Two more corruption arrests

A new year, and the corruption busts keep coming. Wednesday was a busy day when it came to arrest ing CBP officers. In Yuma, Arizona, a 41-year-old CBPO and his wife were arrested on bribery charges after allowing 600,000 fake ecstasy pills to be smuggled through his inspection lane during what turned out to be a sting operation.

Nearly 2,000 miles away, a Brownsville CBPO was busted for allowing unauthorized immigrants to be smuggled into the country, along with more than 30 pounds of cocaine to be smuggled into the country through his lane.

And earlier in the month, a former Border Patrol Agent stationed in Arizona, Jose Luis Sanchez, was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison for taking bribes to smuggled marijuana into the country (press release after the jump) while Salomon Ruiz, 34, and Leonel Morales, 30, cousins who were both Border Patrol agents, pleaded guilty in separate hearings to accepting bribes from drug smugglers to guide loads of cocaine into the country. They were arrested in December in Texas.

With the violence in Mexico, particularly in border cities like Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana, the pressure seems greater than ever to find a corruptible border agent. The Department of Homeland Security may have met its hiring goals with patrol agents, but have they met their goals with internal affairs agents is another question.

Another corruption arrest

To clean up some old items from the draft file:

Not that it would surprise some people, but the corruption cases along the border keep piling up.

I was surprised a recent case out of Texas didn’t get more coverage, seeing that the Homeland Security Department’s press release mentioned that Customs and Border Protection Internal Affairs helped investigate, not to mention that it was a DHS/Office of Inspector General (the overarching internal affairs unit for the department) press release.

Jorge A. Leija was arrested on drug charges right around Halloween. He was not charged with accepting bribes, but a DEA agent testified that he was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. And he let in a lot of cocaine: more than 1,300 kilos, or about 3,000 lbs.

The story appeared in the Monday, November 10 edition of the NY Times.

Extraditions at record pace

In Sunday’s Los Angeles Times Ken Ellingwood writes about the “record” number of extraditions of drug suspects and other wanted criminal suspects from Mexico to the US.

Ellingwood writes,

The government of President Felipe Calderon is extraditing drug suspects and other fugitives to the United States at a record pace, reflecting a quiet but seismic shift in Mexican policy that many analysts say could help dismantle trafficking gangs.

Calderon’s administration has handed over more than 150 criminal suspects since coming to power in December 2006.

The extradition rate is double what it was before Calderon took office. And it represents a radical policy change from a decade ago, when Mexico, sensitive about its sovereignty, rarely handed suspects over for prosecution in the United States.

I’d heard something similar about a month ago, and checked in with different sources. I was pointed to a web site for the US Embassy in Mexico City that details the breakdown of extraditions. As of August 2008, about 48 percent of the extraditions involve drugs, while 33 percent are for murder. Overall, more than half the extraditions are for offenses other than drug trafficking, including murder, sexual crimes against children, rape and kidnapping. Most of the fugitives returned are Mexican nationals.

These figures are up from 40 percent of extraditions involved drug trafficking while down from 37 percent involving murder from figures that appear to be about a year old.

See: http://mexico.usembassy.gov/eng/eataglance_law.html

The overall numbers are certainly up — Mexico extradited only four people in 1995, for instance, compared with 83 people last year and about 70 this year, as Ellingwood reports (the latest figures I have from August are at 57 for the calendar year). A telling number, however, is that 51 extradition cases remain before Mexican judges (at least two involve the Villarreal brothers, as mentioned previously here.)

What I don’t know is if the actual rate of extraditions has increased, as Ellingwood reports. Are the number of extradition requests increasing as well? Or are the requests static and the number of approved extraditions increasing?

Anyway, there has been a trend upward in extraditions going back to 2000. As this State Department press release points out, 2003 saw a record, too. The fact is, we’ve heard about new records before:

Narco-Mexico, update

Old news, but here’s an update on SoS Rice’s Puerto Vallarta visit last week, courtesy of Reuters

PUERTO VALLARTA, Mexico (Reuters) – The United States and Mexico will launch a new effort next month to battle Mexican cartels that are smuggling drugs into the United States, their two foreign ministers announced on Thursday.

Funding for the new program has not yet been released. But Rice said the money would be sent as soon as letters of agreement governing the funds were finished.

“We all want the disbursements to begin and we expect that to happen, really, quite soon,” she said at a press conference.

The Merida Initiative, as it is called, will pay for inspection equipment like scanners, helicopters and surveillance aircraft as well as canine units to support interdiction. It will also finance training and technical advice to support law enforcement operations in Mexico.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who has sent some 36,000 troops across Mexico to try to restore law and order, has called on Washington to release the equipment quickly.

Bush, who leaves office early next year, proposed the initiative as a three-year program totaling $1.4 billion. He has asked Congress to approve another $500 million for the fiscal year that ends next September

M3 Report 10/23/08

Life on the border…

Courtesy: National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers/ http:www.nafbpo.org

The M3 report translates a nice bit of writing about life on the border from La Prensa, in Mexico City. Read it after the jump. But, with news of the arrest of Jesus Zambada Garcia, the brother one of Mexico’s most notorious narco kingpin suspects, Ismael Zambada, comes some hefty weaponry/jewelry, as posted by the M3 report. The little vignette and the usual carnage round-up after the jump.

Check out that bullet-blasting bling:

Jesus Zambada Garcia and some friends?