Mexican Police

SAN DIEGO - Alleged drug kingpin Victor Emilio Cazares, among the most wanted trafficking suspects in the United States, has been arrested in Mexico, U.S. and Mexican officials say, despite having changed his appearance through plastic surgery. A senior U.S. law enforcement official in Mexico confirmed this week that Cazares was captured April 8 at a highway checkpoint near the western city of Guadalajara. Mexican authorities on Friday confirmed Cazares was in custody. Mexican authorities did not make the arrest public at the time, and it has not been previously reported.

SAN DIEGO - Alleged drug kingpin Victor Emilio Cazares, among the most wanted trafficking suspects in the United States, has been arrested in Mexico, U.S. and Mexican officials say, despite having changed his appearance through plastic surgery. A senior U.S. law enforcement official in Mexico confirmed this week that Cazares was captured April 8 at a highway checkpoint near the western city of Guadalajara. Mexican authorities on Friday confirmed Cazares was in custody. Mexican authorities did not make the arrest public at the time, and it has not been previously reported.

The state of Mexico has prosecuted 620 police officers for corruption in recent months, its director of public security and transportation was quoted as saying. The daily newspaper El Universal on Saturday quoted Joaquin Rodriguez Lugo as vowing to end police irregularities in the state.

A congressional investigation into a controversial federal gun-running surveillance operation is moving to Mexico this week amid new reports that two AK-47s sold in Arizona during the operation were found at the scene of a shootout with the suspected killers of a well-known Mexican attorney. According to testimony provided to investigators with the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the two guns were sold to a straw buyer watched by agents of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, who were under orders not to stop the guns from crossing the border.

A team of Mexican federal police swept down a on truck traveling between Tecate and Tijuana Saturday and seized nearly a ton of cocaine destined for the United States. Twelve persons were arrested. "This is one of the largest (drug) seizures in the history of Mexico," federal police Commandant Jorge Gonzales Ortiz said in Tijuana Sunday. Gonzales was jubilant over the success of the operation. "It's a triumph for us fighting a war against drug's."

As Terry Mamalis and David Forsberg lay in the dark on the floor of the Mexican police van--bound, gagged, blindfolded, beaten, robbed, tortured and soaked with gasoline--the two New York tourists were certain they were about to die. All they had done wrong, they say, was ask two men in uniform for directions. It happened on Feb.

A jury here Monday convicted a Mexican police official of lying to a federal grand jury investigating the slaying of a U.S. drug agent in Mexico. The conviction of Mario Martinez Herrera was the first in a U.S. court related to the February, 1985, abduction and slaying of Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique Camarena Salazar in Guadalajara. Martinez, 38, has been linked to the Camarena case, which was blamed for souring relations between U.S.

The FBI's top agent in Los Angeles on Wednesday defended the Mexican authorities' actions in an ongoing murder investigation involving two former Los Angeles police officers. James V. DeSarno, an assistant director of the FBI, said Mexican federal agents have been swift and professional in responding to requests for assistance by U.S. authorities investigating the statements of 23-year-old Sonia Flores.

Street cops insist that under similar circumstances, the Los Angeles Police Department officers who beat Rodney G. King would have delivered the same baton blows to someone like, say, Robert Shapiro of Beverly Hills. (After listening to Shapiro's sanctimonious book-tour attempts at rehabilitating his reputation, a lot of folks would like to deliver baton blows to the turncoat Dream Teamer. But that's another story.

"Look, we need help!" the cop shouted into his cellphone in the middle of an enraged mob. "We're in Tlahuac, and the people are beating us up. Please send backup!" It took riot police three hours and 35 minutes after Edgar Moreno called to get there.

Mexican authorities on Friday announced the arrest of the man they say directed the kidnappings of 72 Central and South American migrants found slain in northern Mexico last year. Federal police said Edgar Huerta Montiel, 22, told them he led the capture of two freight trucks packed with undocumented migrants in the state of Tamaulipas, then killed 10 of the victims. Huerta, described as an army deserter who works for the Zetas drug gang, allegedly told police he also ordered the kidnappings of six busloads of passengers in the rural town of San Fernando.

A much-touted federal effort to keep U.S. firearms out of the Mexican drug wars is unwieldy, mismanaged and fraught with "significant weaknesses" that could doom gun smuggling enforcement on the border to failure, an internal Justice Department review concluded Tuesday. Agents with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives focus only on small gun sales and do not share information with law enforcement officials on both sides of the border, the review said.

Fresh off this week's capture of a notorious drug lord, Mexican President Felipe Calderon declared Wednesday that his sustained assault on organized crime and efforts to clean up the police were paying off. In the president's annual state of the nation report, delivered in writing to Congress, Calderon cited a string of drug kingpins arrested or killed during the last year as evidence of success in his nearly 4-year-old offensive against the...

Mexican federal police on Saturday rescued two of four journalists kidnapped five days earlier by a drug gang in northern Mexico, authorities said. The case highlighted the dangers faced by journalists in Mexico, where criminal gangs often seek to silence news coverage or slant it in their favor. The captors had demanded the airing of homemade videos that linked a rival gang to corrupt police in the states of Durango and Coahuila. Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna said intelligence work led to a predawn operation that freed cameramen Javier Canales of Multimedios Laguna and Alejandro Hernandez of Televisa from a house in Gomez Palacio, Durango.

Jason Harrington, wanted on a battery charge in Alameda County, was caught after a chase across rooftops in the Baja California fishing village of San Felipe. Alleged child molester Father Joseph Briceno of Phoenix was handcuffed amid a crowd of parishioners in Mexicali. Tony "The Big Homie" Rodriguez, a Mexican Mafia boss from Indio, hurled threats after being hauled off a street corner by Mexican police posing as junkyard dealers. All three fugitives had a similar escape plan: Flee to Baja California and leave their troubles at the border.

The bedraggled immigrants were picking their way through the boulders and scrub when a group of heavily armed men descended on them just short of the California-Mexico border. They corralled them in a cave and pointed their guns on the 10 men and one woman. These lawless badlands in the hills east of Tijuana have long teemed with bandits and rapists, but these criminals demanded only phone numbers. They started calling the immigrants' loved ones in Pomona, San Diego and Bakersfield: Send us money or we'll shoot, they said.

A man wanted here on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon led police on a 117-mile chase that ended Saturday after he rammed his car into a truck full of Mexican police officers near Ensenada, authorities said. Arturo Ambriz Bermudez, 25, was arrested in Mexico on suspicion of assaulting Mexican police and crossing the border illegally, Costa Mesa police said. Costa Mesa Police Sgt. Dave Anderson did not know when Bermudez would be returned to Orange County to face charges.

Mexican and U.S. investigators teamed up Thursday to arrest nine accused kidnapers and rescue a San Diego businessman who had been abducted this week from his factory here. After three suspects picked up $200,000 in ransom money at a pedestrian bridge south of the San Ysidro international border crossing, Baja state judicial police officers swooped in and arrested them Thursday, authorities said. They then raided a house in a tough Tijuana neighborhood and liberated Peter Barabas, 57.

Mexican authorities issued an arrest warrant Monday for Bruce Beresford- Redman, former producer of the "Survivor" reality show, in connection with the death of his wife at a Cancun resort, a Mexican official confirmed. Francisco Antonio Alor Quezada, attorney general for the southern Mexican state of Quintana Roo, said a judge in Cancun had issued an "order of arrest" against Beresford in connection with the crime of "qualified homicide" in the death of his wife, Monica Beresford-Redman, 41, who apparently was strangled.

Bruce Beresford-Redman, a successful reality TV producer, and his wife, Monica, the owner of a popular Westside nightclub, left Los Angeles with their two children last week for a resort in Cancun, Mexico. Family members say the couple were trying to repair a marriage that had been fraying in recent months. Monica Beresford-Redman had recently discovered that her husband had had an affair, relatives say. The pair were scheduled to come home Thursday -- Monica's 42nd birthday.