Mexico Trucker Online

Starr County commissioners this morning, accepted the resignation submitted by Starr County Texas Sheriff Reymundo Guerra over the weekend

County Judge Eloy Vera said said the sheriff’s office would for now be under the command of Chief Deputy Rene Fuentes, who is next in the chain of command.

Since Guerra was running unopposed in the Nov. 4 election, he effectively starts a new term as sheriff in January, Vera said. It is not yet known whether he plans to withdraw his candidacy.

“At that time the topic will come up again,” Vera said.

U.S. Magistrate Dorina Ramos had expressed concerns during a detention hearing last week that Guerra might return to his post as sheriff while free on bond.

Reymundo Guerra’s resignation as Starr County sheriff didn’t convince Judge Ramos to set bail for the former lawman,

Defense attorney Philip Hilder said Guerra would appeal today’s denial of bond. Unless overturned by a district court, Ramos’ decision means Guerra will remain behind bars pending trial in early December.

HUATULCO, Mexico — Mexico’s navy seized a homemade submarine carrying a drug shipment off the Pacific Coast on Wednesday and arrested its four-man crew.

Similar vessels carrying cocaine have been discovered off Colombia and Central America, but navy spokesman Capt. Benjamin Mar said the seizure is a first for Mexico.

The 30-foot (10-meter) makeshift submarine was detected heading north about 200 miles (322 kilometers) off the southern state of Oaxaca, Mar said.

The green-topped, arrowhead-shaped vessel was intercepted when it surfaced hours later, and the crew was taken into custody without resistance.

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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.

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.

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.

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.”