This article titled “Migrants run Mexican gauntlet to make leap of faith to US” was written by Rory Carroll in Flores and Jo Tuckman in Mexico City, for The Guardian on Sunday 19th June 2011 17.49 UTC

Salsa music piped from the radio and the bus had a name, Teresita, but there was nothing jaunty about the young men with small backpacks who filed aboard in silence, avoiding eye contact.

Behind them was home, Honduras, ahead lay the United States, and in between was el brinco, the jump. Also known as Mexico. Not so much a leap as a roll of the dice.

The passengers were illegal migrants and they were bracing for perils which, as they travelled through northern Guatemala to the Mexican borderwards Mexico, could strike at any time: betrayal, kidnap, murder.

A landscape of stunted trees, cattle and the occasional police checkpoint passed with barely a word spoken on the crammed little bus. There was plenty to say but, as one passenger explained later, better to stay silent. “You don’t know who’s listening.”

Extortion by police, falling off a train and getting lost in the desert have always been risks, but the journey has become much worse since organised criminals started preying on travellers.

Fifteen Nicaraguans were shot and burned on a bus outside Guatemala City, allegedly because the driver was transporting cocaine without the permission of drug gangs. Mexico is the real danger: mass abductions, ransom demands, tortures, massacres.

The bus stopped at the San Pedro river, deep in a tropical forest once ruled by the Maya. The passengers piled out, forming groups of four or five. Canoes would take them to El Ceibo from where they would hike into Mexico. “You’ve got to be optimistic,” said Juan Colindres, 25, expressing hope over experience. Five times he had headed for the US and five times he was foiled in Mexico – robbed by police, robbed by his guide, deported.

Each time organised crime’s breath felt closer, he said. There was no safety in numbers. Armed gangs would stop trains with hundreds of migrants clinging to the roof and herd them into waiting buses. “Better to go in a small group so you can dodge a bit,” said Colindres, wriggling his hand.

But even small shoals get hooked. Some are sold to gangs by guides, others by fellow migrants known as enganchadoras. Others are handed over by corrupt police and immigration officials. With their backpacks and accents, migrants are easily identifiable.

Groups such as the Zetas drug cartel in Mexico find it profitable to demand ransoms from captive migrants’ relatives, especially if they are in the US. They recruit some hostages as footsoldiers.

Rumours circulated from about 2006 but the phenomenon exploded into public consciousness only last August when Zetas massacred 72 people – mostly Hondurans, Guatemalans and Salvadoreans – at an abandoned farmhouse in the north-eastern state of Tamaulipas.

About 300,000 migrants pass through Mexico each year, the vast majority Central Americans, but keeping track of them is impossible, said Flora Reynosa, head of a state office in Guatemala City tasked with defending migrants’ human rights. Kidnapping had become a plague, she said.

Families trek to Reynosa’s little office to supply names of missing relatives. That morning a father had registered the disappearance of a son who left in February, with no word since.

Thelma Schaub, a psychologist in the office, said that families’ anguish often leads to neuroses, such as compulsively watching TV news bulletins in the hope of spotting loved ones.

Casas del Migrante, a network of church-funded shelters in the region, receives chilling stories.

Carlos Lopez, who runs one such centre in Guatemala City, recalled a Honduran who escaped from a farm in northern Mexico with more than 200 captive migrants. Those left behind, and whose ransoms were not paid, were dismembered by “the butcher”, a stocky killer who seemed to enjoy his work.

The brinco used to refer to the final jump into the US, but now also refers to running the gauntlet that Mexico itself has become.

It started a decade ago when authorities began intercepting migrants to reassure the US that an immigration accord with Mexico would not open floodgates from all Latin America. The crackdown but pushed the flow into the shadows.

Mexico’s declaration of war on the drug cartels in late 2006 triggered a brutal competition among gangs to stamp authority on their territories. All vulnerable groups were fair game, few more so than migrants. A few thousand dollars’ individual ransom added up, as victims multiplied, to a lucrative sideline.

Some of the most travelled routes passed through Zeta territories. When not doing its own dirty work, the organisation lent its fearsome name as a sort of franchise to smaller gangs.

A National Human Rights Commission report in 2009 documented hundreds of mass kidnappings involving about 10,000 people in a six-month period. Victims said police and immigration agencies colluded with gangs.

The Tamaulipas massacre is thought to have been a warning to human traffickers who tried to bypass the Zetas.

One survivor said three migrants accepted an offer to join the Zetas, for a ,000 (£615) weekly salary. The rest were blindfolded, ordered to lie on the ground and shot.

The outcry prompted a law in April guaranteeing migrants’ rights. But they remain subject to arbitrary detention and deportation.

The same month authorities freed hundreds of captives from safe houses, mostly in Tamaulipas. One group said it had been ordered off a bus by immigration officials and passed on to a gang.

It is a measure of Central America’s poverty and unemployment that so many still risk the journey.

“There’s nothing in Tegucigalpa [the capital of Honduras] for me. And there’s an excellent chance I’ll make it back to the US,” said Edwin Omar, 22, as he waited for a canoe by the San Pedro river.

He had been working as an interior decorator in Miami, Florida, before being deported seven months ago.

Coyotes – the name given to those who specialise in human smuggling – offer different “packages”.

For ,000 you are escorted from Honduras through Guatemala and Mexico to the US. Make it to the US border on your own steam and you pay ,500 for help with the final brinco. Prices include three attempts.

The El Ceibo crossing into Mexico has few official controls, reducing the risk of deportation, but is rife with Zetas. The El Carmen crossing is the reverse.

For many the journey is a rite of passage. Seven Honduran teenagers in a Guatemala City shelter said they left home on a whim but were now marooned, having used all their cash to bribe police at checkpoints.

Odanis Acuna, 35, a Cuban asylum seeker, warned them against Mexico. “I was robbed and stripped naked. I’m lucky to be alive.” Two of the teenagers are resolved to return home.

Even without predatory gangs, journeys can end in tragedy. Cristobal Tambriz, 17, lost his grip and fell under a train in central Mexico. It sliced off his lower right leg. The Red Cross is helping with a prosthetic limb but a bleak future awaits on the family’s dust-blown farm. “I wanted to send back money, now I won’t even be able to work here.”

Last September Laura Coc, 22, left the family’s hilltop house near Yesuj, outside Guatemala City, to join a brother and boyfriend in New Jersey. The family went into debt to pay a coyote 20,000 quetzals (£1,550).

Coc apparently died of sunstroke in the Arizona desert. No body has turned up, tormenting her mother, Maria, 50. “I want to bury her,” she said, crying. “I want my daughter home.”

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Source: CBS
Congress grilled the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms as well as the Department of Justice about the controversial gunwalking program that intentionally let guns into Mexico. Sharyl Attkisson reports.

This article titled “Mexico’s drugs war escalates as eight headless bodies discovered in Durango” was written by David Batty and agencies, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 12th May 2011 20.49 UTC

The naked bodies of eight decapitated men have been found dumped along roads in a Mexican city plagued by increasingly deadly conflict between rival drug gangs.

Six of the corpses were found along a highway leading out of the capital of the northern state of Durango, with their heads lying nearby, said the state attorney general’s office.

The two other bodies were found in another street in Durango city. One was identified as the remains of Gerardo Galindo Meza, the deputy director of a city prison who had been kidnapped on Monday.

Galindo’s head was on a different street corner, accompanied by a threatening message signed by a drug gang, the attorney general’s office said in a statement.

It was the second time this week that decapitated corpses have been found in Durango state. Eleven bodies were found on Monday, including six left opposite a school in the state capital.

Meanwhile, soldiers digging at mass graves in five places around the city on Wednesday uncovered another eight bodies – seven men and one woman, bringing the total number of victims there to 196, said the Durango public safety department.

Durango is one of Mexico’s most dangerous states. Its murder rate has more than doubled over the past two years. At least 1,025 killings were reported in 2010, compared to 930 in 2009 and 430 in 2008, according to government figures.

Authorities suspect some of the most-wanted drug kingpins may be hiding in the mountainous state, which has been a battleground between the Sinaloa, Zetas and Beltran Leyva cartels.

Families of people who have disappeared in Durango have come forward to ask whether their relatives may have been buried in the mass graves, according to Juan Rosales, the deputy state public safety secretary. But he said the identification process has overwhelmed the state government, prompting it to seek help from central government.

Durango’s secretary for government, Hector Vela, said many of the victims are likely to be gang members killed by rivals. But some may be missing police officers, and others may be victims of kidnapping and extortion attempts.

Only one body has so far been identified – a 31-year-old man who had been reported missing several months ago. His brother claimed the body.

Drug violence has killed more than 34,000 people in Mexico since the president, Felipe Calderón, launched a military-led crackdown on the cartels in December 2006.

Mexico has launched an ad campaign to counter its image as a dangerous country and the negative impact on its vital tourist industry of US travel alerts warning Americans of violence south of the border.

The country is spending millions of dollars on print media and billboard ads in US cities showing its ancient pyramids and sunny beaches to sway Americans from cancelling their visits.

The drug violence is occurring far from the most popular resorts such as Cancun, Huatulco, Ixtapa, Puerto Vallarta and Los Cabos, Mexico Tourism Board CEO Rodolfo Lopez-Negrete said.

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This story will blow your mind. Frustrated ATF agents are coming forward to expose a stunning multi-year program they’ve been involved with. A couple of years ago the ATF decided to redouble their efforts at stopping the illegal flow of firearms to Mexico. They put hundreds of agents along the border to carry out investigations and make arrests. What they ended up doing is contributing to the mass murder in Mexico rather than stopping it.

ATF agents say their superiors forced them time and again to let firearm shipments “walk” so they could follow the guns and take down the cartel. Agents who had gunrunners under surveillance as they loaded their vehicles with hundreds of AK-47′s, pistols, and .50 caliber Barrett sniper rifles, were forced to stand down and allow the weapons to reach Mexico. It wasn’t long before those weapons began popping up at grizzly murder scenes and cartel killings. According to one agent, the rise in violence in Mexico directly correlates with weapons shipments they let “walk.”

Field agents angrily confronted superiors and warned of the agency having blood on its hands, but the critics were told to shut up or find a new line of work. The biggest fear that ATF agents had was that one of “their” weapons would be used to kill Americans.

That nightmare finally came true with the recent death of a US Border Patrol agent in Mexico. The DOJ has been strangely silent about the case and the family of the slain agent is outraged. ATF agents who’ve come forward say it was one of the AK-47′s they had to let pass that killed the agent. They have the serial numbers for all the weapons they let reach Mexico and it’s a match.

The tactic of letting a suspect “walk” in hopes of catching the big fish is nothing new. It’s frequently used in drug and money laundering cases. However, using that approach for weapons trafficking is unthinkable. Let someone walk with several kilos of cocaine is not the same as letting someone walk with 500 AK-47s. Those weapons went directly into the hands of drug cartel members and used explicitly for the purpose of mass murder. It wasn’t a question of if those guns would be used to kill, but when and how many would die.

Moreover, allowing criminals to take hundreds of .50 Barrett sniper rifles into Mexico is not just stupid, it’s insane. A single round from a Barrett can tear a man in half. It can take out a vehicle at more than a mile a way. Families of the dead in Mexico should sue the US government for aiding and abetting in the death of their loved ones.

Here’s some background on the Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle. ATF let hundreds of these at a time flow into Mexico.

This article titled “Mexico drug wars have killed 35,000 people in four years” was written by Haroon Siddique and agencies, for The Guardian on Thursday 13th January 2011 01.08 UTC

A total of 34,612 people have died in drug-related killings in Mexico in the four years since President Felipe Calderón declared an offensive against cartels shortly after taking office, officials said tonight.

Killings reached their highest level in 2010, when there were 15,273 deaths, up from 9,616 the previous year.

At a meeting with anti-crime groups at which the government presented a data system to track drug-related crimes, Calderón said 2010 had been “a year of extreme violence”.

The office of federal security spokesman, Alejandro Poire, said the four-year figure included 30,913 execution-style killings, 3,153 deaths in shootouts between gangs, and 546 deaths involving attacks on authorities.

Calderón said many of the killings in 2010 were generated by the turf war between the Zetas drug gang and their former allies in the Gulf cartel.

About half the killings took place in three northern states: Chihuahua, Sinaloa and Tamaulipas.

Poire said drug-related killings peaked in the third quarter of 2010 and declined by almost 11% in the fourth quarter.

Calderon said the decline towards the end of the year was important but refused to rule out another rise.

He said Mexico’s 31 state governments must do more to deal with corruption in local police forces and to fight organised crime. The president said the federal government was doing its part, pointing to the recruitment of army troops to serve as state police officers in northern Nuevo León state, where killings have spiked this year.

Calderón’s interior secretary, Francisco Blake Mora, presented a prototype of a national identity card, Mexico’s first to be distributed to youths under 18 in some states. Most Mexicans currently use their voter ID cards as identification, but the new cards will have better security measures, including digital fingerprints and iris images, to prevent criminals from using false IDs.

In a separate development, the defence department said today that soldiers had caught Rigoberto Andrade Rentería, an alleged operations leader for the La Familia cartel, in the northern border city of Tijuana at the weekend. He was found with almost 60lb (27kg) of methamphetamine, it said.

The government had offered a reward of 5 million pesos (£263,000) for information leading to his arrest. La Familia cartel is based in the western state of Michoacán, but apparently has ties with traffickers in northern border states.

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From the AP:

The federal agency that monitors gun sales wants weapons dealers near the Mexican border to start reporting multiple sales of high-powered rifles, according to a notice published in the Federal Register.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has asked the White House budget office to approve an emergency request requiring border-area gun dealers to report the sales of two or more rifles to the same customer within a five-day period.

This may seem innocuous to some, but it’s not. When it comes to guns and the government you cannot give an inch. This is how you open the door to them. If they can get reporting of rifle sales at the border it will soon expand to everywhere. Then they’ll try and impose limits on the number of rifles you can buy. Then what kind of rifles you can buy. Then the so-called “Assault weapons” ban will come back. This is how it starts.

From the El Paso Times:

The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating Tuesday’s crash of a Mexican drone in El Paso’s Lower Valley.

"We are collecting data about the crash. We don’t have the aircraft because it was returned to its owner," said Keith Holloway, spokesman for the NTSB, which investigates aircraft crashes in the United States and in other countries that requests its help.

Holloway said the aircraft that crossed into the U.S. air space is a mini orbiter unmanned aerial vehicle developed by the Aeronautics Defense System.

It is designed for use in military and homeland security missions, and is capable of conducting over-the-hill reconnaissance missions, low-intensity conflict and urban warfare operations, and any other related close range mission.

Just an accident? Or something more?

Three counties a mere 80 miles from Tucson have effectively been ceded to Mexico. The US government has put signs up warning American citizens not to travel beyond a certain point within the US, because it’s under the control of heavily armed foreigners.

The president should resign from office immediately.

According to the President of Mexico, Arizona has no right to keep illegal aliens from flooding into the state. He’s saying it from The White House lawn so it must be true. Once again I find myself in The Twilight Zone.