Sinaloa

A Mexican beauty queen from the drug-ravaged state of Sinaloa was arrested with suspected gang members in a truck filled with guns and ammunition, police said. Miss Sinaloa 2008 Laura Zuniga, 23, was arrested late Monday at a military checkpoint in Zapopan, Jalisco state, police said. She told police that she was planning to travel to Bolivia and Colombia with the men to go shopping.

Eduardo Arellano Felix, the last of four brothers targeted by U.S. authorities for running the notorious Arellano Felix drug cartel, pleaded guilty Friday to money laundering and conspiracy charges. Arellano Felix, 56, a medical doctor who avoided the swaggering, hard-partying ways of his brothers, was a shadowy figure in the hyper-violent organized crime group that pumped tons of drugs into the U.S. during its peak in the 1980s and '90s. After his brothers Benjamin and Javier were arrested in the previous decade, Eduardo became a key advisor to a nephew of the brothers who was trying to restore the group's control of key drug trafficking routes into Southern California.

In a significant blow against the powerful Sinaloa drug cartel, Mexican troops on Thursday killed one of the group's top figures during an arrest raid in western Mexico. The raid came as troops in Tijuana rounded up dozens of police officers in a separate operation targeting organized crime. Ignacio Coronel Villarreal is described as one of the three most important bosses in the cartel, which is based in Sinaloa state and run by the country's most-wanted drug suspect, Joaquin "Chapo" Guzman.

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.

Second of four parts G abriel Dieblas Roman took orders from cartel bosses in Mexico, hard men who ruled by fear, but he wouldn't approve a shipment without talking to a plucky, middle-aged woman from Compton. Guadalupe "Lupita" Villalobos ran a storefront botanica where Virgin of Guadalupe statuettes sat beside grinning Saint Death skeletons. She would threaten to turn neighbors into toads, and her clients believed she could divine the future by studying snail shells scattered on a tabletop.

Alongside a railroad track that runs through Culiacan, the steamy capital of Sinaloa state, there is an ornate shrine to a turn-of-the-century bandit. Legend has it that this bandit was a kind of Robin Hood who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. People here all but worship him, and pilgrims come to the shrine in search of miracles. They rub his plaster head.

The bodies of at least 25 people, 15 of them with their heads cut off, were discovered Saturday in the resort city of Acapulco, authorities said. Drug cartel violence has increasingly plagued Acapulco as rival gangs fight for control of the local market, occasionally spilling into the tourist areas of the city. Even though most of Saturday's killings appeared to have steered clear of those sections, the violence damages the reputation of a once-glamorous city struggling to make a comeback amid President Felipe Calderon's drug war. The grimmest discovery came as police were investigating a burning car in a shopping center parking lot early in the morning: the decapitated bodies of 15 people.

The claim has floated around for months, circulating among academics and critics of President Felipe Calderon's military-led war on Mexican drug gangs. It goes like this: Army and police operations that have included massive arrests, confiscation of drug shipments and numerous deadly shootouts, have left the largest and most powerful of the cartels relatively unscathed. The so-called Sinaloa cartel, based in the drug-rich Pacific state of the same name, has been allowed to escape most of the government's firepower and carry on with its illegal business as usual, according to this theory.

Fifteen years ago, Sinaloa state's moneyed elite wouldn't give Jesus Vizcarra the time of day. His murky past and reputed personal ties to major drug traffickers kept him out of the top social clubs and business associations. Today the same power brokers who once shunned him are Vizcarra's enthusiastic backers as he emerges as the solid favorite to become governor of the key state. To critics, Vizcarra's election on Sunday would be the culmination of a steady penetration by narcotics traffickers into Mexican political power.

Political parties across the spectrum looked for ways to claim bragging rights Monday after gubernatorial elections in a dozen states yielded surprises but no clear overall victor. With results still being tallied, the outcome so far offered something of a boost to President Felipe Calderon, whose conservative party avoided an embarrassing sweep by joining with leftist parties in several key states. Those oil-and-water alliances stunned the surging Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, in two states it has long ruled: Oaxaca and Puebla.

SAN DIEGO - A woman claiming to be the daughter of the world's most wanted drug trafficker was arrested at the San Ysidro port of entry Friday afternoon after trying to enter the country with fraudulent documents, according to a criminal complaint and a high-ranking U.S. law enforcement official. Alejandrina Gisselle Guzman Salazar allegedly told U.S. customs officers that she was traveling to Los Angeles to give birth. After questioning, she admitted that she was the daughter of Joaquin "Chapo" Guzman, the leader of Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel, said the unidentified official who is not authorized to speak about the case.

SAN DIEGO - Federal authorities have linked a high-ranking Mexican organized crime member to two of the largest drug tunnels ever discovered under the San Diego-Tijuana border, according to a 13-count indictment announced Wednesday that details a far-flung operation that allegedly moved tons of marijuana across the border. Jose Sanchez-Villalobos, 49, is the highest-ranking member of the Sinaloa drug cartel ever charged in connection with the construction of underground tunnels, according to federal prosecutors in San Diego.

SAN LUIS, Ariz. - The powerful Sinaloa drug cartel is believed to be behind one of the most sophisticated and well-engineered smuggling tunnels ever found along the U.S.-Mexico border, according to U.S. drug enforcement officials who announced the discovery Thursday in Yuma. The “fully operational” tunnel is a 755-foot passageway, tall enough for a 6-foot person to walk through, that burrows under the border fence, a park and a water canal. It connects a small, nondescript warehouse on the U.S. side to an inoperative ice manufacturing plant behind a strip club in Mexico.

CULIACAN, Mexico - For generations, the extended Hernandez family tended fields of marijuana high in Sinaloa's western Sierra Madre highlands. They sold their crops to representatives of the Sinaloa cartel for a fraction of what the drug would bring at the U.S. border and eked out a pittance. Barefoot children never went to school; they just helped their dads with the planting and harvest. Women washed clothes in the river. They burned pine sap for light at night because there was no electricity.

CULIACAN, Mexico - The cartel henchman nicknamed "El Loco" was reported behind the latest atrocity in Mexico's ever-more-depraved drug war: mutilating 49 people and piling their bodies - heads, hands and feet missing - by the side of a road leading to the U.S. border. Authorities say he acted this month on orders from the top commanders of the brutal Zeta paramilitary force, who wanted to send a message to the long-dominant Sinaloa cartel and its allies, in a new phase of a conflict that has claimed more than 50,000 lives in less than six years.

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.

It was a street party at a popular gathering place, typical of Saturday nights in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. Drinks, a musical band, a joining together of the mostly young. Then, shortly before midnight, a white double-cabin pickup screeched to a stop on Palm Tree Street in the town of Navolato. At least four gunmen burst from the vehicle and sprayed the party with semiautomatic gunfire. Eight people were killed, among them women and teenagers. Several more were seriously wounded and remained hospitalized Sunday, said Jose Luis Leyva of the state prosecutor's office in Culiacan, the state capital about 20 miles to the east.

With a gilded, four-foot statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe tucked under his arm, Jose Espinoza clambers up the Italian-marble staircase, past the Jacuzzis and gigantic Corinthian columns, to a domed chapel inside the ornate mansion of a particularly successful Sinaloa "farmer." Espinoza installs the Virgin in her niche on an elaborate cedar altarpiece that he carved by hand, a la early Baroque. Around her dance rosy-cheeked, feather-winged angels that Espinoza has painted on the walls and ceilings, an enveloping palette of pale blue skies and cottony clouds.

Smugglers stacked the bundles of dope on a freight elevator that descended to an underground staging area, where electric carts whisked the marijuana down a tunnel into California. The passageway linked a warehouse in Tijuana with another nondescript building in San Diego, and just like several other drug tunnels, its discovery this week yielded another jackpot seizure. More than 32 tons of marijuana were seized in connection with the tunnel investigation, making it one of the largest drug seizures in U.S. history, and the latest in a series of enormous busts along the California-Mexico border.

Human rights activists Friday welcomed a rare prison sentence for Mexican military personnel in the killing of civilians but said they continued to mistrust the army to prosecute its own. The 14 soldiers and army officers were sentenced to long prison terms for the shooting deaths of five women and children at a checkpoint in the state of Sinaloa four years ago. The Defense Ministry, in a statement on the verdict, described the shootings as...