Mexico Trucker Online

MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s top security official blamed organized crime for the brazen killing of an acting federal police chief, saying today his death shows a nationwide crackdown is hurting gangs.

Public Safety Secretary General Garcia Luna said authorities would not be deterred by an onslaught of attacks against police as he presided over the funeral of Edgar Gomez Millan and two other federal officers killed this week.

Millan, 41, was shot 10 times early Thursday by gunmen who waited for him inside the courtyard of his Mexico City apartment complex. His two bodyguards were wounded.

The two other officers were killed Wednesday in a shootout with suspected drug traffickers in southern Morelos state.

The “attacks by organized crime against federal police in the last few days are in response to their interests being affected,” Garcia Luna said as he stood near the three coffins guarded by heavily armed agents wearing bulletproof vests. “But we will not be intimidated.”

President Felipe Calderon attended the funeral, hugging Millan’s sobbing wife and handing her a folded Mexican flag. He did not speak publicly.

Millan was responsible for coordinating operations — many of them targeting drugs — between federal police and the army. He was named acting chief March 1 after his superior was promoted to a deputy Cabinet position.

On May 1, he announced the arrest of 12 suspected hit men tied to the Sinaloa cartel.

Hours later, a federal intelligence analyst was killed in Mexico City by assailants who tried to steal his car, and a federal commander was gunned down the next day.

Police would not comment on whether the Sinaloa cartel was behind Millan’s killing, but said they were investigating possible drug links. Police were interrogating two suspects, including one of the alleged gunmen.

Since taking office in 2006, Calderon has sent more than 25,000 troops to drug hotspots. Cartels have responded with unprecedented violence, beheading police and killing soldiers. Drug-related violence killed more than 2,500 people last year alone.

In Washington, Thomas Shannon, the U.S. assistant secretary for Western Hemisphere affairs, urged Congress to approve the Merida Initiative, a US$1.4 billion (euro0.91 billion) proposal to help fight drug crime in Mexico and Central America. The administration of U.S. President George W. Bush wants Congress to approve US$550 million (euro355 million) of the package, the majority of which would go to Mexico.

“Central America and Mexico are facing public security threats of tremendous proportions,” Shannon told the House Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere. “The leaders of the region have shown that they are committed to working together to put an end to the growing violence and crime, but their resources are limited.”

Eleven alleged hit men for a powerful drug cartel were captured Tuesday at two Mexico City mansions stocked with grenades and automatic weapons — a day after Mexican authorities reported nabbing one of the cartel’s reputed leaders.Police said it was the first time they have found a safe house linked to the cartel in the capital city.

“Yes, the cartel is operating here in Mexico City,” said Edgar Millan, top commander of Mexico’s national federal police, at a news conference following pre-dawn raids on two houses in southern Mexico City. Eight men were arrested in one raid and three in the other.

Millan said the men, whose identities were not released, were part of three cartel “commando” groups that may have been preparing attacks in response to a federal crackdown on drug trafficking.

The suspects were lined up in the homes’ spacious living rooms and presented to reporters alongside caches of seized weapons, including 20 fragmentation grenades, automatic weapons, rifles, and materials presumably intended for constructing a drug lab.

Police also found 40 bulletproof vests, eight of which bore the initials FEDA, which Millan said was likely a Spanish acronym for “Arturo’s Special Forces.” Authorities also found an unspecified amount of cash in one of the homes.

Arturo Beltran Leyva is one of five brothers believed to be top lieutenants of the Sinaloa drug cartel, based in the northwestern Mexican state of the same name. A second brother, Alfredo Beltran Leyva, was arrested early Monday in the Sinaloa capital of Culiacan with two suitcases containing $900,000, an assault rifle, a luxury SUV and 11 expensive watches, the army said.

The U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Tony Garza, praised Monday’s arrest as “a significant victory.”

Army Gen. Luis Arturo Oliver Cen said the arrested Beltran Leyva commanded two groups of hit men for the cartel, whose reach extends from the northwestern state of Sonora to the southern state of Oaxaca. He was allegedly in charge of transporting drugs, bribing officials and laundering money for the cartel, which is led by Mexico’s most-wanted drug lord, Joaquin Guzman.

Guzman escaped from federal prison in 2001 in a laundry cart after bribing guards.

Alfredo Beltran Leyva’s arrest follows two weeks of bloody confrontations along the U.S.-Mexico border between federal agents and gunmen suspected of working for the Arellano Felix and Gulf cartels, rivals of the Sinaloa.

Soldiers also randomly stopped cars in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas, in search of assailants who shot and wounded a state police chief on Monday night. The attack came the day after a Juarez police captain was shot to death in his patrol car.

Also Monday, gunmen firing from a car shot and killed Judge Ernesto Palacios in a suburb of the northern Mexican city of Monterrey, police said. He had been overseeing the trial of two alleged hit men arrested in 2005.

Blessed with charm and good looks, Sandra Avila Beltran is enthralling Mexico. Not as a beauty queen, but as an alleged drug lord, and the story of her arrest and possible extradition to the U.S. is being followed more closely than a telenovela.Police say the raven-haired 46-year-old spent more than a decade working her way to the top echelons of Mexico’s male-dominated drug trade, uniting Colombian and Mexican gangs, and seducing several notorious kingpins.

Dubbed the “Queen of the Pacific,” she even has her own song — a “narcocorrido” folk ballad about drug traffickers by Los Tucanes de Tijuana that pays homage to her as “a top lady who is a key part of the business.”

Read the rest of this entry »