Mexico Trucker Online

A bus owned by Autobuses Lucano of Dallas Texas, traveling from San Luis Patosi, SLP to Houston Texas crashed 35 miles south of Nuevo Laredo Thursday morning, killing 2, including a pregnant 19 year old woman whose body was found under the bus and injuring 10.

The injured were taken to hospitals in Sabinas Hidalgo NL and Cruz Roja in Nuevo Laredo.

Juan Carlos Flores Sanchez, Commandander of Federal Police Highways, reported initial investigation and interviews with passengers suggested the driver fell asleep at the wheel shortly before the bus left the highway and overturned.

The driver left the scene and a warrant was issued with the Nuevo Leon State Police for his arrest and detention.

Read the rest of this entry »

The newest outrage against Mexico going around the blogosphere and on the rabid right wing talk shows and overnight conspiracy fests, is the story of personnel of the Mexican Army being involved in a home invasion and murder in Phoenix Arizona.

When I first heard this, I believe it was on Lou Dobbs nightly hatefest, I was incredulous at the stupidity of the report and that anyone with a lick of sense would believe it.

Now, KFYI in Phoenix is reporting Immigration and Customs Enforcement is saying,

mmigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said three suspects arrested in a Monday morning Phoenix home invasion and homicide were not members of the Mexican Army.

“We have no indication whatsoever that any of the individuals were involved with formal military in Mexico,” said Vincent Picard of ICE.

That should be enough to put to rest the rumor mill, and heaven forbid, a retraction from those reporting to the contrary, but we know that hasn’t happened nor will it.

Read the rest of this entry »

The border wall has gained a new, and very visible opponent. Interviewed by 02138, the magazine about all things Harvard, alumnus Tommy Lee Jones minced no words when asked about his thoughts on the barrier.

The idea of a fence between El Paso and Brownsville bears all the credibility and seriousness of flying saucers from Mars or leprechauns. Or any manner of malicious, paranoid superstition. In other words, it’s bullshit.

(T)he talk is worth headlines, the talk is worth attention, and that might lead to votes. It’s a predatory approach to democracy by those who would instill fear and then propose themselves as a solution. It’s very destructive. Very, very destructive. And it’s the perfectly wrong thing to do.

First of all, it won’t work. You can’t build a fence that I cannot get over, through, or under if I want to go to Mexico. In that [border] country, you cannot do it. It’s a complete folly. Ecologically, it’s a complete disaster, and sociologically, it’s a complete disaster. It’s an act of fascist madness.

But that isn’t bad enough, Jones says. What building a border wall is really all about is electoral politics at its most cynical.

And the people who are being appealed to, the voterships that are removed from that country, are being spoken to as if it’s time to fence their backyard so the stray dog doesn’t get in. “OK, let’s just build a fence.” That’s as far removed from reality as can be, and entirely cynical by those who would manipulate these people. It’s a sad day for the democratic process to see people manipulated through fear and insecurity.

Jones’ incisive view is based not on ideology but on life experience. He grew up Midland and lived in San Antonio for three decades.

The annual three-day inspection blitz known as Roadcheck takes place this week at more than 1,000 inspection locations at weigh stations and roadside checkpoints across the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

The annual event sponsored by the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance is Tuesday through Thursday, June 3-5, and will involve tens of thousands of inspections by federal, state, provincial and local inspectors.

For Mexico Trucker, it will be the first time in almost 20 years I’ve worked during this event. Why? Well, my 10 year old Mexican owned Classic XL passed a Level I inspection in Louisiana last week so in theory, I won’t be subjected to the hassles of the event. According to Louisiana State Troopers Chesne at the St Martin scales, mine was the only truck in 72 hours which he put a sticker on. For me, it’s the hassle factor. They say it is for safety but in reality, safety takes a back seat to revenue enhancement.

Mexico began their participation yesterday. As I was returning from the house in Monterrey to the border to begin another work week, I encountered no less than 8 Federal Police units with Mexican big rigs on the side in pull offs undergoing inspection.

I can’t find any statistics for Mexico’s participation in Roadcheck 2007, but OOIDA is reporting,

CVSA reported that Mexican officials conducted just 139 inspections with 10 trucks being placed OOS and no driver violations.

I can’t find these figure anywhere on CVSA website so I would assume it is more of OOIDA spreading misinformation about Mexico and it’s trucking industry.

It will be an interesting day as I travel the border route from Laredo to El Paso and on to Denver tomorrow afternoon to see just how intensive this “blitz” is. In the past, it seems to have been, as Willy P. Shakesphere once said, “Much a doo doo over nada”!

Reputed Sinaloa drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera, accompanied by an army of sicarios (hit men), strolled into Juárez one day claiming the city’s lucrative smuggling corridor as his own, so the rumor goes.

Whether true or not, Juárez and other parts of the Mexican state of Chihuahua this year have become ground zero in a battle over drug-trafficking routes that have been under the control of the Carrillo Fuentes drug organization for more than a decade.

The violence, which has included kidnappings, car-to-car shootings on boulevards and victims pelted by machine guns in broad daylight, has left about 400 dead and has Juarenses looking over their shoulders as they try to go about their daily lives.

What sparked the bloodshed in Juárez is unclear, but somehow agreements between the Sinaloa and Juárez drug cartels apparently crumbled, leading to fighting among smaller organizations, said Mexico experts and U.S. anti-narcotics officials.

It is difficult to gauge the size of each of the drug-trafficking organizations, although it is clear that the estimated $10 billion in drug money and weapons that flows into Mexico from the United States each year supplies traffickers with enough money to corrupt authorities and to buy weapons, equipment and technology.

The animosity between Chapo Guzman’s Sinaloa cartel and “La Linea,” as the Juárez cartel is also known, is evident as the death toll mounts, including several corpses recently found with threatening notes aimed at Guzman’s associates.

“This will happen to those who keep supporting El Chapo. From La Linea and those who follow it,” stated a note found next to two men slain last week in the Loma Blanca area outside of Juárez.

The suspected head of the Juárez drug cartel is Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, who is believed to have taken control of the organization after the 1997 death of his brother, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, who was nicknamed the “Lord of the Skies” because of his use of airplanes to smuggle cocaine.

Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, 45, was indicted in 2000 by a U.S. federal grand jury on a long list of charges, including 10 counts of murder and the distribution of tons of cocaine and marijuana bound for New York, Chicago and other markets throughout the nation.

A Mexican federal police, or PGR, commander identification card bearing a photo of Vicente Carrillo Fuentes was recovered by the FBI from a West El Paso home in 2000, El Paso Times archives showed.

A high-ranking U.S. anti-narcotics official has said that to survive the recent upheaval, Vicente Carrillo Fuentes allied himself with reputed drug trafficker Heriberto “Lazca” Lazcano, one of three leaders of the Gulf cartel.

Lazcano is believed to be the leader of the Zetas, a group of trained assassins formed years ago by deserters from the Mexican army.

John “Jack” Riley, head of the El Paso division of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, confirmed encounters involving Zetas in Juárez and the town of Palomas across from Columbus, N.M. But the squad, he said, is not the threat it is said to be.

Juárez is only one battleground in a war taking place across Mexico as narco-gangs battle each other during an unprecedented crackdown by the military and federal forces.

“You have the president of Mexico (who) is doing something no other president has done before, that I can think of. He has basically declared war on the cartels,” said Robert Almonte, executive director of the Texas Narcotics Officers Association.

Mexican President Felipe Calderón has sent more than 2,000 soldiers and federal police to Juárez as part of a strategy to take back areas across Mexico besieged by drug violence.

While Calderón has made his intentions clear, so have the cartels.

A hit list naming police officers, similar to the ones found in Juárez, was hung on a banner last week in Chihuahua City, which is also experiencing a rash of gangland-type shootings.

Mexico and anti-narcotics experts said the conflict has three fronts:

# Intra-cartel: Internal struggles and the elimination of “traitors” within an organization.
# Inter-cartel: Fighting between different organizations.
# Government vs. cartels: The military and law enforcement’s fight against drug organizations.

The deaths are not limited to drug dealers. Businessmen, lawyers and others have also been killed in mob-style hits carried out by commandos armados, or bands of armed men. In addition, nightclubs, bars and a car lot were recently torched.

“There is a series of vendettas being worked out among the drug lords,” Tony Payan, a political science professor and Mexico expert at the University of Texas at El Paso, said recently.

“The different people involved in hits … (include) people who took money from the drug lords and perhaps some of them who took money in the past and haven’t delivered as they promised,” Payan said.

The foundation of the current war in Mexico is a drug-trafficking problem, which grew in size, sophistication and ruthlessness over decades, all while being funded by the multibillion-dollar U.S. drug market.

In the 1980s, Mexican drug-smuggling groups began growing as Colombian cocaine traffickers shifted trafficking routes to seaports and clandestine airstrips in Mexico, offering access to the U.S. drug market, according to a history of the DEA by the agency.

By the mid-1990s, the cocaine routes that ran through the Caribbean into Florida, which gave rise to the Miami cocaine cowboys period, shifted to Mexico. The Mexican drug traffickers were paid in cocaine, leading to an explosive growth in profits, power and ability to corrupt police and officials at the highest level of government.

During that time, an unspoken code in Mexico separating police from criminal forces — in which police would take money to look the other way — broke down, and many in law enforcement became employees of criminal groups, said Payan, who has studied drug trafficking for years.

“I think (former Mexican presidents, Carlos) Salinas (de Gortari) and (Ernesto) Zedillo allowed this problem to get worse and worse and allowed these cartels to get more sophisticated and powerful over time,” Payan said last week at a forum on the violence in Juárez. “The number one problem in Mexico … is corruption.”

Corruption has allowed drug traffickers to elude authorities, and when some cartel leaders have been sent to prison, their stays have been short.

Guzman, reputed to be one of the most powerful of the drug kingpins in Mexico, escaped from a maximum-security prison in Mexico in 2001. Guzman, 54, has also been indicted by a U.S. federal grand jury on charges of cocaine trafficking.

There are separate $5 million rewards for information leading to the capture of both Guzman and Vicente Carrillo Fuentes. The men are natives of the eastern Mexican state of Sinaloa, which has been described as the equivalent of Sicily to the Italian Mafia.

“The media portrays these guys in suits and ties like if they are the board of AT&T. They are not,” said John “Jack” Riley, the head of the DEA in El Paso, in an interview earlier this year. He was referring to the glamorized images of drug traffickers and gangsters populating television, music and film.

“They are thugs, killers really. They would eat each other if they could make a dollar,” Riley said.

U.S. authorities say the recent violence may be an indication that the tide is turning against the cartels.

As an example, the DEA said, cooperation with Mexican authorities is at its best level ever. In the past decade, Mexico has begun extraditing drug cartel leaders to face punishment in the U.S., and authorities feel the violence is a sign of turmoil making the cartels vulnerable. The once-powerful Tijuana drug cartel, hit by high-level busts through out the years, is now said to be in disarray.

At a border governors conference in Mexico City last week, Calderón asked that the U.S. do its part in the fight against organized crime and illegal gun trafficking.

“It is fundamental everyone comprehend that the narco-trafficking problem, which is the origin and the principal cause of the violence on the border, is fundamentally due to one clear fact: The American drug market is the largest market in the world,” Calderón said.

“It is a problem whose origin is the American consumer, but there are those who pretend that Mexico should confront and resolve it alone,” Calderón said in Spanish. “The battle in Mexico daily costs the lives of Mexican police; nevertheless, the majority of the consumers are Americans.”

CULIACAN, Mexico — Automatic weapons at the ready, the platoons of federal police officers descend from the transport planes and high-step as neatly as majorettes into the searing heat.

Gen. Rodolfo Cruz puts the officers through their paces as TV cameras record the event.

“Here we are, showing our faces,” said Cruz, 65, a career army officer who sprinkles conversations with English phrases. “I fight crime, I put on my uniform and show my face. I don’t go around hidden.”

Frustrated with the rising death toll from a resilient criminal insurgency, President Felipe Calderón seems ready to make a stand in this sprawling northern city that’s long been an incubator for Mexico’s drug gangs.

With freshly arrived units, nearly 3,000 soldiers and militarized federal police now patrol here and in nearby communities in Sinaloa state, trying to bring rival gangs to heel.

Similar surgical efforts have been tried over the years in Sinaloa and elsewhere in Mexico. All have won remission, but ultimately failed. The current attempt meets with frustrated shrugs.

“The federal forces are insufficient to stop organized crime,” said an editorial in El Debate, a leading newspaper here. “One can’t live in Culiacan now. Insecurity is pervasive.”

Eight federal policemen were killed in the past week after they attempted to raid a gangster safe house in a middle-class Culiacan neighborhood. More than 330 people have been killed gangland-style in Sinaloa this year, included 36 local, state and federal police.

Mexico’s narcotics industry started in Sinaloa when mountain communities began producing heroin early in the 20th century for U.S. consumers. Poppy production led to marijuana farming. Then South American cocaine started moving through the area in the 1980s.

The trade has always enjoyed the protection of local and federal officials, says Luis Astorga, a Culiacan-born sociologist who is one of Mexico’s leading experts on the drug gangs. The government has launched frequent campaigns since the 1950s to eradicate narcotics, he adds.

But, as he wrote in a report for the United Nations, “Tougher measures in one place created trafficking problems in another.”

Most people in this city of nearly 1 million are law-abiding and abhor the narcotics trade. Culiacan anchors thriving agricultural production of tomatoes and other vegetables for Mexico’s tables and those in the United States each winter.

Many people seem scandalized by the violence and the drug trade; they want it to stop.

But not all of them. Narco-culture has deep roots here.

New “narco-corridos” — gushing ballads about the gangsters — hit the streets almost as soon as one of them dies, is jailed or scores a victory against a rival or the government.

No one writes songs about the police or the soldiers.

Soldiers and federal police, fingers on rifle triggers, patrol like an occupying army. Military and police convoys snarl traffic, often running red lights — stopping might present a tempting target.

Several hundred troops camp at an outdoor sports complex in one of Culiacan’s rougher neighborhoods, their armored personnel carriers positioned at the corners of the fields, machine guns pointed at the surrounding cinder-block houses.

People stare indifferently from doorways or sidewalks as the military vehicles roll through neighborhoods. No one is overtly hostile. But few seem particularly friendly either.

Homes in the neighborhoods are packed tight, their walls and rusting roofs touching one another. The gunmen hide there.

“Everyone knows who everyone is,” said Gen. Jose Antonio Guzman, commanding the federal police patrols. “Where do you think they buy their supplies? Who washes their clothes and performs other services for them?”

Cruz, the general, who commands federal police operations across Mexico, has few illusions. To truly lock down the drug trade here, “we would need 50,000 or 60,000 men to be permanently in the streets,” he said.