Woman Captured Guarding Massive Weapons Cache

Smirking for the camera, this is the 20-year-old woman Mexican police caught guarding an extraordinary arsenal of weapons.

Anahi Beltran Cabrera was seized during a routine patrol in Sonora state, near the U.S. border.

Officers recovered a vast cache of weapons including an anti-aircraft gun capable of firing 800 shots per minute, a number of rifles and an array of ammunition.

They believe the haul belongs to a group allegedly linked to the powerful Beltan Leyva drug cartel.

Cabrera was paraded before the media – along with the weapons she was caught guarding.

Large swathes of Mexico have been ravaged by violence with drugs gangs battling for territory.

Last month, 2,000 soldiers and armed federal police were deployed into the border town of Ciudad Juarez to restore order to the country’s most violent city.

In one month, 250 people were killed by hitmen fighting for lucrative smuggling routes.

Source

Vigilantes Appear To Be Fighting Back In Mexico Drug War

Shadowy vigilante groups are threatening Mexico’s drug gangs near the U.S. border in retaliation for a wave of murders and kidnappings that killed 1,600 people in this city alone last year.

One group in the border city of Ciudad Juarez pledged last week to “clean our city of these criminals” and said their mission was to “end the life of a criminal every 24 hours.”

The emergence of vigilantes would be a new twist to a vicious drug war that killed 5,700 people in Mexico last year and forced the United States to give hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the Mexican government.

Ciudad Juarez, a manufacturing center in the desert across from El Paso, Texas, was the scene of the worst violence in 2008 as drug cartels fought each other as well as staging kidnappings for ransom and extorting businessmen.

In an e-mail to news organizations, the “Juarez Citizen Command” said it was funded by local businessmen sick of abductions and extortion in the city, home to factories that export goods to the United States.

While none of the city’s 1,600 in the last year were undoubtedly the work of vigilantes, a body was found on January 7 with a message next to it that read: “This is for those who continue extorting.”

And six men in their 20s and 30s were shot dead and dumped together in Ciudad Juarez in October with a cardboard sign reading: “Message for all the rats: This will continue.”

Drug gangs often leave threatening messages with the bodies of their victims, but security officials said those two incidents might have been the work of vigilantes.

Another group, “Businessmen United, The Death Squad” put a video on Internet site YouTube last June threatening to go after kidnappers and criminals in Ciudad Juarez, the biggest city in Mexico’s Chihuahua state. The video is no longer on YouTube.

via Shadow of vigilantes appears in Mexico drug war – Yahoo! News.