Sunday, May 08, 2011

U.S.-bred criminal accused in Mexico mass killings

When he was deported from the U.S. to Mexico for the third time, Martin Estrada Luna was a high school dropout with a rap sheet of petty crimes like burglary. Less than two years later, Mexican authorities say, he has transformed himself into a drug baron known as El Kilo, the leader of a ruthless cell of the Zetas gang who masterminded the mass killings of more than 250 people. He is now under arrest in Mexico City. Mexican prosecutors have not presented any evidence publicly to support their claim that he was responsible for the deaths of 72 migrants in August and 183 people months later. The Mexican government often announces big arrests immediately after high-profile crimes, but according to its own statistics, three-quarters of those initially accused as drug traffickers or assassins are let go without charges. Whether he was a big player or not, Estrada Luna appears to have succumbed to a cross-border crime culture that is growing as hundreds of thousands of deportees with criminal backgrounds are dumped in Mexico. Under a tough-on-crime immigration crackdown, half of the 393,000 people deported from the United States between October 2009 and September 2010 were convicted criminals, with crimes that could have ranged from minor drug offenses to murder. There are seldom arrest warrants to hold the ex-convicts in Mexico, so they are let loose into a lawless border land increasingly run by drug lords eager to train recruits in violent tactics...more

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