Word: cartels
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...confessed drug cartel hood whose alias is "The Nut Job," Marco Vinicio Cobo is remarkably calm and plain-looking. Sitting in the blue-walled interrogation room of a Mexican army base, the chubby, goatee-bearded 30-year-old coolly describes his work for the Zetas, a feared paramilitary force responsible for thousands of brutal murders. And even when he details how his bosses kidnapped and chopped the head off a soldier, he appears relaxed and unemotional, as if he were discussing the weather. But despite the unsettling indifference of its tone, Cobo's confession - of which a video has been...
...worst year for Mexican law enforcement in recent history, cartel gunmen have killed more than 500 police and military personnel, including eight soldiers who were beheaded near Acapulco on Sunday. Cobo's own life story also sheds light on the machinations of the crime empires behind this killing spree. From a lower-middle class family, Cobo had worked for a while as a journalist in the poor state of Oaxaca before joining the cartel in his late 20s because it was the best job opportunity available. "They first paid me $300 a fortnight, and then it went...
...publish a story about some men who were arrested with guns. They said the story couldn't come out." When he joined up with these gangsters, he said his first job was to monitor the local roads. Later he helped set up the abductions of any cartel targets on those routes. "They kidnapped people who had committed what they said was a crime," he said. "Many were people who worked as drug traffickers. He lost count of how many victims they abducted, but said three had had been killed and buried in the yard of a suburban house...
Public security in Mexico has all but collapsed under the blood-soaked weight of a drug cartel war and an equally vicious convulsion of criminal abduction. Kidnapping is such a booming business south of the border that an astonishing 5% of the country's 106 million people report having been a victim or having known one, according to a new survey by the Mexican polling firm Gabinete de Comunicacion Estrategica. In the same poll, 45% of Mexicans who have a phone line said they've been victims of telephone extortion, in which persons call a residence, claim they've abducted...
...deepening fears among oil-rich nations of an economic disaster at home. Whereas in July, with futures at a record high of $147 a barrel, the daily oil earnings for Opec's 11 members stood at $4 billion, this week, with oil hovering at around $43 a barrel, the cartel's combined daily earnings stood closer to $1.2 billion. Saudi Arabia's oil minister Ali Al-Naimi said last month that Opec members needed a price range of between $60 and $80 a barrel in order to sustain their exploration and costly production. To achieve that, he recommended that...