Dozens of Gunmen Storm Northern Mexican Town, Kill 4 Dozens of organized crime gunmen stormed a small town in the northwestern Mexican state of Sonora, killing four people and setting a police headquarters ablaze, state Attorney General Abel Murrieta said. The assailants burst into the town of Maycoba at around 6:00 p.m. Thursday and stayed about five hours, according to local residents. Between 80 and 100 gunmen bearing rifles and with their faces covered entered the town on board about 15 late-model vehicles, Murrieta told a press conference on Friday. Their first action was to open fire on the town’s police station and then set it on fire. The police in the small town were not at the station at the time of the attack and were therefore unharmed, the prosecutor said. But the gunmen killed the father of the local police chief and three dead bodies were found a few kilometers from the town, two of whom have still not been identified. They also looted a store. Prior to terrorizing the town, the group of gunmen had blockaded the nearby federal highway with two trucks...
Sheriff To Texas Border Town: 'Arm Yourselves' Last week, residents held a town-hall meeting in Fort Hancock, Texas — a sleepy agricultural town on the border, about an hour southeast of El Paso, that looks like the bleak set of No Country for Old Men. A couple hundred people crowded into the grade-school gym to hear a chilling message from Hudspeth County Sheriff Arvin West. "You farmers, I'm telling you right now, arm yourselves," he said. "As they say the old story is, it's better to be tried by 12 than carried by six. Damn it, I don't want to see six people carrying you." His warning was prompted by the killing of the Arizona rancher, and the spiraling violence a couple of miles away in Mexico in a region known as the Valley of Juarez. The notorious smuggling territory is being fought over by the Sinaloa and the Juarez cartels. "One of the men that works for me had five people killed in front of his house over there [in Mexico] this past weekend," says Curtis Carr, who is a farmer and county commissioner. The violence in the Juarez Valley directly affects this little Texas town. A couple of weeks ago, gunmen in the Juarez Valley killed the Mexican relative of a Fort Hancock high school student. When the student's family in Fort Hancock heard about it, they crossed the border at 10 a.m. to see the body, and took the student with them. "By 10:30, they had stabbed the relatives that went with him, which included his grandparents, with an ice pick," says school superintendent Jose Franco. "My understanding is that the gentleman is like 90 years old, and they poked his eyes out with an ice pick. I believe those people are still in intensive care here in a hospital in the U.S."...
As agents clear out Mexican gangs, more brutal ones move in The bodies that turned up on a squalid back street in the border town of Reynosa in December were no longer human. The torsos showed deep lacerations and punctures; the severed heads were badly beaten and mutilated. Crudely butchered limbs lay scattered across the tarmac stained by blood. Violence fueled by the illegal drug trade has long been a daily fact of life along the U.S.-Mexico border. But as the Mexican and U.S. governments have made significant inroads in dismantling an older order of drug cartels, their rivals and even newer ones have moved to fill the vacuum - and fill it in increasingly terrifying and barbarous ways. Beheadings and dismemberments have since become the cartels' signature crime - to punish those who oppose or betray them, to establish their turf, to terrorize the citizenry against testifying against them, and to press community and political leaders to collaborate. Heads, torsos and severed legs and arms have been strewn along city streets throughout Mexico, mostly in border towns where the Gulf and Sinaloa cartels are in a pitched battle against each other and with Los Zetas, a former Mexican military group, for control of the multibillion-dollar drug industry. Zapata County, Texas, Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez Jr., who has experienced the border violence firsthand, said his department started seeing beheadings in Mexico about a year after the videotaped beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002 in Pakistan. "Terrorists from the Middle East brought this practice to Central America then to Mexico. It is also a practice of the [violent U.S. street gang known as] MS-13," Sheriff Gonzalez told The Washington Times. "They are getting worse and worse. It never stops shocking me. "I am even more nervous about this practice spilling over into U.S. cities," he said, noting that Mexican drug cartels are now operating in more than 200 American cities...
Bomb damages US consulate in Mexico An attacker threw an explosive device over the wall around the U.S. consulate in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, breaking windows and startling employees inside but causing no injuries, the U.S. Embassy said Saturday. The attack, which took place about 11:30 p.m. Friday, is under investigation, embassy spokesman Claude Young said. Young said the consulate and the consular agency in the border town of Piedras Negras would be closed Monday pending a review of security measures. Mexican federal prosecutors in the capital said they were reviewing evidence from the scene, including video feeds from security cameras at the consulate. Nuevo Laredo, across the Rio Grande River from Laredo, Texas, and other cities have seen increased violence in recent weeks as powerful Mexican drug cartels battle over control of lucrative trafficking along the border...
Mexico Says 2 Minors Killed in Gun Battle Involving Army Troops The Mexican government said two minors were killed inside a vehicle during a clash between army troops and cartel hit men in the northern state of Tamaulipas, although other passengers inside the SUV sprayed with gunfire said they were the only ones fired upon. In a press conference Thursday, Interior Secretary Fernando Gomez Mont said “a group of armed subjects attacked army troops, who repelled the aggression” on a road that leads to the city of Nueva Ciudad Guerrero, Tamaulipas. “As a byproduct of the clashes, regrettably two minors were killed, Bryan Almanza Salazar, 5, and Martin Almanza Salazar, 9,” Gomez Mont said, adding that the government “empathizes with the suffering of the (slain children’s) family.” Last Saturday, shots fired by army soldiers struck an SUV carrying a family of 13 as it was passing through a military checkpoint, killing the two minors and wounding two other adults...
Mexican Governor Requests Federal Police to Halt Prison Escapes amaulipas Gov. Eugenio Hernandez called on the Mexican government to deploy 500 federal officers in his state to prevent prison escapes, which have resulted in at least 50 inmates getting out of penitentiaries in recent weeks. The Federal Police officers would be in charge of providing security at five of the eight state penitentiaries in Tamaulipas, a state in northeastern Mexico, Hernandez said. “We are urgently requesting 500 officers to guard five state prisons in the cities of Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa, Matamoros, Victoria and Altamira, 100 officers for each one of them,” the governor said. Hernandez said he expected a favorable response from the federal government. Organized crime groups have resorted to helping criminals escape to bolster their forces in a turf war against rival gangs. At least 40 inmates escaped on March 26 from the state prison in Matamoros, located across the border from Brownsville, Texas, while gunmen helped 12 others break out of the prison in Reynosa last Saturday, killing three guards...
Fear Factories: Violence impacting maquilas The gunmen charged after midnight Friday, making off with uniforms and at least five trucks from the world’s largest oilfield services company. It’s unclear if the attackers were from a drug cartel or how they even managed to bypass the security gate and guards at the Schlumberger Ltd. compound on the western outskirts of Reynosa. In a city wracked by drug violence, where many describe government control as illusory, information is scarce. Until recently few criminals dared to touch the factories and offices of the hundreds of multinational corporations in Reynosa. Amid a violent three-way war among two cartels and the military, they are no longer untouched. Cartels have commandeered cargo trucks loaded with goods and buses for factory workers to create impromptu roadblocks. Factories have canceled shifts on violent nights when they felt it was too unsafe for workers to leave home or when they couldn't catch the bus. The upsurge in violence has impacted the bottom line, making some of Reynosa’s industrial giants wonder when enough will be enough, factory managers said...
Sinaloa cartel wins Juarez turf war After a two-year battle that has killed more than 5,000 people, Mexico's most powerful kingpin now controls the coveted trafficking routes through Ciudad Juarez. That conclusion by U.S. intelligence adds to evidence that Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman's Sinaloa cartel is winning Mexico's drug war. The assessment was made based on information from confidential informants with direct ties to Mexican drug gangs and other intelligence, said a U.S. federal agent who sometimes works undercover, insisting on anonymity because of his role in ongoing drug investigations. The agent told The Associated Press those sources have led U.S. authorities to believe that the Sinaloa cartel has edged out the rival Juarez gang for control over trafficking routes through Ciudad Juarez, ground zero in the drug war. Other officials corroborated pieces of the assessment. Andrea Simmons, an FBI spokeswoman in El Paso, confirmed that the majority of drug loads arriving from Juarez now belong to Guzman. The twin border cities of Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, Texas, are a primary crossing point for drugs smuggled into the United States. Control of drug routes in Chihuahua, the state along New Mexico and West Texas where Juarez is located, is vital to Guzman's efforts to grow his massive drug cartel's operations...
Turf Battles in Juarez Prompt Policing Changes The Mexican Public Security Secretariat took over policing in Ciudad Juarez on Thursday as part of a shift in strategy -- the federal government's third in less than two years -- to quell persistent violence in the border city. Five thousand federal police will replace the exiting Mexican army, which some say had little success in reining in the cartels that operate in Juarez during its years in charge of the city's security. Those federal Public Security Secretariat police will supplement a force of 2,500 municipal police. Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz told several Mexican media outlets on Wednesday that the city would now have a "policing solution." Corchado noted the cartel activities were altering Juarez's residential and business landscape. Around 116,000 homes in Juarez have been abandoned and many local businesses have shuttered or moved to El Paso...
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