De War on Drugs in Mexico #4 - Hoe lossen we de oorlog op?

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Border checks on drugs and guns 'dropped' at Heathrow

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Senior immigration officers and border force unions say staff shortages and growing political pressure to reduce queueing times mean that operations to combat the influx of drugs, guns and other contraband into the UK have, in effect, been placed on hold.

One senior official at Heathrow told the Observer the situation was so serious that Britain's busiest airport could be described as having "no border controls" when it came to smuggling. The officer, who wished to remain anonymous, added that passengers identified as suspicious, including those accredited to work on Olympic sites, were being waved through without extra security checks because they there were not enough staff to tackle queues.

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The senior official at Heathrow, who has almost 10 years' experience, said: "We have actually ceased doing [anti-smuggling operations] at the moment, even though they won't say they have. Word has already got around to criminal enterprises."

Chris Hobbs, a former Metropolitan police officer who worked with border control at Heathrow and Gatwick before retiring last summer, said: "Organised crime networks will only be too well aware of this and, if they can recruit couriers, will be having a field day."

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[b]Op

Recently Veracruz has been plagued by cartel violence

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Op zondag 6 mei 2012 01:30 schreef BlaZ het volgende:

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Nah niks aan de hand in Veracruz momenteel ben er dit jaar alweer 2x geweest. Van een drugsoorlog is er na vorig jaar september echt geen sprake meer.

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Gunmen killed the deputy mayor of the municipality of Atzalan north of Veracruz, Rafael Fernandez Landa, 46 years old, who was a school teacher Telesecundaria "Alfonso Arroyo Flores.

During yesterday became the acts of terror in the state of Veracruz, as authorities moved to the subdivision streets Coyol after receiving the report of a strange situation.

It was right next to the sports called The Pit, where authorities found three male persons, men were beheaded.

Naval Police spotted Thursday in the vicinity of the dwelling unit Las Vegas II of Boca del Rio, four bags with the remains of four of these, were identified Guillermo Luna Varela, who was a photographer and agency Veracruznews Huge Gabriel, who, according to local media, until last year worked as a newspaper photographer Notiver.

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En ik heb maar 3 nieuwsberichtjes gequote in een maand tijdsbestek oid. En dat is alleen in Veracruz.

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US officials at Mexican border accused of widespread human rights abuses

Civil rights body accuses Customs and Border Protection agents of using excessive force against US citizens and immigrants

US citizens and immigrants with full legal rights to reside in America are being subjected to widespread physical and legal abuses at the hands of US border guards at crossing points with Mexico, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

The ACLU has sent a formal letter of complaint to the department of homeland security to protest what it says is a sharp increase in human rights violations by US government agents along the Mexican border.

The civil rights body accuses Customs and Border Protection agents of wielding excessive force, carrying out unwarranted strip searches, detaining people for long periods without explanation and coercing individuals into surrendering their legal rights and citizenship documents.

"We are seeing widespread federal abuses against US citizens and non-US citizens alike. Something is going very wrong here, and it needs looking into," said Sean Riordan, an ACLU lawyer and signatory to the complaint.

The ACLU is requesting an investigation into the instances of alleged excesses at the Mexican border. It cites 11 cases of individuals who claim they were mistreated at various border crossings.

Among them are Hernan Cuevas who crossed from Mexico to the US at Calexico/Mexicali on 19 May 2011. A Chilean businessman who works for an industrial manufacturing corporation, he spends most of his working life travelling to and from America and had never before had any trouble with border agents.

He was stopped and his car searched, and when he tried to complain that his property was being roughly handled was astonished by the reaction. He was handcuffed and chained by his big toe to a metal bench, and refused the right to call a lawyer or the Chilean embassy.

In sweltering heat, he asked repeatedly for water but was also refused. Before he was released after almost four hours of detention, an agent allegedly said to him: "I don't give a fuck of your educated manners and all your corporate bullshit. This is my country now and when you are here, you listen to me. I don't like your kind that takes our jobs and uses our system."

Cuevas told the Guardian that he was utterly taken aback by what had happened. "I never would have believed that such behaviour was possible in a civilised country, let alone the US," he said.

"I thought this kind of thing only happened in films about banana republics. These guys behaved as though they were above the law."

ACLU contends that Cuevas's experiences were part of a pattern of abuse by Customs and Border Protection that must now be investigated and rectified. CBP is America's largest law enforcement agency and has expanded dramatically in recent years. The numbers of its border patrol guards has grown from 5,000 in the mid 1990s to more than 20,000 today, and has doubled in just the past six years.

Riordan said that the exponential expansion of the agency had not been accompanied by a proporational growth in training, oversight and accountability, creating a vacuum out of which the current problem of abuses had been allowed to fester.

A spokesman for CBP said that ACLU's letter of complaint had not yet been received and made no comment at this stage.

The other cases highlighted by ACLU include Edith Collins-George, a US citizen who was detained without explanation in March 2010 at the Calexico/Mexicali crossing having visited her mother in Mexico.

She says she was told by officers: "You don't have rights here", and was then pushed up against a wall and searched, with officers touching her breasts and genitals.

Another of the cited cases, Trinidad Muraira de Castro, was crossing at Brownsville, Texas on a temporary visa with her two daughters who were born in the US and are thus US citizens.

The whole family was detained and interrogated for about 10 hours, at which point De Castro says she broke down and made a false confession that her daughters were not born in America and had no right to be there.

On that basis the family was turned back at the border and her visa confiscated.

Last month the justice department announced that it had decided not to prosecute a US patrol agent who shot and killed a Mexican teenager in June 2010 near the El Paso border crossing. Sergio Hernandez-Guereca, 15, was shot by the unidentified CBP officer after reportedly throwing rocks at the border line.

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Tientallen verminkte lichamen gedumpt in Mexico

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Er zijn vandaag 49 onthoofde en verminkte lichamen gevonden langs een snelweg in Mexico, tussen de Noord-Mexicaanse metropool Monterrey en de grens van de VS.

Volgens de politie werden de lichamen van 43 mannen en zes vrouwen gevonden bij San Juan. De autoriteiten hebben de snelweg van Monterrey naar Reynosa voor sporenonderzoek afgesloten. Er zou een boodschap met dreigende taal achtergelaten zijn uit naam van de drugskartel Los Zetas. Het identificeren van de lichamen is lastig omdat hoofden, handen en voeten in veel gevallen afgehakt zijn.

De afgelopen tijd zijn op meer plaatsen in Mexico verminkte lijken op openbare plekken achtergelaten, als waarschuwing van drugsbendes aan hun rivalen. In april werd een leider van Los Zetas opgepakt – hij werd verdacht van de moord op 145 mensen.

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Mexican drug cartel massacres have method in their brutal madness

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Violence that has claimed 50,000 lives is horrific but not mindless: it is inter-cartel turf wars played out in body count

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This weekend's discovery in Mexico of 49 headless, handless and footless bodies dumped alongside a road just outside the northern industrial hub of Monterrey was the worst event of its kind, but it was far from the only one.

Last Wednesday, 18 mutilated bodies were found in abandoned vehicles near the country's second largest city, Guadalajara. The week before that, nine bodies were hung from a bridge, and in another case 14 severed heads were left in ice boxes outside the local government office in the north-east border city of Nuevo Laredo.

The federal government issued a statement following the latest incident in this spate of mass murders, blaming the cartels for "unleashing inhuman and inadmissible episodes of irrational violence in their criminal dispute".

Most independent observers, however, question the portrayal of the horror as mindless. They tend to put the massacres firmly within the dynamic of the inter-cartel rivalries that form a core part of the violence that has killed more than 50,000 people since President Felipe Calderén launched an offensive against the cartels in December 2006.

"I don't think they are irrational. They are psychopaths sure, but I believe there is method in this madness," Alejandro Hope, a security expert and former member of the government intelligence agency, told the Guardian. He said the display of mutilated corpses tended to contain messages for rival groups, for the authorities, and for the population. "They are fighting to defend their reputation for brutality and the image of control in the territories they claim."

The current spate of massacres appears linked to the rivalry between the Zetas drug cartel and the Sinaloa cartel, allied to the Gulf cartel. This is a long-running campaign of violence that involves a number of other cartels.

The 23 bodies displayed in Nuevo Laredo at the beginning of the month looked like an incursion into the Zeta cartel's most important stronghold by the Sinaloa cartel, led by the infamous capo Jaoquín "El Chapo" Guzmán. The subsequent massacre in Guadalajara looked like a Zeta retaliation on Sinaloa turf. At least, that is what messages left behind with the corpses claimed.

As well as displays of bravado, both events could also be seen as efforts to calentar la plaza, or heat up the turf, of their rivals as mass brutality tends to trigger announcements from the government that it will increase troop and police numbers in the area.

Within that logic, this weekend's scene outside Monterrey could be interpreted as an attempt by the Zetas to reaffirm their control of an area that is already heavily militarised. A graffito near the scene stated: "Z 100%."

Analysts tend to discount a direct link between the intensification of the violence and Mexico's presidential elections, seven weeks away, in which security has been a constant issue, but not a particularly contentious one.

All the candidates make vague promises to be more effective in reducing the violence, but avoid getting into serious debates about the problem.

Even so, the drug war provides a backdrop to the political campaign and the public's sense that Mexico is struggling to keep control of its destiny.

The feeling of powerlessness increases with evidence that many victims of the violence have no obvious links with the cartels. This has made it difficult for either the federal or local governments to imply that they brought their fate upon themselves, as was common in the past.

After the latest massacre outside Monterrey, the authorities suggested the mutilation of the bodies was a strategy to make identification more difficult. They noted that a number of the torsos were tattooed with images associated with the criminal underworld, such as the figure of the Santa Muerte, but also accepted that the victims could be unconnected people who had disappeared from elsewhere in Mexico, or perhaps Central American migrants trying to get to the United States.

Alberto Islas, a security expert who heads a consultancy company called Risk Evaluation, says that the Zetas are likely to pick their victims randomly because their networks are unsophisticated.

Islas, however, stressed that the force driving the violence does not lie within the criminal organisations but in the failure of the federal government to investigate the crimes or pursue those carrying them out. This, he says, means the level of violence required to shock is increasing.

"If the government doesn't do anything, this will continue," Islas said. "Forty-nine people is a lot of people, but tomorrow Mexico will forget about them."

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Op donderdag 22 maart 2012 01:12 schreef El_Matador het volgende:

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Sterker; de VS is de afzetmarkt voor die klotedrugs. De cokesnuivers in de VS houden die hele zooi in stand. Zonder kopers geen verkoop.

Als men slim is, zorgt men voor eigen productie van prettigere drugs in de VS. Zoiets als de Nederlandse XTC-markt dus.

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Op dinsdag 15 mei 2012 09:08 schreef VeX- het volgende:
Gaat nergens meer over daar. Die Mexicaanse gangs vermoorden puur om het feit dat ze ongestraft kunnen vermoorden.

Je kan zeggen wat je wil over de Italiaanse, Japanse, Russische/etc maffia, maar die hebben over het algemeen nog enigszins fatsoensnormen en ruimen alleen elkaar op. Mexicaanse gangs gedragen zich als beesten tegenover onschuldige burgers.

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Op dinsdag 15 mei 2012 09:08 schreef VeX- het volgende:
Gaat nergens meer over daar. Die Mexicaanse gangs vermoorden puur om het feit dat ze ongestraft kunnen vermoorden.

Je kan zeggen wat je wil over de Italiaanse, Japanse, Russische/etc maffia, maar die hebben over het algemeen nog enigszins fatsoensnormen en ruimen alleen elkaar op. Mexicaanse gangs gedragen zich als beesten tegenover onschuldige burgers.

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Op dinsdag 15 mei 2012 15:46 schreef waht het volgende:

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Vooral tegenover elkaar. Burgers zijn zo nu en dan ook slachtoffer.

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Op dinsdag 15 mei 2012 09:08 schreef VeX- het volgende:
Gaat nergens meer over daar. Die Mexicaanse gangs vermoorden puur om het feit dat ze ongestraft kunnen vermoorden.

Je kan zeggen wat je wil over de Italiaanse, Japanse, Russische/etc maffia, maar die hebben over het algemeen nog enigszins fatsoensnormen en ruimen alleen elkaar op. Mexicaanse gangs gedragen zich als beesten tegenover onschuldige burgers.

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Op dinsdag 15 mei 2012 16:54 schreef Weltschmerz het volgende:

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Die gangs zitten dan weer vol met mensen die ooit onschuldige burgers waren. Maar dankzij die fantastische war on drugs zijn ze dat niet meer.

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Op dinsdag 15 mei 2012 17:04 schreef woid het volgende:

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je bedoelt; dankzij die fantastische war on drugs zitten nu hele onschuldige volkstammen op gescheept met die bende zooi

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Op dinsdag 15 mei 2012 17:49 schreef leRomein het volgende:

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Die war on drugs heeft ervoor gezorgd dat de criminaliteit enorm verweven is met alle lagen en facetten van de samenleving. De resultaten van wat volgens bepaalde mensen een oplossing zou zijn voor problematiek omtrent mensen die drugs gebruiken, zijn vele malen schadelijker voor de maatschappij dan het aanvankelijke probleem.

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New York judge writes impassioned defense of medical marijuana

In a New York Times opinion piece, a sitting state supreme court judge writes of his cancer and the palliative drug he depends on

A New York state supreme court judge has written an impassioned plea to legalize medical marijuana in the state, potentially taking New York one step closer to becoming the 17th state in the nation to allow use of the drug as a palliative.

In an op-ed piece in Thursday's New York Times, justice Gustin L Reichbach writes eloquently of his three-and-a-half-year long battle with prostate cancer. He describes enduring chemotherapy, brutal surgery, radiation, constant nausea and insomnia. The only remedy that has given him a modicum of relief has been marijuana.

"I find a few puffs of marijuana before dinner gives me ammunition in the battle to eat. A few more puffs at bedtime permits desperately needed sleep," he writes.

"This is not a law-and-order issue; it is a medical and human rights issue."

Reichbach, who was not immediately available for comment, goes on to "implore the governor and the legislature of New York" to pass a medical marijuana bill currently before the state senate.

"This is a huge thing," Gabriel Sayegh of the Drug Policy Alliance, an activist organization promoting alternatives to criminalization, told the Guardian. "To have an active judge sitting on the bench dealing with a fairly serious form of cancer, it's a remarkable turn of events."

New York's bill A7347-A/S7283, which would decriminalize medical marijuana, is currently before the state senate, having passed in the assembly. The bill requires a patient to have a licensed health care professional authorized to prescribe controlled substances certify a need for marijuana to treat a "severe, debilitating or life-threatening condition."

A Siena College survey released Wednesday found 57% of New York voters support legalizing medical marijuana, with 33% opposed.

But governor Andrew Cuomo, the former state attorney-general, does not appear prepared to join the majority of his constituents.

"I understand the benefits, but there are also risks, and I think the risks outweigh the benefits at this point," he recently told reporters.

The current session ends June 21, and even the bill's sponsor, state senator Diane Savino, is sceptical it will make it to the floor before the next session. But she did find Reichbach's piece remarkable.

"Every time somebody who is unexpected would be in support of medical marijuana, it moves the ball down the field in terms of support," she said.

There are thousands of people who fervently hope she's right.

"The Senate needs to act," said Jamin Sewell, an attorney who works for the New York city council. "It is an issue of compassion."

Sewell, 44, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis 10 years ago, but because he works as a lawyer in the public sector, he said he has never smoked marijuana to provide relief from some of his symptoms.

Being able to smoke marijuana, he said, would alleviate the severe tingling and numbness in his legs ("the worst pins and needles when your legs fall asleep, magnified tenfold") and the neuropathic pain that shoots from his jaw down his back for up to 45 minutes at a time.

"There's nothing I've found legally that my doctors have prescribed," he said. He has spoken to other MS patients who have benefitted from smoking marijuana, but as long as it remains illegal, he said he will refrain.

"I've worked in public service my entire life and I want to continue to be able to do that," he said. "Because MS is progressive in nature, if the symptoms I live with currently continue to get worse, I really hope I'll be able to use the best medicine that will help alleviate them."

For Reichbach, marijuana has become too necessary a medicine to wait.

"Given my position as a sitting judge still hearing cases, well-meaning friends question the wisdom of my coming out on this issue. But I recognize that fellow cancer sufferers may be unable, for a host of reasons, to give voice to our plight," he wrote.

"Because criminalizing an effective medical technique affects the fair administration of justice, I feel obliged to speak out as both a judge and a cancer patient suffering with a fatal disease."

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Op zondag 20 mei 2012 21:08 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

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Meer heroïnesmokkel vrachtvervoer Schiphol

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Heroïne wordt steeds vaker gesmokkeld in vrachtzendingen via Schiphol. Rechercheurs van het speciale opsporingsteam CargoHarc, een samenwerking van Koninklijke Marechaussee, FIOD en Douane, constateren een forse stijging ten opzichte van voorgaande jaren.

Dit jaar werd op de luchthaven tot nu toe al zo'n 100 kilo heroïne onderschept in verschillende vrachtzendingen. In heel 2011 werd ongeveer half zo veel in beslag genomen, aldus een woordvoerder zaterdag. De meeste van die zendingen komen uit Azië. De heroïne is vaak op ingenieuze wijze verstopt, bijvoorbeeld in trossen bananen of ingeweven in Perzische tapijten.

Tien dagen geleden werd op Schiphol een man uit Liberia aangehouden. Hij zou betrokken zijn bij de smokkel van 15 kilo heroïne. Volgens gegevens van het Trimbos-instituut wordt heroïne 'op straat' verhandeld voor 20 tot 40 euro per gram.

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Vrouw machtiger in Mexicaanse kartels, omdat mannen worden vermoord

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De macht van vrouwen in de drugskartels neemt toe, omdat de drugsoorlog in Mexico zoveel mannen het leven kost. Steeds meer vrouwen krijgen daardoor leidinggevende functies in de kartels.

Dat schreef de Mexicaanse wetenschappelijke onderzoeker Arturo Santamaria in een boek hierover. Volgens hem profiteren de kartels van de toenemende macht van vrouwen. 'Zij zullen moeilijker te bestrijden zijn, omdat vrouwen slimmer te werk lijken te gaan.' Zij handelen behoedzamer en gebruiken minder gemakkelijk dodelijk geweld dan mannen.

Sinds de Mexicaanse regering in 2006 de drugskartels de oorlog verklaarde, zijn er ongeveer 50.000 mensen, vooral mannen, gedood. De vrouwen die de macht overnemen, zijn vaak de weduwen, dochters en vriendinnen van de doden. Die zijn opgegroeid in de drugshandel en weten waar het om draait en hoe die werkt.

In oktober hebben de Mexicaanse autoriteiten 46 vrouwen aangehouden die een leidinggevende rol in de drugshandel hadden, blijkt uit cijfers van het Openbaar Ministerie in Mexico-Stad. In de Verenigde Staten zijn de laatste 10 jaar 2143 Mexicaanse vrouwen gearresteerd om hun betrokkenheid bij de smokkel van drugs.

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De War on Drugs in Mexico #4 - Hoe lossen we de oorlog op?

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But governor Andrew Cuomo, the former state attorney-general, does not appear prepared to join the majority of his constituents.

"I understand the benefits, but there are also risks, and I think the risks outweigh the benefits at this point," he recently told reporters.