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Posted
2 hours ago, MinerProphet said:

My question is...if the FBI has direct contact and frequently talks to Chapitos, Mayo, all the top of the pyramid type guys, then they clearly know how to contact them, what their likely whereabouts are, who they interact with, etc. and why can't they just treat them like they do the Hamas or terrorists? With Mexico's approval or their "wink wink" disapproval-but-approval, You know, drone bomb their facilities, sneak a bomb in Mayo's ranch and then months later detonate it, etc.? 

cellulose-encased laser-guided bomb.

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Posted
3 hours ago, mycox said:

The reason El Salvador's plan is working is because their president is rich and can't be bought off. No way that happens in Mexico.

And controls congress, and scares the commercial sector, and the military is "bought" in, and the FMLN sucked as a party (which is why he left it and took their apparatus with him) and the opposition prefers to kick it in Miami.

Yep, won't work in Mexico.

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Posted
41 minutes ago, mycox said:

Well a little bit of all that. My point is, you aren't going to do shit with a corrupt government that is bought out by the cartels. 

It is a lot of that. And there are allegations he is corrupt as well.

Oh, and right now is negotiating with Russia to allow BitCoin transactions, thus circumventing sanctions.

Posted
On 8/2/2024 at 4:08 PM, MinerProphet said:

My question is...if the FBI has direct contact and frequently talks to Chapitos, Mayo, all the top of the pyramid type guys, then they clearly know how to contact them, what their likely whereabouts are, who they interact with, etc. and why can't they just treat them like they do the Hamas or terrorists? With Mexico's approval or their "wink wink" disapproval-but-approval, You know, drone bomb their facilities, sneak a bomb in Mayo's ranch and then months later detonate it, etc.? 

I think I've brought this up before up-thread, but if you don't follow and listen to the talks from former Mexican Federale Ed Calderon, I suggest you give him a try.  He worked in in counter-narcotics and organized-crime units.  Edsmanifesto on the socials.  He has a grin perspective on what the US us up against.  Mexico is a narco-state.  Full stop.  Further, they have infiltrated every facet of the government at all levels in Mexico.  Much like doing business in China, you have to know you are also doing business with the CCP.  Same with the cartels. They make as much, if not more in "legitimate" business as they do illegal.  Then you have trafficking, which they are among the world leaders in.

The extent of what the US is up against

Further, to the point of pinpoint attacks - they have also infiltrated almost every major city in the US.  Direct attacks would have catastrophic results here.  They want to kill a million Americans overnight?  They could taint products intentionally and see hundreds of thousands if not millions of Americans OD within days or weeks.  That's before terror attacks are even introduced.  Then you have next level leaders.  Take out one head of the snake, etc.  They could shut down our economy overnight if they wanted to.  Tens of thousands of OD'ing people, coupled with indiscriminate terror attacks across the country.  Full stop, the economy grinds to a halt.  And I'm not talking about drug users dying.  I'm talking about millions hooked on pharmaceutical pain pills that come from Mexico.  

Quote

“We are seeing trench warfare; nothing is being done about it. Fentanyl is everywhere. It is something being pumped into the world, and it is going right through the ports of entry in Mexico right now,” Ed cautions. “The big move is using it in pain medication pills on an industrial level. It is going through conventional, regulated pharmaceutical companies, and there is no real effort by the Government to stop it.”

Quote

When I ask about the safe scenario across Mexico now, or more specifically along the shadowy California border region, Ed doesn’t hesitate to respond in melancholy for a moment. From his lens, the horrific levels of violence today directly result from an ill-conceived war-against-drugs policy first ignited by President Nixon in 1971.

“That was based around decapitating the leadership at high levels, which fragmented a lot of the cartels, and then they started creating independent opportunities for new people who didn’t know how to manage their territories,” Ed explains. “It turned into smaller groups of young people wanting to exert violence instead of diplomacy.”

According to the latest research from Mexico’s Center for Economic Research and Teaching (CIDE), at least 150 organized crime gangs are operating across the country. Sadly, many Mexicans have come to understand that organized crime is the most powerful player in the Mexican calamity, its bottom line soaked in bloodshed. 

One would logically think it is bad for business for cartel operatives to kill off their clientele carelessly daily. However, as Ed bluntly puts it, they “don’t give a shit about the clients. Their only job is to give the product to a distributor up north.”  Further, data presented to ALMO in July highlighted that 2022 is on track to be one of the most violent in decades, with 15,4000 murders in the first six months alone.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
Posted
On 8/1/2024 at 2:27 PM, InkaUtexas said:

I did not discount his plan. And the voices against it come mainly from the outside. No matter what El Salvador does, with their history someone is going to bitch.

But to continue the discussion and be devils advocate. Does that 13 year old now spend his life in jail? There is no "rehabilitation" programs large enough for the amount arrested.

I have very good Salvadoran friends there. A few years ago their solution was like the early 1980's. And these are not the Elite. These are small business/land owners who were tired of the extortion and murders.

And not sure how it would be CR.

And, of course, once you give the dictator that kind of unilateral power, where else does he take it.  Look where Bukele is taking it.

This is the fatal flaw with this type of thinking.

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Posted
2 hours ago, PW119 said:

Arrested on May 16th at the border.  Then freed and allowed to travel to Endicott NY.  WTF?

Texas probably put him on a bus.

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Posted
30 minutes ago, chainsaw said:

How do I get the 7,777 gold coins?

Find somebody who has 7,777 Dos Peso coins, low-ball em $800,000, which they take because the water bill is due and they also want to get a new tattoo.

Posted
2 hours ago, PW119 said:

Arrested on May 16th at the border.  Then freed and allowed to travel to Endicott NY.  WTF?

I’m guessing he was only processed like a regular illegal crossing. Don’t think they detain everybody these days. I think they briefly hold them, set a court date where they can make their case for asylum or whatever, then release them. Probably didn’t have it in their system that an arrest warrant was issued from a country we expedite to. But the name eventually got flagged, and he was subsequently arrested for real.

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Posted
2 hours ago, SquishMitten said:

I’m guessing he was only processed like a regular illegal crossing. Don’t think they detain everybody these days. I think they briefly hold them, set a court date where they can make their case for asylum or whatever, then release them. Probably didn’t have it in their system that an arrest warrant was issued from a country we expedite to. But the name eventually got flagged, and he was subsequently arrested for real.

 

5 hours ago, PW119 said:

Arrested on May 16th at the border.  Then freed and allowed to travel to Endicott NY.  WTF?

Am I reading correctly that they found him by geolocating his gf’s SM posting?

  • 1 year later...
Posted

Long piece about the militarization of the cartels. Figured this was the best place for this. And, given the increased calls for US military action in Mexico, it should be on our radar.

image.thumb.png.046d83f278c2a119ca225110dfebd3ac.png
https://archive.is/dPX5Z

The explosions began before dawn, shaking the ground and rattling windows in the darkness. With them, residents said, came the telltale buzz of drones.

“We knew the devil was coming,” said Ana, a mother of six who grabbed her children and ran as gunmen moved in to do battle.

Weeks later, her town still bore scars. Holes were blasted into roofs where drones had dropped bombs. Craters gaped where land mines had exploded. Spent .50-caliber shells glinted in the dirt.

The clash was not in a war zone of Ukraine or the Middle East, and the combatants did not belong to any army. They were criminal groups, armed with military-grade weapons and fighting just a few hundred miles from the U.S. border, in Mexico’s western state of Michoacán.

A woman’s silhouette behind drapes hanging from a blue wall.
Ana, a mother of six, looking out of a window in a wall scarred by bullet holes at her home in El Guayabo.

Some of Mexico’s most formidable cartels are locked in a vicious arms race on multiple fronts. On one side, they are battling the Mexican government, which is under intense pressure from the United States to crack down on the drug trade. But they are also fighting one another for territory and resources, leaving a deadly toll among their members and the civilians caught in between.

Now, President Trump has ordered the Pentagon to begin using military force against certain drug cartels designated as terrorist groups. The directive has infuriated Mexico’s leaders, who have rejected the idea of U.S. forces on Mexican soil. But despite their disagreements about what actions to take, officials and security analysts in both countries agree that cartels are amassing new levels of firepower, transforming some groups into full-fledged paramilitary forces.

Drug smugglers and cartel gunmen no longer wield just handguns or automatic rifles, officials and experts say, but also Claymore land mines, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars built from gas-tank tubes and armored trucks mounted with heavy machine guns. They are burying improvised explosive devices to kill their rivals and modifying drones bought online to make attack drones, loaded with toxic chemicals and bombs.

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An array of recovered improvised explosives recovered by the state police force bomb squad in Morelia, Michoacán. Casings are commonly made from plastic bottles, cut drainpipes and even fire extinguishers.

“We cannot continue to just treat these guys as local street gangs,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in an interview with EWTN, a Catholic television network, last month. “They have weaponry that looks like what terrorists, in some cases armies, have.”

Mexican officials say that most of the military-grade weapons that powerful groups have acquired originated in the United States, and that up to half a million firearms are smuggled south each year. The officials say that criminals also reverse-engineer weapons, sometimes 3-D printing parts to build them.

Nowhere are the consequences of this varied and growing arsenal starker than in the rugged hills of Tierra Caliente in Michoacán, a swath of fertile farmland and lush mountains that has become a strategic corridor for drug cultivation.

The battle for control there between rival groups — including the Knights Templar, La Familia Michoacana and the group with the most military power, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel — has pushed the fight into a new, more brutal era.

cont'd

Quote

 

A War Transformed
Like other armed groups around the world, the cartels combine old and new weapons to deadly effect. Drones circle overhead in Michoacán, while roads and footpaths used by soldiers and civilians alike are seeded with I.E.D.s.

Over the past two years, the state has recorded more mine explosions than anywhere else in Mexico, a chilling marker of the drug war’s evolution, experts say.

Caught between the shifting front lines of gangs and security forces are dozens of farming villages, their lemon and avocado fields tucked deep in the hills. Many have no phone service, effectively leaving them to fend for themselves. Ana, the mother in the attacked town, El Guayabo, gave only her first name for fear of retribution by criminals.

A boy in a small room with a bed and blue walls, looking out a barred window.
Ana’s son in her bedroom, the windows shattered by explosions.

When fighting nears, most residents flee, sometimes for weeks or months. Some never return at all, leaving towns deserted. In nearly two years, more than 2,000 people have been displaced in Michoacán, rights groups say. Those who stay risk being trapped in the crossfire.

In the past five months alone, at least 10 civilians, including a 14-year-old boy, have been killed by hidden explosives while tending crops or walking to school, according to Julio Franco, an adviser with the Human Security Observatory, a group tracking violence.

Security analysts and Mexican officials say the cartels began to militarize in the mid-2000s, when Los Zetas, a group formed by former army members, brought battlefield discipline, encrypted communications and heavy weaponry to organized crime.

As Los Zetas acquired more of a military arsenal, so did its rivals, trying to compete. Mexico’s security forces, too, responded with ever more sophisticated equipment and tactics. The United States has also brought its own technology to bear, including by recently using drones that hunt for fentanyl labs.

In 2015, a sign of the transformation underway became evident when cartel gunmen in Jalisco State brought down a Mexican Army helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, killing six soldiers. It was the first time a criminal group had destroyed a military aircraft in Mexico.

By 2022, Mexican military intelligence reported that criminal groups were “routinely” deploying I.E.D.s, drones and new tactics.

“We are witnessing the latest phase of the war: a move toward paramilitary-style tactics and capabilities,” said Alexei Chávez, a security analyst who has advised the Mexican Army.

image.thumb.png.51101286e43d6a0cd78a3f4d966fa5dc.png
Clockwise from top left: a bullet-riddled car in El Guayabo; pieces of an armored cartel vehicle that was destroyed when it rolled over an improvised land mine; a bucket full of bullet casings; and a hole left by a makeshift landmine.

Just as drones, cheap and easy to modify, have proliferated in the battlefields of Ukraine, their use by cartels — for surveillance and precision bombing — has surged drastically in recent years, according to government officials, security experts and analysts.

Drones allow criminals “to attack rivals or security forces with far greater precision” than the crude bombs they once relied on, said Vanda Felbab-Brown, an expert on nonstate armed groups at the Brookings Institution. “With drones,” she said, “the cartels have gained the ability to strike deep into enemy territory — to hit targets that would have been unreachable before.”

To prepare for heightened pressure from the Trump administration, criminal groups also started importing scanners to detect government drones and hiring more people with experience using and tracking the aircraft, cartel operatives have said in recent interviews with The New York Times. As another step, the operatives said, they increased arms shipments from the United States.

18 Officers. Thousands of Bombs.
Facing these new threats, Mexico’s police have often found themselves badly outgunned.

“They’ve been a step ahead of us for years,” said Alfredo Ortega, Michoacán’s former state security chief, who stepped down last year. “They have unlimited resources and access to weapons and technology our local forces simply don’t. They came at us with Barrett .50-caliber semiautomatic rifles, and our local police forces didn’t even have anything close to that.”

To counter the threat, Mr. Ortega in 2023 formed a specialized anti-bomb unit of police officers, many with military backgrounds, led by Capt. Mario Gómez, a former army officer and expert in explosive ordnance disposal.

In one operation last year, Captain Gómez stumbled on sprawling compounds that functioned as assembly plants, he said. Inside, workers had welded makeshift armor onto vehicles, fashioned homemade explosives, and built improvised mortars from gas-tank tubes, packing them with explosives.

His unit of 18 members is severely outmatched by the scale of the threat it faces, he said.

A man wearing full military gear, including a helmet and multiple guns, stands in a room with pictures on the wall behind him.
Capt. Mario Gómez, a former army officer and expert in explosive ordnance disposal, leads the anti-bomb unit of police officers in Morelia.

Even Mexico’s military lacks mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, known as MRAPs, like those developed by the United States to shield troops from I.E.D.s in Iraq and Afghanistan. As improvised explosives became a hallmark of insurgencies, militaries around the world adopted the armored vehicles to save lives. Mexico has not, Captain Gómez said.

In July, Captain Gómez and his men responded to a farmer’s call about a possible roadside bomb. After they arrived, they found an entire cartel complex nearby and recovered 258 improvised explosive devices, disarming each over 14 hours in the sweltering heat.

The next morning, their convoy was ambushed by gunmen, said Captain Gómez, who had a bullet tear through his hand that left a long, swollen scar.

In the past two years alone, he said, his team has seized more than 2,000 I.E.D.s and homemade bombs meant to be used with drones or simple mortars.

Most are rudimentary contraptions. Casings are commonly made from plastic bottles, cut drainpipes and even fire extinguishers. The devices are fitted with steel, glass and plastic  fins to stabilize the bombs in flight. Inside, they pack homemade gunpowder and ammonium nitrate fuel oil, an explosive often used in mining and construction.

“These artifacts can deliver a blast almost the same as factory-made bombs,” Captain Gómez said, pointing at a display of dozens of improvised bombs deactivated by his unit. “And they’re always experimenting, always finding new ways to cause more harm.”

MichoacanCartels_AdrianaZehbrauskas_88-threeByTwoMediumAt2X.jpg
A controlled detonation at the state police force special bomb squad in Morelia.

In one recent discovery in June, he said, his unit found a 40-millimeter grenade modified for drone delivery, the first of its kind documented in Mexico.

Cartels are also increasingly making chemical bombs, the authorities say, loading drones with compounds like aluminum phosphide, a toxic pesticide that can trigger hypoxia and circulatory failure, as well as other pesticides and poisons.

In April, a cartel dropped such bombs on three towns in southeastern Michoacán, where residents told local news outlets that they felt itching, burning skin and, in some cases, a feeling of suffocation.

Mr. Ortega said the surge in drones and I.E.D.s coincided with the arrival of Colombian nationals, former soldiers recruited to train cartel fighters. In only seven months, the state authorities have arrested 53 foreigners accused of having links to organized crime, among them 23 Colombians and 22 Venezuelans.

A police dog wearing a vest, collar and mask with a police trainer. A bomb-defusing suit is behind them.
Trini, an explosives-detecting dog, with his trainer and handler at a display of makeshift explosive artifacts recovered by the unit.

The Mexican government, under pressure from Mr. Trump, has pursued an aggressive crackdown, deploying thousands of troops to states like Michoacán. But officials have also blamed the United States for fueling the violence by manufacturing the guns that wind up in cartel hands.

President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico said in March that any real strategy against organized crime should begin by cutting off access to “high-powered, military-use weapons.” She said that 70 percent of those in Mexico came from the United States.

The government has pursued two lawsuits against American gunmakers, accusing them of sending an “iron river” of weapons into cartel hands. The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously rejected one of those suits, ruling that legislation shields gun makers from liability in certain cases.

The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said in a statement that it works “closely with both domestic and international law enforcement partners to counter illegal firearms trafficking.” The agency recently noted that cartels use a range of weapons, including the Barrett M82 .50-caliber semiautomatic rifle, a gun designed to pierce light vehicles and fortified positions. It is often used by snipers.

Masked gunmen in fatigues with a variety of large weapons in front of trees.
Members of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel brandishing weapons, including .50-caliber sniper rifles and a .50-caliber machine gun.

The cartels themselves frequently flaunt their weapons, with gunmen posting videos and photographs online or in WhatsApp groups. In one recent image, a squad in military-style uniforms bearing the Jalisco cartel insignia cradled weapons including a Browning M2 .50-caliber heavy machine gun, a battlefield staple for the U.S. Army and militaries worldwide.

The weapons leave a path of destruction in their wake.

Pablo Fajardo, a resident of El Guayabo, recently returned to find his two-bedroom home a charred ruin, holes in its roof from bomber drones. “Fear and sadness, that’s all I feel,” he said. “All that effort and work I put into building my little house, and it was destroyed in a matter of days.”

 

 

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