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Captured Zetas "Piracy Czar" linked to Sicario Group

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Borderland Beat
 
In his statements to authorities, Villanueva said that the profits obtained, he personally handed to Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano, the Lazca'''

Mexican authorities today presented to journalists the detained Gregorio Villanueva Salas, known as "piracy czar", alleged member of Los Zetas cartel and charged with several grenade attacks .

A statement was read  during the perp presentation by a  SEDENA spokesman Colonel Ricardo Trevill.  The statement reported that Villanueva was arrested by soldiers on  June 11th  in the city of Monterrey,  along with three other members of his gang, who were also presented to the press. An that Villanueva  was "one of the main operators" Los Zetas.

Zetas are known for their extreme brutality in their treatment towards their victims. 

According to the source, the detainee controlled production and distribution of pirate discs in the states of Zacatecas, San Luis Potosi, Nuevo Leon, Coahuila and Nuevo Laredo on the border with the United States.

In his statements to the authorities Villanueva said that the profits obtained were personally handed  to Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano, "the Lazca", considered the leader of Los Zetas. With the arrest of Villanueva, the statement said, "it shortens the flow of resources for the criminal organization .

" The drug cartels in Mexico have for years been moving away from drugs as their only revenue as they extend   its activities to commit crimes such as kidnapping, extortion and piracy. Trevilla, reading the joint statement from the Department of Defense and the Attorney General's Office (PGR) said Villanueva is allegedly responsible for an undetermined number of attacks on schools, businesses, media and military installations. 

 in the northern city of Matamoros, these actions, according to the same source, they focused on cities such as  Matamoros to  "create a climate of violence" and "affect the activities" of a rival organized crime group, the Gulf Cartel.

According to their statements to the authorities, Villanueva said that the bodies found on June 7 Tamaulipas, in the north east Mexico,  were  members of Los Zetas who were murdered by the Gulf Cartel "in retaliation for their involvement in attacks with grenades".

Along with Villanueva were arrested Rodolfo Cornejo Chan, Christian Gonzalez Miguel Navarrete Ruben Dario Martinez and Alvarado. During the arrest of the group, the military seized four rifles (including a submachine gun), a handgun, ammunition, six vehicles and about 291 thousand pesos in cash.

 The detainees will be prosecuted for the crimes of organized crime , violation of the Firearms Act, illegal resource operations and unlawful use of copyrighted material.

Sources: Notimex and Informador

Victor Baez, Kidnapped Crime Reporter, Found Murdered In Veracruz

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Victor Baez

MEXICO CITY, June 14 (Reuters) - Assailants kidnapped and killed a reporter who covered the crime beat in Mexico's Veracruz state, officials said on Thursday, the latest in a series of attacks on journalists amid a relentless drug war across the country.

Victor Baez, who worked for Mexican daily newspaper Milenio was abducted when he was leaving his office in the town of Xalapa late Wednesday and police found his body in the morning in the city center, said Gina Dominguez, spokeswoman for Veracruz state government.

Dominguez said the assailants were three armed men but did not give details about how Baez was killed.

"Victor Baez's murderers committed a crime that hurt his family and all journalists. Their aim is to intimidate society," Dominguez told a tearful news conference which was attended by fellow reporters who had worked alongside Baez for years.

Several journalists have left Veracruz state in recent months fearing for their lives, but Baez had insisted on staying to cover his beat.

"He told me, 'Friend, we cannot and should not live in fear and darkness. We won't let them impose terror on us,'" Dominguez said.

Baez is at least the sixth journalist to have been murdered in Mexico in the last two months. One crime reporter was killed in the northern Sonora state and another in Morelos state near Mexico City.

Three other journalists have been slain in Veracruz, which has seen a surge in violence as the Zetas cartel battles rivals for control of drug trafficking routes to the United States.

On Friday, a crime reporter in the northern state of Coahuila went missing along with her 2-year-old son. Stephania Cardoso, 28, works for the Zocalo daily in the city of Saltillo.

"We are deeply concerned by the disappearance of Stephania Cardoso and her son," said Joel Simon, director of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

More than 80 journalists have been murdered in Mexico since 2000, according to Mexico's National Human Rights Commission. (Reporting by Ioan Grillo; editing by Mohammad Zargham)


Mexican reporter Victor Baez is seen in Veracruz

Additional related source:
Map of Journalists killed in Mexico

Mexico crime reporter found killed in Veracruz state

Police arrest 52 alleged Zetas in Nuevo Leon

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Police arrested 52 suspected employees of the notoriously violent Los Zetas drug cartel in the northern Mexican state of Nuevo Leon, officials said Wednesday.

The detainees include two municipal police officers and two ex-cops, state Attorney General Adrian de la Garza told a press conference here.

He said those four individuals are believed to be the leaders of a Zetas cell.

The 39 men, eight women and five minors were arrested over a four-day period in the towns of Linares, Allende, Galeana, Iturbide and Montemorelos.

The five underage suspects are accused of acting as lookouts to alert the Zetas to movements of the security forces, the attorney general said.

Police seized assault rifles and torture devices during the raids, state government security spokesman Jorge Domene said.

Nuevo Leon, which borders Texas, and other states in northern Mexico, have been battered in recent years as the upstart Zetas battle the more-established drug cartels for control of territory and smuggling routes.

To earn extra cash, some cartel “sicarios” (hit men) engage in kidnapping, extortion and armed robbery.

Conflict among rival cartels and between criminals and the Mexican security forces have claimed more than 50,000 lives since December 2006, when newly inaugurated President Felipe Calderon militarized the struggle against organized crime. 
EFE

New Mexico Mayor is Sentenced for Smuggling Guns to La Linea

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Borderland Beat

Read a BB related post of Buggs HERE

Ashley Meeks Reuters
The ousted mayor of a small New Mexico border town who helped run nearly 200 firearms to a violent Mexican drug cartel was sentenced on Thursday to 51 months in prison, authorities said.

Eddie Espinoza, 52, the former mayor of Columbus, received the sentence from U.S. District Judge Robert Brack in federal court in Las Cruces, New Mexico, U.S. Attorney Robert Pitman said.

Brack also ordered three years of supervised release for Espinoza, who pleaded guilty in July 2011 to conspiracy, three counts of making false statements in the acquisition of firearms and three counts of smuggling firearms from the United States.

Espinoza, who faced up to 50 years in prison, is among 12 defendants who pleaded guilty to charges in the gun-running conspiracy.

From January 2010 until March 2011, Espinoza bought 16 firearms from Chaparral Guns in Chaparral, New Mexico, falsely stating on federal forms he was buying them for himself, even though he knew they were illegally destined for Mexico, prosecutors said Thursday.

Espinoza also agreed to allow former Columbus Village Trustee Blas Gutierrez, the alleged ringleader of the conspiracy, and others, to use city-owned vehicles to transport the weapons south over the border, they said.

The guns were among 193 Kalashnikov-type assault weapons and 9 mm pistols purchased by the conspirators, who used their positions to enable trafficking of the around $70,000 worth of firearms to Mexico.

Some of those weapons were later recovered at drug busts and implicated in murders in Mexico, where more than 55,000 people have been killed in cartel-related mayhem since 2006.

Prosecutors said tactical gear and body armor were also smuggled to the Ciudad Juarez-based La Linea criminal organization, sometimes using village vehicles.

Members of La Linea, formed by rogue police officers in the northern Mexico state of Chihuahua, act as enforcers for the Juarez cartel, a group also based in Ciudad Juarez that controls some of the main drug trafficking routes into the United States.

Espinoza is the fourth defendant to be sentenced in the case. Vicente "Tito" Carreon was sent to prison in March for 46 months, Brenda Christy received two years' probation in April for making a false statement in the acquisition of a firearm, and Ian Garland, the owner of Chaparral Guns in Chaparral, New Mexico, received a five-year prison sentence in May.

Gutierrez, the former village trustee and Espinoza's nephew, remains in federal custody awaiting sentencing. He faces up to 280 years in prison, while former Columbus police chief Angelo Vega could be sentenced to 35 years. All have pleaded guilty.

Gutierrez's wife, who has not pleaded guilty, was set to start trial in April in Las Cruces, but Pitman's office said on Thursday that case is "pending litigation." A final defendant, Ignacio "Nacho" Villalobos, remains a fugitive.

Vega, who was not charged in the gun purchases, bought thousands of dollars in body armor, boots, helmets and clothing, including a bulletproof vest for a La Linea enforcer, who has not been named in public documents.

Mexico's Cartels and How it Got to This

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By ACI for Borderland Beat
 
How it happen….
The war began before Calderon, but no one could have known what lay in store.  It was so unlikely; most thought that some arrangements would be made, life would go on as it always had.  But as time passed it became clear this was not to be and many simply wished that this Pandora's box would simply close.  Little did anyone know how pervasive and ingrained the darkness had become.

Only a few saw the demons lurking in the shadows, even then no one predicted what lay ahead.   The true roots of the evil had been lurking within the almost 80 year reign of the PRI and its predisposition to corruption.  The system was well worn, the networks had been laid, there was a price for everything, and this was all before the age of the Narco.

When the PRI lost to the PAN in 2000, it shook the foundation of the system to its core.  The old way of doing things had radically changed, the old networks fragmented, alliances broken, and what we have now come to know as the fragmentation of Mexico's criminal underworld had begun.  The chaos had arisen.  This was the cost of years and years of nepotism and corruption and the consequences were finally coming to pass.

Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo
The Godfather and His Empire
There was a time when one man stood above all others.  He was part of the old guard, well entrenched with the workings of the world in which he lived.  His name was Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo or El Padrino (The Godfather); he oversaw over an entire empire; his industry, illegal smuggling.

He was soon to create what would soon be know as the Mexican Cartel.  For years his network remained unchallenged, immune to justice.  At the time Felix Gallardo was untouchable, too big to fail as they would say.  His organization laid the foundation for the TCO’s to come.

He masterfully greased the hands of politicos and high ranking military officials.  He reached out and began relationships with the Colombians.  The relationship he forged with the Colombians was to be worth more than even he could imagine.  Seemed like there was nothing anyone could do about El Padrino or his organization. That was until the untimely death of DEA agent Enrique Camarena.
Enrique "Kiki" Camarena
The Attention One Receives
Enrique Camarena, an agent with the Drug Enforcement Agency began working in Guadalajara in 1981.  His goal was to find out how powerful the Guadalajara Cartel had become.  At the time he was only one of a handful of agents working within Mexico.  He spent years infiltrating the Guadalajara Cartel for the DEA and had built close ties to El Padrino.  Everything was going according to plan until the betrayal. 

In 1984 Camarena led a raid on a 10,000 acre plantation called the Buffalo Ranch.  Miguel; through his network of police and federal informers quickly became aware of Enrique’s role in the raid.  The ranch was reportedly worth 8 billion dollars.  To Miguel and his ego this was  line that should have never been crossed. 

Miguel reacted and had Enrique kidnapped, tortured then killed, to serve as a warning to any who might want to disrupt cartel business.  The blow back was historic; the United States began the largest murder investigation in its history.  It did not take long before Miguel was identified as a target of interest.  The United States put an enormous amount of pressure on the Mexican Government to apprehend Miguel.  It would take the authorities 5 more years before they would be able to secure his arrest in 1989.


All Empires Eventually Fall
But as with all kings, his reign was to come to an end, all kings eventually fall.  Miguel could see the wheels in motion, he could hear the whispers from those that tended to his mansion, his telephones were a lit with the chatter of governors he had so faithfully served.  He listened as his friends in the government turned on him, the end was near.

He thought he might be able to save what he had built; that he could prevent his subjects from feeding on each other.  He was wrong.  Little did he know how fragile his empire had become, or the monsters he would release upon the Mexican people.  Prior to his arrest he held a meeting in the upscale tourist town of Acapulco.

Here he met with his top lieutenants; Arellano Felix, Carrillo Feuntes, Miguel Quintero, Juan Abergo, Chapo Guzman and Mayo Zambada.  During this meeting he divided up his empire.  Tijuana went the Arellano Felix brothers, Sonora would go to Miguel Quintero, Guzman and Zambada would get Sinaloa and Juarez would go to Carrillo Feuntes.

The Gulf would remain in the hands of Juan Abergo.  His plan worked for a short while, but greed has its own temptations, and the empire he sacrificed his soul for, was doomed to fail.
 

Let the Good Times Roll
One major shift occurred in the early 1980’s with the Cocaine Wars in Florida.  As law enforcement started to seal off the Caribbean route, as it was called, the money dried up and the routes shifted west; towards Mexico and its porous border with the US.  Prior to this Mexican drug traffickers mainly focused on marijuana and opiate cultivation.  El Padrino had already established connection with the Colombian Cartels, so the transition came naturally.

Cocaine brought with it vast amounts of cash, but with that cash also came blood.  The influx of cash changed the face of the game.  It also changed its nature, violence increased as did the tactics used to intimidate enemies.   It turned one king into to many; soon it would be the Mexicans dictating to the Colombians how the game was played.

Nothing was too expensive, anything could be purchased, and everyone could be bought.  This is the moment that the Mexican Cartels became the main suppliers of drugs to the United States.

Ramon Arellano Felix
The Peace is Broken
It wasn’t long before Guzman started warring with the Arellano Felix brothers.  In the early nineties the Arellano Felix brothers; Ramon in particular, branded extreme violence as par for the course.  Savage daylight hits, terrible stories of torture and vats filled with acid became their legacy.

The war between Guzman and Ramon took place during the early 1990’s. The war hit its climax with the killing of Archbishop at the Tijuana airport.  But while the world was focused was on the AFO, the rest of Mexico’s criminal underworld were quietly making moves in the shadows, and they were just beginning.

The Gulf Cartel which had been around since the 1950’s smuggling booze and other forms of contraband across the border began consolidating power.  The Juarez Cartel run by Carrillo Feuntes, which at the time was considered the most sophisticated and wealthy of the cartels was enjoying the height of its power.  It operating fleet of 747s that were so well known, law enforcement gave Carrillo Feuntes the nickname, the lord of the skies.

During this period Carrillo Feuntes work closely with a man who would become known as the king maker amongst the underworld.  His name was Juan José Esparragoza Moreno or El Azul.
Carrillo Feuntes "The Lord of the Skies"
 Another Fragmentation
In the 1990’s the Lord of the Skies died from complications during a surgery. Many members defected and joined up with Guzman and his gang.  Guzman was arrested but his organization was kept afloat by Beltran Levya brothers, Mayo and El Azul.

The game was changing; some of the original leaders grew closer, while others grew further apart.  Family ties were fostered, while others were severed, the wheels of destiny were slowing starting to turn.  Marriage became a popular way of gaining grace, or hedging bets.

So with the CDJ losing many of its members to CDS and the AFO losing ground due to key arrests and deaths, the stage was set for what was to come.  The Gulf Cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel were primed and ready to go toe to toe.
The New Golden Goose
Before the Sinaloa and the Gulf Cartels beef began another unforeseen factor emerged. The game changer was the introduction of large scale methamphetamine labs.  Prior to the late nineties almost all methamphetamine production was made by small groups in small labs all across the heartland of America.

When US law enforcement began cracking down on these mom and pop operations, the manufacture of the drug moved south, and in a massive way.  Instead of small labs producing small amounts of the drug, the Narcos in Mexico began large scale laboratories that would shock the world; both in their scale and complexity.  This gave the Narcos a new and highly lucrative cash supply.

It would create several new networks that dedicated themselves to the manufacture of methamphetamine.  La Familia, Milenio or Los Valencia and Ignacio Coronel Villarreal began to wield great power.  Since then Mexico has become the world’s largest producer of Methamphetamine.  It allowed cartels to have a source of income that did not rely on the unpredictable Colombians or on the treacherous weather of the Sierras.

It is now thought that methamphetamine has superseded the demand for cocaine in the United States and meth use in Mexico has since exploded.  It has also added to the increase in random acts of violence and brutality that has been witnessed so far in this conflict.
The Formation of Paramilitary Security 
The Zetas were another major shift in the way that Mexico Cartels functioned.  Salvador Gómez took control of the Gulf Cartel from Juan Abergo after his arrest in 1996.  Salvador Gomez's second in command and close friend and confidant was Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, Osiel killed Salvador Gómez shortly after his accent to power.  Thus earning the nickname "Friend Killer" as a result.

As Osiel Cárdenas Guillén came into power he was paranoid; he had always felt bribes only took you so far.  His solution to this problem was to build a paramilitary outfit that would act act an armed wing of his organization.  The faction took the name Los Zetas.  At the time this was a new development for the cartels in Mexico.  Neither Osiel, nor Mexico could have foresaw the terror which was to be unleashed.

With the formation of the Zetas came a new way of confronting both the government and the Gulfs rivals.  They used fear and intimidation openly, displaying their contempt for a system they saw as ridged.  No longer were Narcos to remain out of sight, hiding their acts of terror.  They advertised the horror, using public displays of death marked with the trademark Z, a letter which struck fear in all those who encountered it.  But what truly set Los Zetas apart was the knowledge which they brought with them.  These were the same soldiers trained to apprehend the Narcos themselves.  

The tactics used by the Cartels suddenly became more militaristic, more sophisticated and more brazen.  It wasn’t long before the other cartels formed their own military wings, carrying out acts of savagery that would equal the Zetas.  The escalations have continued unabated to this date, and there seems to be no limit to the brutality and fear they are willing to unleash upon the innocent population.

The Slaves Become Masters
The rapid increase in power of the Zetas after Osiel was extradited to the US also changed the way most cartels operated, the old rules were challenged by those who had no respect for the ways of the past. 

Those from the older generations were caught off guard by how fast the Zetas began to obtain territories.  They broke from their predecessor and set out on their own.  Instead of the focus being on bribes and long standing relationships with government officials, the Zetas preferred fear and intimidation to achieve their goals.  They broke with convention by preying on civilians within their territory.

They expanded the criminal rackets to include traditional crimes such as extortion and kidnapping but also incorporated more exotic rackets such as oil theft and human smuggling.  With this warlord like mentality they became the fastest growing Cartel in Mexico.  This lead to a more militarized approach towards the Cartels from the Government.  Attacks became more outrageous as time continued.

The public was to bear witness to these atrocities; what were once rumors now became national news.  La Famililia who evolved from the Zetas took public displays of brutality even further when they threw several severed heads on the floor of a club in Michoacán.

This signaled the start of what we now see; the war against the Narcos, a war which would become more savage than darkest nightmare that even Hollywood slasher films would envy. 
If It Is War You Want War, Then War You Shall Have
The acts of violence were so outrageous and the impunity so thick, the Government was forced to act.  Calderon who himself a native of Michoacán decided to take the war to the Cartels.  Keep in mind, the cartels had now spent several years militarizing their forces.

Calderon took a bat to the wasps nest and beat it as if it were a piñata.  To say the wasps reacted badly would be an understatement.  No one could have seen what was to become; the bloodiest conflict to hit Mexico since it revolution nearly 100 years ago.  
The Vacuum
The Government took a top down approach recommended by the Americans.  It was known as the Kingpin Strategy, this focused most of the effort on taking out the top bosses.   The unintended consequence of this however was the fragmentation of some of the most powerful cartels in Mexico.  Some of the cartels splintered never to recover, allowing them to be swallowed up by the remaining cartels.  Others went on to rebrand themselves, others simply faded away.

This approach led to a dramatic increase in violence; with up and comers eagerly showing their machismo though savagery.  A kind of one up man ship emerged, with newer cartels having to show their worth through debauchery.  This fracturing and assimilation has rapidly increased with the landscape which is always shifting and always changing.  This has cumulated with most of the smaller groups falling in line either with the Zetas or the Sinaloa Cartels.

 
The Breakup of the PRI
With PAN winning the election in 2000, the old way of doing business disappeared, payments to those who allowed for business to continue was ruptured.  To understand this one must look at the almost 100 years or PRI rule.  The PRI functioned through bribes, always had, it was the way business was done.

This helped create one of the largest income gaps in the world.  The rich in Mexico are very rich, the poor, very poor.  Nothing was done without bribes but at least you got what you paid for.  Corruption was vertical, money went up and permits and the like went down.  What no one thought of was what would happen if the PRI lost.

When this happened the corruption became horizontal in nature.   No one knew who to pay, or what type of protection they would receive.  This added considerably to the volatility of the situation in Mexico.  Suddenly corruption also became fragmented.  For the underworld, this was the equivalent of a credit crunch in a recession.  It created such a level of uncertainty that reprisals and false agreements became part of the game.

Loyalty became a nuanced term, only thought of when thinking about the way things used to work.  How the upcoming elections will shift this dynamic remains to be seen
Sinaloa Vs. Zetas 
With the smaller cartels seeming to have either assimilated or forged alliances with either the Sinaloa or Zeta Cartels, violence is sure to continue.

While grisly displays seem to be on the rise, overall violence in Mexico seems to be stabilizing.  This statistic is deceiving however; the security of everyday people in Mexico has deteriorated substantially in the past 6 years of war.  With low impact crime on the rise and an influx of criminals trying to take advantage of the chaos, the typical Mexican is less secure now than they have ever been.

While two cartels are much easier to control than many, the chance of these pacts to sustain themselves is low.  Fragmentation will surely follow; the cartel able to maintain its alliances the longest will come out on top.

This is also true for the corrupted officials who must navigate the the treacherous option of silver of lead. One thing that is sure, is that no matter what prediction lay ahead for Mexico , we should be expect the unexpected.

Zeta/Sinaloa Conflict
 What Lies In Store 
The real victims of this war have been the youth.  Mexico has lost a generation of would be doctors, teachers, judges, innovators and innocents.  How does one come to grips with losing so much ?

This war has not been fought by old men but rather by those who are lost.  Those who see no hope in an honest future, those who dream of romantic stories of gold and fame, believing that the horror will not reach them.

Children who see nothing but loss and injustice, those who believe the only way to gain anything from life is to take it, by force if necessary.  The youth who would prefer to die young as false kings rather than toil in abject poverty.  This generation, which has thrived on the material, rather than the righteous, has been misguided.

The faces of the thousands of the unnamed and unseen, the invisible; need to become seen, become visible.  Time has a way of healing wrongs, but to blind oneself to what has been lost and what continues to be lost; is in and of itself an injustice and makes it impossible to move forward.  Hope is what is missing for many, but changes could be made, change can occur.

Incentives need to shift; the poor need opportunities to make something good out of themselves.  Poor men deserve dignity, when they are not afforded this, many choose the Narco way of life.  It is easy to preach virtue from gilded perspectives.  Hope needs to be available to all not just the elites.  Mexico for all its beauty must look at what has become so ugly, not just in terms of this drug war but at society as well.

“Vigorous” Background Checks, Nor “Open Secret” Kept Zetas From Horse Racing Business

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Borderland Beat

AT The "Zetas' Stable"; Hiding in plain sight
Vigorous” Background Checks, Nor “Open Secret” Kept Zetas From Horse Racing Business.  Stable workers now disclose the stables were referred to as "Zetas' Stable" and Mexican nationals would show up with duffle bags filled with cash. 
Yet, no one called authorities.  This was not Mexico, there are no reasons, no excuses not to have tipped an agency or police. 
Authorities have yet to confiscate horses or property.
 Racetrack officials say horse owners are subjected to “vigorous” background checks before being issued a license. It appears Jose Trevino Morales, whose brother is head of the infamous Los Zetas cartel in Mexico, slipped through the cracks. He wasn’t the only one, either.   Paz, Chivis


A Remington Park racetrack official says horse owners are subjected to “vigorous” background checks before being issued a license in Oklahoma

It appears Jose Trevino Morales, whose brother is a leader of an infamous drug cartel in Mexico, slipped through the cracks.

Jose Trevino, his wife and 13 others were indicted May 30 by a federal grand jury in Texas, although court documents weren’t unsealed until Tuesday. He is accused of using a quarter horse breeding and racing operation to launder $20 million in drug money, starting in 2008.

A ranch in Lexington, called Zule Farms, had become the center of the breeding and racing operation, court records show.

Four other men who were indicted last month along with Jose Trevino also are licensed by the Oklahoma Horse Racing Commission.

Two of the men are described as owners, one as a registered agent and one as a trainer. Except for one, all had been licensed in other states, including Texas, Louisiana, California and New Mexico.

One of Trevino's Homes, This One in Texas
REQUIRED PAPERWORK

Lisa Hanson, the racing commission’s license supervisor, said all applicants are required to fill out paperwork that asks for a Social Security number, date of birth and other pertinent information. She said fingerprints, which are sent to the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation and the FBI to check for criminal history, are also taken from those seeking a license.

“We don’t fingerprint minors, or if they’re disabled or anything, but we do fingerprints,” Hanson said, adding that she wasn’t sure what the law enforcement agencies do with the documents and other items once they receive them.

Court records describe Jose Trevino as the older brother of Miguel Angel Trevino Morales, second-in-command of Los Zetas, an organization well-known for heinous, murderous acts in Mexico’s borderland wars. The four men with state-issued licenses face the same serious charges as Jose Trevino and are linked to the same drug trafficking organization.

Scott Wells, general manager of Remington Park, said Oklahoma racetracks rely on the racing commission to vet owners, jockeys and trainers.

“Remington Park functions as a host facility and by law all racing participants including owners, trainers and jockeys must undergo vigorous background checks and be licensed by Oklahoma and Texas racing commissions to race at our facility,” Wells said. “This is a matter for state and federal officials and we have and will continue to cooperate in any way we can.”

Kym Koch Thompson, a spokeswoman for the Chickasaw Nation, said no horses owned by the Trevino family were seized at racetracks owned by the tribe, including Remington Park and Lone Star Park in Grand Prairie, Texas.

“Not that I’m aware of,” she said. “But our quarter horse racing season ended Memorial Day.”

Daryl Fields, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in San Antonio, said Jose Trevino and his wife, Zulema, remain in the custody of the U.S. Marshal’s Service. He said they’re expected to be taken to Texas for detention hearing, “but I don’t expect anything to happen for some time.”

OPEN SECRET AND SOCIALIZING AT "ZETAS' STABLE"
The couple’s Lexington ranch was raided Tuesday. Agents raided a racetrack in New Mexico on the same day and made five additional arrests in Austin, Texas; Los Angeles; and Ruidoso, N.M.

Jose Trevino’s brothers, including Miguel Trevino and Oscar Omar Trevino Morales, were not arrested and are believed to be in Mexico. Oscar Trevino is described as a cartel leader, as well.

Sources near the Ruidoso Downs Race Track and Casino said the cartel’s link to Jose Trevino’s horse racing operation was an open secret.

Stable workers, who spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity, said Jose Trevino’s stables were called the “Zetas’ stables,” and that they had seen Mexican citizens show up in New Mexico with duffel bags full of cash to buy horses.

IN PLAIN SIGHT
The Trevino family has been living for years in the U.S., essentially hiding in plain sight. The family lived in the Dallas-Fort Worth area before buying the farm in Lexington.

                                                            Adolphus Hotel in Dallas
The Trevinos’ daughter, Alexandra, was married recently at the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas. A hotel employee said the facility is among the swankiest in the city. “I don’t know how much a wedding costs, but it’s not cheap,” the employee said.

The Trevino family forged relationships with industry professionals, including one of the most successful trainers in the business, Paul Jones.

Nancy Yearsley, president of a Kentucky-based company that insures race horses, attended Alexandra Trevino’s wedding, according to her company’s Facebook page.

“Nancy Yearsley was one of the guests at Alexandra and Luis Garcia’s wedding which was held at the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas last Saturday,” a June 5 post read. “Alexandra is the daughter of Jose and Zulema Trevino, owners of Zule

Media reports also suggest the wedding was covered by Track Magazine, which follows the horse racing industry.

Paul Jones, who is a highly successful quarter horse trainer, often worked for Jose Trevino. The two are featured in photographs together on racing websites, usually with large trophies in hand.

Neighbors in Lexington described Jose Trevino and his ranch employees as good people, but many were suspicious because of the size of the ranch and the scope of its operations.

Authorities said the upkeep, just for the 425 horses, would be roughly $200,000 per month.

Clifford Massengale, a neighbor and retired military officer, said he noticed the extravagance.

“It would take a multimillionaire just to support an operation like that,” he said.

TO READ MY ORIGINAL POST ON THIS STORY LINK HERE

Source: NEWSOK

"El Quico", alleged Zeta leader of Nuevo Laredo and Nephew of Z-40, arrested in Monterrey

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Mexican authorities have announced the arrest of  "El Quico", alleged Zeta leader of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas and nephew of Miguel Treviño Morales, Z-40.


According to reports, Juan Francisco Treviño Chávez 31, was arrested Tuesday in Monterrey commercial plaza while meeting with his cousin, the alleged Zeta leader of Sabinas Hidalgo, Nuevo Lean, Jesús Chávez García.

Treviño Chávez is one of the 141 prisoners who escaped from the Nuevo Laredo prison on December 16, 2010.


Two AR-15 assault rifles, a Volkswagen Beetle and Chevrolet Avalanche were seized during the arrests.


Earlier this week, during a raid on an Oklahoma ranch, U.S. authorities arrested the brother of Z-40, José Treviño Morales.


Nuevo Leon Security Spokesman, Jorge Domene, will be giving a press conference within the next few hours.


More to follow.


Sources: El Norte, Milenio, El Universal



The Cover Up of the Cadereyt 49

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By ACI for Borderland Beat

On May 13, 2012, 49 mutilated bodies turned up, outside the small village of San Juan.  The bodies were piled up on the side of the highway leading to Reynosa.  But before we delve deeper into how this massacre was covered up, let’s lay out some ground work.  



 A Sleepy Little Town
San Juan is very small village close to the town of Cadereyt, just outside of the city of Monterrey.  Cadereyt was a lazy town, best known for its churches and heat.  It is also home to some amazing grottos.  But in the war that has engulfed Mexico it will be known for something else entirely.
The town's historical Plaza
The Emergence El Loko
Cadereyt along with Allende were placed under the control of El Loko, or Daniel Elizondo sometime around July 2011.  He was the considered the Zetas boss for the rural area surrounding these two cities as well.  He wasted very little time making a name for himself, by leaving several mutilated bodies strewn through out the streets of both Allende and Cadereryt.  He is held reasonable for the killing of two young sisters from the town of Allende.  The two were picked up by the local police while walking home one night.  The local police apparently were ordered to deliver the girls to El Loko. He then raped, killed, then dismember their bodies, once again displaying the parts at the entrances to the town.  This case ended with the dismissal of 14 police officers who were reportedly involved.  El Loko, the man responsible was mysteriously was no where to be found.

A Mexican Cover Up
The Location of Loko's assumed death

Not long after the police were arrested, the military claimed one of two men shot in Cadereyt was none other than El Loko himself.  They announced his death saying only that they had killed a man who reportedly fit the description of El Loko, at this time no one even knew his real name.  What follows is the description the military released. 

 
Excerpt from Buggs
There have been preliminary reports that one of the sicarios killed was no other than El Loko. He was described as heavy set, about 200 pounds and was wearing a green shirt and Bermuda shorts. The military believes that it might be El Loko and the Attorney General's Office did confirm that the man killed was in fact El Loko.

The military had intitially suspected the man to be El Loko based on the fact that his name was written on the sun visor and the trunk of one of the vehicles. On the walls of the ranch military observed the letter "Z" written in yellow paint. The military believe that the ranch was used by the sicarios as a safe house.

El Loko is plaza boss in Allende and Cadereyta for Los Zetas. He is known to be a brutally violent sicario that has participated or has been linked to some gruesome executions.

http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2011/08/el-loko-taken-down.html

El Loko
 El Loko was obviously a man who wielded significant power within los zetas.  He commanded enough power to have the Police bring him two innocent girls.  He survived an intense manhunt, which could have only been accomplished with the help of those higher up in the leadership of los zetas.  His death which was falsely claimed by the military, was promoted by the media and government and then quickly forgotten about.  The description given by the military did not resembled the true El Loko, it was generic and simple, it could have described almost anyone.  This by itself was troubling enough but as this terror unfolded the true depth of government complicity began to unravel.

The Menace Returns
September 2011, quiet returned to the area and silence took hold.  Not much was heard, some were frightened it was going to become another Mier.  The silence which plagues Nuevo Leon continued until May 13, 2012.  The day 49 torsos were discovered wrapped in plastic.  What followed was a bizarre chain of events, all of which deserving of a closer look.  

A Mothers Day to Remember
Several days before the massacre 12 people were found alive in Jalisco.  The victims lead police to a man called El Chato.  He was working for a cartel aligned with los zetas, he explained los zetas plan to display numerous corpses on Mother’s Day, even though he was unaware of the extent of the diabolic plan.  This portion of his interview was dismissed while the public focused on his confession that the victims were picked at random and had no ties to criminal organization.  It has long be suspected that many of the victims of these body dumps have been innocent.  No one paid much thought to this so called plan, that was until Sunday May 13, the day the 49 were found.  
Here is an except of that interview.  
Police: When were you going to kill the 12 people that were found alive, or what was the plan?
El Chato: Supposedly May 10 [Mothers Day in Mexico].
Police: Why?
El Chato: I don't know.

El Chato
http://borderland-beat.924382.n3.nabble.com/quot-El-Chato-R8-quot-from-Cartel-Millennium-quot-Fernando-R2-quot-from-ZETAS-and-quot-El-Moco-Booge-td4004302.html 
This leads us to the conclusion that the zetas had planned this massacre to take place on Mother’s Day, and that it was not a rouge cell leader who had gone off the reservation.  The plan it seems was to have several body dumps through out Mexico, utilizing not only los zetas but their allies as well.  This amount of coordination that would have had to taken place would have needed the cooperation of the highest levels of leadership, due to the compartmentalization of the los zetas organization and their allies.      



The Banners
The first to arrive on the seen were the Federal Police.  These officers closed off the scene, no one was allowed close enough to see.  We know the Police removed a narcobanner which was left which implicated Los Zetas Leadership.  They refused to let anyone know what was said on these banners.  This in and of itself is not uncommon in Mexico but what followed was.  

The First Public Declaration
Within days of the discovery los zetas put several narcobanners up all over the state claiming they had nothing to do with the massacre.  They instead laid blame on their rivals.  They asked for the public to notice some grammatical errors in the first banners.  This was strange thing to say about banners which the public never saw.  But these new banners had no problems garnishing the attention of the media.  The rouse seemed to be working.  

Here is an excerpt from Chivis:
While reading a statement on the premises of the SIEDO, the military said that "El Loco" also stated that this action was endorsed by the head of the Zetas in Nuevo Leon, known as "El Morro" they had to coordinate with a guy nicknamed "El Camaron" (the shrimp) because he was going to deliver the bodies to be dumped on the main square along with a manta.

"This was part of a strategy to blame for such acts antagonistic to criminal organizations, so it could be augmented by placing mantas around the country, disputing of such facts to cause confusion towards the authorities and public opinion.

"Likewise a representative said of "Camaron" "known as" El Bocinas" as quoted as living in the village of Los Herreras, he was hired to attain 30 to 49 bodies, which were transported by several trucks.

http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2012/05/presenting-el-loco-z40-and-lazca.html

 What Does it Mean?
 It means Loko didn’t even kill these people.  Nor did he want them to be dumped in his area.  He knew it would bring too much heat.  So he left the bodies outside of town, far enough away he thought he would be safe.  The amount of people involved to move 49 torsos undetected shows how powerful los zetas have become in Nuevo Leon.  Los Zetas used their influence in the local government to stall, confuse and block the investigation.  This is apparent by the way they were able to so quickly blame this on their rivals.  Even then it was too big; someone had to be held accountable.  Los Zetas gave them El Loko.  The deception was so great that even SIEDO got it wrong at first, by claiming Loko was part of CDG a rival of los Z.  This is a story of a pawn being sacrificed so that those who are truly responsible for this heinous act may continue their reign of terror.

"Chapo Now Controls Juarez and Western Texas

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Borderland Beat
The US report affirms that the Sinaloa Cartel has the ability to produce a big scale of methamphetamine in Mexico and is gaining territory to distribute in El Paso-Juarez




The organization that is lead by Joaquin, El Chapo Guzman has  replaced the Juarez Cartel in controlling drug trafficking in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua and  El Paso, Texas.  It has  increased the transfer of cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine. There is now a major availability of these drugs in west Texas, says a report of the Justice Department of the United States.


The document, elaborated by the National Intelligence Center of Drugs (NDIC) in an analysis about the market in the region, emphasize that the Sinaloa Cartel “increased their influence over lucrative smuggling routes in Mexico and West Texas region”, a zone that since 2007, the organization  lead by Vicente Carrillo Fuentes.

The plaza is strategic for the drug traffickers, since it has four of the seven official border entries to west Texas: The Americas bridge, North Pass, Stanton Street Bridge and the crossing of the International Bridge Ysleta (The complete part of El Paso bridge).


The report includes facts through 2011.  Details that in  the last year, indicators suggest that the Sinaloa Cartel won this battle. It already has a major influence over the drug contraband in the Juarez Valley and now domains the contraband drug operation carried out in small towns throughout the Rio Grande, once controlled by the Juarez Cartel”.


Illegal drugs increase


Police information that is stated in the document, indicate that the Sinaloa Cartel domains drug transportation in all Juarez Valley, even in the cities of Guadalupe and Porvenir  “and the rival members of Juarez Cartel have now abandoned those areas.

He pointed out that even in Ciudad Juarez; the organization of Carrillo Fuentes has lost territory against the onslaught of cells supporting El Chapo: “The Sinaloa Cartel is proactive in search of any opportunity of having domain over the Juarez Cartel in this city, while the Juarez Cartel operates defending their territory, trying to neutralize the losses caused by the rival group”.


The Juarez Cartel hasn’t lost complete control due to the connections with the group Barrio Azteca – gang classified as the most violent-, “the cartel is weaker” because of the arrests and deaths of members and partners, it is stated.


The impact of the outgrowing influence of El Chapo in the region, has turned into an increase in drug trafficking. While in the period of 2006-2010 showed a decrease in the availability of illegal drugs, after 2011, it started to rise again.


The report explains that  a high volume of methamphetamines exists  in West Texas, that it is   also distributed in the schools,  “which could be the result of the capacity of the Sinaloa Cartel to produce in high scale, these drugs in Mexico, and the growing influence in El Paso- Juarez”. It is also known that “the availability of cocaine, increased in the region”.

 NDIC projected  that the high level of Ciudad Juarez is not going to  decrease further,  it even “might increase if the Sinaloa Cartel attempts to reduce more of  the capacity of the operations of drug trafficking of the Juarez Cartel.  However, the criminal group has now  increased other areas of crime for revenues, such as intellectual market counterfeit, extortion and kidnapping.

Source: El Universal

Decrease in Homicides Proof of El Chapo Control

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Diario de Juarez. 6-15-2012.  The decrease in homicides in Ciudad Juarez is an indicator that an organized crime group already has territorial control over drug smuggling, because it's in the interest of criminal groups to have a secure zone  since their objective is to make money not murder people.
According to an expert in security matters, Gabriel Regino, it's clear that the decrease in violence is due more to this cartel's control than to a public safety strategy implemented by the three levels of government.

In an interview with El Diario, the UNAM criminologist explained that, "we see a decrease in executions because they are no longer necessary; there's territorial control and it's no longer necessary to use the violence used in the past." The homicide statistics, he pointed out, are being used as a key factor to assert that violence has declined. Despite that, he clarified, homicides considered independently cannot necessarily show that violence or unrest has declined in any particular area.

"In the case of Ciudad Juarez, there was a sharp increase in very violent deaths a few years ago, beginning in 2007 until 2010 and including part of 2011, [the numbers] reaching historical levels. This number of homicides had not been seen in in recent history in Ciudad Juarez, they were killing a lot of people because there was a dispute in the city between different criminal groups, like La Linea, the Sinaloa Cartel, the Aztecas, among others, for territorial control."  The reason is that, at the national level, criminal organizations are battling amongst themselves to take control of drug smuggling routes and Juarez is a key point in this matter.

"The number of arrests or convictions of individuals responsible for these deaths is very low. The federal government tried to implement different strategies, such as militarization and use of the  Federal Police, which in the end could not put a stop to the violence at that time, " he recalled. That's because, he insists, "government efficiency plays no part in criminal thinking; a criminal organization does not seek to become a killing machine, but a money making machine., and for that there's drug smuggling."

On the other hand, if the U.S. authorities tell us that there's more drugs, that prices are stable, that's a clue that there is actually a large organization that has taken temporary control in the area; "We'll see that this territorial group will sustain itself and will grow, as the incidence of extortion goes down, because once the group that gains control begins to get income from drug smuggling it will abandon other sources of income such as extortion, which were taking place during the dispute."

With respect to the efficacy of the public safety strategies implemented by the three levels of government, Gabriel Regino recalled that, "the first response took place at the federal level by sending out the Army and even with their presence, there were massacres such as the ones at Villas de Salvarcar and at the rehabilitation centers.

When there were no results from the Army presence, he asserted, [the federal government] decided to send in the Federal Police; with them, not only did things get worse, but murders went up and there was dissatisfaction with the presence of the federales, and , in fact there was even an uprising among the police officers against their own commanders, and this last development led to the return of the Army in the area. All this, he emphasized, absolutely cannot be interpreted to mean that the strategy was successful, but rather was the result of the fact that there was an ongoing dispute between powerful criminal groups in the area, and if the city is quiet today, that's because it serves the interests of a group whose objective is to smuggle drugs, not to kill people, even though that's what they did for several years in many places.

"In reality," he concludes, "what's best for a criminal organization is to have a quiet, safe zone where drugs can flow without social, political or economic problems as was the case for many years in Ciudad Juarez under the rule of that famous Senor de los Cielos (Lord of the skies)".

La Linea, still here   

Even though there is evidence that the Sinaloa Cartel has taken control of almost the entire state, including the Juarez Valley, the Cartel has not been able to completely eliminate La Linea, the enforcement arm of the Juarez Cartel  that had control of the plaza  for several years, declared a specialist, based on studies by Stratfor, the U.S. agency that specializes in national security matters. This interpretation is substantiated by the Stratfor, an agency that specializes in national security matters, which holds that the corridor from Sinaloa to the Chihuahua border, except for part of Ciudad Juarez, is under the control of the Sinaloa Cartel. According to Stratfor, the border area between  Sonora, Sinaloa and Chihuahua is under the control of Sinaloa Federation, led by Joaquin Guzman Loera, "l Chapo." Another fringe, which encompasses the border area between Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahu, is dominated by the group known as the Pacifico Sur Cartel.  The specialist consulted by El Diario  points out that one of the most serious territorial disputes among the drug cartels is precisely for the [route] that goes through Chihuahua to the Juarez [international] crossing, because this is the point of origin for distribution points in the area known as the Midwest in the U.S.  This crossing dominates drug distribution that reaches large urban centers of north-central United States, such as Chicago and Minneapolis. According to this "mapping", the group led by Chapo Guzman controls almost all of Baja California peninsula, except for the border area with the state of California, which remains under the control of the Felix Arellano brothers' organization.

Meanwhile, the Zeta Cartel controls all of the Gulf of Mexico coast, except for a fringe of the Tamaulipas coast still controlled by the Gulf Cartel. The specialist consulted by El Diario pointed out that the the blows that the Zetas have suffered, both in Mexico and the United States, could lead the group known as "La Linea" to end  its its alliance with the Zetas. One of the signs that there is no longer a Zetas operation and that an alliance no longer exists with La Linea is that there haven't been any cases of dismembered bodies, such as take place on the eastern fringe of the country, which is the distinctive signature  of the Zetas group.

"It's police work"

The decrease in crime in Ciudad Juarez is due to the frontal attack on organized crime by the authorities and not because "Chapo" Guzman operates by himself here, asserted Hector Gonzalez Mocken, the head of the Chihuahua  Federation of Attorney Colleges (Chihuahua state bar). The lawyer said that the purported supremacy of the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel is a myth strenghtened by the fact that drug trafficking and drug addiction has decreased very little. He said that the three levels of government have undertaken a direct confrontation (with crime) that has weakened the presence of organized crime in the city.  "We need to understand, "he states, "that what is said to be a weakening of one group and the growth of another is part of the myth that arises from the confrontation that Juarez lived through in the last two years, but nevertheless, it must be recognized that society and institutions have closed ranks against this scourge."

He indicated that [the authorities] have undertaken concrete actions that have helped diminish the presence of drug cartels in Juarez. He said that there 's a story going around in social circles that "El Chapo" had ended up in control of the plaza  because there is still the perception that drugs continue to be distributed as usual in the area. He says, "That's the reason there's an urban legend that there's another group now in charge of trafficking and exporting narcotics to the United States, and as a result, that control explains the decrease in the murder of members of the groups that are fighting over the plaza." 

Another Blow to Z-40, his Financial Operator El Cucho Arrested

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Posted in the Borderland Beat Forum by Havana

Source: Proceso
The federal and state police of Nuevo Leon today dealt a huge blow to Miguel Angel Trevino Morales, El Z-40, second in command of Los Zetas cartel, arresting in different incidents; a money launderer of the criminal organization and his nephew.

In the first case, the Mexican Marines in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, apprehended Erick Jovan Lozano Díaz, El Cucho, alleged financial operator of Los Zetas, in possession of 41,111,650 pesos and more than a million in US currency.

According to the agency under the command of Admiral Francisco Saynez Mendoza, the detainee would be linked to the operations of Jose Trevino Morales, who was arrested in Oklahoma, United States, after being identified by U.S. authorities as a financial trader for the Zetas and is suspected of laundering about a million dollars a month through the sale of thoroughbred horses.

El Cucho was presented today to the press on the premises of the SIEDO. During the press conference, the Navy spokesman Jose Luis Vergara said that Lozano Díaz confessed to being the financial operator of Los Zetas, directly providing the money from illegal activities to Z-40.

He also confessed to owning a company dedicated to the import of vehicles, which charges a commission.

After his capture, which occurred yesterday in a safe house in Nuevo Laredo, authorities secured 36,111,650 pesos, plus $1,480,919  in US currency.

Elements of the Semar said that in the office where El Cucho was arrested they found another 5 million pesos, making a total of 41,111,650 pesos.

In addition to the large sum of money, police also seized 10 doses of cocaine, two handguns and 300 rounds of ammunition of different calibers, along with different firearms, a vehicle and computer equipment.

The SIEDO UEIORPIFAM/AP/148/2012 opened a preliminary investigation against Eric Jovan Diaz Lozano on charges of participating in organized crime with illegal procedures and crimes violation of the Federal Firearms and Explosives act. SIEDO requested a hearing with a judge to present a case and bring an injunction against the detainee to commence the investigation.



Another alleged associate of the Z-40 voluntarily surrendered to American justice. Veracruz entrepreneur Francisco Colorado Cessa, Pancho Colorado , who is appointed by the Treasury Department United States as a money launderer for Los Zetas through equestrian business, connected to the operations of Jose Trevino Morales, brother of the Z- 40.

Miguel Angel Trevino Morales and Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano directed the organization of Los Zetas, considered by authorities in Mexico and the United States as one of the most violent and powerful, with connections to criminal groups in Italy.

In another police action in the state of Nuevo Leon, the State Investigation Agency captured Juan Francisco Treviño Chavez, El Quico, nephew of Miguel Treviño Morales, El Z-40, who is second in command of Los Zetas.

El Quico leader of Los Zetas in Nuevo Laredo, was arrested with his cousin Jesus Chavez Garcia who heads the cartel in Sabinas Hidalgo and is one of the 141 inmates who escaped from prison in New Laredo on December 16, 2010.

At the time of his arrest in the parking lot of Plaza Rea in ​​the city of Monterrey, the detainees were carrying two rifles AR-15, a Beetle  and an  Avalanche

Treviño Chavez is wanted by U.S. authorities.

El Quico is the son of Juan Francisco Treviño Morales, brother of the Z-40 and the suspect that was recently arrested in the United States.

Also on Tuesday, another brother of the Z-40 , Jose was captured in Oklahoma, while another of the brothers, Oscar, Z-42 , is considered a fugitive from U.S. justice.

How the Sinaloa Drug Cartel Makes Its Billions

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BorderlandBeat 


By PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE FOR NYT

The  American Birth of EL Chapo's Daughters

Chapo's wife Emma Coronel,
is the nice of Nacho Coronel
One afternoon last August, at a hospital on the outskirts of Los Angeles, a former beauty queen named Emma Coronel gave birth to a pair of heiresses. The twins, who were delivered at 3:50 and 3:51, respectively, stand to inherit some share of a fortune that Forbes estimates is worth a billion dollars. Coronel's husband, who was not present for the birth, is a legendary tycoon who overcame a penurious rural childhood to establish a wildly successful multinational business. If Coronel elected to leave the entry for "Father" on the birth certificates blank, it was not because of any dispute over patrimony. More likely, she was just skittish about the

fact that her husband, Joaquín Guzmán, is the C.E.O. of Mexico's Sinaloa cartel, a man the Treasury Department recently described as the world's most powerful drug trafficker. Guzmán's organization is responsible for as much as half of the illegal narcotics imported into the United States from Mexico each year; he may well be the most-wanted criminal in this post-Bin Laden world. But his bride is a U.S. citizen with no charges against her. So authorities could only watch as she bundled up her daughters and slipped back across the border to introduce them to their dad.

Known as El Chapo for his short, stocky frame, Guzmán is 55, which in narco-years is about 150. He is a quasi-mythical figure in Mexico, the subject of countless ballads, who has outlived enemies and accomplices alike, defying the implicit bargain of a life in the drug trade: that careers are glittering but brief and always terminate in prison or the grave. When Pablo Escobar was Chapo's age, he had been dead for more than a decade.
In fact, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, Chapo sells more drugs today than Escobar did at the height of his career. To some extent, this success is easily explained: as Hillary Clinton acknowledged several years ago, America's "insatiable demand for illegal drugs" is what drives the clandestine industry. It's no accident that the world's biggest supplier of narcotics and the world's biggest consumer of narcotics just happen to be neighbors. "Poor Mexico," its former president Porfirio Díaz is said to have remarked. "So far from God and so close to the United States."
                                                      
Talking Numbers

The Sinaloa cartel can buy a kilo of cocaine in the highlands of Colombia or Peru for around $2,000, then watch it accrue value as it makes its way to market. In Mexico, that kilo fetches more than $10,000. Jump the border to the United States, and it could sell wholesale for $30,000. Break it down into grams to distribute retail, and that same kilo sells for upward of $100,000 - more than its weight in gold. And that's just cocaine. Alone among the Mexican cartels, Sinaloa is both diversified and vertically integrated, producing and exporting marijuana, heroin and methamphetamine as well.

Estimating the precise scale of Chapo's empire is tricky, however. Statistics on underground economies are inherently speculative: cartels don't make annual disclosures, and no auditor examines their books. Instead, we're left with back-of-the-envelope extrapolations based on conjectural data, much of it supplied by government agencies that may have bureaucratic incentives to overplay the problem.

So in a spirit of empirical humility, we shouldn't accept as gospel the estimate, from the Justice Department, that Colombian and Mexican cartels reap $18 billion to $39 billion from drug sales in the United States each year. (That range alone should give you pause.) Still, even if you take the lowest available numbers, Sinaloa emerges as a titanic player in the global black market. In the sober reckoning of the RAND Corporation, for instance, the gross revenue that all Mexican cartels derive from exporting drugs to the United States amounts to only $6.6 billion. By most estimates, though, Sinaloa has achieved a market share of at least 40 percent and perhaps as much as 60 percent, which means that Chapo Guzmán's organization would appear to enjoy annual revenues of some $3 billion - comparable in terms of earnings to Netflix or, for that matter, to Facebook.

The drug war in Mexico has claimed more than 50,000 lives since 2006. But what tends to get lost amid coverage of this epic bloodletting is just how effective the drug business has become. A close study of the Sinaloa cartel, based on thousands of pages of trial records and dozens of interviews with convicted drug traffickers and current and former officials in Mexico and the United States, reveals an operation that is global (it is active in more than a dozen countries) yet also very nimble and, above all, staggeringly complex. Sinaloa didn't merely survive the recession - it has thrived in recent years. And after prevailing in some recent mass-casualty clashes, it now controls more territory along the border than ever.

"Chapo always talks about the drug business, wherever he is," one erstwhile confidant told a jury several years ago, describing a driven, even obsessive entrepreneur with a proclivity for micromanagement. From the remote mountain redoubt where he is believed to be hiding, surrounded at all times by a battery of gunmen, Chapo oversees a logistical network that is as sophisticated, in some ways, as that of Amazon or U.P.S. - doubly sophisticated, when you think about it, because traffickers must move both their product and their profits in secret, and constantly maneuver to avoid death or arrest. As a mirror image of a legal commodities business, the Sinaloa cartel brings to mind that old line about Ginger Rogers doing all the same moves as Fred Astaire, only backward and in heels. In its longevity, profitability and scope, it might be the most successful criminal enterprise in history.

The Early Years
The state of Sinaloa, from which the cartel derives its name, lies wedged between the Sierra Madre Occidental and Mexico's west coast. Sun-blasted and remote, Sinaloa is the Sicily of Mexico, both cradle and refuge of violent men, and the ancestral land of many of the country's most notorious traffickers. Chapo was born in a village called La Tuna, in the foothills of the Sierra, in 1957. His formal education ended in third grade, and as an adult, he has reportedly struggled to read and write, prevailing upon a ghostwriter, at one point, to compose letters to his mistress. Little is known about Chapo's early years, but by the 1980s, he joined the Guadalajara cartel, which was run by a former policeman known as El Padrino - the Godfather.
For decades, Mexican smugglers had exported homegrown marijuana and heroin to the United States. But as the Colombian cocaine boom gathered momentum in the 1980s and U.S. law enforcement began patrolling the Caribbean, the Colombians went in search of an alternate route to the United States and discovered one in Mexico. Initially, Mexican traffickers, like a pudgy 25-year-old airplane pilot named Miguel Angel Martínez, acted as independent contractors who were paid a fee by the Colombians to move their cargo. In 1986, the Guadalajara cartel dispatched Martínez to the Colombian port of Barranquilla, in the hope that someone might commission him to fly drugs up to Mexico. But Martínez couldn't find any takers and ended up languishing in Colombia for months, worrying that he had blown his big opportunity with the cartel. Eventually, he caught a commercial flight back to Mexico, and shortly thereafter, he was summoned to a meeting with Chapo, who was by then an underboss in the cartel. "You were very well behaved in Colombia," Chapo told him, according to subsequent testimony. He seemed impressed by Martínez's patience in waiting for an assignment.

Having passed this test, Martínez started working for Chapo as a kind of air traffic controller, negotiating directly with the Cali and Medellín cartels, then guiding their cocaine flights from South America to secret runways in barren stretches of Mexico. Martínez knew U.S. agents were monitoring his radio communications, so rather than say a word, he would whistle - a signal to the pilots that they were cleared for takeoff.

With the decline of the Caribbean route, the Colombians started paying Mexican smugglers not in cash but in cocaine. More than any other factor, it was this transition that realigned the power dynamics along the narcotics supply chain in the Americas, because it allowed the Mexicans to stop serving as logistical middlemen and invest in their own drugs instead. In 1986, Martínez couldn't land a gig as a lowly courier in Barranquilla. Not five years later, he was marshaling hundreds of flights laden with cocaine for Chapo. "Sometimes we would get five planes a night," he remembered. "Sometimes 16." Now it was the Colombians who went hat in hand to Chapo, looking not to hire him to move their product but to sell it to him outright. They would tip Martínez $25,000 just to get an audience with the man.
The young pilot became a gatekeeper to the ascendant kingpin, fielding his phone calls and accompanying him on foreign trips. There's a vaudevillian goofiness to nicknames in Mexico, and the stout Martínez was known in the cartel as El Gordo. He and Chapo - Fatty and Shorty - made quite a pair. "Japan, Hong Kong, India, all of Europe," Martínez recalled in testimony. Chapo owned a fleet of Learjets, and together, they saw "the whole world." They both used cocaine as well, a habit that Chapo would eventually give up. When a lawyer inquired, years later, whether he had been Chapo's right-hand man, Martínez replied that he might have been, but that Guzmán had five left hands and five right hands. "He's an octopus, Chapo Guzmán," he said. For his efforts, Martínez was paid a million dollars a year, in a single annual installment: "In cash, in a suitcase, each December." When Martínez's son was born, Chapo asked to serve as godfather.
El Padrino

In 1989, Chapo's mentor, El Padrino, was captured by Mexican authorities, and the remaining members of the Guadalajara cartel assembled in Acapulco to determine which smuggling route each capo would inherit. According to Ioan Grillo's book, "El Narco," the meeting was ostensibly a gathering of friends. But the shards of El Padrino's organization would become the basis for the Tijuana, Juárez and Sinaloa cartels, and these onetime colleagues would soon become antagonists in a cycle of bloody turf wars that continues to this day.
"Drug cartel," it turns out, is a whopper of a misnomer; neither the Mexicans nor the Colombians ever colluded to fix prices or supply. "I wish they were cartels," Arturo Sarukhán, Mexico's ambassador in Washington, told me. "If they were, they wouldn't be fighting and driving up the violence.
At first, Chapo's organization controlled a single smuggling route, through western Mexico into Arizona. But by 1990, it was moving three tons of cocaine each month over the border, and from there, to Los Angeles. The Sinaloa has always distinguished itself by the eclectic means it uses to transport drugs. Working with Colombian suppliers, cartel operatives moved cocaine into Mexico in small private aircraft and in baggage smuggled on commercial flights and eventually on their own 747s, which they could load with as much as 13 tons of cocaine. They used container ships and fishing vessels and go-fast boats and submarines - crude semi-submersibles at first, then fully submersible subs, conceived by engineers and constructed under the canopy of the Amazon, then floated downriver in pieces and assembled at the coastline. These vessels can cost more than a million dollars, but to the smugglers, they are effectively disposable. In the event of an interception by the Coast Guard, someone onboard pulls a lever that floods the interior so that the evidence sinks; only the crew is left bobbing in the water, waiting to be picked up by the authorities.
Moving cocaine is a capital-intensive business, but the cartel subsidizes these investments with a ready source of easy income: marijuana. Cannabis is often described as the "cash crop" of Mexican cartels because it grows abundantly in the Sierras and requires no processing. But it's bulkier than cocaine, and smellier, which makes it difficult to conceal. So marijuana tends to cross the border far from official ports of entry. The cartel makes sandbag bridges to ford the Colorado River and sends buggies loaded with weed bouncing over the Imperial Sand Dunes into California. Michael Braun, the former chief of operations for the D.E.A., told me a story about the construction of a high-tech fence along a stretch of border in Arizona. "They erect this fence," he said, "only to go out there a few days later and discover that these guys have a catapult, and they're flinging hundred-pound bales of marijuana over to the other side." He paused and looked at me for a second. "A catapult," he repeated. "We've got the best fence money can buy, and they counter us with a 2,500-year-old technology."

Transition and Improvisation
Improvisation is a trafficker's greatest asset, and in recent years, Sinaloa has devised an even more efficient solution to the perennial challenge of getting marijuana across the border. Grow it here. Several years ago, a hunter was trekking through the remote North Woods of Wisconsin when he stumbled upon a vast irrigated grow site, tended by a dozen Mexican farmers armed with AK-47's. According to the D.E.A., it was a Sinaloa pot farm, established on U.S. National Forest land to supply the market in Chicago.

Heroin is easier to smuggle but difficult to produce, and as detailed in court documents, Chapo is particularly proud of his organization's work with the drug. He personally negotiates shipments to the United States and stands by its quality, which is normally 94 percent pure. "The value-to-weight ratio of heroin is better than any other drug," says Alejandro Hope, who until recently was a senior officer at Cisen, Mexico's equivalent to the C.I.A.

But the future of the business may be methamphetamine. During the 1990s, when the market for meth exploded in the United States, new regulations made it more difficult to manufacture large quantities of the drug in this country. This presented an opportunity that the Sinaloa quickly exploited. According to Anabel Hernández, author of "Los Señores del Narco," a book about the cartel, it was one of Chapo's deputies, a trafficker named Ignacio (Nacho) Coronel, who first spotted the massive potential of methamphetamine. "Nacho was like Steve Jobs," Hernández told me. "He saw the future."

Here was a drug that was ragingly addictive and could be produced cheaply and smuggled with relative ease. When they first started manufacturing meth, the Sinaloa would provide free samples to their existing wholesale clients in the Midwest. "They'd send five hundred pounds of marijuana, and secreted in that would be two kilos of meth," Jack Riley, the D.E.A.'s special agent in charge of the Chicago office, told me. "They'd give it away for free. They wanted the market." As demand grew, the cartel constructed superlabs, capable of churning out industrial volumes of meth. Container ships from India and China unloaded precursor chemicals - largely ephedrine - in the Pacific ports Lázaro Cárdenas and Manzanillo. To grasp the scale of production, consider the volume of some recent precursor seizures at these ports: 22 tons in October 2009; 88 tons in May 2010; 252 tons last December. When Mexico banned the importation of ephedrine, the cartel adapted, tweaking its recipe to use unregulated precursors. Recently they have started outsourcing production to new labs in Guatemala.

Going Underground
But Chapo's greatest contribution to the evolving tradecraft of drug trafficking was one of those innovations that seem so logical in hindsight it's a wonder nobody thought of it before: a tunnel. In the late 1980s, Chapo hired an architect to design an underground passageway from Mexico to the United States. What appeared to be a water faucet outside the home of a cartel attorney in the border town of Agua Prieta was in fact a secret lever that, when twisted, activated a hydraulic system that opened a hidden trapdoor underneath a pool table inside the house. The passage ran more than 200 feet, directly beneath the fortifications along the border, and emerged inside a warehouse the cartel owned in Douglas, Ariz. Chapo pronounced it "cool."




 When this new route was complete, Chapo instructed Martínez to call the Colombians. "Tell them to send all the drugs they can," he said. As the deliveries multiplied, Sinaloa acquired a reputation for the miraculous speed with which it could push inventory across the border. "Before the planes were arriving back in Colombia on the return, the cocaine was already in Los Angeles," Martínez marveled.
Eventually the tunnel was discovered, so Chapo shifted tactics once again, this time by going into the chili-pepper business. He opened a cannery in Guadalajara and began producing thousands of cans stamped "Comadre Jalapeños," stuffing them with cocaine, then vacuum-sealing them and shipping them to Mexican-owned grocery stores in California. He sent drugs in the refrigeration units of tractor-trailers, in custom-made cavities in the bodies of cars and in truckloads of fish (which inspectors at a sweltering checkpoint might not want to detain for long). He sent drugs across the border on freight trains, to cartel warehouses in Los Angeles and Chicago, where rail spurs let the cars roll directly inside to unload. He sent drugs via FedEx.

But that tunnel into Douglas remains Chapo's masterpiece, an emblem of his creative ingenuity. Twenty years on, the cartels are still burrowing under the border - more than a hundred tunnels have been discovered in the years since Chapo's first. They are often ventilated and air-conditioned, and some feature trolley lines stretching up to a half-mile to accommodate the tonnage in transit.

You might suppose that a certain recklessness would be a prerequisite for anyone contemplating a career in the drug trade. But in reality, blue-chip traffickers tend to fixate, with neurotic intensity, on the concept of risk. "The goal of these folks is not to sell drugs," Tony Placido, who was the top intelligence official at the D.E.A. until he retired last year, told me. "It's to earn a spendable profit and live to enjoy it." So the smart narcos are preoccupied with what Peter Reuter and Mark Kleiman once referred to, in a classic essay on the drug business, as "the marginal imprisonment risk." In 2010, Chapo's old friend Ismael (El Mayo) Zambada, the No. 2 man in the Sinaloa cartel, granted an interview to the Mexican magazine Proceso. Now in his 60s and a grandfather, El Mayo has been in the drug business for nearly half a century and has amassed a fortune. But you can't buy peace of mind. "I'm terrified they'll incarcerate me," he acknowledged. "I'm full of fear. Always."

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Profit and Loss

There's a reason coke and heroin cost so much more on the street than at the farm gate: you're not paying for the drugs; you're compensating everyone along the distribution chain for the risks they assumed in getting them to you. Smugglers often negotiate, in actuarial detail, about who will be held liable in the event of lost inventory. After a bust, arrested traffickers have been known to demand a receipt from authorities, so that they can prove the loss was not because of their own negligence (which would mean they might have to pay for it) or their own thievery (which would mean they might have to die). Some Colombian cartels have actually offered insurance policies on narcotics, as a safeguard against loss or seizure.
To prevent catastrophic losses, cartels tend to distribute their risk as much as possible. Before sending a 100-kilo shipment across the border, traffickers might disaggregate it into five carloads of 20 kilos each. Chapo and his associates further reduce their personal exposure by going in together on shipments, so each of those smaller carloads might hold 10 kilos belonging to Chapo and 10 belonging to Mayo Zambada. The Sinaloa is occasionally called the Federation because senior figures and their subsidiaries operate semiautonomously while still employing a common smuggling apparatus.
The organizational structure of the cartel also seems fashioned to protect the leadership. No one knows how many people work for Sinaloa, and the range of estimates is comically broad. Malcolm Beith, the author of a recent book about Chapo, posits that at any given moment, the drug lord may have 150,000 people working for him. John Bailey, a Georgetown professor who has studied the cartel, says that the number of actual employees could be as low as 150. The way to account for this disparity is to distinguish between salaried employees and subcontractors. A labor force of thousands may be required to plow all that contraband up the continent, but a lot of the work can be delegated to independent contractors, people the Mexican political scientist and security consultant Eduardo Guerrero describes as working "for the cartel but outside it."

Even those who do work directly for the cartel are limited to carefully compartmentalized roles. At a recent trial, a regional cartel lieutenant, José Esparza, testified about his experience working for the Sinaloa along the border. On one occasion, he attended a meeting outside Culiacán with many of the cartel's top leaders. But there was no sign of Chapo. Once the discussion concluded, an emissary left the group and approached a Hummer that was parked in the distance and surrounded by men with bulletproof vests and machine guns, to report on the proceedings. Chapo never stepped out of the vehicle.
It's not just the federales that the narcos fear; it's also one another. The brutal opportunism of the underworld economy means that most partnerships are temporary, and treachery abounds. For decades, Chapo worked closely with his childhood friend Arturo Beltrán Leyva, a fearsome trafficker who ran a profitable subsidiary of Sinaloa. But in 2008, the two men split, then went to war, and Beltrán Leyva's assassins were later blamed for murdering one of Chapo's sons. To reduce the likelihood of clashes like these, the cartel has revived an unlikely custom: the ancient art of dynastic marriage. Chapo's organization is occasionally referred to as an alianza de sangre ("alliance of blood"), because so many of its prominent members are cousins by marriage or brothers-in-law. Emma Coronel, who gave birth to Chapo's twins, is the niece of Nacho Coronel, the Steve Jobs of meth (who died in a shootout with the Mexican Army in 2010). All of this intermarriage, one U.S. official in Mexico suggested to me, functions as "a hedge against distrust." An associate may be less likely to cheat you, or to murder you, if there'll be hell to pay with his wife. It's a cynical strategy, certainly, but in a vocation where one of Chapo's rivals went by the nickname Mata Amigos, or "Friend Killer," it may also be quite sound.
Bribes, The Single largest Line Item

Chapo's Son Edgar Executed

The surest way to stay out of trouble in the drug business is to dole out bribes, and promiscuously. Drug cartels don't pay corporate taxes, but a colossus like Sinaloa makes regular payments to the federal, state and municipal authorities that may well rival the effective tax rate in Mexico. When the D.E.A. conducted an internal survey of its top 50 operatives and informants several years ago and asked them to name the most important factor for running a drug business, they replied, overwhelmingly, corruption. At a trial in 2010, a

former police official from Juárez, Jesús Fierro Méndez, acknowledged that he had worked for Sinaloa. "Did the drug cartels have the police on the payroll?" an attorney asked."All of it," Fierro Méndez replied.
                                              
The cartel bribes mayors and prosecutors and governors, state police and federal police, the army, the navy and a host of senior officials at the national level. After an arrest for drug trafficking in the 1990s, Chapo was sentenced to 20 years and shipped to Puente Grande, a fortified prison in Jalisco that was Mexico's answer to a supermax. But during the five years he spent there, Chapo enjoyed prerogatives that make the prison sequence in "Goodfellas" look positively austere. With most of the facility on his payroll, he is said to have ordered his meals from a menu, conducted business by cellphone and orchestrated periodic visits by prostitutes, who would arrive aboard a prison truck driven by a guard. I spoke with one drug producer who negotiated a joint venture deal with Chapo while he was behind bars. Eventually, as the story goes, Chapo was smuggled out in a laundry cart. According to Martínez's testimony, he paid more than $3 million to secure his release. Today, Chapo is a free man, Puente Grande's warden only recently completed a jail sentence for letting him go and Mexicans call the prison Puerta Grande - the Big Door.

The tacit but unwavering tolerance that Mexican authorities have shown for the drug trade over the years has muddled the boundaries between outlaws and officials. When Miguel Angel Martínez was working for Chapo, he says, "everyone" in the organization had military and police identification. Daylight killings are sometimes carried out by men dressed in police uniforms, and it is not always clear, after the fact, whether the perpetrators were thugs masquerading as policemen or actual policemen providing paid assistance to the thugs. On those occasions when the government scores a big arrest, meanwhile, police and military officials pose for photos at the valedictory news conference brandishing assault weapons, their faces shrouded in ski masks, to shield their identities. In the trippy semiotics of the drug war, the cops dress like bandits, and the bandits dress like cops.

 When

you tally it all up, bribery may be the single largest line item on a cartel's balance sheet. In 2008, President Felipe Calderón's own drug czar, Noe Ramirez, was charged with accepting $450,000 each month. Presumably, such gargantuan bribes to senior officials cascade down, securing the allegiance of their subordinates. "You have to recruit the high commands, so they can issue the information to lower ranks and order whatever they want," the corrupt cop, Fierro Méndez, testified. But in key jurisdictions, the cartel most likely makes payments up and down the chain of command. In a 2010 speech, Genaro García Luna, Mexico's secretary of public security, speculated that together, the cartels spend more than a billion dollars each year just to bribe the municipal police.

 

It's not only officials who must be bribed, either. There are also the "falcons," an army of civilian lookouts who might receive $100 a month just to keep their eyes open and make a phone call if they notice an uptick in border inspections or a convoy of police. "There are cities in Mexico where virtually every cabdriver is on the payroll," Michael Braun, formerly of the D.E.A., said. "They have eyes and ears everywhere."

 A

nd then there are the Americans. Guards at the U.S. border have been known to wave a car through their checkpoints for a few thousand dollars, and since 2004, there have been 138 convictions or indictments in corruption investigations involving members of the United States Customs and Border Protection. Paradoxically, one explanation for this state of affairs is the rapid expansion of border forces following the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. In their hurry to fortify the U.S.-Mexico boundary with uniformed personnel, it seems, officials may have made allowances on background checks and screenings. In some instances, job offers have been extended to the immediate relatives of known traffickers.

 

When corruption fails, there is always violence. During the 12 years that he worked for the cartel, Martínez claims that he did not carry a gun. But Sinaloa has risen to pre-eminence as much through savagery as through savvy. "In illegal markets, the natural tendency is toward monopoly, so they fight each other," Antonio Mazzitelli, an official with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Mexico City, told me. "How do they fight: Go to court? Offer better prices? No. They use violence." The primal horror of Mexico's murder epidemic makes it difficult, perhaps even distasteful, to construe the cartel's butchery as a rational advancement of coherent business aims. But the reality is that in a multibillion-dollar industry in which there is no recourse to legally enforceable contracts, some degree of violence may be inevitable.
"It's like geopolitics," Tony Placido said. "You need to use violence frequently enough that the threat is believable. But overuse it, and it's bad for business."

The most gratuitous practitioners of violence right now would be the Zetas, a rampaging league of sociopaths with a notable devotion to physical cruelty. The Zetas are a new kind of cartel, in that they came somewhat late to the actual business of smuggling drugs. They started out as bodyguards for the Gulf Cartel before going into business for themselves, and they specialize in messaging through bloodshed. It's the Zetas who are charged with dumping 49 mutilated bodies by the side of a highway near Monterrey last month. Sinaloa is responsible for a great deal of carnage as well, but its approach to killing has traditionally been more discreet. Whereas a Sinaloa subsidiary allied with a Tijuana farmer known as the Stewmaker, who dissolved hundreds of bodies in barrels of lye, the Zetas have pioneered a multimedia approach to violence, touting their killings on YouTube. One strategic choice facing any cartel is deciding when to intimidate the civilian population and when to cultivate it. Sinaloa can be exceedingly brutal, but the cartel is more pragmatic than the Zetas in its deployment of violence. It may simply be, as one Obama administration official suggested, that the Sinaloa leadership is "more conscious of their brand."

It's a curious rivalry between these two organizations, because their business models are really very different. The Zetas have diversified beyond drugs to extortion, kidnapping and human trafficking, blossoming into what officials call a "polycriminal organization." Sinaloa, by contrast, has mostly tended to stick to its core competence of trafficking. According to one captured cartel member, Chapo specifically instructed his subordinates not to dabble in protection rackets and insisted that Sinaloa territory remain "calm" and "controlled."

"Sinaloa does not do extortion directly," Eduardo Guerrero said. "It's so risky, and the profits are so small. They want the big business - and the big business is in the United States."

 

Just how active the cartel is north of the border is a divisive question. According to the Department of Justice, by 2009, Mexican-based criminal organizations were operating in "more than a thousand U.S. cities." When you consider the huge jump in the price of narcotics between bulk importation and retail sales, it might seem that Chapo would want to expand into street-level distribution. In 2005, the D.E.A. began intercepting large shipments of cocaine in which each kilo brick was heat-sealed in a distinctive Mylar foil. They spotted the foil in Los Angeles first, then in Oklahoma, Chicago, Atlanta and New Jersey. "This was Sinaloa coke," Michael Wardrop, who led two of the agency's most ambitious operations against the domestic networks of the cartel, told me. As the telltale wrapping popped up across the country, Wardrop and his colleagues marveled at the sheer expanse of Sinaloa's market. "It was like watching a virus in a Petri dish," he said. "It was constantly growing."

 

Wardrop's investigations netted more than a thousand arrests. But some observers question the extent to which the perpetrators in these cases were actually working for the cartel. "If you're telling me there's a straight chain of command back to El Chapo in Sinaloa - come on, that's absurd," the Mexican ambassador, Arturo Sarukhán, protested. Often, the gatekeepers and logistics men that the D.E.A. arrested were indeed connected to handlers in Mexico. But this was more true of high-level importers dealing in kilos than run-of-the-mill retailers pushing grams. When The Associated Press tracked down Otis Rich, a Baltimore dealer who was ensnared in one of the operations, he answered the obvious question with a telling reply: "Sina-who?"

 

"The fully integrated model would indeed maximize profits," John Bailey observes in a coming book about the cartels, but "it also maximizes risk of exposure." A big reason for the markup at the retail level is that the sales force is so exposed - out on the corner, a magnet for undercover cops, obliged to negotiate with a needy, unpredictable clientele. When you adjust for all that added risk, the windfall starts to seem less alluring. Like a liquor wholesaler who opts not to open a bar, Chapo appears to have decided that the profits associated with retail sales just aren't worth the hassle.

 

What Sinaloa does do inside this country is ferry drugs along highways to regional distribution hubs, where they are turned over to trusted wholesalers, like the Flores twins of Chicago. Pedro and Margarito Flores grew up in a Mexican-American enclave of the city during the 1990s. Their father and an older brother had moved drugs for Sinaloa, and by the time the twins were in their 20s, they had gone into business as distributors, purchasing cocaine and heroin directly from Mexican cartels, then selling to dealers throughout the United States. Chicago, home of the Mercantile Exchange, has always been a hub from which legitimate goods fan out across the country, and it's no different for black-market commodities. Chapo has used the city as a clearinghouse since the early 1990s; he once described it as his "home port."
In 2005, the Flores twins were flown to a mountaintop compound in Sinaloa to meet with Chapo Guzmán. The kingpin is an intimidating interlocutor; one criminal who has negotiated with him face to face told me that Chapo tends to dominate a conversation, asking a lot of questions and compensating for his short stature by bouncing on the balls of his feet. But the meeting went well, and before long, the brothers were distributing around two tons of Sinaloa product each month. As preferred customers, they often took Chapo's drugs without putting any money down, then paid the cartel only after they sold the product. This might seem unlikely, given the pervasive distrust in the underworld, but the narcotics trade is based on a robust and surprisingly reliable system of credit. In a sense, a cartel like Sinaloa has no choice but to offer a financing option, because few wholesale buyers have the liquidity to pay cash upfront for a ton of cocaine. "They have to offer lines of credit," Wardrop told me, "no different from Walmart or Sears."

This credit system, known as "fronting," rests on an ironclad assumption that in the American marketplace, even an idiot salesman should have no trouble selling drugs. One convicted Sinaloa trafficker told me that it often took him more time to count the money he collected from his customers than it did to actually move the product. It may also help that the penalty for defaulting could involve dismemberment.

As wholesale buyers, the Flores brothers occupied a crucial bottleneck between the cartel and its consumers. They grew so indispensable, in fact, that after taking delivery of a shipment of drugs, they could retroactively bargain down the price. One day in 2008, Pedro Flores telephoned Guzmán in Mexico to ask for a discount on heroin.

"What did we agree on?" Chapo asked him, according to a government transcript of the call.

They had negotiated a price of $55,000 per kilo, Flores explained. But if Chapo would consider lowering that to $50,000, the twins could pay immediately.

"That price is fine," Chapo agreed, without argument. Then he added something significant: "Do you have a way to bring that money over here?"

For the Sinaloa cartel, pushing product north into the United States is only half the logistical equation. The drug trade is a cash business - you can't buy kilos with your credit card. So while politicians tend to focus on cartels primarily as importers of drugs, the narcos also devote an enormous amount of energy to the export of money. Cash is collected in small denominations from individual buyers and then bundled in great stacks of broken-in bills that are used to pay wholesalers, like the Flores brothers. These bills are counted, hidden in the same vehicle compartments that were used to smuggle drugs in the opposite direction and then sent to stash houses in Los Angeles, San Diego and Phoenix. From there, they move across the border into Mexico.

 

What happens to the money when it gets there? The cartel employs professional money launderers who specialize in drug proceeds, and according to Robert Mazur, a former D.E.A. agent who infiltrated the Colombian cartels, the fee for fully scrubbing and banking illicit proceeds may run Sinaloa more than 15 cents on the dollar. But a great deal of the cartel's money remains in cash. In the early 1990s, a Sinaloa accountant sent planeloads of U.S. currency to Mexico City in suitcases holding $1 million each. When Miguel Angel Martínez worked for Chapo, the kingpin would test his loyalty, adding an extra $200,000 to one of the suitcases to see if Martínez would pocket it. "Eight suitcases, compadre, so that is $8 million," he would say. (Martínez never fell for the trick.) A sizable share of the cash is devoted to paying bribes, and some is sent to Colombia to purchase more product, because drugs offer a strong return on investment. "Where would you put your money?" the former Cisen officer Alejandro Hope asked me with a chuckle. "T-bills? Real estate? I would put a large portion of my portfolio in cocaine."
Even so, the business generates such volumes of currency that there is only so much you can launder or reinvest, which means that money can start to pile up around the house. The most that Martínez ever saw at one time was $30 million, which just sat there, having accumulated in his living room. In 2007, Mexican authorities raided the home of Zhenli Ye Gon, a Chinese-Mexican businessman who is believed to have supplied meth-precursor chemicals to the cartel, and discovered $206 million, the largest cash seizure in history. And that was the money Zhenli held onto - he was an inveterate gambler, who once blew so much cash in Las Vegas that one of the casinos presented him, in consolation, with a Rolls-Royce. "How much money do you have to lose in the casino for them to give you a Rolls-Royce?" Tony Placido, the D.E.A. intelligence official, asked. (The astonishing answer, in Zhenli's case, is $72 million at a single casino in a single year.) Placido also pointed out that, as a precursor guy, Zhenli was on the low end of the value chain for meth. It makes you wonder about the net worth of the guy who runs the whole show.
Vicentillo, A Deal WIth the Devil?
Vicentillo
In 2008, the Flores twins were indicted in Chicago and began secretly cooperating with law enforcement. The following year, one of their Sinaloa contacts - a debonair young trafficker named Jesús Vicente Zambada Niebla, or Vicentillo - was arrested in Mexico and later extradited to Chicago. He will be the highest-ranking member of the cartel ever to face trial in the United States, and his favorite wholesale customers will be the star witnesses against him. In a surprise twist, Vicentillo (who is the son of Chapo's partner, Mayo Zambada) has argued that he can't be prosecuted - because even as he worked for Sinaloa, he was also a secret informant for the D.E.A.
There has been speculation in Mexico that the Calderón regime favors Sinaloa over the unhinged Zetas and has made a devil's pact to lay off the cartel. It might be impossible to eradicate all the cartels in Mexico, this theory goes, so the government has picked a favorite in the conflict in the hope that when the smoke clears, a Sinaloa monopoly might usher in a sort of pax narcotica. A 2010 National Public Radio investigation of Mexican arrest statistics found that Sinaloa had suffered conspicuously fewer arrests than had its peers, though this could simply be evidence of triage on the government's part rather than proof of a conspiracy. Calderón vehemently denies any charges of favoritism, and his administration has arrested or killed several of Chapo's key deputies in the last few years. (My repeated requests for interviews with relevant officials in Mexico were denied.)

The suggestion that the D.E.A. might have made a deal with a high-ranking Sinaloa figure is new, however. In the past, Chapo has occasionally authorized employees to provide information to American law enforcement. Fierro Méndez, the Juárez cop, described a system in which junior traffickers would walk into U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and announce their willingness to become informers - then feed the Americans intelligence about rival cartels, thereby using law enforcement to eliminate their competitors. U.S. officials allow that there were discussions between the D.E.A. and Vicentillo, but they deny that any quid pro quo was in place.

The trial, which is scheduled for October, should shed significant light on Sinaloa's logistical apparatus - provided the witnesses can stay alive until then. Recently, a career criminal named Saul Rodriguez testified that Vicentillo solicited his help at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown Chicago, where they were both being held, in an effort to have the Flores twins assassinated. Authorities have expressed concern that the cartel might undertake a daring jailbreak to get Vicentillo out. They have also voiced the opposite worry - that Vicentillo will himself be killed. A request by the trafficker's attorneys that he be permitted to exercise outdoors raised concerns from prison officials, because the only open space at the prison is a fenced-in recreation area on top of the building, where Vicentillo could be picked off by a sniper. (He has since been moved to a more secure facility.)

It might seem far-fetched that the cartel would try to assassinate one of its own, the son of Mayo Zambada, no less. But Sinaloa guards its secrets ruthlessly. After Chapo's friend Miguel Angel Martínez was arrested in 1998, four men came to kill him in prison, stabbing him repeatedly. In that assault, and another that followed, he sustained more than a dozen stab wounds, which punctured his lungs, pancreas and intestines. After the second attack, he was moved to another facility and kept in a segregated unit. This time, an assassin managed to get as far as the gate outside Martínez's cell and chucked two grenades at the bars. Locked in with nowhere to run, Martínez could only cower by the toilet to shield himself from the blast. The roof caved in, and he barely survived. Asked later who it was that tried to have him killed, Martínez said that it was his compadre, Chapo Guzmán. "Because of what I knew," he explained. (Today he is living in witness protection in the United States.)


Between the coming trial and the increased political drumbeat on both sides of the border for his capture, Chapo may be more embattled today than at any time in his career. In February, he escaped a raid by Mexican authorities in the resort area of Los Cabos. President Calderón's party is trailing in the polls, and some have theorized that the only way it might manage to retain power after next month's presidential election would be if Chapo is killed or captured. U.S. authorities, meanwhile, are uncertain about who might succeed Calderón - Vice President Joe Biden met with all of the leading candidates on a visit to Mexico in March - and whether that successor will have any appetite to continue battling the cartels. With so many dead and so little progress, the Mexican populace has grown war-weary. Several U.S. officials told me that the critical window for capturing Chapo is between now and when Calderón leaves office.

In addition to the threat of capture, there is the threat of competition. By some estimates, the Zetas now control more Mexican territory than Chapo does, even if they don't move nearly as many drugs. Zeta gunmen have made bloody incursions on Chapo's turf, going so far as to penetrate the previously inviolable stronghold of his own home state, Sinaloa. In 2008, Chapo's lover, Zulema Hernández, was discovered dead in the trunk of a car, her body carved with the letter "Z." "It's like the evolution of the dinosaurs, and the coming of the T. Rex," Antonio Mazzitelli told me. "The T. Rex is the Zetas."

Chapo and his colleagues were never peaceful types; in the last few years, they have waged vicious wars of acquisition to seize the lucrative smuggling routes through Juárez and Tijuana. But to fend off the Zetas, Sinaloa is resorting to new levels of barbarism. In March, the cartel dumped a collection of dismembered bodies in Zeta territory and posted a series of open letters on the walls around them, deriding the Zetas as "a bunch of drunks and car-washers." Each message was signed, "Sincerely, El Chapo."
The Future Secure

One thing Chapo has always done is innovate. Even as he engages in violent brinkmanship along the border, the cartel is expanding to new markets in Europe, where a kilo of cocaine can sell for three times what it does in the U.S., and in Australia, where authorities believe that Chapo is now a major cocaine supplier. There are also indications that the cartel is exploring opportunities in Southeast Asia, China and Japan - places Chapo and Martínez first visited as younger men. And Chapo's great comparative advantage still lies along that fraught boundary between Mexico and the United States. Even if the kingpin is killed or captured, one of his associates will quite likely take his place, and the smuggling infrastructure that Chapo created will endure, channeling the product, reaping the profits and feeding, with barely a blip in service, the enduring demand on this side of the border - what the historian Héctor Aguilar Camín once referred to as "the insatiable North American nose."

Note:  All text is undedited from original material.  However, all photos and section titles have been added...

Horse Ranch in Zetas Cartel Case Raised Suspicions

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More on  the Zetas Tervino laundering scheme in horse racing.

The Associated Press
If associates of a reputed Mexican drug cartel leader had wanted to lay low while laundering money at an American horse ranch, they seemed to do everything wrong.
They swept their fields at night with a giant spotlight, threw around lots of cash, bought parcels of land in a deep recession and made expensive improvements to their farm in an industry not known for generating large profits.

“It would take a multi-millionaire just to support an operation like that,” neighbor Clifford Massengale said.

A day after federal authorities arrested ranch operator Jose Trevino Morales in an alleged money laundering scheme benefiting the notorious Zeta cartel, people in this horse ranching community said Trevino was a good neighbor. But his ranch, Zule Farms, seemed strangely out of step.

According to tax records cited by prosecutors, Trevino and his wife reported making only $58,000 in 2009. But somehow they plowed millions of dollars into the quarter-horse ranch.

Neighbors questioned how the couple and their associates could afford to pay cash for top-notch horses and said the pair’s determined effort to blend in with the area’s horse-farming culture actually made them stand out.

“The first thing I noticed was they were too obvious in their attempt to let people know they were in the horse business, but they were the best neighbors we’ve ever had on that property,” said Massengale, a retired military officer who lives next door.

He said ranch workers put fresh paint on the barns, built a new barn and took good care of the hundreds of horses that roam the 160 acres southeast of Lexington. The fields were finely manicured.

An indictment against Trevino and his wife, Zulema, was unsealed Tuesday in Texas. Agents raided ranches in Lexington, the Ruidoso Downs horse track in New Mexico and sites in Texas, arresting Trevino, his wife and five others.

The defendants are expected to be extradited to Texas to face charges. Seven other suspects, including two Trevino brothers, were charged but remain at large.

Greg Lucy, who owns Purcell Farm and Ranch Supply in a neighboring town, said it was unusual for anyone to put a large amount of money into a horse operation.

“The horse industry has been real tough over the last three years. Grain markets were high. Fuel markets were high. The drought last year was real tough,” Lucy said. Some operations have gone out of business.

Convenience store operator Jung Kim said Trevino once showed him satellite photos of his property and expressed an interest in expanding.

“I did think they were pretty rich,” Kim said. “They had a lot of nice horses, and the owner talked about buying some other ranches to grow hay.”

Trevino and the ranch hands would stop by occasionally for soft drinks, snacks and beer. They all appeared to be dedicated to the ranch.

“They were working hard every day. They had a lot of horses, raised them, bred them and took them racing,” he said. “I never thought they laundered money.”

Of all the money that the federal government said was spent — $20 million or more — little of it was spent locally. Lucy said he didn’t recall any major purchases at his store. At a saddle shop in Lexington, the people would browse but not buy.

“They didn’t have much of an impact at all on the local economy, as far as I could tell,” Lucy said.

Prosecutors reviewed records from banks, the American Quarter Horse Association and state racing commissions to track the money, according to an affidavit.

Several confidential informants shared information about Trevino and the two brothers also named in the indictment. One of the brothers, Miguel Angel Trevino Morales, helps lead the Zetas drug cartel in Mexico, prosecutors said.

Tax records showed that Trevino and his wife made $70,000 in 2008 and $58,000 in 2009, but that horses were transferred to his ownership to cover up his brothers’ effort to launder money. Horse records were often backdated to indicate Trevino bought an animal at a low price and that its winnings generated the money to run the farm when, in fact, it was drug money, according to prosecutors.

Authorities said Trevino and his wife would need to spend $200,000 per month to feed and care for the horses alone, much less the stunning landscape.

Wage records show that Trevino “did not have a legitimate source of income significant enough” to pay for either the horses or their care, authorities said.

Trevino and his wife lived in North Texas before moving to Oklahoma sometime around 2011, a neighbor said. Madeline Easterling of Balch Springs, Texas, said the couple had four children and that he often looked tired from laying bricks all day.

“We are just floored,” Easterling said. “I can’t help but feel like there has to be some kind of mistake.”

A woman who was at the family’s former home Tuesday in Balch Springs said she was Jose Trevino’s niece. She insisted the charges were untrue.

“Everything is legal,” she said. “I’ve seen receipts.”

The woman, who would only give her middle name, Isabel, said the U.S. government was discriminating against Mexicans and unfairly naming Jose Trevino because of his ties to his brother.

“Just because we’re related to him, they’re trying to tie us to that,” she said. “I don’t get it, though. It’s all stories.”

Neighbors said the spotlight used to illuminate stables was especially unusual. They assumed the fields were illuminated for security reasons.

Debbie Schauf, director of the Oklahoma Quarter Horse Racing Association in Edmond, said the quarter horse industry is not the “sport of kings,” like the high-price thoroughbred industry, and that upfront expenses aren’t that great.

Still, Trevino had 425 horses, so basic daily maintenance would have cost thousands of dollars per day, maybe more to care for race horses.

K.D. Wilhite, whose Old Dog Gun Shop faces the ranch, was grateful for ranch workers who kept a ditch clear of weeds. But he noticed after the fact that some things seemed odd.

“There is no way they could make that much profit from that operation, not unless they know something I don’t,” Wilhite said.

Anyone who spends that much money “is going to stand out,” he said. “They would have had to buy an awful lot of feed. It appeared to me horses were coming and going all the time.”


Government Forced to Take Abandoned Cartel Horses

Federal agents were forced to seize a dozen horses in New Mexico that are part of a racing operation allegedly laundering money for one of Mexico's most powerful drug cartels, after their trainers refused to continue caring for them, prosecutors said in court documents filed Friday.

Prosecutors had hoped a previous protective order would force companies used to front the alleged operation to pay for the continued care of more than 400 horses. But the government has had to take custody of 12 abandoned this week.

The seizure notice came the same day an FBI agent testified in Austin that a Texas horse trainer accused of helping the ruthless Zetas drug cartel launder money would be in danger if released on bail. Eusevio Maldonado Huitron, 48, was arrested earlier this week as part of a money laundering indictment that named two high-ranking Zeta brothers among others.

Authorities estimated it would have cost Jose Trevino Morales, a third brother charged with running the U.S. horse operation, $200,000 a month to care for the hundreds of horses involved. In the indictment unsealed Tuesday in Austin, prosecutors allege millions of dollars in drug profits were funneled through the group's quarter horse activities in Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and California.

The government had tried to stay out of the horse business. But that's hard to do when more than 400 quarter horses make up a good chunk of the assets prosecutors want forfeited. It also could be months or even years before the forfeitures can be resolved.


Anticipating this, prosecutors got a protective order earlier this month requiring that the horses continue to be fed and housed by their current caretakers. It was unclear if the front companies listed as the horses' owners were expected to continue using money the government alleges is drug profits and the U.S. Attorney's office did not immediately return phone messages Friday.

Among the 12 horses seized Thursday at Ruidoso Downs in New Mexico were Break Out the Bullets and Eye on Corona. It wasn't immediately clear where those horses were taken.

"Federal agents were concerned about getting enough food and water for the animals and also had security concerns regarding the facility at Ruidoso," the notice filed in court in Austin said.

Court documents showed there was only a week's worth of food remaining at the New Mexico stables and that, when approached by federal agents, one trainer refused to help care for the horses. Another initially agreed but then abandoned the animals because he said his dad saw media coverage of the raids and told him to get out, the document said.

John Kirby, a former federal prosecutor in San Diego who worked on money laundering cases, said seizing animals can be a headache for the government.

"When I was at the U.S. Attorney's office a guy who was in charge of forfeiture always said never seize anything that you have to feed," Kirby said. "And you think about it, I mean they need to eat, they need to be trained. The government is going to have to put some money into them to retain their value."

Also in Austin on Friday, FBI agent Haskell Wilkins testified that investigators found bank statements in the home of Maldonado, the trainer, indicating about $24,000 in personal accounts belonging to his young children. He also described a picture found inside of Maldonado allegedly posing with Jose Trevino and a winning horse named "Tempting Dash."

Wilkins said the photo shows Trevino's children using their hands to make the numbers "40" and "42" — alleged Zeta nicknames for Miguel Trevino and Oscar Trevino.

Wilkins testified Maldonado would likely be at risk if freed on bond.

"There would definitely be some flight to avoid any type of retaliation," Wilkins said.

A judge scheduled the hearing to continue Monday and Huitron will remain in jail until then.

Useless Expense and Failed strategy

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Useless Expense and Failed Strategy

By the staff reporters at El Diario de Juarez

El Diario. 6-17-12.  Once again the futility of President Calderon's war against drugs was made evident; not even the deployment of federal and military forces, which coincided in Juarez with a bloody dispute among cartels and turned Juarez into the most violent city in Mexico, impacted the market nor put a stop to the drug trade to the United States.

On the contrary, according to the latest intelligence report from that country's Department of Justice, after 2011 the illegal shipment of cocaine, black tar heroin and metamphetamines increased and there's a greater availability of drugs in West Texas. The document, drafted by the NDIC, establishes that the spike in the flow of drugs coincides with the displacement by the cartel led by Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman of the organization led by Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, although this last still maintains control over a part of the corridor that goes through Juarez.

The final balance in this dispute that has gone on for four years is about 11,000 homicides. Despite the fact that the figures are lower after 2011, this number has no parallel in any other area.

It fell on the people of Juarez to suffer a war that not only brought death  and disintegration to thousands of families, but also devastated the economic and social structures that sustained the city's development. After that overly long critical juncture in which Juarez became an emblem of the binational war against drug trafficking  and in which the city came under fire from cartels that diversified their criminal activities, breaking lives and property, it hurts the citizens who survived the violence to learn that the sacrifice was for nothing.

It is repugnant, too, to confirm again and again that the strategy imposed by the United States and followed blindly by Mexico to attack drug trafficking is a farse because its financial structures remain untouched, and the demand by drug consumers intact. Little or nothing is done to inhibit consumption or the investment of drug proceeds.

It appears that the only objective that authorities from the neighboring country have is that of guaranteeing that things remain unchanged so that there is no lack of drugs for U.S. consumers, regardless of the trail of blood left by their trip through Mexico.

Another facet of this farse in the crusade against drugs is that only Mexicans are stigmatized as mafiosos while in the United States the cartel leaders who are citizens of that country remain faceless.

The prosecution in Texas for money laundering against Jose Trevino -- the brother of Miguel Angel Trevino, second in command of the Zetas -- and his sister Zulema, both United States citizens, illustrates one of a number of activities that the narco can use to launder money. The individuals that have been detained are accused of laundering money through the purchase of quarter horses and stables in racetracks such as the one in Ruidoso, New Mexico.  The activities and acquisitions of the Trevinos had raised suspicisions for some time in the horse racing industry, but U.S. authorities are only now taking action in an operation that according to Mexicos' Attorney General, Marisela Flores, began with the arrest of a Zeta cell by the Mexican Army.

And although the detainees are U.S. citizens, the operation is aimed at Mexican businessmen linked with the Zeta Cartel. Pancho Colorado, a Pemex contractor from Veracruz, has also been accused of being a front for Manuel and Oscar Trevino, which is why he decided last Thursday to surrender in Houston, Texas, to face the charges that the United States Department of Justice has brought against him.

But Anglo names and last names generally do not show up in large scale operations. A case which is emblematic of the permissive policy that the U.S. government follows in money laundering cases  brings us to the Bank of Wachovia, whose executives, without running any great risk, laundered millions of dollars from drug trafficking. According to news stories, between 2004 and 2007, Wachovia handled $378.4 billion dollars that they transferred Mexican currency exchange  businesses, without the bank's owners and executives worrying much about the source of these funds.

When the U.S. authorities detected the irregularities, they merely imposed a fine of $160 million, that is to say, less than 2% of its earnings in 2009. In effect, the punishment became an incentive for bankers and all sorts of businessmen to continue laundering money in violation of the law.

So long as practices like money laundering by banks are not prevented or punished in the U.S., the pressure to expand operations against trafficking on this side of the border, which has contributed to the escalation of violence instead of diminshing it, will continue to be insulting. The strategy of the war should not be limited to causing casualties among the traffickers, which generally results in fragmentation  of the cartels and more violence; what is urgently needed is a serious, legal battle against big enterprises (banks, currency exchange businesses, casinos, real estate, construction companies, among others) that are in the business of injecting drug money into the marketplace.

That's one part of the equation; the other part has to do with rescuing the economies devastated by the war. There, Juarez is once again an example of what can happen when, in the fight against crime, purely police measures are given priority over other basic investments. Empty commercial buildings (22% of commercial space vacant), closed down shopping centers, houses left vacant and destroyed, entire housing developments abandoned, empty lots full of trash or junk, torn up streets and sidewalks, and, generally, deficient and diminshed urban facilities, all reflect a city ruined by the economic recession brought on by violence and crime.

This crisis, in every sense of the word, did nothing but magnify the underdevelopment of the urban and social infrastructure.  The needs are obvious, with evidence of recovery that can barely be perceived after four years of hardship.

Given this devastation, one feels even more indignation that a useless war against drugs should have monopolized the greater part of the federal government's budget. While the deficit was growing here  (according to Juarez social and business sources, at least $5 billion dollars is needed  to rebuild the city), public funds were used to maintain a strong public safety employee payroll and federal and military operations all around the country, without any effect in the war against drug trafficking. Neither have the statistics on violence -- which has spiked to its highest levels, ever, in states like Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon, Jalisco or Veracruz-- nor the consumption of illegal drugs or their price on the market shown any evidence that the strategy has been productive.

Internal consumption (of drugs) is growing, drugs are still reaching the United States, the market grows, the the price has not even gone up. Drug trafficking has not stopped and, at the end of the day, the result does not translate into a decrease in cartel presence, but merely in a reassignment  of the drug corridors, internal reconfigurations, splits and new alliances.  

Fundamentally, nothing changes, and the distribution and money laundering web is guaranteed. The butchery of the war against drugs has only justified the multimillion budgets of public agencies on both sides of the border, but it doesn't seem to matter to anybody that in the midst of all this useless paraphernalia an entire city has bled to death.

The Mystery of Knights Templar

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By ACI for Borderland Beat
 
In December 2010 the streets of Michoacan were set ablaze, burning vehicles blocked the highways.  Black smoke could be seen from miles away, it was a war zone. The smell of burnt tires and gun powder permeated the air.  As bullets ricochet off the pavement, screams of panic could be heard as helicopters flew overhead.  Out numbered and out gunned the criminals began to vanish into the hills surrounding Apatzingan, taking their dead with them.  It would go down as one of the fiercest battles the drug war had seen, lasting several days.  This was the to be the last stand of the once mighty La Familia Cartel and their leader Nazario Moreno Gonzalez,  or was it?
  
The Intellectual Author
Nazario Moreno Gonzalez, the intellectual and spiritual leader of La Familila Michoacana was supposedly wounded during this fire fight.  But his body was never recovered.  It was suspected by the authorities that the reason the gunmen fought so fiercely was to protect someone of great importance.  It was widely assumed  that this person was none other than Nazario Moreno Gonzalez.  To Calderon this was to be a huge his success; a validation of his crusade against the cartels, with or without a body.  To claim with such certainty, that the leader of the feared La Familia was in fact dead without a body was strange, considering the prominence of El Chayo.  The people of Apatzingan mourned his death but none fully believed he actually died.  The rumor of a man who had taken advantage of the assumption of government begun. 
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2010/12/mexican-city-is-blockaded-by-gunmen.html
Banner Claiming Knight Templar's Replacement of LFM

The Missing Body
Though a body was never found, one of El Chayo's most loyal lieutenants Servando Gomez Martinez, also know as La Tuta, sent a recording into Televisa announcing Nazario Moreno Gonzalez's death.  This is interesting to note as one would not expect a cartel to come out and announce the death of their own leader, much less to do it in such an elaborate fashion.  At the time the image of LFM was beginning to suffer greatly.  The heat they were receiving from the Federal Government was too much for the organization to withstand.  It would make sense for them to distance themselves from La Familia brand.  Before the end of December 2010 the Knights Templar would appear and Calderon had the one the feather in the cap he had always wanted, La familia disbanded.  But did they dismantle La Familia, or was this a impressive maneuver from the leadership to rid themselves of all the heat LFM had been receiving.
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2010/12/la-tuta-confirms-el-chayos-death.html
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2011/03/la-familia-michoacana-is-now-knights.html

To be Made an Example Of
To understand why El Chayo may still be alive one must look at the history of La Familia Michoacana.  LFM started out as a faction of Los Zetas who went rouge.  They had long standing ties with both Los Zetas and the Gulf Cartel, and received training from Los Zetas.  Of all the cartels, President Calderon wanted La Familia most of all.  It was personal, La Familia came from the state where he was born, and they were openly provoking the federal authorities, killing several Federal Police.  Furthermore, no other state represented how far the narcos had be able to infiltrate the local institutions better than Michoacan.  Some said La Familia were able to put in place a shadow government, one which paralleled the state.  So Calderon's War was to begin here.  

La Familia which had arose from an armed wing of the Gulf Cartel was tasked with securing the drug trade in Michoacan.  They were to take over territory controlled then by the Milenio Cartel.  The Milenio Cartel had been operating in the state for some time and were the dominate organization in area, they were major methamphetamine producers.  In what could only be called a Mexican twist of fate, Milienio would later became allied with Los Zetas who would later become the biggest rivals of La Familia.

The Bait and Switch
Nazario Moreno Gonzalez was most likely wounded that day in Apatzingan, there has been little to discount this.  But did he survive?  One must consider the circumstantial evidence of the claim.  There was certainly major discord after the battle which can only be interpreted as a void in leadership, but did this mean his death?  Or was this the work of a man who took advantage of a governments eagerness to see him and his Cartel eliminated.  If he in fact survive then this would be one of the most intriguing tales from one of the most eccentric cartels in history.

The Rumors
The rumor that El Chayo is alive has been around since his death but it had some weight added to it recently.  The most damning evidence came in March of this year.  A message was posted online from CJNG targeting the Knight Templar.  In the video they clearly state they know El Chayo is still alive.  It makes no sense for them to make this accusation if it has no merit.  There would be nothing to gain from this claim but perhaps to promote confusion but this seems unlikely.  Given the similarities between the Knights Templar's code of conduct and La Familia's there are striking parallels.  It is also worth noting how solidified the Knights Templar became after the death of  Nazario Moreno Gonzalez.  While La Familia collapsed rapidly, leaving only isolated cells, leaderless across the country, while the Knights Templar seemed surprisingly organized.
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2012/03/narco-response-to-knights-of-templar.html

On Their Own
With this new video, it appears that the Knights Templar have overplayed their hand.  It appears that Sinaloa, a long time ally has turned against them.  For what reason still remains unclear, but it is thought this might have to do with the Knights Templar encroaching on Sinaloa's territory.  This leaves the Gulf Cartel as CT's only ally left.  There is a lot of history between Enrique Plancarte of the Knights Templar and Juan Reyes Mejía González of the Gulf Cartel.  This relationship appears to have remained in tact.  The Knights Templar however have seemed to have lost ground in their abilities to produce methamphetamine, this can be assumed due to the increase in extortion and kidnappings attributed to the group.  In addition, the Knights Templar have seen several of their distribution networks in the US dismantled.  This has left the Cartel isolated from the narcotic trade.  If they can re-establish themselves as significant producers and exporters of methamphetamine they may one day return to power.  As for now the Cartel seems to be increasing less prominent in the scope of Mexico's Drug War.  So will it ever become clear the true fate of El Chayo and his role within the Knights Templar, that remains to be seen but as with most things in this war, anything is possible.



World Leaders Meet In "A Mexico" Now Giving Brazil a Run For Their Money

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Borderland Beat

"Are you better off  than you were five years ago?",  asks President Calderon of his citizens.  In 2011 Mexico's economy incresed at a faster pace than the Latin American economic gem,  Brazil, and is on track to repeat that fete again in 2012.  One wonders where Mexico would be but for the run away violence in a war that began two years before Calderon's Presidential Term....Paz, Chivis Martinez

Obama Arrives in Cabo

Elizabeth Malkin

Cabos- Mexicans looked on with envy in recent years as Brazilians won a reputation as Latin America’s chosen people. With a surging economy and a prominent place on the world stage, Brazil was the country poised for greatness while Mexico  remained mired in bloodshed and destitution.

But just as momentum can change suddenly in a match at the World Cup or an event at the Olympics — both competitions that Brazil will host in the next four years — so can the dynamics between nations.

                                                NEWLY RELEASED RAW VIDEO
Last year, Mexico’s economy grew faster than Brazil’s, and it looks set to outpace its larger Latin rival again in 2012.

Brazil’s slowdown can be attributed partly to debt-burdened consumers and the erosion of industrial production, which is tied to the recent strength of Brazil’s currency, the real. On top of that, slowing global growth, particularly in China, has pushed down prices of the commodities that Brazil exports.

Meanwhile, Mexican factories are exporting record quantities of televisions, cars, computers and appliances, replacing some Chinese imports in the United States and fueling a modest expansion.

Economically, Mexico does not appear as grim a place anymore.

“The best way to improve your image is G.D.P. growth,” said Luis de la Calle, a former Mexican trade negotiator and an economic analyst here.

Mexico’s strengthening economy underlies the glossy veneer on display as President Felipe Calderón hosts the Group of 20 leaders of major industrialized and emerging economies at the luxury beach resort of Los Cabos on Monday and Tuesday.

In contrast to the widening crisis in the euro zone, which will be the focus of the talks, Mexico will be able to point to 17 years of macroeconomic stability, low inflation, manageable debt, an open economy and increasing competitiveness. The gross domestic product expanded 3.9 percent last year, ahead of Brazil’s growth of 2.7 percent.

Golf on the Schedule, Departing Chicago
And there are encouraging signs for the years ahead. Nissan, Mazda and Honda all announced that they would build new plants in Mexico, and new investments in aerospace and electronics are also on the horizon.

“Stars appear to be increasingly aligned for an economic outperformance” by Mexico, a report in May from Nomura Securities concluded. “A changing of the guard is slowly but surely taking place.”

The reversed fortunes of Latin America’s two largest economies are a sharp contrast to the euphoria over Brazil’s prospects as recently as 2010, when the economy grew 7.5 percent in the last year of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s government.

“The years of good growth are clearly in the past,” said Antony Mueller, a professor of economics at the Federal University of Sergipe in Brazil.

In one sign of unease, the Brazilian government threatened this year to cancel a 10-year-old automotive trade accord with Mexico. For most of the pact’s life, Brazil had sent more cars to Mexico, but last year that reversed, with imports of Mexican-made cars surging 70 percent to $2.4 billion. In March, Mexico agreed to cut its exports to Brazil to an average of $1.55 billion annually for the next three years and restore free trade after that.

The dispute highlights each country’s distinct approach to development. Mexico has been dedicated to open markets, free trade and deregulation. Brazil’s model involves muscular government intervention through big state-controlled companies.

At the same time, China’s rise has affected Brazil and Mexico in opposite ways: China competes with Mexico and buys from Brazil. Mexico struggled for much of the past decade as Chinese-made products replaced Mexican goods in the United States, which buys 78 percent of Mexico’s exports. And China’s demand for raw materials helped lift Brazil’s economy as stability allowed the government to redistribute the wealth and expand credit.

“Brazil has had two powerful narratives,” said Gray Newman, an economist for Latin America at Morgan Stanley. “If you believe in China, you believe in Brazil. That counted for a lot. The second narrative is that ‘We’ve become a normal country and created the conditions for the emergence of a middle class.’ Those narratives are so powerful.”

Mexico’s story has not been as positive, Mr. Newman said, with its fortunes tied to the United States and the government engaged in a war against powerful drug gangs. Even with the tide turning in their favor, Mexicans are so gloomy they do not see it, analysts say.

“This self-flagellation in Mexico is a malady,” said Mr. de la Calle, who argues against the conventional wisdom and describes Mexico as a middle-class country. “When I said, ‘You are not as badly off as you say you are — there is a reason to have hope for the future,’ the argument that I got back was that Brazil is doing much better.”

Indeed, the candidate who leads in opinion polls ahead of Mexico’s July 1 presidential election, Enrique Peña Nieto, began a recent presidential debate by asking people if they were better off and answering the question himself: “Surely, no.”

One reason for the malaise is Mexico’s drug war. The sight of miles upon miles of factories outside the industrial capital of Monterrey attracts far less attention than the image of nine bodies hanging from a bridge in the border city of Nuevo Laredo. Mexico’s Finance Ministry has estimated that the violence shaves at least 1 percentage point from G.D.P. growth.

Even though Brazil’s homicide rate trumps Mexico’s, the gory nature of the killings in Mexico and Mr. Calderón’s use of the military to combat traffickers have focused more attention on the death toll here.

And Mr. Peña Nieto is correct that growth has yet to trickle down to many workers. Real wages have barely increased. Indeed, one reason that Mexico has captured market share from China is the narrowing gap between Chinese and Mexican wages.

Brazil and Mexico probably have more in common than their supposed rivalry would suggest. Each has stabilized its economy after decades of veering from crisis to crisis and improved the well-being of many of its citizens.

In Brazil, “the dividends of what it did in the 1990s paid off with a political transition dovetailing with commodity prices,” said Lisa M. Schineller, a Latin America analyst for Standard & Poor’s. “It all came together.”

Now the two countries also face many of the same problems: inadequate schools, creaky infrastructure, bureaucracy and corruption.

Mexico’s political paralysis has stopped it from taking effective measures to break up monopolies, rewrite labor laws, collect more taxes and pry open the world’s most closed oil company, changes that would add 2.5 percentage points to its growth rate, the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness estimated.

The question is how these middle-income countries find a way to advance further, said Shannon K. O’Neil, a Latin American analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Trying to move from G.D.P. per capita of $5,000 to $10,000 is much easier than moving from $10,000 to $20,000,” she said. “I think that’s the challenge that both face.”

 

Mexican security forces kill 7 in Veracruz state

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By Chris Covert
Rantburg.com

A total of seven armed suspects were killed in a firefight with a joint Mexican security road patrol late Sunday night in central Veracruz state, according to Mexican news accounts.

According to a news item posted on the website of Proceso news weekly, the confrontation took place in near the village of La Gloria in Ursulo Galvan municipality, where the security patrol signalled the drivers of two vehicles to stop, but instead were met with preparations to fire weapons by the armed suspects.

La Raza news daily reported the patrol was a joint patrol comprising Veracruz state police agents as well as Mexican Army units.

After the confrontation, patrol elements seized four rifles, ten weapons magazines, communications gear and the two vehicles.

Ursulo Galvan is a coastal municipality, about 20 kilometers north of the port city of Veracruz and 40 kilometers southeast of Xalapa, the capital of Veracruz state.

Veracruz state has been the scene of a major security operation for the last 18 months dubbed Seguro Veracruz, a security program operated jointly by state and federal security forces including Mexican Army and Mexican Naval Infantry forces. 

The security operation, similar to one in the La Laguna region and in places such as Tamaulipas state, seeks to concentrate security forces in choke points used by the drug cartels to ship product, shooters and munitions north to the US border crossings.

Chris Covert writes Mexican Drug War and national political news for Rantburg.com
© Copyright 2012 by Chris Covert
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Despite FBI Warning His Life is in Danger, Trevino's Horse Trainer is Released

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Borderland Beat Chivis Martinez

Only time will tell who was in the right with this man.  Or if he skips town. First the backstory then the decision by the judge.Paz, Chivis
 An FBI agent says a Texas horse trainer accused of helping a Mexican drug cartel launder money would potentially be in danger from the cartel if released on bail.

Federal prosecutors Friday sought to keep Eusevio Maldonado Huitron in custody. The 48-year-old who trains horses near Austin is charged with conspiracy to launder money and was arrested as part of a nationwide sweep that included two reputed leaders in the Zetas drug gang.

FBI agent Haskell Wilkins testified that Huitron likely would flee "to avoid retaliation" from the cartel if released. The hearing is scheduled to continue Monday, and Maldonado will remain in jail until then.

The Zetas have been accused of smuggling thousands of tons of drugs into the United States and dismembering rivals.


He is Released But Remains in Custody  (AP Wire)


 A federal judge ruled Monday that a Texas horse trainer charged with conspiring to launder money for Mexico's powerful Zetas drug cartel should be released on bail, rejecting the prosecution's argument that the threat of cartel reprisals against him was so severe it could harm the surrounding community.

Eusevio Maldonado-Huitron remained in custody because federal prosecutors said they will appeal the decision. Hours later, however, federal prosecutors filed a motion to withdraw their appeal, clearing the way for Maldonado-Huitron's release soon.

Maldonado-Huitron ran a horse farm in Bastrop County southeast of Austin and is among 15 people charged with helping the Zetas launder millions of dollars through quarter horse operations in Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and California.

After listening to a string of witnesses in a bail hearing that stretched over two days, U.S. Magistrate Judge Andrew Austin said he was setting conditions for Maldonado-Huitron's release, but he didn't immediately make them public.

Prosecutors conceded that they had no evidence Maldonado-Huitron was violent but said there was a risk he could flee to Mexico and disappear given his family ties in that country. However, the greater danger in releasing him from federal custody, they argued, was the threat posed by the Zetas targeting him and his family - and by extension, the community at large.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Michelle Fernald said she was limited on what she could say in open court prior to trial. But she argued that Maldonado-Huitron should remain in custody given the "nature and seriousness of the danger to any member of the community," due to both "the nature of this organization and the seriousness of the potential retaliation, not just to him but to his family members and anyone else."

That argument was based on testimony Friday from FBI agent Haskell Wilkins, who said the defendant was a serious flight risk due to the possibility he could be targeted by the Zetas.

But Maldonado-Huitron's attorney, assistant federal Public Defender Jose Gonzalez-Falla, countered Monday that "we haven't heard anything to indicate" his client's guilt. He said prosecutors' arguments of "'trust us, it's in the indictment'" is not enough.

Gonzalez-Falla said Maldonado-Huitron is an illiterate horse trainer who poses no threat to the Zetas. An associate of Maldonado-Huitron's from El Paso testified Monday that the trainer was actually dismissed weeks before his arrest because his horses were underperforming, which the defense attorney said meant his client was now even less important in the eyes of the cartel.

"Why on earth would they hit my client?" he asked. "What has he done? He's a horse trainer."

Also testifying Monday was Maldonado-Huitron's brother, Jesus, who when asked if he knew what the Zetas were answered through an interpreter, "just what you hear on TV."

"From what they say, they killed a lot of people in Mexico and then they toss the bodies out," the elder Maldonado-Huitron testified.

Gonzalez-Falla said his client had a right to get paid for his services no matter who hired him, adding that the government's arguments were based only on "a bunch of rumors about receiving some money." He said prosecutors feared the ferociousness of any possible reprisals, "just because they're the Zetas and they're bad and they kill people and take their heads off."

"What does that have to do with my client?" he asked.

Austin sided with the defense, saying Maldonado-Huitron's family might be targeted, but that the threat was no less acute if the defendant was in prison. He said the only risk to the lager community he could see might be "someone's horse might get beat in a race if Mr. Huitron trains the horse."

Austin also said he appreciated the flight risk but couldn't imagine the defendant fleeing to Mexico given how powerful the Zetas are there.

Maldonado-Huitron is "frankly, a lot better off in the United States than in Mexico, which is the only place I can see he'd flee to," the judge said.

 Sources:  AP WIRE-KTVN-KVUE

How to Report on Cartels.....and Live

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Borderland Beat

 
Adam Martin
It's been a big week for reporting on Mexican drug cartels in The New York Times, where reporters on two stories kept themselves safe by replacing direct danger with lots of hard work.

On Tuesday, Ginger Thompson broke the story of Zetas cartel leaders allegedly laundering money through a massive U.S.-based horse-racing operation. Then on Friday, a lengthy Times Magazine feature by Patrick Radden Keefe went live, exploring the structure, business, and leadership of the Sinaloa cartel, which dominates the drug trade along the U.S.-Mexico border.


Keefe, author of Snakehead, told The Atlantic Wire on Friday that he'd started reporting his piece in January, using U.S. court documents and trial transcripts to track down three people involved with the Sinaloa cartel, who would speak as sources: A pilot, a drug manufacturer, and a mid-level trafficker. "In a bunch of these cases the people were either doing prison time or had gotten out of prison, so I started tracking people down. A lot of them don’t want to talk. It’s kind of a low-yield form of reporting."

But through it, Keefe has put together a fascinating profile of an organization that rivals in scale the corporate giants of our time: "By most estimates, Sinaloa has achieved a market share of at least 40 percent and perhaps as much as 60 percent, which means that Chapo Guzmán’s organization would appear to enjoy annual revenues of some $3 billion — comparable in terms of earnings to Netflix or, for that matter, to Facebook." And we meet the Sinaloas' infamous leader, Chapo, who sounds like a cross between CEO and Bond villain: "From the remote mountain redoubt where he is believed to be hiding, surrounded at all times by a battery of gunmen, Chapo oversees a logistical network that is as sophisticated, in some ways, as that of Amazon or U.P.S."

Keefe opted not to go to Sinaloa itself, the seat of the cartel's massive operation. He knew he wasn't going to meet Chapo, so what would he achieve? "There was a cost-benefit analysis. Looking at the reporting from people who have gone to Sinaloa, generally what people come back with -- and this is gringo reporters who go up there and ask around -- they come back with color. You can describe Culiacon, the capital there ... And you might get some guy sitting in front of a restaurant saying 'we do not speak of the Choppo.' " But you're not going to get an interview with the man himself. "I decided against that for a number of reasons, primarily that a lot of journalists have been killed in mexico, most of them Mexican journalists." On Thursday, reporter Baez Chino was found dead in Veracruz  the country's 81st journalist killed since 2000.

So Keefe opted for a week in Mexico City, speaking with academics who follow the drug trade, and lots of time leafing through court documents. Eventually, he found a record of a 2006 trial in Arizona, at which Chapo's right-hand man, Miguel Angel Martínez, had testified. He tracked down the court reporter, who sent him a copy of the transcript. Amazingly, it had been untouched by reporters. "People have been writing about Chapo for years and years and they’ve poured over his biography," Keefe said. But here was a document that had never made it into the hands of a journalist or biographer. It included revelations such as Chapo's own use of cocaine, and what Keefe called "trival details," like the fact that he had his own private zoo in Guadalajara that contained tigers and bears. "It was gobsmacking for me to get my hands on this transcript, which has been out in the world and available if you’d found it, since 2006. And to realize nobody had found it."

Thompson, meanwhile, was reporting a much more sensitive story. As she explains in her report, she found out about the Zetas cartel's alleged involvement in U.S. horse racing in December 2011, and in the course of her reporting discovered that the U.S. Department of Justice was also investigating Zetas leader Miguel Ángel Treviño and his ranch-owning brother, José Treviño, which led to arrests this week. "The Times learned of the government’s investigation last month and agreed to hold back this article until Tuesday morning’s arrests," she wrote. But she worked on the story for a lot longer than a month, so how did she keep herself and her sources safe? She hid behind her own reporting, she told PRI's The World:
"I was never threatened. I think a lot of the reason for that is that I didn’t make it known that I was looking specifically at Jose Trevino. I did a lot of reporting that made it appear I was looking at something other than him directly. It was complicated and it took us a lot longer to finish this story because of that. But, yes, we thought about safety at every turn and not just for my safety but really for the safety of the people who spoke to me which is why so many people in my story are unidentified. It was mostly for the sake of their safety."

Thanks to the two reports' legwork, we know a lot more about the cartel situation on both sides of the border on Friday than we did on Monday.

Source-Atlantic Wire

10 Tons of Marijuana Dumped Off California Coast and 2 Tons off Ensenada

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6.20.12 UPDATE: Read the report from the US Navy,  details HERE

Borderland Beat:   reports are all over the place 10, or 12 or 19 tons....whatever,  alota mota...
and in the waters off of Ensenada, Baja California Mexican Marina retrieved 2 tons.  Link for that story at the bottom of this post.  "Someone" is losing tons of MJ  each week.  Paz, Chivis

Navy Plucks 19,000 lbs of Mota Out of the  Ocean

US Navy Retrieving Floating MJ

UTSD by Nathan Max

An aircraft carrier group recovered an estimated 19 tons of marijuana that had been dumped into the Pacific Ocean over the weekend by three boats off the California coast, the Navy said Tuesday.
Nobody was apprehended and the three boats sped off after dropping their load, said Lt. Aaron Kakiel, spokesman with Naval Air Forces Pacific. Crews from the aircraft carrier Nimitz, guided-missile cruiser Princeton, Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron 6, Helicopter Maritime Squadron 75 and the Mexican Navy picked up 186 bales of marijuana that apparently was en route to the United States. The Nimitz Strike Group is operating in the Pacific Ocean off the Southern California coast conducting carrier qualification operations.

“The coordinated response of all hands involved was phenomenal,” Nimitz Strike Group Commander Rear Adm. Pete Gumataotao said in a statement. “The combined efforts of each of our strike group components demonstrated the flexibility and capability that defines how we conduct business.”

Shortly before 2 p.m. Saturday, starboard lookouts on the Nimitz spotted two boats about four nautical miles away. When helicopter crews flew in for a closer look, they saw two 25-foot single-engine boats, which began dumping 80 black hefty bags, each filled with about 100 pounds of marijuana, the Navy said.

A little more than three hours later, an officer of the deck on the Nimitz spotted a third boat, which also dumped its load into the ocean. The bales were eventually transferred to the Coast Guard and brought to shore.

“This crew’s response was amazing,” Nimitz Commanding Officer Capt. Jeff Ruth said in a statement. “To operationally shift gears quickly and safely from carrier qualifications to a real-world response shows what true professionals work here.”

Note: AP is reporting 2 boats and 10 Tons, 6 Tons off one boat and 4 off the other.  No news source is reporting less than 10 Tons...

Sources: UTSD-San Diego Reader-SDT-AP

PGR Transporting Marijuana Found n Ensenada Waters

Additionally: Mexican Navy (Marina) found 2 tons floating off of waters near Ensenada.
See Havana's post on BB Forum about that find HERE

HuffPO HERE
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