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5/24/2013
(AP) At least nine Colombian soldiers were killed in an attack with homemade explosives by the country’s second-largest leftist rebel band, the military said Wednesday.
The apparent ambush of a patrol by the National Liberation Army, or ELN, occurred in a rural area of Chitaga in the northeastern state of Norte de Santander, the military said in a statement posted online.
It was the biggest blow to Colombia’s military since February, when seven soldiers died in combat with biggest rebel band, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and comes on the eve of regional trade [...]
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It’s the general’s hour again in Mexico as the new president deploys troops in Michoacan, where gangsters are facing off against vigilante militias.
5/23/2013
By Dudley Althaus / Global Post
MEXICO CITY, Mexico — President Enrique Peña Nieto says he wants to soften Mexico’s bloody, military-led offensive against its criminal lords with a brainier, more preventive strategy.
Well, wish him luck with that.
Peña Nieto this week had to dispatch troops to the so-called hot country of western Michoacan to quell confrontations between marauding gangsters and village self-defense militias.
An army general with special forces experience has been [...]
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5/23/2013
By MARK STEVENSON / Associated Press
LA RUANA, Mexico—The farm state of Michoacan is burning. A drug cartel that takes its name from an ancient monastic order has set fire to lumber yards, packing plants and passenger buses in a medieval-like reign of terror.
The Knights Templar cartel is extorting protection payments from cattlemen, lime growers and businesses such as butchers, prompting some communities to fight back, taking up arms in vigilante patrols.
Lime picker Alejandro Ayala chose to seek help from the law instead. After the cartel forced him out of work by shutting down fruit [...]
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5/22/2013
By Beau Kilmer / New York Times
Much of the marijuana consumed in the U.S. comes from Mexico. It’s impossible to know exactly, but my colleagues and I put the range at 40 to 67 percent for 2008. Our research also suggests that legalizing commercial marijuana production at the national level could drive out most of the marijuana imported from Mexico.
With marijuana legalization at the state level, imports from Mexico would depend on several factors, like how taxes influenced the market price, whether legally sold marijuana were illegally diverted to other states, and the severity of [...]
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Another article related to the Army deployments in Michoacan
5/21/2013
By Tracy Wilkinson / Los Angeles Times
MEXICO CITY — The Mexican government poured army troops — and high-level delegations — into western Mexico on Tuesday in a bid to take back control of a region long besieged by a deadly drug cartel.
The operation in the Pacific state of Michoacan is the first major military deployment targeting drug traffickers to be ordered by the government of President Enrique Peña Nieto, which is still struggling to publicly define its security strategy six months after assuming leadership of this [...]
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5/21/2013
by Mark Stevenson / AP
Mexico’s top security officials gathered Tuesday in the western state of Michoacan to launch a campaign with thousands of army troops to rescue towns besieged, sometimes for months, by the powerful Knights Templar drug cartel.
Interior Secretary Miguel Osorio Chong and his national security team met with local officials in the state capital of Morelia at a time of escalating tension in Michoacan, where communities mistrustful of state authorities have been creating their own vigilante forces for protection against the cartels.
But it was unclear that sending troops to Michoacan, which is [...]
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5/21/2013
Karl Ritter / AP
PETARE, Venezuela: Stern-looking soldiers clutching assault rifles wave down the beat-up Chevy Caprice entering this sprawling slum on the outskirts of Caracas.
Flashlights in his face, the driver steps out and places his hands on the roof while the soldiers frisk him for drugs and weapons.
He’s clean, and a hand gesture from the commanding officer sends him off into the maze of ramshackle homes that is Petare, one of the most dangerous parts of Venezuela’s notoriously crime-infested capital.
Since Monday, this scene is playing out day and night at dozens of military [...]
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The former U.S. attorney in Arizona leaked an internal report about an ATF agent who had criticized the failed gun operation.
21/05/2013
by Richard A. Serrano / Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON — The former top federal prosecutor in Arizona retaliated against the lead whistle-blower in the Fast and Furious gun-smuggling scandal by leaking an internal report that suggested the whistle-blower once favored allowing illegal gun sales as a way to track weapons to drug cartels in Mexico, the Justice Department’s inspector general’s office said Monday.
Dennis K. Burke, who resigned from the U.S. attorney’s office following the Fast [...]
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5/20/2013
LA RUANA, Michoacan (AP) — Residents of a western Mexico town who endured months besieged by a drug cartel are cheering the arrival of hundreds of Mexican soldiers.
People in La Ruana in Michoacan state lined the main road Monday to greet more than a dozen troop transports and heavily armed Humvees with applause and cheers.
La Ruana’s supplies had been blocked by the Knights Templars cartel, which declared war on the hamlet after residents formed self-defense squads and drove the cartel out of the town.
On Monday, the leader of the self-defense movement agreed to stop [...]
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5/20/2013
NEW YORK (AP) — The Long Island college student was being held in a headlock by a masked intruder with a loaded gun to her head, police said. Then the gunman took aim at an officer.
A moment later both Hofstra University junior Andrea Rebello and the intruder were dead— killed after a split-second decision that is perhaps the most harrowing in law enforcement: when to pull the trigger.
“The big question is, how do you know, when someone’s pointing a gun at you, whether you should keep talking to them, or shoot?” said Michele Galietta, [...]
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