Word: laredos
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...evening three weeks ago, Auto Salesman José Jiménez Lizcano was talking with a young customer in front of his home in Nuevo Laredo, just across the Rio Grande from Laredo, Texas. Suddenly, a late-model yellow Mustang cruised past, and a gunman stuck the barrel of an AR-15 automatic rifle out the window and fired a burst at the two men. Jiménez, whom someone in the underworld apparently suspected of working with the police, escaped the second attempt on his life in nine months and promptly departed for Chicago. His customer, a young carpet...
...86th person to die in 22 months of a vicious drug war that has engulfed Nuevo Laredo. The sprawling Mexican border town (pop. 160,000) has become the principal point for smuggling into the U.S. Mexican marijuana, South American cocaine and European heroin funneled through Latin America. Upwards of $1 million worth of drugs passes through Nuevo Laredo to U.S. buyers each week...
...drug war began bizarrely when 31-year-old Refugio Reyes Pruneda gunned down a Mexican federal police agent and his aide in a Nuevo Laredo restaurant. Simona Pruneda de Reyes, the 72-year-old matriarch of the clan, reacted sharply to the unwanted publicity; with the help of another son, she tied Refugio's arms and legs to stakes driven into the earth of their farmyard, then left him there for two days in temperatures that often rose above...
...month later, Refugio was found with 30 bullets in his body. An ex-paratrooper from Tennessee, who was pushing narcotics in Nuevo Laredo, was suspected of the killing and dispatched with the mathematical precision that has become a trademark of the war, and particularly of the Reyes Pruneda gang. For Refugio's 30 bullets, he received 90. His companion, a U.S. Army deserter who was only interested in buying a pound of pot, was found alongside the Tennessean with 60 bullets in his body. In another grisly episode, an independent dealer was found in a clump of bushes near...
Local police, with fewer men, cars and guns than the gangs, have been unable to stop the killings. But the federal government frequently strikes back. Last May a tough police comandante named Everardo Perales Rīos was sent to clean up Nuevo Laredo. In six weeks, Perales collected three tons of marijuana, two pounds of heroin and quantities of cocaine and raw opium-more drugs than local police had confiscated in 20 years. Unfortunately, Perales' success was his undoing. The gangs put a $5,000 contract on his head...