Tagged: Ciudad Juarez

About Drug Lord, the Life and Death of a Mexican Kingpin

Pablo Acosta posed for the author in front of the shot up Ford Bronco he was in when ambushed by a rival drug trafficker.

CHARLES BOWDEN, AUTHOR OF Down By the River, Juarez, the Laboratory of Our Future, and numerous other great books, has this to say about Drug Lord in his Preface to the 3rd edition:

“This book could function as an owner’s manual for the Mexican drug cartels. Here is found the first good description of the plaza, that arrangement where the Mexican government seeks a partner to supervise all criminal activity in a city. How to maintain discipline by killing everyone connected to a lost load lest a traitor survive. And also the history of the shift of power from Columbia to Mexico, when American efforts hampered the pathways in Florida and made Mexico the trampoline for cocaine shipments into the U.S. markets. I remember in the mid-nineties paying fifty bucks for a copy in a used bookstore in El Paso and being damned happy to get my hands on it.

Terence Poppa was a reporter for the El Paso Herald who in the eighties captured the rise and fall of Pablo Acosta in Ojinaga, the border town across from Presidio, Texas, and by that act wrote the history of the key moment when flights of cocaine from Columbia entered the Mexican economy. He interviewed the players, got down their life histories and made the indelible point that the people their own country wrote off as ill-educated bumpkins were creative and were turning power on in its head in the nation. Acosta’s slaughter by Mexican comandante Guillermo Calderoni with the help of the FBI ended this kind of access. Since then becoming famous and talking to the press has been seen as a fatal decision. And since then the Mexican drug industry has become a source of thirty to fifty billion dollars of foreign currency a year for the Mexican economy—second only to oil and now the oil fields of Mexico are collapsing.

His book has to be ignored by those who run countries and work for agencies. While they sketch monoliths they call cartels, Poppa actually describes in detail a world of shifting alliances, small pods of operators knitted together, and billions of dollars sloshing around in dusty towns and cities. He is the historian of the actual fabric of life as opposed to being the mouthpiece for government rhetoric.

If you wish to be as ignorant and dishonest as your public officials when they mouth the pieties of the War on Drugs, then avoid this book at all costs. But if you want to know how it works and why it works and why it will keep on working, read this book.

Besides, it is an adventure story as the working poor of Mexico claw their way to a new golden hell. Since it was published, only the names have changed. This is the story behind the lies of the headlines. The business goes on, the slaughtered dead pile up, the U.S. agencies continue to ratchet up their budgets, the prisons grow larger and all the real rules of the game are in this book, some kind of masterpiece.

And it’s a damn good read, too.

Get this classic book about Pablo Acosta from amazon.com

Get this classic book about Pablo Acosta from :Amazon.com

WITH THIS WEBSITE, we are offering you a preview of this world. Herein are photos taken by the author of Acosta only six months before the drug lord’s dramatic death in an adobe village at the edge of the Rio Grande. You will learn about the early career of Amado Carrillo Fuentes, Acosta’s partner in crime who later became the founder of the Juarez drug cartel and one of the most powerful drug traffickers ever to emerge in Mexico.

As an added feature, the website will also post breaking news about the border, Mexico, and the growing chaos along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Drug Lord is a must-read book for anyone concerned about Mexico’s escalating drug violence, massive human smuggling, and what it means for the United States and for all of North America.

SOME REVIEWS:

“Mr. Poppa has crafted an eerily even-handed history of Mr. Acosta’s rise and fall. The result is a believable, roach-eye view of a gloomy business that has worked as much havoc on American culture as the Vietnam War.”—The Dallas Morning News

“The author has more to offer than a sensational story of a brutal border jefe. He weaves into it a broad view of the border milieu, traces the roots of the smuggling trade, and outlines the succession of Ojinaga drug lords who preceded Acosta.”—Texas Monthly

“Mr. Poppa is a first-rate journalist who has painstakingly cross-checked the testimony of convicted dealers, drug agents, and police to document the rise and fall of one of the most notorious drug lords, Pablo Acosta.”—The Wall Street Journal.

“Poppa is a gifted storyteller who has a clear-eye for detail. He found the reality of drug smuggling along the border and tells us what he found.”—Albuquerque Journal

Drug Lord is one of the few stories about double-dealing, murder, and endemic Mexican government corruption ever told from inside a drug ring, and is a must for anyone who wants to understand how drug rings really operate.”—Penthouse Magazine

Introduction by the author

This book came about because of the kidnapping of an American newspaper photographer by a Juarez drug trafficker, a brutal and unprecedented event that caused an international scandal and brought about the downfall of one of the major drug traffickers of the time.

Until the kidnapping, I didn’t have much interest in the subject of drugs. Drug trafficking was part of the background noise of the El Paso-Juarez region where I worked as a reporter. It was low keyed even in its violence; it did not draw too much attention to itself. My journalistic work, which had begun for the El Paso Herald-Post in 1984, focused primarily on reporting on a political movement in northern Mexico that was challenging the entrenched one-party system that had ruled Mexico since 1929. Juarez, the largest city in the state of Chihuahua, was the scene of what today would be called a “color” revolution — a democratic movement that used tactics of non-violent resistance to achieve its goals. Such a revolution was unfolding only ten blocks south of the newspaper, just on the other side of the Rio Grande. Read more »

Juárez among most dangerous cities in the world

(CURRENT-ARGUS) — Juárez is once again one of the most dangerous cities in the world, according to a group that releases annual rankings.

The Citizens Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice, a Mexican think tank, has ranked Juárez 37th out of the 50 most violent cities worldwide with a population of more than 300,000. The ranking comes after Juárez had fallen off the list last year.

Juárez was among eight Mexican cities on the list, which included Acapulco in the No. 2 spot. The most violent city in the world was Caracas, Venezuela. Four U.S. cities also made the list, including St. Louis, Mo., Baltimore, Md., New Orleans, La., and Detroit, Mich. They ranked 14, 26, 34 and 36, respectively.

Juárez’s return to the undesirable list — as well as that of Chihuahua City and Mazatlán, which fell off the list in 2015 and 2012, respectively — is evidence on how violence has picked up in Mexico and attempts to contain it have utterly failed, said José Antonio Ortega Sánchez, president of the Citizens Council for Public Safety and Criminal Justice.

The rankings are based on homicides for 2016 and don’t include deaths in combat zones or cities with unavailable data.

[READ MORE]

Murdered Mexican journalist exposed cartel-government connection

(BREITBART) — by Ildefonso Ortiz

The murder of a respected journalist in the Mexican state of Chihuahua appears to be driven by her work exposing the close ties between government officials and the Juarez Cartel. One of those investigations pointed to the mother-in-law of a cartel boss trying to run for mayor, while others looked into how the former governor of that state protected certain criminal organizations.

Over the weekend, journalists held protests in Mexico City, Torreón, and Monterrey; calling for a stop to the impunity that surrounds the murder of their colleagues. The protests come after cartel gunmen shot Miroslava Breach moments after she dropped her children off at school. As Breitbart Texas reported, the gunmen left a poster board signed by a Juarez Cartel boss that said Breach had been murdered for being a “Lenguona” or loudmouth.

While Breach’s murder has received minimal attention from international media, journalists in Mexico that spoke with Breitbart Texas revealed that they are deeply concerned by the ongoing wave of violence targeting them. As Breitbart Texas has reported, Breach’s murder is the third of its kind this year. In recent years, various freedom of the press organizations such as Reporters Without Borders and Article 19 have labeled Mexico as one of the most dangerous places to work in.

Breitbart Texas spoke with representatives of the Network of Journalists in Mexico’s Northeast who expressed their concern and anger at the impunity with which journalism continues to be silenced in Mexico. The organization continues to call on the Mexican government to investigate and punish not only the triggermen, but also those who ordered the various murders.

New information published by Breach’s employer, La Jornada, revealed that her investigation exposed how Juarez Cartel boss Carlos Arturo “El 80” Quintana had tried to get his mother-in-law Silvia Mariscal Estrada to be elected as the mayor of Bachiniva, Chihuahua. Quintana is listed as a wanted fugitive by the U.S. Department of Justice after being named in a federal indictment accusing him of various drug trafficking and drug smuggling charges in connection with the Juarez Cartel.

The move had the blessing of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and would have likely been successful had it not been for Breach and some of her close colleagues who exposed the cartel ties. At the time of the publication of that investigation, Chihuahua was run by former Governor Cesar Duarte Jaquez, a member of the PRI that left the state under a perceived cloud of corruption and narco-collusion. Breach and other journalists had been working to expose the dealings of Duarte and his close allies.

[READ MORE]

About Drug Lord, the Life and Death of a Mexican Kingpin

Pablo Acosta posed for the author in front of the shot up Ford Bronco he was in when ambushed by a rival drug trafficker.

Donald Trump wants to build a wall between the United States and Mexico, and he vowed to do so if he became president of the United States. The wall, he argued, will stop the flow of drugs into the country as well as impede the illegal entry of people across the border. Whether Trump is right or wrong about the need for a wall is a matter of fierce debate that will only grow in intensity now that he is president.

What cannot be disputed, however, is that there is a huge volume of drugs coming across the border, no different than in the past. There is also a greater influx of people coming now from all parts of the world than ever before. Who are these people? What is their motive for entering the United States?

Another matter than is beyond dispute is that smuggling activities related to drugs and people are controlled by organized crime groups, and to some extent organized crime is controlled by agencies of the government of Mexico. Read more »

What the DEA had to say about Pablo Acosta

The following are highlights from a DEA report entitled The Pablo Acosta Organization, a report based primarily on investigations carried out by U.S. Customs Service agents in the Presidio, Texas, area:

There has been a continuous increase in the trafficking of Mexican heroin, cocaine, and marijuana into the United States from Mexico over the last few years. Many fields of opium poppies were found and destroyed in Coahuila and Chihuahua in 1984. However, the production of opium is expected to rise in 1985. Mexican opium is converted directly into heroin in Mexico and is usually smuggled across the southern border.

There has also been a noticeable increase in the smuggling of cocaine through Mexico, with significant quantities of cocaine produced in South America crossing the southwest border, and although the largest worldwide marijuana seizure to date occurred in the state of Chihuahua in November 1984, it is believed that there are major quantities still available. The amount of marijuana seized along the U.S.-Mexico border has more than tripled in the last year. Recent seizures of very high-grade marijuana tops suggests the existence of very large stockpiles still in Mexico. Read more »