The war among Mexico’s drug cartels has spurred a major arms race — and the gangs are starting to acquire more serious weapons.
Take, for instance, the discovery last week by Mexican police of a powerful .50-caliber weapon bolted to the bed of a truck. Reports vary on what kind of weapon it was: Mexican Federal Police General Rodolfo Cruz said it was a .50 caliber Browning machine gun — a Ma Deuce — while the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms said it was an unmodified semi-automatic weapon built by U.S. manufacturer TNW Firearms. But either way, it sounds like an effort to build a “technical” — an improvised fighting vehicle of the kind favored by Somali warlords and developing-world armies.
Michael Porfirio Mason
AKA The Peoples Champ
AKA GFK, Jr.
AKA The Sly, Slick and the Wicked
AKA The Voodoo Child
The Guide to Getting More out of Life
http://www.thegmanifesto.com
When the heavy battering started to buckle the front door of her new home in Tucson, Maria remained frozen to the spot with fear.
As her family scattered to hide in the bedrooms, bathroom and kitchen, masked men toting guns and dressed in flack jackets stormed into the living room shouting “Police! Everyone on the floor!”
Her cheek pressed to the ground, she watched as the men fanned out through the comfortable suburban house, pistol whipping her brother-in-law and shouting, “Where are the guns and the drugs?”
“I raised my head and saw his black boots … It was then I realized they weren’t police at all,” she recalled, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Maria, who has no connection to the criminal underworld, is among scores of law-abiding Tucson residents caught up in a wave of violent so-called home invasions, most of them linked to the lucrative trade in drugs smuggled from Mexico. Maria had bought the house weeks before and the gunmen believed drug traffickers were using it.
The desert city is less than two hour’s drive from the Mexico border. It lies on a crossroads for the multimillion dollar trade in drugs headed north to market across the United States from Mexico, as well as guns and hot money proceeds headed south to the cartels.
Five years ago, police say home invasions were virtually unheard of in Tucson. Now the crimes run at three to four a week, as criminals go after the profits of the illicit trade in marijuana, black-tar heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine through the city.
“We’ve always dealt with those in business establishments, banks and convenience stores, it was very unusual to see them in houses,” Roberto A. Villasenor, Tucson’s assistant chief of police said of the recent trend. “The home was seen as a safe spot.”
CAUGHT UP
Curbing drug violence is a top concern for the government in Mexico, where rival cartels murdered 6,300 people last year as they battled the authorities and each other for control of lucrative smuggling corridors to the United States.
It is also high on the U.S. agenda as authorities seek to stop cartel-related crimes such as kidnappings, home invasions and gangland-style slayings from bleeding over the porous U.S. border and taking hold here.
A year ago, Tucson police department set up a special unit to target the rising number of home invasions. Since then, the officers have investigated at least 173 cases scattered across the city, three-quarters of them tied to the drug trade, investigators say.
The assailants — typically teams of two to six people — frequently dress in tactical gear and identify themselves as police officers, Drug Enforcement Administration agents or SWAT team members as they burst into houses to steal drugs, cash or guns.
“Demographics mean nothing when it comes to home invasions. We see (them) in some of the richest, most wealthy parts of town, and also in some of the most downtrodden, completely poor areas,” said Detective Sergeant David Azuelo, who runs the home invasion unit.
While most raids target the drug trade, some have branched out and gone after students and other law-abiding residents, Azuelo said. Others assault families who just happen to live in a house that was once used to deal drugs, or simply because the attackers got the wrong address.
Michael Porfirio Mason
AKA The Peoples Champ
AKA GFK, Jr.
AKA The Sly, Slick and the Wicked
AKA The Voodoo Child
The Guide to Getting More out of Life
http://www.thegmanifesto.com
Standing before flashing cameras in a white Abercrombie & Fitch jogging suit with trendy glasses and a swish haircut, Vicente Carrillo Leyva doesn’t fit the classic image of a gun-toting drug kingpin. The 32-year-old was detained quietly enough: police nabbed him while he was exercising in a park in a plush Mexico City suburb. But Mexican federal agents claim that Carrillo Leyva and other so-called “narco juniors” are key figures in the cartels started by their fathers — and their recent arrests show how the government is gaining ground in its fight against the cartels.
After his arrest, Carrillo Leyva was paraded before the press on April 2, the same day that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano arrived for war talks with their Mexican counterparts near Mexico City. The smooth-looking detainee is the son of the late Amado Carillo Fuentes, the notorious head of the Juarez cartel who became known as the Lord of The Skies because of his fleet of 27 private 727 jet airliners authorities say were used to traffic cocaine. (See pictures from Mexico’s drug war)
Carillo Fuentes, a bearded roughneck from a ramshackle farming town, died in 1997 while undergoing plastic surgery to change his appearance. Since then, Mexican officials allege the young Carrillo Leyva has become No. 2 in the Juarez crime family. “Carrillo Leyva is considered an heir to the criminal organization known as the Juarez Cartel,” said Marisela Morales, Mexico’s Undersecretary for Organized Crime. “His main function was leadership and hiding illicit money for the organization.”
The sweat-suited suspect is the latest of several alleged narco juniors to be nabbed in recent weeks. On Mar. 19, police arrested Vicente Zambada, the 33-year-old son of Ismael “The Mayo Indian” Zambada, a hard-faced character from cattle-ranching territory who rose to the top of the Sinaloa cartel. Ismael Zambada is at large with a $5 million dollar FBI reward for his capture.
Shunning the gem-studded pistols and gold chains flaunted by their fathers, a savvy new generation of drug smugglers is moving up the ranks of Mexico’s cartels wielding college degrees and keeping low profiles to outsmart police.
The fashionably-dressed sons of two prominent drug bosses were recently arrested in smart Mexico City neighborhoods, suspected of laundering money for the Juarez and Sinaloa cartels while moving seamlessly among the country’s elite.
They typify a new wave of leaders of Mexico’s warring drug cartels, whose turf wars killed 6,300 people last year. Often the urbane offspring of cartel founders, they bring a clean-cut management style to the murky multibillion dollar enterprise.
“These people are usually better prepared, better educated and very useful for the cartels because they’re professionals,” said political analyst Jorge Chabat.
“They’re harder to identify because they don’t look like typical drug traffickers,” he said. “You can’t detect them by saying ‘Oh look, he has a big truck with wide tires and automatic weapons, gold chains, snakeskin boots and a big belt buckle and dark glasses.’”
Michael Porfirio Mason
AKA The Peoples Champ
AKA GFK, Jr.
AKA The Sly, Slick and the Wicked
AKA The Voodoo Child
The Guide to Getting More out of Life
http://www.thegmanifesto.com
Police in Cyprus have arrested a man on an Interpol wanted list suspected of belonging to the “Pink Panther” jewel thief gang, blamed for a string of audacious heists worldwide.
Rifat Hadziahmetovic, from Montenegro, was arrested on March 18 as he attempted to depart the east Mediterranean island on a forged Bulgarian passport, Cyprus police said.
A local magistrates’ court on Friday remanded the suspect in custody until March 31, when a hearing will start for his extradition to Spain, police spokesman Christos Andreou said.
“He was initially detained on suspicion of possession of forged documents, but further inquiries revealed he was wanted by Interpol for being a suspected part of the Pink Panther gang,” Andreou said.
He was also identified by a leg tattoo, he told Reuters.
The Pink Panthers are believed to have staged some 120 attacks on luxury stores in around 20 countries, since their first robbery in London’s exclusive Mayfair district in 2003.
They pulled off one of their most spectacular heists last December, when they walked away with up to 85 million euros ($114 million) worth of goods after entering the Harry Winston jewellers in central Paris disguised as women.
Global police agency Interpol said fingerprint checks positively identified Hadziahmetovic, 41, wanted for armed robberies across the world, including in Bahrain, Japan, Spain and the United Arab Emirates.
The Pink Panther nickname refers to the debonair gentleman diamond robber from the 1960s film. Interpol believes the group may have up to 200 members, many with military experience.
Michael Porfirio Mason
AKA The Peoples Champ
AKA GFK, Jr.
AKA The Sly, Slick and the Wicked
AKA The Voodoo Child
The Guide to Getting More out of Life
http://www.thegmanifesto.com
As the first pirate attack of a U.S. ship in 200 years comes to a climax, I’m re-posting an essay I solicited and received several weeks ago from K’naan, a Somali-Canadian singer and activist. A video of a performance by K’naan that I filmed at the All Points West music festival last summer appears below. — Michael Vazquez
Why We Don’t Condemn Our Pirates
by K’naan
Can anyone ever really be for piracy? Outside of sea bandits, and young girls fantasizing of Johnny Depp, would anyone with an honest regard for good human conduct really say that they are in support of Sea Robbery?
Well, in Somalia, the answer is: it’s complicated.
The news media these days has been covering piracy in the Somali coast with such
lop-sided journalism, that it’s lucky they’re not on a ship themselves. It’s true that the constant hijacking of vessels in the Gulf of Aden is a major threat to the vibrant trade route between Asia and Europe. It is also true that for most of the pirates operating in this vast shoreline, money is the primary objective.
But according to so many Somalis, the disruption of Europe’s darling of a trade route, is just Karma biting a perpetrator in the butt. And if you don’t believe in Karma, maybe you believe in recent history. Here is why we Somalis find ourselves slightly shy of condemning our pirates.
Somalia has been without any form of a functioning government since 1991. And although its failures, like many other toddler governments in Africa, sprung from the wells of post-colonial independence, bad governance and development loan sharks, the specific problem of piracy was put in motion in 1992.
After the overthrow of Siyad Barre, our charmless dictator of twenty-some-odd years, two major forces of the Hawiye Clan came to power. At the time, Ali Mahdi, and General Mohamed Farah Aidid, the two leaders of the Hawiye rebels, were largely considered liberators. But the unity of the two men and their respective sub-clans was very short-lived. It’s as if they were dumbstruck at the advent of ousting the dictator, or that they just forgot to discuss who will be the leader of the country once they defeated their common foe.
A disagreement of who will upgrade from militia leader to Mr. President broke up their honeymoon. It’s because of this disagreement that we’ve seen one of the most decomposing wars in Somalia’s history, leading to millions displaced and hundreds of thousands dead.
But war is expensive and militias need food for their families, and Jaad (an amphetamine-based stimulant) to stay awake for the fighting. Therefore, a good clan -based Warlord must look out for his own fighters. Aidid’s men turned to robbing aid trucks carrying food to the starving masses, and re-selling it to continue their war. But Ali Mahdi had his sights set on a larger and more unexploited resource, namely: the Indian Ocean.
K’NAAN – Somalia
Already by this time, local fishermen in the coastline of Somalia have been complaining of illegal vessels coming to Somali waters and stealing all the fish. And since there was no government to report it to, and since the severity of the violence clumsily overshadowed every other problem, the fishermen went completely unheard.
But it was around this same time that a more sinister, a more patronizing practice was being put in motion. A Swiss firm called Achair Parterns, and an Italian waste company called Achair Parterns, made a deal with Ali Mahdi, that they were to dump containers of waste material in Somali waters. These European companies were said to be paying Warlords about $3 a ton, whereas to properly dispose of waste in Europe costs about $1000 a ton.
In 2004, after a tsunami washed ashore several leaking containers, thousand of locals in the Puntland region of Somalia started to complain of severe and previously unreported ailments, such as abdominal bleeding, skin melting off and a lot of immediate cancer-like symptoms. Nick Nuttall, a spokesman for the United Nations Environmental Program, says that the containers had many different kinds of waste, including “Uranium, radioactive waste, lead, Cadmium, Mercury and chemical waste.” But this wasn’t just a passing evil from one or two groups taking advantage of our unprotected waters. The UN envoy for Somalia, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, says that the practice still continues to this day. It was months after those initial reports that local fishermen mobilized themselves, along with street militias, to go into the waters and deter the Westerners from having a free pass at completely destroying Somalia’s aquatic life. Now years later, the deterring has become less noble, and the ex-fishermen with their militias have begun to develop a taste for ransom at sea. This form of piracy is now a major contributor to the Somali economy, especially in the very region that private toxic waste companies first began to burry our nation’s death trap.
The toxic truth
Now Somalia has upped the world’s pirate attacks by over 21 percent in one year, and while NATO and the EU are both sending forces to the Somali coast to try and slow down the attacks, Blackwater and all kinds of private security firms are intent on cashing in. But while Europeans are well in their right to protect their trade interest in the region, our pirates were the only deterrent we had from an externally imposed environmental disaster. No one can say for sure that some of the ships they are now holding for ransom were not involved in illegal activity in our waters. The truth is, if you ask any Somali, if getting rid of the pirates only means the continuous rape of our coast by unmonitored Western Vessels, and the producing of a new cancerous generation, we would all fly our pirate flags high.
It is time that the world gave the Somali people some assurance that these Western illegal activities will end, if our pirates are to seize their operations. We do not want the EU and NATO serving as a shield for these nuclear waste-dumping hoodlums. It seems to me that this new modern crisis is truly a question of justice, but also a question of whose justice.
As is apparent these days, one man’s pirate is another man’s coast guard.
Michael Porfirio Mason
AKA The Peoples Champ
AKA GFK, Jr.
AKA The Sly, Slick and the Wicked
AKA The Voodoo Child
The Guide to Getting More out of Life
http://www.thegmanifesto.com
