Nuevo Laredo. – More than 4 tons of marijuana in addition to other drugs and pirated CD’s,were destroyed yesterday by personnel of the Army in the presence of federal, state and municipal authorities.
Operativo Permanente, has resulted in the seizure of enormous amounts of narcotics in Nuevo Laredo, Nuevo Guerrero, Cd. Mier, Miguel Alemán, Díaz Ordaz y Camargo, according to spokesmen from the First Motorized Cavalry regiment, headquartered in Nuevo Laredo.
The contraband was turned over to the Military and State and local authorities by the Procuraduría General de la República (PGR), after being used as evidence in administrative and legal proceedings
The contraband was incinerated at Cuarentenaria Station, located on the Ribereña Highway, between Nuevo Laredo and Reynosa.
The destruction of the goodies was overseen by members of the local Subdelegation of the PGR, of the Federal Agency of Investigations (AFI), the Army, the Preventive Federal Police (PFP) and the Municipal Police.
Among the items destroyed were various chemicals from a clandestine laboratory in the Municipality of Miguel Aleman that were part of a meth lab.
Also destroyed were more than 50,000 pirated CD’s seized in raids around the city.
This is more evidence of President Calderon’s ongoing effort to fight organized crime and corruption in Mexico.
Mexico deserves and needs the $1.4 billion dollar aid package recently approved by Congress to fight the cartels. Mexico does not need US interference or boots on the ground however. Calderon is quite capable of turning this country around.
A teary-eyed American soldier accused of illegally driving guns and ammunition into Mexico said Tuesday he was just looking for a place to park so he could walk into Mexico for breakfast after a long night of driving.
Instead, Army Spc. Richard R. Medina Torres steered his 1999 Honda Prelude off Interstate 10, over an international bridge, and into Mexico.
“It was just an accident, I didn’t mean to drive over here,” Torres said Tuesday afternoon standing in a hallway of the Mexican federal building where he has been jailed since Monday morning.
Torres, an Iraq war veteran who was heading to his mother’s house in Fresno, Calif., said after driving all night from Fort Hood he planned to park his car at the border and walk into Juarez for breakfast. But he misunderstood directions from an El Paso gas station attendant, took the wrong exit, and wound up in Mexico.
“When I saw where I was, I started asking people at the front gate ‘where can I turn around at?’,” Torres said.
A Mexican border guard told him to make a U-turn several hundred feet past the border, Torres said. But within seconds of leaving the inspection station, Mexican federal authorities stopped his car.
Torres, who doesn’t speak any Spanish, said they started asking if he had drugs or guns. He said he immediately told them he was traveling with an AR-15 assault rifle and a .45-caliber handgun.
After searching his car, Mexican authorities took Torres into custody, and began questioning him, he said. He has not yet been charged with any crime.
It is illegal to bring guns or ammunition and some types of knives into Mexico and weapons offenses can result in lengthy prison sentences. Torres also had 171 rounds of ammunition and three knives.
Roads leading to the border are dotted with clearly marked signs directing drivers to Mexico. Many of those signs include a picture with a revolver in a red circle with a line through it. Other markers are more direct, warning drivers that it is illegal to carry guns or ammunition into Mexico.
“Penalty-Prison,” a sign posted above a road leading directly to the border says in bold, red letters.
Torres said he wasn’t paying attention to the signs, instead focusing his attention on looking for a parking lot.
“I wasn’t even aware I was driving into Mexico,” until seeing the sign welcoming him to Mexico, Torres said. He was driving to California to drop off his car before deploying to Honduras for a year.
Mexican authorities said Tuesday that Torres stopped at the border to ask where he could park his car and was directed to make a U-turn to go back to the U.S. When he stopped again to ask federal authorities working nearby where to park, the agents started questioning him and were told about his weapons.
Torres said he was being treated well, though when he wasn’t being questioned or speaking with U.S. Consulate officials he was being kept in a small, private cell with a bed, shower and toilet.
He said he’s met with a lawyer and hopes to see a judge in the next few days.
Torres’ mother, Gloria Medina, said she was told about her son’s situation Tuesday morning by his commanding officer at Fort Hood. She spoke to her son about an hour later and now just hopes for his quick release.
“I’m worried … I think about him quite often,” Medina said. “I do have my faith and that’s keeping me strong. I feel that he’s going to come out of this ordeal fine, and I’m hoping that it will be soon.”
UPDATE
Spc. Richard Raymond Medina Torres was charged by Mexican authorities with smuggling (punishable by five to 30 years in prison); weapons importation (punishable by three to 10 years in prison); and possession of ammunition reserved for the military (punishable by two to six years in prison), said Angel Torres, spokesman for the Mexican Attorney General.
Medina Torres was transferred to the Cereso prison around noon Wednesday.
Torres said Medina Torres’ case is now in the hands of a federal judge who has 72 hours to decide whether to free him or sentence him to prison time.
Asked whether the U.S. State Department has planned any diplomatic intervention, an official in Washington, D.C., declined to comment.
However, he said consular officials were available to provide legal references and other information if Medina Torres needed it. They also will follow the case as it moves through the legal process.
Under the federal Mexican judicial system, Medina Torres will not have an oral trial or oral hearings in a courtroom. Instead, attorneys for both sides typically file written statements for a judge to read and make a decision.
Yeah, and Santy Claus wear pink panties on Christmas eve also. The roads leading to the International Bridges are well marked and there are public parking lots around the bridge and very evident.
Just two of some 1,600 police officers investigated after the army raided police stations in five border cities last week are being subjected to “a criminal process,” the Tamaulipas state government said. Most of the officers were back on the job Saturday. The fate of the two officers was unclear Saturday as city, state and federal authorities were unable to confirm where they were from, if they were under arrest, and what charges, if any, they faced.
Tuesday’s coordinated dawn raids by troops and federal agents kept most city police off the streets for days in Matamoros, Reynosa, Ciudad Alemán, Río Bravo and Nuevo Laredo. Soldiers took away police firearms, grounded patrol vehicles and checked radios and personal effects.
But so far, the investigation has brought meager results.
Fourteen officers in Río Bravo, southwest of Weslaco, were arrested because their police radios were not tuned to the authorized frequency, but were released on Friday, said Tamaulipas state and city officials.
“No crime was proven against them,” city spokeswoman Gloria Treviño said.
The raids followed the arrests days earlier of four Nuevo Laredo officers on suspicion of radioing information on military and federal operations to drug traffickers.
Police officers Saturday still didn’t have their firearms returned to them in Nuevo Laredo and Reynosa, according to officials for the two larger cities subjected to the military operation.
Reynosa’s 540 officers were expected to have their firearms back on Saturday, “or (today) at the latest,” said Joel Martínez, a city spokesman.
Officials for Tamaulipas, which borders Texas from Laredo to the Gulf of Mexico, said the army began returning firearms to some police departments Friday.
Mexico’s National Defense Ministry, which runs the army, has had no comment on the operation since it began.
Sean Mattson – Express News
Mexican authorities said Wednesday they had arrested a man in northern Mexico in the weekend killing of U.S. Border Patrol agent Luis Aguilar.
Jesus Navarro Montes, 22, was arrested in the northern state of Sonora on Wednesday, said a spokesman for Mexico’s federal Attorney General’s office who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with department policy.
Navarro was transported to the city of Mexicali in Baja California after he told Mexican authorities he ran over Aguilar on Saturday, the spokesman said.
Navarro Montes had previously been arrested and imprisoned for transporting 10 undocumented immigrants to the United States, Mexican authorities said.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents met Mexican federal agents on the Lincoln-Juarez International Bridge on Wednesday to transfer custody of a prisoner wanted in Mexico for homicide and drug trafficking, authorities said.Officials with the Agencia Federal de Investigacion, who took custody of Juan Garcia-Flores, 36, said he is wanted in Guanajuato and the border state Coahuila.
Though ICE officials only confirmed the alleged drug trafficking, AFI agent Jesus Garcia said Garcia-Flores was also being sought on homicide charges in Mexico.
He declined to comment on how long Garcia-Flores had been sought by Mexican law enforcement. Garcia did not clarify whether the alleged homicide occurred in Coahuila or Guanajuato.
According to ICE, Garcia-Flores sold and distributed marijuana in Mexico.
U.S. officials turned Garcia-Flores over to Mexican agents after he served a five-year prison sentence at the Three Rivers Correctional Institute, located about 120 miles northeast of Laredo.
Shackled and surrounded by at least three ICE agents at all times, Garcia-Flores, dressed in a gray sweatshirt and sweatpants, carried a small duffel bag and walked across the bridge in silence. He was met in the middle of the bridge by at least a half-dozen AFI agents bearing automatic guns across their chests.
After being unshackled at the ankles by U.S. agents, AFI authorities strapped a body armor vest on Garcia-Flores before escorting him into Nuevo Laredo.
On the U.S. side of the Lincoln-Juarez International Bridge, ICE agents from San Antonio’s Special Response Team and Laredo’s ICE division secured the perimeter before walking onto the bridge. They entered through a gate located at the dead-end corner of Santa Ursula Avenue and Zaragosa Street.
ICE agents also sat inside a vehicle at the corner of the streets holding rifles and other vehicles blocked in the van carrying Garcia-Flores.
Garcia-Flores’ prison sentence in the United States was the result of a March 2003 conviction for possession of more than 100 pounds of marijuana with intent to distribute, ICE said. Nina Pruneda, a spokeswoman for ICE, said he was also arrested in 1990 for possession of cocaine.
On Nov. 29, 2007, Garcia-Flores was released from Three Rivers and taken into ICE custody. At that time he began immigration proceedings, which includes appearing before a judge in immigration court for a determination on his status in the United States, Pruneda said.
The prisoner transfer Wednesday is an example of the cooperation between Mexican and U.S. officials to catch criminals on both sides of the border, Pruneda said. Anytime someone is wanted for a crime in Mexico, ICE does its part to help, and vice versa, Pruneda said.
“Those who think they can outrun the reach of the law by hiding out in the United States will find out otherwise,” said Marc J. Moore, field office director for ICE detention and removal operations in San Antonio, in an e-mailed statement. “ICE is working closely with our law enforcement counterparts both here and abroad to ensure that the United States is not used as a refuge for criminals or violent offenders.”
NUEVO LAREDO – The federal government is taking no chances on seeing a recurrence of the drug-fueled violence that once plagued this major land port, sending additional military troops and federal police to the area.
After the deadly confrontation earlier this week among police, soldiers and para-military criminal squads in the Rio Bravo Valley cities of Río Bravo and Reynosa, federal authorities dispatched an unspecified number of extra soldiers and federal agents to cities all along the Tamaulipas-Texas border, including Matamoros, across from Brownsville; Reynosa, near McAllen; Río Bravo, across from Donna; Miguel Alemán, across from Roma; and Nuevo Laredo.
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Editor’s Note: Get this out there before Glenn Beck and other’s put their hate spin on it. Another honest politician gunned down!
RIO BRAVO, Mexico — A memorial of flowers and candles took up yards of sidewalk Friday near the bullet-riddled cafeteria where a former mayor who had promised to rid this city of drug corruption was gunned down the previous day. Juan Antonio Guajardo Anzaldua, a father of four, would have turned 49 on Friday. He was shot dead at 5:38 p.m. Thursday at his family-owned restaurant, along with two bodyguards and three other people.
WARNING – GRAPHIC IMAGES FOLLOW
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An interesting story being reported out of Monterrey today concerning three bodies discovered with ties to a truck high jack ring.
Others reporting on this would have you believe it is a commonplace occurrence in Mexico, which it is not, while ignoring the fact that similar events have been happening in Canada, without the killings. It also occurs in the U.S. frequently, although most times, the truck driver is involved in some way. There are many documented facts to support this.
Apparently, the gang used females posing as hookers to catch the drivers attention and delay them, so the rest of the gang could take the truck, sometimes killing the driver in the process.
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