Cartels

Sgt. Ron Caudillo of the Mendocino County Sheriff's Department saw the change coming five years ago as he looked down an old logging road covered with 7,000 marijuana plants. His experience in the state's most fertile pot-growing area told him the garden was not the work of any local doper. The scale was too big, the rows of sinsemilla too straight. Whoever it was didn't even spread out the crop to avoid discovery.

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.

Mexico's top anti-drug chief said Tuesday that police had captured Luis and Jesus Amezcua, two of the country's most wanted drug traffickers. "Theirs is the fourth most important organization dedicated to the trafficking of illegal substances in Mexico," the country's special anti-narcotics prosecutor Mariano Herran Salvatti told a news conference.

More than half of the "breathtaking" sums of money earned by Mexican drug cartels in the U.S. and smuggled into this country dissolves into Mexico's cash-based economy, eluding detection and funding vast criminal operations, according to a new U.S.-Mexican government study released Wednesday. The study, described by a senior U.S. official as the first of its kind, attempts to explore the ways illicit drug-trafficking profits make their way from the United States to Mexico or Colombia and how to stem the tide.

MEXICO CITY - Against the backdrop of a deadly drug war and shifting security cooperation, President Obama joined his Mexican counterpart, Enrique Peña Nieto, here Thursday to promote economic integration, trade and jobs. The two leaders sought to emphasize a U.S.-Mexican partnership committed to growth, education exchange and a strengthened border, minimizing the dominant position that fighting drug cartels has occupied in recent years. Yet the topic was unavoidable. Obama acknowledged that the Mexican government was "organizing a vision" on how to reduce violence, a strategy that is expected to limit the U.S. participation in Mexican security affairs that had flourished under the government of former President Felipe Calderon.

  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.

Police arrested nine suspected members of the powerful Juarez Cartel during raids in seven Mexican states, including those believed to be the drug gang's main killers, said federal Atty. Gen. Rafael Macedo de la Concha. The cartel reportedly operates in 15 Mexican states. The gang is based in Ciudad Juarez, across the Rio Grande from El Paso. Among those arrested was the cartel's suspected security chief, Arturo Hernandez, a former police commander.

The nation's most powerful drug cartel bought a controlling stake in a small, struggling Mexican bank in 1995 and 1996 in a bid to have a private money-laundering operation, a newspaper reported Monday. Citing government documents, Reforma newspaper said the Juarez cartel once run by the late Amado Carrillo Fuentes, alias "Lord of the Skies," negotiated directly with two directors of the Grupo Financiero Anahuac, one of whom is the nephew of a former Mexican president.

The Assn. of Coffee Producing Countries met in Mexico City with nonaligned Latin American producers to try to gather support for a scheme to withhold up to 15% of world exports from the market to push prices up from current depressed levels. Dominated by Brazil and Colombia, the cartel controls 70% of world supply but needs cooperation from nonmembers Mexico, Guatemala and Vietnam for such a plan to stick, observers say.

U.S. officials on Thursday announced indictments against nine reputed members of Colombia's largest drug cartel, an organization believed responsible for smuggling more than $10 billion worth of cocaine into the United States. The Norte del Valle cartel, which supplanted the Medellin and Cali drug organizations in the early 1990s, could be the source of as much as 60% of the U.S. cocaine supply, Drug Enforcement Administration chief Karen Tandy said at a news conference.