Federal agents escort alleged cartel hitmen, front to back: Roberto Salas, Luis Alfredo Galindo, Fernando Monte Godina,partially seen, Sergio Estrada Gutierrez and Julio Cesar Aleman in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, Friday Sept. 25, 2009. Police said Friday the men, who are accused of dozens of murders, including two mass killings at drug treatment centers in this northern Mexico border city, are members of the Sinaloa cartel. (AP Photo/Raymundo Ruiz)
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — Police have arrested five men accused of dozens of murders, including two mass killings at drug treatment centers in this northern Mexico border city.
Police say the men were members of the Sinaloa cartel, a violent gang entrenched in a brutal turf war for control of drug routes to the United States.
The men are accused of 45 different executions in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico’s most violent city. They were arrested by law enforcement agents during a routine street patrol, according to a statement released Friday by federal police.
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Victims of the violence in Cd Juarez is more evidence of the failed US and Mexico drug policies. Mexico has decriminalized amounts for personal use while the US continues to turn a blind eye to the problem.(AP Photo/Guillermo Arias)
EL PASO, Texas – Academics, journalists and officials said at a conference here that the war on drugs has been a failure in both the United States and Mexico, and that the wave of violence has forced many Mexicans to flee their country and silenced journalists.
“Organized crime has Mexican society on the border very quiet and on its knees,” Alfredo Corchado, a correspondent in Mexico for the Dallas Morning News, said Monday at the Global Public Policy Forum on the U.S. War on Drugs, being hosted by the University of Texas at El Paso.
Luis Astorga, a researcher with the National Autonomous University of Mexico, said criminal organizations in the states of Sinaloa and Tamaulipas control drug trafficking along the U.S.-Mexican border.
The drug cartels became more brutal when they started employing former soldiers, who introduced paramilitary tactics to lay down the law for rivals, Astorga said.
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More than 3,000 Mexican soldiers arrived in Juárez this weekend as part of Joint Operation Chihuahua. (Photos courtesy of Joint Operation Chihuahua )
More than 3,000 Mexican troops arrived during the weekend in Juárez as part of what authorities have described as a frontal assault on crime in the coming weeks.
The new soldiers, which are in addition to the 2,000 already assigned to Joint Operation Chihuahua, were deployed after a meeting last week among high-level Mexican government officials in Juárez.
More troops, including intelligence units, are expected to arrive in the next few days, said Enrique Torres, a spokesman for Joint Operation Chihuahua, which began a year ago in the federal government’s battle against drug cartels and rising crime.
On Sunday, two green army Hercules cargo planes and two Mexican air force transport planes landed in Juárez, bringing 1,200 troops, Torres said. On Saturday, 2,000 soldiers rolled into city streets on convoys of Humvees, army pickups and cargo trucks.
Juárez city officials said that within two weeks the anti-crime patrol force will number 8,000 — including 5,000 soldiers, 1,600 city police and 1,000 federales.
“We need the support of citizens united,” Juárez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz, who has received death threats, said in a statement. “This is a fight of Juárez against crime. It is everyone’s fight.”
Convoys with 2,000 Mexican soldiers arrived Saturday, and the Mexican army flew 1,200 soldiers into Juárez on cargo and transport planes on Sunday.
The violence, which has claimed more than 300 lives this year in the Juárez area, continued during the weekend with at least nine homicides since Friday, including two police officers slain Saturday morning in the town of Praxedis G. Guerrero in the valley east of Juárez.
Chihuahua state investigators said Praxedis officers Luis Fernando Porras Fuentes, 35, and Janeth Mares Lujan, 22, were killed when 117 rounds were fired from assault rifles at their truck.
In another incident, Jose Eduardo Olvera Lastra, 33, reportedly a bouncer, was fatally shot in the parking lot of the Rodeo Discotheque on Avenida Lincoln near the Bridge of the Americas.
In another case, police identified Belen Vega Perez, 39, as the woman shot to death late Friday in the back seat of a black Chevrolet Impala with Texas plates. It was unclear whether Vega was a resident of Texas.
Two 9 mm bullet casings were found at the scene.
Daniel Barrunda – EPT
A U.S. Army soldier who was detained at a Mexican prison for more than a month after traveling with guns across the border was released from a Juárez prison Friday night after Mexican authorities dropped the weapons’ charges against him.
Spc. Richard Raymond Medina Torres, a 25-year-old Iraq war veteran who spent about five weeks at the Cereso prison in Juárez, looked refreshed but overwhelmed as he left the custody of Mexican officials and returned to the United States.
“I have no bad feelings, but I just want to go home,” he said. “I have no bad feelings against Mexico or the people of Mexico.”
A statement from Cereso prison officials said Medina Torres was placed in the custody of the National Institute of Migration after a magistrate revoked the pri son’s authority to keep him. U.S. officials also investigated the case and found no indication of arms-trafficking.
“He was transferred this Friday to the National Institute of Migration after federal judicial authorities revoked the formal arrest order against him and ordered he be set free immediately,” Cereso spokes man Mauricio Rodriguez said.
Medina Torres was given a medical examination by Mexican authorities and was determined to be in excellent health before he was driven in a van to the middle of the Stanton Street bridge and released.
Clean-shaven and fresh looking, Medina Torres said he was happy to return to the United States after his prison stay.
Shortly after he was arrested April 21, the soldier said he had been driving from Fort Hood, Texas, to his mother’s home in Fresno, Calif., for a visit before he would be deployed to Honduras to a new assignment as a helicopter crew chief for a unit there.
He decided to stop in El Paso and walk over to Juárez for breakfast. He couldn’t find a place to park at the Bridge of the Americas, missed two turnarounds and arrived on the Mexican side with a semiautomatic AR-15 rifle, a .45-caliber handgun and ammunition, and several knives in his car.
He said the weapons were part of his personal collection.
He was arrested at a police checkpoint right off the bridge as he was trying to make a U-turn to return to El Paso, Medina Torres said.
Mexico prohibits carrying firearms across the border and several signs at international bridges warn crossers not to take such weapons into their country.
Medina Torres was gracious about his prison stay in Mexico and said he was ready to grab a bite to eat and then head to California.
When asked whether he would be dining in Juárez, he said no.
“People were more than happy to help me out, and I had no problems at all,” he said.
Shortly after Medina Torres was detained, a spokes person for his former unit at Fort Hood, Sgt. 1st Class Nick Conner, said that in such cases a soldier would go to his new assignment unless the position had been filled. If it has been filled, he would be given a new assignment based on his skills and the Army’s needs.
Fort Bliss spokeswoman Jean Offutt said Friday evening that the post’s military police had not been notified of Medina Torres’ release and would not be involved.
Because he is not charged with a crime in the United States, and because the charges in Mexico were dropped, there would be no need for him to be taken into custody by Fort Bliss officials, she said.
It would be standard procedure for him to contact his old unit at Fort Hood to determine his status with the Army.
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