NEWS
March 16, 2002 | CHRIS KRAUL, TIMES STAFF WRITER
He was the muscle for Mexico's most feared drug cartel, and he was looking to use it. As revelers filled the streets of Mazatlan for its annual carnival, Ramon Arellano Felix cruised the beach strip like a shark, hunting for a rival. Instead, he ended up the victim, killed in a shootout with police who had stopped his white Volkswagen for driving in the wrong lane. Officially, it was a chance confrontation: The officers opened fire after Ramon brandished a weapon and ran.
WORLD
May 20, 2009 | Tracy Wilkinson
Leaving a baptism party in Acapulco, the reputed lieutenant of a major drug cartel flew to Mexico's wealthiest city, Monterrey. He landed shortly after midnight and stepped casually from his private plane. But before his alleged luggage of guns, marijuana and cash could be unloaded, any plans Rodolfo Lopez Ibarra might have had to take over local smuggling operations were squashed.
WORLD
August 8, 2010 | By Tracy Wilkinson and Ken Ellingwood, Los Angeles Times
Nearly four years after President Felipe Calderon launched a military-led crackdown against drug traffickers, the cartels are smuggling more narcotics into the United States, amassing bigger fortunes and extending their dominion at home with such savagery that swaths of Mexico are now in effect without authority. The groups also are expanding their ambitions far beyond the drug trade, transforming themselves into broad criminal empires deeply involved in migrant smuggling, extortion, kidnapping and trafficking in contraband such as pirated DVDs.
WORLD
September 6, 2010 | By Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times
The meandering network of pipes, wells and tankers belonging to the gigantic state oil company Pemex have long been an easy target of crooks and drug traffickers who siphon off natural gas, gasoline and even crude, robbing the Mexican treasury of hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Now the cartels have taken sabotage to a new level: They've hobbled key operations in parts of the Burgos Basin, home to Mexico's biggest natural gas fields. Forced to defer production and curtail drilling and maintenance in a region that spreads through some of Mexico's most dangerous badlands, the world's seventh-largest oil producer has become another casualty of the drug war. In May, gunmen wearing camouflage and tennis shoes kidnapped five Pemex workers as they rode to the front gate of the Gigante No. 1 natural gas plant in the Burgos Basin.
WORLD
September 1, 2011 | By Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times
Two women from the world of Mexico City journalism were abducted and slain, their naked, bound bodies found Thursday in a field behind a cemetery, authorities said. Although dozens of journalists have been killed, kidnapped or threatened as part of Mexico's spiraling violence, this appears to be the first time news media employees have been slain in the relative safe harbor of Mexico City. It was not immediately known whether the attacks on the women were related to their work.
WORLD
April 14, 2011 | By Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times
Sixteen police officers have been arrested for allegedly providing cover to drug-cartel gangsters suspected in the grisly slaying of more than 120 people whose bodies are being pulled from mass graves in northeastern Mexico. The federal attorney general's office, in a statement, identified the 16 as members of the municipal police force in the town of San Fernando, near where the bodies were found. On Thursday, officials in the border state of Tamaulipas said the number of dead who have been extracted from several pits about 90 miles south of Brownsville, Texas, had risen to 126. Digging continued in search of additional victims, the officials said.