The reported discovery in cartel hands of a sheaf of police documents containing agents’ names and contact numbers, along with apparent references to shared US intelligence data, has renewed fears of high-level corruption in Mexico’s war on drugs.
The papers — which also included an apparent drug cartel payroll listing police commanders — was found in the car of an associate of Mexico’s most powerful drug lord, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, during a bust in May last year, the newspaper Reforma said on Monday.
Coming less than two years after a widespread corruption probe known as Operation Clean House toppled Mexico’s former anti-drug czar — Noe Ramirez — and other top officials for allegedly collaborating with a drug cartel, the revelation raised more questions about Mexican law enforcement.
“Operation Clean House was a warning that something wasn’t working, and this confirms that it still isn’t working,” said Jorge Chabat, an expert on drug cartels.
“What I see clearly here ... is that the process of infiltration continues” among Mexican police, the country’s former top anti-drug prosecutor Samuel Gonzalez said.
Guzman’s Sinaloa cartel has reportedly gained ascendancy in recent months, with the leadership of rival the Beltran Leyva cartel hit hard by a government offensive.
Allegations have long circulated that Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna, who emerged as the top law enforcement officer after Operation Clean House, may have somehow favored the Sinaloa cartel. No firm proof of favoritism has ever been presented, but the arrests of top drug capos have hit all of the other cartels, while leaving Sinaloa’s leadership largely untouched.
However, Garcia Luna has proved a valuable ally to the US, said David Shirk, director of the University of San Diego’s Transborder Institute, so much so that “there is a certain degree of real concern in the [US] administration” that Garcia Luna will leave office with Calderon in 2012.
Meanwhile, Mario Ernesto Villanueva Madrid, a recently extradited former governor of southeastern Quintana Roo state, on Monday denied taking millions of dollars in bribes for protecting US-bound cocaine shipments before a New York federal judge.
Villanueva Madrid was flown to White Plains, New York, late on Sunday, the US Department of Justice said in a statement.
He faces a maximum life sentence if convicted. He is also charged with money-laundering, which carries a 20-year term.
Seven people sustained mostly minor injuries in an airplane fire in South Korea, authorities said yesterday, with local media suggesting the blaze might have been caused by a portable battery stored in the overhead bin. The Air Busan plane, an Airbus A321, was set to fly to Hong Kong from Gimhae International Airport in southeastern Busan, but caught fire in the rear section on Tuesday night, the South Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said. A total of 169 passengers and seven flight attendants and staff were evacuated down inflatable slides, it said. Authorities initially reported three injuries, but revised the number
A colossal explosion in the sky, unleashing energy hundreds of times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. A blinding flash nearly as bright as the sun. Shockwaves powerful enough to flatten everything for miles. It might sound apocalyptic, but a newly detected asteroid nearly the size of a football field now has a greater than 1 percent chance of colliding with Earth in about eight years. Such an impact has the potential for city-level devastation, depending on where it strikes. Scientists are not panicking yet, but they are watching closely. “At this point, it’s: ‘Let’s pay a lot of attention, let’s
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
CHEER ON: Students were greeted by citizens who honked their car horns or offered them food and drinks, while taxi drivers said they would give marchers a lift home Hundreds of students protesting graft they blame for 15 deaths in a building collapse on Friday marched through Serbia to the northern city of Novi Sad, where they plan to block three Danube River bridges this weekend. They received a hero’s welcome from fellow students and thousands of local residents in Novi Said after arriving on foot in their two-day, 80km journey from Belgrade. A small red carpet was placed on one of the bridges across the Danube that the students crossed as they entered the city. The bridge blockade planned for yesterday is to mark three months since a huge concrete construction
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