Mexican Military Helicopter Hovers Over Texas Homes

The Houston Chronicle reports that the Zapata County sheriff Thursday was questioning why a Mexican military helicopter was hovering over homes on the Texas side of the Rio Grande.

It was one of the more jarring incidents of the fourth week of border tensions sparked by drug killings — and rumors of drug killings — in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas.

Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez said he’d reviewed photos of the chopper flown by armed personnel Tuesday over a residential area known as Falcon Heights-Falcon Village near the binational Falcon Lake, just south of the Starr-Zapata county line. He said the helicopter appeared to have the insignia of the Mexican navy.

“It’s always been said that the Mexican military does in fact … that there have been incursions,” Gonzalez said. “But this is not New Mexico or Arizona. Here we’ve got a river, there’s a boundary line. And then of course having Falcon Lake, Falcon Dam, it’s a lot wider. It’s not just a trickle of a river, it’s an actual dam. You know where the boundary’s at.”

The sighting came amid ongoing fighting between the Gulf Cartel and its former enforcers, Los Zetas. The mounting death toll and crisis of fear in cities opposite the Texas border have drawn global attention, as has a news blackout in affected cities with the kidnappings of eight Mexican journalists, at least one of whom was killed.

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Arturo Beltran Leyva Mexican Drug Lord Killed

Mexican security forces have killed drug lord Arturo Beltran Leyva, one of the most wanted traffickers in both Mexico and the United States, in a victory for President Felipe Calderon’s war on drug cartels.

Beltran Leyva, a drug lord dubbed “The Boss of Bosses,” was killed on Wednesday by Navy forces in a luxury residential complex in the southern city of Cuernavaca.

“We confirm the death of Arturo Beltran Leyva. He was killed in a Navy operation in Cuernavaca,” said a Navy captain who declined to be named.

Six bodyguards died together with Beltran Leyva, who ran a cartel that carried his family name. He was an ally turned foe of Mexico’s No.1 most wanted man, Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman.

More than 16,000 people have been killed in drug violence in the last three years as rival gangs have fought each other and security forces. Atrocities have become common.

Suspected drug gangs dumped the severed heads of five police officers and a prosecutor outside a church in the northern state of Durango on Wednesday.

The heads were left in plastic bags discovered by trash collectors as blood ran out of the bags onto the street.

via Mexican forces kill drug lord Beltran Leyva | Reuters.

Hitmen Massacre 18 In Border Drug Rehab – Juarez Mexico

About a dozen hooded gunmen burst into a Mexican rehabilitation clinic near the U.S. border on Wednesday, lining up patients before killing 17 of them. Drug gangs have targeted rehab clinics in the manufacturing city of Ciudad Juarez across from El Paso, Texas, accusing them of protecting dealers from rival gangs.

The attack was one of the deadliest in President Felipe Calderon’s three-year war against drug cartels, despite the presence of 10,000 troops and federal police in Ciudad Juarez who constantly patrol the city’s streets.

The suspected hitmen stormed their way into the drug and alcohol rehab clinic in Ciudad Juarez and forced patients into a line in a corridor before shooting them, the army and the El Diario newspaper said.

“Armed men shot at about 20 people, killing 17 of them and injuring three,” said army spokesman Enrique Torres.

In a separate attack on Wednesday, gunmen killed the deputy police chief in Calderon’s home state of Michoacan in western Mexico.

Jose Manuel Revueltas, appointed just two weeks ago, was intercepted by heavily armed men in two vehicles as he drove down a busy avenue in the state capital, Morelia, a few blocks from police headquarters, police said.

Revueltas, 38, and his two bodyguards died in the intense gunfire that also killed a man traveling on a bus.

via Hitmen kill 17 in Mexico clinic on U.S. border | Reuters.

State Department Warns About Mexico Travel

Citing rising violence, the U.S. State Department’s latest Mexico alert urges travelers to delay trips to parts of Michoacan and Chihuahua states. The alert, issued Thursday, advises U.S. citizens to delay unnecessary travel to those areas and to exercise “extreme caution” if a visit is necessary.

From The State Department Travel Alert

Throughout Mexico, the State Department said, travelers should try to travel on main roads during daylight hours, especially toll roads, which are typically more secure. Officials also recommend that Americans avoid traveling alone, put away fancy jewelry, stay in well-known tourist areas and leave itineraries with friends or family.

Mexican drug cartels are engaged in violent conflict – both among themselves and with Mexican security services – for control of narcotics trafficking routes along the U.S.-Mexico border.  In order to combat violence, the government of Mexico has deployed military troops in various parts of the country.  U.S. citizens should cooperate fully with official checkpoints when traveling on Mexican highways.

Some recent Mexican army and police confrontations with drug cartels have resembled small-unit combat, with cartels employing automatic weapons and grenades.  Large firefights have taken place in towns and cities across Mexico, but occur mostly in northern Mexico, including Tijuana, Chihuahua City, Monterrey and Ciudad Juarez.  During some of these incidents, U.S. citizens have been trapped and temporarily prevented from leaving the area.  The U.S. Mission in Mexico currently restricts non-essential travel within the state of Durango, the northwest quadrant of Chihuahua and an area southeast of Ciudad Juarez, and all parts of the state of Coahuila south of Mexican Highways 25 and 22 and the Alamos River for US Government employees assigned to Mexico.  This restriction was implemented in light of the recent increase in assaults, murders, and kidnappings in those three states.  The situation in northern Mexico remains fluid; the location and timing of future armed engagements cannot be predicted.

A number of areas along the border are experiencing rapid growth in the rates of many types of crime.  Robberies, homicides, petty thefts, and carjackings have all increased over the last year across Mexico generally, with notable spikes in Tijuana and northern Baja California.  Ciudad Juarez, Tijuana and Nogales are among the cities which have experienced public shootouts during daylight hours in shopping centers and other public venues.  Criminals have followed and harassed U.S. citizens traveling in their vehicles in border areas including Nuevo Laredo, Matamoros, and Tijuana.

The situation in the state of Chihuahua including Ciudad Juarez is of special concern.   The U.S. Consulate General recommends that American citizens defer non-essential travel to the Guadalupe Bravo area southeast of Ciudad Juarez and to the northwest quarter of the state of  Chihuahua including the city of Nuevo Casas Grandes and surrounding communities.  From the United States, these areas are often reached through the Columbus, NM and Fabens and Fort Hancock, TX ports-of-entry.  In both areas, American citizens have been victims of drug related violence.

Mexican authorities report that more than 1,000 people have been killed in Ciudad Juarez in the first six-months of 2009.  Additionally, this city of 1.6 million people experienced more than 17,000 car thefts and 1,650 carjackings in 2008.  U.S. citizens should pay close attention to their surroundings while traveling in Ciudad Juarez, avoid isolated locations during late night and early morning hours, and remain alert to news reports.  Visa and other service seekers visiting the Consulate are encouraged to make arrangements to pay for those services using a non-cash method.

U.S. citizens are urged to be alert to safety and security concerns when visiting the border region.  Criminals are armed with a wide array of sophisticated weapons.  In some cases, assailants have worn full or partial police or military uniforms and have used vehicles that resemble police vehicles.  While most crime victims are Mexican citizens, the uncertain security situation poses serious risks for U.S. citizens as well.  U.S. citizen victims of crime in Mexico are urged to contact the consular section of the nearest U.S. consulate or Embassy for advice and assistance.

See Full Travel Alert

Ciudad Juarez – 43 Murders In 72 Hours

There has been a surge of violence in the Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez, with 43 people murdered in and around it in the last three days. About 1,300 people have been murdered in the border city since the start of the year. Most of the killings are believed to be drug related. Earlier this year the government sent thousands of troops to the city in an effort to contain the violence.

The move had appeared to be working; it is not clear what prompted this rise.

Bar attack

A family of three were the latest victims of the rash of killings that is currently taking place in Ciudad Juarez.

A man was driving his wife and their four-year-old son along a highway near the city when their car was sprayed with automatic gunfire. The father and child were killed instantly, the mother is in hospital.

The previous day a popular bar in the centre of town was attacked.

The owner and his wife were shot at close range by gunmen who then opened fire on customers, killing six of them.

A few hours earlier a group of heavily-armed masked men attacked a house outside the city, close to the border with Texas. A further six people were killed.

Mexican prosecutors are offering no explanation for the surge in violence.

via BBC NEWS | Americas | Violence surges in Mexican city.

Cartel Member Killed In El Paso Feared For His Life

A Mexican man who was allegedly killed on orders from his own cartel believed they were hunting for him after he began working as an informant and was fearful for his life, according to court documents. Jose Daniel Gonzalez Galeana began to worry after he began working as an informant for immigration officials in the United States.

“The victim was concerned for his own well-being and the safety of his family,” the documents said, referencing statements the victim made to a witness.

When Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials gave Gonzalez a visa so he could live in El Paso, Texas, his fellow Juarez cartel members began to get suspicious, El Paso Police Chief Greg Allen said at a press conference.

Allen said Gonzalez’s exit from Mexico, combined with a raid on a cartel warehouse and the arrest of cartel lieutenant Pedro “El Tigre” Aranas Sanchez led cartel members to believe he might be working as an informant, Allen said.

Then, a Mexican newspaper named Gonzalez as an informant in the arrest of the high-ranking cartel member, according to court documents. Police say Gonzales quickly became the target of his own cartel.

Police said Gonzalez knew if his fellow cartel members found him, he would likely be killed, police said.

On May 15, the cartel found him.

Read Full Article.

Drug Cartels Target Mormon LaBaron Clan in Mexico

Mormon pioneer Alma Dayer LeBaron had a vision when he moved his breakaway sect of polygamists to this valley 60 years ago: His many children would live in peace and prosperity among the pretty pecan orchards they would plant in the desert.

In the past three months, American Mormon communities in Mexico have been sucked into a dust devil of violence sweeping the borderlands. Their relative wealth has made them targets: Their telephones ring with threats of extortion. Their children and elders are taken by kidnappers. They have been drawn into the government’s war with the drug cartels.

This month, a leader of their colony was abducted by heavily armed men dressed as police, then beaten and shot dead 10 minutes from town. Benjamin LeBaron, 31, whom everyone called Benji, had dared to denounce the criminals, while refusing to pay a $1 million ransom demanded by kidnappers who had grabbed his teenage brother from a family ranch in May.

via Drug Cartels Target Mormon Clans in Mexico – washingtonpost.com.

12 Mexican Intelligence Officers Found Tortured, Killed

Mexican officials have identified 12 tortured bodies found dumped in Michoacan state as off-duty military intelligence officers who were ambushed by a drug cartel they were investigating.

The bound, blindfolded and tortured bodies of the 11 men and one woman were found late last night. National security spokesman Monte Alejandro Rubido said they were ambushed and executed by the La Familia cartel. Earlier reports said the bodies were those of soldiers.

Two Americans Beaten, Murdered In Mexico

A top member of a breakaway Mormon sect was dragged from his home by marauders and killed early Tuesday in a village founded and named for the American families that settled the remote community in the northern Mexican desert.

Benjamin LeBaron, 31, and Luis Widmar, 29, a brother-in-law who tried to help him, were grabbed by at least 15 commandos shortly after midnight in Colonia LeBaron, which is about 200 miles southeast of El Paso, witnesses said.

The bodies of the men, both naturalized U.S. citizens with five children each, were found nearby shortly afterward, each shot several times in the head, Brent LeBaron, a cousin of Benjamin who lives in the village, said by telephone.

Benjamin LeBaron had led successful protests earlier this year to free his kidnapped brother and demand police protection for their isolated rural community.

[...]

Attacked cousin’s house

The attackers struck his cousin’s house as the family slept trying to knock down the front door and smashing its windows, Brent LeBaron said. A panicked Benjamin LeBaron phoned two brothers-in-law for help.

But after the attackers threatened to throw a grenade into the house, LeBaron opened the door.

The gangsters beat Le-Baron and one threatened to rape his wife in front of their children before carrying their victims away, Brent LeBaron said.

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11 Bodies, Some Mutilated Found In Car Near US Border

Mexican police found 11 bodies in an abandoned vehicle near the U.S. border on Thursday, some with their hands and legs cut off and left with threatening messages scrawled by suspected drug hit men.

The bodies of the men, who were shot to death, were found in the northwestern state of Sonora in a stolen SUV with Arizona plates, the state attorney general’s office said.

A state attorney general’s office spokesman said drug cartels were likely behind the attack, although he declined to give details about the messages left on the bodies.

The killings came a day after drug gangs shot up a police station in a nearby town as violence flared in the state dominated by Mexico’s top trafficker, Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman.

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4 U.S. Citizens Found Strangled in Tijuana Mexico

The bodies of four U.S. citizens were found strangled, beaten and stabbed in a van in this border city, two days after they reportedly left their Southern California homes for a night at the Mexican clubs, U.S. officials said Thursday. The bodies were described as having been tortured; bludgeoned, beaten and with their skulls crushed. They were found wrapped in blankets early Saturday morning, according to a news release from the Tijuana State Attorney’s Office.

The victims were found Saturday, but their deaths were not reported earlier because they were under investigation, said Fermin Gomez, an assistant state prosecutor in Baja California.

U.S. consular officials in Tijuana said the victims  two men and two women from the San Diego and Chula Vista areas — were U.S. citizens. The state attorney general’s office in Baja, Calif., said one of the women was Mexican.

A spokesman for the U.S. Consulate in Tijuana confirmed the identities of the dead as Luis Games Chavez, 21; Oscar J. Garcia III, 23; Brianna Hernandez Aguilera, 19; and Carmen Ramos Chavez, 20. All were U.S. citizens and Southern California residents, the consulate spokesman said. He declined to give specific hometowns or say how long the four had been in Tijuana.

Their deaths are the latest in a string of violence in Tijuana that authorities blame on a bloody turf war between drug cartels.

“I just don’t think kids should be going to Tijuana right now,” Chula Vista police Lt. Scott Arsenault told the San Diego Union-Tribune. “They ran into the wrong people, obviously.”

Bernard Gonzales, a spokesman for the Chula Vista Police Department, said a friend told the women’s parents they were headed to nightclubs in Tijuana on Thursday night. They were reported missing the next day when they did not answer their cell phones.

Source

Tunnels Pose Trouble from Mexico to Middle East

By 2014 most of the border will be home to sensor-equipped towers that are linked to a central communications network. But while proponents argue that the system will help stem the flow of illegal immigrants, drugs and arms coming over the border, most experts admit it will do little to guard against people making their way under it.

[...]

Since 2001, more than 100 tunnels have been discovered by U.S. law enforcement, compared with just 15 in the 1990s, and the pace is accelerating. Most of those have been uncovered through human intelligence, since there are no currently available technical means to reliably detect tunnels.

The Department of Homeland Security started spending research money on detection technologies two years ago. But even the most promising ones — primarily adapted from mining and petroleum exploration industries — are several years from proving reliable. “We see this as one of those frontier threat areas that have to be mitigated but it is a very, very difficult problem area,” says Rick Miller, a leading expert at the Kansas Geological Survey.

Most of the tunnels are pretty crude, what law enforcement call gopher holes. Typically just a few feet down and only long enough to get under a fence or two, they can be dug with a pick axe and shovel in the span of just a few nights.

[...]

Far more worrisome are the increasingly sophisticated tunnels that display mining engineering expertise and significant investments of money. A tunnel discovered in 2006 believed to have been financed by the Tijuana Cartel led by the family of Ramon Arellano Felix was around 2,400 feet long and about nine stories deep. It had concrete floors in certain sections, ventilation, electricity and a water drainage system. It went from an industrial area of Tijuana across the border to a warehouse in Otay Mesa, the main commercial port of entry near San Diego.

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Mexico Drug Smugglers Relocate to Town in New Mexico

The dusty little border town of Columbus, New Mexico, with almost no visible means of support, has been seeing something of a boom in the past year: Brand-new sport utility vehicles with flashy wheel rims are parked just off the bleak main drag. Homes are selling quickly, sometimes for cash.

The source of this sudden wealth? An influx of Mexican drug smugglers, investigators say.

The smugglers are fleeing the Mexican army’s occupation of the town of Palomas, on the other side of the U.S.-Mexico border fence, and settling in Columbus, where there has been a law enforcement vacuum. The four-man police force in Columbus has turned over seven times in three years because of scandal or apathy.

“We know the names of the people,” said Luna County Sheriff Raymond Cobos, who is based in Deming, 35 miles away. “I know that if I were a person involved in criminal activity, whether it’s drug-related, human smuggling related, I certainly would welcome the absence of police.”

So far, Columbus has been spared any violence, even though the sheriff’s investigators estimate 10 percent of the population of 2,000 may be involved in illegal activity.

“I would say greater,” said resident Robert Odom. “If a person wanted to, they could make a good living in Columbus — not legally, but they can make a lot of money if they are willing to risk going to jail.”

via FOXNews.com – Drug Smugglers From Mexico Relocate to Town in New Mexico – Local News | News Articles | National News | US News.

7 Police Officers Murdered In Tijuana Attacks

Heavily armed gunmen staged a series of surprise attacks against municipal police forces in this tense border city, killing seven and wounding three in brazen assaults that shattered a four-month period of relative calm.

Six police officers and an auxiliary officer died within a 45-minute span late Monday in ambushes at a hillside substation, on busy streets and outside an OXXO mini-mart, where four were killed in a hail of bullets, including one who tried to fight back.

“He took out his gun and tried to fire at them, but they shot him and he fell backward, and his eyes rolled up in his head,” said a teenager who witnessed the shooting in the tough Los Arenales neighborhood.

With authorities placing the blame on organized crime gunmen, municipal police Tuesday retreated to substations and headquarters and patrolled mostly in groups or with army escorts. The tension was palpable outside the 8th Street headquarters downtown, where motorcycle cops were being held back from patrol until further notice.

[...]

Authorities said the attacks, by men firing AK-47 rifles from late model cars and SUVs, were preceded by a spate of threats over police radio frequencies. Such threats are so common, Leyzaola said, that authorities didn’t feel a need to take precautionary measures.

The first act of violence against police Monday occurred about 9:15 a.m., when a female officer was wounded, shot in the back while on patrol in her vehicle near the airport. But the frenzy of attacks erupted at 8 p.m. in the ramshackle Los Arenales neighborhood of east Tijuana, where residents say police rarely venture. The four police officers arrived at the mini-mart to take a report of an assault and were ambushed as they left.

Witnesses said two or three cars pulled up and that several masked men opened fire with high-caliber automatic weapons. The officers didn’t stand a chance, even though they were wearing bulletproof vests, the witnesses said.

Two were shot in the back and fell near the door. A female officer was struck in the face and died while trying to take cover under a car. The fourth was shot in the neck and died with his gun still in his right hand.

The teenager who witnessed the attack said he placed his sisters on the floor and then peeked outside and saw the last officer go down.

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