Mexican police: Drug suspect sought rivals' help before capture

The capture this week of Jose de Jesus Mendez Vargas, the alleged leader of the La Familia crime syndicate, offered a lesson on how short-lived and fickle alliances in Mexico's criminal underworld can be.

Battered by onetime underlings seeking control of his violent criminal syndicate, Mendez Vargas, whose known as "El Chango," or The Monkey, had in recent weeks fled his home turf of Michoacan state and sought help from leaders of Los Zetas, a rival cartel, officials said Wednesday.

"The final accord reached after the meeting was that Los Zetas would support him with 200 elements (fighters)," Federal Police anti-drug chief Ramon Eduardo Pequeno told reporters.

The accord marked a radical change. La Familia and Los Zetas had been at war for more than two years. Mendez Vargas had even sent La Familia gunmen to northeastern Mexico last year in a joint operation with the Sinaloa and Gulf cartels to exterminate Los Zetas.

But in Mexico, the bad blood that sparks such feuds can be forgotten as drug lords grow weaker or stronger and opportunities arise to muscle into new turf.

Federal police presented Mendez Vargas to the press early Wednesday after his transfer from Aguascalientes, the central Mexican city near where he was captured. The burly alleged capo wore a red short-sleeved shirt partially covered by what appeared to be a black bulletproof vest.

Federal Police Commissioner Facundo Rosas said Mendez Vargas' arrest marked the virtual destruction of the leadership of La Familia Michoacana.

The senior U.S. diplomat in Mexico, John Feeley, congratulated the police on the "important step" taken with the arrest.

"As Mexico's federal police and armed forces continue to improve their tactical capabilities to investigate and take down organized criminal networks and their leaders, impunity shrinks and Mexico's people become more secure," Feeley said.

A watershed moment for Mendez Vargas came on Dec. 9, when federal police shot and killed Nazario Moreno, the messianic ideological co-leader of La Familia who wrote bizarre cult-like pamphlets under the pseudonym El Chayo, "The Craziest One."

With Moreno's passing, Mendez Vargas tried to seize undisputed leadership of La Familia but two key underlings resisted, Pequeno said.

By March, those two men, Servando Gomez Martinez ("La Tuta") and Dionicio Loya Plancarte ("La Chiva"), had broken off to form their own faction, which they named Knights Templar. By May, Knights Templar followers had hung banners around Michoacan state declaring Mendez Vargas a traitor and unleashing gun battles with his crime soldiers.

By May 27, the heat on Mendez Vargas was so great that when he convoked his closest operatives to a meeting, they gathered in Las Lomas, a village in neighboring Jalisco state, Pequeno said. As the meeting broke up, federal police swooped in and arrested 40 people, including five mid-level chiefs, he added.

The meeting with the Zetas took place sometime after that. Then Mendez Vargas wended his way north to Aguascalientes. Police were vague about the circumstances of his arrest, except to deny that he'd turned himself in.

Rosas, the Federal police commissioner, said Mendez Vargas was captured in a "surgical" operation without a shot being fired. Whether someone offered a tip to his whereabouts - Knights Templar, Zetas or random but savvy civilians - is not publicly known.

If the alleged capo did reach out to Los Zetas, as police say, he would have been relying on connections from early in his career.

At the beginning of the last decade, Mendez Vargas worked with Michoacan-based crime groups dispatching loads of marijuana from Reynosa along the Texas border, Pequeno said. His bosses made an alliance with the powerful Gulf Cartel in 2002, an alliance that remained strong for six years, at the end of which La Familia was formed and gained strength.

In 2008, La Familia broke with the Gulf Cartel over control of the Michoacan port of Lazaro Cardenas, he said. It was also around then that the Gulf Cartel went through its own split: Gulf Cartel enforcers broke away and formed their own group, which they called Los Zetas.

 

Gunmen Kill Police Chief in Eastern Mexico

A police chief was killed and three civilians were wounded by gunmen in southern Veracruz, a state on Mexico’s Gulf coast where drug-related violence has been on the rise due to a turf war involving three cartels.

Ciudad Isla municipal police department coordinator Ricardo Reyes Alvarez was gunned down on Tuesday afternoon, officials said.

Gunmen armed with AR-15 assault rifles opened fire on the police chief at a car wash, wounding three employees.

Reyes Alvarez tried to reach a nearby hospital but died before he could get there, officials said.

One of the car wash employees wounded in the attack is listed in serious condition.

Shootouts between the security forces and gunmen working for drug cartels have left more than 50 suspected criminals dead in the past six months in Veracruz, which is in eastern Mexico.

The La Familia Michoacana, Los Zetas and Gulf drug cartels all have a presence in Veracruz, 6th Military Zone commander Gen. Carlos Rene Aguilar Paez said Tuesday.

Los Zetas and the Gulf cartel are waging a turf war in the Gulf state, Aguilar Paez said.

Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano, known as “El Lazca,” deserted from the Mexican army in 1999 and formed Los Zetas with three other soldiers, all members of an elite special operations unit, becoming the armed wing of the Gulf drug cartel.

After several years on the payroll of the Gulf cartel, Los Zetas, considered Mexico’s most violent criminal organization, went into the drug business on their own account and now control several lucrative territories.

A total of 15,270 people died in drug-related violence in Mexico last year, and nearly 40,000 people have died since President Felipe Calderon declared war on the country’s cartels shortly after taking office in December 2006.

Calderon has deployed tens of thousands of soldiers and Federal Police officers across the country to combat drug cartels and other criminal organizations.

The anti-drug operation, however, has failed to put a dent in the violence due, according to experts, to drug cartels’ ability to buy off the police and even high-ranking officials.

 

Fuerzas Comando competitors gut through grueling aquatic event

The Salvadoran special operations team took first place in the two-day aquatic event of Fuerzas Comando 2011 June 20 at Costa del Sol, increasing their overall lead to 145 points beyond second-place Ecuador.

Fuerzas Comando was established in 2004 as a U.S. Southern Command-sponsored special operations skills competition and senior-leader seminar featuring nations from Central and South America and the Caribbean.

The event began June 19 when the ten teams in Group B took on the course. All eight members of each national team worked together to overcome what many described as the most difficult event of the entire competition.

A helicopter dropped off the competitors on the beach, where they began the course with a 6K run. Then they picked up a raft and paddled 100 meters into the forbidding Pacific surf before turning and rowing for a kilometer along the coastline.

Upon returning to shore, the teams carried the boat a half kilometer, dropped it off, and ran another .75 kilometers to the mouth of the Rio Jiboa. They crossed the river in full packs and flippers. At the opposite river bank they ran another kilometer to a pistol range, where they engaged targets at 5, 10 and 15 meters.

The teams then carried a hostage dummy another 600 meters to the finish line.

El Salvador carries its lead into today’s final competitive events, the obstacle course and integrated assault. Fuerzas Comando 2011 ends June 23 with a closing ceremony.

 

Venezuelan billionaire Gustavo Cisneros is setting up joint ventures with Chinese banks to carry out investment in Latin American commodities industries.

The chairman of Cisneros Group of Companies, who is relinquishing operations of the firm to his youngest daughter Adriana, said he aims to push through projects delayed by state inefficiencies through partnerships in energy, agriculture and metals. Deals may take place in countries including Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Panama, Cisneros said.
“You’ll probably see in the next year or two a lot of Cisneros China or China Cisneros in Latin America and it’s going to be whatever comes, whether it’s oil, gold or big cattle operations,” Cisneros, 66, said yesterday in an interview at Bloomberg’s headquarters in New York. “They understand they don’t have the knowledge to run these businesses. They need results now and we can provide results.”
Cisneros, who first traveled to China about 30 years ago with billionaire philanthropist David Rockefeller, is expanding into deals with the Chinese after shedding beverage and consumer-goods companies and America Online Latin America since the early 1990s to focus on his Venevision television network. Banks in China, the third-largest source of foreign direct investment in Latin America, lent Brazil’s state-run Petroleo Brasileiro SA (PETR4) $10 billion in 2009 in exchange for oil supplies, among credit provided to secure resources from the region.
China Development Bank
Since 2007, government-owned China Development Bank has lent more than $68 billion to Venezuela, Turkmenistan, Ecuador, Brazil and Russia in exchange for crude and gas shipments. Liu Kegu, a bank adviser, said in a Jan. 15 interview that the lender would extend credit to Chile, Peru and some African nations.
China Investment Corp., the country’s $300 billion sovereign wealth fund, is targeting mining, real estate and infrastructure investments in the Americas, Felix Chee, the fund’s representative in Canada, said at a CFA Society Conference in Toronto today. The fund has three “active deals” under consideration, he said.
Export-Import Bank of China Ltd., the nation’s policy lender specializing in cross-border trade and investment, and Agricultural Bank of China Ltd. agreed last year to tie up with Inter-American Development Bank to expand their trade finance activities in Latin America.

Mexican federal police have arrested a military deserter believed to have joined the Zetas drug cartel and participated in the massacre of 72 migrants in Tamaulipas

Mexican federal police have arrested a military deserter believed to have joined the Zetas drug cartel and participated in the massacre of 72 migrants in Tamaulipas, near the US border.

Ramon Eduardo Pequeo, chief of the Anti-Drug Division of the Federal Police, said that Edgar Huerta Montiel, alias "El Huache", was the local leader in San Fernando, Tamaulipas, for the Zetas gang and allegedly "coordinated the multiple homicide of migrants" in that municipality.

Edgar Huerta Montiel was detained in the northern state of Zacatecas along with his girlfriend Brenda Acevedo, said Pequeo.

Huerta is suspected of killing at least 10 Central American migrants in August 2010 and orchestrating the kidnapping of two cargo trucks where 60 migrants from Central America were hiding.

Huerta told police victims were taken to safe houses and tortured. Those who died were buried in mass graves.

Pequeno also said it is believed the migrants were kidnapped for ransom.

The bodies of the 72 massacred migrants from Honduras, Salvador, Guatemala and Brazil were discovered on a ranch, bound, blindfolded and slumped against a wall.

A lone survivor, an 18-year-old Ecuadorean who managed to escape and alert marines at a checkpoint, said the killers identified themselves as Zetas, a drug gang that dominates much of Tamaulipas.

In April authorities dug out clandestine mass graves where they found 193 bodies. It is believed the victims were immigrants trying to cross into the US.

U.S. pledges to raise deportation threshold

Moving to repair an immigration enforcement program that has drawn rising opposition from governors and police chiefs, senior immigration officials on Friday announced steps they said would focus the program more closely on deporting immigrants convicted of serious crimes.
In unveiling the changes, John Morton, the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the deportation program would continue to expand as planned in order to be operating nationwide by 2013, despite criticism from many police chiefs and from the governors of Illinois, New York and Massachusetts.
But in making course corrections to the program, known as Secure Communities, Morton acknowledged the groundswell of local resistance, including opposition from Latino and immigrant groups, to an effort that is central to President Barack Obama's approach to controlling illegal immigration.
Critics said the program was casting too wide a net and had strayed from its goal of bolstering public safety by expelling illegal immigrants who committed the most dangerous crimes.
In a fix likely to have broad practical effect, Morton issued a memorandum that greatly expanded the factors immigration authorities can take into account in deciding to defer or cancel deportations. Agents are now formally urged to consider how long an illegal immigrant has been in the United States, or whether the immigrant was brought here illegally as a child and is studying in high school orcollege.
In practice, the memorandum gives immigration agents authority to postpone or cancel, on a case-by-case basis, deportations of illegal immigrant students who might have been eligible for legal status under a bill stalled in Congress that is known as the Dream Act.
The authorities are also instructed to give "particular care and consideration" to veterans and active-duty members of the military and to their close relatives

 

make a substantial dent in the financial insecurity of Hispanics in the coming years.

. Hispanics did see strong job growth during the last business cycle with the number of employed Hispanics growing by 26.2 percent—significantly more than the 6.0 percent for African Americans and 4.1 percent for whites. This relatively strong job growth is largely due to dramatic gains in the residential construction and accommodation and food services sectors, which are large employers of Hispanic workers. Residential construction employment grew by 16.3 percent and jobs in hotels and restaurants by 14.0 percent, a sharp contrast to the 3.8 percent increase for the entire private sector during the last business cycle. As a result of these strong job gains, Hispanics were the only group to recover the employment losses relative to the population that occurred after the last recession ended in November 2001.

Importantly, though, most of the job growth for Hispanics occurred in the low-wage labor market. At the end of 2007, Hispanics’ usual median weekly earnings were just $498.68, in inflation-adjusted terms, which was markedly below African Americans’ $564.58 and significantly below whites’ $710.15. Hispanics worked more, but their poverty rate was almost three times as large as that for whites and actually increased during the last business cycle. In 2007, the poverty rate for Hispanics was 21.5 percent, up from 19.2 percent in 2000, compared to only 8.2 percent for whites.

Moreover, low wages were also accompanied by low benefit coverage. In 2007, just 67.9 percent of Hispanics had health insurance coverage, compared to 80.8 percent of African Americans and 89.6 percent of whites. Hispanics’ participation in employer-sponsored retirement plans also lags behind other groups, with 30.6 percent of private-sector Hispanic workers covered in 2007 compared to 47.1 percent of African Americans and 57.6 percent of whites—even though Hispanics had stronger job and wage gains than African Americans and whites before the current recession began.

Similarly, Hispanic families’ homeownership rates also increased—to 49.7 percent in 2007 from 46.3 percent in 2000—compared to whites and African Americans, but these gains came at a substantial cost. Just 10.5 percent of loans made to whites in 2007 were subprime, compared to 28.6 percent for Hispanics and 34.0 percent for African Americans. Not surprisingly, Hispanics (along with African Americans) are bearing the brunt of the rolling home foreclosure crisis.

Policymakers in the Obama administration, in Congress and in local governments across the country must heed these lessons. They must focus on creating jobs with good wages and benefits alongside an emphasis on wealth and asset building. Together, this could make a substantial dent in the financial insecurity of Hispanics in the coming years.