features&utm_source=twitter&utm_term=rss&utm_medium=tweet

Why is the Mexican Drug War Being Ignored?

 Neighbors and family of slain Alberto Rodriquez, 28, watch and cry as the authorities descend on the crime scene. Rodriguez was killed in his car outside his house while his family watched. See more here.

Why is the Mexican Drug War Being Ignored?

Excerpt:

Killings continue to rise, and hardly a week passes without a new report of grisly acts south of the border. Portions of several key cities, especially Ciudad Juarez and Monterrey, are now virtual war zones. The Mexican government’s control is becoming precarious in major swaths of territory, including the crucial northern states of Nuevo Leon, Chihuahua, and Tamaulipas. Several of the cartels, especially the Sinaloa cartel and the ultra-violent Zetas, pose a threat to the integrity of the Mexican state.

 Equally troubling, the turmoil in Mexico is spreading to Central America and beginning to seep over the border into the United States. One would think that such a national security problem would merit some attention from the incumbent president and the man who aims to replace him.
Indeed, Mexican opinion leaders were justifiably miffed at the failure to address the drug war. Prominent journalist Leon Krauss’s widely circulated tweet summarized the frustration. “Mexico, facing 100,000 deaths, neighbor to the United States, didn’t deserve a single mention tonight. A disgrace.”

READ MORE HERE...
http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2012/10/30/why-is-mexico-drug-war-being-ignored/

Meet Mexico's New Cartel Boss...Z-40

More blood and more death. Mexico’s drug wars seem to be getting crueler and more sadistic by the year. Of all the players involved, probably no one is more responsible for the increasing violence than Miguel Angel Treviño, a.k.a. ‘Z-40,’ who has just taken over control of the notorious Los Zetas cartel following the killing last week of kingpin Heriberto “El Lazca” Lascano.
Mexican authorities confirmed the leadership change, as have rival cartels, which are urging a unified approach to face Treviño head on.

READ MORE HERE...
http://www.worldcrunch.com/culture-society/meet-mexico-039-s-new-boss-anointed-drug-kingpin-039-s-notorious-thirst-for-blood/trevi-o-z-40-los-zetas-cartel/c3s9882/#.UJWrp4bPs3y

Mexico's New Deadly City

Excerpt:

Once enticing U.S. firms like Caterpillar and John Deere and Japanese auto parts maker Takata to open plants, Torreon has not attracted any other big names since the Zetas swept in.

"It's a powder keg," said a former mayor, Guillermo Anaya, who ran the city from 2003 to 2005 and is now a federal lawmaker.

Many people in the arid metropolis about 275 miles (450 km) from the U.S. border believe if Torreon cannot defeat the Zetas soon it may need to reach some kind of agreement with their arch rivals, the Sinaloa Cartel, and let them do the job.

Widely seen as the most brutal Mexican drug gang, the Zetas have so terrorized Torreon and the surrounding state of Coahuila that some officials make a clear distinction between them and the Sinaloa Cartel, for years the dominant outfit in the city.

"They (the Zetas) act without any kind of principles," Torreon's police chief, Adelaido Flores, told Reuters. "The ones from Sinaloa don't mess ... with the population."

READ MORE HERE...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/29/torreon-mexico-drug-war_n_2037555.html

The CIA Burglar who went Rogue

Great article, real cloak and dagger stuff...
 
Excerpt:

"This unit was so secret that few people inside CIA headquarters knew it existed; it wasn’t even listed in the CIA's classified telephone book. Officially it was named the Special Operations Division, but the handful of agency officers selected for it called it the Shop.
In Doug Groat’s time there, in the 1980s and early ’90s, the Shop occupied a nondescript one-story building just south of a shopping mall in the Washington suburb of Springfield, Virginia. The building was part of a government complex surrounded by a chain-link fence; the pebbled glass in the windows let in light but allowed no view in or out. 

The men and women of the Shop made up a team of specialists: lock pickers, safecrackers, photographers, electronics wizards and code experts. One team member was a master at disabling alarm systems, another at flaps and seals. Their mission, put simply, was to travel the world and break into other countries’ embassies to steal codes, and it was extraordinarily dangerous. They did not have the protection of diplomatic cover; if caught, they might face imprisonment or execution. The CIA, they assumed, would claim it knew nothing about them."


READ MORE HERE...
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-CIA-Burglar-Who-Went-Rogue-169800816.html

Marriage, Mcdonald's and Mexico

Three cool articles...

Doubts About Marriage Should Not Be Ignored

http://www.baltimoresun.com/health/blog/bal-poh-do-not-ignore-wedding-gitters,0,6961107.story

The 10 Best McDonald's Meals You Won't Find in the US

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/10/08/10_best_mcdonalds_meals_you_wont_find_in_the_us?page=0,0

Mexico: Failed State or Economic Giant?

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/thecafe/2012/09/20129161631565644.html

CIA-Sinaloa Cartel Connection Deepens

Bomb explosion in Nueva Leon

High Ranking Cartel Member Says Operation Fast And Furious Was Meant To Supply Guns To The Sinaloa Cartel

"Excerpt"

Zambada-Niebla was arrested by Mexican authorities in March 2009 and extradited to Chicago to face drug trafficking charges.

From the court document:

[T]he United States government at its highest levels entered into agreements with cartel leaders to act as informants against rival cartels and received benefits in return, including, but not limited to, access to thousands of weapons which helped them continue their business of smuggling drugs into Chicago and throughout the United States, and to continue wreaking havoc on the citizens and law enforcement in Mexico.  

Zambada-Niebla believes that he, like the leadership of the Sinaloa cartel, was "immune from arrest or prosecution" because he also actively provided information to U.S. federal agents.

READ MORE HERE... http://www.businessinsider.com/fast-and-furious-guns-sinaloa-cartel-2012-8
ALSO WORTH CHECKING OUT...  
The global drug war and the Nixon connection

As one indication of how badly the war on drugs has failed, the report cited UN data showing a 34.5 per cent increase in opiate use from 1998 to 2008, along with a 27 per cent increase in cocaine and an 8.5 per cent increase in cannabis.
READ MORE HERE...
 http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/06/201164135055160347.html

Ton's more great articles on the drug war here...
http://ajarnmike.blogspot.ca/search/label/Mexico

U.S. Drug War Expands to Africa, a Newer Hub for Cartels

 

Excerpt:

The initiatives come amid a surge in successful interdictions in Honduras since May — but also as American officials have been forced to defend their new tactics after a commando-style team of D.E.A. agents participated in at least three lethal interdiction operations alongside a squad of Honduran police officers. In one of those operations, in May, the Honduran police killed four people near the village of Ahuas, and in two others in the past month American agents have shot and killed smuggling suspects. 

To date, officials say, the D.E.A. commando team has not been deployed to work with the newly created elite police squads in Africa, where the effort to counter the drug traffickers is said to be about three years behind the one in Central America. 

Read Full Article here...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/world/africa/us-expands-drug-fight-in-africa.html

Apologies to Mexico

A thought-provoking and timely article on the modern drug war...

Excerpt:

"Then there’s our futile “war on drugs” that has created so much pain of its own. It’s done so by locking up mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and children for insanely long prison sentences and offering no treatment. It does so by costing so much it’s warping the economies of states that have huge numbers of nonviolent offenders in prison and not enough money for education or healthcare. It does so by branding as felons and pariahs those who have done time in the drug-war prison complex. It was always aimed most directly at African-Americans, and the toll it’s taken would require a week of telling.

No border divides the pain caused by drugs from the pain brought about in Latin America by the drug business and the narcotraficantes.  It’s one big continent of pain -- and in the last several years the narcos have begun selling drugs in earnest in their own countries, creating new cultures of addiction and misery.  (And yes, Mexico, your extravagantly corrupt government, military, and police have everything to do with the drug war now, but file that under greed, as usual, about which your pretty new president is unlikely to do anything much.)

Imagine that the demand ceased tomorrow; the profitable business of supply would have to wither away as well. Many talk about legalizing drugs, and there’s something to be said for changing the economic arrangements. But what about reducing their use by developing and promoting more interesting and productive ways of dealing with suffering? Or even getting directly at the causes of that suffering? Some drug use is, of course, purely recreational, but even recreational drug use stimulates these economies of carnage. And then there are...

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rebecca-solnit/apologies-to-mexico_b_1661723.html