Being a Hero

Today's cop can only dream of being a hero.

The desert sun beats on my dark uniform, its rays reflecting off the shining badge on my chest. My hand remains poised above the gun in my holster. The dusty street is quiet as the showdown nears its climax ....

I can never cross the invisible line from plain citizen to lawman without an acute sense of transition. My personality changes, and my mind detours somewhere deep into the folklore of western America, creating legends of heroic stature.

As I walk the streets of Albuquerque I sometimes picture people saying, "Oh, here comes the town sheriff with his gun." Then all of the sudden -- I can just see it, you know -- some big bad guy wearing a pair of six-shooters on his hips emerges from a bar and says, "OK, sheriff, draw!"

I'm fully conscious that this is a fictional misrepresentation.

Police work very seldom reflects the heroic romanticism so frequently portrayed in television, movies, and books. To find the true nature of a cop's work, one must go beyond the superficial portrayals and the myths.

Only Dirty Harry has his lunch break interrupted by armed robbers. The fact is the average police officer never fires his weapon in self-defense in 20 years of duty.

Read More

FBI Warns of Drug Cartels Arming for Front

The FBI is warning that one of Mexico´s most brutal drug cartels is attempting to violently regain control of drug trafficking routes in the United States and has been ordered to engage law enforcement officers to protect their operations, according to an intelligence report obtained by The Washington Times.

Los Zetas, the enforcer of Mexico´s infamous Gulf Cartel, is reinforcing its ranks and stockpiling weapons in safe houses in the U.S. in response to recent crackdowns in the U.S. and Mexico against drug traffickers, said the FBI San Antonio Field Office's Joint Assessment Bulletin. The bulletin was dated Oct. 17 and was sent to law enforcement officials in the Texas region.

The bulletin said the cartel's regional leader, Jaime Gonzalez, has ordered the reinforcements to a tactical operational territory, or "plaza," in the area around the southern Texas towns of McAllen and Mission, about 235 miles south of San Antonio and less than five miles from the border with Mexico.

Read More

Informant puts out a hit on another informant

A man accused of hiring a U.S. Army soldier and another man to kill a Mexican drug cartel lieutenant who was cooperating with U.S. authorities was himself a government informant, police said Tuesday.

In this photo provided by the El Paso police department, Ruben Rodriguez Dorado is shown, Monday, Aug. 10, 2009.

Ruben Rodriguez Dorado hired Pfc. Michael Jackson Apodaca, 18, and Christopher Duran, 17, to help kill Jose Daniel Gonzalez Galeana, El Paso police said Tuesday in charging documents against them. The three men were arrested Monday and charged with capital murder in the May 15 slaying of Gonzalez, who was shot eight times outside his pricey El Paso home.

Rodriguez, like Gonzalez, was an informant working with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement service, El Paso Police Chief Greg Allen said. He said a warrant has been issued for a fourth man who police say ordered and paid for the killing.

Read More

The Capture of El Gilillo

A fourth leader of the Arellano Félix Organization falls as Mexican and U.S. law enforcement make unprecedented strides together to crush the cartel.

In the pre-dawn darkness of Aug. 22, an elite team of heavily armed Mexican federal agents surrounded a house in a small town east of the Baja California capital of Mexicali. At a pre-arranged signal, the masked agents burst into the home. Inside, they found their quarry – a long-hunted narco-trafficker under indictment in both the United States and Mexico. The U.S. government had posted a $2 million reward for information leading to his capture.

The suspect and an alleged accomplice were arrested, handcuffed and whisked away to the Mexicali airport. The entire operation, carried out with textbook precision and without a shot fired, was over in a mere three minutes.

In San Diego, jubilant agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration stamped "captured" over their wanted-poster photograph of Gilberto "El Gilillo" Higuera Guerrero, formerly a top lieutenant of the Tijuana-based Arellano Félix drug-trafficking cartel.

Read More

A Brutal Sadistic Death

Tijuana, BC -  Brutal torture suffered by the young aide Adriana Ruiz Muñiz, before being beheaded. This is a preliminary inspection revealed her body, found the evening of Wednesday in a trash the secret cologne Altiplano, La Presa delegation.

The body and head were two black polyethylene bags, in a semi-used to dump garbage and debris.

Her had been feet smashed by blows with a blunt instrument.

The murderers tore off her nails and pinkie fingers.

Expertise in the Attorney General for the State (PGJE) assume that the death occurred Tuesday afternoon, the body was probably dumped there the night of that day or the early hours of Wednesday.

As it is an unoccupied site, the neighbors could not give any information about who made the hole about one meter in depth which was unexpectedly buried at the edge of a crude way open for local people.

Although it is said that inside the bag were several pictures of Adriana, the PGJE refused to confirm until yesterday afternoon that it was indeed her.

Read More

More Cops Die as Drug Lord Wants Chief Out

TIJUANA — The first attack came at 7 p.m. Monday. Gerónimo Calderón Jiménez was getting off guard duty in southern Tijuana when heavily armed men shot him repeatedly and left behind a handwritten sign: Five officers will die each week unless police chief Julián Leyzaola resigns.

Gerónimo Calderón

The next 15 hours saw four more assaults in Tijuana and Rosarito Beach that left two officers dead, one wounded and one unhurt but badly shaken. In the brutal showdown between drug cartels and Mexican law enforcement, these victims were shot at random, authorities said – officers who found themselves in harm's way as a brutal drug lord named Teodoro García Simental sent a deadly message.

Read More

Jaime González Durán "El Hummer"

Jaime González Durán (a.k.a: El Hummer) is one of the 31 original founding members and he ranked third in the chain of command of the criminal organization known as Los Zetas.

A former Mexican Army elite soldier of the Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales (GAFE), he was trained in counter-insurgency and locating and apprehending drug cartel members. He deserted in the late 1990s and was hired along other 30 ex-soldiers by the Gulf Cartel leader, Osiel Cárdenas Guillen as his private enforcement army.

After Osiel's arrest, González controlled a large-scale illegal drug distribution and transfer to the United States, mostly of cocaine and marijuana.

He also controlled much of the illegal drug trade in the Mexican states of Nuevo León, Michoacán, Hidalgo, Veracruz, Tabasco, Quintana Roo and Mexico City. The Attorney General has cataloged him as one of the most dangerous and violent of organized crime members, and was one of the most wanted by Mexican and U.S. justice.

Jaime González Durán is believed to have been responsible for the murder of narcocorridos singer Valentín Elizalde

Read More