Border Patrol agents seized more than 1,400 pounds of marijuana over the weekend in four separate busts, according to Laredo Sector Border Patrol
The most recent seizure occurred Monday at Texas 16 traffic checkpoint.
Hebbronville agents observed a white pickup truck heading northbound make an abrupt U-turn prior to reaching the checkpoint.
Agents observed the driver of the vehicle pull onto the south side of the road and exit the vehicle.
The driver quickly jumped over a barbed wire fence and fled into the brush.
Agents saw several bundles of marijuana wrapped in cellophane in plain view inside the passenger seat and in the bed of the pickup truck.
One hundred individually wrapped bundles of marijuana, weighing 620.7 pounds and valued at $496,560, were recovered from the truck.
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Nearly one ton of marijuana was discovered by the Army in a village near Ciudad Miguel Aleman, hidden in a vehicle and in a drainage ditch nearby.
[caption id="attachment_1827" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Nearly one ton of marijuana was discovered by the Army in a village near Ciudad Miguel Aleman, hidden in a vehicle and in a drainage ditch"]
Tuesday, the 75th Infantry Battalion was on patrol between Los Angeles and Miguel Aleman, .
They found a 1991 Black Ford Grand Marquis with Minnesota plates, containing 31 packages of what appeared to be marijuana wrapped in brown tape and plastic.
While searching for the owner of the vehicles, soldiers discovered 160 more packages, wrapped in the same manner and containing marijuana, but could not locate the owner of the car.
Both the vehicle and the contraband were seized and turned over to agents of the Federal Attorney Generals Office. The weight of the seizure totaled of 909 kilograms with 100 grams.
This information was provided to Mexico Trucker by the press office of the First Cavalry Motorized Battalion, which the 75th is a part of. They are part of “Operation Nuevo Leon-Tamaulipas” Combating Narco Trafficking.
Vigilantes on U.S. border say they’re compassionate, even save illegal immigrants’ lives
The “Viagra Vigilantes” aka The Minutemen want you to know they are humanitarians, and they can be quite persuasive.
They say they are not vigilantes or racists. They understand the impulse to come to America, to feed a family. They might do it themselves if they were Mexican.
Dr. Eugene Cafarelli wants you to know. He is Arizona state director of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, which has 1,500 state members and 10,000 nationwide, according to Cafarelli.
For several years, the Viagra Vigilantes have gathered at spots like this one, on a private ranch near the border, to “observe, record and report” illegal immigrants, or as the Minutemen call them, illegal aliens, or IA for short.
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NUEVO LAREDO (MTNS) Almost 3 tons of marijuana was seized Monday outside the town of Camargo by units of the First Motorized Calvary, on routine patroi.
Military units discovered two SUV’s abandoned next to a canal on a ranch close to town and upon investigation, found they contained 276 packages of marijuana wieghing 2,852 kilograms
.It appeared the vehicles and their contents had been abandoned and no arrests were made. The drugs and vehicles were truned over to the AFI for further investigation.
To date, as part of operations on the border to combat narcotics, the First Motorized Calvary stationed in Nuevo Laredo have seized more than 14 tons of marijuana and 51 kilos of cocaine.
Cd Camargo is approximately 60 miles south of Nuevo Laredo and reputedly a stronghold of the Zeta’s, enforcement arm of the Gulf cartel.
Calderon vows to press war on cartels despite the body count
MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s security forces have been swept into the eye of the storm since President Felipe Calderon decided to get tough on the country’s drug-smuggling gangs.
Once-untouchable federal officials have been assassinated in the streets. Out-gunned soldiers and police have battled gangsters armed with grenades and bazookas. Local police chiefs have resigned, a few fleeing to the United States for safety. Hundreds of police and soldiers have been sent early to their graves.
Amid a fierce counteroffensive by the drug cartels, the question becomes: How long can, or will, Mexico’s thin police line hold?
Calderon and his top assistants say the security forces are up to the task. The gunfights and killings, including the assassinations this month of four top police officials, are signs of success rather than defeat, they say.
“This reaction is precisely a desperate act to weaken the federal police,” Calderon said, defending his policies and trying to rally the public to support them. “The effectiveness of a new, cleaned-up police force was hitting the criminals. We’re going to continue this frontal attack.”
But Bush administration officials, pushing Congress to approve a $1.4 billion, three-year package of equipment and training for Mexico’s security forces, warn that Calderon’s campaign will founder without the aid.
Analysts on both sides of the border worry that Mexico’s underequipped and poorly trained police forces — with long histories of ineffectiveness and corruption — will come up short.
“There comes a moment when the imbalance in resources reverses the relationship between government and cartels,” George Friedman, founder of Strategic Forecasting, an Austin political risk firm, wrote in a report on Mexico’s drug war this week.
“Government officials, seeing the futility of resistance, effectively become tools of the cartels.”
A relatively new twist
Other analysts point out that many Mexican policemen and officials have long been at the cartels’ service. They argue that much of today’s sustained violence against police — a relatively new twist in the country’s decades-long dance with the drug trade — arises from a fragmentation of a protection system that existed for decades.
Hundreds of dedicated police and soldiers have been killed over the years in the line of duty. But for much of the past, authorities and gangsters preferred their relationships to be defined by business rather than bloodshed.
Officials were killed if they welched on a deal with the criminals. They rarely were targeted for simply doing their jobs.
“They didn’t have to kill the police before, because the agreements were clear, and the limits were well defined,” said Ernesto Lopez Portillo, president of a Mexico City think tank that studies police and public security.
That has changed since the presidential elections of 2000 ended seven decades of one-party rule and shook the protection that it afforded the country’s gangsters, Lopez Portillo said.
Political power, and the cover it can provide drug traffickers, has splintered among the federal, state and local governments.
At the same time, a reorganization of the federal security forces, including the replacement of the notoriously corrupt Federal Judicial Police with a quasi-military force, has made enforcement more effective. Narcotics use has ballooned in Mexico, while smuggling organizations grew more powerful and more competitive with one another.
Now, each cartel has its own protection system, often based on the guns of local and state police. Many crime bosses also employ gunmen who until recently were active-duty soldiers.
Gangs’ firepower and vendettas have multiplied. Police have been caught in the crossfire. Chaos reigns.
“All the old alliances have broken down,” said Bruce Bagley, a University of Miami political scientist who specializes in the Latin American drug trade. “And they are striking back against cops, many of whom are dirty. The whole process has been thrown into flux.”
Calderon has ordered nearly 30,000 soldiers and quasi-military police into the fight against the cartels. The offensive has proved ineffective in stopping the trafficking of cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine and heroin to American consumers. But more than 3,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence in the 18 months since Calderon became president.
The dead include about 300 federal, state and local police. Some have been killed by rivals of the gangsters who employed them. Many others were slain doing their jobs.
“There have been, obviously, very lamentable losses on our side,” Calderon told reporters this week. “But fortunately Mexico has many patriots like them.”
Calderon insists he is determined to press the crackdown, regardless of the body count. He has asked Congress for a five-fold increase in the budget of the federal police, to be used in large part to build new regional bases across the country.
“We will continue building a better federal police, which this country has severely needed,” Calderon said. “We’re not going to add to the abandonment, the cowardice or the complicity that allowed Mexico to arrive at this situation.”
Read more in the Houston Chronicle
WASHINGTON – Qualcomm has won a federal contract to provide a satellite-based tracking system for U.S. and Mexican trucks participating in a contentious experiment that opens the border to long-haul commercial traffic.
Federal officials said yesterday that the San Diego-based company’s OmniTRACS system will allow the U.S. government to closely monitor trucks from both countries, including compliance with regulations that prohibit truckers from driving more than 11 hours per day.
Although Qualcomm is best-known for its prominent role as a chip-maker in the wireless industry, the company also is a major designer of satellite tracking systems for vehicles.
Qualcomm will provide tracking technology for 100 trucks at a cost of $367,000, officials said.
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In states bordering Mexico and Canada, it is common practice for people to buy their medications in the countries with the best pricing-which is not the United States.
In my own case, even though I have USA medicare, I get almost all medical care in Mexico. However, with frequent trips back to Phoenix, I sometimes overstay my supply of prescription medications from my Mexican doctors.
I was back in Phoenix , recently, doing rehab on my wife’s rental house and maintenance on our own home. As work progressed slower than anticipated, I told mi esposa that I had to make a drug run to the border to refill one prescription. Mexican prescriptions cannot be refilled in the USA. She told me that I almost always wind up having to do the same, each time I come back to Arizona.
Transportation to the border is cheap and convenient from Phoenix and Tucson, where 75% of Arizonans live. From Phoenix, I took a $25 shuttle van direct to the border- a three hour ride. The driver’s speedometer often showed 80 mph. Contrast this with transportation up north. How far will $25 take you? Why? It has to be the competition in Phoenix, since there are many border shuttle companies.
Read the rest of Don Patricio’s Run for the border
Transportistas de Nuevo Laredo pide al DOT de Estados Unidos frenar las presiones hacia los transfers por no saber hablar inglés
NUEVO LAREDO.- Transportistas de Nuevo Laredo pide al DOT de Estados Unidos frenar las presiones hacia los transfers por no saber hablar inglés, porque advierten que podrían suspender las operaciones.
“Nos habían dicho que ya no iban a insistir en los warnings(advertencias), que era por un tiempo. Sin embargo, siguen presionando a los transfers(chóferes de camiones) y nos parece mal.
Si siguen así pues entonces a ver quién les cruza la mercancía”, expresó el transportista Gerardo Madrazo O. quien forma parte del Comité Binacional en Comercio Exterior Blue Ribbon.
In translation; Border shuttle drivers are asking Texas DPS to quite handing out tickets and warning for not being able to speak English, and I happen to agree with them.
With a population along the border that is 90% hispanic, business is done in Spanish, and there is no reason in the world to be enforcing this on cross border shuttle trucks, other than harassment and discrimination. Especially since the majority, if not all of the Texas DPS officers assigned to the border region are bi-lingual.
However, Mexico Trucker fully supports enforcement efforts of the English language provision on truckers beyond the commercial zones without exception.
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