" ...Mexico purges federal police chiefs
The housecleaning comes as the nation seeks traction in a foundering drug war...."

Competing Mexican drug cartels are destroying each other ... and that's where 'Warrior' begins ...."

http://imdb.com/title/tt0320751
http://www.warriorthemovie.blogspot.com

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-208917617001990565&q=warrior+mexican+OR+drug+OR+cartels+duration%3Ashort+genre%3AMOVIE_TRAILER

"the action adventure fantasy feature film "Warrior" ... about the son of a divine force ... is a story of a young man's quest to find his true identity set against the twin backdrops of Native American folklore and the treacherous Mexican drug trade and a portrayal of the classic confrontation between "good and evil" ... filmed in the exotic jungles of Costa Azul in the State of Nayarit and the urban grit of Puerto Vallarta in the State of Jalisco, Mexico .. with action, adventure, romance, comedy, a multi-ethnic cast, a major studio movie music score and spectacular cinematography..."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexdrug26jun26,0,3471511.story?coll=la-home-center
From the Los Angeles Times

Mexico purges federal police chiefs
The housecleaning comes as the nation seeks traction in a foundering drug war.

By Sam Enriquez
Times Staff Writer

June 26, 2007

MEXICO CITY — Mexico replaced the federal police chiefs from each of the country's 31 states and the Federal District on Monday, pending polygraph and drug tests to determine whether they are on the right side of the law in the nation's foundering drug war.

The surprise purge of top leaders of the federal police and an elite federal investigations agency comes as Mexican President Felipe Calderon seeks traction in a 6-month-old campaign against drug traffickers that has neither stemmed killings nor slowed shipments.

Corruption among local, state and federal law enforcement has for years given cover to drug smuggling gangs, now at war over access routes to the United States, and over Mexico's growing domestic markets.

"Every federal cop is obliged to carry out his post with legality, honesty and efficiency," Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna said at a news conference Monday announcing the housecleaning. "In the fight against crime, we have strategies. One axis of our strategy is to professionalize and purge our police corps."

The police chiefs were replaced Monday by federal officers who have passed a rigorous screening, Garcia Luna said.

Shortly after taking office in December, Calderon sent the army to work alongside federal police in nine states. But there are growing suspicions that millionaire kingpins continue to buy protection as easily as ever, despite Calderon's efforts. Half a dozen federal police officers were arrested this month when their army counterparts discovered they'd allowed a cocaine shipment to pass through the Mexicali airport.

About a third of Mexico's 20,000-member federal police force, which investigates all drug crimes and homicides, is assigned to work alongside the 12,000 soldiers employed in Calderon's anti-trafficking campaign. That pairing has raised speculation about information being leaked to smugglers and growers.

Street prices in the United States remain stable, suggesting that suppliers continue to smuggle narcotics over the U.S.-Mexico border relatively undisturbed, drug experts say.

With more than 2,000 people killed last year, curbing drug violence emerged as Calderon's first priority when he took office. The army, with its reputation of being more trustworthy than Mexico's police agencies, emerged as Calderon's tool of choice.

But critics worry that Mexico's army will be the next institution to be tainted by drug profits. American drug users are estimated to spend as much as $65 billion a year, mostly on cocaine, marijuana, heroin and methamphetamine, commodities largely controlled by Mexican trafficking organizations and their Colombian affiliates.

"Drug trafficking results in a lot of money, and money buys power," said a senior U.S. counter-drug official. "When you have someone who has a base of operations significant enough to earn millions of dollars a year, it's not uncommon for them to wield the kind of power to develop circles of protection. Mexico is no exception to that. That's no secret here. The government of Mexico is well aware."

Calderon has asked the U.S. to shoulder a larger share of the drug enforcement burden. U.S. officials acknowledge that the war in Iraq has shifted attention and military resources away from drug interdiction in the air and sea shipping zones of Mexico and Central America.

Although Calderon has won credit for facing down drug cartels, uncertainty lingers in Washington over how much help to give Mexico's law enforcement agencies, particularly in the gathering and sharing of intelligence.

Garcia Luna would not say whether any of the replaced federal officers were being investigated for alleged corruption, or what prompted the government's decision.

"Any evidence we have will be processed by the attorney general's office, and, of course, any reference we find will be analyzed and sent to prosecutors," he said.

Mexican lawmakers on Monday demanded that Calderon's government present any evidence it has of federal police corruption.

The removed state heads of the federal police, known as the Federal Preventive Police, or PFP, as well as the Federal Investigative Agency, or AFI, will undergo additional training and be subjected to close scrutiny, Garcia Luna said. They will be given polygraph and drug tests, he added, and their financial assets will be examined to see whether they are in line with a public servant's salary.

Garcia Luna said the new state police chiefs were among 284 federal police officers who began work Monday as replacements. Calderon in March called for new standards in police ethics and discipline, triggering the recall.

"It's obvious that there are mafias that don't want things to change," Garcia Luna said. "In the fight against corruption, we won't give in to pressures."

Calderon's campaign began with a flurry of successes in his home state of Michoacan; TV news broadcasts showed destroyed marijuana and opium poppy fields. But cocaine seizures by the army this year are less than half the amount taken during the same period in 2006. Drug killings continue at last year's pace.

The PFP was created in 1998, unifying various federal agencies that had specialized jurisdiction over airports, customs, roads and civil unrest. The 5,000-member AFI was created by then-President Vicente Fox in 2001 to replace a corrupt federal police force.

More than 100 AFI agents work under the supervision of U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents based in Mexico, according to the Justice Department's Office of Inspector General.


sam.enriquez@latimes.com

Carlos Martínez and Cecilia Sánchez of The Times' Mexico City Bureau contributed to this report.

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Border tunnel found under officers' noses

Competing Mexican drug cartels are destroying each other ... and that's where 'Warrior' begins ...."

http://imdb.com/title/tt0320751
http://www.warriorthemovie.blogspot.com

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-208917617001990565&q=warrior+mexican+OR+drug+OR+cartels+duration%3Ashort+genre%3AMOVIE_TRAILER

"the action adventure fantasy feature film "Warrior" ... about the son of a divine force ... is a story of a young man's quest to find his true identity set against the twin backdrops of Native American folklore and the treacherous Mexican drug trade and a portrayal of the classic confrontation between "good and evil" ... filmed in the exotic jungles of Costa Azul in the State of Nayarit and the urban grit of Puerto Vallarta in the State of Jalisco, Mexico .. with action, adventure, romance, comedy, a multi-ethnic cast, a major studio movie music score and spectacular cinematography..."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-briefs25.2jun25,1,1838683.story?coll=la-headlines-world
From the Los Angeles Times
WORLD IN BRIEF | MEXICO
Border tunnel found under officers' noses
From Times Wire Reports

June 25, 2007

Police in Tijuana have discovered a narrow tunnel under the border that was used to smuggle drugs and possibly undocumented migrants into the United States, officials said.

More than 50 tunnels under the U.S.-Mexico border have been found in the last five years.

The latest was found inside an area guarded by Treasury Department officials, according to a Public Safety department spokesman who was not authorized to give his name.

Officials were investigating how the tunnel, about 32 feet long, 2 feet wide and 3 feet high, came to be used so close to where federal officials were on duty, the spokesman said.

Another bloody week as Mexico's drug war rages
Two are killed during the wake of a cartel founder's grandson. At least 46 others die in later attacks nationwide.

Competing Mexican drug cartels are destroying each other ... and that's where 'Warrior' begins ...."

http://imdb.com/title/tt0320751
http://www.warriorthemovie.blogspot.com

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-208917617001990565&q=warrior+mexican+OR+drug+OR+cartels+duration%3Ashort+genre%3AMOVIE_TRAILER

"the action adventure fantasy feature film "Warrior" ... about the son of a divine force ... is a story of a young man's quest to find his true identity set against the twin backdrops of Native American folklore and the treacherous Mexican drug trade and a portrayal of the classic confrontation between "good and evil" ... filmed in the exotic jungles of Costa Azul in the State of Nayarit and the urban grit of Puerto Vallarta in the State of Jalisco, Mexico .. with action, adventure, romance, comedy, a multi-ethnic cast, a major studio movie music score and spectacular cinematography..."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexdrugs9jun09,1,4532721.story?coll=la-headlines-world
From the Los Angeles Times

Another bloody week as Mexico's drug war rages
Two are killed during the wake of a cartel founder's grandson. At least 46 others die in later attacks nationwide.

By Héctor Tobar
Times Staff Writer

June 9, 2007

MEXICO CITY — In the dark early-morning quiet of a funeral parlor here, with a group of mourners praying before the coffin of a 10-year-old boy, another horror-filled week in Mexico's drug-trafficking wars began.

The boy had died in a drowning accident some days earlier that surely had nothing to do with drug trafficking. But his grandfather was Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, the fugitive founder of the Tijuana cartel.

Just after 4 a.m. Monday, as many as six hooded gunmen interrupted the traditional all-night wake, shooting two people to death.

Before they left, the "commandos" (as one newspaper here described them) had scribbled Zs on the victims' backs, a symbol of the Gulf cartel.

By week's end, at least 46 more people would be dead in a dizzying variety of attacks across Mexico, including hand-grenade assaults and decapitations, mainly targeting police, federal agents and rival drug traffickers.

The killings offer a window into the scope of the violence and the tactics of psychological warfare that are often behind it. Many of the deaths appear to involve disputes between competing bands of traffickers. At least one of those bands appears to be splitting into at least two different groups.

On Tuesday, authorities in Tuxtepec, a city in the southern state of Oaxaca, discovered a severed head with a note nearby. "This is going to happen to all the people who work with the Zetas," the message read, referring to the hit men who work for the Gulf cartel. The message was signed, "Sincerely, the New Blood."

The "New Blood" probably refers to a group of Gulf Cartel operatives who have turned against the Zetas as members of the organization bid to control trafficking routes and local drug markets. Genaro Garcia Luna, Mexico's secretary of public safety, said last month that the Gulf cartel had split into rival bands.

At a recent news conference, Garcia Luna said the wave of extreme violence was part of a plan by drug traffickers to force authorities into a "strategic retreat."

"They are trying to create a climate of intimidation and fear … in order to gain operational advantages," Garcia Luna said.

If the residents of a rural town or urban neighborhood come to believe that the drug traffickers cannot be defeated, they will refuse to cooperate with the authorities and create a "social space" of support for the traffickers, he said.

News of ever-more spectacular and gruesome killings has become a hallmark of the drug war this year. Every day this week, new tales of gangland violence have filled the newspapers and airwaves.

On Wednesday, authorities discovered a decapitated body left with a message for state police in the Gulf of Mexico port city of Veracruz. The message accused police of protecting rival drug traffickers and said the decapitated man had been selling street drugs for a rival group.

Four other people were killed in and around Veracruz on Wednesday. One was a funeral director who in May had transported the body of Efrain Torres, an assassinated Zetas leader, to a cemetery in the city of Poza Rica. Torres' body was later stolen from its crypt.

Also on Wednesday, business owner Roberto Moguel Martinez was kidnapped by armed men after being released from a hospital where he had been recovering from wounds suffered in a May 31 attack. His mother wrestled briefly with his kidnappers on a busy street in the center of the city, according to the Veracruz newspaper Notiver. He has not been seen since.

On Thursday, there were three grenade attacks on two police stations and an army barracks in the southern state of Guerrero. In all, seven people were killed in apparent drugrelated attacks there, authorities said.

By Friday morning, the websites of Mexico City newspapers reported that as many as 20 people had been gunned down nationwide in drug-related violence during the previous 24 hours. The dead included three people shot on a highway in the northern state of Durango.

All this happened during a week when President Felipe Calderon traveled to Europe to meet with Pope Benedict XVI and other leaders. On Monday in Rome, Calderon told reporters that U.S. consumers were to blame for the drug-driven chaos in his country.

"I have argued that this is a shared problem between the United States and Mexico," he said. "The principal cause … is the use of drugs. And [the U.S.] is the prime consumer in the world."

Calderon has sent the army into several Mexican states to fill in for over-matched and corrupt local police.

On Monday, three army officers and 16 soldiers were ordered detained in the shooting deaths of three women and two children at a rural, anti-smuggling checkpoint in the western state of Sinaloa. The five were members of a family returning from a wake. Military officials said they had failed to stop at the checkpoint.

For many, the shooting was more evidence of the war psychology gripping many corners of Mexico; about 1,200 people have died in the violence this year.

Writing in the newspaper Reforma, columnist Sergio Sarmiento said the Sinaloa incident proved that innocent people were being killed in the drug war.

"The idea that drug dealers and the people close to them are the only people caught up in the violence we are living in Mexico is a silly lie made up to keep the population calm," Sarmiento wrote. "We are in the midst of war … a struggle in which two sides face off without any concern or thought about the civilian population."


hector.tobar@latimes.com

Carlos Martínez of The Times' Mexico City Bureau contributed to this report.


If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives.

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