Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives under pressure to turn over documents on anti-gun-trafficking strategies

Gruesome Discovery in Mexico

 

Associated Press= MEXICO CITY (AP) — Investigators found 26 badly decomposed bodies at a vacant lot in the northern Mexico state of Durango on Wednesday and said they were looking for more.

The grisly Holy Week discovery came just days after police found 10 complete bodies, three headless bodies and four severed heads in a pit in Durango, a state that has become a battleground between the Zetas and Sinaloa drug cartels.

Acting on information that there were skeletal remains at the lot, state and federal authorities launched a joint operation to search the site in the state capital, also known as Durango.

The search uncovered 26 bodies, but they were too badly decomposed to immediately identify them or their cause of death, the Durango state prosecutor's office said in a statement.

Prosecutors did not answer phone calls seeking to determine whether the bodies were found in multiple-burial pits, like the 145 bodies that have been pulled from mass graves in the border state of Tamaulipas.

While Mexican drug cartels frequently use such pits to dispose of the remains of executed rivals, many of those buried in the Tamaulipas mass graves are believed to have been passengers kidnapped from passing buses.

In Tamaulipas on Wednesday, authorities reported they had rescued 68 people, including 12 Central American migrants, allegedly kidnapped by a drug cartel.

Mexico Rattled by 6.5 Quake

USGS
A magnitude 6.5 earthquake struck Mexico early Thursday morning.
Southern Mexico was shaken by an earthquake with a magnitude of 6.5 Thursday, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) said.
The quake was centered about 35 miles from Las Choapas, a city of about 70,000 people in the state of Veracruz, at a depth of 104 miles. A slight tremor from the quake was felt in Mexico City, about 250 miles away.
Buildings swayed for several seconds in the capital city of Mexico, prompting people to flee into the streets, and the temblor was felt strongly in Chiapas, a state bordering Guatemala, the Associated Press reported.
The quake was about 300 miles from Guatemala City, according to a USGS preliminary report. A USGS map of the area shows reports of the temblor spanning the Mexican peninsula.
There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries.




Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/04/07/mexico-rattled-65-quake-damage-reported/#ixzz1IrDy171c

Mexican Authorities Find Mass Grave Holding 59 Bodies

AP

Feb. 27: State police guard the site where at least five bodies were found in a clandestine grave in Santa Mara Tlalmanalco on the outskirts of Mexico City.

MEXICO CITY -- Mexican security forces searching for abducted bus passengers in a violent northern state bordering Texas have stumbled on a collection of pits holding a total of 59 bodies.

The grisly find was made near the ranch where drug cartel gunmen less than a year ago massacred 72 migrants who were trying to reach the United States.

Investigators struggled to exhume the bodies in the mass grave to determine whether they belonged to kidnapped bus passengers, migrants who frequently ride buses in the area, or drug traffickers executed by rivals.

Tamaulipas state investigators and federal authorities went to the site about 80 miles south of the border at Brownsville, Texas, to investigate reports that gunmen had begun stopping buses and pulling off some passengers in the area starting March 25.

Two other such cases were reported in subsequent days, in what may have been an attempt at forced recruitment by a drug gang, Tamaulipas state interior secretary Morelos Canseco said. The gunmen reportedly abducted almost exclusively men and allowed the remaining passengers to continue on their way.

State and federal investigators and soldiers conducted the raid, but differed on what exactly happened.

The federal Interior Department said the first pit was discovered Saturday and soldiers detained five suspected kidnappers. Tamaulipas officials said the pits were found Wednesday, and a total of 11 suspected kidnappers were captured and five kidnap victims were freed. The reason for the discrepancy was not clear.

But the security forces agreed that a series of eight burial pits had been found, one of which contained 43 bodies and the others 16 corpses. The bodies were being examined to determine their identities and cause of death.

Canseco said two of the dead were women. Many of the victims found in the pits appeared to have died between 10 and 15 days ago, dates that would roughly match the bus abductions, he said.

A statement from the Tamaulipas government, which "energetically condemned" the killings, did not say what drug gang, if any, the suspects belonged to.

President Felipe Calderon's office issued a statement saying the find "underlines the cowardliness and total lack of scruples of the criminal organizations that cause violence in our country."

While there was no immediate confirmation that a drug cartel was involved, officials refer to the cartels as "criminal organizations."

The pits were found in the farm hamlet of La Joya in the township of San Fernando, in the same area where the bodies of 72 migrants, most from Central America, were found shot to death Aug. 24 at a ranch.

Authorities blamed that massacre on the Zetas drug gang, which is fighting its one-time allies in the Gulf cartel for control of the region.

The victims in the August massacre were illegal immigrants from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Ecuador and Brazil. An Ecuadorean and Honduran survived the attack, which Mexican authorities say occurred after the migrants refused to work for the cartel.

Mexican drug cartels have taken to recruiting migrants, common criminals and youths, Mexican authorities say.

But drug gunmen also operate kidnapping rings, and erect roadblocks on highways in Tamaulipas and other northern states, where they hijack vehicles and rob and sometimes kill passengers.

San Fernando is on a major highway that leads to the U.S. border, but it wasn't immediately known whether the victims found in the mass grave had been kidnapped from that road.

Drug gangs across Mexico also sometimes use mass graves to dispose of the bodies of executed rivals.

The wave of drug-related killings -- which has claimed more than 34,000 lives in the four years since the government launched an offensive against drug cartels -- drew thousands of protesters into the streets of Mexico's capital and several other cities Wednesday in marches against violence.

Many of the protesters said the government offensive has stirred up the violence.

"We need to end this war, because it is a senseless war that the government started," said protester Alma Lilia Roura, 60, an art historian.

Several thousand people joined the demonstration in downtown Mexico City, chanting "No More Blood!" and "Not One More!" A similar number marched through the southern city of Cuernavaca.

Parents marched with toddlers, and protesters held up signs highlighting the disproportionate toll among the nation's youth. "Today a student, tomorrow a corpse," read one sign carried by demonstrators.

The marches were spurred in part by the March 28 killing of Juan Francisco Sicilia, the son of Mexican poet Javier Sicilia, and six other people in Cuernavaca.

"We are putting pressure on the government, because this can't go on," said the elder Sicilia. "It seems that we are like animals that can be murdered with impunity."

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/04/07/mexican-authorities-mass-grave-holding-5-bodies/#ixzz1IqqTK866

Two U.S. Citizens Shot Dead At Mexican Border

Two American men, waiting on the Mexican side of the border at a California border crossing were shot dead while in their pickup truck yesterday. Let me make sure we are clear here...these two Americans were in their truck INSIDE MEXICO while waiting to cross back into their home country of America and were shot to death in their truck.

Here's some of the report at Yahoo News:

Two workers shot to death on Monday while waiting to cross the border from Mexico into the United States were American citizens, the U.S. State Department said.

The two men were riding in a pickup truck and about to cross into California at the San Ysidro border crossing point when they were gunned down on Monday afternoon, local authorities said.

Sergio Salcido Luna, 25, and Kevin Joel Romero, 28, were found dead in the vehicle having been shot several times. A small amount of marijuana was recovered from the scene, local law enforcement said.

"We can confirm that two U.S. citizens were shot to death at a Tijuana border crossing yesterday," the State Department said in a statement on Tuesday.

The two men worked for a beverage maintenance company in southern California, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported.

Apparently, the Mexicans are trying to blame this on drug cartels but twice in the story we see that the pair had only a very small amount of marijuana in the truck - so who the hell killed these two Americans? Is this dejavu in regards to the American shot in cold blood in Mexico by Mexican security forces? Or was this really drug cartels? And where is the news on this coming from the Federal government?

These two Americans were probably a football field away from American soil and are now dead and I'm not hearing much from our State Department or the DOJ or Homeland Security. What is the response from the Mexican government? Why isn't the death of two Americans in Mexico making news, people?

Two U.S. citizens killed at Mexico border


TIJUANA, Mexico (Reuters) – Two workers shot to death on Monday while waiting to cross the border from Mexico into the United States were American citizens, the U.S. State Department said.

The two men were riding in a pickup truck and about to cross into California at the San Ysidro border crossing point when they were gunned down on Monday afternoon, local authorities said.

Sergio Salcido Luna, 25, and Kevin Joel Romero, 28, were found dead in the vehicle having been shot several times. A small amount of marijuana was recovered from the scene, local law enforcement said.

"We can confirm that two U.S. citizens were shot to death at a Tijuana border crossing yesterday," the State Department said in a statement on Tuesday.

The two men worked for a beverage maintenance company in southern California, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported.

San Ysidro is the busiest border crossing in the world, handling 50,000 vehicles each day crossing north from Tijuana along with 25,000 people on foot.

It is also used by traffickers ferrying drugs and undocumented immigrants north while illegal weapons head south to armed bandits in Mexico's bloody drug war.

Baja California state prosecutors on Tuesday downplayed speculation that the slayings were linked to the drug trade, and said that a small packet of marijuana in Salcido Luna's possession was likely for personal use.

In September 2009, U.S. agents fired at three vans packed with about 70 illegal immigrants that tried to evade heavy security at the same crossing and pass into the United States. Three people in the vans and a motorist were wounded.

Federal Agents Told to Reduce Border Arrests, Arizona Sheriff Says

AP

Nov. 1, 2010: Cochise County Sheriff Larry Dever, left, speaks about illegal immigration at an event in Arizona also attended by Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu.

An Arizona sheriff says U.S. Border Patrol officials have repeatedly told him they have been ordered to reduce -- at times even stop -- arrests of illegal immigrants caught trying to cross the U.S. border.

Cochise County Sheriff Larry Dever told FoxNews.com that a supervisor with the U.S. Border Patrol told him as recently as this month that the federal agency’s office on Arizona's southern border was under orders to keep apprehension numbers down during specific reporting time periods.

“The senior supervisor agent is telling me about how their mission is now to scare people back,” Dever said in an interview with FoxNews.com. “He said, ‘I had to go back to my guys and tell them not to catch anybody, that their job is to chase people away. … They were not to catch anyone, arrest anyone. Their job was to set up posture, to intimidate people, to get them to go back.”

Dever said his recent conversation with the Border Patrol supervisor was the latest in a series of communications on the subject that he has had with various federal agents over the last two years. Dever said he plans to relay the substance of these conversations when he testifies under oath next month before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

“I will raise my hand to tell the truth and swear to God, and nothing is more serious or important than that,” he said. “I’m going to tell them that, here’s what I hear and see every day: I had conversation with agent A, B, C, D and this is what they told me.”

Dever’s charges were vigorously denied by a commander with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

“The claim that Border Patrol supervisors have been instructed to underreport or manipulate our statistics is unequivocally false,” Jeffery Self, commander of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Joint Field Command in Arizona, said in a written statement.

“I took an oath that I take very seriously, and I find it insulting that anyone, especially a fellow law enforcement officer, would imply that we would put the protection of the American public and security of our nation’s borders in danger just for a numbers game," he said. "Our mission does not waiver based on political climate, and it never will. To suggest that we are ambiguous in enforcing our laws belittles the work of more than 6,000 CBP employees in Arizona who dedicate their lives to protect our borders every day.”

In recent days, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has said the U.S.-Mexican border is more secure than ever, and Homeland Security officials have used recent statistics to support those claims.

"There is a perception that the border is worse now than it ever has been," Napolitano said at the El Paso border crossing last week. "That is wrong. The border is better now than it ever has been."

Dever doesn’t agree.

“Janet Napolitano says the border is more secure than it’s ever been. I’ve been here for 60 years, and I’m telling you that’s not true,” he said.

The sheriff of Santa Cruz County, which borders Dever’s Cochise County to the west, said, “This is news to me,” when asked about reports that border agents were being told to turn illegal immigrants back to Mexico rather than arrest them.

“It comes as a complete surprise that that would be something that’s going around,” Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada said. “I meet with Dever all the time and I have great respect for him, so I expect he’d come forward and say what he knows and give the source.

“Not knowing who the source is, how reliable that source is, I really don’t have much of a position,” Estrada said. “I’ve been around a real long time and haven’t heard anything like this. By the same token, you learn new things every day.”

Both sheriffs are elected officials. Dever is a Republican, Estrada, a Democrat.

Others have questioned the methodology and conclusions of the Homeland Security numbers showing the border is more secure.

Mark Hanna, CEO of Real Life Enterprises, a Phoenix-based technology integration and security company, has testified before the Arizona Senate about what he called Homeland Security’s flawed methodology used to compile border security statistics. Hanna maintains the numbers are dangerously misleading.

Hanna, who is currently working on a private/public partnership pilot program along the Arizona border, said he attended a February conference at which Michael Fisher, chief of the United States Border Patrol, and Mark S. Borkowski, assistant commissioner for technology and innovation acquisition, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, showed off charts indicating arrests were decreasing and argued the border was more secure. The charts also showed an increase in marijuana seizures along the border and an increase in Border Patrol agents.

But those charts left out crucial data, Hanna said.

“Since we don't know how many illegal crossings are occurring, then a decrease in apprehensions might mean that there are fewer illegal crossings, and the border is more secure. But it could also just as easily mean that more illegal border crossings are occurring, and we're just not catching as many. In order to know how secure the border is, you need to know how many are crossing and the threat level of those who are crossing illegally," he said.

“It is a very dangerous condition for the secretary of Homeland Security to be using incomplete data to form such a conclusion, and then repeatedly announce these conclusions as fact,” he said.

The Department of Homeland Security did not return repeated requests for comment on Hanna’s specific challenges to the agency’s methodology.

Whatever the methodology, Dever said the numbers don’t accurately describe what’s happening on the ground.

“We do not know who’s crossing that border, but that anyone who wants to can. That’s the message our nation needs to hear, that anyone who wants to can, and is. And our own Department of Homeland Security does not have clear definition of what securing the border even means," Dever said.

“People are disgusted, the smiles are gone off their face, their general sense of welfare been taken away from them and until that’s returned you can throw all the numbers on the board. … I’ll tell Napolitano, in spite of all of your declarations and efforts to the contrary, things are not safe. No, they are not secure.

“You can use your numbers to say it’s more secure, but it does not define a sense of safety or well-being. You can say it’s more secure, but it’s more dangerous than ever.”

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/04/01/exclusive-federal-agents-told-reduce-border-arrests-arizona-sheriff-says/#ixzz1IgCi7vre

Should Americans Travel to Mexico ???

Hey Bill,  This guy is a dumba$$ !!!

Did You Know That America Is Flying Spy Drones Over Mexico?

In this article at The Telegraph, I learned, for the first time, that the U.S. government has teamed up with Mexico to try and battle the drug cartels along the U.S./Mexico border by providing unmanned spy drones to fly along the border and gather intel on drug movements. Perhaps I'm a mushroom here but I had no idea this was going on. I find it interesting that the Mexicans are insisting that they are running this surveillance program - let's see...the drones are American, the pilots of the drones are American....hmmmm.

From the report:

The country's National Security Council said in a statement that the unmanned aircraft have flown over Mexico on specific occasions, mainly along the border with the U.S., to gather information at the request of the Mexican government.

The flights expand the U.S. role in the drug war, in which Americans already have been training Mexican soldiers and police as well as co-operating on other intelligence.

"When these operations are carried out, they are always done with the authorisation, oversight and supervision of national agencies, including the Mexican Air Force," the council said.

It said Mexico always defines the objectives, the information to be gathered and the specific tasks in which the drones will be used and insisted that the operations respected Mexican law, civil and human rights.

So, my next question is this - why aren't these drones equipped with hellfire missiles so when they happen upon five Mexican drug cartel vehicles who have their trucks loaded with drugs and members of the cartel present have automatic weapons, the hellfires can be loosed and rained down upon these Mexican terrorists? Why not?

Do we needs drones to tell us that there are drugs passing over the border into America? Do we need drones to tell us that the cartel people running the drugs are armed? Do we need drones to tell us where along the border they are coming in? Well, obviously, the answer to all those questions is a resounding "hell no." I guess one thing the drones could try to do would to determine the origination point of these drug cartel excursions but I like the idea better of adding the firepower.

Mexico allows US drones into its territory


The country's National Security Council said in a statement that the unmanned aircraft have flown over Mexico on specific occasions, mainly along the border with the U.S., to gather information at the request of the Mexican government.

The flights expand the U.S. role in the drug war, in which Americans already have been training Mexican soldiers and police as well as co-operating on other intelligence.

"When these operations are carried out, they are always done with the authorisation, oversight and supervision of national agencies, including the Mexican Air Force," the council said.

It said Mexico always defines the objectives, the information to be gathered and the specific tasks in which the drones will be used and insisted that the operations respected Mexican law, civil and human rights.

The drones "have been particularly useful in achieving various objectives of combating crime and have significantly increased Mexican authorities' capabilities and technological superiority in its fight against crime," the council said.

The drone operations were first reported on Wednesday by The New York Times.

Mexican politicians have often criticised the involvement of U.S. agencies on Mexican soil. Last week, the Mexican Senate voted to summon Mexico's ambassador to the U.S., Arturo Sarukhan, to talk about allegations that U.S. agents allowed guns to be smuggled into Mexico as part of investigations into drug trafficking.

Mexican Sen. Luis Alberto Villareal said direct U.S. involvement "violates trust and undermines national sovereignty."

More than 35,000 people have died since President Felipe Calderón launched a stepped-up offensive against the cartels in late 2006.

American Professor Kidnapped in Mexican Border City

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico -- Armed men kidnapped an American university professor while she was visiting her mother in the violent Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez, the state prosecutor's office said Saturday.

The American was identified as Veronica Perez Rodriguez, an archeologist at Northern Arizona University.

A source at the Chihuahua state prosecutor's office said she was visiting her mother in Ciudad Juarez Friday afternoon "and the moment she left her family's house she was intercepted by armed men and deprived of her liberty."

Since 2003, Perez has been an associate professor of anthropology at the university in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Perez attended elementary, junior high, and high school in Ciudad Juarez, according to her resume, posted on the university's website. She is fluent in Spanish and English.

Perez, on her Northern Arizona University web page, describes herself as an ecological and environmental anthropologist and archeologist.

"My primary focus is the study of social complexity, urbanism, and its environmental impact in the Mixteca Alta region of Oaxaca, Mexico," she wrote.

She earned two degrees from the University of Texas at El Paso and a doctorate in 2003 from the University of Georgia, according to her resume.

At least 39 U.S. citizens were killed in 2010 in Ciudad Juarez, which has 1.3 million people. It is Mexico's most violent city, according to a report by state prosecutors.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/03/12/professor-kidnapped-mexican-border-city/#ixzz1GQHCx1Tf