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.
ANGER: A video shared online showed residents in a neighborhood confronting the national security minister, attempting to drag her toward floodwaters Argentina’s port city of Bahia Blanca has been “destroyed” after being pummeled by a year’s worth of rain in a matter of hours, killing 13 and driving hundreds from their homes, authorities said on Saturday. Two young girls — reportedly aged four and one — were missing after possibly being swept away by floodwaters in the wake of Friday’s storm. The deluge left hospital rooms underwater, turned neighborhoods into islands and cut electricity to swaths of the city. Argentine Minister of National Security Patricia Bullrich said Bahia Blanca was “destroyed.” The death toll rose to 13 on Saturday, up from 10 on Friday, authorities
Two daughters of an Argentine mountaineer who died on an icy peak 40 years ago have retrieved his backpack from the spot — finding camera film inside that allowed them a glimpse of some of his final experiences. Guillermo Vieiro was 44 when he died in 1985 — as did his climbing partner — while descending Argentina’s Tupungato lava dome, one of the highest peaks in the Americas. Last year, his backpack was spotted on a slope by mountaineer Gabriela Cavallaro, who examined it and contacted Vieiro’s daughters Guadalupe, 40, and Azul, 44. Last month, the three set out with four other guides
Local officials from Russia’s ruling party have caused controversy by presenting mothers of soldiers killed in Ukraine with gifts of meat grinders, an appliance widely used to describe Russia’s brutal tactics on the front line. The United Russia party in the northern Murmansk region posted photographs on social media showing officials smiling as they visited bereaved mothers with gifts of flowers and boxed meat grinders for International Women’s Day on Saturday, which is widely celebrated in Russia. The post included a message thanking the “dear moms” for their “strength of spirit and the love you put into bringing up your sons.” It
DISASTROUS VISIT: The talks in Saudi Arabia come after an altercation at the White House that led to the Ukrainian president leaving without signing a minerals deal Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was due to arrive in Saudi Arabia yesterday, a day ahead of crucial talks between Ukrainian and US officials on ending the war with Russia. Highly anticipated negotiations today on resolving the three-year conflict would see US and Ukrainian officials meet for the first time since Zelenskiy’s disastrous White House visit last month. Zelenskiy yesterday said that he would meet Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the nation’s de facto leader, after which his team “will stay for a meeting on Tuesday with the American team.” At the talks in the Red Sea port city of Jeddah, US
RSS