WebProNews

Tag: drug war

  • Emma Coronel: Former Beauty Queen Arrested With “El Chapo”

    Joaquin Guzman, also known as “El Chapo,” was finally arrested on Saturday in Mazatlan, Mexico. The head of Sinaloa Cartel drug syndicate was captured in a condominium while he was cooking breakfast. Along with him was his wife of six years, former beauty queen Emma Coronel.

    The most wanted drug lord in the world, as El Chapo is called, escaped from his Culiacan hideout through tunnels that led to Mazatlan just about a week ago.

    Coronel met El Chapo at a beauty pageant back in 2007 when she was just 17 years old. El Chapo was immediately enamored by the young woman’s beauty that he used his influence in order for Coronel to win the competition. The two eventually married on Coronel’s 18th birthday. El Chapo was 47 years old.

    According to sources, El Chapo was not the only connection Coronel had with the Sinaloa Cartel. She is reported to be the daughter of Ignacio Coronel, also known as Nacho, who was one of El Chapo’s right-hand men.

    The arrest was carried out just after sunrise. Law enforcement personnel enclosed the 10-story condominium building. They smashed El Chapo’s door open and quickly seized the drug lord. Though there was an assault rifle right by his side, El Chapo did not attempt to reach for it. According to retired senior DEA Mike Vigil, El Chapo did not resist the arrest and seemed tired from the stress of running away from authorities.

    El Chapo was taken to a maximum-security prison in Almoloya de Juarez by helicopter. The next steps after the arrest are still unclear. El Chapo will be facing a barrage of charges in Mexico with his involvement in selling methamphetamine, marijuana, heroin, and cocaine to over 50 countries. Politicians in the U.S. are also appealing the cartel leader’s extradition to the U.S. in order to face drug trafficking charges.

    Most Wanted: Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman

    Image via YouTube

  • Sinaloa Cartel Boss Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman Arrested

    Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the head honcho of the Sinaloa Cartel, was finally arrested on Saturday February 22. The Mexican cartel is famous for trafficking drugs into the United States, Europe, Asia, and even Australia. Last year, Chicago declared Guzman as Public Enemy Number One. The United States had sought Guzman’s extradition in the past, and had offered $5 million bounty on the drug lord’s head.

    Guzman was captured in a surprise raid on a hotel in a beach resort in Mazatlán, Mexico. The joint operation of the Mexican marines and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was the peaceful implementation—no shots were fired—of a plan that has been in the works for more than a month.

    Months before Guzman’s capture, the Mexican authorities have been capturing and killing many of the cartel’s lieutenants. The operations gave the DEA and the Mexican authorities the information they needed to track down Guzman. The information leading to the capture comes from an investigation conducted by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, which, together with Homeland Security, arrested people connected to the Sinaloa Cartel around five years ago in Arizona.

    Mexico Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam stated that the authorities almost arrested Guzman earlier this month, but the cartel chief eluded capture by using a complex tunnel network that was linked to the city of Culiacan’s sewer system.

    The seven residences believed to be Guzman’s hiding places were raided by the Mexican marines, but the entrances were reinforced with steel, enabling the drug boss to escape through the tunnels. The underground tunnel system is used by the cartel to smuggle drugs across the border.

    The authorities were also careful about apprehending Guzman in public areas, fearing citizens might be caught in crossfire.

    Guzman was previously arrested, but in 2001 was able to bribe his way out of his high-security prison, reportedly escaping in a laundry truck. Throughout the years, he was able to avoid capture by bribing corrupt officials.

    http://youtu.be/Cz6RF26Fgws

    Image via YouTube

  • Border Tunnels: A Sophisticated Way To Smuggle Drugs

    Border Tunnels: A Sophisticated Way To Smuggle Drugs

    Drug cartels have resorted to underground tunnels to avoid detection since security has become more stringent along the border.

    Since 1990, about 170 tunnels have been discovered, the majority of them have been along California and Arizona’s border with Mexico. As a result, the U.S. border patrol will soon unveil an underground wireless robot equipped with camera to search underground networks.

    The tunnels vary in terms of size and complexity, depending on who’s using them. While some can be extremely simple such as those dug by hand, others can be extremely sophisticated, including ventilation, lights, and supports for ceiling.

    Those employed to construct rudimentary tunnels are miners who use hoes, shovels, jackhammers and picks to excavate soil which is transported out of the tunnel’s opening in Mexico. They normally old-fashioned tools like a compass to do their work.

    However, cartels who want to construct sophisticated tunnels normally hire engineers as well as miners to build the tunnels. Those tunnels found near San Diego, Arizona, are good examples of sophisticated tunnels.

    U.S. border officials have estimated the cost of more sophisticated tunnels to be between $2 million and $3 million.

    Once a tunnel has been built, the smugglers use it to move guns and drugs as well as people who want to sneak into the U.S. Officials say that some traffickers are selective about what can move through their tunnels but most sophisticated tunnels are mainly used for moving drugs and guns across the U.S Border.

    Marijuana is among the drugs that are mostly moved through the tunnels because it is bulky and riskier to move above the ground. In 2011, authorities seized about 32 tons of marijuana that was being moved across a 600-yard tunnel in the southern California. The tunnel was equipped with lighting, railcars and ventilation while the floor was lined with wooden planks.

    Image via Wikipedia

  • School Drug Testing Doesn’t Work, Shows Study

    Though states such as Colorado and Washington are easing up on marijuana, the war on drugs is still in full force throughout the U.S.

    As part of the drug war, many high schools across the country test students for drugs. New research, however, shows that such programs are not only not effective, but could have the opposite of their intended effect on students.

    A new study published in this month’s issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs shows that students in the around 20% of U.S. high schools that drug test students are just as likely as other students to try marijuana, smoke cigarettes, or consumer alcohol.

    “Even though drug testing sounds good, based on the science, it’s not working,” said Daniel Romer, a co-author of the study and a pubic policy researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. “So as a prevention effort, school drug testing is kind of wrong-headed.”

    According to Romer, the best that parents and school officials can hope for with drug testing programs is that students stay away from commonly-tested-for drugs such as marijuana. Meanwhile, the atmosphere of suspicion such programs create might be the opposite of what actually works to keep kids off drugs.

    According to the study, a “positive climate” at schools is what works best to keep student away from drugs. The study’s authors say that cultivating such a climate involves mutual respect between teachers and students and “clear rules.” Students in such schools were found to be around 20% less likely to try marijuana and 15% less likely to smoke cigarettes. Positive school climates were not seen to have an effect on students’ alcohol consumption.

  • Drug Cartel Leader Shot… By Clown

    Reuters and The New York Post have both reported that one of Mexico’s most powerful ex-drug lords was shot by children’s clowns as he attended a party in Cabo San Lucas.

    A former Tijuana Cartel boss, the 63-year-old Francisco Rafael Arellano Felix sustained a bullet to the head at point-blank range during a family gathering at the Los Cabos resort in the southern part of Baja California. Francisco Rafael was the oldest of the seven Arellano Felix brothers, who helped to popularize trafficking drugs between Mexico and California. Their story inspired Steven Soderbergh’s 2000 drug war film Traffic.

    Rafael was first arrested in 1980 for selling drugs in San Diego. He returned to Mexico, where he continued to sell drugs. A second arrest in 1993 connected with the murder of a Roman Catholic Cardinal, Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo, did not dampen his efforts, and in 2006 the cartel made headlines when smuggling tunnels were discovered connecting Tijuana to the United States.

    Security experts have indicated that they believe Tijuana’s cartel is still operational, and that the Arellano Felix legacy is being continued by their sister and her son, alias “The Engineer.”

    Although Rafael was released in 2008 for good behavior, his enemies were more than willing to wait for the opportune moment to strike. Since most of the Arellano Felix brothers have been arrested or killed, their rivals have supplanted their place in the Latin American illicit drug trade, and officials have speculated that the assassins had ties to organized crime.

    The AP reported a former San Diego prosecutor who penned one of the cartel’s indictments, John Kirby, as saying “[Rafael] was never really part of the leadership of the big organization, mostly because he was in [Mexican] jail. He was arrested before they became what they really became.”

    Mexican authorities had hoped to let the United States deal with Rafael, but even after an extradition request to finish out a weapons possession sentence, Kirby said “The Mexicans were very concerned he was going to get out.” The Mexicans were right; Rafael’s 2008 release followed a six-year prison sentence from 2006 for drug trafficking, but he was released on parole and was deported to Mexico shortly after.

    [Image via Google Maps]

  • Justice Dept: ATF Lost 420 Million Cigarettes in Botched Stings

    An audit newly released by the U.S. Department of Justice has made public a series of mistakes from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, including 2.1 million missing cigarette cartons (or 420 million cigarettes) which disappeared during a series of stings, and almost $5 million was paid to an informant… for no documented reason.

    The Washington Post quoted the Justice Department’s inspector general who oversaw the audit, Michael E. Horowitz, as saying that the investigation “found a significant lack of oversight and controls to ensure that cash, cigarettes, equipment and other assets used… were accurately tracked, properly safeguarded and protected from misuse.”

    Horowitz’s office looked at 20 different undercover stings conducted by the ATF between 2006 and 2011. Those stings netted the ATF a cool $162 million as it elected to prosecute cigarette smugglers. One case in particular saw $15 million in illegal cigarettes sold undercover, with $4.9 million allowed to be kept by an informant, no strings attached. He submitted no documentation as to why he needed the cash.

    Of the cigarettes the ATF purchased for the operation, 2.1 million of almost 10 million cartons are unaccounted for. A spokeswoman for the ATF, Ginger Colbrun, defended her organization by saying that the numbers were inaccurate; that only 447,218 cartons were missing, not 2.1 million.

    Although the audit was released today, the questions started with a pair of investigative reporters from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel who sought to check out an ATF operation in their city being run out of a cigarette warehouse called Fearless Distributing on the south side. The reporters discovered that in that operation, the ATF found themselves burglarized as two thieves (pictured above) stole $10,000 worth of cigarettes from the Fearless Distributing warehouse.

    Only nine people were arrested as a result of the Milwaukee operation, and of those nine, only one got jail time. The reporters also discovered in the course of their investigation three major mistakes by the ATF, including using a brain-damaged man with the mind of a child to set up drug and gun deals and paying him with cash, cigarettes, and merchandise, and the occurrence of a second burglary of ATF property that led to the loss of three government-owned firearms including an automatic machine gun.

    For more on the origins of the story, check out this YouTube video from the authors of the Journal Sentinel report.

    [Image via the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel]

  • Eric Holder: We Can’t Jail our Way to Safety

    In the long and drawn out battle between inmate advocacy groups and the U.S. Justice Department regarding the efficacy of mandatory minimum sentences, a stalemate has been finally struck. Eric Holder, Attorney General of the United States, has come out against the decades-old policy in a speech at the San Francisco American Bar Association.

    The Washington Post reports that in his speech, Holder referred to a new Justice Department prison reform plan that would reduce sentences for nonviolent drug offenders without ties to gangs or organized crime as well as the elderly. The plan is to become the central point of Holder’s tenure as attorney general.

    In excerpts from his speech, Holder calls for Americans to “face the reality that, as it stands, our [prison] system is, in too many ways, broken… with an outsized, unnecessarily large prison population, we need to ensure that incarceration is used to punish, to deter and to rehabilitate — not merely to warehouse and to forget… it imposes a significant economic burden — totaling $80 billion in 2010 alone — and it comes with human and moral costs that are impossible to calculate.”

    Reuters describes other parts of the plan, which might include new local guidelines to help decide if a case should be charged federally and a new path for releasing some federal prisoners “facing extraordinary or compelling circumstances.” Holder himself personally would like to see federal judges given the opportunity to divert from the mandatory minimum, but that would require actual changes to the law.

    The New York Times presented information from a memorandum detailing how the new policy would be carried out, a memo that is being sent by Holder’s office to all United States attorney offices. According to the memo, prosecutors will not be permitted to write a mass or quantity of drugs on indictments for defendants who meet specific criteria (they are not violent, they didn’t sell drugs to minors, they don’t lead a gang or drug cartel, and they have little history of criminality).

    The Times used a hypothetical example of a defendant who sold five kilos of cocaine, which typically triggers a 10-year mandatory minimum sentence. Under the new policy, prosecutors would simply write in that he was accused of “conspiring to distribute cocaine” and that such a defendant could potentially receive a sentence of less than the 10 years called for by the mandatory minimum sentencing law.

    The American prison system contains 25 percent of the world’s prisoners while the United States represents roughly 5 percent of the world’s population. While the population itself grew by one third since 1980, the prison population has grown by 800 percent.