Feral Jundi

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Mexico: Mexican Drug Gangs Worship Saint Death

Filed under: Law Enforcement,Mexico — Tags: , , , , — Matt @ 9:59 AM

   You learn something new all the time.  I am sure there are numerous tattoos and symbols that these drug cartels are rallying around, but this one is pretty unique.  At least law enforcement has another way to identify these jackasses.

    The other little piece of interest in this story, is about Senor B.  He is a businessman that resorted to using ‘machine gun totting’ security in order to protect his business from drug cartels and corrupt police.  The point is, he didn’t trust anyone, to include the police, and so he resorted to using heavily armed private security and turned his business into a small fortress.  I am sure this same situation is repeating itself throughout the country, and it would be interesting to hear more about the evolution of the private security market there. –Matt

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Mexican drug gangs worship Saint Death

As bloody feuds grip the traffickers, many are turning to a grim icon. Tony Allen-Mills reports from Ciudad Juarez

January 10, 2010

Tony Allen-Mills in Ciudad Juarez

She was yet another desolate victim of the endless drug wars ravaging the northern Mexican borderlands, one of more than 2,600 people murdered in Ciudad Juarez last year. When police found her body in a residential area close to the Rio Grande river, there were two distinctive signs that she had been caught up in the bloodsoaked feuding between the rival Juarez and Sinaloa cartels.

First, her head had been crudely hacked off — a trademark cartel warning to rivals. Second, her torso bore a distinctive tattoo of a cackling skeleton dressed in suggestive female clothing.

Police recognised it at once as Santa Muerte — best translated as Saint Death, a macabre feminine icon who has replaced the Virgin Mary as an improbable source of unholy comfort to Mexico’s legions of gangsters and hitmen.

(more…)

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Kidnap and Ransom: Rural Mexican Villages Dig Moats to Repel Raiding Gangsters

Filed under: Kidnap And Ransom,Mexico — Tags: , , , , — Matt @ 10:50 PM

“We have support of the federal forces,” said an official of the dirt-street village. “Security is what we’re lacking.” 

    This is sickening to read.  When a town has to resort to these types of measures to defend themselves from this kind of crime, then you know things are really bad. The protection of this town would be an excellent project of a PMC, if given the contract.  Just saying.  –Matt

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Rural Mexican villages dig moats to repel gangsters

Ditches don’t always deter raids, but federal troops can’t be spared

By DUDLEY ALTHAUS

Houston Chronicle

March 22, 2009, 3:43PM

Julian Cardona For the Chronicle

Ruben Solis, a farmers’ leader, says these moats that villagers dug around Cuauhtémoc were “a means of preservation” for the town. The sentinels at the checkpoints to the village, however, have been removed. ?

CUAUHTEMOC, Mexico — Little town, big hell.

That proverb about turmoil in small communities has never seemed truer than in this gangster-besieged village and a neighboring one in the bean fields and desert scrub a long day’s drive south of the Rio Grande.

Since right before Christmas, armed raiders repeatedly have swept into both villages to carry away local men. Government help arrived too late, or not at all.

Terrified villagers — at the urging of army officers who couldn’t be there around the clock — have clawed moats across every access road but one into their communities, hoping to repel the raids.

“This was a means of preservation,” said Ruben Solis, 47, a farmers’ leader in Cuauhtemoc, a collection of adobe and concrete houses called home by 3,700 people. “It’s better to struggle this way than to face the consequences.”

But shortly after midnight last Sunday, villagers said, as many as 15 SUVs loaded with pistoleros attacked nearby San Angel, population 250, and kidnapped five people. Four victims were returned unharmed a few days later. The fifth hostage, a teenage boy, was held to exchange for the intended target the raiders missed, villagers said.

“We have support of the federal forces,” said an official of the dirt-street village. “Security is what we’re lacking.”

After the earthworks were dug in both villages, volunteers manned checkpoints at the remaining open entrances. Those sentinels, however, were removed when it was decided they couldn’t stop a serious attack, anyhow .

“We aren’t able to confront this sort of thing,” Solis said. “We have a few shotguns, some .22 rifles, a few pistols — nothing compared to what they have.”

(more…)

Saturday, March 7, 2009

Mexico: A Mexican Army Surge for Juarez

Filed under: Mexico — Tags: , , , , , , , — Matt @ 11:12 AM

   Some startling news, and this is right on the US border. The thing I will be looking for, is where this feud will go next. When you clear one town, the combatants will just push on over to the next.  –Matt

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Mexico army to take over policing in drug-hit city

Wed Mar 4, 2009 7:09pm EST

By Robin Emmott

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (Reuters) – Mexico’s army will take over the local police force in the border city of Ciudad Juarez where it helped quell a deadly prison riot on Wednesday in its widening war against drug gangs.

Soldiers poured into the city this week to restore order after 250 people died in February in a feud between drug gangs, which are often aided by corrupt police.

Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas, and home to foreign-owned factories that export to the United States, has become the main flashpoint in President Felipe Calderon’s two-year-old war against drug smugglers.

Some of the several thousand troops expected in Ciudad Juarez by the end of this week will take over the municipal police, local jails and police traffic department.

On Wednesday they helped federal police quash a fight between drug gang inmates in a prison on the city’s edge that left 20 people dead.

“General Galvan will appoint soldiers to take control of the municipal police next week,” a spokesman for the Ciudad Juarez mayor’s office said, referring to Defense Minister General Guillermo Galvan.

Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora told Reuters on Tuesday the government is deeply worried about the killings in Ciudad Juarez, which have sparked fears that the war between drug cartels might spill over to the United States.

The U.S. and Canadian governments have warned tourists to stay away from dangerous border cities this spring. Mexico is a prime destination for college students traveling on spring break vacations.

Mexico’s army has increasingly taken over police operations to stiffen the resolve of agents who are often bribed to join the cartels or killed if they do not.

POLICE CHIEF QUIT

Ciudad Juarez’s previous police chief, Roberto Orduna, quit two weeks ago after drug hitmen murdered his deputy and another officer and pledged a police murder every 48 hours until he resigned.

Soldiers in Humvees backed by helicopters supported police as they brought a prison in the desert outside Ciudad Juarez under control after the riot.

Inmates from a drug gang known as the “Aztecas” seized a guard’s keys at the state penitentiary and opened cell doors, freeing 170 prisoners who went on a rampage.

“They attacked other prisoners in a high-security area with iron bars and home-made firearms,” said Victor Valencia, the state government representative in the city.

The Aztecas are believed to be allied to the Juarez cartel, which is fighting Mexico’s most-wanted man, Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman, for control of smuggling routes into the United States.

That feud is the most violent outbreak of a drug war that killed more than 6,000 people in Mexico last year.

Mexico’s army hopes to have 7,500 soldiers and federal police in Ciudad Juarez by the end of this week. They will patrol the streets and man checkpoints at the airport and on bridges across the Rio Grande into Texas.

Story Here

 

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