Drug Cartels

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.

Joyce Kozloff's most recent body of work, “Social Studies,” at CB1 Gallery, takes as its basis a series of maps designed in the 1950s for elementary school students in France. The works - large, digital prints of the maps with collaged and painted elements laid over - are vivid, colorful and enchantingly intricate, evoking all the pleasure of a child's first grasp on cartographic comprehension, a vision of the world as a wide and wondrous thing. Look closely, however, and anomalous, often unsettling details emerge.  A tentacled creature with a monstrous human face stretches across the top of “L'Afrique,” representing “Mussolini strangling North Africa during WWII.” Three inset maps illustrate “rates of stunting in children,” “the European Colonial powers that controlled Africa in 1914” and “the multi-national corporations than operate there today.” “L'Amerique du Nord” delineates free and slave states across the U.S. and drug cartels in Mexico.

TUCSON - A couple of weeks after a bipartisan group of senators declared that securing the border was key to enacting immigration reform, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer reiterated her call to beef up security along the U.S.-Mexico border. “It's pretty obvious that Arizona once again is a gateway for the drug cartels," Brewer told a crowd of reporters at a news conference Tuesday. Moments earlier, she had stepped off a Black Hawk helicopter, culminating an aerial tour of the U.S.-Mexico border.

With this month's seizure of 7 tons of marijuana at the U.S.-Mexico border, it's probably time to stop pretending that the assorted statewide legalization measures sweeping the country in recent years are the foundation for a domestic pot-growing industry that will create jobs and can be taxed and regulated like other industries. Marijuana -- medical and otherwise -- has already been largely taken over by the Mexican drug cartels, which enforce their personnel regulations with bullets and do not pay taxes to ship their goods across the border.

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.

GUATEMALA CITY - She holds one of the most dangerous jobs in this spectacularly dangerous country, confronting the most feared and powerful men of the Guatemalan present: gang leaders; dirty public officials; shot-callers in the Mexican drug cartels who have bled in from the north. She is also taking on the titans of Guatemala's past: military men and security chiefs whom she has accused of human rights abuses during the nation's brutal 35-year civil war. Guatemala's emblematic 20th century strongman, Efrain Rios Montt, has been under house arrest since January, when her office charged him with genocide and crimes against humanity.

MEXICO CITY - On the eve of Mexico's Day of the Dead this year, authorities in Veracruz declared triumphantly that they had solved one of the decade's most notorious slayings of a journalist in Mexico. They trotted before reporters a sad-sack figure, one Jorge Antonio Hernandez Silva. They proclaimed him guilty of the April slaying of Regina Martinez, a highly respected reporter for the national Proceso magazine. He had confessed, the Veracruz government said, and the motive was robbery.

WELDON, Calif. - A few minutes after 4 a.m., agents in camouflage cluster in a dusty field in Kern County. "Movement needs to be slow, deliberate and quiet," the team leader whispers. "Lock and load now. " They check their ammunition and assault rifles, not exactly sure whom they might meet in the dark: heavily armed Mexican drug traffickers, or just poorly paid fieldworkers camping miserably in the brush. Twenty minutes later, after a lights-off drive for a mile, the agents climb out of two pickup trucks and sift into the high desert brush.

MEXICO CITY - You find the capos of the drug trade, and you arrest them or kill them. That, in its simplest form, was the idea behind the so-called kingpin strategy that former Mexican President Felipe Calderon pursued with zeal for most of his six-year term. As his administration drew to an end this year, he would often mention, as a point of pride, that his government had taken out two-thirds of Mexico's 37 most wanted criminals. But as new President Enrique Peña Nieto rolled out his crime-fighting strategy this week, his team was explicit about the trouble that "kingpin" had wrought: On Monday, Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong said the strategy caused a fragmentation of criminal groups that had made them "more violent and much more dangerous," as they branched out into homicide, extortion, robbery and kidnapping.

WASHINGTON - Two of the weapons found after a drug cartel gunfight last month in Sinaloa, Mexico, that killed five people have been traced back to the U.S. - one lost during the ATF's Operation Fast and Furious, the other originally purchased by a supervisory ATF agent who helped oversee the botched gun-tracking operation. The discovery of the firearms - an AK-47 assault rifle and a 5.7-millimeter pistol - provides new evidence that some of the 2,000 weapons lost under Fast and Furious, and others as well, continue to flow freely across the U.S.-Mexico border and likely will be turning up at violent crime scenes for years to come.