America's Mexican Border Wars

[Tosh Plumlee]

News items you will not find in American mainstream media coverage:

Monday July 21, 2009:

Several Juarez Mexican media outlets report 3 men shot outside Mormon chapel in Zaragoza, just east of Juarez.
the men were NOT Mormons; two dead at the scene one critical.
Unfortunately these were not the only homicides
in Juarez on Monday. There were another 5 shot throughout the city on Monday and twelve murdered last Monday. The number of daily homicides in Juarez Mexico is averaging about ten a day .....not counting the other 60 a day nation wide. So far in two years over 11500 to date have been tortured and murdered:

Other reported killings that the American Media refuses to cover, or that the American people in general are not interested in hearing about.

Lady walking her three year old son and their dog, all three gunned down in drive by shooting in Juarez Mexico:

Elderly man (86) murdered in his store front business. The gunman, walked up laughing and shot the man for no reason then left a card 'Ace of Spades" on the body as a warning to other store keepers not to trade with rival gangs of the Zetas.

Young boy, four years old, kidnapped and found murdered the next day in a back street of Juarez. The family had no connections with drug trafficking.

And the Body Count goes on and on... But, who really cares?

Six killed in Jarkarta... and who will be on Idol next year and one of our State Governors found God after getting caught after an affair seems to be the topics of interest these days.

Friday: Five bodies found in mass grave near the border town of Palomas Mexico across from Columbus New Mexico.

[Tosh Plumlee]

INTEL REPORT (Mexican/American Special operations Task Force)

XXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXXX (classified)

".... Regional trend: Mexico’s cartel violence
The pace of the cartel war in Mexico has held steady throughout 2009 so far and there is little to suggest that there will be major changes in the third quarter. At the current rate, cartel-related deaths for the year are on track to reach close to 7,500 — 1,500 more than in 2008. The cartels controlling Mexican drug trafficking are at war with the government and each other. Alliances and rivalries among the cartels remain highly unstable, and the degree of volatility in these relationships makes it difficult to predict the course of the violence.
Since 2006, the Mexican military has been pushed into a wide range of counternarcotics operations normally conducted by law enforcement agencies, such as drug eradication, maritime and airborne interdiction, signals intelligence operations, local security patrols, raids and arrests. In the third quarter, Mexico will reexamine the appropriateness of these roles for the Mexican military, which did not traditionally perform these functions. The debate is unlikely to reach a conclusion by the end of the quarter, but it is one that is well worth watching as the outcome could change the way the cartel war is fought.
The months ahead also likely will shed more light on the shifting geography of cartel operations. Central America’s rising importance as a drug trafficking route will make the Mexican border with Guatemala increasingly important to the cartels and will continue affecting the security situation in the region....".

[Keith Millea]

Boots on the groung heading south.Drug cultivation heading north.When I first read that the police were finding marijuana gardens that were comprised of 1,000 to 3,000 plants several years ago,I immediatly knew this was not your usual grower.It had to be the Mexican gangs(cartels).Well,now the police have found the second large opium poppie growing operation in the last month.Yep,they're here in the Northwest.How long will it take before we are a full fledged "Narco State"??????????

http://news.opb.org/article/5459-opium-p...ll-county/

[Magda Hassan]

MEXICO SECURITY MEMO: AUG. 17, 2009 (not classified)



Mexican Drug Cartel Violence in the United States
Police in El Paso, Texas, announced Aug. 11 that they had arrested three suspects in the May 15 shooting death of Jose Daniel Gonzalez Galeana, a Juarez cartel lieutenant that had been acting as an informant for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. Gonzalez was shot multiple times outside his home in an upscale El Paso neighborhood. Among the suspects was an 18-year-old U.S. Army soldier stationed at Fort Bliss, who the other suspects said had been hired by one of the leaders of the group to pull the trigger. The group's leader, Ruben Rodriguez Dorado, was also among those arrested. Rodriguez was also a member of the Juarez cartel who had been working as an informant for ICE, and he is believed to have orchestrated Gonzalez's assassination in retaliation for cooperating with law enforcement.

Separately, the district attorney's office in San Diego, announced Aug. 13 a series of indictments against 17 members of the Los Palillos kidnapping and drug trafficking gang linked to the Tijuana-based Arellano Felix Organization (AFO). The gang is accused of having committed nine murders, a series of kidnappings, and trafficking marijuana and methamphetamines from Mexico to the United States. Authorities also said that some members of Los Palillos -- who include Mexican and U.S. citizens -- are accused of firing on a police officer during a chase and dissolving dead bodies in corrosive substances in order to destroy evidence, a common means of disposing of bodies in Tijuana and elsewhere in Mexico. Police believe Los Palillos established itself in San Diego several years ago after a falling out with a faction of the AFO.

These two cases represent new but not necessarily surprising examples of the expansion of Mexican cartels into the United States. In addition to the lack of informant control and protection, the El Paso example highlights the security risks associated with Mexican cartel members increasingly moving to the United States. This case clarifies that at least in some instances, Mexican cartels continue to target their enemies, regardless of where they live. Targets living in the United States are not off limits.

The San Diego example represents a different but no less significant risk. As opposed to cartel bosses on the Mexican side of the border tasking operatives in the United States to commit killings -- which appears to have happened in El Paso -- Los Palillos appears to have been a Mexico-based drug trafficking organization that simply relocated to the United States, conducting the same type of crimes north of the border.

In both of these cases, it is important to note that the groups involved did not demonstrate a shift in targeting or tactics from the cartels' norm in the United States toward the way they have been operating in Mexico. Neither is accused of anything as provocative as, for example, ordering the murder of a police officer or kidnapping victims outside of the criminal or illegal immigrant community. This does not mean that these risks do not exist, but only that the threshold has not yet been crossed. The more that these Mexico-based groups establish themselves in the United States, however, the risks of an escalation also increase.


Rifts Within PAN Over Cartel War Strategy?

Former Mexican President Vicente Fox said Aug. 14 that the military should be pulled off the streets as soon as possible, and thatstate and local governments should begin playing a larger role in the cartel war. Fox's statement is significant because it comes amid an intensifying debate regarding the role of the Mexican military in the country's cartel war, and it makes him the first major representative of President Felipe Calderon's National Action Party (PAN) to publicly question the federal government's strategy of relying so heavily on the armed forces.

Fox did not elaborate on his comment, or specify when exactly the military should withdraw or what duties it should perform. And on the surface, his position is not too different from that of Calderon, who has said repeatedly that the military is being used only until the federal police are capable of taking over, a process that is optimistically scheduled to be completed by 2012. However, Fox's implication that the transition should happen sooner was enough to prompt a statement from the Interior Ministry affirming, "The supreme commander of the armed forces is Felipe Calderon."

Fox and Calderon have had policy disagreements in the past, but in the cartel war, Fox and the rest of PAN have generally expressed support for Calderon's strategy. STRATFOR has been watching for possible disagreements between Calderon and opposition parties following the results of the July 5 legislative elections, which could make it far more difficult for Calderon to pursue his agenda. Fox's statement ratchets up existing tensions between rival factions of the PAN, and is an indication that Calderon is facing serious policy challenges close to home. Fox's move is likely an attempt to gain the upper hand within the ranks of PAN, and how the power plays shake out will undoubtedly influence the policies of the PAN presidential candidate in 2012.

In the meantime, the critical challenge to Calderon and his war against the cartels will come not from political infighting, but instead from a measurable shift in public opinion. At the moment, Calderon's policies in the cartel war appear to have substantial public support, but should Mexicans turn against the government's effort, Calderon will come under pressure to change direction.

Click image to enlarge



Aug. 10

Mexican military forces near Culiacan, Sinaloa state, arrested two men in possession of 17 firearms, including two Barrett .50 caliber rifles.
Authorities in Tapachula, Chiapas state, arrested a man suspected of a grenade attack on a government office in July.



Aug. 11

Police in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon state, will no longer be able to observe traffic or people from parked patrol cars, based on a city ordinance that took effect Aug. 11. The new law was motivated by concerns that police could be conducting surveillance for drug trafficking or kidnapping organizations.

Aug. 12

A prison warden was unharmed but three of his bodyguards were killed when several persons attacked his convoy with assault rifles in Chihuahua, Chihuahua state.
A group of armed men in Mazatlan, Sinaloa state, threw two fragmentation grenades into a house, killing one man.
The former police chief in Ajuchitlan del Progreso, Guerrero state, died when a group of attackers shot him several times.



Aug. 13

Mexican President Felipe Calderon met in Bogota with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, who said that 86 Colombian police officers had been in Mexico during the past few months to help train Mexican police in counternarcotics operations.

Aug. 15

Police in Chalco, Mexico state, arrested eight members of La Familia Michoacana believed responsible for kidnappings and drug dealing in several nearby towns.
More than 700 Mexican customs agents were fired following indications of widespread corruption in the agency. Customs officials later said that they were being replaced with more than 1,400 new agents and the military was assisting the transition.
Authorities in Ciudad Altamirano, Guerrero state, found the dismembered body of an attorney. His head, hands and feet had been placed in a cooler, with the rest of his body in several plastic bags.
Several men fired on a family from Las Cruces, New Mexico with assault rifles in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua state. Two children were wounded, and one man and two women -- including a pregnant woman -- were killed.

Aug. 16

A city employee in Gomez Palacio, Durango state, died when he was shot several times.
Four people died when a group of assailants opened fire on a home in Zapotitlan Tablas, Guerrero state.
The bodies of two unidentified people were found with gunshot wounds and bound at the hands and feet in Acapulco, Guerrero state.
Several mend armed with assault rifles and handguns opened fire in a bar in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua state killing eight people and wounding four.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Among the suspects was an 18-year-old U.S. Army soldier stationed at Fort Bliss,

Hmmmm.

Fwiw - Fort Bliss is alleged to be the covert home of the military intelligence version of MK-ULTRA.

[Magda Hassan]

-----XXXX classified).... TF7..... )


(following not classified) Mexican Army Security memo xxxx xx ...."


by C xxx ...... X xxx........ Elpaso Aug. 18, 2009... sensitive

Cd. Juárez – A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent is being investigated on possible corruption charges after running an informant network that has imploded throughout the El Paso law enforcement community, a Mexican law enforcement source in Juárez said this morning.
The agent, who goes by the nickname VeeJay or DeeJay (he wasn’t certain), was moved out of the area after his primary informant, Jose Daniel Gonzalez Galeana, was shot dead in El Paso. Gonzalez, if you recall, was a high level cartel figure for La Linea, the crew of killers operating under the auspices of Vicente Carrillo Fuentes. He was shot and killed outside his girlfriend’s home on Pony Trail Drive, near the home of El Paso police chief, Gregory Allen. Last Monday, El Paso police arrested Ruben Rodriguez and two other men, including a U.S. Army soldier out of Fort Bliss. (Galeana is pictured above in this photo courtesy of Crime Stoppers, El Paso.)
The Juárez Cartel believed Gonzalez had given up Pedro Sanchez Aranas, El Tigre; the number three man of the Juárez Cartel’s infrastructure. As a result, Rodriguez was sent in to kill the informant.
Police sources in El Paso aren’t saying much but my sources in Juárez say VeeJay was running both informants, Rodriguez and Gonzalez. Now, I’m told, the agent is being investigated to see if he had any ties back to the cartel.
Gonzalez’s murder is the highest level cartel assassination performed on the U.S. side of the border and one of the creepiest. The case has chilled relationships between local and federal law enforcement in El Paso because the El Paso Police Department was never told Gonzalez had been living so close to the chief of police. It’s also raised suspicions on the Mexican side that the ICE agent was compromised, as classic a man bites dog story as any I’ve ever heard.
Gonzalez was shot eight times outside his girlfriend’s $364,000 home. He was identified as the owner of a trucking company when he died. Publicly, the Feds were alarmed because Gonzalez was a high-level cartel figure, the first to be executed on the U.S. side that they ever acknowledged in this latest Mexican drug war. What the Feds didn’t say was that Gonzalez was working as an informant for ICE when he died. Or that ICE had given him a S-Visa, a visa for snitches, I think Gonzalez was given the S-5, meaning no State Department oversight.
Sanchez, his former cartel boss, was arrested in Hidalgo in May 2008 at the hands of the Mexican Army. Gonzalez, it’s said, was the man who gave him up. What I’ve never known is whether Gonzalez gave him up because he was taking money for the Feds or because he stood to succeed Sanchez in the hierarchy of the Juárez Cartel.
What is known is was shot eight times when he fell. Last Monday, El Paso Police arrested Rodriguez, soldierMichael Jackson Apodoca, 18 who is accused of being the triggerman and Christopher Andrew Duran, a 17-year-old who drove the getaway car. Duran wasn’t supposed to be at the site of the hit, Juárez Cartel associates I spoke with claim. On Wednesday, a 16-year-old was also arrested in the execution.

Rodriguez admitted to El Paso police that he was also a snitch but told the cops that he had been instructed to hunt down Gonzalez.
I spoke with the El Paso police department; they didn’t have much new to offer except to note that they were the arresting agency on the hit. No DEA, no FBI, and definitely, absolutely, no ICE agents were involved in the arrest.
It’s a mess. Was this ICE agent, the handler for snitches, in fact a snitch himself, one working for the Juárez cartel? Rodriguez is a known killer, so’s Gonzalez, whose crew, La Linea, has been responsible for scores of murders in Mexico, I’m not sure anyone knows how many. Both men were too high up to be the triggermen, instead, they were the autóres intelectual working Juárez these days.
Does ICE really believe that it’s practical, even moral, to run killers as snitches on drug traffickers? It appears the agency does think so, yes. It’s how we’ve ended up with the situational ethics quandary we’re in today. Or,desmadre.
One only need look at the case of Guillermo Ramirez Pereyo, AKA Lalo. Lalo was ICE’s informant within the Juárez Cartel the last time a situation like this came up, 2004. He participated and knew of the murders of at least a dozen men in Juárez but ICE kept him on the payroll anyway and never moved against him until they lost control of the man and he started talking about taking down a DEA agent. In that case, ICE saw fit to run an informant they knew was a killer in exchange information, not on the cocaine industry of the cartel’s business of a counterfeit cigarette operation being run in Juárez.
VeeJay or whatever the agent’s name is, has just started up a whole new level of questions that need to be asked of the federal law enforcement community in El Paso.
The three were a bit of a mess as far as hitmen go. Court records show that about ten days after killing Gonzalez, the three were involved in an attempted theft of a trailer full of flat-screen televisions. Rodriguez had an Alejandro Escalante post his $10,000 bond. Jackson, the soldier and Duran both had bondsmen pay their $10,000, all on Aug. 4,

[Magda Hassan]

http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/p...l=15112463

[Jan Klimkowski]

ICE had given him a S-Visa, a visa for snitches, I think Gonzalez was given the S-5, meaning no State Department oversight.

Democracy in action.

[Ed Jewett]

Among the suspects was an 18-year-old U.S. Army soldier stationed at Fort Bliss,

Hmmmm.

Fwiw - Fort Bliss is alleged to be the covert home of the military intelligence version of MK-ULTRA.

And (correct me if I am wrong) the place where the Greater D.C. Beltway sniper-from-the-trunk (should I say boot?) hailed from?

[Tosh Plumlee]

Hey Tosh check this out... Its here... tighten up old friend S... is about to happen real soon... Bob


XXXXXX XXXXXX AP Oct 6 2009 forward

Federal investigator claims he faced retaliation for failing to play ball with a cover-up


What can best be described as a bombshell revelation has surfaced in a long-running state-secrets case filed by a former DEA agent, Richard Horn, against past high-level employees of the CIA and State Department.
A court pleading filed in the litigation indicates that a former supervisory agent with the State Department Inspector General’s Office (OIG) has agreed to testify under oath that an investigative report he prepared in the Horn matter “was rewritten without his knowledge or permission, and his signature forged, and his intended conclusions changed.”
In addition, the former State Department investigative agent, Paul E. Forster, according to the court filing, plans to testify that his “counterpart” at the CIA’s Office of Inspector General (an individual named Michael E. Grivsky) also was subjected to similar treatment.
From the court pleading:
Forster knows his counterpart at the CIA [Grivsky] also wrote a report concerning Horn’s allegations and that his report sustained Horn’s allegations, which essentially was that the CIA undermined Horn’s and DEA’s counter-drug operations in Burma, but Forster knows Grivsky’s report was re-written and the original copies recovered and then were ordered to be destroyed by an Agency supervisor.
Forster knows that the conclusions in Grivsky’s report were changed to protect and better support the CIA and [CIA Station Chief in Burma at the time, Arthur] Brown, who had undermined Horn and the DEA in Burma.
… Forster will testify that his counterpart at the CIA, Grivsky, stated that he and Forster were expected by their respective agencies to bury the allegations made by Horn and that they were expected to prepare a joint report that erroneously concluded that Horn’s claims were unfounded and untrue.
And in another interesting revelation contained in the court filing, Forster reveals that the State Department, like the CIA, controls and operates its own spying equipment.
From the pleading:
Forster knows that the Department of State also has eavesdropping devices similar to those at issue in this case. Forster knows this because it was revealed to him by a high-level Senior Foreign Service Officer who has considerable first-hand knowledge. This ranking executive shared much relevant and very specific information with Forster. Forster also spoke independently with two DS agents who confirmed the existence of the DOS [Department of State] capabilities.
Narco News has previously reported at length on the Horn case in a 2004 story that was based on leaked court pleadings. That story can be found at this link.
Horn’s lawsuit was filed in 1994 against the CIA’s Brown and State Department Chief of Mission in Burma Franklin Huddle Jr. — who were both stationed in Burma in the early 1990s at the same time Horn served as DEA’s country attaché.
In the litigation, both Brown and Huddle are accused of violating Horn’s constitutional rights by conspiring to plant an eavesdropping bug in his government-leased quarters in Burma. Horn also alleges in the lawsuit that the eavesdropping was part of a larger effort by Brown and Horn to undermine DEA’s anti-narcotics mission in Burma.
From Horn’s lawsuit:
While stationed in Burma [in Southeast Asia], Horn made substantial progress working in concert with the Burmese government to improve its performance to address major drug issues, and Burma is and was the leading opium producing country in the world and is a major source country for the heroin that enters the United States. Even though the country of Burma was making substantial progress in its drug law enforcement efforts, Defendant Charge Huddle was sending reports to the Department of State stating that the government of Burma was not making any progress. Horn strongly encouraged Defendant Huddle to more accurately report on the drug situation in Burma to policy makers in Washington.
Horn alleges further that as a result of his efforts to expose Brown and Huddle’s dishonest agenda, the two launched a campaign to discredit him — which included illegally eavesdropping on his conversations in order to, among other motivations, dig up some dirt. The eavesdropping effort failed to produce any damaging information against Horn, yet in September 1993, Horn alleges, Huddle used his State Department authority to expel the DEA agent from Burma.
Brown, Huddle and the CIA itself have denied any role in setting up surveillance on Horn while he was stationed in Burma, according to court pleadings.
Inconvenient Report
Horn, prior to filing his lawsuit, reported the alleged misconduct on the part of Brown and Huddle to the State Department Inspector General’s Office, resulting in a joint investigation by State’s Forster and CIA’s Grivsky. The report of that investigation was completed in 1996 but not made available to Horn and his attorney, in redacted form, until this year.
In July of this year, Horn’s case, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., finally made it onto the radar of the mainstream media. The federal judge in the case, Royce Lamberth, clearly upset with a pattern of CIA dishonesty, ordered the court pleadings in Horn’s case to be unsealed and made available for public viewing. (The case, until that point, had been cloaked under a “state-secrets privilege” ruling due to alleged “national security” concerns and all of the pleadings filed under seal.)
In another recent development in Horn’s case, the Washington Post reported last week that Horn and the government had ironed out a “tentative settlement” in the litigation — with a final agreement on that front anticipated by the end of October.
The Forster pleading likely has to be among the considerations in the government’s decision to move toward a settlement, given the devastating impact the OIG agent’s revelations have on the case filed against Huddle and Brown — which is being defended by Justice Department attorneys.
Forster also plans to testify once deposed under oath, according to the court pleading, that both he and Grivsky were subjected to retaliation due to their decision to pursue the investigation into Horn’s allegations with “honesty and integrity.’
From the court pleading:
Robert K. Terjesen, Assistant Inspector General for Investigation at the Department of State’s Office of Inspector General, told Forster that Forster’s career would suffer if Forster failed to do what was expected of him with respect to the Horn investigation, and what was expected of Forster was to “dump” the case and cover-up many of the true and substantial facts.
… Forster can testify that his counterpart at the CIA, Mr. Grivsky, was ostracized and otherwise punished by his superiors in the CIA in retribution for his efforts to conduct the investigation of Horn’s allegations with honesty and integrity.
Forster will state that his counterpart at the CIA asked him to go to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and complain to them about how Forster and Grivsky’s investigations were being undermined by their own respective agencies, among other grievances. Forster personally made those complaints as Grivsky requested. Grivsky advised Forster that Grivsky’s career would immediately suffer if he, Grivsky, made the presentation to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee.
… Forster can testify that Robert Terjesen … and another CIA employee, whose identity Forster knows, would regularly meet and discuss how they could manipulate the investigation and ensure that the Agencies’ desired outcome (i.e., no findings in favor of Horn) was achieved.
The court pleading, filed in late August, indicates that Forster, who is suffering from health problems, was slated to be deposed for the Horn case in Jacksonville, Fla., at some future date and time to be scheduled. It is not clear, at this time, whether the deposition has yet taken place.
However, the court pleading, filed by Horn’s attorney, Brian Leighton, provides a general overview of what Forster would say under oath at the deposition — and also alludes to the fact that additional information damaging to the government is likely to surface during his testimony.
From the pleading:
While the gist of Forster’s information is stated above, he knows of much additional information, that if deposed, it would be information to which he would testify, but it is additional information that has not been disclosed herein, because of possible classification [national security] issues.

reference; W.Plumlee; M Palmer, K. Camerana, Previous testimony interviews of 1993 and 2004 Senate Intel Com SCOM