Word: narco
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...road, along with several bags of cocaine and about $2,000 in cash. "Franco told me that the officer was from military intelligence and he was getting too close," Cobo said. "The drugs and the money were planted so it would seem like he was involved in narco trafficking." Following the slaying, soldiers arrested Cobo and 13 others, along with semi-automatic rifles and radio equipment. His confession led the military to the suburban house where they dug up the bodies he had mentioned. Cobo was eventually sent to a civilian prison, where he awaits his court date on organized...
...banking]". His modest wage shows how many cartel foot soldiers such as Cobo live a world apart from the extravagant kingpins with their million-dollar mansions and fleets of luxury cars, but it was still five times the country's minimum wage. And it's the swelling of the narco armies with tens of thousands of low-paid recruits that helps explain the scale of the bloodshed here, with more than 5,300 drug-related killings over the past year alone...
...little surprise that Batista, who has worked as an antikidnapping instructor and kidnapping-release negotiator all over Mexico, was taken in Coahuila. Just as Mexico's powerful drug cartels have lashed out with an insurgency against President Felipe Calderón's anti-narco offensive - Mexico has had more than 5,000 drug-related murders this year, double last year's record - kidnapping bosses in Coahuila, on the border with Texas, are fighting back against the state government's antiabduction crusade. Batista was a consultant to Enrique Martinez, who was Coahuila's governor from 1999 to 2005, and he greatly...
Batista's Dec. 10 kidnapping seems to point to a likely source of that scared life: Mexican police. Not because they fail to catch the kidnappers but because they often are the kidnappers. Sometimes narco-criminals, especially the notorious Zetas gang, do the deed; but since Mexico's abduction spree began more than a decade ago, cops have almost always been involved (as they often are in narco-related crime as well). Federal police officers who allegedly form a kidnapping gang called La Banda de la Flor (the Flower Gang) were recently arrested in the case of Marti, whose decomposed...
...strengthen security forces and the justice system. Rember Larios, adjunct director of the national civil police, says the force was committed to facing the drug threat. "Our hand will not tremble," says Larios, noting that police were carrying out searches for traffickers and evidence in provinces with heavy narco presence. McFarland says the Guatemalan government's expanded budget for security next year was a positive sign. "My feeling is that the leaders of the government are aware that 2009 really is a sort of make or break year...