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  1. #1

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    Mexico adds troops to drug war (6,400 at border)

    http://www.dailystar.com/dailystar/rela ... /67273.php

    Hmmm .. inquiring minds would have to ask if the timing of this is intentional to coincide with MMP?

    Mexico will add troops to drug war
    Deployments into northern states in response to escalating violence
    By Michael Marizco
    ARIZONA DAILY STAR
    March 25, 2005

    Mexico is mobilizing 6,400 soldiers next week to its northern states in response to a vicious drug war that has left nearly 200 people dead this year, officials said.

    In Sonora, 1,600 soldiers are being sent to Caborca, southeast of Puerto Peñasco, and Alamos, near the Sinaloa border, said Diego Padilla, the Sonoran government's Arizona representative.

    Those additional soldiers will supplement Mexican army troops already based in the different cities throughout the state, he said.

    The movement of troops is designed to fight the drug traffickers and comes after Sonora Gov. Eduardo Bours Castelo and the governors of Sinaloa, Chihuahua and Durango met with federal officials in Mexico City in early March. Bours had called for the meeting out of concern the ongoing drug war in Sinaloa and Chihuahua would spill into his state.

    Using Humvees, four-wheel-drive trucks and helicopters, the soldiers will work with agents from the Mexican Federal Attorney General's Office to destroy drug crops in southern Sonora and launch operations against the clandestine runways drug traffickers use on the border south of Arizona.

    They will also work with Judicial State Police to arrest drug traffickers throughout the state, he said.

    The military buildup on the northern border will last one to two months, then the extra soldiers will leave, he said.

    It comes during a tenuous time when Mexico's powerful drug lords battle for control of lucrative areas along the border with the United States. The fighting has erupted into street gunbattles in Durango, public executions in Sonora and police killings in Tijuana and Nuevo Laredo.

    The violence has left about 200 people dead along the border, according to figures supplied by the Mexican Federal Attorney General's Office to Mexican newspapers.

    Sonora, compared with the rest of the country, has been relatively calm, but drug trafficking remains a problem.

    On Thursday, the Sonoyta police chief, Ramon Robles Cota, 29, was charged in U.S. District Court in Tucson with bribing a federal officer after he was arrested trying to negotiate passage across the border for a large shipment of marijuana, officials said.

    Experts say the military move is well-timed, coming when tourism is high in Sonora for Easter Week and Mexican President Vicente Fox has taken the fight to the drug lords.

    But publicly announcing the fight and only keeping the troops through the spring means the drug traffickers will move elsewhere - then return, said Michael Vigil, the recently retired chief of international operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration and a former agent in Hermosillo, Sonora.

    The military expansion in northern Mexico is Fox's best option to combat the drug traffickers, he said.

    "It's good for them to bring in a large force, but the fact of the matter is they have to have a presence there. It can't be a one-time affair just to clean house," he said.

    Mexico has been under pressure to control the drug violence since U.S. Ambassador Tony Garza issued a travel warning earlier this year for Mexico's northern border.

    That scared away tourists even as Mexico criticized the warnings, saying the country can control its own problems, said Jorge Chabat, an organized-crime expert at Mexico City's Center for Economic Research.

    "What's surprising is the large number of soldiers. It reflects the concerns of the Mexican government with the deteriorating situation in some of these states," Chabat said.

    It's also a display of power on the country's part, coming at a time when the FBI has said terrorists may use Mexico to enter the United States, he said.

    Padilla maintains the military move will "sever the heads off" some trafficker organizations in Sonora. He said Sonora is safe for residents and tourists.

    Meanwhile, Robles Cota, the police chief for Sonoyta, south of Lukeville, faces a maximum term of life in prison if convicted. According to the federal complaint against him:

    Robles Cota and his bodyguard, police officer Julio Cesar Lozano Lopez, 28, tried to bribe a U.S. agent with $80,020 on March 15. They were arrested in Gila Bend on Wednesday.

    The case started last January when Robles Cota approached the agent about moving marijuana across the border. They spoke over the phone and set up a meeting in the United States to discuss his offer.

    In February, Robles Cota and Lozano Lopez traveled to Gila Bend to meet with the agent in a federal agency sting.

    Robles Cota tried to bribe the agent to allow vehicles loaded with marijuana to cross the border near Menagers Dam on the Tohono O'odham Nation. He also agreed to set up a future meeting in Tucson to negotiate a final bribe.

    About 10 days later, the two met with the agent in Tucson. Robles Cota told the agent the organization he works for moves about 60 carloads of marijuana across the border every month.

    The organization had a tractor-trailer rig filled with pot and asked the agent to clear the border for two hours so "they could send in three to four vehicles with marijuana every couple of minutes," the complaint stated. In exchange, Robles Cota said that the organization was willing to pay $25,000 for every vehicle the agent protects.

    Then the police chief agreed to pay the agent a $100,000 advance on the bribe. Other U.S. agents were monitoring the meeting.

    On March 15, the two men met in a Tucson parking lot with the agent. Robles Cota carried a plastic shopping bag holding the $80,020 and handed it off to the agent. He also supplied him with a radio to communicate with the drug traffickers.

    Wiretaps recorded their subsequent phone conversations. Robles Cota agreed to meet with the agent in Gila Bend last Wednesday to deliver a new radio and discuss the crossings.

    Just before the meeting, an Arizona Department of Public Safety officer pulled the men's pickup truck over.

    Both men are in federal custody in the United States, said Sandy Raynor, spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Tucson. She declined to say which agency the agent worked for. The agent has not been arrested on any charges.

    "I'm looking forward to the day he can prove his innocence," said Robles Cota's attorney Saji Vettiyil. "This man is presumed innocent and is a well-respected police officer."
    "This country has lost control of its borders. And no country can sustain that kind of position." .... Ronald Reagan

  2. #2

    Join Date
    Jan 1970
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    Mexico added these troops to protect, not prevent, the drug trade. Some think this is a an anti-MMP move. God help them if they jump the border.
    They are "undocumented" border patrol agents, not vigilantes.

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