NY Times: Mexican Drug Cartel Violence Spills Over, Alarming U.S.
March 23, 2009 by pablo
March 23, 2009
Mexican Drug Cartel Violence Spills Over, Alarming U.S.
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
TUCSON — Sgt. David Azuelo stepped gingerly over the specks of blood on the floor, took note of the bullet hole through the bedroom skylight, raised an eyebrow at the lack of furniture in the ranch-style house and turned to his squad of detectives investigating one of the latest home invasions in this southern Arizona city.
A 21-year-old man had been pistol-whipped throughout the house, the gun discharging at one point, as the attackers demanded money, the victim reported. His wife had been bathing their 3-month-old son when the intruders arrived.
“At least they didn’t put the gun in the baby’s mouth like we’ve seen before,” Sergeant Azuelo said. That same afternoon this month, his squad was called to the scene of another home invasion, one involving the abduction of a 14-year-old boy.
This city, an hour’s drive north of the Mexican border, is coping with a wave of drug crime the police suspect is tied to the bloody battles between Mexico’s drug cartels and the efforts to stamp them out.
Since officials here formed a special squad last year to deal with home invasions, they have counted more than 200 of them, with more than three-quarters linked to the drug trade. In one case, the intruders burst into the wrong house, shooting and injuring a woman watching television on her couch. In another, in a nearby suburb, a man the police described as a drug dealer was taken from his home at gunpoint and is still missing.
Tucson is hardly alone in feeling the impact of Mexico’s drug cartels and their trade. In the past few years, the cartels and other drug trafficking organizations have extended their reach across the United States and into Canada. Law enforcement authorities say they believe traffickers distributing the cartels’ marijuana, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and other drugs are responsible for a rash of shootings in Vancouver, British Columbia, kidnappings in Phoenix, brutal assaults in Birmingham, Ala., and much more.
United States law enforcement officials have identified 230 cities, including Anchorage, Atlanta, Boston and Billings, Mont., where Mexican cartels and their affiliates “maintain drug distribution networks or supply drugs to distributors,” as a Justice Department report put it in December. The figure rose from 100 cities reported three years earlier, though Justice Department officials said that may be because of better data collection methods as well as the spread of the organizations.
Gov. Rick Perry of Texas has asked for National Guard troops at the border. The Obama administration is completing plans to add federal agents along the border, a senior White House official said, but does not anticipate deploying soldiers.
The official said enhanced security measures would include increased use of equipment at the ports of entry to detect weapons carried in cars crossing into Mexico from the United States, and more collaboration with Mexican law enforcement officers to trace weapons seized from crime scenes.
Law enforcement officials on both sides of the border agree that the United States is the source for most of the guns used in the violent drug cartel war in Mexico.
“The key thing is to keep improving on our interdiction of the weapons before they even get in there,” said Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security and the former governor of Arizona, who will be testifying before Congress on Wednesday.
Familiar Signs
Sergeant Azuelo quickly began to suspect that the pistol whipping he was investigating was linked to a drug dispute. Within minutes, his detectives had found a blood-spattered scale, marijuana buds and leaves and a bundle of cellophane wrap used in packing marijuana.
Most often, police officials say, the invasions result from an unpaid debt, sometimes involving as little as a few thousand dollars. But simple greed can be at work, too: one set of criminals learns of a drug load, then “rips” it and sells it.
“The amount of violence has drastically increased in the last 6 to 12 months, especially in the area of home invasions, “ said Lt. Michael O’Connor of the Pima County Sheriff’s Department here. “The people we have arrested, a high percentage are from Mexico.”
The violence in the United States does not compare with what is happening in Mexico, where the cartels have been thriving for years. Forbes recently listed one of Mexico’s most notorious kingpins, Joaquin Guzmán, on its list of the world’s billionaires. (No. 701, out of 793, with a fortune worth $1 billion, the magazine said.)
But a crackdown begun more than two years ago by President Felipe Calderón, coupled with feuds over turf and control of the organizations, has set off an unprecedented wave of killings in Mexico. More than 7,000 people, most of them connected to the drug trade or law enforcement, have died since January 2008. Many of the victims were tortured. Beheadings have become common.
At times, the police have been overwhelmed by the sheer firepower in the hands of drug traffickers, who have armed themselves with assault rifles and even grenades.
Although overall violent crime has dropped in several cities on or near the border — Tucson is an exception, reporting a rise in homicides and other serious crime last year — Arizona appears to be bearing the brunt of smuggling-related violence. Some 60 percent of illicit drugs found in the United States — principally cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine — entered through the border in this state.
The city’s home-invasion squad, a sergeant and five detectives working nearly around the clock, was organized in April. Phoenix assembled a similar unit in September to investigate kidnappings related to drug and human smuggling. In the last two years, the city has recorded some 700 cases, some involving people held against their will in stash houses and others abducted.
The state police also have a new human-smuggling squad that focuses on the proliferation of drop houses, where migrants are kept and often beaten and raped until they pay ever-escalating smuggling fees.
“Five years ago a home invasion was almost unheard of,” said Assistant Chief Roberto Villaseñor of the Tucson Police Department. “It was rare.”
Web of Crime
Tying the street-level violence in the United States to the cartels is difficult, law enforcement experts say, because the cartels typically distribute their illicit goods through a murky network of regional and local cells made up of Mexican immigrants and United States citizens who send cash and guns to Mexico through an elaborate chain.
The cartels “may have 10 cells in Chicago, and they may not even know each other,” said Michael Braun, a former chief of operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Elizabeth W. Kempshall, who is in charge of the drug agency’s office in Phoenix, said the kind of open warfare in some Mexican border towns — where some Mexican soldiers patrol in masks so they will not be recognized later — has not spilled over into the United States in part because the cartels do not want to risk a response from law enforcement here that would disrupt their business.
But Mrs. Kempshall and other experts said the havoc on the Mexican side of the border might be having an impact on the drug trade here, contributing to “trafficker on trafficker” violence.
For one thing, they say, the war on the Mexican side and the new border enforcement are disrupting the flow of illicit drugs arriving in the United States. The price of cocaine, for instance, a barometer of sorts for the supply available, has surged.
With drugs in tighter supply, drug bosses here and in Mexico take a much harder line when debts are owed or drugs are stolen or confiscated, D.E.A. officials said.
Although much of the violence is against people involved in the drug trade, law enforcement authorities said such crime should not be viewed as a “self-cleaning oven,” as one investigator put it, because of the danger it poses to the innocent. It has also put a strain on local departments.
Several hours after Sergeant Azuelo investigated the home invasion involving the pistol whipping, his squad was called to one blocks away.
This time, the intruders ransacked the house before taking a 14-year-old boy captive. Gang investigators recognized the house as having a previous association with a street gang suspected of involvement in drug dealing.
The invaders demanded drugs and $10,000, and took the boy to make their point. He was released within the hour, though the family told investigators it had not paid a ransom.
“You don’t know anybody who is going to pay that money?” the boy said his abductors kept asking him.
The boy, showing the nonchalance of his age, shrugged off his ordeal.
“No, I’m not scared,” he said after being questioned by detectives, who asked that his name not be used because the investigation was continuing.
Growing Networks
Not all the problems are along the border.
The Atlanta area, long a transportation hub for legitimate commerce, has emerged as a new staging ground for drug traffickers taking advantage of its web of freeways and blending in with the wave of Mexican immigrants who have flocked to work there in the past decade.
Last August, in one of the grislier cases in the South, the police in Shelby County, Ala., just outside Birmingham, found the bodies of five men with their throats cut. It is believed they were killed over a $450,000 debt owed to another drug trafficking faction in Atlanta.
The spread of the Mexican cartels, longtime distributors of marijuana, has coincided with their taking over cocaine distribution from Colombian cartels. Those cartels suffered setbacks when American authorities curtailed their trading routes through the Caribbean and South Florida.
Since then, the Colombians have forged alliances with Mexican cartels to move cocaine, which is still largely produced in South America, through Mexico and into the United States.
The Mexicans have also taken over much of the methamphetamine business, producing the drug in “super labs” in Mexico. The number of labs in the United States has been on the decline.
While the cartel networks have spread across the United States, the border areas remain the most worrisome. At the scene of the pistol-whipping here, Sergeant Azuelo and his team methodically investigated.
Their suspicions grew as they walked through the house and noticed things that seemed familiar to them from stash houses they had encountered: a large back room whose size and proximity to an alley seemed well-suited to bundling marijuana, the wife of the victim reporting that they had no bank accounts and dealt with everything in cash, the victim’s father saying over and over that his son was “no saint” and describing his son’s addiction problems with prescription drugs.
A digital scale with blood on it was found in a truck bed on the driveway, raising suspicion among the detectives that the victim was trying to hide it.
The house, the wife told them, had been invaded about a month ago, but the attackers left empty-handed. She did not call the police then, she said, because nothing was taken.
Finally, they saw the cellophane wrap and drug paraphernalia and obtained a search warrant to go through the house more meticulously.
The attackers “were not very sophisticated,” Sergeant Azuelo said, but they somehow knew what might be in the house. “For me, the question is how much they got away with,” he said. “The family may never tell.”
All in all, Sergeant Azuelo said, it was a run-of-the-mill call in a week that would include at least three other such robberies.
“I think this is the tip of the iceberg,” Detective Kris Bollingmo said as he shined a light through the garage. “The problem is only going to get worse.”
“We are,” Sergeant Azuelo added, “keeping the finger in the dike.”
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NY Times: Kidnappings in Mexico Send Shivers Across Border
January 5, 2009 by pablo
We’re been keeping track of this for awhile but it’s finally hitting the large media centers, that the violence in Mexico is seeping over the border. My friends and family in Mexico and Arizona have known this for some time, but now the public at large will hopefully tune in to the southern border and realize that what happens in one neighborhood affects the other. Another interesting part of this article is how the recession and violence is shaping migration patterns. A must read.
Pablo
January 5, 2009
Kidnappings in Mexico Send Shivers Across Border
By SAM DILLON
FELIPE ANGELES, Mexico — Four hooded men smashed in the door to the adobe home of an 80-year-old farmer here in November, handcuffing his frail wrists and driving him to a makeshift jail. They released him after relatives and friends paid a $9,000 ransom, which included his life savings.
The kidnapping was a dismal story of cruelty and heartbreak, familiar all across Mexico, but with a new twist: the daughter of this victim lived in the United States and was able to wire money to help assemble his ransom, the farmer, who insisted that he not be identified by name, said in an interview.
A string of similar kidnappings, singling out people with children or spouses in the United States, so panicked this village in the state of Zacatecas that many people boarded up their homes and headed north, some legally and some not, seeking havens with relatives in California and other American states.
“The relatives of Mexicans in the United States have become a new profit center for Mexico’s crime industry,” said Rodolfo García Zamora, a professor at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas who studies migration trends. “Hundreds of families are emigrating out of fear of kidnap or extortion, and Mexicans in the U.S. are doing everything they can to avoid returning. Instead, they’re getting their relatives out.”
The reported rush into the United States by people from the state of Zacatecas is another sign that Mexico’s growing lawlessness is a volatile new factor affecting the flow of migrant workers across America’s border. The violence is adding a new layer of uncertainty to the always fraught issue of Mexican emigration, already in flux because of the economic downturn in the United States.
Academics and policy makers on both sides of the border, who are watching closely for shifts in migration patterns, say it is too early to know the long-term impact of either the drug-related violence or the loss of jobs by thousands of migrant workers in the United States. But so far, earlier predictions of an exodus of out-of-work Mexicans back to their hometowns seem to have been premature.
Instead, it appears that the pattern in the state of Zacatecas — where many people have family in the United States — may be a good indicator of what is happening throughout Mexico. The country’s spiraling criminality appears not only to be keeping some Mexicans in the United States, but it may also be leading more Mexicans to flee their country. “It’s a toxic combination right now,” said Denise Dresser, a political scientist based in Mexico City. “Mexicans north of the border are facing joblessness and persecution, but in their own country the government can’t provide basic security for many of its citizens.”
The extraordinary increase in violence in Mexico in recent years has resulted in part from President Felipe Calderón’s war against drug lords. His campaign to arrest the leaders of the cartels and the military officers and law enforcement officials they have compromised has unleashed factional fighting among rival drug groups, as well as violence against the government.
To read the rest of the article, please click here.
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Drug War Targets Schools | LA Times
December 4, 2008 by pablo
A truly shocking story from the Times about schools being targeted by drug cartels. The situation there is dire and is only going to get worse. Please support our efforts to bring innovative and creative educational opportunities to the kids in these war-ravaged communities.
Original Story: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-schoolfear4-2008dec04,0,5713324.story
Schools become latest targets in violence-plagued Ciudad Juarez
Outside the gaily painted gates of the Elena Garro Federal Kindergarten, the grown-ups are afraid.
If daily drug-related killings haven’t sown enough alarm in this gritty border city, parents now confront written messages left near several schools warning of unspecified harm unless teachers hand over their annual year-end bonuses.
The threats, printed on posters hung near schools last month, have spread panic among teachers and parents throughout a city rattled by a violent turf war between drug gangs that has killed more than 1,300 people here this year.
Some parents are keeping their children at home, at least through this month, when Mexican teachers receive a yearly bonus of as much as three months’ salary. Other parents have sent youngsters back to class, but with trepidation.
“We don’t know if these [threats] are real or false,” said one mother recently, standing outside the Elena Garro school, which has about 120 pupils ages 3 to 5. . “This is the way things are in Juarez. We don’t know anything.”
The mother gave only her first name, Judith, for fear that she would be targeted by the people who posted the threat. She said she would keep her 5-year-old daughter home this month, just in case. She wanted to see how things went.
“We’re all shocked,” she said.
December offers an especially good opportunity for criminals because under Mexican law, workers must be paid a cash bonus, or aguinaldo, usually equal to a month’s pay. The bonus is often higher for public school teachers, who earn about $450 to $1,050 a month.
Extortionists for months have laid siege to other livelihoods in Ciudad Juarez, demanding payoffs from bar and restaurant owners and junkyard operators. More than two dozen businesses have been burned to the ground after owners refused to pay. Some junkyards have shut down.
The growing extortion racket is attributed to drug-trafficking groups seeking additional sources of income.
But preying on schools would mark a new low.
It’s unclear who posted the threats or to whom the teachers were to hand over their bonuses. Some say the messages were posted by criminal gangs only to throw an edgy city further off balance.
“The objective is to destabilize the population, to create panic,” said the mayor, Jose Reyes Ferriz.
Reyes sought to quell the fears by deploying municipal police cadets at entrances to the city’s 900 schools. But because there are only 350 cadets, they have to move from school to school, offering piecemeal coverage.
Gabriel Tarango, a cadet standing guard at the Elena Garro school, said he doubted reports that drug cartels were behind the threats. Such a scheme would offer too little money, he reasoned.
“It’s just the same people who don’t want to work, don’t want to do anything, trying to take advantage of the situation that we have in Juarez,” he said.
There have been no arrests. Public schools, which are under joint federal and state management, have kept their normal schedules. Teachers say they plan to keep showing up for work, but the threat is another reason to think twice before going out on this city’s streets.
“We can’t be paralyzed by the threats of these violent people,” said Jose Salazar, director of the city’s public high schools. “It’s up to the authorities to do something about these threats. We as teachers have to keep going forward.”
Ellingwood is a Times staff writer.
ken.ellingwood@latimes.com.
Cecilia Sánchez of The Times’ Mexico City Bureau contributed to this report.
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6,285 Reasons Not To Quit
December 4, 2008 by pablo
Lately I’ve been tempted to stop reading the paper. Like everyone else in the nation knows, each time you pick up the paper (or log on) there is bad news waiting to be read. From the recession to the terror attack in India to my @#$# USC Trojans being left out of the college football championship, there is bad news everywhere. Now is an easy time for a lot of people to quit, whether it be a new venture or a new idea or, in our case, a project like Libertad.
In this dismal economy who in their right mind could think they could raise $100,000 to pull off their project, no matter how innovative? I don’t blame those people who think it’s foolish; people are losing their jobs and there is an air of uncertaintly in the country, the likes I’ve never seen.
But once in awhile you come across something that slaps you in the face and demands action. For everyone here at Libertad, it came in the form of a number.
6,285.
That is the number of people killed in Mexico’s drug war this last year. That number didn’t suprise me - it shocked me. Let’s do some quick math.
6285 divded by 12 = 523. 523 deaths a month. If you go further, that is about 17 murders a day.
Shocking? Hell yeah. But remember, with each of those deaths there are kids involved, there are families ripped apart, there are hearts broken and lives of the survivors totally destoryed.
Now, to bring this back to Libertad; What are we to do about this?
First, I know we can’t put a dent in the drug war. That isn’t our mission anyway. But what I feel we can do through Project Libertad is to help the kids (and some adults) living through this horror to not give up hope. Not only that, but through continuing to create narratives about situations like Mexico’s you bring light to a problem that still hovers in the dark.
I’ll end on this: I got an email from a young man living in San Diego that other day, asking us what the status of the project was (I hadn’t posted in awhile). He thought we’d probably quit “like all the rest.” It reminded me that projects like this take on a life of their own and people start to get inspired by the work, people that you might not know or ever hear from.
So I told him that we are not giving up, bad economy and all, and we will continue pushing until this project is fully realized. Now is not the time to quit.
Now is the time to push, and if we do, perhaps we might help the child who was destined to become #6,286.
More to come, and thanks for staying strong with us.
Pablo
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Introducing The Good Fight, the engine behind Project Libertad
October 27, 2008 by pablo
Ever wonder what an independent filmmaker does in his off time? Well, in my case it’s trying to bring the same principles that defined both Runnin’ At Midnite and Project Libertad to the communications and non-profit world. Enter The Good Fight, my latest and greatest venture. Read on to find out more about it and how it ties in with Project Libertad.
The Good Fight is a new and emerging creative entity committed to the creation of socially relevant projects in cinema, photography and design. We develop and implement narratives using the latest online and real-world technologies while continually looking for new ways to tell the stories of humankind.
The Good Fight was borne out of a need for effective and compelling visual strategies for non-profits. We develop and implement innovative approaches to content creation and digital communications strategies.
We have a firm commitment to “doing the right thing” and reach out to non-profit and socially active organizations to help them battle for their cause. Our team is dedicated to infusing an “unstoppable” ethos across all projects.
Are you ready to join the fight?
By partnering with Camino Public Relations, our aim is to create a learning lab for the future that will not only elevate our ability to generate stories, but drive the creation of other educational and socially conscious projects. This is obviously a huge challenge – one that will inspire us for years to come.
The Good Fight develops and implements innovative approaches to content creation and digital communications strategies. We have a firm commitment to “doing the right thing” and reach out to non-profit and socially active organizations to help them battle for their cause.
Our diverse and collective backgrounds work to create an engaging and effective communications platform that is easy to maintain, expand and modify. Everything we do emanates from these four words: Ideas, Inspiration, Creation and Community. We believe a good digital communications strategy doesn’t work well when isolated from a broader, more integrated system.
This ideology extends to Project Libertad, as we believe that independent film, coupled with education with youth, is a tremendous tool for self expression, political engagement and community empowerment. All of The Good Fight’s projects echo this belief, and wherever possible The Good Fight will donate its revenue towards Project Liberatad.
I hope you all are ready to “join the fight”. Please forward this to your friends, colleagues and contacts and ask them to support The Good Fight as well. Please visit our “services” page to find out exactly what it is we do, and how we approach it.
Thanks for your continued support.
Pablo
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