MORELIA, Michoacán – The raging cartel violence that reignited this week with gun battles, executions, and arson has killed close to three dozen victims. Officials continue to reassure the public by claiming the dead are mostly criminals.
Category Archives: Mexican drug cartels
Mexico’s crime rate is so bad that scientists are avoiding observatories
MEXICO CITY — Astronomers have become the latest victims of Mexico’s violence, with activities at two observatories being reduced because their staff suffered crimes while traveling to the remote mountain sites, researchers said Thursday.
The problems occurred near the Alfonso Serrano Large Millimeter Telescope, or LMT, in the central Mexico state of Puebla. It is the world’s largest single-dish steerable millimeter-wavelength telescope and is jointly run by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Mexico’s national institute of astrophysics.
It’s time to designate the Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations
Imagine for a moment that groups of Islamic terrorists set up shop at our border, killed tens of thousands of Mexicans, mutilated bodies, controlled a flow of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants every year over our border, and flooded our country with drugs and gangs. These organizations, in our “hypothetical,” operate in over 40 countries, are flush with weapons, money, and military-style tactics, control operations inside our country, and bring in drugs like fentanyl and carfentanil that are essentially chemical weapons.
Try to picture the reaction of our government under that circumstance.
Border residents fear retaliation from cartels if they report crimes
Border residents in New Mexico say they are hesitant to report suspicious immigration activity to local and federal law enforcement because they fear the Mexican cartels moving drugs or people into the U.S. will retaliate against them.
Seven residents who live 30 to 50 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border told the Washington Examiner that picking up the phone to call for help if they have been burglarized or found someone sleeping in their barn can lead to nasty consequences.
VIDEO: Largest Fentanyl Drug Bust In History Made As Truck Tried Crossing The Southern Border
U.S. Customs and Border Patrol seized enough fentanyl to kill over 50 million people from a truck that was trying to cross the southern border into the United States, according to an investigation by “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
Mexico sets new murder record with more than 33,000 killed in 2018
With drug-related crimes and gang violence rife across Mexico, investigators opened 33,341 murder probes in 2018, setting a new record, according to the latest data published by the nation’s authorities. Men make up the overwhelming majority of the victims, with 861 women losing their lives last year.
The number of murders logged in 2018 is also the biggest since the national records began in 1997.
The data showed a total increase of some 15.5 percent compared to all murders in 2017. Mexico logged 28,866 murders in 2017, far outpacing the much larger US where the FBI noted 17,284 instances of “murder and non-negligent manslaughter” during the same time.
Mexico’s population is about 130 million, compared to the US population of about 326 million.
Mexican ‘sicario’ hitmen film themselves gunning down 4 cops
A pair of videos has emerged online which appear to show Mexican hitmen ambushing and killing four police officers.
In the video, apparently made by the assailants, at least seven armed men wait in the forest before opening fire with automatic weapons on a Mexico state police SUV, according to El Universal.
Mexican prosecutors find 166 skulls in mass graves
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Investigators said Thursday they have found 166 skulls in clandestine burial pits in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz, one of the biggest mass graves discovered so far in Mexico.
Veracruz state prosecutor Jorge Winckler said that for security reasons he would not reveal the location of the site.
Mexican drug cartels frequently use clandestine pits to dispose of their victims.
Winckler said the bodies were buried at least two years ago and did not rule out finding more remains. He said investigators had found 114 ID cards in the field, which held about 32 burial pits.
Our free trade partner.
Mexico’s failing war on drugs: after 200,000 dead, Amlo pledges to end the violence
…Some are stashed in bin bags or hammocks; others in blood-soaked rucksacks. Some are dumped in bike lanes or canals; others left on street corners or football pitches – severed, shredded and stomach-churning symbols of the country’s failing war on drugs.
“Sometimes we don’t even know who they are,” admitted Arturo Bautista, the silver-haired administrator of Tecomán’s cemetery and the final custodian of the victims of this Pacific beach town’s relentless killing machine.
Not With A Bang, But With A Whimper – Mexican Governmental and Social Control Continues To Erode
Coca-Cola Plant Shuts Down Indefinitely After 40 years in Altamira, Guerrero
Translated by Yaqui for Borderland Beat from: Universal
March 25, 2018 Chilpancingo, Guerrero
The soft drink bottler Coca-Cola FEMSA (KOF) announced the indefinite closure of its operations in Ciudad Altamirano, in the Tierra Caliente region of Guerrero, due to the fact that it has registered two months of harassment by criminal groups against its bottling plant in the absence of a rule of law in the area.
Early yesterday, ie the early morning hours of Friday March 23, an armed group tried to launch Molotov cocktails and shoot at the company, which has been operating in the area for 40 years. The attack, according to official sources, was staved off by agents of the Estatales or the State Police, and the only thing they criminals managed to hit was a truck in the main access.The spokesman of Grupo Coordinación Guerrero (GCG), Roberto Álvarez Heredia, reported that around 3 AM, about 20 men tried to break into the bottling facility. With a truck they rammed the security gate and at that moment the agents arrived and a confrontation began.
Although in the brawl there were no injuries, the agents detained an aggressor, in addition they confiscated Molotov weapons and bombs. The other attackers fled and abandoned a pick-up truck.
At noon on Friday March 23 Coca-Cola FEMSA announced the closure of the plant in Altamirano:
“With the fundamental objective of preserving the integrity and safety of its employees, Coca-Cola FEMSA decided to close its operations indefinitely, starting immediately on Friday March 23 in Altamirano City, Guerrero.
The measure was taken for the safety of more than 160 employees who work in the distribution center, ” the company said in a statement.
All 160 employees just became unemployed indefinitely.
Mexi-Mouth.Con
Just another day in Mexico.
Vincente Fox fumes at Trump but ignores Mexican government violence.
After the 2016 election, former Mexican president Vincente Fox posted a video with a sign reading “Mexico will not pay for the f—– wall.” Last October, Fox said “Donald, you suck so much at this job” and compared the president to a “worn-out baseball glove gripping a turd.” After the recent Florida high-school shooting Fox ramped up the rhetoric on HBO’s “Real Time” with Bill Maher.
“When you speak out of the White House this aggressive, violent language, when you discriminate, when you’re a racist, that’s what you get,” said Fox. “We need harmony, we need love, we need happy communities, and those concepts don’t come out of his mouth.”
DEA: $1M in pot smuggled into U.S. via Mexican-made Ford Fusions
The cars were manufactured at a Ford plant in Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico, and then were shipped to a dealership in Ohio, where the marijuana was found, DEA agent Silverio Balzano said.
Officials believe drug smugglers made some kind of mix-up to allow large quantities of marijuana to get lost. Approximately 32 pounds of marijuana was found in 15 Ford Fusions, officials said.
Mexico’s avocado army: how one city stood up to the drug cartels
Javier is finally starting to feel safe. A gruff 46-year-old avocado grower with a laugh like an idling Harley Davidson, Javier still remembers the gruesome reports of cartel gunmen kidnapping and killing a neighbour’s daughter, torching a local avocado packaging facility and murdering a pregnant schoolteacher. But the memories are starting to fade.
Tancitaro, the world capital of avocado production, has finally achieved a semblance of stability. It has been over two years since the last pitched battles between vigilante fighters and cartel gunmen on the outskirts. Families whose orchards were seized by cartel gunmen are now running their farms again. “The government doesn’t rule here. But it’s under control. You can relax,” he says.
Mexican Drug Cartel Operating in U.S. Suburb More than 1,500 Miles from Border
Illustrating that the Mexican drug crisis is having a far-reaching impact on the U.S., a heroin ring operated by a Mexican cartel was recently busted in an American suburb more than 1,500 miles from the southern border. In the last few years Judicial Watch has reported extensively on the massive amounts of drugs—especially heroin—that get smuggled into the U.S. by Mexican traffickers who later use street, prison and outlaw motorcycle gangs to distribute them throughout the country. Undoubtedly, these enterprises benefitted tremendously from the Obama administration’s open border policies.
Now we have confirmation that these illicit drug operations have penetrated areas far from the border.
Shootout at U.S. Consulate in Nuevo Laredo Part of Cartel-Terrorist Attack Plan for Trump Inauguration
A deadly shootout at the construction site of the new American Consulate occurred this week in a Mexican border town where Islamic terrorists and drug cartels plan to launch attacks against the U.S. during the period surrounding the presidential inauguration, high-level government sources tell Judicial Watch. An unknown number of gunmen fired multiple rounds adjacent to the new U.S. Consulate compound in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, a crime-infested city in the state of Tamaulipas that lies directly across from Laredo, Texas.
The Mexican military responded to the attack, law enforcement sources on both sides of the border confirm insisting that their identities be kept confidential for security reasons, and at least three soldiers were either killed or critically wounded in the ambush. A local newspaper in Tamaulipas reported that 13 people died during a shootout in Nuevo Laredo, referring to the deceased as heavily armed “delinquents” with an arsenal that includes 12 automatic weapons, a rocket launcher, grenade, loads of ammunition and drugs in three vehicles, one of them armored. The deceased have not been identified and Mexican authorities will continue to investigate, the article states, attributing the information to a press release issued by Mexico’s Defense Secretary.