Cartel Hunts Cops Accused of a ‘Massacre’ in Mexico

Posted by DD Republished from the Daily Beast

Photo Illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast

Mexico’s Jalisco New Generation Cartel put a price on the heads of police officers accused of killing women and children and allegedly attempting to cover up the crime.

By Jeremy Kryt

In the central Mexican state of Morelos on Thursday, Nov. 30, a raid by state police left four women, an infant, and a teenage boy dead. And since then Mexico’s fastest growing drug cartel has been out for blood.

The officers involved claim the deceased were “caught in a crossfire” during a shootout at their residence in the town of Temixco, about three miles south of Cuernavaca, a popular tourist destination.

But the crossfire theory has been contradicted by eyewitness testimony and and by forensic evidence. The half-dozen victims were found huddled on the bathroom floor and appear to have been killed execution style. At least three bodies were found with a single 9mm bullet to the head, according to the family lawyer. Investigators also charge that the police officers falsified evidence in the case, such as planting bogus firearms near the bodies.

DEA Operation Played Hidden Role in the Disappearance of Five Innocent Mexicans

Reposted by El Profe for Borderland Beat from ProPublica          
             

The agency knew why the victims were kidnapped in 2010 by the Zetas drug cartel from a Holiday Inn in Mexico, but it did nothing to investigate or help. The victims’ friends and relatives now wonder why.

By Ginger Thompson

At about 2 a.m. on April 21, 2010, a convoy of gunmen working for the Zetas drug cartel, one of the most violent drug trafficking organizations in the world, rolled into Monterrey, Mexico, a wealthy, bustling city considered that country’s commercial capital. With brazen efficiency, they set up roadblocks at all major thoroughfares, then sent a convoy of sport utility vehicles downtown, encircling a Holiday Inn.

The heavily armed men, some wearing ski masks, swarmed into the hotel’s lobby and rushed directly to the fifth floor, bursting into every room and rousting the guests from their beds. The gunmen questioned the guests, then separated four of them from the rest: a marketing executive at an eyewear company, a chemical engineer for a cosmetics manufacturer, a shoe salesman expecting his first child, and a college professor who was the mother of two.

Then the four were loaded, along with the hotel’s receptionist, into the gunmen’s vehicles and driven away. None of the hostages has been seen since. All are presumed dead.

Drug-trafficking, Money Laundering, Chemical sales to Syria, Obama turned a blind eye to Hezbollah to procure the Iran Deal

posted by Chivis Martinez republished from Politico by Josh Meyer

click on to enlarge

The Secret Backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook

A GLOBAL THREAT EMERGES

How Hezbollah turned to trafficking cocaine and laundering money through used cars to finance its expansion.

In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a POLITICO investigation.

The campaign, dubbed Project Cassandra, was launched in 2008 after the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political organization into an international crime syndicate that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.

Over the next eight years, agents working out of a top-secret DEA facility in Chantilly, Virginia, used wiretaps, undercover operations and informants to map Hezbollah’s illicit networks, with the help of 30 U.S. and foreign security agencies.

They followed cocaine shipments, some from Latin America to West Africa and on to Europe and the Middle East, and others through Venezuela and Mexico to the United States. They tracked the river of dirty cash as it was laundered by, among other tactics, buying American used cars and shipping them to Africa. And with the help of some key cooperating witnesses, the agents traced the conspiracy, they believed, to the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.

They followed cocaine shipments, tracked a river of dirty cash, and traced what they believed to be the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.

20 year anniversary of the tragedy of Acteal

Translated by Otis B Fly-Wheel for Borderland Beat from Reforma and La Journada articles

Subject Matter: Massacre of 45 men women and children by Government agencies
Recommendation: No prior subject matter knowledge required

The poster reads, welcome to the sacred land of the Martyrs of Acteal. A site of conscience, house of memory and of hope. 20 years of impunity, 25 years of organization

Reporter: Edgar Hernandez
Today, activities began to commemorate the Acteal massage that occurred 20 years ago in the municipality of Chenalho, Chiapas, in which 45 indigenous people died. Survivors, relatives of the victims and organizations headed by "Las Abejas", to which the victims belonged, today began a day of activities that will last three days to remember the tragedy.

At noon they started with a prayer in Tsotsil, but the activities included religious ceremonies, cultural events, artistic presentations, documentaries, pilgrimages, pronouncements and a popular dance.

It is expected that Jan Jarab, Representative in Mexico of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, will participate during the meetings; as well as the Bishop of the Diocese of Saltillo, Coahuila, Raul Vera.

Terror at Dawn in BCS: 6 Bodies Hanging from 3 Bridges in La Paz and Los Cabos

Translated by Yaqui for Borderland Beat from: BCS Noticias

Dec 20, 2017
La Paz, Baja California Sur (BCS)
Extra Material from El Sudcaliforniano and Colective Pericue (RIP: Maz Rodriguez)
El Mundo Digital, Debate, Proceso, Milenio

Security elements belonging to the Mixed Command, as well as the members of the fire brigade,  have lowered the bodies that were accompanied by Narco Mantas. 

At dawn, today, Dec 20, 2017 Six bodies were discovered  hanging from bridges near both International Airports in the Municipalities of La Paz and Los Cabos,  in La Paz and in cabos airport corridor, see map below.

Click on image to enlarge

Two unidentified men were discovered at the stroke of 6 am after security forces received notice that their bodies were hanging from the bridge at the exit to the La Paz International Airport, ie: Bridge Manuel Márquez de León en La Paz.

Feminicides in Veracruz advance with more brutality, also in municipalities not under Gender Alert

Translated by El Profe for Borderland Beat from SinEmbargo, originally published in BlogExpediente

                   
  
[Translator Note: Diana E. H. Russell, the feminist writer and activist who coined the term ''Femicide'' defines the word as, ''the killing of women because they are females."

see Russell's discussion on the use of these terms here

The term ''feminicide" has become more commonly used in Latin American countries and is defined by the Guatamalan Human Rights Commission as "...a political term. It encompasses more than femicide because it holds responsible not only the male perpetrators but also the state and judicial structures that normalize misogyny. Feminicide connotes not only the murder of women by men because they are women but also indicates state responsibility for these murders whether through the commission of the actual killing, toleration of the perpetrators’ acts of violence, or omission of state responsibility to ensure the safety of its female citizens."

In this article, the writer's use of the word ''feminicidio", or "feminicide'', is kept.]

Contains graphic descriptions of violence towards women.

In Veracruz, 175 women were raped and dismembered in the last two years in seven violent municipalities outside of the Gender Violence Alert area.

 

The municipalities of Coatzacoalcos, Xalapa, Poza Rica and Córdoba have hot spots, but in the larger part of Veracruz, the cases do not stop and the women disappear.

By Arantxa Arcos

Xalapa, Veracruz, December 16 (BlogExpediente / SinEmbargo) .- From the crime committed against the Salvadoran who decided to live in Veracruz, Adela Isabel Romero Guevara, 42, to the murders of Abigail Roxana Sagrero Wilson, 31, and Dana Paula Sánchez Sagrero, 16; all are counted on the Feminicides in Mexico Map, created by María Salguero, geophysical engineer of the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN).

The crime of Adela Romero is marked with a red cross, like 1 thousand 844 more cases located in the Google Maps application. She left the house, in Nautla, to celebrate the New Year.

She considered seeing her boyfriend, Juan Reyes Moctezuma. An argument went off track and hours later, on January 1, 2016, she was found without clothes and with several stab wounds to her body. The crime scene was discovered by her daughter.

Mexican Journalist Shot Dead at Sons Elementary School Christmas Party

Posted by Yaqui from: Houston Chronicle

Gumaro Perez 10th Mexican Journalist to Murdered in 2017 

Dec 20, 2017
Lev Garcia Flores for AP Xalapa , Veracruz

Attackers burst into an elementary school where a Christmas party was taking place and shot reporter Gumaro Perez to death Tuesday, making him at least the 10th journalist slain in Mexico this year in what observers have called a crisis of freedom of expression.

The Veracruz state security coordinator said in a statement that dozens of parents and children were present when the unidentified attackers shot Perez, whose own child attends the school in the city of Acayucan.

Perez, 34, covered crime for a number of local outlets, had founded the online news site La Voz del Sur and also worked for the local government in some capacity.

Mario Armando Ramirez Trevino, El Pelon, X-20 extradited to the United States

Translated by Otis B Fly-Wheel for Borderland Beat from a Milenio article

Subject Matter: Mario Ramirez Trevino, El X-20, Victor Manuel Felix Felix
Recommendation: No prior subject matter knowledge required

Reporter: EFE
Mexico extradited to the USA, the narco traffickers Mario Ramirez Trevino, ex leader of the Cartel del Golfo, and Victor Manuel Felix Felix, brother in law of Jaoquin El Chapo Guzman of the Sinaloa Cartel, informed the Department of Justice today.

Ramirez Trevino, 55 years old, was detained in August of 2013 in Tamaulipas after leading the Cartel del Golfo for 11 months; he had been required by the USA for almost a decade. The criminal leader known as El X-20 or El Pelon, will appear today in Washington before Judge Deborah A Robinson where he will face charges of cocaine and marijuana trafficking to the United States.

The authorities are accusing him of being behind two shipments of 10 and 2.4 tonnes of cocaine that were intercepted in Mexico and Panama in October and November of 2007.

Who was "‘El Pirata de Culiacán'" and why was he murdered?

By Chivis Martinez for Borderland Beat

Much interest surrounds the death of 17 year old Juan Luis Laguna Rosale, better known as ‘El Pirata de Culiacán', who he was, and why he was killed. And for an English language narco blog, many of you may be wondering, who is this guy, and why the interest?

For starters last month, in a 10 second video he had challenged Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, aka El Mencho leader of the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel.

Today his death is not yet confirmed, although photos of his dead body had circulated on social media and mainstream media alike.

"No relative has come to claim the body or identify it", details FGE
.

However, Pirata posted hours before his death from his personal Facebook page a video inside an apartment, confirming he was in Guadalajara. In the video he is seen spending the night with friends.

Among his friends who was with him, with whom he was seen repeatedly, is the singer Beto Sierra, who shared on his Facebook account with a video confirming the murder of "El Pirata”.

Pirata de Culiacan reported shot dead in a bar in Jalisco

Translated by Otis B Fly-Wheel for Borderland Beat from a Riodoce article

Subject Matter: El Pirata de Culiacan
Recommendation: No prior subject matter knowledge required

Reporter: Riodoce Redaction
On Monday night, several media outlets reported the murder of Juan Luis Lagunas Rosales, know in social networks as "El Pirata de Culiacan".

The even took place in the municipality of Tlajomulco in Jalisco, in a bar where the young man from Villa Juarez, Navolato, visited.

Reports indicate that he was shot dead inside the place located on Calle Colon close to the junction with Las Torres Street in the municipality of Tlajomulco de Zuniga, near Guadalajara.

The preliminary report states that there were several bullet wounds, and it was a direct attack on Lagunas Rosales, who was popularized for appearing in narco related videos, finishing off his lyrics with the phrase " that's how it was".

Tepito, Los Camarillo and their criminal lineage

Translated by Otis B Fly-Wheel for Borderland Beat from a Reforma article

Subject Matter: Los Camarillo
Recommendation: No prior subject matter knowledge required

Since the start of the new millennium, the organized criminality has been linked to the history of one family: Los Camarillo. This is a chronological report of the the brothers, associates, treachery and killings.

Mario and Fidel Camarillo started as managers of a wine and bathroom furniture warehouse, but later converted into drug Zsars in Tepito. Fidel was imprisoned in 1998 and his brother, nicknamed "El Loco", remained in charge. However, since 2001 commenced a fight between Los Camarillo and political members of his family that culminated in 2003, when Mario was assassinated by sicarios, headed by former federal judicial policeman Alfredo Martinez, El Golda.

El Tanque

The history of  Los Camarillo, and its criminal roots continue today by the groups that control drug trafficking. One of the old Lieutenants of Fidel converted to an enemy of the family: Jorge Ortiz Reyes, El Tanque, who was accused to be the intellectual author, together with El Golda, of the killing of El Loco.

Government Alleges Attorney is passing messages on El Chapo's behalf

 By Chivis Martinez for Borderland Beat

T

he government filed a motion seeking to delay production of discovery that would identify government witnesses because of unspecified “security concerns.”  Eduardo Balarezo, attorney for Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán, responded saying that delaying production would violate his client’s right to due process,  and the ability to defend himself. The government in turn replied with an incredible accusation, saying that Balarezo had contacted potential witnesses and that he had passed on messages from his client, and that one of the people spoken with took the message as a threat. The letter below denies unequivocally the government’s “baseless allegations”.

It is permissible for defense attorney’s to contact possible witnesses.  Balarezo did reach out to persons that are possible witnesses, all agreed to meeting him…except one. One wonders how it is possible El Chapo could even give a threatening message to pass on to anyone, since he does not have the privilege of speaking to his attorney in private or contact visits.

Alleged Mistress of El Chapo Back in Court in D.C.

Translated by Yaqui for Borderland Beat from: Debate

"La Chapa Diputada "/ "El Chapo" Guzman Loera

Dec 13, 2017

Judge Rudolph Contreras of the Federal District Court of the District of Columbia in the US capital postponed for the second time the judicial hearing of Lucero Guadalupe Sánchez López, former congresswoman from Sinaloa who has been imprisoned in the United States since the end of August on charges of drug trafficking .

As in the judicial hearing last October, Sánchez López appeared in the courtroom in the orange prison suit, her hair was pulled back on the  right side and the  twitch in her eyes was very visible. As on previous occasions, she did not speak during the five minutes that the audience lasted, and she followed through a simultaneous translation device.

Her attorney, Heather Shaner, did not object to the prosecution's request to postpone the court hearing for another 60 days until February 13, 2018 given the "complexity" of the case.

San Diego: The fentanyl gateway

San Diego: Fentanyl Gateway

Tijuana is quietly the entry point for most of the fentanyl in the county, as the heroin crisis rages from the Bronx to quiet midwestern towns, and across San Diego, relapsed addicts found nonresponsive in their childhood bedrooms.  It's a deeply personal story for some, the children or parents of addicts, for whom the news of major arrests and seizures don't matter as much as the less than a tenth of a gram that their loved one ingested.

Last summer, a DEA operation resulted in the arrest of a Lemon Grove woman, the daughter of the former mayor (Of Lemon Grove, Marry Sessom Baker) one Anna Baker, 31 years old.  She was in possession of 44 kilos of fentanyl, trafficked from Tijuana, and assumedly awaiting transshipment to Los Angeles, and further points east.  

At that time, it was the largest seizure of fentanyl in San Diego county, and likely the country, as San Diego has been the premier corridor of fentanyl trafficking. It is up almost 900% percent from 2015, which resulted in a handful of seizures, to a more routine standard of dozens of kilos.  Authorities have seized over 540 kilos in 2017.

Mexico's most sinister serial killers + Otis list of the worst cartel killers

Written and Translated by Otis B Fly-Wheel for Borderland Beat from a Noreste article

Subject Matter: Mexico's most notorious serial killers and Cartel killers
Recommendation: No prior subject matter knowledge required

A record of the history of impulsive men and women with a cruel impulsion of death ( Otis: plus a selection of the worst killers from Cartels, who for some reason don't make this articles list, despite killing sometimes for pleasure, when it was not required ).

Reporters: Infobae and Otis B Fly-Wheel
He was called El Chalequero. He killed 20 women in eight years. All prostitutes that he beat, strangled and decapitated in the central zones of Mexico City. He was compared with "Jack the Ripper", because they were contemporaneous and he was the first serial killer registered in this country.

His history is contained in the first of four volumes of the "Red Book", edited by the Foundation for Economic Culture (FCE), that is a compilation of the crimes and criminals in Mexico's history, but it is not unique.

There was before, another Red book, published in 1870 by liberal writers such as Vincente Riva Palacio, Manuel Payno and presumably even Manuel Zarco, who made a compilation of the most famous crimes of his times.

Since then, the Red Book has been a strong element in the information on offer from Mexico, of the serial killers and the main protagonists. Through the recounting of crimes and murders, both of the individuals, and the collective ones that shake us by waves, it is possible to narrate a chronicle of the country, wrote the journalist and playwright Vincente Lenero in the prologue of the first volume of the Red Book in 2008.