Word: mexicans
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Violent urban legend has always swirled around Mexican drug traffickers, but few of them have ever set out to build a reputation as vicious as that of Heriberto Lazcano, 28. As leader of the Zetas, a new and ruthless drug gang situated along the U.S. border, Lazcano has perpetrated crimes that range from the brutal to the bizarre. In one instance last summer, Mexican officials say, Lazcano murdered a prominent Tijuana publisher in his car in broad daylight as his two young children watched horrified from the backseat. In January the Zetas attempted a raid on a federal prison...
While savagery like El Verdugo's might evoke a Hollywood gangster movie, it has become a grim reality of life in some Mexican border towns. Upstart groups like the Zetas have emerged largely as a result of the Mexican government's recent crackdown on the big cartels that have long monopolized the country's $25 billion-a-year drug trade. Experts call the phenomenon "atomization": as the large Mafias decompose, more reckless "microcartels" spin off or move in. In their heyday in the 1980s and '90s, Mexico's biggest kingpins ran networks that employed thousands of people; now gangs like...
...more vexed than Mexican President Vicente Fox, who is under pressure from the Bush Administration to crack down on the flow of drugs and illegal migrants across the Mexican border, amid fears that terrorists might exploit the lawlessness to sneak into the U.S. Mexico was infuriated by a recent U.S. alert about security dangers on the Mexican border and by a State Department report last month claiming that 90% of the cocaine hitting U.S. streets comes via Mexico, much higher than prior estimates of less than 75%. Mexico disputes the report, especially since it has made strides in breaking...
...harder for Fox to trumpet his accomplishments when criminals like El Verdugo are on the loose. According to Mexican officials, Lazcano was a clean-cut Mexican army recruit from the Gulf Coast state of Veracruz when he was picked a decade ago to be part of the highly trained Airborne Special Forces Group. The unit was sent to the eastern border to battle drug trafficking. But in the late 1990s, Lazcano and more than 30 other members of the special forces began working for drug lord Osiel Cárdenas, head of the Matamoros-based Gulf cartel, which at the time...
...lapses into Spanish for basic words the gringo audience will be able to understand: words like “sĂ” and “señora”. This particular subplot’s conclusion has lily-white Jean learn to appreciate her helpful Mexican servant with an insipid, cringe-worthy character reversal that basically materializes out of thin...