In his hometown, fugitive Mexican drug lord 'El Chapo' is a hero to many

LA Times: A new shipment of caps arrived at Isaias Rodriguez's Culiacan store, black canvas with the image of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman — once again the world's most-wanted drug lord — embossed in gold on the front.

The hats came in just a week or so after El Chapo escaped from a high-security prison in July, via a ventilated, well-lighted tunnel just under a mile long.

Rodriguez, 46, said this is the first time he has sold merchandise that depicts Guzman, who was born and made in Culiacan. The latter's escape has been good for business. Read more. 

Eight family members decapitated in north Mexico

AFP: Eight people from the same family, including two minors, were kidnapped by masked gunmen and their decapitated bodies were found days later in northern Mexico, authorities said Wednesday.

The bodies were found after a ninth member of the Martinez family escaped Sunday's abduction near Casa Quemada, in the state of Chihuahua, and alerted the authorities, prosecutors said. Read more. 

Mexican drug lord Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán escapes from prison again

The Guardian: Top Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, head of the powerful Sinaloa cartel, has escaped from a maximum-security prison for the second time, Mexican officials said as they launched a manhunt.

Guzmán was last seen about 9pm on Saturday in the shower area of the Altiplano prison, 56 miles outside Mexico City, according to a statement from the national security commission. He went to the shower area but security cameras lost sight of him. Upon checking his cell, authorities found it was empty. Read More. 

Mexico brothers lose final death sentence appeal in Malaysia

Note: Another issue that should be taken up at the UN meeting is this. A mandatory death sentence by hanging for trading in prohibited substances? That is utterly outrageous.

Mexico has protested death sentences for far worse crimes. It should make an exemplary stand on this one, committing to diplomatic sanctions against Malaysia if these men are murdered by the state.

AP: Three Mexican brothers and two other people on Thursday lost their final appeals against death sentences for drug trafficking in Malaysia, their lawyer said.

The Mexicans are from Sinaloa state, the cradle of their country's drug trade, but have no criminal record at home. They were arrested at a secluded drug-making factory in Malaysia in 2008, and claimed they had been cleaning the place, not making drugs. Read more. 

$8.5 Million in Gold Reported Stolen from Sinaloa Mine

Americas Program, April 8:

News reports have come out regarding an armed heist of some 900 kilos of gold from a mine in Sinaloa.

All the information in the news articles comes from the company press release, found here.

The company reports that the "gold-bearing concentrate" containing some 7,000 ounces of gold was stolen from its El Gallo 1 mine in the state of Sinaloa. The company states that the mine works two gold deposits and a silver deposit "in the foothills of the Sierra Madre" located in the township of Mocorito on ejido and private lands. It further states that there were no injuries and no material damage and that business continues as usual.

The company, which has its head offices in Toronto, writes that the Mexican authorities are "vigorously investigating" the crime. Mexican authorities have issued no statements so far, a day after the April 7 announcement.

The amount of concentrate carted off and the apparent absence of a clash between company security forces and the robbers raises many questions regarding just how this crime occured. The company reports that the insurance company will be paying damages although "the Company's policy will not be sufficient to cover the entire expected loss."

In 2012 the Federal Attorney General's Office (PGR) reported seven open cases of mine robberies in silver and gold, in the states of Sonora, Durango, Chihuahua, San Luis Potosí and Zacatecas. Lately Michoacan has seen entire mining areas taken over by organized crime, with direct sales to China according to some sources, including this interview I did with Tania Vazquez some weeks back. Some reports indicate that agreements are made with drug cartels. Previous robberies have been mostly of lingots in transport but the PGR stated that some criminal groups have the capacity to refine gold-laden material.

An outright robbery of a refinery has been relatively rare. It will be interesting to watch for more information as this case continues.

How Mexico's Sinaloa Cartel Fed US Heroin Market

El Universal (Translated by Borderland Beat): The Sinaloa Cartel has taken control of New York’s heroin market, replacing Colombian and Asian groups as the principal supplier of the drug, according to an investigation by the Dromomanoscollective, winner of the Ortega y Gasset Journalism Awards.

Jeen Blake, a 40-year-old truck driver, drove from Queens, New York to Riverside, California. The cross-country trip, which took at least 42 hours, had an extremely profitable end: deliver $750,000 in exchange for 15 kilos of heroin.

Blake, an employee of the company Good Guys Transport Corporation, spent a week driving. His truck was filled with the soles of shoes in which some of the drugs were hidden. The rest was concealed in square packets located in secret compartments. After driving 4,800 kilometers, the driver entered New York this past August 26, without knowing that he was being monitored as part of a special operation by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the state police.

Fueling drug gangs' impunity, unidentified corpses pile up in Mexico

Reuters: In Mexico's blood-soaked northern state of Sinaloa, a simple gravestone adorned with pink, blue and yellow plastic flowers marks the tomb of 42-year-old assistant carpenter Carlos Montano.

But Montano is alive and well in the city of Tijuana, hundreds of miles away near the U.S. border, the victim of different enemies: incompetence and indifference in a land where authorities have failed to identify thousands of people killed in grisly gangland violence.  Read more. 

Mexico's tomato-farm workers toil in 'circle of poverty'

L.A. Times 
By Tracy Wilkinson
November 11, 2013

Villa Juarez, Mexico - They sure do have tomatoes here in the Mexican state of Sinaloa.

Elongated red ones. Round green ones. Cherry tomatoes, yellow tomatoes, grape tomatoes.

Vast fields of tomatoes, lining the roads out of the Sinaloa capital of Culiacan, miles and miles of mesh tenting shielding the plants from the sun.

Last year, Sinaloa exported 950,000 tons of vegetables, mostly tomatoes and mostly to California and other parts of the United States, worth nearly $1 billion. Half the tomatoes eaten in the United States this time of year are from Sinaloa. The tomato is the symbol on the Sinaloa license plate.

But while a short list of landowners make millions, the planting, weeding, pruning and picking of the vegetables fall to armies of workers from Mexico's poorest states — Oaxaca, Guerrero, Chiapas — who have little opportunity for schooling or other forms of legal employment.  Read more. 

Displaced: The ordeal of losing everything

El Universal: Americas Program Original Translation by Anna Moses
See Spanish Original.Ignacio Alvarado. One night in May 2011, several trucks stealthily arrived in La Noria, the historic village to the northeast of Mazatlán which for centuries was used by carts laden with gold and silver extracted from the mines of Sinaloa and Durango. They drove through the deserted roads while dogs barked frantically. Finally they stopped in front of a house and a group of twenty armed men approached. The dogs' barking was silenced by the sound of the gunshots. From a distance, through the only window in the house, on the top of a small hill, Ricardo observed what he called, "hell on earth."

"Although I was 100 meters away, I felt the bullets. Everything echoed. But what scared me the most was to see the fire, the fire coming out of the rifles. It lasted forever. It was never-ending. It was like 10 minutes in which God was not present."

From then, effectively, La Noria became no-man's land. Communities belonging to the area, such as New San Marcos and Juantillos, for example, were left empty after the mass exodus of inhabitants. Violent gangs entered the town again and again to kill or abduct men and women, whether for their affiliation with a criminal group or simply to ensure they could not cooperate with one.

And so that night Ricardo, who until then had resisted the idea of leaving, woke his wife and their three children to gather some belongings and abandon their land at dawn, something he had not thought of in his nearly 70 years.

In Mexico, State Seeks to Ban Narco-Messages

InSight Crime: The governor of Sinaloa state, west Mexico, is trying to outlaw the posting of "narcomantas," public banners hung by drug gangs to threaten enemies or improve their image, in an initiative that seems both counterproductive and doomed to fail.

Governor Mario Lopez Valdez has introduced a bill that would make it illegal to hang the banners or to serve as a lookout, also known as a “halcone”, for criminal groups, as Riodoce reported.

Lopez, whose state is among the most violent in Mexico and is home to many of Mexico’s most notorious capos, did not say what the penalties would be for breaking his proposed law.

Mantas have become an increasingly common element in Mexico’s criminal landscape over the past few years, with messages appearing on a regular basis to taunt enemies, call on the government to take action against rivals, improve a group's image with the public, or a combination of the three. Read more.

Tiny Mexican newspaper leads the fight for truth amid the drugs war

The Guardian: "The ambush of a young man in his white Ferrari never looked like a run-of-the-mill murder. The arrival of a second group of gunmen to retrieve the body and the car, as police and reporters looked on, rammed home the point. The silence that followed made it crystal clear.

As far as the authorities and the local daily papers were concerned nothing happened that night in Culiacán, the capital of the Pacific coast state of Sinaloa and bastion of the Sinaloa cartel. As far as the tiny investigative local weekly Río Doce was concerned, it was time to get to work.

"It was just not right that they said nothing," says Ismael Bojórquez, the newspaper's editor. "People have a right to know what is going on."

Run on a shoestring from a few rooms above a dentist's office in Culiacán, Río Doce is one of the last redoubts of investigative journalism on the frontline of Mexico's drug wars that have killed more than 50,000 people since President Felipe Calderón launched his crackdown on organised crime five years ago." read more

Guards Foil Attempted Prison Escape in Mexico

Hispanically Speaking News: "Police and guards foiled an attempt by inmates to escape from a prison in Culiacan, the capital of the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa, over the weekend, state officials said, adding that a police officer was wounded in the incident.

The inmates were spotted by guards early Sunday as they tried to make their way to the perimeter wall, the Sinaloa Public Safety Secretariat said.

Guards fired warning shots in the air and forced the inmates to return to the cell block that they had escaped from by cutting through a metal screen." read more

Seven men killed in Angostura, Sinaloa

El Milenio: "Seven people were shot by a group armed with high-caliber weapons early Friday morning in the town of Angostura, Sinaloa, reported local sources.

According to information released by the police, the events occurred on the 88th kilometer of the Benito Juárez Highway, near the Agustina Ramírez rest stop in Angostura.

It was established that the gunmen burst into the area known as “Las Cachimbas,” through which they descended carrying AK-47 and AR-15 rifles in multiple units. Authorities stated that they brought two captives bound hand-and-foot in one of their cars.

They then lined up four employees of the establishment, a truck driver, and the two men who had been brought tied up and they forced them to lie face down on the asphalt of the federal highway. They then shot the seven dead with their powerful rifles and got back into their cars, disappearing on the highway.

The victims were identified as Carmelo Vázquez Medell, 59 years old, Jesús Eduardo Valenzuela Vázquez, 30, and Juan Miguel and Martín Mora Aguilera, 24 and 42 respectively, all residents of the Agustina Ramírez neighborhood.

Truck driver Luis Alonso Moreno Sauceda, 29, a resident of the town of El Manchón in Mocorito township, who happened to be eating nearby at the time of the massacre, was also killed.

The identities of the two other victims are not known.

After the killing, the zone was cordoned off by soldiers and police, as well as the Special Public Prosecutor for Intentional Homicide, who immediately ordered a police deployment after receiving a report that the gunmen were reportedly “patrolling” in a group near the site of the attack." Spanish original

Translation: Michael Kane, Center for International Policy

Drug War: Mexico Says Drought Also Hurting Marijuana Growers

ABC News: "The drought in northern Mexico is so bad that it has hurt even illicit drug growers and their normally well-tended crops of marijuana and opium poppies, a Mexican army commander said Monday. One effect of the lack of rains is that drug planting has "declined considerably," said Gen. Pedro Gurrola, commander of army forces in the state of Sinaloa, the cradle of the drug cartel by the same name." read more

Drug War: The UN Gang, and the Canada-Mexico Connection

InSight Crime: "The story behind the murder of a Canadian citizen in Sinaloa, Mexico, reveals how far links between organized crime networks in Canada and Mexico have been broken up by aggressive police work.

Police sources in British Columbia, Canada, confirmed that Salih Abdulaziz Sahbaz, in his mid-thirties, was the key cartel contact for the notorious United Nations Gang, also known as Global United Nations Syndicate (GUNS), which operates out of the city of Vancouver and the surrounding area.

Sahbaz, a naturalized Canadian citizen of Iraqi origin who had spent much of the past three years in Mexico, was found dead on the street in the Country Alamo area of Culiacan, Sinaloa, around midnight on January 15. He had been shot execution-style by what appeared to be a .45 caliber firearm -- police recovered at least 8 empty .45 caliber shells at the scene." read more

Mexico Drug War Bloodshed; 47,512 drug war deaths during during Calderon's presidency

MexicoBlog note: The statistics for 2011, as noted by El Universal, only include through September. If the average rate of 4,301 deaths per quarter continued, the total for all twelve months of 2011 would be 17,294. This would put the five year total at 51,816. The official total for 2010 was 15,273. That would mean a 13.3% increase in deaths in 2011 over 2010.

El Universal: The Mexico Attorney General Office released statistics today on the number of deaths related to "presumed criminal rivalries" from December 2006 to September 2011. The total given is 47,512. The breakdown is as follows: in

• December 2006 - 62 
• 2007 - 2,826
• 2008 - 6,858
• 2009 - 9,614
• 2010 - 15,273
• 2011 - 12,903 (through September)

While the Attorney Generals Office states that there has been an 11% decline in deaths from 2010 to 2011, the 2011 data only includes up until September. 

For the nine months of 2011, the states with the highest number of deaths were Chihuahua (2,276), Guerrero (1,533), Tamaulipas (1,153), Sinaloa (1,100), Veracruz (538), Baja California (250).

The municipalities with the highest number of deaths were Ciudad Juarez (1,206), Acapulco (795), Monterrey (399), Culiacan (365), San Fernando (292), Tijuana (183) and Veracruz city (155). Spanish original

Mexico Drug War: Rival cartels take bloody drug war to the heart of the country

McClatchy: "Mexico's two most powerful criminal gangs are locked in a titanic battle for control of the country's heartland in a struggle that's redrawn Mexico's map of violence. Violence has dropped along the U.S. border, with Ciudad Juárez, once considered the most violent city in the world, seeing a 35-per-cent drop in homicides this year.

That good news is balanced by bad news in Guadalajara, Culiacán and Veracruz, where the Sinaloa cartel, whose bulwark has always been Mexico's Pacific coast, and the Zetas, a violent gang that originally was created to protect the Gulf cartel along the Gulf of Mexico coast, are locked in a spiralling struggle that's seen each gang invade the other's territory." read more

Drug War Bloodshed: Guadalajara and Sinaloa Massacres Raise Questions

A reveiw of various speculations about what cartel dynamics are behing last weeks massacres in Guadalajara and Sinaloa and what they may portend.

Justice in Mexico: "In a new surge of cartel violence, the city of Guadalajara was shocked last Wednesday when vans full of bodies were found in the center of the city. ... a circle of parked vans loaded with 26 corpses was discovered in a busy area, during the morning of November 23, 2011.

... The Sinaloa cartel is considered to be the most powerful cartel in Mexico. Control of the Guadalajara area is very valuable to cartels as the routes that run through Guadalajara provide access to both Ciudad Juarez and Mexicali, both the ideal drug trafficking routes to the United States. Guadalajara is the gateway to the main highway running through western Mexico, including mega drug production state Michoacan, and continues north toward the Pacific Coast state of Sinaloa where the Sinaloa Cartel is based." read more

Mexico Drug War: Zetas lay claim to Sinaloa turf

AFP: " The increasingly powerful Zetas are likely behind the killings of 50 people in strongholds of the rival Sinaloa cartel in western Mexico, analysts say.... The message left by the Zetas near some of the 26 corpses found Thursday in Guadalajara, Mexico's second largest city, make the targets quite clear: the Sinaloa gang and its fugitive boss, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.

The messages also apparently slam an alleged alliance between Guzman and the leaders of Sinaloa state, where 24 bodies were found Wednesday, and Jalisco state, of which Guadalajara is the capital." read more

Mexico Drug War and the Press: Covering Cartels Is Risky Business, Says Mexican Journalist

Talk Radio News Service: "The Committee to Protect Journalists will award Mexican journalist Javier Arturo Valdez Cardenas next week with the International Press Freedom Award for his work reporting on Mexico’s dangerous drug cartels.

... “The narco commands the news,” Valdez Cardenas said. “When I’m writing, I’m not thinking about my wife, my kids, the editor, the director, the reader. I’m writing and I’m thinking about the narco as if he was behind me watching as I write, and I think ‘Will he like it? Will he get pissed off and send me a bouquet of grenades?’…You don’t have to be under direct threat, you assume you’re under threat, reality is a threat…There’s a guy always pointing a firearm at you…following you…with his finger on the trigger waiting for you to cross the line to pull it.”" read more