Border News
WASHINGTON — A surge in migrant traffic across the Southwest border into Texas has resulted in a milestone: the front line of the battle against illegal crossings from Mexico has shifted for the first time in over a decade away from Arizona to the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas.
Austin police have arrested 35-year-old Sergio Guzman and charged him with possession with intent to distribute more than five kilograms of cocaine. According to police, Guzman was identified as a suspect with ties to a Zeta Cartel cell which operated out of Piedras Negras, Mexico.
PENITAS - A landowner is opting for a new approach to keep illegal immigrants from destroying his fences. Rene Garcia, of Penitas, said illegal immigration forced his family out of the cattle business. He said repeated trespassing and vandalism left his fences in shambles.
A 43-year-old man who was apparently targeted in a fatal drive-by shooting in the Town Square on Wednesday evening was a longtime Mexican cartel attorney who had been living in Southlake, according to authorities.
Juan Jesus Guerrero Chapa, a native of Mexico and father of three teenagers, was shopping with his wife Wednesday evening in the hour before he was shot numerous times while sitting in the front passenger seat of his car.
U.S. officials on Wednesday said their intelligence indicates that the Sinaloa and Juárez drug-trafficking organizations are still active in the Juárez region, and that a recent spike in drug violence there can be attributed to cartel disputes.
One early morning in mid-January of 2013, Jesús Juárez opened the front door of his Brownsville, Texas home and saw a package. It had the typical FedEx markings on it, and despite the fact that his daughter’s boyfriend didn’t see it on his way out the night before, Jesús brought the package inside and opened it. Fortunately, only one of the four pipe bombs inside the package detonated, but just that single device blew out the front door and windows and severely burned him, his wife and their young daughter.
In the small town of San Juan, Texas, a few miles north of the Mexican border, Police Chief Juan Gonzalez toured some of the human stash houses his officers recently uncovered. They had been used to hide immigrants from all over the world who were smuggled across the border into the United States.
Gonzalez says his department has never dealt with as many undocumented immigrants as it encounters now.
(CBS News) CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - Mexico is at war with drug cartels and that spills into the U.S. One border town is caught in the crossfire. Like many people in Juarez, Maria Torres cries at all the suffering. She lost four children in five years: one strangled, two shot, one overdose. All victims of Juarez' deadly drug-trafficking, she said. The violence has left Torres to raise three grandchildren and a niece by herself on $10 a day.
Mexico’s ultra-violent Zetas drug cartel has made connections and collaborated with U.S. gangs throughout the United States since at least 2010, a leaked, confidential FBI document revealed.
The FBI intelligence bulletin, published by the free information group Public Intelligence, showed that the Zetas have formed strong bonds with gangs of both Mexican and non-Mexican Americans to facilitate drug trafficking and enforcement on both sides of the border. The presence of Zetas-linked gangs is especially prominent along Texas’ southwest border and in Houston.
Austin’s proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border may lend itself to drug cartel activity in the city and surrounding areas, officials say.
“We’re only 234 miles from Laredo,” Michael Lauderdale, a social work professor who is writing a book detailing Mexico’s political, social and economic development, said. “For all the reasons Austin’s nice, if I’m worth five or ten billion dollars running a cartel, I want to move up here. It’s safer here than it is anywhere in Mexico. There’s certainly reason to worry.”
Escalating Mexican cocaine cartel violence is claiming the lives of increasing numbers of ambitious Canadian mobsters, an RCMP internal report says.
...“An escalation in murders and shootings within the criminal element in British Columbia in 2007-2008 paralleled with reporting of brutal and extreme levels of violence in Mexico have raised concern of Mexican criminal influence in Canada,” the report states.
Monterrey, Mexico, Apr 17 (EFE).- Nine bullet-riddled bodies were found on the banks of the La Silla River in the northern Mexican state of Nuevo Leon, state prosecutors said.
NORTH OF EDINBURG — Hidalgo County sheriff’s investigators continue to look into a drug seizure they believe could be linked to a Mexican drug cartel.
LA JOYA — Just north of the green waters of the Rio Grande, in a barren soccer field framed by rusty goal posts, Mike Salinas stood in the shadow of an abandoned Border Patrol substation. When Border Patrol set up operations here in late 2011, it immediately slowed immigrant traffic through town, said Salinas, who lives on a 12-acre plot nearby. But just as locals came to depend on the agents who staffed the corrugated metal trailer, the station was shuttered last year, and immigrants returned in greater numbers than before.
AUSTIN – A months long, joint investigation between Austin Police, Round Rock Police, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Cedar Park Police, U.S. Marshals, Travis County and Williamson County Sheriff Offices, I.C.E. and the F.B.I. resulted in the arrests of 37-people in Austin Wednesday all of whom are charged with conspiracy to distribute drugs including Methamphetamine, Heroin, Cocaine and Marijuana.
For all the talk in Washington about border security, the one agency charged with providing it isn't sharing a wealth of details. So a group of volunteers -- called Secure Border Intelligence -- has stepped in, working around the clock in Arizona to keep a thorough record of the front lines of the border battle.
FALFURRIAS (April 9, 2013)--U.S. Border Patrol agents have found the remains of three suspected immigrants in recent days on ranches in South Texas, adding to a total that is outpacing last year's.
Newly released arrest numbers show a significant increase in illegal immigrants crossing along the southwest border, despite claims as recently as Thursday by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano that the border is more secure.
Mexican drug cartels whose operatives once rarely ventured beyond the U.S. border are dispatching some of their most trusted agents to live and work deep inside the United States -- an emboldened presence that experts believe is meant to tighten their grip on the world's most lucrative narcotics market and maximize profits.
According to military officers interviewed by the organization, the “cartel bosses will treat the young killers as cannon fodder, throwing them into suicidal attacks on security forces.”
Longtime rancher Jim Chilton and his wife, Sue, support reforms but also a secure border — to keep migrants from risking their lives and to keep out drug smugglers.
The shootout occurred about 2 a.m. south of Hebbronville after agents came upon a man standing by a parked late model Honda that appeared to have been in a minor accident.
A Mexican man has pleaded no contest to beheading a man in Arizona who police say stole drugs from the El Chapo drug trafficking organization launching the grisly attack authorities fear to be spreading across the U.S. border.
"If you're buying cocaine or high-level weed anywhere in the United States, you are buying it from the Mexican drug cartels," Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan said.
U.S. Border Patrol agents from the Rio Grande Valley Sector seized more than 6 tons of marijuana, with a value of more than $9.8 million, over the weekend.
Agents assigned to the Weslaco Station made another large seizure Friday after encountering a pair of smugglers on marijuana-laden all-terrain vehicles near the Rio Grande.
“I’m not trying to be a hero ... I do my part as a citizen and member of society to challenge organized crime that poses threats to the stability of our state and our country,” the response read.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano testified to Congress last month that the border “has never been stronger.” What she doesn’t say is that the department no longer measures illegal immigrants who get away -- only those it catches.
Police said that Neri told them, "I work for the Sinaloa (drug) cartel, and my job is to collect drug debts."
Earlier this week, a group of armed men broke into a prison and freed 12 prisoners in the state of Tamaulipas on the border with Texas.
|