Desertdog
Member
More Americans abducted along Mexico border than in Iraq
By Maxim Kniazkov, Special to Insight
http://www.insightmag.com/Media/MediaManager/laredo_0.htm
It is late Sunday morning, and streets in Nuevo Laredo's commercial district remain eerily empty. As many as 176 people were killed in the city last year amid a turf war between drug cartels. (Photo by Maxim Kniazkov)
LAREDO, Texas – This border area is one of the least publicized international crisis zones. More Americans have been kidnapped just in this area than in all of Iraq by Islamic terrorists.
Twenty-six Americans are now officially listed as missing in the Laredo-Nuevo Laredo region of the U.S.-Mexico border—in addition to the more than 400 Mexicans reported to be suffering a similar fate.
The number of American civilians missing or kidnapped in Iraq since the beginning of the war is 23 as of last September, the latest figure released by the State Department.
And then there are the executions.
Unlike Muslim jihadists, enforcers from the feuding Gulf and Sinaloa Mexican drug cartels favor off-camera basement executions and oil-drum burials.
“I’ve seen these barrels with bodies stuffed into them,” said a U.S. law enforcement official, who, like most here, spoke on condition of anonymity. “It’s horrible, but it is really happening.”
First acid is poured in to break up flesh and bone. Then the drum is filled with diesel fuel.
A match—that’s all it takes to turn a life into a heap of ashes.
How many of those unaccounted for have already been “processed” this way? Nobody here knows—or is eager to find out.
“The Mexican government has lost control along the border,” fumes Rick Flores, the youthful Webb County sheriff.
“They had 176 murders in Nuevo Laredo last year, and none of them have been solved. In the first less than six weeks of this year, there were another 27 murders. Again, none solved. At the rate they are going, the death toll will be over 300 by year’s end.”
If anything, Mr. Flores said, the cartels have become more brazen, more willing to reach for their guns.
On Jan. 3 there was a harrowing standoff with heavily armed suspected cartel paramilitaries in the hamlet of El Cenizo, about 15 miles south of here.
An alleged smuggler drove a van pursued by sheriff’s deputies into the Rio Grande and used his cell phone to call in reinforcements.
“They arrived within minutes—all clad in black, all with AK-47s—and took up positions on the Mexican bank,” recalls Mr. Flores. “They shouted to us in English—and I convey these words literally—‘You wanna play, mother f…rs? Let’s play!’ Unfortunately, we could not engage them across an international boundary.”
Law enforcement officials don’t believe the gunmen were the much-publicized Los Zetas, members of a U.S.-trained Mexican special forces unit, who deserted in the 1990s to become enforcers for the Gulf Cartel.
They say about half of the original 33-member group have already been captured or killed, and, according to the most recent intelligence, only one or two of those still at large work in the Nuevo Laredo sector.
But they are concerned the group has spawned in northern Mexico a kind of cultural franchise with its seemingly infinite litter of Zetas imitators, wannabes and unscrupulous thugs.
“They don’t even court women anymore. They abduct them at gunpoint and give them as presents to their bosses,” Mr. Flores says, shaking his head. “Here, beauty can be a curse.”
That is what happened, many believe, to U.S. citizens Yvette Martinez and Brenda Cisneros, who disappeared in Nuevo Laredo in September 2004.
There is also evidence, officials warn, of foreign fighters heavily moving into the region.
The Gulf Cartel, bloodied in the turf war, they say, is actively recruiting reinforcements from among “kaibiles,” former Guatemalan guerrilla fighters. The Sinaloa Cartel is bringing in members of the MS-13 gang from El Salvador.
And there have been other new arrivals that officials say worry them even more.
Mexico has long had a thriving Middle Eastern community, but there is word it might now be getting new, possibly less benevolent members.
“We’ve had source intelligence that there are possible terrorist cells making their way into Mexico, who want to learn the language and culture and camouflage themselves as Mexicans,” said another law enforcement official, who requested anonymity.
“There have been new arrivals of that kind in Nuevo Laredo as well, and we don’t know yet whether their business is legitimate.”
Coincidentally or not, Laredo police and federal agents busted in early February what amounts to an underground factory for manufacturing improvised explosive devices comparable to those used in Iraq, seizing about half a dozen ready-made bombs and materials able to make almost 100 more.
A puzzling incursion, local officials said, was witnessed in the middle of the night 20 miles south of Laredo about a year ago.
About 20 physically well-trained men, all dressed in black with automatic rifles slung over their shoulders, crossed the Rio Grande and headed into the U.S., carrying oversized duffel bags.
“They were intercepted by the Border Patrol further down. But to this day, we don’t know what was in these bags,” one of the officials said. “Whatever the cargo, these men appeared to be ready to pick up a major fight to protect it. And that’s very unusual for a drug smuggling operation.”
A request for information left with the Border Patrol still remains unanswered.
- Maxim Kniazkov is a Washington-based journalist
By Maxim Kniazkov, Special to Insight
http://www.insightmag.com/Media/MediaManager/laredo_0.htm
It is late Sunday morning, and streets in Nuevo Laredo's commercial district remain eerily empty. As many as 176 people were killed in the city last year amid a turf war between drug cartels. (Photo by Maxim Kniazkov)
LAREDO, Texas – This border area is one of the least publicized international crisis zones. More Americans have been kidnapped just in this area than in all of Iraq by Islamic terrorists.
Twenty-six Americans are now officially listed as missing in the Laredo-Nuevo Laredo region of the U.S.-Mexico border—in addition to the more than 400 Mexicans reported to be suffering a similar fate.
The number of American civilians missing or kidnapped in Iraq since the beginning of the war is 23 as of last September, the latest figure released by the State Department.
And then there are the executions.
Unlike Muslim jihadists, enforcers from the feuding Gulf and Sinaloa Mexican drug cartels favor off-camera basement executions and oil-drum burials.
“I’ve seen these barrels with bodies stuffed into them,” said a U.S. law enforcement official, who, like most here, spoke on condition of anonymity. “It’s horrible, but it is really happening.”
First acid is poured in to break up flesh and bone. Then the drum is filled with diesel fuel.
A match—that’s all it takes to turn a life into a heap of ashes.
How many of those unaccounted for have already been “processed” this way? Nobody here knows—or is eager to find out.
“The Mexican government has lost control along the border,” fumes Rick Flores, the youthful Webb County sheriff.
“They had 176 murders in Nuevo Laredo last year, and none of them have been solved. In the first less than six weeks of this year, there were another 27 murders. Again, none solved. At the rate they are going, the death toll will be over 300 by year’s end.”
If anything, Mr. Flores said, the cartels have become more brazen, more willing to reach for their guns.
On Jan. 3 there was a harrowing standoff with heavily armed suspected cartel paramilitaries in the hamlet of El Cenizo, about 15 miles south of here.
An alleged smuggler drove a van pursued by sheriff’s deputies into the Rio Grande and used his cell phone to call in reinforcements.
“They arrived within minutes—all clad in black, all with AK-47s—and took up positions on the Mexican bank,” recalls Mr. Flores. “They shouted to us in English—and I convey these words literally—‘You wanna play, mother f…rs? Let’s play!’ Unfortunately, we could not engage them across an international boundary.”
Law enforcement officials don’t believe the gunmen were the much-publicized Los Zetas, members of a U.S.-trained Mexican special forces unit, who deserted in the 1990s to become enforcers for the Gulf Cartel.
They say about half of the original 33-member group have already been captured or killed, and, according to the most recent intelligence, only one or two of those still at large work in the Nuevo Laredo sector.
But they are concerned the group has spawned in northern Mexico a kind of cultural franchise with its seemingly infinite litter of Zetas imitators, wannabes and unscrupulous thugs.
“They don’t even court women anymore. They abduct them at gunpoint and give them as presents to their bosses,” Mr. Flores says, shaking his head. “Here, beauty can be a curse.”
That is what happened, many believe, to U.S. citizens Yvette Martinez and Brenda Cisneros, who disappeared in Nuevo Laredo in September 2004.
There is also evidence, officials warn, of foreign fighters heavily moving into the region.
The Gulf Cartel, bloodied in the turf war, they say, is actively recruiting reinforcements from among “kaibiles,” former Guatemalan guerrilla fighters. The Sinaloa Cartel is bringing in members of the MS-13 gang from El Salvador.
And there have been other new arrivals that officials say worry them even more.
Mexico has long had a thriving Middle Eastern community, but there is word it might now be getting new, possibly less benevolent members.
“We’ve had source intelligence that there are possible terrorist cells making their way into Mexico, who want to learn the language and culture and camouflage themselves as Mexicans,” said another law enforcement official, who requested anonymity.
“There have been new arrivals of that kind in Nuevo Laredo as well, and we don’t know yet whether their business is legitimate.”
Coincidentally or not, Laredo police and federal agents busted in early February what amounts to an underground factory for manufacturing improvised explosive devices comparable to those used in Iraq, seizing about half a dozen ready-made bombs and materials able to make almost 100 more.
A puzzling incursion, local officials said, was witnessed in the middle of the night 20 miles south of Laredo about a year ago.
About 20 physically well-trained men, all dressed in black with automatic rifles slung over their shoulders, crossed the Rio Grande and headed into the U.S., carrying oversized duffel bags.
“They were intercepted by the Border Patrol further down. But to this day, we don’t know what was in these bags,” one of the officials said. “Whatever the cargo, these men appeared to be ready to pick up a major fight to protect it. And that’s very unusual for a drug smuggling operation.”
A request for information left with the Border Patrol still remains unanswered.
- Maxim Kniazkov is a Washington-based journalist
The Feds really need to clean up that place.
It is time for Bush to get off his keester and do his job, which is protecting America, when we worry about people in Iraq being abducted and executed and put squat to citizens right here at home there is something seriously ass backwards.
