Mexican Drug Cartels, Violence and Drug Trafficking across the US-Mexico Border

TLALMANALCO, Mexico — The bodies were headless and covered in lime and asbestos, hidden under a thick concrete slab — young men and women not seen since they went out partying in an upscale area of Mexico’s capital nearly three months ago.

As the families of 12 missing youths settled in Saturday for an anguished wait for DNA identification, they and others said this week’s gruesome discovery at a muddy mass grave in the countryside east of Mexico City was bitter vindication for those who have said all along that the city’s top law-enforcement officials downplayed the disappearances and were at best incompetent in trying to find their loved ones.

In this file photo composite of images taken from flyers made by relatives showing 10 of at least 12 young people who were kidnapped in broad daylight from an after hours bar in Mexico City on May 26, 2013. Ricardo Martinez, an attorney for the families of at least 12 of the people who disappeared at the nightclub said on Thursday, Aug. 22, 2013 that officials discovered 13 bodies and are investigating whether they are those of the missing. Martinez says a suspect in the Heaven case led officials to two graves containing the bodies. From left to right, top row; Josue Piedra Moreno, Aaron Piedra Moreno, Rafael Rojas, Alan Omar Athiencia Barragon, Jennifer Robles Gonzalez. From left to right, bottom row; Jerzy Ortiz Ponce, Said Sanchez Garcia, Guadalupe Morales Vargas, Eulogio Foseca Arreola, Gabriela Tellez Zamudio.

Family members of youth who disappeared in May from a Mexico City nightclub listen to prosecutor Rodolfo Rios at a press conference regarding a mass grave that was found in Mexico City, Thursday, Aug. 22, 2013. At least seven badly decomposed corpses have been recovered so far from a grave in Tlalmanalco, according to Rios. He said the victims can’t be identified so far based on clothing, nor can they tell the cause of death.

The area of Rancho La Negra that is being searched for a mass grave by authorities, behind center, in Tlalmanalco, Mexico, Thursday, Aug. 22, 2013. Mexican authorities said Thursday that they have found a mass grave east of Mexico City and are testing to determine if it holds some of the 12 people who vanished from a bar in an upscale area of the capital nearly three months ago.

Mexican authorities leave Rancho la Negra where a mass grave was found in Tlalmanalco, Mexico, Thursday, Aug. 22, 2013. Mexican authorities said Thursday that they have found a mass grave east of Mexico City and are testing to determine if it holds some of the 12 people who vanished from a bar in an upscale area of the capital nearly three months ago.

A municipal police truck arrives to the entrance of Rancho la Mesa, which leads to Rancho La Negra in Tlalmanalco, Mexico, Thursday, Aug. 22, 2013. Mexican authorities said Thursday that they have found a mass grave east of Mexico City and are testing to determine if it holds some of the 12 people who vanished from a bar in an upscale area of the capital nearly three months ago.

The bodies were only found once federal investigators stepped in — after waiting impatiently for local police to make progress.

The kidnapping and murder has revealed a gangland battle for control of the lucrative drug trade in the poshest bars and nightclubs of a megalopolis that had been an oasis of calm during Mexico’s nearly seven-year drug war. The head of Mexico City police on Saturday deployed more officers and a helicopter to some of the city’s upscale districts along with the rough neighborhood of Tepito where most of the victims lived, fearing retaliatory attacks.

A federal official who helped discover the bodies said that they were found separately from their heads in what could be a frightening echo of the brutal mutilations of drug cartel victims in other parts of Mexico. The official spoke condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the ongoing investigation.

“Mexico City is not a bubble. If we don’t put a stop to it, we’re going to fall into a serious security problem,” said Miguel Amelio Gomez, a security consultant and former investigative police chief for Mexico City’s attorney-general.

The kidnapping occurred three months ago midday on a sunny Sunday in an upscale district in the heart of Mexico City, five cars pulled up outside the after-hours club known as Heaven, a block from federal police administrative offices and the U.S. Embassy. Eight men and four women who had been partying all night left and climbed inside, grainy surveillance video shows.

Then they vanished.

Mexico City police said they were working on the case. But after more than two months of little progress, federal investigators were brought in. They discovered 13 bodies, apparently the 12 young victims and an unidentified person, on Aug. 16 on a ranch 35 miles from where they disappeared. Tattoos and dental work identified at least five of the victims from the Heaven club. Work to identify the rest continued Saturday, and families pleaded for the remains to also be examined by forensic experts abroad arguing they can’t trust their country’s investigators.

Relatives of the 12 expressed grief, frustration and mistrust at the discovery. And they accused Mexico City’s law-enforcement authorities of moving slowly on the sensitive investigation, perhaps because they were afraid of what it might reveal.

“It’s all really confusing to us,” Beatriz Loza, the aunt of victim Monserrat Loza, said Saturday. “The investigation failed. I can’t believe that three months have passed.”

Four current and former law-enforcement officials told The Associated Press the massacre appears to have been orchestrated by a wealthy and powerful drug gang as revenge and a warning to a group of poorer interlopers trying to seize territory in some of the city’s trendiest neighborhoods.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to reveal details of the ongoing investigation.

With some 100,000 police officers in the capital, Mexico’s largest cartels have little public presence here. The retail drug business is booming, however, and local drug gangs collectively make $100-200 million a day selling marijuana, cocaine and hallucinogens, said Gomez, the former district-attorney’s investigative chief.

Investigators told the AP they believe dealers from the poor eastern neighborhood of Tepito have been trying to move in on the Union of Insurgentes, a gang that’s named after the city’s prosperous main north-south thoroughfare and controls sales in virtually all of the nightspots in the wealthiest parts of the city. The gang in control hires women as spies to flirt with potential rivals looking to sell drugs on their territory, and valets are used as lookouts, Gomez said. Corrupt police with annual salaries of less than $10,000 are paid to turn a blind eye.

Two owners of the Heaven bar, Mario Ledezma and Ernesto Espinosa Lobo, have been arrested. Some of the witnesses have testified that both were working with the Union of Insurgentes, according to an investigative document written by Mexico City prosecutors and shown to the AP by a person with access to the case files.

Ledezma claimed in a statement to authorities that he was threatened by armed men from the gang who informed him that they were going to sell drugs in his bars — and kill him if he objected.

Ledezma said they told him if they ever saw other people dealing in the bars they had claimed as territory, those rivals would disappear.

Of the 12 victims, at least some had family ties to a Tepito gang.

One, Jerzy Ortiz, has a father, Jorge, who is currently imprisoned for extortion, organized crime, homicide and robbery. Another victim was Said Sanchez, whose father is serving a 23-year prison sentence for similar crimes.

Mexico City Attorney-General Rodolfo Rios has said the Heaven case was also connected to a murder two days earlier in a nightclub in the trendy Condesa neighborhood, where an alleged drug dealer was taken out onto the street and shot in the head.

An official with the Mexico City prosecutor’s office told the AP that investigators there are looking into whether the gang feud was behind other deadly incidents in the capital around the same time.

In one case from April, relatives of five other young men reported that loved ones had been taken from a bar called Virtual in the same area as Heaven. Relatives said that when they filed missing persons’ reports authorities asked them to stay quiet for their own safety.

Surveillance camera footage that could have helped solve the mystery disappeared eight days after the kidnapping, according to the prosecutor’s official, who wasn’t authorized to speak about the case.

In the Heaven case, families started to report the missing the next day but nothing happened until four days later when the relatives blocked streets in a public protest. Even then the case seemed to be going slowly, with leads turning up and immediately going cold, and Mexico City officials repeatedly emphasizing that the case was no sign of a broader problem of insecurity in the capital.

“They have many elements, many people, but where are the victims?” Leticia Ponce, mother of 16-year-old Jerzy Ortiz, one of the missing, asked in July. “Are they really trying to find them?”

The break came on Aug. 16, when federal investigators were searching a suburban area east of Mexico City. Attorney-General Jesus Murillo Karam said last week that the investigators were out on a completely different case when they stumbled across the ranch. But the official with the federal prosecutor’s officer told the AP that federal investigators had been assigned specifically to look for the Heaven victims in neighboring Mexico state, a sign of impatience with efforts by police in the capital.

The investigators, following informants, had heard that the kidnappers might be in rural Tlalmanalco, already known as a spot that was popular among criminal gangs. In their search, they came upon an armed man near a cemetery who took off in his truck at the sight of investigators, the federal official said.

The officers followed him onto a ranch known as La Negra, thinking perhaps they would find a “safe house,” where criminals hide guns, victims or themselves. They returned several times to move on the wooded property, where they found cows, turkeys and horses, plus an unfinished shed.

They got a search warrant on Wednesday to look for weapons. When they arrived on the ranch, they found bags of clothing and a box full of cellphones.

When they started questioning two men living on the property, the men got nervous and investigators got suspicious. Under separate questioning, the two gave different stories. Finally one confessed that someone had buried bodies on the ranch and led them to the site. By Wednesday night, federal and Mexico state authorities were mounting a full-scale excavation.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/mexico-officials-5-bodies-found-in-mass-grave-are-among-people-abducted-from-mexico-city-bar/2013/08/23/23aa7ffe-0c54-11e3-89fe-abb4a5067014_story.html

Intel on “Z40” May have been Attained Through US Drones in Operation “Lowrider”

Posted on August 29, 2013 by Doc

August 29, 2013
Inside the Pentagon’s top secret spy plane operation against the Mexican drug cartel

It was one of the most gruesome periods of Mexico’s drug war. In the spring of 2011, Mexican authorities discovered a series of mass graves holding a total of 183 corpses near the southwest Texas border. The victims had been killed—some after rape and torture—by one of the country’s most brutal drug gangs. Weeks later, investigators exhumed more than 200 additional bodies buried hundreds of miles west.

As the death count climbed, the Pentagon decided to launch an unprecedented intelligence operation. Vocativ has learned that the U.S. military began a series of surveillance missions into Mexican airspace, using techniques and equipment refined in Iraq and Afghanistan. The goal: to track the cartels and their kingpins using aircraft with live pilots and crews, not just remotely controlled drones.

The operation was initially code-named “Lowrider,” but officially known as the Northern Command Aerial Sensor Platform. And like so many military enterprises since 9/11, the contract was privatized: Without a bidding process, the government farmed it out to a large private defense company, Sierra Nevada Corporation, to provide the planes, pilots and crews for the classified missions.

For years, in response to the mounting violence, the U.S. and Mexican governments have been secretly sharing intelligence on drug traffickers. But the previously unreported spy-plane operation underscores how deeply involved the U.S. military has become in the war against the cartels, even as the general public has remained largely unaware of the extent of its operations.

In private, because of the classified nature of the program, insiders raise a number of questions, not just about the effectiveness of the missions, but also about the way a secret intelligence contract was awarded, and about the potential risks to American flight crews.

According to a source involved in the surveillance program, the manned spy planes take off from Texas and cross the border, flying deep into Mexico to conduct “pattern of life” reconnaissance missions. It’s a technique the U.S. military has used in the wars in the Middle East and elsewhere.

The pilots quietly watch from the air and learn the schedules and itineraries of America’s adversaries. Sources say this program employs just two aircraft, which are outfitted with sophisticated electronic-intercept technology and cameras capable of tracking a suspect from 6 miles away.

Drones (“unmanned aerial vehicles,” the military prefers to call them) can be useful for this sort of work, but they aren’t interchangeable with piloted planes. It may be relatively easy to fly drones out of a military field in Yemen or Afghanistan, but it’s far more difficult—if not impossible—to steer clear of civil aviation in more populated areas. Live humans can also notice things that the best remote-controlled cameras will never catch.

U.S Customs and Border Protection officers’ conduct an $860,995 outbound cash seizure this month at the Calexico West port of entry. The currency was hidden in a vehicle.

Yet manned flights can put pilots and crews in danger, and given the cartels’ military-grade weaponry, critics particularly worry about one of the planes, which uses a single engine. The program’s original contract, according to individuals who were involved, called for only twin-engine planes—and with good reason. If one engine fails, the other can still fly everyone home safely. With a single-engine plane, there is no backup. Any sort of engine failure could result in a crash landing somewhere in Mexico.

The fear is not merely hypothetical. In two separate incidents over the span of a month and a half in 2003, single-engine American surveillance planes on contract to the U.S. military crashed in Colombia. In the first incident, the engine failed and the plane was forced to crash-land. Marxist guerrillas killed the American pilot and a Colombian soldier aboard before taking the three U.S. crewmen hostage. Their captivity continued for more than five years until they were rescued. In the second crash, everyone died.

Given that history, it’s understandable that some acquainted with the Lowrider program aren’t entirely comfortable with its risks. “Especially after the lessons learned in Colombia, seems like they are doing the same thing,” says one source familiar with the Mexican operation. Another source who is also familiar with the program disagrees, saying despite initial concerns, the single-engine aircraft has worked well in this case.

An estimated 60,000 or more people have been killed since President Felipe Calderón declared war on the cartels in 2006. As the carnage ensued, the cartels made war not only against the government, but also against one another, setting in motion a cycle of violent turf wars and revenge killings. At times, enforcers for the cartels flaunted their brutality, killing police, torturing or beheading competitors, and occasionally posting the bloody evidence online.

For all the harrowing violence, the U.S. military overflights could be a touchy issue in Mexico, where the country’s sovereignty is never taken for granted. Most people in the United States may forget the two countries’ troubled past, but Mexicans know all too well how the southwestern U.S.—from Texas to California—used to be theirs.

“Mexico’s military doctrine has posited that their number one threat is the United States,” says Adam Isaacson, who follows security developments in the Western Hemisphere as a senior associate at the Washington Office on Latin America think tank. “And it’s been that way since 1848.” On hearing about the Northern Command program, he says: “Traditionally, this would be a hypersensitive thing for the Mexicans.” A spokesman at the Mexican Embassy in Washington declined to comment on the program. continues on next page

The U.S. military says that any operations in Mexico are conducted with the Mexican government’s invitation. But the Americans in the planes have no direct communications with Mexican officials. Any intelligence they collect is transmitted first to the U.S. military, which then provides Mexican authorities with whatever information they may need to conduct raids.

Some insiders say that efforts to target the cartels with the manned surveillance program have been frustrating. According to one source, the Americans have sometimes suspected that cartel figures were given advance warning of impending raids. Surveillance crews would watch helplessly as a kingpin they had monitored for days would suddenly leave the scene just before a raid. “It seems like they were finding out ahead of time,” the source says. “It was consistently like that.”

Another source familiar with the program says it has posted some real successes, not just nice tries. It’s unclear exactly when its intelligence played a role, but at least 10 cartel bosses have been caught or killed by Mexican forces since Lowrider began. Earlier this month, authorities in Mexico bagged Mario Ramirez Treviño, a top leader of the Gulf cartel. And July brought perhaps the biggest triumph yet, the capture of alleged Zeta cartel leader Miguel Angel Treviño—a man who was reportedly fond of incinerating his victims in oil drums and dissolving them in acid.

The Mexican marines who grabbed him seemed to have superb intelligence about his movements. There have been reports that the intel American came from the U.S. though it remains to be seen if the Northern Command operation was involved.

The secret nature of the Lowrider program makes its rough outlines difficult to trace. But one document obtained by Vocativ indicates that it began with a 2011 directive from the Pentagon’s Northern Command to the 645th Aeronautical Systems Group—a secretive U.S. Air Force office also known as Big Safari. That summer, Big Safari awarded an $18 million contract to Sierra Nevada Corporation for the Northern Command Aerial Sensor Platform. The company would provide the planes, integrated with the intelligence-gathering equipment, and the crews.

The privately owned company, based in Sparks, Nevada, and run by the husband-and-wife team of Fatih and Eren Ozmen, is little known outside defense-contracting circles, but it wields considerable influence both in the military-intelligence trade and on Capitol Hill. For years, Sierra Nevada has handled high-tech classified programs, integrating cameras for use on planes and drones deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. (The company is also working to develop a potential scaled-down space shuttle known as Dream Chaser for NASA.) A spokeswoman for Sierra Nevada has not returned Vocativ’s phone calls and emails.

Last year Republican Congressman Bill Shuster of Pennsylvania wrote to the Pentagon raising concerns about the military’s decision to award the contract to Sierra Nevada without putting it out for competitive bidding, as the law usually requires. Shuster didn’t specifically mention Mexico or refer to the Lowrider program by name, but his letter, obtained by Vocativ, alludes to an aircraft “currently operating in North America providing aerial surveillance and signals intelligence collection in support of Northern Command.” In response to Shuster’s missive, Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary Maj. Gen. Edward Bolton wrote back that there had been“urgent National Security requirements” to justify the contract award.

“This mission is classified and extremely sensitive,” he wrote, adding his assurance that Sierra Nevada “has a proven track record.” Shuster’s office declined to comment on the exchange, and a Pentagon spokesman would not comment specifically on the Lowrider program.

To carry out the mission, insiders say that Sierra Nevada hired the Colorado-headquartered subcontractor PGI Aviation to provide pilots and crews for the program. Although PGI officials declined to comment about the contract or the operation, the company’s website lists this among PGI’s credits: Northern Command Aerial Sensor Platform pilots and operators.

More than two years after Lowrider began, the program’s future is an open question. Insiders tell Vocativ that the Sierra Nevada contract is scheduled to expire in September. Meanwhile, Enrique Peña Nieto, who took over from the staunchly anti-cartel Calderón as president last December, has advocated a more conciliatory approach to the drug war.

Early this month a Mexican court ordered the release of Rafael Caro Quintero, the old-time cartel boss responsible for the 1985 kidnapping, torture and murder of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena. Amid the ensuing outcry, Mexican authorities promised they would try to put him back behind bars, but so far they’ve had no success.

Source: Vocative-Aram Roston for Sneak Peek

http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2013/08/intel-on-z40-may-have-been-attained.html

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