Mexico’s Drug War Bloodies Areas Thought Safe

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Jan 222012
 

 

 

Mexico’s Drug War Bloodies Areas Thought Safe

The New York Times

By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
January 18, 2012

 

 

A man with a relative’s body found last year in Acapulco, now Mexico’s second most violent city.

Pedro Pardo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

MEXICO CITY —

The Mexican drug war that has largely been defined by violence along the border is intensifying in interior and southern areas once thought clear of the carnage, broadening a conflict that has already overwhelmed the authorities and dispirited the public, according to analysts and new government data.

A forensic worker photographed bodies found last week in a vehicle in Mexico City. Carpeting, in foreground, covered two heads.  Victor Rubio/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Last week, two headless bodies were found in a smoldering minivan near the entrance to one of the largest and most expensive malls in Mexico City, generally considered a refuge from the grisly atrocities that have gripped other cities throughout the drug war.

Two other cities considered safe just six months ago — Guadalajara and Veracruz — have experienced their own episodes of brutality: 26 bodies were left in the heart of Guadalajara late last year, on the eve of Latin America’s most prestigious book fair, and last month the entire police force in Veracruz was dismissed after state officials determined that it was too corrupt to patrol a city where 35 bodies were dumped on a road in September.

The spreading violence, believed to largely reflect a widening turf war between two of the biggest criminal organizations in the country, has implications on both sides of the border, putting added pressure on political and law enforcement leaders who are already struggling to show that their strategies are working.

“It is a situation ever more complicated and complex,” said Ricardo Ravelo, a Mexican journalist who has written several books on criminal organizations. “Resources are and will be stretched to deal with this.”

American officials here acknowledge that the mayhem is unpredictable but contend that they have a way to help tackle it, spreading word that the $1.6 billion Merida Initiative, Washington’s signature antidrug program, will step up training and advising for the Mexican state and local police and judicial institutions this year, rather than emphasizing the delivery of helicopters and other equipment.

In a year in which President Felipe Calderón’s party, in power since 2000, may struggle to hang on to the presidency in July elections, the expanding violence is giving political rivals, all promising a more peaceful country, much to run on.

Discerning patterns of violence in the drug war can be perilous; it is often like a tornado skipping across terrain, devastating one area while leaving another untouched.

But government statistics released last week showed a surge in deaths presumed to be related to drug or organized crime in Mexico State, which surrounds the capital and is the nation’s most populous state, in the first nine months of last year. The government data also show that violence has now afflicted 831 communities nationwide, an increase of 7 percent.

Although questions have emerged about the government’s tally, many analysts agree that the violence is widening.

“There has been a definite shift of violence away from the border and back to the interior states,” said David A. Shirk, director of the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego, who closely tracks drug crime.

In a way, he said, the shift is a stark reversal of the trend of six years ago, when violence exploded in more southerly states and migrated north along drug-trafficking routes, accelerating a drug war that has now left more than 47,000 people dead, according to the government.

In response, the Mexican government deployed its military and the federal police, arresting and killing more than two dozen cartel leaders and splintering or dismantling several groups. Their push has been backed by American aid in the form of helicopters, remotely piloted drones and the deepening involvement of American drug agents in investigations and raids.

The violence slackened in many areas along the border, including Ciudad Juárez, the bloodiest city, where homicides have been declining. Mexican officials say the decrease is proof that they are making headway, but analysts say it may have more to do with one rival group’s defeat of another, reducing competition and the bloodshed that comes with it.

As for the violence in other areas — Acapulco, in the south, is now the second most violent city — that, too, may reflect the shifting contours of the fights between criminal organizations.

The drug war, Mr. Shirk and other analysts say, is increasingly coming down to a fight to the death between the Sinaloa cartel, a more traditional drug-trafficking organization widely considered the most powerful, and Los Zetas, founded by former soldiers and considered the most violent as it expands into extortion, kidnapping and other rackets in regions far off the drug route map. A third, the Gulf Cartel, remains well armed and rises to attack from time to time.

Many of the clashes have been in central or more southern areas where the two main rivals have not previously fought each other so violently, analysts say. George W. Grayson, a longtime researcher of Mexican violence and co-author of a coming book on Los Zetas, said the group had spread to 17 states from 14 a year ago.

Though experts have said that Mexico City’s size, complexity and police force, considered better trained than many others, make it unlikely to fall into the mayhem of other locales, there have been alarming signs that violence is encroaching on the capital.

 

Police officers filing past Mexican Marines after the Veracruz police were disbanded.
Felix Marquez/Associated Press

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At the mall where the bodies were found, a banner proclaiming it was the work of the Sinaloa cartel appeared nearby, though experts say the killings could have been carried out by any number of offshoots operating in the region.

The murders were not the first in or near the capital to bear the signature of a cartel; in October two human heads were found on a busy road near the Defense Ministry headquarters.

But as the government, buttressed by United States drug agents and military advisers, deploys its armed forces and the federal police to dismantle criminal organizations and causes them to splinter, it has grown difficult to determine which criminal group is doing exactly what.

The conflict has undergone “Zetanification,” as all manner of criminal outfits copy the cartel’s brutal tactics and claim its name, said Mr. Grayson, a professor at the College of William and Mary.

Mexican officials continue to assert that they are getting the upper hand. In Washington last week, Mexico’s public safety secretary, Genaro García Luna, warned that violence would probably not decrease significantly for five more years. But he insisted that progress was being made, saying the rate of increase in homicides believed related to organized crime was showing signs of slowing. “You have to give the process more time to measure its efficiency,” he said.

At the mall in Mexico City, in the high-end Santa Fe district, known for its financial buildings and apartment towers, shoppers said they were worried but growing accustomed to gruesome violence in the country.

“We are living in a terrible situation,” said Jasia Grinberg, 65, who runs a hair salon at the mall, Centro Santa Fe, “and meanwhile, we are getting used to it.”

U.S. Agents Aided Mexican Drug Trafficker to Infiltrate His Criminal Ring

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Jan 092012
 

 

 

U.S. Agents Aided Mexican Drug Trafficker to Infiltrate His Criminal Ring

 

The New York Times

By GINGER THOMPSON
January 9, 2012

 

Reuters
Harold Mauricio Poveda-Ortega, an accused Colombian drug trafficker, in custody in 2010.

 

WASHINGTON — American drug enforcement agents posing as money launderers secretly helped a powerful Mexican drug trafficker and his principal Colombian cocaine supplier move millions in drug proceeds around the world, as part of an effort to infiltrate and dismantle the criminal organizations wreaking havoc south of the border, according to newly obtained Mexican government documents.

The documents, part of an extradition order by the Mexican Foreign Ministry against the Colombian supplier, describe American counternarcotics agents, Mexican law enforcement officials and a Colombian informant working undercover together over several months in 2007. Together, they conducted numerous wire transfers of tens of thousands of dollars at a time, smuggled millions of dollars in bulk cash — and escorted at least one large shipment of cocaine from Ecuador to Dallas to Madrid.

The extradition order — obtained by the Mexican magazine emeequis and shared with The New York Times — includes testimony by a Drug Enforcement Administration special agent who oversaw a covert money laundering investigation against a Colombian trafficker named Harold Mauricio Poveda-Ortega, also known as “The Rabbit.” He is accused of having sent some 150 tons of cocaine to Mexico between 2000 and 2010. Much of that cocaine, the authorities said, was destined for the United States.

Last month, The Times reported that these kinds of operations had begun in Mexico as part of the drug agency’s expanding role in that country’s fight against organized crime. The newly obtained documents provide rare details of the extent of that cooperation and the ways that it blurs the lines between fighting and facilitating crime.

Morris Panner, a former assistant United States attorney who is an adviser at the Center for International Criminal Justice at Harvard, said there were inherent risks in international law enforcement operations. “The same rules required domestically do not apply when agencies are operating overseas,” he said, “so the agencies can be forced to make up the rules as they go along.” Speaking about the Drug Enforcement Agency’s money laundering activities, he said: “It’s a slippery slope. If it’s not careful, the United States could end up helping the bad guys more than hurting them.”

Shown copies of the documents, a Justice Department spokesman did not dispute their authenticity, but declined to make an official available to speak about them. But in a written statement, the D.E.A. strongly defended its activities, saying that they had allowed the authorities in Mexico to kill or capture dozens of high-ranking and midlevel traffickers.

“Transnational organized groups can be defeated only by transnational law enforcement cooperation,” the agency wrote. “Such cooperation requires that law enforcement agencies — often from multiple countries — coordinate their activities, while at the same time always acting within their respective laws and authorities.”

The documents make clear that it can take years for these investigations to yield results. They show that in 2007 the authorities infiltrated Mr. Poveda-Ortega’s operations. Mr. Poveda-Ortega was considered the principal cocaine supplier to the Mexican drug cartel leader Arturo Beltran Leyva. Two years later, Mexican security forces caught up with and killed Mr. Beltran Leyva in a gunfight about an hour outside of Mexico City.

As for Mr. Poveda-Ortega, in 2008 he escaped a raid on his mansion outside Mexico City in which the authorities detained 15 of his associates and seized hundreds of thousands of dollars, along with two pet lions. But the authorities finally captured him in Mexico City in November 2010.

According to the newly obtained documents, Mexico agreed to extradite Mr. Poveda-Ortega to the United States last May. But the American authorities refused to say whether the extradition had occurred.

“That’s how long these investigations take,” said an American official in Mexico who would speak only on the condition that he not be identified discussing secret law enforcement operations. “They are an enormously complicated undertaking when it involves money laundering, wires, everything.”

The documents, which read in some parts like a dry legal affidavit and in others like a script for a B-movie, underscore that complexity. They mix mind-numbing lists of dates and amounts of illegal wire transfers that were conducted during the course of the investigation.

One scene described in the documents depicts the informant making deals to launder money during meetings with traffickers at a Mexico City shopping mall. Another describes undercover D.E.A. agents in Texas posing as pilots, offering to transport cocaine around the world for $1,000 per kilo.

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Those accounts come from the testimony by a D.E.A. special agent who described himself as a 12-year veteran and a resident of Texas. There is also testimony by a Colombian informant who posed as a money launderer and began collaborating with the D.E.A. after he was arrested on drug charges in 2003. The Times is withholding the agent’s and the informant’s names for security reasons.

In January 2007, the informant reached out to associates of Mr. Poveda-Ortega and began talking his way into a series of money-laundering jobs — each one bigger than the last — that helped him win the confidence of low-level traffickers and ultimately gain access to the kingpins.

A handful of undercover D.E.A. agents, according to the documents, posed as associates to the informant, including the two who offered their services as pilots and another who told the traffickers that he had several businesses that gave him access to bank accounts that the traffickers could use to deposit and disperse their drug money.

In June 2007, the traffickers bit, asking the informant to give them an account number for their deposits. And over a four-day period in July, they transferred tens of thousands of dollars at a time from money exchange houses in Mexico into an account the D.E.A. had established at a Bank of America branch in Dallas.

According to the testimony, the traffickers’ deposits totaled $1 million. And on the traffickers’ instructions, the informant withdrew the money and the D.E.A. arranged for it to be delivered to someone in Panama.

Testimony by the informant suggests that the traffickers were pleased with the service.

“At the beginning of August 2007, Harry asked my help receiving $3 million to $4 million in American money to be laundered,” the informant testified, referring to one of the Colombian traffickers involved in the investigation. “During subsequent recorded telephone calls I told Harry I couldn’t handle that much money.” Still, the informant and the D.E.A. tried to keep up. On one occasion, they enlisted a Mexican undercover law enforcement agent to pick up $499,250 from their trafficking targets in Mexico City. And a month later, that same agent picked up another load valued at more than $1 million.

The more the money flowed, the stronger the relationship became between the informants and the traffickers. In one candid conversation, the traffickers boasted about who was able to move the biggest loads of money, the way fishermen brag about their catches. One said he could easily move $4 million to $5 million a month. Then the others spoke about the tricks of the trade, including how they had used various methods, including prepaid debit cards and an Herbalife account, to move the money.

The next day, the informant was summoned to his first meeting in Mexico City with Mr. Poveda-Ortega and Mr. Beltran Leyva, who asked him to help them ship a 330-kilogram load to Spain from Ecuador. The documents say the shipment was transported over two weeks in October, with undercover Ecuadorean agents retrieving the cocaine from a tour bus in Quito and American agents testing its purity in Dallas before sending it on to Madrid.

The testimony describes the informant reassuring the traffickers in code, using words like “girlfriend” or “chick” to refer to the cocaine, and saying that she had arrived just fine. But in reality, the testimony indicates, the Spanish authorities, tipped off in advance by the D.E.A., seized the load shortly after its arrival, rather than risk losing it.

 

Direct Link:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/09/world/americas/us-agents-aided-mexican-drug-trafficker-to-infiltrate-ring.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha22

Cartel Plot: Use U.S. Guns for Massive Mexico City Attack

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Nov 202011
 

Cartel Plot: Use U.S. Guns for Massive Mexico City Attack
By Robert Beckhusen
November 18, 2011

Photo: Flickr / cfrausto

In October of 2008, Chicago-based drug trafficker Margarito “Twin” Flores was summoned to the Sinaloa Cartel’s mountaintop compound. The leaders of the Mexican narcotics syndicate were pissed. The brother of a top lieutenant had been arrested by the government and risked being extradited to the United States; the Sinaloans wanted to retaliate — in a massive and deadly way, and in the heart of Mexico City.

“Let it be a government building, it doesn’t matter whose. An embassy or a consulate, a media outlet or television station,” cartel boss Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman said. Even the U.S. embassy might be fair game.

“Twin, you know guys [in the U.S. military] coming back from the war,” the lieutenant’s son, Jesus Vincente Zambada Niebla, told Flores. “Find somebody who can give you big powerful weapons, American shit. We don’t want Middle Eastern or Asian guns, we want big U.S. guns, or RPGs [rocket propelled grenades].”

“You know what I’m talking about,” Zambada added. “We don’t need one, we need a lot of them, 20, 30, a lot of them.”

“Make it your job,” Guzman said.

At least, that’s how Flores says the meeting went down. Now an informant for U.S. authorities, Flores described the meeting in a proffer filed in U.S. District Court in Chicago (.pdf) and first described by the Chicago Sun-Times.

Following the meeting, Flores told a DEA agent about the plot and asked for “black market prices for rocket and grenade launchers.” This way, he’d have something to report back to the cartel. The proffer presents an audio transcription of that report.

“Hey, do you remember what we talked about? About those toys?” Flores asked. “I have somebody that just got out of the service and he said he could hook me up, but they’re going to charge twice as much.”

“That’s fine, just let me know,” Zambada answered.

But the Sinaloa Cartel didn’t find any veterans willing to supply the weapons, and the would-be attack went nowhere. Why?

In the states where they hold sway, the drug lords routinely massacre policemen, mow down attorneys and reporters, and very occasionally kill U.S. officials. A frontal attack on the government in the capital city, however, is a rarity. Yes, there was one grenade blast near the U.S. embassy in Mexico City in 2008, but that could’ve easily been the work of leftist guerrillas, too. The proffer alleges Guzman and his lieutenants chose the capital city because it was at the time controlled by rival drug lord Arturo Beltran Leyva, who would presumably be blamed.

Bottom line: The Sinaloas didn’t want to take the heat for such a bald-faced assault.

“Their goal is not to completely overthrow the national government or to take it over in the way 70’s revolutionaries attempted,” security analyst James Bosworth said. “Rather, they simply want to degrade governance to a point at which they can operate freely.”

It’s also difficult to believe the world’s largest criminal organization was short of weapons when balanced with reports dating back years about the cartels blowing up police vehicles with high-explosive projectiles. In Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields, author Charles Bowden claimed the Sinaloa Cartel’s smaller rival, the Juarez Cartel, has been in possession of rockets since the late 1990s.

Meanwhile, Zambada claims he was also snitching for U.S. agents — a claim denied by federal prosecutors — and was allowed to smuggle cocaine into the U.S. in exchange for information on the cartel’s rivals. It wouldn’t be the first time. Another informant working for the Juarez Cartel was apparently known by U.S. officials for his hobby of dissolving murder victims in lime.

Such claims of collaboration between governments and organized crime, however, weigh heavy in Mexico, where the Sinaloa Cartel is widely believed to be linked with top Mexican officials and the military.

This was made worse by Operation Fast and Furious, an enormous screw-up by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to allow 2,000 guns bought in U.S. gun stores to “walk” unobserved into Mexico in the hope of building cases against top cartel leaders. Enough guns arrived in Sinaloan hands — and at Sinaloan assassinations — for the ATF’s Mexico attache to say the U.S. effectively “armed” the cartel.

On the other hand, “[Zambada] has absolutely nothing to lose by saying this since he is looking at considerable prison time. Possibly he is trying to cut a deal for a reduced sentence,” Robert J. Bunker, a professor at the American Military University and California State University’s National Security Studies Program, said to Mexican magazine Proceso.

“Strategically, if the DEA gave the suppression of the Sinaloa cartel a lower priority in its operations — as opposed to the other cartels — this would make some sense,” Bunker said in a translation provided by the Small Wars Journal blog. “It would represent a law enforcement triage approach to contending with these threats — this, however, would not mean that the DEA had a hand shake deal with the Sinaloa cartel. Any notion that the DEA is working with that cartel strikes me as a conspiracy theory.”

Rule one: When tasked to weigh competing claims made by former participants in a mercenary drug war fought not over loyalty or ideology, but money and drugs, take the claims of all sides with a grain of salt

Direct Link: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/11/u-s-guns-mexico-city-attack/#more-63667