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.

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.

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Mexico Offered U.S. Help In Battle With Drug Cartels

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said the United States could help with equipment and intelligence techniques after returning from a six-day trip to Latin America punctuated by news of beheadings and intimidation by Mexican drug cartels.

Mexico could borrow from U.S. tactics in the fight against terrorism as it battles a crisis of drug-related violence along the U.S.-Mexico border, the top U.S. military officer said Friday.

Returning from a six-day trip to Latin America punctuated by news of beheadings and intimidation by Mexican drug cartels, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said the United States could help with equipment and intelligence techniques.

Adm. Mike Mullen would not be specific about what kind of intelligence or surveillance help the United States might offer, but said he saw ways to employ experience the United States has gained in the ongoing hunt for extremists and terrorists.

He would not say whether there may already be U.S. drones flying over bloodstained cities such as Ciudad Juarez, where 17 bodies came into the morgue on one day recently, including the city police force’s second-in-command and three other officers.

“Obviously it affects us because of the relationship between the two countries,” Mullen said during a telephone news conference as he flew to Washington following meetings in Mexico, his last stop.

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Threat of Mexican Drug Cartels Near Crisis

Two of Mexico’s deadliest drug cartels have reached a combined force of 100,000 foot soldiers, wreaking havoc across the country and threatening U.S. border states, the U.S. Defense Department told The Washington Times.

The cartels rival the Mexican army in size and have both Mexico and the U.S. in crisis mode as they deal with what they fear is a coming insurgency along the border.

“It’s moving to crisis proportions,” an unidentified defense official told The Times. The official also said the cartels have reached a size where they are on par with Mexico’s army of 130,000.

About 7,000 people have died in the last year — more than 1,000 in January alone — at the hands of Mexico’s increasingly violent drug cartels. Murders often involve beheadings or bodies dissolved in vats of acid.

The two most dangerous cartels are the Sinaloa cartel, nicknamed the “Federation” or “Golden Triangle” by law enforcement agencies, and “Los Zetas” (the Gulf Cartel). They have been growing and are reportedly discussing a truce or merger to better withstand government forces, The Times reported.

Mexico is now only behind Pakistan and Iran as a U.S. national security concern, coming in ahead of Afghanistan and Iraq, the defense official told The Times.

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Mexico Send In Military To Restore Order

The Mexican government will deploy 1,000 more federal police officers as part of a wider effort to restore order in Ciudad Juarez, the nation’s most violent city, officials said Monday.

Some of those uniformed federal officers began arriving in the border city Monday, two days after about 2,000 soldiers landed there in a related military buildup. Those soldiers were the first of an expected 5,000 additional troops who will be sent to help perform basic police functions.

The military reinforcements will bring to more than 7,000 the number of soldiers in Ciudad Juarez.

The nation’s public safety chief, Genaro Garcia Luna, said that along with the soldiers, he planned to dispatch the additional 1,000 federal police officers, Notimex news agency reported.

About 425 federal officers already had been posted in Ciudad Juarez, where the death toll last year exceeded 1,600, the highest in a country racked by drug-related violence.

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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.

Homeland Security Has Plan If Mexico Drug Violence Spreads To US

If Mexican drug violence spills across the U.S. border, Homeland Security officials say they have a contingency plan to assist border areas that includes bringing in the military.

“It’s a common sense extension of our continued work with our state, local, and tribal partners in securing the southwest border,” DHS spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said Friday. Read more

Border Terror – Violence and Brutality Spreads In Mexico

Violence in Mexico continues to grow in both brutality and the  number of dead.  Here’s just a few of the many stories to come from the border cities over the past week.

Mystery Man Blamed As Body Count Grows

He is said to love the ladies, fast horses and dissolving enemies in lye.

Teodoro Garcia Simental is among the best known but least identifiable villains in Mexico’s drug war, blamed for a trail of terror across Baja California.

His heavily armed hit men, authorities say, have been leaving the gruesome displays of charred and decapitated bodies across the city, signed with the moniker “Tres Letras,” for the three letters in “Teo.” And authorities believe he runs a network of hide-outs where kidnap victims are held in cages.

Yet thousands of police officers, soldiers, state and federal agents can’t seem to find him.

Billboards showing Tijuana’s most wanted kidnappers don’t include Garcia’s image, even though he is believed to be behind most of the gang war that has claimed more than 400 lives here since late September.

“That tells you that you don’t want to be the one responsible for putting Teo’s picture in public,” said one U.S. law enforcement source who spoke on condition of anonymity. “There’s no future in it.”

[...]

Garcia is said to be in his mid-30s — even his date of birth is not known. He reportedly bets big on clandestine horse races at isolated ranches outside Ensenada. He hires people at $400 per week to guard kidnapping victims and to weld together the barrels of caustic chemicals used to dispose of some of his victims, according to documents and interviews. One Mexican law enforcement official said Garcia has killed people at parties, laughing at their stunned reactions.

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A Week In Tijuana

The teenage nephew of the army general leading the local fight against drug traffickers was killed this weekend in Baja California’s continuing violence.

A municipal police department spokesman said gunmen shot the boy, Carlos Alfonso Ortiz Davila, 16, about 8:30 p.m. Friday while he was in front of a high school known as CECYTE on the southside of Tijuana, the spokesman said.

He said the teen was the nephew of Gen. Alfonso Duarte Mujica, commander of the Second Military Zone and a leading figure in the fight against drug cartels in northwest Mexico.

A state police officer also was killed during the weekend. Around 6 p.m. Sunday, a battle broke out on city streets between gunmen and state police officers. The officer was wounded and died soon after the fight, said the Baja California State Attorney General’s Office.

The boy and the officer were among seven people killed this weekend in the state.

In Tijuana, police around 2 a.m. Saturday found the body of man who had been burned to death on the the east side of the city, the Attorney General’s Ofice said.

About 3:30 that afternoon, two men were shot, also in eastern Tijuana. One of them died three hours later, the Attorney General’s Office said.

About 8 p.m., municipal police found two decapitated bodies in an empty lot in in far eastern Tijuana near the Tecate city limits. The bodies had a message signed by “La Maña,” a nickname used by a drug trafficking leader, the state agency said.

The violence extended to Rosarito Beach, when a man was shot to death around 11 a.m. Sunday as he drove his car, the state agency reported.

About 800 have been killed in Tijuana this year. Most of the deaths have been blamed on rival drug gangs battling for supremacy.

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Four Police Officers Killed in Ciudad Juarez

Gunmen staged four attacks on police within a half-hour period, killing four officers in a Mexican border city overrun by drug violence, an official said Monday.

Authorities are investigating whether the attacks Sunday night were coordinated, municipal police spokesman Jaime Torres said.

Dozens of Ciudad Juarez police have been killed this year in attacks blamed on drug gangs trying to consolidate territory. Many officers have quit out of fear for their lives, often after their names have appeared on hit lists left in public.

Another such list naming 26 officers was found early Monday at a dog racing track above the bodies of four civilian men gunned down at the track, Torres said. One of the four had been decapitated, and a Santa Claus hat had been placed on his head. A fifth man who survived was left bound and gagged next to the bodies.

At Least 9 Soldiers Found Decapitated

Mexican police on Sunday found nine decapitated bodies and the army identified eight soldiers who had died fighting powerful drug gangs and whose murders were seen as a brazen challenge to the government.

The bodies showed signs of torture. They were left on the side of a highway about an hour north of the tourist resort of Acapulco in the southern state of Guerrero, state police said.

Their heads were stuffed in a plastic bag and left outside a shopping center.

Mexico’s President Feline Calderon has deployed tens of thousands of troops and police since 2006 to take on drug cartels. The defense ministry vowed not to back down despite its latest losses.

“They are trying to scare the military. Regardless, the ministry promises to continue fighting,” it said in a statement.

The ministry released the names of eight decapitated soldiers but said one of them was recovered on December 9.

Drug killings throughout Mexico have more than doubled to over 5,300 this year, scaring off investment and tourists. The United States has sent hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to help its southern neighbor fight the cartels.

The Mexican army has made some prominent captures, but the cartels seem able to quickly replace their losses. Meanwhile, a growing number of police have been gruesomely murdered.

A note left with the severed heads warned of more decapitations, the state police said.

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