Feds Disrupt Iranian-Backed Plot to Bomb Israeli Embassy, Assasinate Saudi Envoy to USA

Agents from the FBI and DEA have reportedly disrupted a terror plot liked directly to Iran's Quds force that involved simultaneous attacks against the Israeli and Saudi embassies in Washington D.C.

Federal investigatos allege that an Iranian American identified as 56 year old Mansour Arbabsiar, a Corpus Christi TX used car salesman as the man who approached what he thought was a member of the Los Zetas cartel with a proposal to kill the Saudi ambassador to the USA and bomb the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C. in exchange for $1.5 million and an undisclosed amount of opium.

Arbabsiar and the informant met twice in Reynosa in the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas, across the border from McAllen, TX [interestingly, observers note that Reynosa is in territory still under control of the Gulf Cartel, but the accused was meeting with what he thought was an enforcer from the archrival Los Zetas- NANESB!] where Arbabsiar bragged that he had a cousin who was a high-ranking member of the Quds force of Iran's Revolutionary Guard and that they were being directed by senior-level officials of the Iranian regime.

The five count criminal complaint names Gohlam Shakuri, an Iranian based member of the Quds force still at large in Iran, as a co-conspirator in the plot. Arbabsiar and the informant negotiated a $1.5 million payment to carry out the attacks, with the accused wiring two seperate payments of $49,960 into a dummy FBI bank account. Arbabsiar also told the informant that his contacts in Iran couild provide Los Zetas with 'tons' of opium if they were interested.

Federal agents said they recorded a number of phone calls and meeting with the informant and Arbabsiar, some of the calls coming from Iran. In late September, when Arbabsiar was flying to Mexico City from Iran via Frankfurt, he was refused entry into Mexico by immigration officers at Arturo Beneitez international airport and was put on a flight to New York where he was taken into custody.

Not surprisingly, Iran has denied the charges against their regime, claiming the case is a 'prefabricated scenario' and propaganda against the Islamic regime.

Interestingly, even though Arbabsiar was taken into custody nearly two weeks ago, Attorney General Eric Holder's press conference announcing the disruption of the plot came a day before House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chariman, Darrell Issa (R- CA49) issued Holder a subpoena in regards to their ongoing Fast & Furious probe in which the ATF allowed firearms to be trafficked from the USA to Mexican drug cartels. In fact, one of the reporters brought up Fast & Furious during the press conference, only to have Holder dismiss it with a boilerplate statement about turning over the relelvant documents before walking out.

There is precedent for Iranian-backed groups co-ordinating attacks out of Latin America. In 1992, 29 people were killed when a truck bomb exploded outside the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires. A group with links to the Iranian back Hezbollah terrorist group and Iran called the Islamic Jihad organization claimed responsibility. The Isreali Embassy attacks were followed up by the 1994 bombing of the AMIA (Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina) building in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people. Argentine investigators believe that both operations were planned and financed in the Tri-Border area where the boundaries of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil meet near Iguazu Falls and where Hezbollah has been active over the last two decades. More recently, Mexican intelligence has been aware of a Hezbollah presence in Tijuana and Durango.

Borderline Psychosis Update- Mexican Kidnap Victims Held in N.L. Jails; Cartels Luring Border Lawmen to Dark Side; Sofia Vergara Cameo at Drug Raid?

TEXAS: An increasing number of police officers on the US side of the border are being influenced by organized crime from south of the border, a recent Houston Chronicle article reports.

Nine South Texas lawmen have been charged or sent to prison in the past 16 months for using their badges to sneak drugs or guns through the U.S.-Mexico border region from Laredo to Brownsville.

The lawmen's downfalls, an indication of growing corruption prosecutions, are all linked to Mexico's lucrative drug cartels, which long have sought to infiltrate not only federal border guards but local officers patrolling U.S. towns along the Rio Grande.

"I thought we knew these people like the back of our hand," said Laredo police investigator Joe Baeza. "But then again, if you look at the back of your hand every five years, it changes."

Laredo officer Orlando Hale hyperventilated when federal agents showed him photographs of him meeting with a supposed cocaine trafficker he aided by escorting loads through the city, court records show.

So began a nightmare for Hale, whose parents are law-enforcement veterans.

He was convicted by a jury and got 24 years.

Others who got busted include police officers, deputies and constables, as well as one high-ranking official, Sullivan City's police chief.

None of the corruption cases appears to involve the classic cartel threat of offering "silver or lead," the practice of demanding the target "take our money and live, or turn us down and die." The tactic has devoured police departments in Mexico.

Instead, interviews and court records and testimony show the South Texas cases often involve one officer at a time pulled to the dark side by friends, family or associates offering quick cash.

Hale, 28, is to be released from prison in 2032.

He claims he was set up by fellow officer Pedro Martinez III, whom he knew since childhood. Martinez testified against Hale as part of a plea deal and got six years.

Martinez's father, who died in a suspicious suicide, was apparently a drug dealer who lured his son into the business.

Martinez drove his squad car to escort what he thought was 44 pounds of cocaine. The drugs were a sham. The dealers were federal agents and government informants running a sting.

Such tricks have worked repeatedly.

Pharr police officer Jaime Beas was busted for using his vehicle to escort a load of cocaine and for his involvement in a scheme to ship a grenade, semiautomatic rifles and body armor to Mexico.

Authorities went after Beas when he was turned in by an uncle in the military who said he repeatedly was approached about equipment.

As for the Border Patrol, it's been reported that as many as one in 100 agents are presently under investigation for corruption of misconduct.

ELSEWHERE IN TEXAS: Although she probably had an airtight alibi, actress Sofia Vergara made an appearance of sorts after agents from the FBI and DEA raided a used car lot and three different homes in the El Paso, TX area earlier this year.

Luxury watches, diamond jewelry, 20 vehicles, 30 firearms, framed "Scarface" pictures and an autographed nude photo of actress Sofia Vergara were among numerous items seized by federal agents as part of a drug cartel investigation.

Recent filings in U.S. District Court in El Paso detail a treasure-trove seized by FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration agents in a series of raids on used-car lots and homes in the El Paso area in February.

The wife and parents of defendant Alejandro Melendez are asking in documents that some of the goods be returned, claiming that they were bought years before any alleged criminal activity.

Melendez is accused of belonging to a marijuana and cocaine trafficking group linked to the Sinaloa drug cartel, federal agents said. Melendez is owner of Budget Auto Sales, one of three Alameda Avenue car lots raided in February by the FBI and DEA El Paso Strike Force.

Federal agents raided the Budget Auto Sales car lot and a $653,000 home in the 5500 block of Woodgreen Drive in the Upper Valley, documents stated. The home is listed in property tax records as belonging to Alejandro Melendez.

While the authenticity of the signature of the Vergara photo wasn't immediately confirmed, the FBI and DEA claim that the Vergara fanboys were members of the Juarez cartel.

CHIHUAHUA: Four people, including two Americans were killed earlier this week when gunmen opened fire on an SUV in Juarez.

The four were riding in a blue Dodge Durango with Texas plates peppered with gunshots from assault rifles Friday evening on Eje Vial Juan Gabriel and Zaragoza boulevard, the Chihuahua state attorney general's office said.

An official with the U.S. Consulate in Juárez confirmed two of the dead were U.S. citizens. They were identified as Pablo Noe Williams, 19, and his mother Rosa Williams, 35, and are listed as being from Kansas.

A spokesman for the Chihuahua state attorney general's office said the young man was from El Paso. The other people killed were Alberto Nieto Nieto, 24, and Alma Yesenia Flores, 21.

NEW MEXICO: On the heels of the arrest of the mayor and police chief of the border village of Columbus, NM on weapons trafficking charges, two former law enforcement officers turned whistleblowers have claimed that the FBI and Texas Department of Public Safety have ignored their findings on sweeping corruption in Southern New Mexico and the El Paso, TX area.

Two former law enforcement officers allege that they cannot get anyone to investigate allegations that the Mexican drug cartels have corrupted U.S. law officers and politicians in the El Paso border region.

Greg Gonzales, a retired Doña Ana County sheriff's deputy, and Wesley Dutton, a rancher and former New Mexico state livestock investigator, said that instead of arrests and prosecutions of suspects, their whistle-blowing activities have resulted only in threats and retaliation against themselves.

Both men were confidential sources for the FBI in El Paso and assisted with investigations over an 18-month period.

Gonzales and Dutton allege that the FBI dropped them after "big names" on the U.S. side of the border began to surface in the drug investigations.

Gonzales and Dutton said both or either one of them helped with federal investigations that were successful, including the arrest of Special FBI Agent John Shipley. Shipley was convicted of weapons-related charges after a weapon he sold someone turned up in Chihuahua state at a scene where a firefight took place between Mexican soldiers and drug traffickers.

However, they said, they are concerned that other serious allegations have not found their way to court.

"One of the street gangs that works for the Juárez cartel put a hit out on FBI Special Agent Samantha Mikeska, and I told the FBI as soon as I heard about it," Dutton said. "We also had information on campaign fundraisers and parties in La Union that the cartel held for officials from New Mexico and El Paso. A lot of important people were at those parties, such as bankers, judges, and law enforcement officers."

Mikeska is a high-profile agent whose investigations of the Barrio Azteca gang led to prosecutions of gang leaders. The gang, which has members in West Texas and New Mexico, is linked to the Carrillo Fuentes drug cartel.

Gonzales said a U.S. law enforcement officer was suspected of selling to a street gang with Juárez drug cartel ties a list of U.S. Marshals that included their telephone numbers.

"With their number, the gang was able to 'clone' the agents' cell phones and intercept their calls," Gonzales said. "That way, they would know when one of the agents was trying to serve an arrest warrant against one of their members."

Dutton and Gonzales said small aircraft regularly drop drug loads on ranches or other properties along the U.S.-Mexico border, and that some U.S. law officers escort the loads to the next stop.

The two whistle-blowers said that drug cartels have managed to obtain computer access codes to U.S. surveillance systems that let them see where and when Border Patrol agents are monitoring the border.

They also alleged that drug cartels have given big donations to politicians, which are unreported, to influence appointments of key law enforcement officers.

As a former livestock inspector andDutton also claimed that drug smugglers would often try to sneak contrabad into the USA from Mexico by using saddles and tack equipment.

NUEVO LEON: Police officers in a suburb of Monterrey repotedly allowed kidnap victims to be held in local jails while their abductors negotiated a ransom with their families, according to state prosecutors.

The scandal at the northern prison came to light this week when state and federal police freed two kidnapping victims from jail cells in Juarez. Investigators believe that the victims were abducted by the extremely violent Zetas cartel and that the officers were working for the Zetas, Domene said.

Four police officers from Juarez, a suburb of the city of Monterrey, are being held pending further investigation, said Jorge Domene, the security spokesman for Nuevo Leon state.

Local police in northern Mexico have often been bribed or threatened to work for drug gangs by providing them with information, protecting their activities or detaining and turning over members of rival gangs.

VERACRUZ: Police and Mexican Marines in the Gulf state of Veracruz have discovered an additional 32 bodies barely two weeks after gunmen halted traffic as they dumped 36 corpses in the middle of a busy highway during rush hour in what was apparently a gruesome and brazen challenge to the Zetas.

Just two days after the Mexican government unveiled a plan to lay down the law in the state of the same name, police and marines found the bodies in three separate areas of the city, the Navy said in a statement.

The bodies were in homes around the port as the military conducted operations under the new "Safe Veracruz" program, the statement said. Twenty bodies were found in one house that was searched after a tip from naval intelligence.

While the bodies found this week in housing developments in Veracruz have yet tp be conclusively identified, officials say that most of the bodies dumped on the highway in Septmeber had been identified as having a criminal background and associated with Los Zetas.



ELSEWHERE IN VERACRUZ: A spokesman from Mexico's Navy said that Marines had arrested nine Zetas who had escaped from prison last month. During the raid, they came across detailed information documenting bribes paid out to at least 18 municipal police officers throughout the state.

MEXICO CITY: Two severed heads were found on a street adjacent to Mexico's defence ministry in Mexico City on Monday. A statement left at the scene suggested the gruesome display was from a fairly obscure organization known as 'Hands With Eyes', an offshoot of the Beltran Leya cartel.

Borderline Psychosis Update- Gunmen Dump 35 Bodies on Expressway in Rush Hour; Female Ex-Cop & Zeta Leader Arrested; Border Patrol Finds Arms Cache

VERACRUZ: In a gruesome and brazen display of force, masked gunmen in the Veracruz suburb of Boca De Rio dumped 35 corpses by the side of a busy highway in the middle of rush hour this week.

Veracruz state Attorney General Reynaldo Escobar Perez said the bodies were left piled in two trucks and on the ground at an underpass near the city's biggest shopping mall and its statue of the Voladores de Papantla — ritual dancers from Veracruz state.

Motorists caught in the horrifying scene Tuesday afternoon posted warnings on Twitter that masked gunmen in military uniforms were blocking Manuel Avila Camacho Boulevard and pointing their guns at civilians.

"They don't seem to be soldiers or police," one tweet read. Another said, "Don't go through that area, there is danger."

Escobar said police were reviewing surveillance video recorded in the area.

Local media said that 12 of the victims were women and that some of the dead men had been among prisoners who escaped from three Veracruz prisons on Monday, but Escobar said he couldn't confirm that.

At least 32 inmates got away from the three Veracruz prisons. Police recaptured 14 of them.

The bodies were dumped less than a mile away from where Meixo's top prosecutors were scheduled to meet on Wednesday. A banner left behind at the scene claimed that the dead bodies were the handywork of 'The New Generation', a Jalisco-based gang reportedly allied with Sinaloa Cartel head Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman.

The Gulf cartel had control of smuggling and distribution in and around the port of Veracruz until 2010, when they were usurped by their former enforcers- Los Zetas. At least a dozen of the corpses have been identified as having a criminal background, reportedly working with the Zetas.



NUEVO LEON: Mexican Marines arrested a female underboss for the Zetas in the northern part of the state last week.

Mireya Moreno Carreon is the first woman linked to the Zetas leadership who has been arrested by authorities, the secretariat said.

Moreno Carreon managed drug sales in San Nicolas de Los Garza, a city in the Monterrey metropolitan area.

She apparently took over from Raul Garcia Rodriguez, who was arrested by marines last month in Monterrey, the capital of Nuevo Leon, the secretariat said.

Moreno Carreon was arrested in the Colonia Santa Fe Oriente section of San Nicolas de Los Garza, thanks to "intense intelligence and urban operations work," the Navy Secretariat said.

The suspected drug trafficker was armed with a revolver and driving a stolen vehicle at the time of her arrest, the secretariat said.

Carreon- aka La Flaca- was a former policewoman in Monterrey until 2010 when she was dismissed by supervisors for a "lack of confidence. Reportedly she was wounded by flying glass in a 2009 shootout between police and extortionists that left a kindergarten class pinned down in the crossfire.

TAMAULIPAS: The bodies of a man and a woman left dangling from an overpass in the border city of Nuevo Laredo last week included handmade signs explicitly threatening bloggers and internet.

Not only have social networking and microblogging sites like Twitter demonstrated themselves to be quicker than local media in most cases, but organized crime has succeeded in intimidating local media into silence throughout much of Mexico. Odds are that Twitter users knew about the 35 bodies being dumped on the expressway outside of Veracruz before the local authorities did, as many witnesses were using smartphones to warn motorists of the gruesome spectacle.

"This is going to happen to all the internet busybodies, Listen up, I'm on to you" one placard read. It was signed with a 'Z', presumably for Los Zetas. Two of the blogs mentioned in the threats- Frontera Al Rojo Vivo and El Blog Del Narco [caution, the latter isn't the least bit squeamish about posting graphic crime scene photos- NANESB!] have shown no signs of letting up. The two victims found in Nuevo Laredo have yet to be identified

TEXAS: US Border Patrol agents discovered an abandoned black bag containing six automatic rifles, a grenade launcher, a rocket launcher and three packages of whats believed to be C4 explosive along the Rio Grande outside of Fronton, TX last week.

Agents found the weapons on Tuesday in a black bag along a quiet stretch of the Rio Grande near Fronton, a small community about 210 miles south of San Antonio. No arrests have been made.

The weapons are similar to those reported used in the borderland drug wars and smuggled south from the U.S. into Mexico, and were found in an area of the river that is easily crossed and close to a Mexican cartel battleground.

But authorities stopped short of making any direct link between the guns and the drug cartels, saying only that they signaled a threat to public safety in both Texas and Mexico.

"These deadly weapons could have had a devastating impact on communities on both sides of the border and to our agents and other law enforcement officers," Rosendo Hinojosa, head of Border Patrol's Rio Grande Valley sector, said in a statement.

Officials theorized that the guns were waiting to be smuggled across the border into Mexico, but said that was just speculation.

The discovery took place about 10 miles south of Falcon Lake and on the other side of the border where Los Zetas and the Gulf cartel are locked in a bitter struggle over lucrative smuggling routes.

WASHINGTON DC: In a series of secretly recorded audio tapes dating back to March 2011, an ATF field agent disclosed to an Arizona gun dealer the existence of a 3rd weapon recovered from the December 2010 shootout between the Border Patrol and armed smugglers north of Nogales, AZ that killed Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.

Court records have previously only mentioned two weapons: Romanian WASR "AK-47 type" rifles. Both were allegedly sold to suspects who were under ATF's watch as part of Fast and Furious.

Also, a ballistics report turned over to Congressional investigators only mentions the two WASR rifles. The ballistics report says it's inconclusive as to whether either of the WASR rifles fired the bullet that killed Terry.

The third weapon was reportedly an SKS purchsed from a Texas gun shop.

The recordings were obtained by CBS news as well as copies being turned over to the Office of Inspector General and Congressional investigators.

In other Fast & Furious news, before stepping down this month, US Attorney Dennis Burke had opposed the Terry family's motion to qualify as crime victims in the eyes of the court.

[Hat Tip Support Your Local Gunfighter; Friends of Ours; Pat Dollard]

Sour Grapes: Much to Miss France's Chagrin, Miss Angola Wins 2011 Miss Universe Pageant

25 year old Leila Lopes, an Angolan presently living in the UK, won the Miss Universe title at the 2011 pageant in Sao Paulo Brazil this week. The business student, originally from rhe seaside city of Begeula, is the first Angolan to win the pagent's title.


Miss Ukraine- 22 year old law student Olesya Stefanko from Odessa (above), was named the pageant's runner-up.

Ms Lopes replaces last year's Miss Universe winner Jimena Navarette (Miss Mexico- above) .

The decision to crown Lopes Miss Universe didn't sit too well with some of the other contestants pageant. Miss France (above)- 20 year old Laury Thilleman- was particularly critical in comments to French magazine Premiere.

“She was the only girl I didn’t know very well. We didn’t see her much; she was very discreet. She was often in jeans and not wearing makeup. We were all surprised by her win. Many girls made efforts that were not rewarded. I don’t know, something is missing in her temperament. The fact that the competition was held in Brazil surely played a role.”

Miss Brazil- 25 year old Priscilla Machado (above)- was actually named second-runner up in the 2011 Miss Universe tournament.

Millions On West Coast, Arizona Left Without Power Overnight After Blackout Triggered in Arizona

Traffic signals, street lights and crossing signals remain dark at sunset in Cardiff, CA on the night of September 8th. Mike Blake- Reuters photo

Federal regulators are looking into the cause of a prolonged blackout that left millions of people without electricity in southern California, Western Arizona and the northern part of Baja California, Mexico on Thursday afternoon and on into the early morning hours of Friday.

Arizona Public Service Co. said that the problems began at about 3:30 p.m. Thursday when a 115-mile high-power line that runs from west of Phoenix to the Yuma area switched out of service.

APS had an employee working in the Yuma-area substation where the line connects, but officials are unsure if that worker caused the line's failure, said Daniel Froetscher, APS vice president of energy delivery.

"We don't know whether it was related, but we have been very transparent with the work we were doing there, and will investigate whether there is a relationship," he said.

Power wasn't lost immediately, with the first customer calls coming about 10 minutes after the line's failure, so APS will investigate what actually prompted Yuma-area customers to lose service, he said.

"The system has contingencies," he said. "It is designed to withstand the loss of a single line feed. For about 10 minutes or so, there were no interruptions of service. The system performed as intended."

About 56,000 APS customers lost service throughout Yuma, Somerton, San Luis and Gadsden.

Those power outages cascaded west into California, where the high-power transmission line switches from APS control to the California power grid operator.

APS will investigate what allowed the problems to spread, rather than be contained by the protections built into the power system.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, North American Electric Reliability Corp. and other entities also announced Friday they would investigate the outage, possibly leading to fines.

The cascading power failures that were supposed to be localized around Yuma instead made their way west, knocking out power at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating station.

In the San Diego area, flights at Lindbergh field were halted and classes at local schools and universities were cancelled. Some beaches were shut down as nearly 2 million gallons of untreated sewage spilled into the water.

Power was restored by the early morning hours on Friday, but not before restaurants in the region experienced losses in the hundreds of thousands of dollars in food that had to be discarded when refrigeration didn't work and labor when many eateries simply shut their doors to the public. Even though power had returned by Friday morning, hundreds of facilities had to remain closed until a health department alert regarding potentially dangerous tap water was lifted.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the designated media cheerleaders for the Obama Administration have insisted that the international power failure validates President Obama's call for additional stimulus spending to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

Thursday's blackout was the most widespread since the August 2003 blackout that left a large swath of the Northeast as well as parts of the Midwest and the province of Ontario without electricity [I remember the 2003 blackout well. I was in rural upstate New York, blissfully unaware that there was any significant power outage for at least two hours until I drove into this one small town where their one stoplight wasn't working and their one policeman was directing traffic- NANESB!] That blackout left metropolitan areas such as New York City, Cleveland, Buffalo and Toronto without power at the height of rush hour.

Anti-Social Club Episode of Borderline Psychosis- 53 Killed After Gunmen Torch Monterrey Casino; NM Police Chief Admits Cartel Ties; Iraqi Connection?

UPDATE 8/31: Acting ATF director Kenneth Melson was reassigned to a lesser post in the Justice Department on Tuesday in the wake of further fallout from the Fast & Furious investigation. US Attorney for Minnesota B. Todd Jones was named as acting director after Melson's departure- a permanent head for the ATF would need to be confirmed by the US Senate.



Also on Tuesday, the US Attorney for Arizona resigned effective immediately. US Attorney Dennis Burke stepped down two weeks after testifying before a House Oversight Committee regarding Fast & Furious, which Burke was in charge of as the state's US Attorney.





NUEVO LEON: At least 53 people were killed when eight gunmen burst into a casino in the northern industrial center of Monterrey, doused the place with gasoline and ignited a fire that trapped dozens of patrons and gamblers.

With shouts and profanities, the attackers told the customers and employees to get out. But many terrified customers and employees fled further inside the building, where they died trapped amid the flames and thick smoke that soon billowed out of the building.



Video footage showed workers continuing to remove bodies well into the night.



Monterrey Mayor Fernando Larrazabal said many of the bodies were found inside the casino's bathrooms, where employees and customers had locked themselves to escape the gunmen.



In an act of desperation, authorities commandeered backhoes from a nearby construction site to break into the casino's walls to try to reach the people trapped inside.

The attack took place on August 25th. The following day, Mexican President Felipe Calderon declared three days of mourning and the Mexican government offered a reward of 30 million pesos ($2.4 million) for information leading to any of the assailants in the Casino Royale attack.



On Monday night, Federal Police in Monterrey announced that they had arrested five suspects and were still seeking the whereabouts of two more. Authorities believe a likely motive in the casino attack is nonpayment of extortion money and the five detained suspects are said to be members of the Zetas. Surveillance footage of the suspects filling up five gallon canisters of gasoline at a gas station not too far from the Casino Royale was shown at the conference announcing the arrests Monday.



The attack shocked and angered many Mexicans because instead of career criminals, the victims were mostly middle aged women who frequently visited the casino to play bingo.



MEXICO CITY: 21 of Mexico's 31 senior federal prosecutors abruptly quit earlier this month. Mexican press outlets report this as being the single biggest mass resignation of federal officials in recent history.

The office announced late last month that in Morales' first 100 days on the job, 462 prosecutors and other officials had been dismissed and 111 more were facing criminal charges involving a range of infractions, including fraud, theft, abuse of power and falsification of documents. An additional 386 employees were in the process of being dismissed.



Rosa Elena Torres Davila, a senior official in the attorney general's office, made Monday's announcement and said the resignations were tendered on Friday. They included the top federal prosecutors in some of Mexico's most violent states where drug traffickers have intimidated local authorities and killed thousands of people in cases that have largely gone unprosecuted. They also included the top federal prosecutor in the capital, Mexico City, which is a federal district with a status similar to that of a state.

Attorney General Marisela Morales declined to cite specific reasons behind the mass departures



CALIFORNIA: Local, state and federal law enforcement officers raided an Iraqi-Chaldean social club in San Diego County and arrested 60 men in a multi-agency investigation dubbed 'Operation Shadowbox'. The social club had been a source of complaints from both neighboring businesses claiming drug dealing and prostitution were rampant and wives of some patrons said that their life savings was being gambled away at the club.



More ominously, members of the club were alleged to have purchased drugs and explosives from the Sinaloa cartel. Marijuana was sold out of the club while methamphetamine smuggled in from Mexico would be forwarded to a sister organization in Detroit.

Since January, the DEA and El Cajon police have purchased narcotics, firearms, improvised explosive devices and pharmaceuticals from people at the club, Sprecco said. In April, an undercover operative was shown a hand grenade and was told more were available from a Mexican military source. Suspects in the investigation reportedly arranged narcotics shipments from El Cajon to Detroit.



During the course of the investigation, operatives discovered a suspected association with the Sinaloa Cartel, a Mexico-based drug trafficking organization, and the Chaldean Organized Crime Syndicate, which began in Detroit in the early 80s and has been linked numerous crimes, including murder, arson and kidnapping, Sprecco said.



The investigation resulted in the seizure of drugs including more than 13 pounds of methamphetamine, more than four pounds of ecstasy and pharmaceuticals and about 3,500 pounds of marijuana, Sprecco said. Authorities confiscated more than $630,000 and three luxury cars.



Officers seized 34 firearms, including semi-automatic rifles and four explosive devices, which were processed with the help of the San Diego County Sheriff's Department's Bomb Squad and the FBI, Sprecco said.

The city of El Cajon has the second-highest Chaldean population in the United States after Detroit- the San Diego suburb is home to about 47,000 Iraqi Chaldeans, many of them having immigrated there before the 2003 fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in their native Iraq.



NEW MEXICO: The former police chief of the small New Mexico border town of Columbus has pleaded guilty to trafficking firearms and tactical gear across the border into Mexico on behalf of enforcers for 'La Linea'- a gang of enforcers for the Juarez cartel.

As a participant in the conspiracy, Vega conducted counter-surveillance, used a village-owned Ford F150 truck to transport firearms from the country, pulled over a car of ATF agents at La Linea's request, and tried to get ATF agents to return firearms to Gutierrez after they were seized, Spitzer told the court.



And on Feb. 10, Vega purchased thousands of dollars in body armor, boots, helmets and clothing, including a bulletproof vest for a La Linea leader, whose name was not mentioned in court.



Vega had previously pleaded not guilty to taking part in the conspiracy, in which he and his co-defendants allegedly purchased about 200 firearms - including AK-47-type pistols, weapons resembling AK-47 rifles, but with shorter barrels and without rear stocks, and American Tactical 9 mm caliber pistols - from Chaparral Guns in Chaparral and smuggled them to members of the Juárez-based La Linea cartel between January 2010 and March 2011.



In raids, law enforcement seized 40 of the AK-47 type pistols, more than 1,500 rounds of ammunition and 30 high-capacity magazines before they crossed the border, and found another 12 firearms in Mexico that were traced back to the defendants. Three others were found on three dead individuals in an SUV in Juárez, and others were found at a narcotics bust there, according to federal prosecutors

Former police chief Angelo Vega faces up to 35 years in prison and a $750,000 fine. The village's former mayor- Eddie Espinoza- and village trustee- Blas Gutierrez- have already pleaded guilty for their role in the weapons smuggling case.



Since the arrests, the small 4-man police department has been disbanded and the area is patrolled now by the Luna County Sheriff's Department.

ATF Awarding Promotions to Fast and Furious Architects?

Earlier this week, the Los Angles Times had reported that three supervisor level ATF officials from the agency's Phoenix office were promoted and transferred to Washington D.C.

The three supervisors have been given new management positions at the agency's headquarters in Washington. They are William G. McMahon, who was the ATF's deputy director of operations in the West, where the illegal trafficking program was focused, and William D. Newell and David Voth, both field supervisors who oversaw the program out of the agency's Phoenix office.

McMahon and Newell have acknowledged making serious mistakes in the program, which was dubbed Operation Fast and Furious.



"I share responsibility for mistakes that were made," McMahon testified to a House committee three weeks ago. "The advantage of hindsight, the benefit of a thorough review of the case, clearly points me to things that I would have done differently."



Three Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives spokesmen did not return phone calls Monday asking about the promotions. But several agents said they found the timing of the promotions surprising, given the turmoil at the agency over the failed program.



McMahon was promoted Sunday to deputy assistant director of the ATF's Office of Professional Responsibility and Security Operations — the division that investigates misconduct by employees and other problems.



Kenneth E. Melson, the ATF's acting director, said in an agency-wide confidential email announcing the promotion that McMahon was among ATF employees being rewarded because of "the skills and abilities they have demonstrated throughout their careers."



Newell was the special agent in charge of the field office for Arizona and New Mexico, where Fast and Furious was conducted. On Aug. 1, the ATF announced he would become special assistant to the assistant director of the agency's Office of Management in Washington.



Voth was an on-the-ground team supervisor for the operation, and last month he was moved to Washington to become branch chief for the ATF's tobacco division.

Shortly after the Los Angeles Times article, the Justice department confirmed that the three had been transferred to D.C. but defined the move as a 'lateral transfer' to 'adminstrative duties'.



The ill-fated Operation Fast and Furious involved the agency allowing weapons purchased on the American side of the border to 'walk' into Mexico- in many cases against the wishes of ATF field agents- where they would supposedly be tracked to leaders of the different Mexican cartels. No cartel leaders were arrested as a result of Fast and Furous- the weapons instead turned up at the scene of the December 2010 shooting death of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry in Arizona and at several crime scenes south of the border.



Additional House Oversight Committee hearings on Operation Fast & Furious are scheduled for later on this year.



Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) sent a letter to the Justice Department demanding answers to reports that there were similar ATF "gun-walking" programs operated out of Texas.

“Until Attorney General (Eric) Holder and Justice Department officials come clean on all alleged gun-walking operations, including a detailed response to allegations of a Texas-based scheme, it is inconceivable to reward those who spearheaded this disastrous operation with cushy desks in Washington,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Last month, acting Director Kenneth Melson admitted to congressional investigators that his agency, in at least one instance, allowed sales of high-powered weapons without intercepting them. Melson accuses his superiors at the Justice Department of stonewalling Congress to protect political appointees in the scandal over those decisions.

Arizona Gun Store Sues Feds Over ATF Order Requiring Tracking of Long Gun Sales in Border States

A Yuma, AZ gun shop is one of two plaintiffs suing the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco & Firearms over a directive to report multiple sales of long guns at gun stores in border states.

The directive, which was passed last month, requires that stores report to the ATF purchases of two or more semiautomatic rifles greater than .22 caliber over the span of five days. The ATF Order comes amid Congressional hearing on the ATF's disatrous Operatation Fast & Furions in which senior ATF officials ordered field agents to allow guns purchased by suspected straw buyers in the USA to 'walk', i.e. be illegally exported to Mexico where they were sold to cartels and other criminal organizations before eventually turning up at crime scenes on both sides of the border- including the fatal December 2010 shooting of US Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.

The move comes after gun control advocates met with Obama administration and Justice department officials earlier this year. In a quote attributed to none other than Sarah Brady, President Obama assured prominent gun control adovcates in a meeting that he was working on gun control 'under the radar'- in other words, through regulatory means and executive orders instead of leaving the volatile and often unpopular issue to the Senate or House of Representatives prior to an election year.

While at first blush, the ATF directive may not seem particularly onerous, kindly consider that this is the agency whose senior officials allowed thousands of weapons to be illeaglly exported to Mexico where they were used by criminal gangs and cartels to kill scored Mexican civilians, public officials, police officers and soliders. Now THE VERY SAME AGENCY is responsible for enforcing this directive?

Even more galling, many retailers were repeatedly warning the ATF about suspicous customers during the Fast & Furious operation; the agency urged them to continue with the transactions nonetheless.

It's also worth contemplating how this month-old directive would prevent arms trafficking when according to diplomatic cables released via Wikileaks, the Mexican cartels are increasingly arming themselves with military-grade weaponry such as rocket launchers, grenades and plastic explosives from poorly-guarded military armories in Central America, not semiautomatic rifles or shotguns from US retailers.

Mexicana Calendar Girls Make Playboy Debut as Former Co-Workers File Suit Against Equity Firm

Within a few months of their wildly popular 2011 calendar, the stewardesses from defunct carrier Mexicana took it off for their debut in the April 2011 edition of the Mexican version of Playboy. At present, there is no word whether or not a 2012 calendar is in the works.

Meanwhile, the 'Aeromozas' former coworkers have filed a lawsuit against Mexican equity firm PC Capital. Some 8000 former Mexicana Airlines employees filed suit against PC Capital after the firm was unable to come up with the US$200 Million it offered for the bankrupt carrier in March. The suit alleges that PC Capital delayed the sale by overstating the funds available and making an offer that wasn't backed up by available economic resources.

Mexicana ceased all flights a just under a year ago, with some of the routes being taken over by low-cost competitors Volaris and Viva Aerobus. Since late 2010, there has been talk among Mexicana's creditors and the government to restore limited service.

Borderline Psychosis Update- Fast & Furious Twin in Fla?; PEMEX Files Suit Over Stolen Oil; If a Tree Falls in the Woods, did the Zetas Cut it Down?

NEW MEXICO: The former mayor of the small border town of Columbus, NM pled guilty to multiple counts of weapons smuggling four months after his arrest.

Eddie Espinoza, 51, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy, three counts of smuggling firearms from the United States and three counts of making false statements.

Former NM mayor admits to gun smuggling: krqe.com

Federal documents state the group smuggled more than 200 guns from New Mexico to the streets of Cíudad Juárez and Palomas, Chihuahua. The documents further state that at times the group used unmarked police cars registered toColumbus to smuggle the guns across the border. Agents had been following the illegal operation for more than a year.

Espinoza is the fourth person to plead guilty in this case so far.

Earlier this month, the village board voted to eliminate the four-man police department as a cost-cutting measure. The Luna County Sheriff's Department will be responsible for patrolling the area now.

In another development on the Columbus case, the El Paso US Attorney's office recently took over the case from the New Mexico US Attorney, although the Justice department has been tight lipped about the reasons behind the switch.

ARIZONA: Recently leaked memos from the Arizona Deparment of Public Safety confirm that Hezbollah has established ties with some of the Mexican cartels in establishing smuggling routes and warn that the terrorist organization may be stockpiling heavy weaponry south of the border.

As evidence, it points to the 2010 Tijuana arrest of Hezbollah militant Jameel Nasr, who was allegedly tasked with establishing a Hezbollah network in Mexico and South America. The memo also recalls the April 2009 arrest of Jamal Yousef in New York, which exposed a huge cache of assault rifles, hand grenades, explosives and anti-tank munitions. According to Yousef, the weapons were stored in Mexico after being smuggled from Iraq by members of Hezbollah.

The memo warns that consequences of partnerships between Hezbollah and Mexico's drug partnerships could be disastrous for Mexico's drug war, given Hezbollah's advanced weapons capabilities — specifically their expertise with improvised explosive devices (IEDs). It notes that some Mexican criminal organizations have started using small IEDs and car bombs, a marked change in tactics that indicates a relationship with Islamic militants

Hezbollah is already active in the tri-border/Iguazu region of South America where the borders of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay meet.

Some experts, while aware of Hezbollah's presence in Mexico, claim that while the organization may have no immediate plans for attacking the USA, the terrorist organization raises funds through criminal activity in Mexico and the USA.

FLORIDA: A possible counterpart to the ATF's Phoenix-based Fast & Furious has come to light in Florida in recent weeks. Guns from a suspected trafficker in Florida under surveillance by the ATF had begun turning up in Puerto Rico, Honduras and Colombia in 2010.

At the center of the operation is 63-year-old Hugh Crumpler III, a well-known Central Florida bass fishing guide and tournament pro. He and 10 others have been charged -- six of whom were in the country illegally. Nine, including Crumpler, are scheduled for sentencing next month in federal court in Orlando. The other two are fugitives and are believed to have fled the country.

Crumpler, who lives in Palm Bay, has admitted to selling the guns and knowing most of them were going out of the country to places such as Honduras, according to court documents. Records show three guns Crumpler bought were used in crimes in Puerto Rico, one just nine days after he bought it. Another gun was used in a homicide in Colombia 66 days after he bought it.

The reports prompted a letter from Congressman Gus Bilirakis (R- FL9) to the ATF enquiring about the scope of Operation Castaway and whether or not the agency allowed any weapons to be 'walked' to Central America or Colombia.

NUEVO LEON: A few weeks ago, Reuters ran a special report titled If Monterrey Falls, Mexico Falls highlighting how the northern industrial center has largely been spared the bloody narco-violence spasming the rest of the country so far, but how that is changing.

If there's any merit to using Mexico's main industrial center as a barometer, then Mexico's problems have only just begun, as the violence in the city has escalated with gunmen massacring 17 people at a bar in the city last weekend.

Monterrey, a major industrial hub, has seen a spike of violence since the Gulf and Zeta cartels began fighting for control of drug traffic there two years ago.

The medical examiner's official said his office has recovered 17 bodies, including those of women, from the crime scene. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record.

Police sources would not confirm the number of dead people with The Associated Press and referred the AP to local prosecutors, who are not giving an official account of the shooting.

Federal police spokesman Jose Ramon Salinas said that high-powered weapons used in the shooting indicated it might have been a drug cartel confrontation.

The uptick in violence in Nuevo Leon could be attributed to violence from neighboring Tamaulipas spilling over.


MICHOACAN: As the cartels have begun expanding their operations into illegal logging, one mountain village is barricading itself in an attempt to preserve the nearby old growth forests.

Masked and wielding rifles, the men of this mountain town stand guard at blockades of tires and sandbags to stop illegal loggers backed by drug traffickers. Their defiance isn’t just about defending their way of life; it’s one of the first major challenges to the reign of terror unleashed by Mexico’s drug cartels.

The indigenous Purepecha people of this town surrounded by mountains of pine forests and neat farmland took security into their own hands last month after loggers, who residents say are backed by cartel henchmen and local police, killed two residents and wounded several others.

“There is no fear here,” said one young man, defiantly peering out between a red handkerchief pulled up to his dark eyes and a camouflage baseball cap riding low over his brow. “Here we are fighting a David-and-Goliath battle because we are standing up to organized crime, which is no small adversary.”

Nearly all residents in the town of 16,000 in the southwestern state of Michoacan spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity because of safety concerns.

The Cheran rebellion is one of the few examples of a town standing up to drug cartels since President Felipe Calderon launched his crackdown on organized crime in late 2006, sparking a national wave of violence that has killed at least 35,000 people. Most Mexicans are too frightened to openly fight back against gangs that have terrorized the country with beheadings and massacres. Some towns in northern Mexico have emptied as cartels move in.

The rebellion in Cheran caught the attention of the federal government, which deployed troops and federal police last week to patrol the outskirts of the town.

“La Familia has the heaviest presence in the zone. Everything indicates that it’s them because they have the biggest presence, but we can’t say for sure,” said David Pena, a lawyer who has been representing the community in negotiations for protection with the federal government.

Disputes over communal woods — between those who want to log indiscriminately and those who subsist on forest products — has long been a source of conflict in southwestern Mexico. The federal government has stepped up efforts against deforestation, conducting raids and shutting down illegal sawmills.

But rogue loggers have become more violent as they align themselves with drug cartels, said Rupert Knox, a Mexico researcher at London-based Amnesty International, which has investigated the crisis in Cheran.

“Illegal logging has gone hand-in-glove with criminal gangs. They have moved into that sphere and controlled it with extreme brutality and corruption of local officials,” Knox said.

The animosity came to a head in Cheran when residents captured five illegal loggers on April 15 as their truck attempted to smuggle out illegally harvested wood.

Two hours later, a convoy of armed men rumbled into the town to free the detained loggers, accompanied by local police, according to Pena and Amnesty International. One Cheran man was shot in the head and remains in a coma. But the townspeople, through force of numbers, managed to drive out the gunmen.

In apparent reprisal, loggers shot and killed two Cheran men and wounded four others who were patrolling the woods on April 27.

Angry Cheran residents stormed the local police headquarters, seizing 18 guns. They swiftly barricaded the town, piling sandbags and tires beneath plastic tents at several checkpoints along the main road. Young men with rifles keep track of residents venturing out and question anyone trying to get in.

Classes have been suspended at the town’s more than 20 schools, which draw students from neighboring communities because both Spanish and the Purepecha language are taught. Instead, young boys hang out at the barricades, covering their faces with handkerchiefs and pretending to patrol with plastic toy guns.

“Everything is paralyzed out of fear that this gang might attack the children,” said a soft-spoken man wearing a white bandana and a black wool cap at a checkpoint.

The municipal police dissolved itself. Mayor Roberto Bautista Chapina reported the guns stolen but has otherwise stayed out of the dispute, trying not to inflame tensions. He said the Cheran men attacked the police chief and grabbed his gun.

Community leaders and Interior Department representatives met Tuesday in the state capital of Morelia and agreed on a long-term security plan, Pena said. The government promised to set up two bases outside the town for army troops and federal and state police, who will patrol the hills and forests and meet weekly with Cheran leaders. Residents will be allowed to keep protecting the town on their own.

Among many observers, this is thought to be the most direct challenge to the cartels since the reported last stand of rancher and businessman Don Alejo Garza last year. It's also worth noting that as an organization, La Familia is pretty much finished thanks to infighting and it's leadership on the run or imprisoned with the rest of the organization reconstituting themselves into the Knights Templar.

ELSEWHERE IN MICHOACAN: Speaking of the Knights Templar, Mexican Federal Police have arrested the man they claim oversees killings for the young organization. Javier Beltran Arco- aka 'El Chivo'- was arrested along with two lookouts in Michoacan this month. Also seized were two pounds of methamphetamine and three automatic rifles.

At the Lazaro Cardenas seaport, officials also intercepted containers from Shanghai, China carrying 44 metric tons worth of chemicals used to manufacture methamphetamine.

TEXAS: PEMEX, Mexico's state run oil company, has filed a lawsuit against nine companies in the US District Court in Houston, TX last month. The suit alleges that the nine companies and two individuals named in the suit have either willingly or unknowingly received oil stolen from PEMEX pipelines.

Pemex said the suit is intended to "combat the theft and smuggling of gas condensate from its facilities in northern Mexico," including tanker trucks hijacked at gunpoint in northern Mexico. The thefts involved dozens of tanker-truck loads.

The suit does not claim any of the U.S. firms participated in the actual robberies, but says some knowingly conspired to ship the stolen goods, while others unwittingly handled them.

"All of the defendants have participated and profited, knowingly or unwittingly, in the trafficking of stolen condensate in the United States," the suit says, referring to a mix of oil liquids produced as a byproduct of natural gas wells.

"Some of the defendants knew, or at least should have known, they were trading in, or transporting, stolen condensate," the suit says. "Others were ignorant that they were purchasing stolen goods. In either case, however, the defendants took possession of Mexico's sovereign property without right or title. All defendants are therefore liable for their individual usurpation of Mexico's patrimony."

The lawsuit does not name a specific amount of damages being sought, but argues that the sued companies are liable for part or all of the $300 million in oil stolen since 2006.

Pemex has "lost large amounts of its condensate, at times approaching 40 percent of the production of condensate from the Burgos Field," the suit says.

A joint U.S.-Mexico investigation in 2010 found that smuggled oil stolen from Pemex was being transported across the border and sold to U.S. refineries. The Mexican government has said drug cartel members and other criminals are responsible for many of the oil thefts.

This would not be the first time organized crime in Mexico branched out into the theft and resale of stolen natural resources as the value of said resources went up.

PEMEX, for its part, has claimed that a crackdown earlier this year has led to a decline in the amount of oil stolen from the national oil company's pipelines, but the thieves have been switching tactics as well as allegedly employing the cartels to help them smuggle and sell off the stolen product.

Gangs are still believed to earn hundreds of millions of dollars a year tapping Mexico's vast, but largely unprotected, pipeline network

We're seeing changes. They are tapping into (propane) pipelines. We've also found some double taps that the criminals use to inject water into the pipes to stop the detection of a loss of pressure," Pemex Chief Executive Juan Jose Suarez said during testimony before a congressional panel last week.

Fuel thieves traditionally focused on stealing gasoline and diesel for sale on the local black market, but gangs increasingly have set their sights on crude oil.

Pemex found 712 connections to its network last year, nearly double the number found the year before and five times the amount detected in 2005.

Two crude pipelines were the most tapped nationwide last year with 191 illegal connections, up from only five in 2005.

Pemex believes thieves siphoned off about 10,000 barrels of crude worth more than $700,000 every day last year.

Officials say the crude most likely ends up with brickmakers and other industrial customers who use it as a substitute for boiler fuel. Privately they admit criminals may be smuggling the oil out of Mexico, given the relatively small size of the domestic market for industrial boiler fuel.

Drug cartels, which extort protection money from fuel theft gangs who are often made up of current and former oil industry workers, are believed to provide the expertise to smuggle siphoned oil into the United States.

Court papers indicate that Mexican and U.S. authorities believe the Zetas cartel helped one gang move up to $300 million in condensate -- a liquid byproduct of natural gas used to make plastics -- into Texas by bribing customs officials, using false transit documents and hiring middlemen to sell it to some of the world's largest chemical companies.

A similar scheme with crude would be easy to replicate and hard to detect due to the huge size of the oil market. Pemex officials say the origin of the smuggled crude can be easily concealed by blending it with legitimately-obtained oil.

The companies named in the suit include Big Star Gathering LTD, F&M Transportation Inc., Western Refining Company LP, Joplin Energy LLC, Superior Crude Gathering Inc., Plains All-American [NYSE- PAA], TransMontaigne Partners LP of Denver, Colorado [NYSE- TLP], SemCrude LP of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and Saint James Oil Inc. of Sandy, Utah.

MEXICO CITY: Another seemingly mundane avenue that various cartels have muscled into include movie piracy.

Led by the notorious La Familia and Los Zetas drug mafias, Mexican cartels now take a big cut of the hundreds of millions of dollars in bootleg disks sold in Mexico each year, according to U.S. officials and representatives of film studios and software manufacturers.

“This is no longer a victimless crime. There is blood on the product,” said Federico de la Garza, managing director of the Motion Picture Association in Mexico City, whose own investigators work closely with the Mexican attorney general.

Disk piracy and U.S. copyright violations are a challenge around the world, but in Mexico the sale of bootleg copies of “Toy Story 3” and Microsoft Windows XP are funding the powerful mafias whose relentless violence has left more than 35,000 Mexicans dead in the past four years.

Mexico has become the pirate capital of Latin America, exporting so many bootleg movies to Central America, for example, that the major studios no longer bother to sell their products on the shelves there, according to industry watchdogs.

And in Cancun or Monterrey or Tijuana, when you buy a bootleg Disney movie for the kids, it is as likely as not to bare a stamp that shows it was distributed by the Zetas (a stallion) or La Familia (a butterfly).

Video piracy is ubiquitous in Mexico, where more than nine of 10 movie DVDs sold are counterfeits. Mexican authorities rarely seize products from street dealers or market stalls. U.S. officials in Mexico suspect many vendors give kickbacks to local authorities to allow them to operate.

While its likely that they aren't producing the bootleg DVDs themselves, the cartels usually make their money through taking over distribution routes and demanding protection money from vendors operating in territory they've taken over.


BAJA CALIFORNIA: Mexican soldiers detained 58 people and seized an estimated US$160 billion worth of pot after stumbling across a massive 300 acre marijuana plantation in the northern part of the state last month.

Mexican officials call it the largest seizure of marijuana on record and claim that the plantation had been operational for less than four months.

Army officers said that the crop was discovered under canopies less than two miles off of Route 1, the main highway that traverses the Baja Peninsula. Although 58 people were taken into custody at the time of the raid, it appears that nearly twice as many people were working there. Although the territory was controlled by the Tijuana-based Arellano Felix cartel, that organization was one of the first organizations to have been undermined by President Calderon's stepped up attacks against the narcos.

A spokesman for the Mexican Army's second region believes that Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman's Sinaloa cartel had a hand in setting up the massive plantation.

TAMAULIPAS: At least 60 inmates managed to escape a state prison in Nuevo Laredo in a jailbreak that was thought to be orchestrated by Los Zetas, across the Rio Grande from Laredo, TX.

Seven prisoners were also killed during the escape, which the government said was preceded by a large-scale fight between inmates. Five employees of the prison, the Centro de Ejecución de Sanciones (CEDES), also deserted their posts. Thirty-five of the inmates were being jailed on federal charges.

The escape marks the second time in eight months the city has seen a mass exodus of criminals from the prison. In December about 140 inmates escaped, which Cuellar attributed to a plan orchestrated by the Zetas to swell its ranks after suffering heavy losses throughout its ongoing battles against rival gangs and law enforcement. The sheriff could not confirm that today’s escape was part of a similar plan.

Between January 2010 and March 2011, more than 400 inmates have escaped from five prisons operated under the state's authority in Tamaulipas.

[Hat tip: Correspondence Committee; Borderland Beat; Friends of Ours]

Borderline Psychosis- Calderon Meets with Critics; Mexican Army Finds Cartel's Homemade 'Tanks', La Familia Unravels

MEXICO CITY: Mexican president Felipe Calderon took the unusual step of meeting with peace activists and victims of Mexico's drug violence in a televised meeting called 'Dialogue for Peace', but defended his hard-line strategy of using the military to crack down against the drug cartels.

[Poet-activist Javier] Sicilia demanded Calderon apologize for carnage that has left an estimated 40,000 dead, and demanded a change in the government's anti-crime strategy. But Calderon, flanked by Cabinet officials, repeated once more that it would be wrong to alter the basic thrust — a military-led campaign against the country's powerful cartels.

Calderon also said he would like to be remembered for other things he has done during his administration, such as building hospitals, fortifying education and legal institutions, and his environmental initiatives. But the conservative president admitted he will "probably be remembered for [the drug war], and probably with much injustice."

The meeting, at Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City, was televised live and attended by other relatives of victims of drug-related violence.

May not be too often I get to say this, but Calderon is absolutely correct. The problem of corruption and emboldened narcocriminals killing with impunity simply does not go away if the president orders the troops to the barracks, and state and local police have often demonstrated that they are unwilling to take on the cartels- or even operate in concert with them.


TAMAULIPAS: Members of the Mexican military on patrol on the northwestern state last month discovered a pair of homemade 'tanks' reportedly belonging to Los Zetas.

The patrol came across the warehouse when they clashed with a group of armed men in the town of Ciudad Camargo, in the far northeastern state of Tamaulipas. Two of the gunmen were killed in a firefight, while two hid inside the warehouse.

"We found two home-made armored trucks in the warehouse, which belongs to the Gulf Cartel," the military source told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The trucks were covered in steel plates one inch (2.5 centimeters) thick, strong enough to "resist the caliber of personal weapons the soldiers use," said the source.

The air-conditioned armored vehicles were equipped with portholes where snipers could open fire from and remain protected.

The home-made tanks are used in clashes with other drug cartels as well as to protect drug shipments.

In recent years, soldiers deployed in the northeastern Mexican border region have confiscated 109 home-made armored vehicles -- including one dubbed the "Popemobile" because it carried an armored cabin similar to that used to protect Pope Benedict XVI in foreign trips.

In May, police in the western state of Jalisco carrying out a sweep against the Los Zetas drug cartel discovered an armored vehicle large enough to carry 20 armed men and also equipped with weapons portholes.

The soldiers also found more than 20 big rigs in the warehouse that were apparently waiting to be up-armoured.

Over the last couple of years, the Mexican military has seized over 100 of these home made armoured vehicles- sometimes dubbed 'El Monstruo' by locals- designed to either attack rival gangs or protect high value shipments. The vehicles often cobbled together from dump trucks, garbage trucks or even heavy duty work trucks with inch-thick steel plating welded on. While the plating and strategically placed bulletproof glass make the vehicles nearly impervious to small-arms fire, they also are exceptionally slow and cumbersome, thus largely offsetting whatever advantage they'd provide in an assault with having to move it from point A to point B while maintaining the element of surprise.

ELSEWHERE IN TAMAULIPAS: The Houston Chronicle published a report earlier this month citing an unnamed cartel operative who claimed that Los Zetas had kidnapped passengers from buses running along Mexican National highway 101 through Tamaulipas and forced some of the abducted passengers into death matches with each other while raping and killing others.

In one of the most chilling revelations yet about the violence in Mexico, a drug cartel-connected trafficker claims fellow gangsters have kidnapped highway bus passengers and forced them into gladiator like fights to groom fresh assassins.

Members of the Zetas cartel, he says, have pushed passengers into an ancient Rome-like blood sport with a modern Mexico twist that they call, "Who is going to be the next hit man?"

"They cut guys to pieces," he said.

The victims are likely among the hundreds of people found in mass graves in recent months, he said.

Many are believed to have been dragged off buses traveling through Mexico, but little has been said about the circumstances of their deaths.

The trafficker said those who survive are taken captive and eventually given suicide missions, such as riding into a town controlled by rivals and shooting up the place.

The trafficker said he did not see the clashes, but his fellow criminals have boasted to him of their exploits.

Former and current federal law-enforcement officers in the U.S. said that while they knew Mexican bus passengers had been targeted for violence, they'd never before heard of forcing passengers into death matches.

But given the level of violence in Mexico — nearly 40,000 killed in gangland warfare over the past several years — they didn't find it tough to believe.

Borderland Beat, a blog specializing in drug cartels, reported an account in April of bus passengers brutalized by Zeta thugs and taunted into fighting.

"The stuff you would not think possible a few years ago is now commonplace," said Peter Hanna, a retired FBI agent who built his career focusing on Mexico's cartels. "It used to be you'd find dead bodies in drums with acid; now there are beheadings."

Even so, Hanna noted, killing people this way would be time-consuming and inefficient. "It would be more for amusement," he suggested. "I don't see it as intimidation or a successful way to recruit people."

While an outlandish anonymously-sourced story from an individual with a criminal background, the tale of forcing bus passengers into death matches would be consistent with autopsy findings that most of the 183 people pulled from the graves were killed by blunt force trauma, not gunshot wounds.

Earlier this month, Federal prosecutors in Mexico have charged 73 people in the mass killings, including at least seven police officers in the town of San Fernando.

MICHOACAN: Jose de Jesus Mendez Vargas- aka "El Chango" (the monkey)- was arrested by Mexican federal police at a checkpoint in the state of Aguascalientes without incident this week. Vargas, who was the de-facto head of the cult-like La Familia Michoacana cartel after military raids resulted in the killing or capture of top members back in December, started out as a hitman for the Gulf cartel, but cast his lot with the quasi-evangelical La Familia cartel when they asserted themselves along Mexico's western coast and in their namesake state in recent years.

La Familia was reportedly financially struggling to the point where they couldn't afford to pay hitmen, while Vargas was soliciting help and manpower from one-time rivals Los Zetas. After La Familia shot down a Mexican Army helicopter in May. Acting on documents obtained in the raid where the helicopter was downed, Police raided a meeting in nearby Jalisco. Information from one of the suspects arrested in that meeting led to the arrest of Vargas. While Vargas' capture may very well be the death knell for La Familia, other organizations including one made up of former La Familia members displaced after the December army raids continue to operate openly in the state.

The remnants of La Familia had been fighting with another faction that had broken off to form another cartel called the Knights Templar, which like La Familia, portrays themselves as Robin Hood-esque figures protecting the people of Michoacan from the invasive designs of the police, military or rival drug gangs.

CHIHUAHUA: A CBS investigative report has discovered that an AK47-variant rifle allowed to cross the Mexican border from the USA as part of the ATF's disastrous Operation Fast & Furious was involved in the abduction and slaying of Mario Gonzalez Rodgriguez- the brother of Chihuahua's then-state attorney general Patricia Gonzalez Rodriguez. In a video filmed shortly before he was killed in 2010, Mario appears in handcuffs and flanked by masked gunmen while being forced to read a statement that his sister was working on behalf of La Linea cartel.

Police later arrested 8 members of the Sinaloa cartel, confiscated their weapons and found Gonzalez Rodriguez's body buried under a home under construction in Chihuahua.

ELSEWHERE IN CHIHUAHUA: The police chief for the embattled border city of Ciudad Juarez survived an assassination attempt on Thursday in downtown Juarez.

City officials said two men opened fire on Leyzaola and his motorcade while they patrolled La Chaveña neighborhood near downtown Juárez, an area known for crime.

Leyzaola's bodyguards returned fire and wounded one of the attackers, identified as Roberto López Valles, 24, officials said. The other attacker fled.

Authorities detained López Valles in connection with the ambush and seized a gun and a weapon's magazine at the scene.

A retired Mexican army officer, Police Chief Julian Leyzaola was sworn in as the city's police chief in March and vowed to crack down on organized crime operating in the city and purge corrupt officers from the Juarez police department.

TEXAS: Officers from the Texas Rangers and other law enforcement agencies were involved in a cross-border shootout outside the town of Abram, TX earlier this month.

The incident began about 6:30 a.m. Thursday, when U.S. Border Patrol agents spotted a Dodge Durango near the lightly populated border town of Abram, Texas, said Steve McGraw, director of the Department of Public Safety Director. He joined officials from Border Patrol and Texas Fish and Wildlife for a news conference Friday in Weslaco, roughly 250 miles south of San Antonio and just north of the river separating Mexico and the U.S.

Agents who gave chase found the truck abandoned on the banks of the Rio Grande, and a group of people on the Mexican shore unloading bundles of marijuana from rubber rafts, according to the Department of Public Safety.

Border Patrol agents say Mexican smugglers often use small, high-quality rafts to float drugs into U.S. territory, where they load them onto waiting vehicles to be taken farther north. Of late, however, smugglers wait with the rafts in American territory in case the vehicles are spotted and have to flee back to the river. There, they quickly put the drugs back onto the rafts and head back to Mexico to keep U.S. authorities from seizing the load.

The group threw rocks and shot "at least six" rounds at American agents, who responded by flooding the area with gunfire, the Department of Public Safety said. A U.S. Border Patrol boat was the first to arrive on the scene, followed by boats from Texas Parks and Wildlife and one belonging to the Texas Rangers, it said.

Authorities said they are still looking into how many Americans fired shots and what agencies they were from.

Three suspects on the Mexican side of the river were believed injured or killed, although authorities in that country were still working to confirm that. Two U.S. game wardens were treated for cuts and abrasions after being struck with rocks.

A video shot from a Department of Public Safety helicopter shows a blue raft with bundles of marijuana packed in plastic and burlap. Smoke is seen pouring from a small structure nearby, although what caused the fire is unclear.

U.S. authorities seized the Durango but found no drugs in it. They contacted authorities in Mexico, who seized about 400 pounds of marijuana on that side of the river and destroyed a raft left behind. No arrests were made.

The Texas Department of Public Safety, whose Rangers were involved in the shootout, said such an overwhelming response was standard given the United States' zero tolerance policy when guns are pointed at its authorities. Department officials previously said the Americans were under "heavy fire," but they've since backed away from that.

Delicia Lopez- Valley Monitor

ELSEWHERE IN TEXAS: Police in San Juan, TX discovered more than 1700 rounds of .50 cal BMG machine gun ammunition concealed in cases after attempting to pull over a truck driven by two illegal aliens earlier this month.

Police found more than 1,700 rounds of military-grade ammunition, commonly used by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, during a Monday evening traffic stop.

Investigators believe the load was headed to Mexico.

San Juan police stopped the driver of a Ford F-150 pickup near the intersection of “I” Road and Business 83 about 7:30 p.m. after an officer noticed the vehicle had a broken tail light, Sgt. Rolando Garcia said.

The driver, later identified in a federal court document as 34-year-old Miguel Angel Avendano-Reyna, drove into the parking lot of an H-E-B near the area before he and his passenger tried to flee on foot, police said. But two officers at the scene, including Garcia, were able to apprehend both of them after a short pursuit.

A search of the vehicle led to the discovery of 16 boxes and a black duffle bag under the truck’s back seat, Garcia said. Each container was filled with at least 100 rounds of .50-caliber ammunition.

The suspects had apparently picked up the load from an undisclosed residence in San Juan, and they had agreed to drop it off to an unidentified person in Hidalgo County for a payment of $250, officials said.

“This is something different for us. We usually get marijuana or other narcotics, but this type of seizure is big, especially with this type of ammunition,” Garcia said. The bullets were attached to a belt used for automatic weapons. “These have had confirmed kills in the military from as far as 3 miles away and it’s very destructive. It’s a very deadly round.”

The bullets are so powerful that they will go through bullet-proof vests and even armored vehicles and tanks, Garcia said.

San Juan police teamed up with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to continue investigating, Garcia said.

Avendano-Reyna and his passenger Jose Resendez-Olivares, 37, both are illegal immigrants who previously were deported a few months ago, according to federal court documents.

Avendano-Reyna, who admitted to authorities he knowingly possessed the rounds, was deported in September, while Resendez-Olivares, who claimed he helped load the boxes but didn’t know what was in them, was removed from the U.S. in November, documents show.

CENTRAL AMERICA: El Salvador's defense minister has asserted that Mexican drug traffickers are continuing to try and acquire high-powered weaponry through police and military forces in Central America.

Mexican officials have long said the most of the guns used by the cartels are smuggled in from the United States.

But Gen. David Munguia warns that the gangs have expanded into Central America are also trying to buy weapons there.

Munguia said Tuesday "there is a real threat," just days after his army arrested two noncommissioned officers and four soldiers accused of trying to steal 1,812 grenades.

The soldiers were allegedly trying to sell the grenades to gang members and drug traffickers in neighboring Guatemala, where Mexico's Zetas cartel has been active.

Earlier this month, Salvadoran military intelligence agents arrested a junior officer who deserted in December 2010 and was attempting to sell three M-16 rifles as well as uniforms to a civilian through to be an intermediary for drug traffickers.