Police in 3 Mexico cities disarmed
Officers in the border towns are removed from duty by troops and searched for evidence that might link them to drug cartels.

Competing Mexican drug cartels are destroying each other ... and that's where 'Warrior' begins ...."
http://www.warriorthemovie.com
http://www.warriorthemovie.blogspot.com
http://imdb.com/title/tt0320751

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-mexdrugs23jan23,1,3300125.story?coll=la-headlines-world
From the Los Angeles Times

Police in 3 Mexico cities disarmed
Officers in the border towns are removed from duty by troops and searched for evidence that might link them to drug cartels.

By Héctor Tobar
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

January 23, 2008

MEXICO CITY — Local police were relieved of duty Tuesday in the border cities of Nuevo Laredo, Matamoros and Reynosa as army troops disarmed the officers and searched for evidence that might link them to drug traffickers.

In Nuevo Laredo, soldiers surrounded police headquarters at 8 a.m. and ordered officers to remain inside. Federal troops conducted a similar operation in Tijuana last January, at the beginning of an offensive against Mexico's drug cartels and their allies in the police.

During the first 14 months of his rule, President Felipe Calderon has sent federal troops to at least half a dozen states, including Michoacan in the south and Veracruz on the Gulf. Calderon has vowed to break the power of the traffickers, who wield wide influence over local authorities and intimidate local news media.

At least two drug-trafficking organizations are fighting for control of Nuevo Laredo and its border crossings, a lucrative source of income for smugglers. President Vicente Fox, Calderon's predecessor, sent army troops there in 2005.

But the violence has continued unabated. Several observers in Nuevo Laredo say it is an open secret that many police officers cooperate with traffickers.

In an interview this month with the Spanish newspaper El Pais, Atty. Gen. Eduardo Medina Mora acknowledged that the Calderon government's purges of federal, state and local police were only the beginning.

"There are municipal police forces that have collapsed and that function more as support staff to organized crime rather than as guardians of public safety," Medina Mora said.

Last week, federal police arrested 11 men in Nuevo Laredo, including four police officers, who were said to be operatives for the so-called Gulf cartel.

On Tuesday, all on-duty police officers were confined to their stations and none patrolled the city, according to news reports. About 300 troops of the army's elite Airborne Special Forces Group established checkpoints throughout the city.

"This is an action that is taking place with the full cooperation of the mayor," said Alberto Rodriguez, a spokesman for the Nuevo Laredo city government.

Mexican military officials said the army would patrol the city with the assistance of state and federal police but declined to comment further.

In Matamoros, 600 police officers were confined to stations and were being questioned by federal authorities, according to media reports.

The similar operation last year in Tijuana lasted three weeks, with more than 3,500 soldiers and federal agents sent into the city. Many police patrolled unarmed, and a few were seen with slingshots until their weapons were returned.

In the months since, violence there related to drug trafficking and organized crime has continued unabated.

At least 17 people were killed in the border city last week, including three senior police officials, one of whom was shot in his home alongside his wife and two daughters.

Federal officials have said privately that many of their most recent shootouts have been with operatives of the Gulf cartel, based in the state of Tamaulipas, which includes Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa and Matamoros. The cartel has been the most aggressive in efforts to conquer territory from rivals, officials say.

Army special forces troops Tuesday confiscated two dozen assault rifles in a Reynosa "safe house" said to belong to the Gulf cartel and its band of hit men, the Zetas.

A day earlier, federal agents arrested Alfredo Beltran Leyva, allegedly a leader in the so-called Sinaloa cartel, also known as the cartel of the Pacific. And 11 suspected hit men allegedly linked to Beltran Leyva were arrested Tuesday in two mansions on the southern edge of Mexico City.

The suspected cartel operatives were lined up in the living rooms of the two homes. Federal drug officials presented the men to local reporters alongside a small arsenal of seized weapons, including machine guns and grenades.

hector.tobar@latimes.com

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

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Tijuana's new chief knows the cartel's killers are after him
They've already shot up his house and gunned down three cops. He urges citizens to stand with him.

Competing Mexican drug cartels are destroying each other ... and that's where 'Warrior' begins ...."
http://www.warriorthemovie.com
http://www.warriorthemovie.blogspot.com
http://imdb.com/title/tt0320751

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/local/la-me-tijuana20jan20,0,508172.story?coll=la-home-local
From the Los Angeles Times

Tijuana's new chief knows the cartel's killers are after him
They've already shot up his house and gunned down three cops. He urges citizens to stand with him.

By Richard Marosi
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

January 20, 2008

TIJUANA — The bullet holes pockmarking the walls of his home were just three days old when Alberto Capella Ibarra took over the police force of this violence-plagued city.

Twenty gunmen dressed in black had swarmed his yard in the middle of the night, and he'd fought them off, firing an automatic rifle.

Taking office Dec. 1 as the city's secretary for public security, Capella, a longtime activist, declared war on organized crime and challenged citizens to join him in the battle.

Even he had no idea it would get so bloody.

Seventeen people were killed last week as organized crime struck back. Last Monday night and Tuesday morning, heavily armed men killed three of Capella's senior police officers, shooting one at his home along with his wife and two daughters. Two days later, schoolchildren ran for their lives as police and soldiers battled with drug cartel members in a normally quiet neighborhood. Police found six executed kidnap victims inside the suspects' house. A federal agent and a gunman died in the shootout.

Capella, a chubby, soft-spoken 36-year-old with no police training, is at the center of the storm. He moves around the city in a six-car convoy with 20 bodyguards. He can't even stop at a taco stand without scaring off customers who fear gunmen will drive up and blast away.

Originally a corporate lawyer, Capella gained prominence as an outspoken advocate for crime victims. He has long assumed that killers would one day come for him.

Still, in his role as the head of both the police and fire departments, he keeps the pressure on organized crime and corrupt cops while reassuring citizens during what he calls some of the saddest days ever seen in the city.

On Thursday he told mourners at an honor guard ceremony for the three slain officers that Tijuana's criminals had crossed a historic threshold by adding children to their target lists. "If they've ever had a traditional code, they've broken it," Capella said. "But we are ready to give our last breath to honor our responsibility to society."

After the gunfight at his home in November, Mexican newspapers published cartoon images of Capella as a superhero and dubbed him the Tijuana Rambo.

He could have sat back, enjoying the adulation.

But in his first public appearance after the shooting, Capella rejected it, telling hundreds in a hotel ballroom that society was at fault for meekly tolerating the growth of drug cartels in Tijuana.

He scolded citizens for not holding political leaders accountable and for cynicism. "It's as if criminals have corrupted us all," said Capella, his voice cracking. "Nobody lifts a finger."

"He's been the only public figure who has taken the problem so seriously, that we should take these crimes as a grave insult that speaks badly of us as a state and society in Tijuana," said professor Guillermo Alonso Meneses at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte.

Expectations for police chiefs are low here. At least two of Capella's predecessors have been killed and others indicted.

Meneses likened Capella to Jimmy Stewart's character in the classic western "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," a lawyer determined against all odds to inspire citizens and impose order in a lawless town.

What Capella needs, Meneses joked, is a partner like John Wayne to battle the bad guys.

Capella has 2,300 cops on his force, but finding trusted gunslingers hasn't been easy. The police are a dispirited, dysfunctional bunch. Many take bribes, deal drugs and carry out kidnappings. Capella said his first day at headquarters was like entering Ali Baba's cavern. Still, he needs the police.

Mayor Jorge Ramos appointed him to the post after promising to reduce crime in one of Mexico's most violent cities.

To do so, Capella has to take on a deeply entrenched world of drug kingpins and rival armies who roam around the city in convoys of SUVs with tinted windows. Weakened by arrests and killings, the networks are more desperate and violent than ever.

Capella's crackdown started downtown. He created a "safety zone" around Avenida Revolucion, the heart of the tourist district, flooding the area with cops whose sweeps yielded more than 100 arrests.

Last week began with the biggest victory to date. Police swarmed a group of armed men trying to hijack an armored vehicle as it made the round of downtown banks. Police pursued the assailants across the city, trading gunfire in a wild chase that ended with the death of one suspect and the arrests of four others.

The slayings of the three police officers just hours later clearly were revenge. Two of them had taken part in the chase. The neighborhood gun battle Thursday occurred as people were gathered for the officers' memorial.

The violence last week has brought fear but also a rare display of civic unity.

Dozens of religious, business and political leaders took out an unprecedented full-page ad in a leading newspaper, exhibiting the kind of social responsibility that Capella had asked of citizens.

"Tijuana society repudiates these recent cowardly acts by organized crime," the civic leaders wrote in the ad.

"We will continue supporting governmental authorities in their fight against crime . . . because it's the only way our children can one day enjoy a life of peace and liberty."

Capella used to lead a comfortable, quiet sort of life. He ran a thriving law practice high in Tijuana's tallest office tower and vacationed regularly in the U.S. and Europe with his wife and three children.

Then four years ago, a terrible crime wave hit the city.

Violence spread outside the worlds of drug traffickers and corrupt cops. Businessmen, doctors and other professionals were being snatched off streets in broad daylight by well-organized kidnapping rings.

Capella agreed to become president of the Baja California citizens' advisory on public security. He quickly turned the state post into a bully pulpit, making headlines with blunt attacks on organized crime and the politicians and police who were too corrupt or inept to do anything about it.

As his public profile grew, so did the threats. He sent his wife and children to live elsewhere.

That's why he was home alone Nov. 27 when barking dogs awoke him at 2 a.m.

He looked out his window, saw the gunmen and figured they would probably abduct him, then cut him into pieces. Silencing a leading voice in such a gruesome way, he thought, would send a demoralizing message to the citizenry.

Capella decided to fight, firing through different windows to make it appear he had backup. The return fire deafened and disoriented him, he said, and time seemed to slow during the 15 minutes in which bullets whizzed past his head.

He could hear the gunmen trying to break in through the front door, but he had fortified it as he always did by sliding a couch in front of it. He kept running and firing, sending bullets into doors and walls in his terror.

Finally, the gunmen retreated. Capella walked around his property, now littered with more than 200 shell casings. Bullets had cracked mirrors, punctured furniture and shredded every dress shirt in his closet, he said. The book on his nightstand -- "Transnational Crime and Public Security" -- was riddled with bullet holes.

The attack had occurred just after Capella had surfaced as a candidate for the police job. It could have been a preemptive strike by corrupt police or crime bosses warning him against taking the job.

Death threats continue. Menacing voices over police radio frequencies promise harm to him and his family.

Last Saturday, gunfire again erupted outside his house. Criminals have called in bomb scares at police headquarters, where Capella has his office.

Capella said he has no regrets. When he emerged from the gunfight alive, he said, he felt reborn. God gave him another chance and he plans to make the most of it.

"I think it would be stupid and cowardly to say 'Adios. May God bless you. Nothing can be done.' " Capella said. "I would be left living with a very tragic and lamentable weight on my conscience."

richard.marosi@latimes.com



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In Mexico, reporters learn not to name names
The drug business has become so deadly that those covering it risk their lives.

Competing Mexican drug cartels are destroying each other ... and that's where 'Warrior' begins ...."
http://www.warriorthemovie.com
http://www.warriorthemovie.blogspot.com
http://imdb.com/title/tt0320751

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-notebook14jan14,1,3763464.story?coll=la-headlines-world
From the Los Angeles Times
E-MAIL FROM ABROAD

In Mexico, reporters learn not to name names
The drug business has become so deadly that those covering it risk their lives.

By Héctor Tobar
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

January 14, 2008

MEXICO CITY — The writer was one of the legion of underpaid beat reporters in Mexico, the kind who churn out four or five stories a day, for low pay and little recognition. They know all about the corrupt and violent dealings going on around them, even though they can't always pass on this knowledge to their readers.

He was going to brief me on the local situation, which involved some high-profile killings, various bands of criminals with colorful nicknames and the transport of large quantities of cocaine and marijuana into the United States.

But when I walked into his office, the reporter looked upset. He bit his lower lip and glanced down at the floor, seemingly trying to fight off tears. "I'm quitting," he said.

"What?" I said. "Why?"

In the 2 1/2 years I've been covering the so-called drug wars in Mexico and Central America, I've traveled to small-town police stations, government ministries and newsrooms where journalists require military protection.

Along the way, I've met many courageous people, and many people whose proximity to the drug traffickers' machinery of death has frightened them into silence. This reporter, the lone staffer in his bureau, was a little bit of both. I cannot mention his name, or the town he works in.

After announcing his resignation, he was silent for a time.

"Is there anything I can do to help you?" I asked. He shook his head. We sat like this for a few minutes, until he finally stood up and directed me to his desk.

He pointed to his computer screen and the window of an instant-messaging program, where a flashing missive declared: "You are bothering a lot of people."

It was a death threat: In the local idiom, to be told you are "bothering" someone is an unambiguous warning.

"They've been following me," he said. An hour and half a pack of cigarettes later, he had told me about a car with no license plates that appeared wherever he did, cruising slowly.

"But that's not the reason I'm quitting," he said. It was the low pay and the unfulfilled promises from his bosses (including a company car) that really had him angry. There was something wrong about having to take a bus to cover stories that could get you killed, he said. The threats were just the final straw.

In the end, the reporter stayed on his beat a bit longer and was transferred to a safer place, where he didn't have to cover so many funerals and drug busts -- and where he wouldn't "bother" people who didn't want to be bothered.

That's how it goes when you write about the drug trade: You get close to the story, and then you step away.

"I don't want to know any names," one prominent Mexico City drug expert told me over coffee one day, explaining how he had managed to write about organized crime for years without "bothering" anyone. "When people in the government offer to show me confidential reports, I say, 'Please, don't! I don't want to see them!' "

The expert writes about the drug war's "big picture," and thus avoids the most dangerous thing a writer can do here: reveal a name or a fact that directly affects a trafficker's operations.

The violence tied to the drug-trafficking business has grown more cruel and irrational as the mad scramble for easy money has grown more mad.

In recent years, the attacks have progressed from ambushes with automatic weapons to grenade assaults and grotesque beheadings. When a ton of cocaine falls from the sky, people barely take notice.

In March, police found 2 tons of $100 bills (more than $205 million) in a mansion four blocks from my house here. I've often walked past that now-abandoned house, fantasizing about discovering dollar bills floating in the nearby gutters like so much trash.

Not long ago, my aunt returned to her home in Guatemala City to discover her humble colonia sealed off with police tape. One of her neighbors, a small-time drug dealer, had been shot to death in his doorway. He had been extorting money from the local grocers and was friends with a police officer. All the neighbors knew this, but could do nothing.

My mother lives in Guatemala City too. Less than a mile from her home in the city center, one neighborhood is so infested with drug gangs that the army has set up a base, complete with sandbag parapets, in the local market.

And it was in Guatemala City in November that I came face to face with the drug dead, a body that had been wrapped up in plastic and dumped onto the street from an overpass.

I don't know who the victim was. The Guatemalan news media were too busy covering a presidential election that night (as was I), and the killing wasn't reported in the newspapers.

Nearly all of the drug-related crimes The Times reported on in the region last year remain unsolved, including the killing of several Mexican musicians and the slaying in Guatemala of three Salvadoran legislators.

The Guatemalan police officers arrested in the legislators' killings -- anti-narcotics officers said to be in the hire of drug traffickers -- were themselves killed a few days later in their jail cells. The masterminds of these crimes remain free.

When I traveled to Guatemala to write about the killings, I met several people with theories as to who might be responsible. I learned the names of families and businesses believed linked to the transshipment of drugs. Officials have leaked this information to local journalists, but no one will publish it.

"It's too dangerous," a journalist said. "There's no one here to protect us. And if we're killed, no one will be prosecuted."

Knowing that the piece of unverified information I'd been given could get someone killed, I wondered whether I should even write it down in my notebook.

hector.tobar@latimes.com

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Bodies of Mexican police officers found near border
The killings are called a response to increased military presence. Also, a cousin of the president is abducted.

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

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

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-cousin4jan04,1,3969347.story?coll=la-headlines-world
From the Los Angeles Times
Bodies of Mexican police officers found near border
The killings are called a response to increased military presence. Also, a cousin of the president is abducted.
From Reuters

January 4, 2008

TIJUANA — Three Mexican police officers were abducted, killed and dumped on a heavily patrolled road not far from the U.S. border on New Year's Day despite an influx of troops in the area, the state attorney general's office said Thursday.

The bodies of the officers from this sprawling border city near San Diego were found wrapped in sheets outside the nearby beach town of Rosarito on a highway with several army checkpoints.

"This looks like a response by organized crime to the military's increased presence," said an unidentified official from the Baja California attorney general's office.

President Felipe Calderon has been using about 25,000 troops and federal police to battle powerful organized crime gangs and drug cartels since he came to power a year ago.

The government sent hundreds more troops to Tijuana and Rosarito in late December and disarmed Rosarito's police force after a failed attempt to kill the town's police chief raised suspicions of infiltration by drug gangs.

In 2007, the state counted more than 400 drug-related killings as more than 2,500 people were killed nationwide in spite of the military assault on traffickers.

In other violence, a cousin of Calderon was abducted at gunpoint, beaten and held for several hours, Mexican dailies Reforma and Milenio reported Thursday.

They said armed men seized businessman Alfonso Reyes on Wednesday in the western state of Michoacan but dropped him back home four hours later.

It was not clear whether the abduction was related to the president and his battle against organized crime, and Calderon's office did not immediately confirm the incident.

Abductions for extortion are common in Mexico, which has one of the world's highest kidnapping rates.

Mexican news agency Quadratin, which first reported the story, said Calderon's brother had confirmed the abduction.

It did not know whether a ransom was paid or any cash extorted.

Milenio daily said the abduction was related to Reyes' work.

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