Drug Cartel May Have Infiltrated U.S. Embassy In Mexico
If this is your first time visiting National Terror Alert you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. The National terror Alert feed features breaking news, alerts and bulletins on demand and it's free of charge..
You will only see this message on your first visit to the site. Thanks for visiting!
The U.S. State Department is investigating an allegation that an employee of the American Embassy in Mexico City passed sensitive information to a major drug cartel.
The report stems from a scandal at the organized crime unit of the Mexican attorney general’s office, where 35 employees were accused yesterday of passing information about investigations to the Beltran-Leyva narcotics organization. The informants collected as much as $450,000 a month.
A unnamed protected witness (who The New York Times said went by the alias “Felipe”) also told authorities that he spied for the drug cartel on U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents while working as a criminal investigator at the U.S. embassy, according to El Universal, a Mexico City newspaper.
DEA intelligence chief Anthony Placido said at a Washington news conference today that he was concerned about Felipe’s claims, but said he couldn’t confirm that embassy information about drug-enforcement measures had been passed on to drug lords.
From The New York Times
One of Mexico’s most notorious drug cartels made huge cash payments to officials in the Mexican attorney general’s office in exchange for confidential information on antidrug operations, officials said Monday, adding that the cartel might have had an informant inside the American Embassy.
Prosecutors announced the arrest of five officials in the attorney general’s elite organized crime unit, who they said were receiving as much as $450,000 a month to feed secrets to the Beltrán-Leyva cartel, one of the major groups transporting cocaine from Colombia through Mexico to the United States.
Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora said several dozen additional people would be fired and a major overhaul would take place because of fears that even more workers in the office might be on the payroll of traffickers.
On top of that, a cartel worker whose identity is being kept secret admitted to leaking details of Drug Enforcement Administration operations to his drug bosses while working as an embassy employee, Mexican officials said.
Leave a comment!