Tag: cartels

Cartel Narco Tank With Cope Cage Anti-Drone Armor Emerges

AMexican drug cartel recently employed an improvised armored truck, also commonly referred to as a “Narco Tank,” with what looks to be a metal screen over the front section of the vehicle. This is reminiscent of the so-called “cope cages” that have become a fixture on tanks and other armored vehicles on both sides of the conflict in Ukraine and that have also now emerged on Israeli tanks. These screens are primarily intended to provide extra protection against drones, something that cartels in Mexico are now regularly employing against government security forces and each other.

The Mexican vehicle in question was a modified Dodge Ram truck with a four-door cab that also had a box-like improvised armored structure at the rear with ports through which individuals inside could fire small arms. It was one of three Narco Tanks that took part in an ambush of Mexican military forces in the country’s state of Jalisco just over a week ago. The Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), or Jalisco New Generation Cartel, carried out the attack on November 19, which also reportedly involved the rapid establishment of roadblocks to hamper the arrival of government reinforcements.

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Sheriff’s deputy caught with fentanyl was middleman for Mexican cartel, investigators say

Prosecutors filed two felony charges Monday against a Riverside County sheriff’s deputy accused of carrying more than 100 pounds of fentanyl in his vehicle. They also alleged for the first time that he had likely ties to a Mexican drug cartel.

Jorge Oceguera-Rocha, 25, was charged with one felony count each of possessing fentanyl for sale and transporting narcotics. He’s also accused of being armed with a loaded firearm during a drug offense, which could get him a longer sentence if convicted.

Oceguera-Rocha, who resigned after being pulled over and arrested Sept. 17, appeared in court in Banning on Monday and pleaded not guilty to all charges.

The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department filed a request to increase his bail to $5 million soon after his arrest, saying he’s a flight risk because of the possible connection to a Mexican drug organization. The Riverside County District Attorney’s Office said Monday that a judge granted that request at the time, but added that it will be reviewed during a court hearing at a future date.

Last week the sheriff’s department said in a news release that it had been investigating a drug ring when it identified one of its own employees, Oceguera-Rocha, as playing a central role in transporting narcotics in the county.

It then opened an investigation into him in September, according to an affidavit filed in court Monday along with the prior bail request. The documents include details about the investigation that had not previously been made public.

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Mexican cartels are fifth-largest employers in the country, study finds

Organised crime groups in Mexico have about 175,000 members – making them the fifth-biggest employer in the country, according to new research published in the journal Science.

Using a decade of data on homicides, missing persons and incarcerations, as well as information about interactions between rival factions, the paper published on Thursday mathematically modeled overall cartel membership, and how levels of violence would respond to a range of policies.

The authors argue that the best way to reduce the bloodshed would be to cut cartel recruitment – whereas locking up more members would actually increase the murder rate.

“More than 1.7 million people in Latin America are incarcerated, and adding more people to saturated jails will not solve the insecurity problem,” wrote the authors.

The number of homicides in Mexico more than tripled between 2007 and 2021 – when the government reported 34,000 victims, or nearly 27 victims for every 100,000 inhabitants – making it one of the deadliest countries in Latin America.

At a national level, two organised crime groups – the Sinaloa cartel and the Jalisco New Generation cartel – battle for domination. But analysts have identified 198 armed groups in Mexico, many of which are subcontractors to bigger players but also undertake local turf disputes.

The paper, titled Reducing cartel recruitment is the only way to lower violence in Mexico, was cautiously welcomed by security analysts in the field. “It is a first of its kind,” said Victoria Dittmar, a researcher for the Insight Crime thinktank, who did not take part in the study. “I haven’t seen any other estimates of how many people we believe are somehow related to criminal groups.”

But Dittmar said the figure would depend on the definition of a cartel and what constitutes membership, since working for a crime faction is very different to being formally employed.

“It can be very difficult to say who is a member of a criminal organisation, and who isn’t,” said Dittmar. “What about a politician that receives money? Or someone who cooperates with the group just once?”

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How Cartels Infiltrate The Border Patrol

Goat Canyon is a dry valley of crystalline rocks in the east of San Diego county named after the desert bighorns that roam. It was the perfect spot, Border Patrol agent Noe Lopez told his contact, to move dope through. “Honestly, the thing is that there aren’t—there aren’t any cameras,” Lopez said. “Nothing, nothing, nothing.”

Lopez went himself to the store and purchased three backpacks for the smugglers to use. On the first night, he collected one at the border fence with a glint of crystal meth inside. He stashed it in his Border Patrol truck, drove to base, switched it to his private car and then handed it to his connect in a parking lot in exchange for three grand in cash.

The second night he grabbed a bag with seven kilo bricks with the markings of cocaine. His source gave him $7,000 but said the smugglers were uneasy about going over the fence. Lopez said there was nothing to worry about. “If I’m saying, ‘cross now,’ that means that I am taking the responsibility for them to cross.”

But Lopez never made it to the third drop. He was arrested and charged with attempted cocaine and meth trafficking. The source, he discovered, was a DEA informant who had him on tape and the drugs were fake. He plead guilty and got seventy months in prison in 2017.

It was no freak case. In 2023, a judge sentenced agent Oberlin Cortez Peña for waving cars of cocaine through a checkpoint north of McAllen, Texas. In 2014, customs agent Lorne “Hammer” Jones got seven years for letting trucks of dope through San Ysidro. And that’s the tip of the iceberg.

Since the Department of Homeland Security was created in 2002, incorporating Customs and Border Protection, well over a hundred agents and officers have been convicted of trafficking dope or running undocumented migrants. This usually means working with cartels and their affiliates who control drug and human smuggling over the border.

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Bipartisan Senators Say Marijuana Legalization Disrupts Cartels In Letter Challenging Proposed Menthol Cigarette Ban

A bipartisan group of U.S. senators are acknowledging that state-level marijuana legalization has disrupted the operations of international drug cartels as they raise concerns with the State Department over plans to ban menthol cigarettes and cap nicotine content.

In a letter sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken last week, Sens. Mark Warner (D-VA), Bob Casey (D-PA), Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Bill Hagerty (R-TN) said that prohibitionist policies for certain tobacco products would benefit the illicit market, which is continually evolving in response to new regulatory policies.

The lawmakers used cannabis as an example of how cartel operations shift depending on whether certain substances are prohibited or regulated. Legalization at the state level, they argued, has reduced demand for illicit marijuana.

“As it has become easier to sell marijuana products in the U.S., Mexican TCOs [transnational criminal organizations] have prioritized trafficking fentanyl and other synthetic drugs that are cheaper to manufacture, easier to transport, and generate more profit,” the senators—none of whom are vocal cannabis legalization advocates—said.

Republican senators, including Cassidy, Rubio and Hagerty, made the same point in a letter to the head of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last month, imploring the agency to reconsider its plans to ban menthol cigarettes and cap nicotine content.

“TCOs have expanded their operations to include the production and distribution of cigarettes,” the bipartisan group wrote in the new letter to Blinken. “TCOs more generally have taken advantage of drug smuggling routes to import illegal cigarettes into the U.S., contributing to the significant use of smuggled cigarettes.”

The senators included a list of questions for the secretary of state about how the department is dealing with issues related to illicit tobacco trafficking. They asked about the status of interagency work to combat the problem, how efforts to limit tobacco use could empower traffickers and engagement with international partners to address the problem, for example.

“It is clear that threat actors—from transnational organized crime entities to terrorist organizations—are employing increasingly creative tools to subvert controls imposed by the U.S. and our international partners,” they said. “We appreciate the work that the men and women of the Department of State do in countering these efforts, and urge continued action to address these threats.”

The senators’ point about shifting trends in marijuana trafficking as states legalize is bolstered by a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report that was released last year, showing how demand for illicit cannabis from Mexico has continued to drop as more states open regulated domestic markets.

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Republican Senators Admit Marijuana Legalization Disrupts Cartels As They Urge FDA To Reconsider Menthol Cigarette Ban

A group of four Republican senators who do not support marijuana legalization has admitted that the policy change disrupts illegal sales by cartels. The acknowledgement comes in a letter urging the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to reconsider plans to ban menthol cigarettes and set nicotine content limits, arguing that the prohibition and strict regulations could benefit illicit trafficking operations.

Writing to FDA Commissioner Robert Califf on Monday, Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Ted Budd (R-NC) and Bill Hagerty (R-TN) unwittingly made the case for the legalization and regulation of controlled substances.

The main point of the letter is to express concern FDA’s proposed menthol cigarette ban, which the senators said could “empower” transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) to “exploit black market opportunities that such policies could create.”

The senators aren’t in favor of cannabis legalization, but they did also—apparently inadvertently—make the case for that reform.

“While the primary threat from Mexican TCOs come from trafficking in illicit drugs, these organizations have diversified their activities in response to changing conditions,” they said. “As it has become easier to sell marijuana products in the U.S., Mexican TCOs have prioritized trafficking fentanyl and other synthetic drugs that are cheaper to manufacture, easier to transport, and generate more profit.”

In other words, the GOP senators are acknowledging that as Americans in more states have the opportunity to buy legal cannabis from licensed retailers, the market share for unregulated marijuana trafficked by cartels is shrinking—and as a result they are having to scramble to sell other substances to make up their losses.

That’s also the conclusion of a federal law enforcement agencies, as well as the Congressional Research Service (CRS), which released a report on the trafficking trend last year.

The head of the labor union that represents U.S. Border Patrol agents also acknowledged in 2020 that states that legalize marijuana are disrupting cartel activity.

In light of what’s been observed with marijuana, the senators are cautioning against opening up a new illicit market for menthol cigarettes by enacting a federal ban, tacitly acknowledging the failures and consequences of prohibition.

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Katie Hobbs accused of receiving Sinaloa cartel bribes

A California-based law firm has accused Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, Runbeck Election Services, and a slew of other election officials, mayors, judges, city councilman, and county supervisors in the state of receiving bribes from the Sinaloa cartel.

During a Thursday hearing before the Senate Elections and Municipal Oversight & Elections Joint Committee, the principal investigator for Harris/Thaler Law Corporation, Jacqueline Breger, presented their shocking findings, detailing how a money-laundering investigation in the midwest revealed alleged corruption in Arizona.

“In 2006, the U.S. Attorney’s Offices in Illinois, Indiana and Iowa investigated the laundering of drug cartel monies through a complex series of single-family home purchases in those states,” Breger told the committee. “By 2009, numerous real estate agents, escrow companies and title insurers had been indicted, charged and convicted of racketeering. In 2014, our office was asked to review the case files and to determine whether monies from the sales of the properties had filtered to property purchases in Arizona, specifically in Maricopa and Pima County.”

The Sinaloa cartel is notorious for being led by the infamous “El Chapo,” the Mexican drug lord whose real name is Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, who was widely considered to have been one of the most powerful drug traffickers in the world before his capture in 2016.

According to the investigator, it was concluded that several real estate agents in Iowa “had set up a laundering system in Arizona and thereafter had transferred the proceeds of sales to Panamanian Corporations.”

“In 2018, Mr. Thaler discovered, incidental to another matter, a series of trust deeds evidencing that cash laundering through single family residences in Arizona was pervasive and ongoing,” Breger continued. “With that, a new investigation began with the focus being on money laundering and related racketeering activities in Maricopa County and several other Arizona counties. The Harris/Thaler office currently represents several parties directly damaged by the racketeering activities.”

In the nearly 100-page report, Breger dug into the entire investigation, naming Dawna Rae Chavez, a resident of Mesa, Arizona, and her daughter, Brittany Rae Chavez, as “principal preparers of the documents necessary to effect the racketeering enterprises.”

“To date, more than 10,000 falsified documents have been recorded with the Maricopa County Recorder. We estimate that more than 35,000 warranty deeds/trust deeds evidencing fraudulent transactions exist in the database. 11. The number of falsified notarizations exceeds 15,000.  12. Dawna and Brittany’s participation in racketeering activities also includes facilitation of bribes to public officials, tax evasion, payroll theft, bankruptcy fraud, insurance fraud, and extortion,” Breger said. 

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Cartel hitman who decapitated enemies has gone missing from a US prison

A cartel leader and hitman fond of videotaping torture sessions and decapitating likely dozens of enemies has gone missing from a federal prison in Florida, where he was serving a 49-year sentence.

As of November, Edgar Valdez-Villareal, a Mexican American cartel leader, had been mysteriously removed from the federal Bureau of Prisons website. He is now listed as “not in BOP custody” even though his release date is not until July 27, 2056.

Valdez-Villareal, 49, is known by his underworld moniker “La Barbie,” and headed up the Los Negros, an enforcement group of the Beltran Leyva cartel — one of Mexico’s most ruthless underworld groups. At one point, he was a top lieutenant for the Sinaloa Cartel, run by convicted drug dealer Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman-Loera.

Valdez-Villareal grew up in Laredo, Texas, and was given his nickname from a high school football coach because his blue eyes and light complexion made him look like a Ken doll, according to a report.

“We called him Ken Doll, mostly because his hair was blond and kinky like the doll’s,” a friend from United High School told Rolling Stone in 2011. “The coach upped the ante to Barbie, and it took off like wildfire.”

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Brazil Military Kills “Red Command” Cartel Leaders, Prepares Take Over

In an unusual step for the military, the Army has invaded favelas of Rio de Janeiro and killed top leaders of the Comando Vermelho (Red Command) drug cartel, which supports the Communist criminal Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Observers take this to indicate the beginning of a federal military intervention. The drug gangs were the only ones to celebrate the alleged election victory by criminal Lula Oct. 30, firing automatic weapons in the air in the favelas. President Bolsonaro cracked down hard on the Brazilian drug gangs.

“The heads of drug trafficking of Morro do Juramento and Juramentinho, identified as Rodrigo Barbosa Marinho, known as Rolinha or Titio Rolinha, and Hevelton Nascimento Júnior, the “Bad Boy”, respectively, were killed during a Military Police operation in Vicente de Carvalho on Thursday (1st). Three other suspects died in the action and one, who was also injured, is imprisoned in custody in the hospital” O Dia reports.

The drug cartels are the armed wing of the Communists. Comando Vermelho controls parts of Rio de Janeiro and was formed 1979 as an alliance between cartels and Communists. If they are eliminated, the risk 0f a civil war will be significantly reduced.

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Mexico’s Former Attorney General Arrested Following Student Massacre Investigation

Mexican authorities arrested the country’s former top prosecutor in connection with the investigation and coverup of a massacre of 43 education students. The murders allegedly took place at the hands of cartel gunmen and corrupt cops.

On Friday afternoon, Mexican federal authorities with the help of Mexico’s Navy, arrested Jesus Murillo Karam, the former Attorney General for Mexico on the charges of torture, forced disappearances, and crimes against the administration of justice, a statement from the country’s Attorney General’s Office (FGR) revealed.

The arrest took place at Murillo Karam’s home on Friday afternoon. In the statement, the FGR revealed that after notifying him of the arrest warrant. He did not resist and collaborated with authorities as they transferred him to the agency headquarters.

The arrest comes just one day after Mexico’s Undersecretary for Human Rights Alejandro Encinas issued a preliminary report from the Commission for Truth and Access to Justice on the Ayotzinapa Case. In the report, Encinas called the case a “State Crime” that was carried out by the highest officials under the previous presidential administration. Encinas claimed that government officials at the federal and state level carried out ommissions, were negligent, and altered evidence, facts, and circumstances to push a false narrative of events that became known as the “Historical Truth.”

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