Word: cartels
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Over the summer, President Felipe Calderón's antidrug czar, Noe Ramirez, resigned abruptly. The likely reason became apparent this week after Ramirez was detained by federal officials and accused of taking $450,000 to keep Mexico's most powerful narco mafia, the Sinaloa Cartel, informed about police antidrug operations. He is the highest-ranking government official to be nabbed in this year's anticorruption sweep. (See pictures of crime-fighting in Mexico City...
...cartels, which run a $25 billion-a-year trafficking industry in Mexico, have also intensified their campaign of co-opting police. Not that Mexico's woefully undertrained and underpaid cops are that hard a mark. But the relentless revelations of the breadth of the corruption - including allegations that officers under Mexico's Public Security Minister, Genaro Garcia Luna, were involved in high-profile kidnappings - seem to make a mockery of Calderón's efforts to stamp it out. "This is Calderón's Iraq," says Sergio Aguayo, a security expert at the Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City...
...Mexico's narco-calamity more seriously. Even U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Tony Garza this week took issue with Washington's complacency about curbing gringo demand for cocaine and the smuggling of Yanqui guns to Mexican drug gangs. "The truth is, Mexico would not be at the center of cartel activity, or be experiencing this level of violence," Garza said in San Antonio, "were the U.S. not the largest consumer of illicit drugs and the main supplier of weapons to cartels...
...whose motives Bond misinterpreted, leading to her selfless suicide. Quantum, the first true sequel in the series, begins an hour after Casino ended. Bond wins a frantic car chase, and in his trunk is a prize for his MI6 boss, M (Judi Dench): a board member of the outlaw cartel once known as SPECTRE, now called Quantum. Instantly, Bond is running in all directions: pursuing and eluding a Quantum biggie named Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), hooking up with Bolivian siren Camille (Olga Kurylenko) and riding his own obsession to avenge Vesper's death...
...Calderón's administration has also been shaken up in recent weeks by high-level corruption scandals connected to drug cartels. On Friday, the head of the Federal Preventive Police resigned after detectives questioned him for two days about links to the Sinaloa cartel. Four days earlier, police had announced the arrest of five senior prosecutors for taking bribes of up to $450,000 per month from drug traffickers. Among information leaked to the cartels had been details of U.S. Drug Enforcement agents working in Mexico, officials alleged. The U.S. government has continually expressed support for Calder...