2009 10 16: In Mexican Drug War, Investigators Are Fearful

Source: New York Times

The hit men moved in on their target, shot him dead and then disappeared in a matter of seconds. It would have been a perfect case for José Ibarra Limón, one of this violent border city’s most dogged crime investigators — had he not been the victim.

Mexico has never been particularly adept at bringing criminals to justice, and the drug war has made things worse. Investigators are now swamped with homicides and other drug crimes, most of which they will never crack. On top of the standard obstacles — too little expertise, too much corruption — is one that seems to grow by the day: outright fear of becoming the next body in the street.

Mr. Ibarra was killed on July 27 in what his bosses at the federal attorney general’s office consider an assassination related to a case he was investigating. As if to prove the point, less than a month later, one of the lawyers who had worked for Mr. Ibarra also turned up dead. Two days afterward, an investigator named to replace Mr. Ibarra insisted on being transferred out of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico’s murder capital.

The current prosecutor investigating Mr. Ibarra’s cases is working anonymously, his or her name kept secret by the government.

The Mexican government knows that revamping its problem-plagued justice system is an essential part of breaking the cartels that control vast areas of Mexico. Major efforts are under way to make the judiciary faster and fairer, and the United States has contributed millions of dollars to help bring more criminals to justice.

But even with training programs by American lawyers and judges, American aid to improve forensics and screen more effectively for corruption, as well as other cross-border initiatives, the traffickers and the cumulative pressures they are putting on the judiciary are straining it as never before.

“Obviously what happened affects us,” said Hector García Rodríguez, the federal prosecutor in Juárez and the supervisor of the slain investigator. “We’re still working. We can’t stop. But we know the dangers we face.”

President Felipe Calderón points to the arrests of more than 50,000 people on drug charges since he began his antidrug offensive in December 2006. Many of the arrests appear to have come from top-notch detective work. Other suspects, though, are quietly released after they have been paraded before the news media.

The federal government refused to provide statistics on how many arrests had resulted in convictions, how many suspects were still under investigation or how many arrests had proved to be mistakes. But independent reviews by scholars suggest that only about a quarter of crimes in Mexico are ever reported and that only a small fraction ever result in convictions.

Compounding matters is the sheer number of crimes, especially murders. On a single September night in Ciudad Juárez, 18 men were shot to death in a drug treatment centernear the border, more than the number of killings all year long in El Paso, just across the Texas border.

“Law enforcement is overwhelmed,” said David A. Shirk, a professor at the University of San Diego and the principal investigator for the Justice in Mexico Project, a binational research initiative. “If you have murders with 13 bodies one day and then you have 4 more the next, there’s not a lot of investigation into who pulled the trigger specifically.”

Fear Gets in the Way

One of the two dozen or so cases that Mr. Ibarra had been investigating involved the killing of a journalist, Armando Rodríguez Carreón, 40, who had produced a string of scoops as the longtime crime reporter for the newspaper El Diario. Mr. Rodríguez was shot to death last Nov. 13 as he prepared to take his 8-year-old daughter to school. She was at his side and saw her father struck by at least 10 bullets.

“It was similar to hundreds of homicides we’ve had here,” remarked Mr. García, Mr. Ibarra’s supervisor. “It was an execution.”

It is also similar in that the perpetrators remain at large. Fear prevents many cases from being solved because investigators hesitate to dig too deeply, and witnesses refuse to talk.

“Nobody cooperates with anything,” Mr. García complained. “They’re too afraid. Nobody wants to say what they saw. Nobody wants to give you a plate number.”

Mexico is promoting confidential telephone lines and rewards to encourage witnesses, but resistance lingers, especially when news reports circulate about threats made to those who do call in. And there is considerable doubt that the reward money is worth the risk.

The attacks on investigators only magnify the problem.

“If you had a difficult case, you went to him and said, ‘Ibarra, what do you think?’ ” Mr. García said. Now in trying to solve Mr. Ibarra’s murder, his colleagues wonder aloud how he might have pursued his killers, possibly four men in all, who shot him many times in the head with .45-caliber and 9-millimeter weapons.

The slain journalist’s wife, Blanca Martínez, said that she had met once with Mr. Ibarra, but that she did not think he had been murdered for closing in on her husband’s killers, despite his reputation for solving difficult crimes.

“I don’t think he was really investigating,” she said. Prosecutors had asked once to interview her young daughter, a witness, but had never followed up, Ms. Martínez said.

Pedro Torres, Mr. Rodríguez’s editor and close friend, was similarly unimpressed with the government’s effort to find the killers of his top police reporter.

Investigators waited for months before visiting the newsroom, interviewing some of Mr. Rodríguez’s co-workers and getting copies of his articles. The government has not yet established whether Mr. Rodríguez’s killing stemmed from his work as a police reporter, infuriating his colleagues, who are convinced that such a connection is clear.

“He’s the godfather of my child,” Mr. Torres said. “I’ve known him for years. They’ve never talked to me. What kind of investigation is that?”

Slipshod Investigations

One of the forensic specialists who photograph bodies, lift fingerprints and count spent bullets at Juárez homicide scenes complained that by the time he arrived at a site, significant tampering had already taken place.

“The soldiers come in and walk over everything,” complained the specialist, who spoke anonymously in an out-of-the-way steak restaurant because his supervisors had not authorized him to give an interview. “They leave their fingerprints all around. They want to know who died, so they move the body. They kick the bullets. They don’t realize they’re contaminating the crime scene.”

Thousands of soldiers, deployed by the president in his war against the cartels, patrol the streets of Juárez alongside the local police. Trained to take on enemy combatants, they are far less familiar with the sanctity of crime scenes, the rules of evidence and other basics of law enforcement.

Many police officers also meddle with crime scenes, sometimes out of incompetence, but sometimes to throw off the investigation or to enrich themselves.

“If the victim’s watch is missing, that could be important because it could mean it was a robbery,” the forensic specialist said. “But we can’t rule out that one of the police officers at the scene took it.”

The joint military-police mission now combating traffickers in Juárez presents a more positive picture. It cites the recent arrests of three men suspected of being hired killers, who in August implicated themselves and a fourth suspect in 211 homicides, an eye-popping number even in Mexico.

To trumpet the breakthrough, the government took out newspaper ads listing all the people the suspects were accused of killing. One man alone was linked to 101 murders.

The authorities said the arrests resulted from ballistics investigations, which are modern enough here in Chihuahua State that the El Paso Police Department used them for years for its own investigations. But the men also confessed to the murders, the authorities said, and questions were raised in the local news media about whether the detainees had been coerced, a frequent problem in Mexico.

“We solve our crimes with evidence, and they solve them with confessions,” said the El Paso County sheriff, Richard D. Wiles. “We have strict rules to follow on how to get confessions. The rules are looser over there.”

In a recent assessment of Mexico’s adherence to human rights, the State Department noted that 21 torture complaints and 580 complaints of cruel or degrading treatment had been made against the Mexican authorities in 2008, a significant increase from the year before.

And yet, the report said: “Since 2007, we are not aware that any official has ever been convicted of torture, giving rise to concern about impunity. Despite the law’s provisions to the contrary, police and prosecutors have attempted to justify an arrest by forcibly securing a confession of a crime.”

Without a Trace

Along the border, many victims are never found, leaving relatives — and investigators — in a state of limbo.

Fernando Ocegueda Flores, a founder of an advocacy group in Tijuana for relatives of the disappeared, felt an odd mixture of despair and relief in January, when the police announced that a suspect, Santiago Meza López, had admitted to disposing of the remains of 300 bodies for a drug cartel by dissolving them in barrels of lye.

Mr. Ocegueda thought that maybe his son, abducted in 2007, had been one of the victims of the Pozolero, a nickname for Mr. Meza that translates roughly as the stew maker. Mr. Ocegueda thought his years of trying to learn his son’s fate might end.

Federal authorities took Mr. Meza to Mexico City for questioning and began testing some remains. But the bones were so corroded by the lye that no DNA was found, the authorities have said.

Mr. Ocegueda contends that the investigators should be doing more, like digging up the yard where Mr. Meza said he had disposed of the bodies after boiling them, to search for more bones to test. The yard is guarded by the federal police, but a human jaw bone with a tooth attached and various suspicious mounds of earth were visible inside.

Frustrated, Mr. Ocegueda said that if the site was not properly investigated soon, he and other relatives planned to storm the place with shovels and begin digging themselves.

But a coroner’s investigator who has reviewed some of the remains from such barrels in other cases said the traffickers covered their tracks well.

“You can’t tell by looking that it’s a human being,” said the investigator, who was not authorized to speak publicly. “It’s a glob of something, and the DNA is gone.”

Cross-Border Police Work

Every month, law enforcement officials from both sides of the border, whether from the F.B.I. or the Tijuana police, gather to talk shop at a chain restaurant in southern California.

“Without cooperation, so many cases would sit still,” said the California investigator who convenes the sessions, Val Jimenez, executive director of the International Law Enforcement Officers Association. Cross-border policing has caught child molesters, car thieves and murderers.

It also helped solve one particularly grisly missing person case.

Daniel LaPorte, 27, disappeared after heading across the border to Baja California from San Diego last year. Eventually, his green Cadillac was found south of Tijuana, outside Rosarito Beach, with four dead people in and around it. None were Mr. LaPorte.

As the family’s private investigator looked into the case with police officers from San Diego and Baja California, a Mexican detective mentioned that a barrel apparently containing human remains had been discovered not far from the location of the quadruple homicide.

Luck played a role in identifying the remains. It had rained heavily after the barrel had been abandoned on a remote hillside, investigators said. The barrel had fallen over and some of the bones had been washed away by the rain, diluting the corrosive solution and preventing all the DNA from being stripped away. Laboratory tests conducted in Tijuana showed that the remains were Mr. LaPorte’s.

Investigators eventually determined that Mr. LaPorte had been involved in trafficking marijuana from Mexico to Rhode Island, some of it in surfboards. He had probably bought several tons of marijuana a year, the family’s investigator said.

Mr. Jimenez and some of the other law enforcement officials who work on these joint investigations are sympathetic to the policing challenges their Mexican counterparts face.

“We don’t think we’re going to die when we go to work, but over there it is a real possibility,” Mr. Jimenez said. “A lot of them want to do good police work, but there are some cases they can’t do because of the pressure of the cartels.”

Arresting the Wrong People

Alejandra González Licea said the only conceivable ties she had ever had to drug trafficking were purely academic ones. A linguistics professor who wrote her thesis on narcocorridos, the Mexican ballads that often extol the exploits of drug bosses, Ms. González found herself blindfolded and handcuffed by soldiers this year and interrogated about which drug cartel was employing her.

Her answer — the Autonomous University of Baja California — did not impress her interrogators. The professor and her husband endured months of detention before the charges were quietly dropped. The $28,000 in cash they were caught carrying was a gift from an uncle in the United States to help them remodel their home, it was determined, not illicit drug profits they were laundering.

After her initial detention, Ms. González was led to a news conference, where journalists were gathered to photograph her. She stood next to her husband and two men she did not know. On the table before them, much to her surprise, was nearly half a million dollars.

It turned out that she was being grouped with two money-laundering suspects arrested the same night with a much larger amount of cash. It would take two and a half months before a judge would throw out the case against her and her husband for lack of proof.

Mexico has approved a sweeping overhaul of its judiciary to replace its closed-door judicial proceedings with trials in which defendants like Ms. González are considered innocent until proved guilty. But revamping the system is no easy feat. It requires retraining lawyers and judges, rebuilding courtrooms and improving forensic technology, all while trying to keep on top of a flood of new cases.

Police forces are also getting an overhaul. Officers in Tijuana and Juárez, two of the most violence-prone cities, have been fired en masse after being linked to organized crime. The two federal police agencies have been reorganized under a single commander. Beyond that, a new police training institute has been established and the government has set up a national database to share information and intelligence.

Still, Ms. González, now back at her teaching job, shook her head when asked about the Mexican government’s competence. She doubts the official statistics, since she figures she was one of the 50,000 people that the president cited as drug suspects.

“They didn’t even find out that I wrote my thesis on narcocorridos,” she said of those who were prosecuting her. “Good thing they didn’t find out.”

Doing What Police Won’t

The authorities discourage civilians from investigating their own cases because of the obvious dangers involved. But many grow tired of waiting for the police and, having no luck with private investigators, conduct their own inquiries.

Cristina Palacios, president of the Citizens’ Association Against Impunity, recounted how one of her members, a Tijuana woman whose brother had been kidnapped, offered a reward herself, furious at how little had been done to investigate the disappearance.

Shadowy men contacted the woman, and she agreed to be taken away with a blindfold, Ms. Palacios said. Soon the woman found herself in a room where a man tied to a chair was being beaten by a group of men. The man confessed to killing her brother.

The next day, the woman, who declined to speak on the record about what occurred, saw in the newspaper that a body had been found. It looked like the man in the chair, Ms. Palacios said.

Mr. Ocegueda, in search of his missing son, had a similar experience. One night, in the course of his personal investigation, he allowed himself to be led away with his eyes covered and driven for about 40 minutes by a man he met who had links to traffickers.

Eventually, he was led into a home, where he said a gruff man told him, “You’re very brave to come here.”

Apparently impressed by his gumption, the man gave Mr. Ocegueda a shot of whiskey and told him that his son had been killed and would never be found. His remains had been destroyed in lye, the man said.

But Mr. Ocegueda, continuing to investigate, later found another organized crime figure, who led him in another direction. This time, he was told his son was alive and working for traffickers. Now, he does not know what to think.

“The police are supposed to be doing this, not me,” he said. “But they don’t want to investigate because they don’t want to solve these crimes. They might be killed if they find the truth. I don’t care if they kill me.”

2009 10 06: Immigration Hard-Liner Has His Wings Clipped

Source(s): NY Times (10/06/2009) & (03/03/2009) + GAO Report

PHOENIX — The Maricopa County sheriff, who has drawn scorn and praise for a running crackdown on illegal immigrants in this city’s metropolitan area, said Tuesday that federal officials had taken away his deputies’ authority to make immigration arrests in the field.

The sheriff, Joe Arpaio, whose high-profile sweeps have been cited in the fevered debate over the need for an overhaul of immigration laws, said he had sought a renewed agreement with the Department of Homeland Security to allow both field arrests and immigration checks at his jails. But a high-level department official presented a document a couple of weeks ago allowing only for jail checks, Mr. Arpaio said.

That prompted an angry, rambling outburst from the sheriff Tuesday at a news conference at which he called Homeland Security officials “liars” and vowed to press on with his campaign, using state laws, against illegal immigrants. He said he would drive those caught on the streets to the border if federal officers refused to take them into custody.

Homeland Security officials declined to comment, saying they are still reviewing their agreement with the sheriff’s department and the other 65 agencies that participate in a program that allows local and state officers to make immigration arrests.

Immigrant advocates and some lawmakers have called on the department to end the program, known as 287(g) after the section of the 1996 law that authorized it, saying it has led to racial profiling and other abuses. Several advocates put out statements Tuesday expressing dismay that the department was keeping any relationship with Mr. Arpaio.

Last week, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus wrote to President Obama, urging him to “immediately terminate” the program because of the complaints.

A report this year by Congress’ watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, found that the program had not been closely supervised and that it had often led to the arrest of minor offenders instead of the criminals it was intended to pursue.

The Homeland Security Department has sought to mend it the program, not end it.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency that runs it, this summer announced an overhaul of the program and sought to reach new agreements with the agencies involved. Two agencies in Massachusetts have since announced their withdrawal from the program.

The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, with some 160 federally trained deputies, is the largest in the program and the most closely scrutinized by people on all sides of the immigration debate.

Mr. Arpaio conceded that the vast majority of the 33,000 arrests of illegal immigrants his office has made in the past two years under the agreement followed a check on the immigration status of people in jails. About 300 have been arrested in the field during “crime suppression” operations, he said. He called those arrests symbolically important.

“It has to do with public perception,” he said, noting reports that some illegal immigrants are leaving the area in part because of his deputies. “I think the bad guys apparently are leaving because they know they are here illegally. This is a crime deterrent program, too.”

In March, the Justice Department’s civil rights division announced that it was investigating the department, but Mr. Arpaio has conducted sweeps since then and he predicted that he would be exonerated.

The Maricopa agreement was also being watched to see if Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, a Democrat and the former governor of Arizona, would take the opportunity to rein in Mr. Arpaio, a Republican and one of the state’s most popular figures. Although they did not often clash publicly, their political supporters often lashed out at one another.

By the account of Mr. Arpaio and his aides, he signed a copy of a new agreement on Sept. 21, allowing for both field and jail arrests. But that evening, Alonzo Pena, a top Immigration and Customs Enforcement official, called from Washington and said he would be arriving in Phoenix the next day to discuss it.

After he arrived, Mr. Pena presented Mr. Arpaio another agreement that allowed only for jail checks.

Mr. Arpaio signed it, but it still must be approved by the county’s governing board. The board has been sympathetic to Mr. Arpaio on immigration matters, but he suggested the vote was far from a done deal.

Either way, he and his supporters vowed to press on.

Andrew Thomas, the county attorney, appeared with Mr. Arpaio to voice his support and condemn the “setback in the fight against illegal immigration.” Mr. Thomas said, “The fight goes on.”

He and Mr. Arpaio suggested that deputies could use the state anti-human smuggling law to make stops and refer suspected illegal immigrants to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, though it was not clear whether the agency would take them.

If not, the sheriff said, “I’ll take a little trip to the border and turn them over to the border.”

By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

2009 10 07: Cartels Face an Economic Battle

Source: Washington Post

U.S. Marijuana Growers Cutting Into Profits of Mexican Traffickers

Stiff competition from thousands of mom-and-pop marijuana farmers in the United States threatens the bottom line for powerful Mexican drug organizations in a way that decades of arrests and seizures have not, according to law enforcement officials and pot growers in the United States and Mexico.

Illicit pot production in the United States has been increasing steadily for decades. But recent changes in state laws that allow the use and cultivation of marijuana for medical purposes are giving U.S. growers a competitive advantage, challenging the traditional dominance of the Mexican traffickers, who once made brands such as Acapulco Gold the standard for quality.

Almost all of the marijuana consumed in the multibillion-dollar U.S. market once came from Mexico or Colombia. Now as much as half is produced domestically, often by small-scale operators who painstakingly tend greenhouses and indoor gardens to produce the more potent, and expensive, product that consumers now demand, according to authorities and marijuana dealers on both sides of the border.

The shifting economics of the marijuana trade have broad implications for Mexico’s war against the drug cartels, suggesting that market forces, as much as law enforcement, can extract a heavy price from criminal organizations that have used the spectacular profits generated by pot sales to fuel the violence and corruption that plague the Mexican state.

While the trafficking of cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine is the main focus of U.S. law enforcement, it is marijuana that has long provided most of the revenue for Mexican drug cartels. More than 60 percent of the cartels’ revenue — $8.6 billion out of $13.8 billion in 2006 — came from U.S. marijuana sales, according to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Now, to stay competitive, Mexican traffickers are changing their business model to improve their product and streamline delivery. Well-organized Mexican cartels have also moved to increasingly cultivate marijuana on public lands in the United States, according to the National Drug Intelligence Center and local authorities. This strategy gives the Mexicans direct access to U.S. markets, avoids the risk of seizure at the border and reduces transportation costs.

Unlike cocaine, which the traffickers must buy and transport from South America, driving up costs, marijuana has been especially lucrative for the cartels because they control the business all the way from clandestine fields in the Mexican mountains to the wholesale dealers in U.S. cities such as Washington.

“It’s pure profit,” said Jorge Chabat, an expert on the drug trade at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics in Mexico City.

The exact dimensions of the U.S. marijuana market are unknown. The 2007 National Survey on Drug Use and Health estimated that 14.4 million Americans age 12 and over had used marijuana in the past month. More than 10 percent of the U.S. population reported smoking pot once in the past year.

Mexico produced 35 million pounds of marijuana last year, according to government estimates. On a hidden hilltop field in Mexico’s Sinaloa state, reachable by donkey, a pound of pot might earn a farmer $25. The wholesale price for the same pound in Phoenix is $550, and so the Mexican cartels could be selling $20 billion worth of marijuana in the U.S. market each year.

“Marijuana created the drug trafficking organizations you see today. The founding families of the cartels got their start with pot. And marijuana remains a highly profitable business they will fight to protect,” said Luis Astorga, a leading authority on the drug cartels at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, who grew up in Sinaloa in 1960s and recalls seeing major growers at social functions in the state capital, Culiacan.

Led by California, 13 U.S. states now permit some use of marijuana; Maryland is considering such a law. In many cities, marijuana is one of the lowest priorities for police.

To some authorities, the new laws are essentially licenses to grow money. With a $100 investment in enriched soil and nutrients, almost anyone can cultivate a plant that will produce two pounds of marijuana that can sell for $9,000 in hundreds of medical marijuana clubs or on the street, according to growers.

High-end marijuana grown under such special conditions often fetches 10 times the price of poor-quality Mexican pot grown in abandoned cornfields and stored for months in damp conditions that erode its quality further.

“What’s happened in the last five years, it’s just gotten totally, totally out of hand, as far as a green rush of people coming from all kinds of different states and realizing the kind of money you can make,” Jack Nelsen, commander of the Humboldt County Drug Task Force in Northern California. County residents who have a doctor’s recommendation can legally grow as many as 99 plants.

Authorities found and destroyed about 8 million marijuana plants in the United States last year, compared with about 3 million plants in 2004. Asked to estimate how much of the overall marijuana crop was being caught in his area, Wayne Hanson, who heads the marijuana unit of the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office, said: “I would truthfully say we’re lucky if we’re getting 1 percent.”

The Mexican traffickers’ illegal use of public lands is a response to the dramatic increase in U.S. production, according to authorities and growers. In the northern woods of California, illegal immigrants hired by well-heeled Mexican “patrons,” or bosses, lay miles of plastic pipe and install oscillating sprinkler systems for clandestine fields that produce a cheaper, faster-growing “commercial grade” of marijuana. Eric Sligh, the editor and publisher of Grow magazine in Northern California’s Mendocino County, said the Mexicans use a fast-growing variety of marijuana and time their harvests to periods of low domestic production in the United States.

After establishing sophisticated farming networks in California, Washington and Oregon, the Mexican traffickers are shifting operations eastward to Michigan, Arkansas and North Carolina, federal agents say.

Like wily commodity traders, Mexican traffickers time their shipments to exploit growing cycles in the United States. They warehouse tons of pot south of the border to ship north during periods when demand peaks and domestic supplies are scarce, Mexican anti-narcotics officials said.

The traffickers are also engaged in an escalating race to achieve higher levels of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the chemical ingredient that gives pot its potency. The THC content of Mexican marijuana seized at the southwest border jumped from 4.8 percent in 2003 to 7.3 percent in 2007, according to U.S. officials. Those levels are still less than half that of the highly potent marijuana found in places such as Arcata, where THC content often tops 20 percent.

Although most Mexican marijuana is still grown outdoors, Mexican security forces have begun to discover greenhouse operations, similar to those found in the United States and Canada. A Mexican army unit on routine patrol in Sinaloa arrested two men in a greenhouse the size of an American football field with more than 20,000 marijuana plants inside. The greenhouse was equipped with modern, highly sophisticated refrigeration, heating and lighting systems.

In the national forests and public timberlands of Northern California, Mexican growers shoot at U.S. law enforcement agents with growing frequency and use fertilizers and pesticides that pollute watersheds and start fires. A 90,000-acre blaze in Southern California’s Los Padres National Forest in August began on a marijuana farm run by Mexican traffickers, according to authorities. The fields are so inaccessible that helicopters are needed to insert agents, who cut the plants with pruning shears, machetes and even chain saws before airlifting them to be destroyed.

This season, five teams from the Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement in California have seized 4.2 million plants worth an estimated $1.5 billion, a 576 percent jump since 2004.

Ralph Reyes, chief of operations for Mexico and Central America for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, said intelligence suggests that the major cartels are directly behind much of the marijuana growth that is taking place on public lands. “The casual consumer in the U.S. — the kid or adult that smokes a joint — will never in their mind associate smoking that joint with the severing of people’s heads in Mexico,” he said.

But it has been difficult for U.S. authorities to prove the connection, partly because the individuals who cultivate the plants have no idea who they are working for and are able to give little information when arrested.

A Mexican grower in Humboldt County, who recently harvested 800 plants and asked not to be identified, said the pot farmers are usually approached by an anonymous boss, who puts up the money — sometimes as much as $50,000 — for the seed, fertilizer, hoses, camping equipment and food needed to live in the woods for three months growing “Maribel,” as the Mexicans refer to the plants.

The grower said the patron pays the growers in cash or product, which they can then sell on their own.

“The mountain can eat you up,” the grower said. “You’re only thinking about the next day. You have to get up at 4 in the morning to water the marijuana, because the helicopter might come by when the sun is up, and if you water too late, he’ll see the mist coming off the plants. You do this every day. There’s no church on Sunday or anything like that. You have to be focused. You have to give everything for them.”

2009 08 21: Bernanke Says Global Economy Emerging From Recession

Source: Bloomberg

Aug. 21 (Bloomberg) — Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said the global economy is “beginning to emerge” from a recession after “aggressive” action by central banks and governments.

“After contracting sharply over the past year, economic activity appears to be leveling out, both in the United States and abroad, and the prospects for a return to growth in the near term appear good,” Bernanke said today in a speech at the Kansas City Fed’s annual symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

Economists forecast the U.S. will emerge from the worst recession since the 1930s, with the economy in the third quarter expanding at a 2.2 percent annual rate, according to the median estimate in an August survey by Bloomberg News. The International Monetary Fund last month predicted the world economy will expand 2.5 percent in 2010 after contracting 1.4 percent this year.

Signs are emerging that growth is resuming in other countries, with Japan, Germany and France all expanding in the second quarter. The Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said Aug. 19 that the economy of its 30 members was flat in the second quarter after contracting 2.1 percent in the previous three months.

Feldstein Sees Danger

The U.S. economy “is still weak and it’s not at all clear that the upturn that we’ve seen recently is the beginning of a sustainable rise,” Harvard University economist Martin Feldstein said in a Bloomberg Television interview in Jackson Hole. “There’s a serious danger that come the end of this year and the beginning of next year we will see it slipping back down again.”

Bernanke said the world economy still confronts “critical” challenges.

“Strains persist in many financial markets across the globe, financial institutions face additional significant losses and many businesses and households continue to experience considerable difficulty gaining access to credit,” Bernanke said. Recovery “is likely to be relatively slow at first, with unemployment declining only gradually from high levels.”

U.S. stocks gained for a fourth day, and Treasury securities fell in reaction to Bernanke’s speech and a rise in existing home sales. The Standard and Poor’s 500 Index was up 1.5 percent at 10:51 a.m. in New York. Benchmark 10-year notes yielded 3.54 percent, up 11 basis points from yesterday.

Home Sales Climb

Sales of existing U.S. homes climbed 7.2 percent to a 5.24 million annual rate, the most since August 2007, the National Association of Realtors said.

European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet and Bank of Japan Governor Masaaki Shirakawa are scheduled tomorrow to address the conference. Brian Madigan, Bernanke’s top official for monetary policy, is scheduled to speak today as part of a panel discussion. The topic of the central bank’s mountainside conference this year is financial stability and macroeconomic policy.

The IMF may raise its forecast for the global economic rebound, John Lipsky, the fund’s first deputy managing director, said in an interview yesterday in Jackson Hole.

A “strong and unprecedented international policy response” averted “the imminent collapse of the global financial system,” Bernanke said. The Fed has “consistently maintained” that the failure of a large, interconnected financial institution would have dire consequences for markets and the economy.

‘Spared No Effort’

“We have therefore spared no effort, within our legal authorities and in appropriate cooperation with other agencies, to avert such a failure,” he said. “The case of the investment bank Lehman Brothers proved exceptionally difficult, however.”

The Fed chairman reiterated that Lehman had inadequate collateral to merit a Fed loan “of sufficient size to meet its funding needs.” The government also lacked the authority to inject capital and sustain the firm, he said. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. filed for bankruptcy in September.

“Although concerted policy actions avoided much worse outcomes, the financial shocks of September and October nevertheless severely damaged the global economy — starkly illustrating the potential effects of financial stress on real economic activity,” Bernanke said.

Last week, Fed policy makers extended by a month, through October, a $300 billion program to buy long-term U.S. Treasuries, aiming to ensure a “smooth transition in markets.” They also affirmed a pledge to keep interest rates near a record low for an “extended period” even as they determined the economy is “leveling out.”

Fed’s Debt Purchases

Since the collapse of Lehman, the Fed has bought as much as $350 billion of short-term debt issued by companies including General Electric Co. and expanded currency swaps with other central banks to aid financial firms outside the U.S.

Bernanke has also led policy makers in a reduction of the benchmark interest rate almost to zero and in the purchase of as much as $1.75 trillion of Treasuries and housing debt.

“As severe as the economic impact has been, however, the outcome could have been decidedly worse,” Bernanke said. “Unlike in the 1930s, when policy was largely passive and political divisions made international economic and financial cooperation difficult, during the past year monetary, fiscal and financial policies around the world have been aggressive and complementary.”

Policy makers must now rewrite regulations to reflect lessons from the crisis, and that will prevent “a recurrence of the events of the past two years,” he said.

Term Expiring

President Barack Obama has yet to indicate whether he will nominate Bernanke for a second term as Fed chief after his current term ends Jan. 31.

Feldstein endorsed Bernanke for a second term. “He certainly deserves it. He has done a remarkably creative job of dealing with these problems,” Feldstein said.

Investors and traders see reappointment as increasingly likely. Yesterday, futures contracts on the Web site Intrade showed a 79 percent chance Bernanke will be tapped for a second term.

To contact the reporter on this story: Craig Torres in Washington at ctorres3@bloomberg.net; Scott Lanman in Washington at slanman@bloomberg.net.

2009 08 20: Department of Justice Press Release

Fuente: Department of Justice

Ten Alleged Mexican Drug Cartel Leaders Among 43 Defendants Indicted in Brooklyn and Chicago as Part of Coordinated Strike Against Mexican Drug Trafficking Organizations

Forty-three defendants in the United States and Mexico, including 10 alleged Mexican drug cartel leaders, have been charged in 12 indictments unsealed yesterday and today in U.S. federal courts in Brooklyn and Chicago, the Department of Justice, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced. The alleged leaders and other high-ranking members of several of Mexico’s most powerful drug cartels are charged with operating continuing criminal enterprises or participating in international drug trafficking conspiracies.

“Breaking up these dangerous cartels and stemming the flow of drugs, weapons and cash across the Southwest border is a top priority for this Justice Department,” said Attorney General Eric Holder. “The cartels whose alleged leaders are charged today constitute multi-billion dollar networks that funnel drugs onto our streets and what invariably follows is more crime and violence in our communities. Today’s indictments demonstrate our unwavering commitment to root out the leaders of these criminal enterprises wherever they may be found. We will continue to stand with our partners in Mexico to dismantle the cartels’ insidious operations.”

“Realizing that neither of our two countries can win over drug traffickers on its own, we have built up the bilateral cooperation between the United States and Mexico to allow us to combine our investigative and legal resources to dismantle these transnational drug organizations and bring the leaders to justice,” said Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora. “We can only protect the right of our societies to live in peace and harmony through our governments’ mutual trust and shared responsibility.”

Three of the suspected leaders were charged in both Brooklyn and Chicago. Joaquin “el Chapo” Guzman-Loera, Ismael “el Mayo” Zambada-Garcia and Arturo Beltran-Leyva, who are allegedly among the most powerful drug traffickers in Mexico, are alleged to be present and former heads of an organized crime syndicate known as the “Sinaloa Cartel” and “the Federation.” Each of these three is designated as a Consolidated Priority Organization Target or CPOT by the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF).

Also charged in the Brooklyn indictments were seven other cartel leaders, including CPOT Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel Villarreal, Hector Beltran-Leyva (Arturo’s brother) and Jesus Zambada-Garcia (Ismael’s brother), each alleged leaders within the Federation; CPOT Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, the alleged head of the Juarez Cartel; CPOT Luis and Esteban Rodriguez-Olivera, alleged leaders of Los Gueros; and CPOT Tirso Martinez-Sanchez, the alleged head of his own international drug trafficking organization.

Together, the four Brooklyn and eight Chicago indictments charge that between 1990 and December 2008, Guzman-Loera, Ismael Zambada-Garcia, Arturo Beltran-Leyva and others were responsible for importing into the United States and distributing nearly 200 metric tons of cocaine, additional large quantities of heroin, and the bulk smuggling from the United States to Mexico of more than $5.8 billion in cash proceeds from narcotics sales throughout the United States and Canada.

The indictments unsealed today collectively seek forfeiture of more than $5.8 billion in drug proceeds. Also, more than 32,500 kilograms of cocaine have been seized, including approximately 3,000 kilograms seized during the Chicago investigation, approximately 7,500 kilograms seized during the New York investigation and 22,500 kilograms seized previously that were later linked to the activities of the Federation. The indictments also detail seizures of 64 kilograms of heroin and more than $22.6 million in cash during the course of the investigation.

As part of the coordinated actions, eight defendants have been arrested in the Chicago and Atlanta areas in the last week.  Earlier this year, 10 additional defendants, all customers of or couriers for the organizations, were charged separately in Chicago. Five defendants, all New York-based wholesale distributors or logistics coordinators for the cartels, were charged separately in Brooklyn. In all, 58 individuals have been charged in the investigation coordinated between the U.S. Attorneys’ Offices in Brooklyn and Chicago. All but one of the defendants face a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted of the charges against them.

“The indictments announced today are the result of a sweeping national and international effort to stem the flow of drugs across the U.S./Mexico border and into our communities,” said Benton J. Campbell, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. “We will apply all available resources to win this battle.” Mr. Campbell extended his grateful appreciation to ICE and the DEA Task Force in New York, the agencies responsible for leading the Eastern District’s investigation, and to the assistance provided by ICE and DEA in Miami, Houston, Mexico and Colombia.

“These indictments are among the most significant drug conspiracy charges ever returned in Chicago,” said Patrick J. Fitzgerald, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois. “They charge two major international supply organizations with importing many tons of cocaine and large quantities of heroin into the United States, often to wholesale distribution customers in Chicago, as well as to customers in other major cities. The defendants allegedly used practically every means of transportation imaginable to move these large amounts of drugs and to funnel massive amounts of money back to Mexico. I applaud the efforts of the DEA investigators who worked hard to put these cases together.” Mr. Fitzgerald also thanked the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation Division agents in Chicago and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Wisconsin in Milwaukee for their assistance.

“Today’s indictments are yet another strike against the leadership of the Mexican drug cartels,” said DEA Acting Administrator Michele M. Leonhart. “Our relentless investigations penetrated deep into these pervasive criminal organizations, connecting street operations in U.S. communities like Chicago and New York to the top drug kingpins calling the shots in Mexico.  Make no mistake; along with our courageous partners in Mexico, we will break these cartels and pursue their leaders.”

“Law enforcement agencies in the Americas are working closer than ever before and setting up a united, borderless offense against drug cartels,” said Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for ICE John Morton.  “This is a significant step in breaking down the infrastructure of these criminal organizations.”

According to one of the Brooklyn indictments, between 1990 and 2005, Guzman-Loera, Ismael Zambada-Garcia and Arturo Beltran-Leyva, together with Hector Beltran-Leyva, Jesus Zambada-Garcia and Villareal as leaders of the Federation, conspired to import more than 120 metric tons (264,000 pounds) of cocaine into the United States through the cooperative arrangements and coordination that the Federation provided. Members of the Federation shared drug transportation routes and obtained their drugs from various Colombian drug organizations, in particular, the Colombian Norte Valle Cartel. For example, in 2004, two shipments totaling 22,500 kilograms of cocaine were seized by the U.S. Coast Guard off the coast of Mexico. The indictment alleges that the defendants employed “sicarios,” or hitmen, who carried out hundreds of acts of violence in Mexico, including murders, kidnappings, tortures and violent collections of drug debts, at their direction.

The indictments in Chicago allege that in approximately early 2008 Arturo Beltran-Leyva split his alliance with Guzman-Loera, Ismael Zambada-Garcia and the Federation due to various issues, including control of lucrative narcotics trafficking routes into the United States and the loyalty of wholesale narcotics customers, including the alleged leaders of a Chicago distribution cell. The indictments charge that Guzman-Loera and Ismael Zambada-Garcia, together with seven other high-ranking associates, including two of their sons, Alfredo Guzman-Salazar (Guzman-Loera’s son) and Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla (Ismael Zamada-Garcia’s son, who is in custody in Mexico), coordinated their narcotics trafficking activities to import multi-ton quantities of cocaine from Central and South American countries, through Mexico, and into the United States using various means of transportation, including Boeing 747 cargo aircraft; submarines and other submersible and semi-submersible vessels; container ships; go-fast boats; fishing vessels; buses; rail cars; tractor trailers; and automobiles

Guzman-Loera and Ismael Zambada-Garcia allegedly coordinated their cocaine and heroin smuggling activities to wholesale distributors throughout the United States, including a large distribution cell in Chicago of which 16 individuals were charged in an indictment unsealed today. On average, the Chicago cell allegedly received 1,500 to 2,000 kilograms of cocaine per month, at times obtaining all or a large portion of that quantity from Guzman-Loera and Ismael Zambada-Garcia and the factions of the Sinaloa Cartel they controlled, while also obtaining a substantial portion of that quantity from the Arturo Beltran-Leyva Cartel. From Chicago, the indictments allege that large quantities of cocaine and heroin were further distributed to customers in Cincinnati and Columbus, Ohio; Detroit; Milwaukee; New York; Philadelphia; Washington, D.C.; Vancouver, British Columbia; and elsewhere.

Guzman-Loera, Ismael Zambada-Garcia and the factions of the Sinaloa Cartel they controlled allegedly used various means to evade law enforcement and protect their narcotics distribution activities, including obtaining guns and other weapons; bribes; engaging in violence and threats of violence; and intimidating with threats of violence members of law enforcement, rival narcotics traffickers and members of their own drug trafficking organizations. According to the indictment, Guzman-Loera, Ismael Zambada-Garcia and his son, Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla, discussed obtaining weapons from the United States and using violence against American and/or Mexican government buildings in retaliation for each country’s enforcement of its narcotics laws and to perpetuate their narcotics trafficking activities.

In one of the indictments unsealed today in Brooklyn, Vicente Carrillo Fuentes is alleged to be the leader of the Juarez Cartel, which operates in the Juarez-El Paso corridor, one of the primary drug smuggling routes along the border between the United States and Mexico running from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, to El Paso, Texas. The DEA estimates that approximately 90 percent of the cocaine that enters the United States comes through Mexico. The Juarez Cartel allegedly received multi-ton cocaine shipments in Mexico from the Colombian Norte Valle Cartel and from the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), a Colombian paramilitary organization and a major drug trafficking organization. According to the indictment, the Juarez Cartel maintained its power through the payment of bribes and through numerous acts of violence, including murder.

In another Brooklyn indictment, brothers Luis and Esteban Rodriguez-Olivera are charged with leading Los Gueros, a drug trafficking organization that rose to prominence within the Federation. According to court documents, Los Gueros operated a narcotics supply route that originated in Mexico, stretched into Texas and then branched off to various points, including the New York metropolitan area. Between 1996 and 2008, Los Gueros allegedly imported more than 100,000 kilograms of cocaine into the United States. The DEA estimates that between 2004 and 2006, the organization was responsible for shipping more than 2,000 kilograms of cocaine to New York City alone. In January 2006, Mexican authorities seized approximately 5,200 kilograms of the organization’s cocaine destined for the United States.

Tirso Martinez-Sanchez is alleged in one of the Brooklyn indictments to be an organizer and leader of an extensive international narcotics importation, distribution and transportation organization that is responsible for the distribution of multiple tons of cocaine in the United States. Martinez-Sanchez’s organization allegedly imported cocaine into the United States from Mexico through California and Texas, and then transported the cocaine overland to large distribution centers, including Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. In addition to coordinating the distribution of his own organization’s cocaine, Martinez-Sanchez also allegedly transported and distributed narcotics for members of the Juarez Cartel and the Federation.

The cases in the Eastern District of New York are being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Andrea Goldbarg, Claire Kedeshian, Bonnie Klapper, Stephen Meyer, Walter Norkin, Patricia Notopoulos and Carolyn Pokorny.

The cases in the Northern District of Illinois are being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Thomas Shakeshaft, Michael Ferrara, Greg Deis, Lindsay Jenkins, Renai Rodney, Angel Krull and Halley Guren.

The cases were investigated by the DEA, ICE and Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation, in cooperation with Mexican and Colombian law enforcement authorities. Additional assistance was provided by U.S. Attorney’s Offices in Milwaukee, Miami and Houston. The Criminal Division’s Office of International Affairs provided assistance in these cases. The investigative efforts were coordinated with the Special Operations Division, comprised of agents, analysts and attorneys from the Criminal Division’s Narcotic and Dangerous Drug Section (NDDS); DEA; FBI; ICE; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; U.S. Marshals Service; and Internal Revenue Service. Certain individuals named in indictments unsealed today have also been charged by other U.S. Attorneys’ Offices around the country and by NDDS.

An indictment is a formal charging document notifying the defendant of the charges. All persons charged in an indictment are presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Copies of indictments can be found at: http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/opa_documents.htm