Mayor Santos Salinas Garza said that all 14 officers of the town's police department resigned the day after the late October attack in which grenades were thrown at the brand-new police station and the town's police cars were raked with machine gun fire. There were no fatalities in the nighttime attack and the officers were able to create an improvised blockade from the town's police cars.
The mayor said that the department hadn't received any specific threats but had noticed luxury SUV's with tinted windows in the days prior to the assault. The Los Ramones station had been open all of three days at the time of the attack. President Calderon is reportedly considering relieving most of Mexico's poorly trained, undermanned and outgunned municipal police departments of their duties and handing over the patrolling to state or federal agencies.
JALISCO: The director of the maximum security Puente Grande prison outside of Guadalajara has been arrested for suspected ties to organized crime.
Officials from Mexico's Federal Public Safety Department did not elaborate on the charges against Francisco Javier Gomez Meza. But an unnamed official said that Gomez came under investigation in 2008 while a part of the now-defunct Federal Investigative Agency during a sweeping corruption probe that led to the arrest of several top officials believed to be protecting members of the Beltran-Leyva cartel. Prior to that, Gomez was responsible for prison transfers of suspects and would oversee the deployment of officers throughout Mexico.
It is unclear why exactly Gomez was named to such a high profile position as the director of Puente Grande earlier this year while he was under investigation.
TAMAULIPAS: Mexican Marines killed one of the top-ranking members of the Gulf Cartel in an hours-long shootout in the border city of Matamoros on Friday night.
Antonio Ezequiel Cardena Guillen, aka Tony Tormenta (Tony the Storm) and four of his bodyguards were killed along with three Mexican Marines and a local reporter in the city just across the river from Brownsville, TX. The US State Department had taken out a US$5 Million bounty on Cardena after he took over Cartel operations from his brother Osiel, who was arrested in 2003.
Putting a 21st century twist on Mexico's age-old problems with entrenched corruption and influential criminal organizations was messages from residents of Matamoros circulating via Facebook and Twitter warning residents of cartel members using vehicles to block off streets and warning others to remain inside while the prolonged gunbattle between cartel gunmen and Mexican soldiers and Marines raged. A shaky video of a convoy of Marines in the back of pickup trucks and SUV's believed to those of Gulf cartel gunment speeding through the streets of Matamoros with gunfire in the background were circulating on YouTube.
Los Zetas- a group of narco-traffickers and enforcers with police and military training that formerly worked with the Gulf Cartel- hung up banners taunting the remaining members of the Gulf Cartel from pedestrian overpasses in the city. One such banner read "Again, the traitor's destiny is evident. There is no place for them, not even in hell".
While this is good news for Mexico's President Calderon and that country's armed forces, it's increasingly likely that the Los Zetas will attempt to move in and take advantage of their former employer's weakened state.
CALIFORNIA: Authorities in San Diego have unearthed a massive cross-border tunnel that connected a warehouse on the Tijuana side of the border with another warehouse some 600 yards north in the Otay Mesa section of San Diego.
Suspicious DEA agents kept the warehouse on the US side of the border under surveillance and tracked a vehicle from the warehouse, searching it as the tractor trailer approached a US Border Patrol checkpoint in Temecula, CA some 75 miles northeast. There, agents seized an estimated 10 tons of marijuana packed into cargo boxes.
Police, DEA and Border Patrol agents raided the Otay Mesa warehouse where another 15 tons of marijuana was found, as well as the entrance to the tunnel. Police on the Mexican side were alerter, where they seized another 4 tons of pot. The tunnel was described as being recently built and sophisticated, coming equipped with lighting and ventilation systems.
ARIZONA: The discovery of a decapitated body in the Phoenix suburb of Chandler, AZ has renewed concerns that violence from Mexico's narcoinurgency could be spilling over into the USA.
Martin Alejandro Cota-Monroy's body was found stabbed to death and with his severed head a few feet away in his suburban apartment back on October 10. Decapitation is a common tactic cartels employ to threaten or intimidate, with headless bodies being strung up from busy overpasses or severed heads being left in duffel bags in public places.
Both Cota-Monroy and the three men alleged to be involved in the brutal slaying are believed to have been in the country illegally. One suspect is in custody while three others are believed to have fled back to Mexico.
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