Drug Cartel

First of four parts Reporting from Calexico, Calif. -- N ever lose track of the load. It was drilled into everybody who worked for Carlos “Charlie” Cuevas. His drivers, lookouts, stash house operators, dispatchers -- they all knew. When a shipment was on the move, a pair of eyes had to move with it. Cuevas had just sent a crew of seven men to the border crossing at Calexico, Calif. The load they were tracking was cocaine, concealed in a custom-made compartment inside a blue 2003 Honda Accord.

MEXICO CITY - Responding to mounting concern about disorder in the Mexican state of Michoacan, officials announced Thursday that an army general would take over as its public security chief, overseeing both state and federal security forces. The appointment of the general, Alberto Reyes Vaca, was announced by state officials but had been arranged in coordination with the federal government. For President Enrique Peña Nieto's administration, the move is part of a promised new focus on the southwestern state, long a hotbed of drug cartel violence.

OUTSIDE SAN LUIS DE LA LOMA, Mexico - Don Polo's heavily armed convoy wound its way through the hills above the lush coastal plain of Guerrero state, its groves of slender palm trees now far below him. The two-lane country road twisted eastward, and upward, for miles. But around each bend, there were no campesinos , no burros, no dogs, no cars barreling down toward the Pacific. Fields of yellow grass, grown taller than a man, covered the landscape, animated only by the wind. This, though, was no vision of tranquillity.

President Obama met in Mexico on Thursday with President Enrique Peña Nieto. Publicly, the two leaders focused on trade. That makes sense given the strong economic ties between the two nations and Peña Nieto's efforts to introduce more competition to Mexico's energy and telecommunications sectors in the hopes of boosting his country's economy. But privately the two presidents will also discuss bilateral security, including Peña Nieto's decision this week to require all U.S. law enforcement contact with federal police to be routed through Mexico's Interior Ministry.

MEXICO CITY - The case against six Mexican military officers accused of colluding with the Beltran Leyva drug cartel may be falling apart as federal prosecutors under new President Enrique Peña Nieto have reportedly admitted they lack sufficient evidence to back up the government's allegations. The prosecutors' statement to a federal judge presiding over the criminal case was included in court documents obtained by the newspaper Reforma and published Tuesday. A representative of the Mexican attorney general's office would not comment.

WASHINGTON - The unlikeliest of marriages  - the most violent Mexican drug cartel and the world of U.S. quarter horse racing - ended with the arrest Tuesday of one of the top men in the Los Zetas drug trafficking ring after U.S. officials began suspecting an uncanny run of good fortune at the track and the laundering of millions of dollars in drug proceeds. Arrested were Jose Trevino Morales, his wife, and five associates. They were taken into U.S. custody after scores of FBI agents in all-terrain vehicles and helicopters raided horse stables and ranches near Ruidoso, N.M., and Lexington, Okla.

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.

A top lieutenant in the Arellano Felix drug cartel in Tijuana pleaded guilty Thursday to drug conspiracy charges, the latest member of the once-powerful organized crime group to now face a long U.S. prison sentence. Jesus "Chuy" Labra Aviles, a wealthy, 62-year-old businessman who helped the Arellano Felix brothers smuggle hundreds of tons of cocaine and marijuana into the United States in the 1980s and '90s, was scheduled to go to trial in November, but changed his plea at a brief hearing in San Diego.

WASHINGTON - Federal law enforcement officials theorize that five people found dead in a burned-out vehicle in southern Arizona were hostages killed by a Mexican drug cartel and that their deaths last weekend could mark another example of violence spreading from Mexico across the Southwest border into the United States. “That is what it sounds like to us,” said a Border Patrol official who has been briefed on the bodies found Saturday morning in a white Ford Expedition in a remote desert area off Interstate 8 between Phoenix and Tucson.

John Charles Ward would take flight in the half-light before dawn, when he could race down the runway without headlights and ascend into the cloaking embrace of an overcast sky. This feature requires that JavaScript be enabled and the Flash plug-in be installed. Third of four parts J ohn Charles Ward would take flight in the half-light before dawn, when he could race down the runway without headlights and ascend into the cloaking embrace of an overcast sky. Soaring above the crowded California freeways in the single-engine aircraft, he'd relax, pour himself a whiskey and Seven and plan his hopscotch route to Pennsylvania.

LAREDO, Texas - This border city is trying to clear its name. It is so conjoined with its Mexican sister city across the Rio Grande, Nuevo Laredo, that the two are often referred to as "Los Dos Laredos," or simply Laredo. That was great for tourism in happier days. But as drug cartel violence exploded in Nuevo Laredo in recent years, pictures broadcast around the world of gunfights, decapitated bodies piled in abandoned minivans, and severed heads dumped in coolers often bore the same headline: "Laredo.

MEXICO CITY - Gen. Tomas Angeles Dauahare, who once held the plum post of military attache to the Mexican Embassy in Washington, was rumored to be the next defense minister of Mexico. Until that day in May last year when he and three other top military men were arrested on suspicion of working on behalf of a notorious drug cartel. It was the largest indictment of army officers on charges of drug-trafficking in recent memory, hailed in many quarters as proof of then-President Felipe Calderon's determination to root out corruption at every level.

MEXICO CITY - Operation Cleanup was a showcase effort to stamp out corruption within Mexico's elite organized-crime bureau. Twenty-five top law-enforcement officials were arrested in the weeks after the operation was launched in 2008, most accused of acting as highly paid moles for a leading drug cartel, the very villains the officials were supposed to be chasing. Today, the cases against them are a shambles, yet another example of Mexico's systemic corruption and a weak judiciary unable to fix it. The operation is also the most high-profile prosecution among the many that fell apart under the government of President Felipe Calderon, which ended nearly five months ago. This week, a federal judge freed the highest-ranking of those ensnared by Operation Cleanup.

  MEXICO CITY - Mexican drug cartels are striving to become “key players in the European drugs market,”  Europol officials said Friday. Their statement , issued from Europol headquarters in the Hague, said that Mexican criminals have become “global market coordinators” in trafficking cocaine and synthetic drugs to Europe. Police officials also alleged that Mexicans were moving firearms from southeast Europe and trading them with cocaine dealers in the Americas. They also specifically cited the Zetas cartel--perhaps the most ruthless of the Mexican gangs - for reportedly trafficking human beings “for sexual exploitation” from northeast Europe to Mexico.

MEXICO CITY - Debate is intensifying over armed vigilante patrols that have sprung up in crime-plagued sections of rural Mexico, particularly in the state of Guerrero, where some patrols joined forces this week with a radical teachers union that has been wreaking havoc with massive protests, vandalism and violent confrontations with police. The two groups, on the surface, would appear to have little in common. The vigilante patrols, typically made up of masked campesinos , are among dozens that have emerged in the countryside in recent months, purporting to protect their communities from the depredations of the drug cartels.

Three Philippine men have been convicted of importing military weapons through a shipment to Long Beach in a plot to arm Mexican drug cartels and gang members, federal authorities said. Evidence presented during the four-week trial in federal court in Los Angeles showed that the men conspired to sell weapons that included machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, as well as explosives including mortars and grenades, according to the FBI. The men, identified as Sergio Syjuco, 26; Cesar Ubaldo, 27; and Arjyl Revereza, 26, met with an undercover FBI agent who posed as a prospective buyer, federal authorities said.

In Mexico, the media called her la bonita ("the pretty one") or la chula ( "the beautiful one") or la reina del crimen ("the queen of Mexican crime"). Mexican authorities have long alleged that Anel Violeta Noriega Rios, 27, was a top operative in the La Familia drug cartel working out of the United States. They said that she helped smuggle drugs from Mexico into the United States, once using a gardening company to move drugs brought by sea into Long Beach. But when authorities arrested Noriega Rios at a modest El Monte apartment last week on immigration charges, there were no indications the woman had a 5-million peso reward on her head.

Authorities were interrogating a suspected ringleader of the drug cartel La Familia on Sunday after the crime syndicate launched a series of coordinated commando attacks against federal police and Mexican soldiers over the weekend that left five dead and a dozen wounded. The ambushes Saturday in eight cities across the western state of Michoacan were carried out with disciplined force by small units of La Familia cartel gunmen with military-grade assault rifles and grenades.

OUTSIDE SAN LUIS DE LA LOMA, Mexico - Don Polo's heavily armed convoy wound its way through the hills above the lush coastal plain of Guerrero state, its groves of slender palm trees now far below him. The two-lane country road twisted eastward, and upward, for miles. But around each bend, there were no campesinos , no burros, no dogs, no cars barreling down toward the Pacific. Fields of yellow grass, grown taller than a man, covered the landscape, animated only by the wind. This, though, was no vision of tranquillity.

MEXICO CITY - After a closed-door meeting with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto here Friday, Republican Sen. John McCain said he was "convinced" that the new leader was "committed to taking action against the drug cartels. " McCain also noted that Peña Nieto, in deference to U.S. sovereignty, appears determined to stay on the sidelines as the U.S. Congress debates immigration policy changes that could affect millions of Mexicans. The vote of confidence in Peña Nieto on the security front was significant, coming from an influential member of the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee.