Word: cartel
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...this week's announcement that a federal officer is among those charged with conspiracy in a drug-mafia hit on the nation's acting police chief Edgar Millan caused little surprise south of the border. Mexican officials say the May 8 assassination was ordered by the Sinaloa drug cartel, and if convicted, the accused officer, Jose Montes, will join a long and infamous line of cops - including one of Mexico's former anti-drug czars - who have moonlighted for the cartels...
...Congress debates the best way to fix the problem, Mexico is fast spiraling in the direction of the narco-terror that gripped Colombia in the 1980s and the early 1990s. Mexico's cartels, including the Sinaloa gang's main rival, the Gulf Cartel, have in recent years raised the scale of the bloodletting by introducing such weapons as grenades, AK-47 assault rifles and bazookas, as well as ghastly methods like mass beheadings...
...Shortly after taking office last year, President Calderon turned to the military to fight the cartels, deploying 25,000 troops throughout the country to harass the narcos and obstruct their trafficking routes. The strategy has resulted in the arrest of numerous cartel bosses and triggermen, and forced the syndicates to make costly detours on their trafficking routes. But it has also sparked a backlash: The cartels have retaliated with a new level of savagery, aided by the country's legions of bent cops, that has left a trail of hundreds of murdered police, prosecutors, politicians and civilians. The cartels "respond...
...Millan appears to have been targeted in retaliation for the federal police jailing such top cartel figures as Sinaloa honcho Arturo Beltran. The accused gunman, Alejandro Ramirez, was waiting inside the police chief's Mexico City apartment early last Thursday morning when Millan, 41, returned home. Ramirez allegedly shot Millan nine times as Millan turned on the lights. Millan's bodyguard was also shot, but managed to subdue Ramirez, who was arrested along with Montes and five other alleged conspirators. Mexican authorities say Montes, the federal police officer, was collared with incriminating documents, including the license plate numbers of senior...
...This week, in response to the Millan killing, Calderon sent 2,700 federal police and soldiers into Culiacan, the capital of the northwestern state of Sinaloa, for new operations against the cartel there. (Over the weekend, the grown son of the Sinaloa Cartel's chief, Juan "Chapo" Guzman, was gunned down by narco rivals in a Culiacan mall.) Perhaps in response, 40 men dressed in black, riding in 10 pickup trucks and armed with automatic rifles, attacked the state police station in Guamuchil, Sinaloa, reportedly leaving a civilian dead and a police officer seriously wounded. Mexico's violence may defy...