More of the same

Border Patrol agents accused of aiding drug smugglers
By CHRISTOPHER SHERMAN Associated Press
Dec. 5, 2008, 12:04AM

MCALLEN — Two South Texas Border Patrol agents appeared in federal court Thursday on charges alleging they helped drug traffickers move their product across the U.S.-Mexico border.

A grand jury in Houston returned sealed indictments Dec. 1 against Leonel Morales, 30, of the Border Patrol’s Laredo sector and Salomon Ruiz, 34, of the Rio Grande Valley sector.

Both men made their initial appearances in federal courthouses in McAllen and Laredo on Thursday after the FBI arrested them Wednesday. They will remain in custody until their respective detention hearings next week, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Ruiz, of McAllen, faces four counts, including taking about $14,000 in bribes to escort drugs between October 2006 and September 2008, conspiring to possess and distribute cocaine, possessing cocaine, and aiding the possession of the drug.

Each drug charge carries a sentence of 10 years to life.

It was not immediately known Thursday if Ruiz or Morales had retained lawyers. Border Patrol spokesman Lloyd Easterling said weeding out corrupt agents is something the agency takes seriously.

“We have several open investigations going on,” Easterling said.

The FBI, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General, Customs and Border Protection Internal Affairs, and the Border Patrol participated in the investigations, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said in a statement.

Morales, of Zapata County, faces three counts, including taking about $9,000 in bribes to escort drugs between June and August of this year, conspiring to possess cocaine and possession with intent to distribute cocaine. The FBI arrested Morales without incident late Wednesday.

“The recent arrest of Leonel Morales is a reminder of the sever consequences of succumbing to avarice and the promise of ill-gotten gains,” said Carlos X. Carrillo, the Laredo Sector’s chief patrol agent.

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:

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?

Spillover

Different law enforcement agencies have different names for cross-border violence, and with it different definitions, I’m told.

According to one definition, there hasn’t been any “spillover” violence from Ciudad Juarez to El Paso (yet — it’s gone to the West and East, but not openly E.P.). There is concern for the growing threat, particularly as gunshot victims — police officers and others — have been taken to El Paso for medical treatment, as discussed in this LA Times article by Miguel Bustillo.

The only hospital within a 280-mile radius to offer state-of-the-art trauma care, Thomason has become an unwilling treatment center of choice for law enforcement officials and others in the vicinity wounded in Mexico’s drug turf battles. The violence has killed more than 2,000 people this year, and more than double that number in the 20 months since President Felipe Calderon began deploying 40,000 troops across the country to crack down on narcotics trafficking.

Thomason has treated 28 people wounded on the other side of the border this year, spending an estimated $1 million, hospital administrators said. Nineteen were U.S. citizens or had dual citizenship, and the rest had legal permission to enter the country.

Mexican police officers in a number of border towns have come to U.S. ports of entry, seeking asylum out of fear of drug traffickers. In one incident, the police chief of Puerto Palomas, in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, just south of Columbus, New Mexico, and nearly 80 miles west of El Paso, came to the port after several officers quit the force in March.

From Manuel Roig-Franzia of the Washington Post:

Javier Emilio Pérez Ortega, a workaholic Mexican police chief, showed up at the sleepy, two-lane border crossing here last month and asked U.S. authorities for political asylum.

Behind him, law and order was vanishing fast. In the four months he had served as Puerto Palomas police chief, drug traffickers had threatened to kill him and his officers if they tried to block the flow of cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamines into the United States, his former colleagues said on condition of anonymity.

After a particularly menacing telephone call, his 10-man force resigned en masse. His bodyguards quit, too. Abandoned by his men and unable to trust the notoriously corrupt Mexican authorities, Pérez Ortega turned to the only place he believed he could find refuge — the United States, the former colleagues said.

While the violence may not have hit El Paso (at least not reported), it’s certainly happened elsewhere, particularly with kidnapping in Arizona and California.