Cartel Corner #92: Columbia’s Elites and Organized Crime

Colombia Elites and Organized Crime

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InSight Crime has done an OUTSTANDING job on producing a 3 part series on understanding the current narco-business culture in Columbia which revolves around a connection between the Countries Elite Families and Personalities and the the Country’s most Notorious Drug Lords.

As the Mexican Cartels partner more and more with Columbian Narco’s, America (and specifically the Southern Border States) will soon be faced with a repeat of the bloody 1980’s when Pablo Escobar left a trail of dismembered corpses from Medellin to Miami, except this time the trail will stretch from Sinaloa to El Paso.

Stay Alert, Stay Armed and Stay Dangerous, Your Enemy’s Are Many!

Cartel Corner #90: Armed Vigilante Groups Wage Urban Warfare Against the Cartels in Mexico’s Second Largest City

Vigilante Urban Warfare in Guadalajara, Mexico

Jesús Morones, the owner of a candy shop in El Salto, a rugged industrial area on the southeastern fringe of the Guadalajara metropolitan area, says he’s been robbed at gunpoint eight times.

“Last time they beat me and locked me and my family in here for 10 minutes while they took what they wanted. They were looking for money but they even took a box of chocolates to snack on afterwards,” he says. “My son was crying and one of the bastards even grabbed my wife’s buttocks.”

With the police providing little or no protection against this kind of violent crime, inhabitants of Guadalajara’s forgotten outskirts have begun forming vigilante groups known as autodefensas, or self-defense squads. Vigilantes have famously fought drug gangs in the nearby states of Michoacán and Guerrero in recent years, but their emergence in the major city of Guadalajara, the capital of the state of Jalisco, is more recent and hardly reported.

Gazing out over El Salto’s scorched scrubland as he patrols the dirt roads of his rundown neighborhood, Raúl Muñoz, a 59-year-old former guerrilla, says he leads the largest of 27 autodefensa cells scattered across the town.

Constantly wary of halcones, or hawks, as cartel lookouts are known, Muñoz points out several black pickup trucks with tinted windows. He says they probably belong to members of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, or CJNG in Spanish. He adds that the cartel has “complete control” of El Salto and the neighboring municipality of Tlajomulco.

The CJNG is a relatively new cartel that has grown and expanded rapidly in the last five years to become one of Mexico’s most powerful criminal organizations. Muñoz suspects it has begun working with smaller groups of petty criminals in El Salto, leading to an increase in kidnappings, thefts, and rapes.

‘We don’t want people to know who we are, because that would put everyone’s safety at risk’

Softly spoken but firm in his convictions, Muñoz says the rising insecurity led a group of locals to form a vigilante group early last year. He adds that their resolve only hardened when gunmen killed one member as a warning in February 2015.

Read the Remainder at Business Insider

Cartel Corner #89: Homemade Narco Tanks (Yeah I said TANKS)

As drug-trafficking-related violence in Mexico raged, the cartels came up with a radical solution for improving their capabilities in face-offs with other criminal groups and Mexican security services.

Narco tanks are homemade armored vehicles, also known in Spanish as “monstruo” for their hulking size. They reached peak popularity in 2011 as the Mexican military seized a garage from the Zetas drug-trafficking organization that was being used to construct the vehicles. At that point, criminal gangs could operate military-like vehicles out in the open with apparent impunity.

The Mexican military’s subsequent crackdown on the creation of monstrous forced the practice even further underground. Narco tanks are still produced, but today’s versions have their armored paneling on the inside so as to not draw unwanted attention from rival cartels and the military.

In January, Mexican authorities surrounded the hideout of notorious drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán during the Black Swan operation, the raid that eventually led to Guzmán’srecapture.

Mexican marines confiscated weapons and two narco tanks from Guzmán’s hideout.

Below is a breakdown of the various features that made narco tanks into seemingly impregnable, drug-running beasts.

Screen grab/Amanda Macias/Business Insider

Screen grab/Amanda Macias/Business Insider

Screen grab/Amanda Macias/

Screen grab/Amanda Macias/Business Insider

Screen grab/Amanda Macias/Business Insider

Read the Original Article at Business Insider

Cartel Corner #87: The Lime Grower Vs. The Cartel

How A Lime Grower Led An Uprising Against One of Mexico’s Bloodiest Cartels

IT WAS WINTER in the pocket of Mexico known as Tierra Caliente, the Hot Land. The sky was cloudless and the sun’s rays were casting flickering reflections off the convoy coming into focus: two behemoth SUVs, one black, one silver, passengers invisible behind tinted windows, a police pickup bringing up the rear. The vehicles kicked up clouds of dust as they pulled to a stop. The doors swung open. Boots, shoes, and sandals connected with the dirt. More than half a dozen well-armed men, and one woman, stepped out.

They weren’t the most imposing gunslingers in the world. Most wore basic navy blue polo shirts with white screen-printed badges on the chest. Some were middle-aged with considerable bellies lapping over their belts. Still, their firepower — mostly AR-15 assault rifles — was considerable. Several wore bulletproof vests strapped with ammunition. One of the men, the fittest of the bunch, dressed in khaki cargo pants with dark wraparound sunglasses and a sidearm strapped to his hip, had the swagger of an American military contractor escorting some important diplomat in a foreign war.

The martial demeanor made sense. Guard duty was exactly what the group was doing. Their cargo stepped out of an armored Chevrolet: a short, stocky man, 60 years old, with a close-cropped gray beard and a white Panama hat. His name was Hipólito Mora Chávez. In 2013, he kicked off an armed citizens’ rebellion against a cult-like drug cartel in his home state of Michoacán, the geographic launching point on Mexico’s Pacific coast for much of the methamphetamine trafficked to the United States.

They called themselves autodefensas, self-defense groups. For a moment, their uprising was Mexico’s biggest story. For some, they symbolized a courageous effort on the part of ordinary citizens to accomplish what the government was unable or unwilling to do, dismantling a notorious criminal organization that had terrorized the Hot Land for years. For others, they were unaccountable vigilantes representing a dangerous slide into anarchic chaos.

Read the Remainder at The Intercept

Cartel Corner #86: Attack on El Chapo’s Hometown Points To A Cartel Turf War

Heavily armed men reportedly descended on the hometown of “El Chapo,” ransacking his mother’s home, killing several residents and displacing 150 families, a clear indication that the sun is setting on an era marked by the Mexican crime boss’s dominance.

A gang of 150 attackers appeared early on June 11 in the small mountain town of La Tuna and raided the home of Consuelo Loera Guzman, mother of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, and took several vehicles, Río Doce reported. Eyewitnesses told the news magazine that eight townspeople had been killed.

The armed group took vehicles from the nearby villages of Arroy Seco, Huixiopa, Pericos, and La Palama, and residents of the remote area in the mountains of Sinaloa state reportedly fled towards the state capital Culiacán and the city of Badiraguato to escape the violence.

Culiacán-based Río Doce was initially the only source of news of the attack. Details were sketchy and the authorities were slow to respond. Sinaloa’s secretary of Public Security told Río Doce on June 15 — four days after the attack — that a joint force made up of police and military units was being dispatched to retake control of the zone.

Sinaloa state officials said they could not confirm details of the attack. Even after arriving in the area the reaction force was reportedly slow to move to the mountaintops where most of the action allegedly occurred.

Both local and national media attributed the attack on territory sacred to the Sinaloa Cartelto the rival Beltran Leyva Organization (BLO) led by Isidro Meza Flores, alias “Chapo Isidro.”

InSight Crime Analysis

This area of northwestern Sinaloa is part of Mexico‘s Golden Triangle, a mountainous region that also covers parts of Durango and Chihuahua states and is synonymous with the drug trade. La Tuna is the home turf of El Chapo, the infamous Sinaloa Cartel leader and until recently one of Mexico‘s most prominent drug traffickers.

Guzman was recaptured in January 2016 following his second escape from Mexican prison and is currently being held near the border city of Cuidad Juarez, awaiting extradition to the US.

The BLO’s Chapo Isidro, also known as “Chapito,” has been on the ascendancy inMexico‘s criminal underworld, and his network was officially designated a Drug Trafficking Organization (DTO) by the US Treasury in 2013.

The reports of violence coming out of La Tuna appear to confirm warnings that Guzman’s arrest would spark conflict and turf wars as other illegal actors try to take advantage of his absence. As Guzman’s expected extradition to the United States edges closer, his empire appears to be unraveling.

Attacks on family were once considered taboo even among the criminals of Mexico‘s drug cartels. The apparent attack on the home of El Chapo‘s mother seems to send an especially stark message and may herald the end of an era in more ways than one.

Read the Original Article at Insight Crime