Traffickers

Drug traffickers fighting to control northern Mexico have turned their guns and grenades on the Mexican army, authorities said, in an apparent escalation of warfare that played out across multiple cities in two border states. In coordinated attacks, gunmen in armored cars and equipped with grenade launchers fought army troops this week and attempted to trap some of them in two military bases by cutting off access and blocking highways, a new tactic by Mexico's organized criminals.

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 Mexican drug gangs rapidly infiltrating Central America call El Salvador "El Caminito," the little pathway. Once a bystander in the region's narco-business, this tiny country now finds itself enmeshed in an expanding drug trade, a shift brought on in part by the presence of a new, U.S.-funded highway that provides an overland route for shipping cocaine north. For years, traffickers used speedboats and small submarine-type vessels to move drugs from Colombia to northern Guatemala or Mexico, using water routes to circumvent much of Central America.

The man with eight pounds of methamphetamine in his carry-on bag stood in the snaking security line at Los Angeles International Airport's Terminal 4, inching toward the checkpoint, when a TSA screener approached. But it wasn't to stop the contraband, according to prosecutors. It was to make sure it got through. The screener, John Whitfield, allegedly told the man to get to the back of the line so he and his luggage would get to the X-ray machines when Whitfield's shift started.

The manner in which drug traffickers have undermined Mexico's democracy was illustrated Sunday in Michoacan, home state of President Felipe Calderon and site of violent local elections. Dozens of candidates dropped out of their races because of threats from drug-trafficking cartels. A mayor was assassinated a week before the vote as he campaigned on behalf of Calderon's sister, who is running for governor. Luisa Maria Calderon led most polls going into Sunday's vote, and her win could serve as a morale boost for her brother's conservative National Action Party, or PAN, ahead of next year's presidential election.

A mayor who took the job when every other official in his town quit out of fear of drug traffickers was reported slain Monday, the fifth Mexican mayor killed in six weeks. Authorities said Gustavo Sanchez, mayor of the town of Tancitaro in Michoacan state, had apparently been beaten to death with rocks. He had been missing since Saturday and his body was discovered Monday along with that of an aide on the side of a rural road. Large bloodied rocks were found nearby, witnesses said.

Iran hanged 13 drug traffickers in public Wednesday, pushing the total number executed this year to 502. Tehran Radio, monitored in Nicosia, said the executions took place in four cities.

For the second time in two weeks, the mayor of a Mexican city has been slain by purported drug traffickers, authorities say. Marco Antonio Leal Garcia, the mayor of Hidalgo in the violent border state of Tamaulipas, was shot to death Sunday. His young daughter was wounded in the attack. Tamaulipas, which borders Texas, is the same state where a drug gang is suspected in the massacre last week of 72 migrants and where the battle between rival cartels has left a bloody trail of death, cowed authorities and terrified citizens.

Mexican and Guatemalan drug traffickers arguing about bets on a horse race in a rural border town fought a series of gun battles in which 17 people died, police said. Guatemala's National Police spokesman, Donald Gonzalez, said the traffickers were drinking in Santa Ana Huista on Sunday afternoon when the argument broke out, leading to a pursuit in which the men shot at one another with automatic weapons from racing trucks. Gonzalez said police found grenade launchers at the scene of the final shootout, along with hundreds of bullet cartridges and a truck with license plates from the Mexican state of Tamaulipas.

Ten suspected drug traffickers and a soldier were killed in gun battles in the southern Mexican town of Arcelia. The violence began with a shootout between two rival gangs that left one dead, according to a statement from Guerrero state's Public Safety Department. Nine more, and the soldier, were killed in a subsequent confrontation between troops and police and heavily armed men traveling in 10 cars. In Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, six people were killed when assailants opened fire inside a pool hall, officials said.

CARTAGENA, Colombia -- President Obama said Saturday that he is open to a debate about current drug laws but that he believes legalizing narcotics could lead to even greater problems in those countries hardest hit by trafficking and violence. Obama told Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos on Saturday that he is willing to discuss whether current laws are "doing more harm than good. " But "legalization is not the answer," Obama said. As president of Colombia, which was ravaged for years by drug-related violence, Santos raised the question of legalization during this weekend's Summit of the Americas meeting here.

A conclave of Central American presidents meeting in Guatemala to discuss a major overhaul of their drug laws — including legalization or decriminalization — failed to arrive at a consensus Saturday and agreed to meet again soon in Honduras. Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina had invited five counterparts to discuss what he described as growing frustration with Washington's anti-drug policy, which many in the region say is exacting too high a price in crime and corruption.

When the ATF made alleged gun trafficker Manuel Fabian Celis-Acosta its primary target in the ill-fated Fast and Furious investigation, it hoped he would lead the agency to two associates who were Mexican drug cartel members. The ATF even questioned and released him knowing that he was wanted by the Drug Enforcement Administration. But those two drug lords were secretly serving as informants for the FBI along the Southwest border, newly obtained internal emails show. Had Celis-Acosta simply been held when he was arrested by theBureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in May 2010, the investigation that led to the loss of hundreds of illegal guns and may have contributed to the death of a Border Patrol agent could have been closed early.

A lawmaker and former federal prosecutor from Los Angeles has drafted proposed new penalties for criminals who illegally purchase and smuggle firearms into Mexico , saying he hopes his measure will bring "something positive" out of the uproar over the Fast and Furious gun-tracking operation on the Southwest border. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank) said he will introduce legislation Thursday to create a two-year prison sentence for so-called "straw purchasers" who currently receive probation or very little jail time for acquiring weapons under false pretenses and then selling them to Mexican gun smugglers.

Federal wildlife investigators in California and other states say they have cracked an international smuggling ring that trafficked for years in sawed-off rhinoceros horns, which fetch stratospheric prices in Vietnam and China for their supposed cancer-curing powers. More than 150 federal agents and other local enforcement officers raided homes and businesses and made several arrests in a dozen states over the weekend, including three alleged traffickers in Southern California. "By taking out this ring of rhino horn traffickers, we have shut down a major source of black market horn and dealt a serious blow to rhino horn smuggling both in the U.S. and globally," said U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe.

When Robert E. Hecht Jr. arrived at the loading platform of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in the fall of 1972, he was carrying a large wooden box and was escorted by an armed guard. Inside the box was perhaps the finest Greek vase to survive antiquity, a masterpiece that would soon be making headlines around the world. The Met had agreed to pay a record $1 million for the ancient work. Hecht said it had been in the private collection of a certain Lebanese gentleman.

It starts at the airport. A burly guy in a hoodie drapes himself over the barrier that leads out of the parking lot. Watching. Just watching. Most taxi drivers are on the drug cartels' payroll, ordered to spy on visitors and monitor the movements of the military and state investigators. Their license plates brazenly shed, they cruise streets dotted with paper-flower shrines marking the dead. Watching. In the main downtown plaza, in front of City Hall and the cathedral, about a dozen guys in baggy pants with sunglasses on their heads hang out alongside the shoeshine men. They eye passersby, without speaking.

Among listings for fraying couches and used television sets, the Craigslist ad stood out — $2,800 for a prized Asian arowana fish, believed to bring good luck and ward off evil spirits. A grammatically challenged buyer from Las Vegas sent the seller an email expressing interest: "Is she a super red asian arowana? I all ready have all the other species and I need the endangered one to finilize my collection. " The seller responded cautiously — "Are you a cop?" she allegedly wrote in one text message — but ultimately agreed to meet the buyer at Laguna Hills Mall for the handoff.

With a title that translates as the punning "Miss Bullet," the Mexican film "Miss Bala" is based in part on the real-life story of a beauty pageant winner who was arrested alongside a drug gang and paraded before the media amid accusations of corruption behind her crown. It aims to not only be a provocative, thoughtful action film for the art house, looking at the overwhelming problems of the drug-trafficking epidemic in Mexico, but "Miss Bala" also marks an ambitiously bold step forward for director Gerardo Naranjo.