DEA Agent Jack Riley: Mexican Drug Cartels Are Embedded in Chicago. Special Agent in Charge for Chicago DEA Jack Riley (Photo credit: Chicago Sun-Times) The city may be nearly 2,000 miles from Mexico, but the country’s drug cartels are so deeply embedded in Chicago that local and federal law enforcement are forced to operate as if they are “on the border,” according to Jack Riley, special agent in charge for the Chicago Field Division of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
Because of Chicago’s location in the heart of the United States, its large Mexican population and its abundance of street gang activity, drug cartels have designated the city as one of its main hubs of operation in America, Riley told TheBlaze in an exclusive interview. Inevitably, the increasing presence of cartels has also contributed to the Windy City’s skyrocketing violent crime rates, the DEA boss revealed.
“My opinion is, right now, a number of the Mexican cartels are probably the most organized, well-funded, vicious criminal organizations that we’ve ever seen,” said Riley. US, Mexican Officials Brokering Deals with Drug “Cartels,” WikiLeaks Documents Show. By Bill ConroySpecial to The Narco News Bulletin August 20, 2012 A high-ranking Sinaloa narco-trafficking organization member’s claim that US officials have struck a deal with the leadership of the Mexican “cartel” appears to be corroborated in large part by the statements of a Mexican diplomat in email correspondence made public recently by the nonprofit media group WikiLeaks.
The Mexican diplomat’s assessment of the US and Mexican strategy in the war on drugs, as revealed by the email trail, paints a picture of a “simulated war” in which the Mexican and US governments are willing to show favor to a dominant narco-trafficking organization in order to minimize the violence and business disruption in the major drug plazas, or markets. Email Trail In a Stratfor email dated April 19, 2010, MX1 lays out the Mexican government’s negotiating, or “signaling,” strategy with respect to the major narco-trafficking organizations as follows: The Mexican strategy is not to negotiate directly. Behind the Chicago trial of a Mexican drug kingpin - Arts + Culture. The abandoned car of Little Village resident Margarito Flores Sr. was discovered in western Mexico’s Sinaloa desert in 2009. A message directed to his twin sons, Pedro and Margarito, was stuck to its windshield: tell those fuckers to shut up or we are going to send you his head.
The Flores twins, 31-year-old Chicago drug traffickers, had warned their father not to return to Mexico, and especially not to the drug-war-torn state of Sinaloa, home to the Sinaloa cartel, which U.S. intelligence considers one of the most powerful drug trafficking organizations in the world. Margarito Sr. was never heard from again. The brothers, now in U.S. custody and acting as informants in a plea deal whose details remain secret, will be the star witnesses in the Chicago trial of Jesús Vicente Zambada-Niebla, a head of the Sinaloa cartel and the biggest Mexican drug kingpin ever to be prosecuted in a U.S. courtroom. Between 2001 and 2008, Pedro and Margarito Flores’s drug distribution operation flourished.
Percent of Firearms Ownership by State. The Faces of Dos Erres. The December 1982 massacre of 250 civilians in the jungle hamlet of Dos Erres stands as one the worst atrocities of the country’s civil war. Only within the last year have trials begun for the Kaibil commandos who did the killing. Here are the principal survivors, soldiers and investigators involved. | Related story » The Survivors Oscar Alfredo Ramírez Castañeda Three years old at the time of the Dos Erres massacre, Oscar survived and was taken by Lt. Ramiro Cristales At age 5, Ramiro was the other green-eyed child abducted from Dos Erres by the soldiers. Tranquilino Castañeda Castañeda, a farmer, was away on the day of the Dos Erres massacre. Salome Armando Hernández Hernández was 11 at the time of the Dos Erres attack. The Military Gen. Guatemalan Dictator, March 1982 - August 1983 After gaining power in a coup, Ríos Montt ordered a search-and-destroy campaign against rural villages thought to shelter guerrilla fighters.
Lt. Las Cruces Army Commander Lt. Kaibil Favio Pinzón Kaibil squad's cook. A CONVERSATION WITH: FREDY PECCERELLI; 'The Bones Tell the Story': Revealing History's Darker Days. Fredy A. Peccerelli spends his days exhuming mass graves and examining the bones of murder victims, hoping that the dead will speak to him. A forensic anthropologist, Mr. Peccerelli, 33, combines elements of pathology, archaeology and anthropology to solve crimes. Human rights organizations employ forensic anthropologists to document war crimes and human rights abuses. Mr. Peccerelli, director of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation, has investigated the deaths of thousands of civilians killed in the civil war in Guatemala from 1960 to 1996. ''What we do is all about life,'' he said here last month on a break at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The association awarded its science and human rights prize for 2004 to Mr.
Q. A. To answer these sorts of questions, forensic anthropologists locate graves and exhume remains. Q. A. You look for obvious things in the bones, bullet holes, crushed skulls, breaks, gashes. Q. A. Q. A. Q. A. Q. Mexico: The Bonfires of Cherán. Editor's note: We bring you this translation of a Mexican journalist's take on Cherán, Michoacan, to bring more light to a community that has been building autonomous resistance to organized crime and corrupt officials since last year. Source: La Rocka Nobody ever told me how Cherán was, I expected the chill of a mountain morning, the wind coming down from the wooded hills. What I hadn’t read in any account, in any article, is that Cherán is quite a picturesque village, a big one, in fact; I would say a bit bigger than Naolinco, in Veracruz; smaller than Empalme, Sonora; nearly the same size as Allende, Nuevo León. It is a small city. A small city with a colonial square and an interesting church. A small city where you don't come across skinny children(there are indeed skinny kids, but the kind of wiry, strong and healthy kids who spend the day playing soccer), where stray dogs won’t follow you begging for leftovers, as a matter of fact, stray dogs will ignore you if you call them.