Mexico: Descent Into Chaos

From Homeland Security newsWire:

Mexico: descent into chaos


Mexico's violence intensifies, becomes more gruesome

Published 19 November 2010



The war among Mexico's seven drug cartels -- and between the cartels and the Mexican government -- is intensifying and becoming more gruesome; as recently as a year or two ago, commandos fighting for the Mexican drug cartels often would rather flee than confront security forces, but an influx of combat weapons -- purchased at U.S. gun shops and shows or stolen from Central American munitions stockpiles -- and a vast supply of ammunition now enables them to fight, and sometimes outgun, army and federal police units; the war is also becoming more gruesome: the preferred form of cruelty by drug cartel henchmen is to capture enemies and behead them, a once-shocking act that has now become numbingly routine; decapitations emerged alongside another gruesome tactic -- dumping the bodies of rivals in vats of acid; cartel goons have moved away from that method, however



Summary executions, kidnappings, torture, and beheadings — we are not talking about al Qaeda, but about Mexican cartels. The cartels have executed more than 10,000 people since January — five times the rate three years ago, before Mexican president Felipe Calderon deployed the Mexican military against the syndicates.



“The cartels don’t have to work like Colombia did for a middle man in Florida or in Texas or anywhere. They have people they know,” Tony Leal, the chief of the Texas Rangers, told Fox News.



Family and friends help the cartels move their product with ease across the porous U.S. border. They even recruit in U.S. prisons.



The Mexican drug business, valued at $40 billion a year, is divided among seven cartels:



•The Arellano Felix Organization, or Tijuana Cartel, is based south of San Diego.

•The Juarez Cartel is situated south of El Paso.

•Their war with the rival Sinaloa cartel has left 2,300 people dead in Juarez this year.

•La Familia is a pseudo-religious cult that operates as a cartel near Mexico City.

•There are also the Zetas, rogue Mexican Special Forces.

•Members of the Zeta once served as the armed wing of the Gulf Cartel in eastern Mexico. Earlier this year, they broke away, creating their own cartel.

•There is also the Beltran Levya, whose American-born kingpin leader is known as “La Barbie,” nicknamed because his blond hair made him look like a Ken doll. He grew up in El Paso, played football in high school, was recruited in a U.S. prison, and was arrested in Mexico in August.

Fox News notes that the cartel leaders are an eclectic group. The head of the Zetas is known simply as the Executioner and uses tigers to scare his victims.



Vicente Carrillo Fuentes became head of the Juarez cartel in 1997 after his brother died undergoing plastic surgery.



“Shorty” Guzman, only 5-foot tall, heads the Sinaloa cartel. He made last year’s Forbes list of the world’s wealthiest people.



A kingpin’s lifespan is getting shorter since Calderon ordered the military to fight the narco-insurgency that threatens to spill across America’s Southwest border.



A newly released interrogation video shows a captured drug trafficker saying this week that the head of La Familia is tired and may be seeking a truce with the government and other cartels.



Gulf Cartel head Tony Tormenta, known as Tango Tango to U.S. law enforcement, was assassinated two weeks ago in Tamaulipas, not far


from Brownsville, Texas, by the Mexican military.




The Zetas may benefit from his death in the short term. Zeta was the radio call sign that the Mexican police in the 1980s used to locate high ranking battalion commanders. Now it is the name of a paramilitary cartel that poses a significant threat to south Texas. About 200 of these former Mexican Special Forces gone rogue were trained by U.S. Army Special Forces at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, in the early 1990s.



The cartel’s origins were confirmed in a video sent to the Dallas Morning News in 2005, in which two men identified themselves as former Special Forces who moonlighted by recruiting from the Mexican Special Forces for the cartels.



“They were trained in operations, special operations by our best of the best and then they went back to Mexico,” Representative Ted Poe of Texas said. “And what happened was they didn’t stay with the military, they defected because the drug cartels pay more money.”





Beheading: the cartels’ preference execution method



The preferred form of cruelty by drug cartel henchmen is to capture enemies and behead them, a once-shocking act that has now become numbingly routine.



Since 22 March, authorities have come across four separate grisly scenes of beheaded bodies, in one case with several heads placed neatly in a row.



Dozens of people have been decapitated in recent months, most of them apparently members of rival drug gangs locked in turf battles over narcotics routes, betrayals of loyalty and territorial influence.



Tim Johnson writes for McClatchy Newspapers that decapitations by drug cartels in Mexico first began in 2006, and that year armed thugs swaggered onto the white tile dance floor of the Sol y Sombra discotheque in Uruapan, a town in Michoacan state, and dumped five heads from plastic garbage bags.



Decapitations emerged alongside another gruesome tactic — dumping the bodies of rivals in vats of acid. Cartel goons have moved away from that method, however. “Dissolving the bodies in acid didn’t bring them the same spectacular results,” said Arturo Arango Duran, a security consultant in Monterrey, the industrial and business hub in the nation’s north, referring to media coverage. “This is all part of a plan to use publicity to control territory through terror.”



Experts suggest that the drug gangs have several motives. First, they seek to use beheadings to cow the citizenry from squealing on them and to pressure local authorities to collaborate. Second, the gangs try to out-macho each other with greater acts of macabre violence, frightening rivals in a murderous spiral.



The pace of drug-related violence is quickening. March was the bloodiest month yet with 958 deaths, El Universal newspaper reported Thursday. Since President Felipe Calderon took office in late 2006, confronting drug cartels, 28,757 people have died, it said.



“They are plumbing the depths of brutality now — the beheading of people, dissolving people in acid, doing the massacres in addiction centers, you know, throwing peoples’ bodies in ditches,” said Bruce Bagley, an expert on narcotics trafficking at the University of Miami.



Mexican army nabs a teen sibling cartel assassination team


Published 3 December 2010



The war among Mexico's seven drug cartels -- and between the cartels and the Mexican government -- is intensifying and becoming more gruesome; the preferred form of cruelty by drug cartel assassins is to capture enemies and behead them; decapitations emerged alongside another gruesome tactic -- dumping the bodies of rivals in vats of acid; cartel goons have moved away from that method, however; the latest move by the cartels is to employ kids as young as 14-year old as assassins; Mexico police last night has captured one such youngster and his 16-year old sister; the two are implicated in four assassinations



The Mexican army has detained a 14-year-old suspected of working as a killer for a drug cartel, an army official said today (Friday).



The much-rumored alleged young assassin nicknamed “El Ponchis” was captured late Thursday at the airport in Cuernavaca with his 16-year-old sister as they were trying to catch a flight to Tijuana, said the official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case.



Fox News reports that the boy was brought to the office of the Mexican Attorney General’s Office in Cuernavaca early Friday and told reporters there that he participated in at least four decapitations. The source said his sister was accused of getting rid of the bodies.



“I participated in four executions, but I did it drugged and under threat that if I didn’t, they would kill me,” said the teen, who appeared calm and showed no remorse.



No formal charges had yet been filed.



The sister told reporters that they planned to cross the border to San Diego, California, where their mother lives.



The two were suspected of helping the South Pacific Cartel headed by Hector Beltran Leyva, brother of Arturo Beltran Leyva, a top drug lord who was killed by Mexican marines in Cuernavaca a year ago.



Hector Beltran Leyva’s fight for control the cartel has caused a major spike in violence in Morelos, a state just south of Mexico City, and in neighboring Guerrero state, where the resort of Acapulco is located.



Rumors that have circulated for weeks of a killer named El Ponchis as young as 12 years old.



Drug cartels employ women assassins (sicarias) in broad killing campaign


Published 19 August 2010



As the drug war in Mexico escalates, drug cartels have began to employ sicaria, or hit women; the women assassins, ranging in age from 18 to 30, work alongside men in cells of La Linea, as the Juárez drug cartel is known; cells are assigned to different jobs -- such as halcones (lookouts), hit squads, and extortionists -- and operate independently; the hit women are trained to use rifles and handguns and sometimes accompany their male counterparts; women in Juárez have been previously accused of being part of kidnapping rings, often assigned to keep watch on captives; women have also held roles as recruiters, transporters and leaders of drug-smuggling cells



Anahi Beltran Cabrera, a cartel arsenal guard // Source: nydailynews.com

An alleged hit man told Mexican federal police that beautiful young women are working as killers for the Juárez drug cartel. “They have to look good to deceive our opponents,” Rogelio Amaya Martínez said in a videotaped interview by Mexico’s Ministry of Public Safety.



Amaya, 27, is one of five men arrested last Thursday in Juárez and accused of being a cartel hit squad that killed two federal police officers in separate attacks earlier this month. Amaya, who appears relaxed in the video while answering questions from a woman off screen, said there are 20 to 30 women working as sicarias, or hit women. El Universal newspaper in Mexico placed the video on YouTube).



Daniel Borunda writes in the El Paso Times that Amaya said that the female assassins range in age from 18 to 30, and they work alongside men in cells of La Linea, as the Juárez drug cartel is known. A recruiter selects the women, he said.



Cells are assigned to different jobs — such as halcones (lookouts), hit squads, and extortionists — and operate independently. The hit women are trained to use rifles and handguns and sometimes accompany their male counterparts.



“They have carried out various jobs,” Amaya said, making a reference to murders. “They work like any other hit man.” Amaya said the women are young and attractive to better fool their targets.



Borunda notes that women in Juárez have been previously accused of being part of kidnapping rings, often assigned to keep watch on captives. Women have also held roles as recruiters, transporters and leaders of drug-smuggling cells.



“Up until now, we have them involved in almost all aspects of cartel operations,” said Diana Apodaca, spokeswoman for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in El Paso. “To date, we don’t know them to be directly involved in assassinations, but we wouldn’t rule it out,” Apodaca said.



The Juárez and Sinaloa drug cartels have been engaged in a bloody fight since 2008 for control of smuggling routes and drug sales throughout the state of Chihuahua.



The violence in Juárez continued Tuesday, including an afternoon attack on a municipal police vehicle that killed two officers. About 3 p.m., gunmen in a moving vehicle fired 35 rounds at the patrol truck on Avenida Gomez Morin, police officials said. After the officer driving was shot, he lost control and crashed into a tree. The slain officers, Francisco Ramirez Rojo, 40, and Leonardo Aparicio Cortes, 33, had been assigned to transport prisoners.



Juárez police spokesman Jacinto Segura said that thirty city police officers have been murdered this year.



There were 22 homicides on Monday, raising the death toll since Friday to 73. More than 1,870 people have been slain in the Juárez area this year.



FBI agent says Mexican drug cartels more violent than al Qaeda


Published 6 August 2010



An FBI Web page quoted an agent calling Mexico's drug cartels more violent than al Qaeda; the quote, from an unidentified senior agent based in El Paso, Texas, says, "We think al Qaeda is bad, but they've got nothing on the cartels"; the FBI says the quote was taken out of context



No longer the most dangerous -- at least according to one FBE agent // Source: cbsnews.com

An FBI Web page quoted an agent calling Mexico’s drug cartels more violent than al Qaeda — a comment sure to grab attention, but which does not tell the whole story, the agency said.



On its Web site, the FBI was highlighting a special series of stories on law enforcement challenges along the Southwest border. The report includes a quote from an unidentified senior agent based in El Paso, Texas, who says, “We think al Qaeda is bad, but they’ve got nothing on the cartels.”



CNN reports that the controversial-sounding comment was just one of point of view that exists on the ground, the FBI said, explaining the remark. “The quote is the opinion of one FBI agent who lives and works on border violence every day,” said Special Agent Jason Pack, an FBI spokesman in Washington. “The FBI does not believe the cartels are any more dangerous than al Qaeda.”



According to the FBI report, “Some areas on the Mexican side of the border are so violent they are reminiscent of the gangster era of Chicago in the 1930s or the heyday of the Mafia’s Five Families in New York.”



It cites the violent and ruthless tactics of the cartels, using as an example the case of a man known as El Pozolero — the stew maker — who is said to have dissolved hundreds of murder victims in acid.



Mexico has seen other violent acts that are reminiscent of al Qaeda tactics, including the severing of heads and videotaping of kidnap victims.



According to one analyst, however, comparing one to the other is apples and oranges. “Obviously, it’s a more complex issue than that,” said Fred Burton, vice president of intelligence at Stratfor, a global intelligence company. “Reading between the lines here, what they might be trying to say is that clearly the scope of the drug cartels from a geographic perspective is very robust,” he said.



The cartels are very brutal and violent, but they have not hijacked planes, built complex improvised explosive devices, or attacked U.S. vessels, as al Qaeda has, Burton said.



The major drug trafficking cartels in Mexico do use terror, however, in their rivalries for smuggling routes to the United States market. In one recent sign of escalation, a device that authorities called a car bomb exploded in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, killing four.



Burton said,however, that it was not clear whether it was a case of explosives packed into a car, or a carefully rigged car bomb in the true sense of the word, the type of fine distinction that separates groups like al Qaeda and Mexican drug cartels.