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CSI – Cd. Juarez

Bodies awaiting autopsies crowd a walk-in refrigerator at the morgue in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico Feb. 18, 2009. Bodies stacked in the morgues of Mexico’s border cities tell the story of an escalating drug war. Drug violence claimed 6,290 people last year, double the previous year, and more than 1,000 in the first eight weeks of 2009.(AP Photo/Guillermo Arias)

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico – Death froze his exhausted face.

The attackers lashed or punctured nearly every part of his body. Then they cut off the dead man’s head, wrapped it in a plastic grocery bag and dumped it with his body between two tractor-trailers on a city street.

As with most murders in Ciudad Juarez, police found no witnesses, no weapons. Only the battered corpse on the steel coroner’s table carries clues to who he was and how he died.

“Every organ speaks,” says Dr. Maria Concepcion Molina, who gently removes packing tape from the head of her third decapitated victim in a week. The dead man’s slack mouth and eyes still seem to pray for relief.

Bodies stacked in the morgues of Mexico’s border cities tell the story of an escalating drug war. Drug violence claimed 6,290 people last year, double the previous year, and more than 1,000 in the first eight weeks of 2009.

Each bullet wound or broken bone details the viciousness with which the cartels battle a government crackdown and each other. Slain policemen lie next to hit men in the rows of zipped white bags.

Workers toil up to 12 hours a day, sometimes seven days a week, to examine the remains. When Tijuana coffin makers fell behind during the December holidays, the morgue there crammed 200 bodies into two refrigerators made to hold 80.

“There are times here when there are so many people, so many cadavers, that we can’t keep up,” says the Tijuana morgue director, Federico Ortiz.

In Ciudad Juarez, the border city with the most killings, Molina prepares to make a dead man talk.

Investigators press each finger of the headless body on a pad for fingerprints.

Molina guesses from his face he was probably in his 30s.

She carefully lays out his bloodied clothing on a red plastic sheet. She pieces together his knife-shredded T-shirt picturing a wanted poster for Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. She lays the tags showing the brands of his jeans and boxers flat before snapping photographs of each.

“Sometimes we show family these photos, and they’ll say it’s his clothing but it’s not him,” says Molina, a 41-year-old mother of five. “It’s a defense mechanism.”

Ciudad Juarez, a city of 1.3 million across the border from El Paso, Texas, has a modern, estimated $15 million morgue and crime lab thanks to international support after another notorious spate of killings – the Women of Juarez. More than 400 women have been raped, strangled and dumped in the desert since 1993.

The morgue has seven doctors, including two hired in the last two weeks.

Still, the procession of the dead is staggering. Plans are under way to double the morgue’s size next year.
Last year, 2,300 victims of violence and accidents were wheeled into the pungent, formaldehyde-infused morgue, where doctors work to Mexican love ballads and the whir of electric saws cutting through bone. More than 460 bodies arrived in January and February this year.

The morgue has stopped taking other death cases.

Nearly 40 percent of the dead last year tested positive for cocaine or marijuana. About 20 percent were never claimed by their families, many out of fear. Cardboard boxes with bloodstained cowboy boots, cell phones and bulletproof vests are stacked to the ceiling in the crime lab.

Drug traffickers know investigators use the cadavers to track killers. They have raided morgues and carted off bodies at gunpoint as shaking workers in blue smocks stood helpless.

Soldiers now guard morgues when a well-known trafficker is suspected among the dead.

Tijuana morgue workers show photographs to families identifying bodies from behind a protective window. Ortiz has asked for bulletproof glass, as well as fencing around the one-story building.

From 4:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. on a recent Tuesday, 17 bodies rolled into the Juarez morgue, including the city police force’s second-in-command and three other officers.

“If this continues, we’re going to have another record year easily. We’re headed toward 2,000 deaths within 10 months,” says Hector Hawley, the administrator of the crime analysis and forensics unit, as workers in white haz-mat suits crane-lift body bags onto steel shelves. “We need a lot more help.”

In a white shower cap and blue medical robe, the bespectacled Molina checks her victim’s neck, but there is no bruising. His head was cut off after he died.

“He’s been decapitated, but I still have to determine the cause of his death,” she says.

Her assistant, Ivan Ramos, 20, matches the head to the body. He holds it in place as Molina shoots a photograph, using a paper identifying the man by number to cover the gap in his neck. That makes it easier for loved ones who have to see the picture.

The doctor notes the rest of his injuries: broken left tibia, broken right humerus, severely bruised and cut abdomen, bruised left thigh, stabbed right thigh, sliced chin, knife punctures on lower right calf, lashes on his back. He has no distinguishable traits – no moles, no scars, no tattoos.

Molina unwraps what appears to be a tourniquet on his left biceps. She speculates it was put there by the killers to stop the bleeding from a stab wound so he would not die before they finished their torture. His knees are bruised. He was forced to crawl at one point.

Molina holds the head on the examining table while Ramos shaves a section to measure a knife wound. He cuts the skin, saws open the skull, then photographs the brain before scooping it out and wiping away a dark pool of blood.

“That dark wine color on the brain, that shouldn’t be there,” Molina says. “That’s a cerebral hemorrhage. Although they didn’t crack his skull, he was beaten hard enough that it caused this.”

Molina sees the carnage as a mound of medical evidence to be explored, a mechanism that helps her leave the gory images locked in the morgue when she heads home. Other doctors have quit after a few days.

She keeps looking, unsatisfied that the head injury caused the man’s death.

Ramos drills through the rib cage to examine the organs. He started at the morgue as a volunteer when he was 17. While he couldn’t eat at first, he’s glad it led to a job in a recession-wracked city.

Molina examines the man’s heart.

“Look, he had a heart attack,” she says, pointing to white pearling on the organ. “But if I put heart attack as the cause, it will remove the responsibility from those who did this because it will be considered a natural death. So I’m going to leave that as a last resort.”

She lifts each organ, noting how healthy the man was. No kidney stones, little fat, a healthy appendix, a normal-sized head.

“This could have been a productive person, and they are all like that, young men between 18 and 36 years old,” she says, shaking her head.

After an hour and a half, she decides he was asphyxiated by the packing tape over his mouth and nose. His lungs are collapsed. His nails are a purplish blue.

Ramos gets a needle and twine, places the brain in the man’s body cavity as standard procedure and sews up his chest. He closes the skull and replaces its skin.

“He’s in good shape for being identified,” Molina says.

As they zip the remains into a body bag to store in the refrigerator, the doors open and workers wheel in another slain man.

The next day, a stone-faced woman arrives among the families who gather daily outside the morgue, hoping to find missing loved ones.

A worker shows her photographs of the man’s clothes. She says they belonged to her brother, 23-year-old Victor Alfonso Picaso, according to the morgue.

“She seemed to already know what she was coming for,” says morgue psychologist Luis Mejia. “She just wanted to recover the body and get this over with.”

JULIE WATSON / Associated Press

El Paso City Council To Debate Legalizing Drugs

Last Tuesday Mayor John Cook vetoed a unanimous city council resolution asking the U.S. Government to have a serious discussion about legalizing narcotics. On Tuesday, city council will have an opportunity to overturn the veto.

City Councilman Beto O’Rourke put the item back on the agenda. The amendment to have the drug discussion is part of a bigger resolution introduced by the Border Relations Committee. The idea of the resolution was to show support for Mexico during this violent time. However, the committee says once O’Rourke’s amendment was added to the equation everything else in the resolution, like cracking down on weapons going into Mexico, was forgotten.

“The subject matter persuaded by Mr. O’Rourke has its place but not in the proposal made to city council,” said Jose Contreras, of the Border Relations Committee. “It created havoc with us and the press ran away with it all over the country, and this is not the idea we had for a resolution like this, they completely forgot about the resolution.”

O’Rourke said the so called ‘War on Drugs” has been going on for 40 years and nothing has worked so why not try something new. “We’re not arguing that the U.S. legalize drugs we’re just asking that all options be on the table and I don’t think it’s too much to ask to have a discussion,” said O’Rourke.

In order to overturn Cook’s veto the council will need a super majority vote, which means at least six council members.

SOURCE: Robert Boyd KDBC 4 News

Cd. Juárez to fire 400 police officers who failed “Confidence Exams”

A Juarez Police SWAT Team prepares to hit the streets. These officers have been vetted and deemed honest. The Juarez Police admit many of their officers are corrupt and paid off by the cartels.

More than 400 members of the Juárez police department will be dismissed after failing confidence exams done by the Mexico federal Public Safety secretary’s office, Juárez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz said.

About 2,000 soldiers arrived in Juárez over the weekend and are expected to begin anti-crime patrols as part of Operation Juárez, the new name of Joint Operation Chihuahua, the local federal offensive against organized crime.

“It’s important that citizens know the Mexican army will be doing patrols throughout the city to stop the collateral crimes generated as a result of Joint Operation Chihuahua,” Reyes Ferriz said.

The city police department has offered the military 65 vehicles for the patrols.

The city has recruited about 900 new officers in recent months as authorities have been unable to stop a crime wave this year, including more than 900 homicides, more than 50 bank robberies, a jump in auto thefts and other crimes.

Officials said the confidence exams by federal authorities found that some Juárez officers had criminal histories in other states. Some had been fired from other agencies.

Other officers were found to have been bribed or had ties to organized crime.

Reyes Ferriz said that federal public safety officials made a registry of fingerprints, DNA samples, voice and iris scans of the officers tested to allow federal authorities to track their future activities.

How can this be? In a country, according to Dale “The Trucking Bozo” Sommers and his son Steve and of course Eric “Bubba Bo” Boulanger, that has no DATA BASES to track Mexican Truck Drivers and others? They are compiling a DATABASE of DNA Samples, Voice prints and iris scans, biometrics in other words? Kudos to the Mayor and Federal Officials for their ongoing efforts

Thanks in part to lax US gun laws, Drug cartels possess more firepower, technology

Mexican police fighting the drug cartels face an enemy that is better funded, better equipped and better armed.

The inequality was never more evident than earlier this year, when several unarmed Juárez police officers were fatally shot on their way home from work.

The off-duty officers had no weapons to defend themselves because they had to share handguns with other officers.

Their deaths are among an estimated 400 homicides in Juárez this year as drug-trafficking gangs battle for control of the region’s lucrative smuggling corridor.

Many of the deadly shootings were what some described as “Juárez-style,” in which cars are blocked off by pursuing vehicles and then strafed with gunfire from automatic weapons.

“Right now, the cartels have the money to access the technology and weapons,” said Robert Almonte, retired El Paso police deputy chief who oversaw the department’s narcotics unit and who is now executive director of the Texas Narcotics Officers Association.Bulletproof sport utility vehicles, grenades, caches of AK-47s assault rifles, body armor and high-powered .50-caliber rifles have been seized recently in stash-house raids by the Mexican army.

“The cartels, there is no doubt they have access to more money than Mexican law enforcement, especially the state and local agencies because they (drug traffickers) have more money and they can afford better equipment and better vehicles,” Almonte said.

“That’s what it’s all about, money,” Almonte said. “The Mexican cartels are a billion-dollar industry.”

An estimated $10 billion in drug money and weapons flows into Mexico from the United States each year, providing a treasure-trove for criminal organizations, Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, Mexico’s deputy federal attorney general for international affairs, said during a border security conference last month in Austin.

The display of wealth by the narcos can be garish. Residents in Villa Ahumada, about 70 miles south of Juárez, talk of the funeral in April of Gerardo Gallegos, who was to be buried with a gold-handled pistol and a cell phone.

Gallegos was a member of the Juárez drug cartel, Mexican military officials said. Paratroopers in helicopters and ground troops raided the funeral and arrested a Villa Ahumada police commander and seven other men as mourners scattered.

A few weeks ago, the Mexican army seized 23 communication antennas illegally installed on a mountain in Culiacan, Sinaloa — equipment suspected of being part of a sophisticated communications system used by drug traffickers and hit men.

For years, there have been whispers that a similar illicit communications system exists in Juárez.

U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officials have said that the drug-trafficking organizations have their weakest points along their systems of communication and shipments of cash profits from the U.S. into Mexico. It is a weakness investigators seek to exploit.

The Internet also plays a role in the current drug war, with the posting of online videos and forums to taunt rivals, the spreading of propaganda and, in some cases, the airing of allegations of corrupt police and government officials.

But the Web’s biggest impact was an anonymous e-mail that spread in the Juárez area warning people to avoid going out in Juárez because the May 24-25 weekend would be the “bloodiest and deadliest” in city history with executions and shootings in the streets.

The violence that weekend claimed 11 lives, including two police officers. It was comparable to other recent weekends, but the e-mail emptied streets of tourists and residents alike.

Juárez authorities are trying to get a grip on crime and return a sense of calm to residents.

More weapons, more vehicles and more police are on the way, Juárez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz said Friday as the city continues an aggressive campaign to lure recruits to the municipal police force.

“Juárez te necesita” (Juárez needs you), say recruitment billboards and ads with a close-up face of a police officer in a ski mask and helmet. Recruits must be in shape. No tattoos. No arrests. Must have a vocation to serve.

Juárez has a population approaching 2 million but has a police force of only about 1,600 members.

City officials said about 600 new officers are set to graduate from the next two academy classes. Police will also get 600 more firearms, including rifles, and 300 patrol vehicles.

“The reality is we require 1,500 additional officers than we have received but the preparation of these (new) officers is not instantaneous,” Reyes Ferriz said.

Threats follow discovery of decapitated bodies

Three headless bodies were found in the Valley of Juárez on Sunday and Monday while worries grew over a new Internet message demanding that prominent Juárez families and business leaders pay a “quota” to a drug cartel for protection.

The validity of the message was unknown. It was posted last week supposedly by “La Linea,” as the Juárez drug cartel is also known, on the popular video-sharing site YouTube.com, and shows scrolling text in Spanish set to a narco-corrido (folk song).

“You saw what happened to Wily Moya,” stated the message referring to the fatal shooting of a prominent nightclub owner May 18 as he left a bar he owned.

The video, posted on May 27, claims that entrepreneurs will pay protection or they will be kidnapped. ” … With us, you do not play (or) you’ll be found without a head. From La Linea,” the video read.

If the menace is true, it would mirror a “war tax” extorted from businesses leaders in Nuevo Laredo by the drug cartels to finance their war in recent years for that border city.

The YouTube message was the latest in a trend of threats left with bodies, threats against police and threats posted online allegedly by warring drug trafficking groups in Juárez associated with reputed Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera or La Linea.

On Sunday, an unidentified man was found in two plastic bags in the sand dunes near the community of El Sauzal. The body was in one bag, a severed head in the other, state investigators said.

Early Monday, the bodies of two unidentified men were found wrapped in blankets with their heads cut off also in El Sauzal. One head was in a black plastic bag. The second head was found three blocks away.

There were signs on two of the bodies stating, “This message is for those who keep believing and for those who don’t believe. Keep listening to El Chapo Guzman who only guarantees you death. … La Linea.”

The violence in Juárez, which has topped 400 homicides this year and has turned increasingly gruesome, was mentioned by Mexico President Felipe Calderón in a speech Sunday in recognition of the anniversary of the Mexican navy .

Calderón said his administration’s war against organized crime was just beginning and would intensify in Juárez and Culiacán, home of the Sinaloa cartel, in order to achieve the drop in crime seen in Acapulco and the states of Tamualipas and Michoacan.

“Criminal operations in the last decade have developed and diversified,” said Calderón in a transcript. “Who controls a plaza (a cartel’s territory) not only seeks trafficking but to generate a domestic consumer market that is destroying our children and with them our future.”

In other developments

• Mexican special forces soldiers seized a cache of firearms, more than a kilo of heroin and two bulletproof Jeep Grand Cherokees during a raid last week targeting a suspected cell of hit men in Juárez, federal officials said.

• Seven men were arrested during the 3 a.m. raid May 28 at a building used as a drug warehouse in the 6500 block of Donato Guerra. Soldiers with the 11th Special Forces Battalion seized a total of seven vehicles and 17 weapons, including five AK-47s and three AR-15 rifles.

The Truth behind the Narco Wars in Cd. Juarez

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.”

U.S. soldier to stand trial in Mexico importing firearms

U.S. Army Spc. Richard Medina Torres, 25, the Fort Hood soldier who drove into Mexico with two high-power firearms will be put on trial, federal authorities said in a statement released Saturday

Medina earlier was charged with smuggling weapons into Mexico, punishable by up to 30 years. The Saturday statement did not mention smuggling, which suggests a judge threw out that charge. Police could not be reached late Saturday for clarification.

José Alfredo Fierro, a lawyer in Chihuahua state where Ciudad Juárez is located, said a court generally would be more lenient if the firearms were legally purchased.

If Medina is convicted and given a minimum sentence, it might be suspended for being a first offense, Fierro said. A trial could take one to eight months, he said.

Now, having crossed into Cd Juarez from El Paso hundreds of times over the years, this guys story is a little flimsy. The roads are well marked, the public parking easily accessible before you are on the bridge, and once you are on the bridge, and you realize you made a mistake, a U-Turn will put you in line for the return to El Paso without ever crossing the International Boundary. Be that as it may;

My question of the day is this. Sgt Medina violated the very strict gun laws of a sovereign nation, Mexico, and when caught, was arrested, as is appropriate.

On the blogs and news websites, there is the beginning of an outcry for the release of this “Patriot” and “Hero” because, he made an “innocent mistake” and didn’t mean any harm by it.  Some even go so far as to demand closure of the border and sanctions against Mexico until this guy is released. They seem to forget that Sgt Medina BROKE THE LAWS of a sovereign nation.  He committed a very serious FELONY when he took the weapons into Mexico.

So what is the validity of the demands these right wing looney toons are making that Mexico release this US citizen who violated their laws, yet when Mexico demands equal rights and protection for one of it’s citizens in US custody, there is a similar outcry against Mexico meddling in US affairs?

Something is kinda screwy here, one would think!

Mexico and Canada have very strict gun control laws. Perhaps the US should consider similar laws considering the high number of gun related crimes. Certainly, the crimes are not committed by law abiding citizens, but the criminals are getting the weapons from someplace.  I see no reason why anyone should have the need for an AR-15 or similar weapon in their homes. I don’t think the founding fathers had that in mind when they established the Second Amendment to the US Constitution

U.S. soldier arrested in Mexico with several weapons in car

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.