Borderline Psychosis Complete W/ Alligator Filled Moats- Ranch Hands Massacred in Guatemala; Gulf Cartel Underboss Arrested; Cartel's AZ 'Expressway'

TEXAS: I find it noteworthy that while President Obama was telling us on how secure America's southern borders are between one-liners during a campaign stop in El Paso earlier this month, the brass casings were still hot from a bloody shootout between the Mexican Marines and drug traffickers in which 13 were killed (most of them suspected Zetas) on an island in a lake straddling the USA/Mexico border.

The Mexican naval secretariat confirmed the shootout at a Zeta encampment on an island on the reservoir used by the Zetas to stage marijuana loads to be transported by boat into the United States. The island is located less than two miles northeast of Nueva Ciudad Guerrero, Tamps., across the border from Falcon Dam.

The bloody fight ensued on Mother’s Day when marines were patrolling the area in boats when they found the camp, officials said in a statement released Monday.

Upon seeing the marines, Zeta gunmen opened fire. A dozen cartel members were killed in the battle. One marine died, as well.

Officials noted no arrests after the shootout, but said they seized 19 firearms, including a Barrett .50-caliber sniper rifle and a 5.56 mm machine gun. Marines also seized gun magazines, ammunition, protective vests and other field equipment that was transferred to Reynosa.

Zapata County Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez said he learned of the deadly shootout when member of the local media contacted him late Monday morning. Had Mexican officials alerted their U.S. counterparts to the shootout, Gonzalez’s deputies would have been able “to react accordingly,”

The shootout capped a busy week along the northern Tamaulipas border for Mexican marines, who killed two suspected cartel gunmen Saturday afternoon in Valle Hermoso, about 25 miles south of Brownsville. Marines also seized weapons and a vehicle Thursday in Matamoros, and rescued a kidnap victim Wednesday in Camargo, across the border from Rio Grande City.

ELSEWHERE IN TEXAS: Border Patrol agents in rural Starr County found nearly 3000 pounds of marijuana in a van with Dish Network markings that they stopped and searched.

U.S. Border Patrol agents reported tha the seizure happened in the rural Starr County community of La Casita on Wednesday, April 20th.

Court records were not immediately available but Border Patrol agents reportedly spotted a Dish Network van exiting a brushy area near the Rio Grande River.

Working on a tip that are drug smugglers are now using counterfeit vehicles from well-known companies as a cover, Border Patrol stopped the van.

Border Patrol agents reported immediately noticing a strong odor of marijuana.

Investigators looked inside and found 100 bundles with close to 3,000 pounds of marijuana worth $2.3 million dollars inside.

Vehicles with counterfeit commercial markings have become increasingly popular with smugglers over the past few years, leading to the occasional moments of hilarity such as this:

In another case, a truck painted with DirecTV and other markings was pulled over in a routine traffic stop in Mississippi and discovered to be carrying 786 pounds of cocaine.

Police said they became suspicious because the truck carried the markings of DirecTV and several of its rivals. An 800 number on the truck's rear to report bad driving referred callers to an adult sex chat line.

Of course, there are concerns that more competently 'cloned' vehicles with EMS, fire or law enforcement markings could be used by smugglers to evade scrutiny from police and the Border Patrol or terrorists to gain access to otherwise secure areas.

CALIFORNIA: A former US Intelligence agent told An ABC affiliate in San Diego that the Shi'a Muslim terrorist group Hezbollah is setting up shop across the border in Mexico.

The former agent, referring to Shi'a Muslim terrorist group Hezbollah, added, "They certainly have had successes in big-ticket bombings."

Some of the group's bombings include the U.S. embassy in Beirut and Israeli embassy in Argentina.

However, the group is now active much closer to San Diego.

"We are looking at 15 or 20 years that Hezbollah has been setting up shop in Mexico," the agent told 10News.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, U.S. policy has focused on al-Qaida and its offshoots.

"They are more shooters than thinkers … it's a lot of muscles, courage, desire but not a lot of training," the agent said, referring to al-Qaida.

Hezbollah, he said, is far more advanced.

"Their operators are far more skilled … they are the equals of Russians, Chinese or Cubans," he said. "I consider Hezbollah much more dangerous in that sense because of strategic thinking; they think more long-term."

Hezbolah has operated in South America for decades and then Central America, along with their sometime rival, sometime ally Hamas.

Now, the group is blending into Shi'a Muslim communities in Mexico, including Tijuana. Other pockets along the U.S.-Mexico border region remain largely unidentified as U.S. intelligence agencies are focused on the drug trade.

"They have had clandestine training in how to live in foreign hostile territories," the agent said.

The agent, who has spent years deep undercover in Mexico, said Hezbollah is partnering with drug organizations, but which ones is not clear at this time.

He told 10News the group receives cartel cash and protection in exchange for Hezbollah expertise.

"From money laundering to firearms training and explosives training," the agent said.

For example, he tracked, along with Mexican intelligence, two Hezbollah operatives in safe houses in Tijuana and Durango.

Hezbollah has already established a presence in the tri-border region of South America, where the borders of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay converge around Iguazu Falls. Mexico has also been home to a number of Lebanese migrants for the past century- some of whom have alerted Mexican and American intelligence to the possibility of Hezbollah operating in Mexico.

In recent years, the DEA has claimed that Hezbollah has utilized the same network of drug traffickers, gun runners and document forgers that the Mexican cartels use.

ARIZONA: An 18-month investigation by the DEA, Arizona Department of Public Safety and Tribal Police has resulted in 25 arrests and highlighting the scope of the Sinaloa cartel's operations along the Mexican border in Arizona's Tohono O'Odham Indian Reservation southwest of Tuscon.

The vast Sonoran desert is the expressway for drug smugglers to get their goods into the U.S.

DEA agent, Todd Scott says, "You've got a clear line of sight all the way here to the roads that they coordinate with smuggling loads on. Continue that way a little further that way and you've got Mexico."

Scott stood on a spot known as a spider hole. It's on the Tohono O'odham Nation where you can easily see 10 miles out on a clear day, "It allows you to observe law enforcement whether it's border patrol or TOPD , DEA anybody operating in this area from this position," says Scott.

This is where Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel hides surveillance teams. People live there 30 to 60 days at a time.

Scott says they act as air traffic controllers, "The smuggling loads come across in either human mule trains or vehicles and the scouts here use night vision goggles or binoculars coordinate those movements of those loads with the radios."

AP Photo/ Matt York

ELSEWHERE IN ARIZONA- *GILA BEND*: Two Border Patrol agents were killed in Gila Bend earlier this month when their vehicle collided with a Union Pacific freight train while pursuing suspected drug traffickers.

Early Thursday, U.S. Border Patrol agents Edward Rojas Jr. and Hector Clark were stationed near Gila Bend, on assignment with a task force, when they got a call about marijuana smugglers moving toward Interstate 8.

Even veteran officers talk about the adrenaline rush that comes with such a call, which causes a sort of tunnel vision. Rojas and Clark sped west on a frontage road parallel to railroad tracks, slightly ahead of a freight train going in the same direction at over 60 mph.

The conductor and engineer would later tell investigators that they sounded the locomotive whistle several times. Suddenly, the agents' vehicle turned left onto a private rail crossing, immediately in front of the 4,600-ton train.

Agents Clark and Rojas were the first Border Patrol agents killed in the line of duty since the December 2010 shooting of Brian Terry outside of Nogales, AZ. After the wreck, deputies from the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office recovered 300 pounds of marijuana and detained eight suspects a few hundred yards from the crash site.

*PHOENIX*: The DEA is refusing to turn over a cache of semiautomatic rifles seized in a raid earlier this month to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms when a routine check on some of the weapons revealed that they were obtained under the ATF's watch as part of Operation Fast & Furious.

The federal drug agents discovered the AK-47-type assault rifles wrapped in cellophane and hidden inside two giant trash barrels. Agents believe the confiscated weapons were heading to drug cartels in Mexico. Problem is, a serial number on at least one of the weapons traces back to the ATF.

The DEA arrests took place on April 13 and the DEA has expressed an interest in keeping the seized weapons as evidence in their own case and separate from the now infamous Fast and Furious investigation.

Agencia Guatemalteca Noticias Photo

GUATEMALA: At least 27 people were massacred at a ranch in the restive northern Peten province along the borders with Mexico and Belize last weekend.

The massacre, which stretched from Saturday into Sunday, took place on a coconut farm in the lawless region of Peten province, a porous region on the Mexican border known as a gateway for drug trafficking.

It was one of the worst mass killings since the end of Guatemala's 36-year civil war in 1996, authorities said.

Police were investigating a link between the ranch killings and the murder of Haroldo Leon, the brother of one of Guatemala's biggest drug kingpins, Juan Jose "Juancho" Leon, who was killed in 2008.

Local reports said the ranch belonged to Haroldo Leon, who was gunned down with three of his body guards in another part of Peten early Saturday.

Hours later, heavily armed members of Mexico's Los Zetas drug gang raided the ranch, tying up their victims before killing them and then writing in blood threatening messages on the walls of the house, cops said.

One of the messages read, "Salguero, we're coming for you." Police did not say who Salguero was.

Police said that the victims - including two women and children - worked at the farm.

Late Sunday, authorities said they found one survivor of the massacre, who had pretended to be dead. Cops didn't release any other details about the survivor.

Authorities in Guatemala arrested a former member of the Kaibiles, a special operations unit of the Guatemalan Army, in neighboring Alta Verapaz province after coming across information left behind in a recently abandoned Zetas encampment in the same province where the ranch massacre took place. Hugo Gomez Vazquez was arraigned in court and charged with obstruction of justice, kidnapping, extortion and accesory to murder. The prosecution presented a recording of a telephone conversation where Vazquez was apparently negotiating a ransom after the abduction of a relative of the ranch's owner who was later killed and decapitated prior to last weekend's massacre.

Three other Guatemalan nationals suspected of involvement in the massacre were arrested in the city of Quetzalenango on Saturday.

Investigators are also looking into ties between the owner of the ranch, Otto Salguiero, and Mexico's Gulf Cartel. Peten's location along the porous borders with Mexico and Belieze make it an attractive venue for smugglers. Guatemala's president declared a state of siege in nearby Alta Verapaz province in late 2010 after the Zetas began infiltrating the region and setting up staging areas and clandestine airstrips.

AP Photo, Marco Ugarte

TAMAULIPAS: Mexican federal police arrested a leading member of the Gulf cartel after raiding his birthday party at a ranch in Reynosa, Tamaulipas.

Gilberto Barragan Balderas "is considered one of the main leaders of the Gulf Cartel" and is the subject of a $5 million reward by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, said Ramon Pequeno, head of anti-drug operations for the federal police.

Barragan Balderas was allegedly in charge of the cartel's operations in Miguel Aleman, across the border from Roma, Texas. Police captured him at a party at a ranch near another border city, Reynosa, which is across from McAllen, Texas.

Police said the party was apparently in honor of Barragan Balderas' May 19 birthday. Two alleged associates were also arrested in the raid, which also netted an assault rifle and three pistols.

According to the DEA, Balderas' duties included obtaining advanced information regarding military and state police patrols and mobile checkpoints in order to protect drug shipments for both the Zetas and the Gulf cartel prior to the organizations violent 2010 split. Since then, he was supposedly tasked with defending the territory from any Zetas incursion.

The fact that the DEA has a US$5 million reward out for Balderas is a pretty good indicator that he wasn't exactly a small fry in the Gulf organization.

ELSEWHERE IN MEXICO: Not surprisingly, human trafficking continues to be a lucrative side business for many of the drug cartels.

Smuggling in decades past was the business of small independent operators who helped migrants cross once they reached the U.S. border. But evading U.S. authorities has become much more difficult with increased border enforcement in recent years. At the same time, Mexico's migrant routes have become much more dangerous, controlled by drug gangs that see new moneymaking opportunities in kidnapping and extorting those who cross their territory.

The harder the trip, the higher the price. Guatemalan officials, who estimate 300 to 500 undocumented nationals cross the border each day into Mexico, say those migrants are paying double what they did two years ago, as much as $10,000 for the hope of gaining work in the United States.

Unlike those running drugs, guns or other contraband, people smugglers lose virtually no upfront costs when migrants are intercepted by authorities or escape.

In the case of Mexico's southern border, no one can say exactly who the organized smuggling groups are. Some say that large transport rings operate separately from Mexico's brutal drug gangs, such as the Zetas or the Gulf Cartel, who stick to kidnapping and extortion.

Some say they are all in collusion, including authorities. Both local police and federal immigration agents have been arrested in recent raids on kidnapping operations in Reynosa, across the border from McAllen, Texas.

"It's clear that they're immigration agents, federal police, Zetas, maras, the whole gamut, along with local crime groups," said the Rev. Alejandro Solalinde, a Catholic priest who runs a migrant shelter in Oaxaca. "Those who make money off migrants are all part of the same mafia."

Added to all this is the fact that organizations like the Zetas or Gulf cartel will target the migrants transiting through territory controlled by them and extort them, hold them for ransom or press them into service as drug mules.

Borderline Psychosis Update- Badges? We Don't Need No Steenkin' Badges! (We Quit!); Tunneling Through; Inmate Running the Asylum Prison?

NUEVO LEON: The entire police force for the town of Los Ramones resigned en-masse after a brazen assault on their days-old headquarters.

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.

Borderline Psychosis Update- More Freshwater Piracy at Falcon Lake; Mexican Authorities Tread Cautiously in Cartel-Held Territory

A Colorado man is missing and presumed dead after he and his wife were attacked and pursued by smugglers in the waters on the Mexican side of Falcon Reservoir along the Texas/Mexico border.

According to a second, more comprehensive statement to Mexican investigators, Tiffany Young-Hartley, 29, said that she and her husband David Hartley, 30, were accosted by gunmen in three small boats as they were sightseeing along the Reservoir on separate jet skis on September 30. The gunmen opened fire, striking David as the couple fled according to her statement. Both Hartley and his jet-ski have been missing since then.

Mexican investigators were initially skeptical of Young-Hartley's account.

Only ranchers and steers populate the abandoned and partially submerged ruins, as well as a handful of anglers who remain along the Salado river, which flows into Falcon Reservoir. None told investigators they heard anything Thursday while out on the quiet waters.

“How would someone know where the incident occurred?” asked Rolando Armando Flores Villegas, the Tamaulipas State Police commander. “That place is very unsafe. Nobody lives there — only organized criminals. That’s their land.”

Flores has received reports of attacks on Falcon Reservoir, he said. But no one has alleged anything close to what Young-Hartley reported to authorities.

“Since everything is so calm over there, they could hear any noise,” Flores said of the anglers and ranchers in that area. “But they said they didn’t hear any gunshots or anything — and they didn’t even hear a Jet Ski.”

The case took an even more sinister turn last week when commander Flores' severed head was dropped off in a suitcase in front of a Mexican military base at nearby Miguel Aleman. Since then, authorities have suspended the search for Hartley's body.

Investigators in the USA and Mexico and a Texas-based national security think tank believe that the couple was initially mistaken for rival smugglers by the gunmen that accosted them.

ELSEWHERE: The Los Angeles Times accompanied a detachment of heavily armed Mexican police officers who were tasked with delivering US$40,000 in pension and back-pay to senior citizens living in remote towns and pueblas in Sonora.

This was necessary because the region is increasingly cut off from the rest of the country due to a struggle for territorial control between two of Mexico's cartels- the Beltran-Leyva and Sinaloa. Gunmen from the Beltran-Leyva cartel had taken over a string of ranches and pueblas between Altar, Sonora and the Arizona border 50 miles to the north. In retaliation, the Sinaloa Cartel has been patiently and methodically cutting off the area from the rest of the country, choking off food, mail and fuel deliveries to their rivals and an estimated 5,000 residents in the reigon.

I'm not a fan of the LA Times, but read the whole thing. Aside from the high profile and brazen acts of violence in places like Juarez or the grisly discoveries of mass graves in Taxco or Monterrey, the besieged villages in northern Sonora are an example of how the cartels are able to control vast tracts of rural land to expedite their lucrative human and drug smuggling routes.