Tagged: Mexican drug cartels

Carnage and corruption: upstart Mexican cartel’s path to top

By Dave Graham

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – In barely four years, a little-known criminal gang has grown to challenge the world’s most notorious drug lord, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, for domination of the Mexican underworld, unleashing a new tide of violence.

Once minions of Guzman’s Sinaloa Cartel, traffickers of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) have turned on their former masters, seizing territory and buying off thousands of corrupt police.

Led by former policeman Nemesio Oseguera, aka “El Mencho”, the gang soon carved out an empire at the expense of weaker rivals.

The speed of its ascent shows how quickly power can shift in Mexico’s multi-billion-dollar drugs trade.

Juggling interests from China to North Africa and eastern Europe, the CJNG’s bloody advance has pushed murders to their highest levels under President Enrique Pena Nieto, who vowed to restore law and order when he took office in late 2012.

All but four in a 2009 list of Mexico’s 37 most wanted capos are now dead or in jail, and Pena Nieto did initially succeed in reducing violence.

But a resurgence that led to 3,800 murders between July and August highlights the government’s failure to beat down cartels without new ones springing up in their place.

Pena Nieto recently sought to allay security concerns by announcing a plan to step up crime prevention in the worst-hit areas. He did not set out the details of his plan, but urged states to speed up efforts to put local police under unified statewide command.

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Trump declares war: Mexican cartel assets to pay for border wall

(BREITBART) — The resources of Mexican transnational criminal organizations, also known as cartels, will be seized and used to fund Donald Trump’s border wall if he wins the 2016 presidential election. The wall, which several previously high-trafficked areas of the U.S.-Mexico border already have–whether an actual wall or a several tiered fencing and integrated technological system–has been a controversial issue to pundits and politicians who lack information on the subject.

Trump’s idea to force the cartels to pay will likely manifest in the form of seizing their assets. It is likely that the U.S. State Department’s diplomatic shackles placed upon the FBI will be removed, as it is common knowledge that the State Department pressures the FBI to balance their law enforcement priorities with diplomatic concerns–a restriction that makes it difficult to properly address Mexican cartels when many of the elected leaders in Mexico are actually surrogates for those very cartels, as Breitbart Texas has reported ad nauseam.

Trump’s plan, as stated as early as March 2016, never included a wall on all 1,954 miles of land border. Trump committed to give the actual Border Patrol agents who patrol each of the nine sectors on the southwest border a seat at the policy table and to listen to where a wall is needed and where one is unneeded–a fact most pundits and journalists seemingly missed as they mistakenly discuss his allegedly changing positions on the matter.

The news first broke on Lifezette; however, the focus on cartels was downplayed in their coverage as an idea that is being “mulled over.” Trump’s campaign is now led by Stephen Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News who stepped down temporarily to run the campaign. Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles project began under Bannon’s leadership and the issue is dear to his heart. The project allows clandestine citizen journalists in several Mexican states that are under direct control from Los Zetas and the Gulf Cartel to have a platform to expose the evils of the transnational criminal groups and has a stated goal of warring with the criminals and exposing them for the purpose of ending them.

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Preface by Chuck Bowden

This book could function as an owner’s manual for the Mexican drug cartels. Here we find the first good description of the plaza — that arrangement where the Mexican government seeks a partner to supervise all criminal activity in a city. And 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 Colombia 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 dollars for a copy of Drug Lord in a used bookstore in El Paso and being damned happy to get my hands on it.

Terrence Poppa was a reporter for the El Paso Herald-Post. In the eighties, he captured the rise and fall of Pablo Acosta in Ojinaga, the border town across from Presidio, Texas. By that act, he 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 written off by their own country as ill-educated bumkins were creative and were turning power on its head in the nation. Acosta’s slaughter by Mexican comandante Guillermo Gonzalez Calderoni, with the help of the FBI, ended this kind of access. Since then, becoming famous and talking to the press — which Acosta did — 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. Read more »