By Matt Castello ticklethewire.com For a big-time Louisiana drug trafficker, the dog and cockfighting ring served as the ideal venue to help expand his drug ring. Pedro Mendez Ramos, of Church Point, La., who authorities described as “an avid pit bull and cock fighter”, used more than 300 gamecocks and 60 pit bulls as a…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com The murderous ways of the Mexican drug cartels may seem very scary, but so is another phenomena: The cartels are apparently shutting up the media. The Washington Post reports journalists, fearing for their lives, “are adhering to a near-complete news blackout, under strict orders of drug smuggling organizations and their enforcers,…
By Jackson Diehl Washington Post Deputy Editorial Page Writer WASHINGTON — Last month, 303 people were murdered in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez, which lies alongside El Paso. This month, the dead include three men killed by a sophisticated, remote-controlled car bomb — the first in Mexico’s drug wars. In a city of…
By Allan Lengel ticklethwire.com As if the drug war in Mexico wasn’t violent enough. Now, the drug dealers, for the first time, have resorted to a car bomb in Mexico in the drug war, the El Paso Times and the Associated Press reported. Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz of Ciudad Juarez said traffickers set a deadly…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com JERUSALEM — Call it a case of very different worlds colliding. The top newspaper Haaretz here in Israel reports that Mexican authorities thwarted a plan by the Lebanese group Hezbollah to set up a network in Latin America and use Mexican Nationals with ties to Lebanon to go after Israel and…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com Authorities on Friday announced the arrest of a Mexican gang leader just south of the Texas border in connection with the March murder of a U.S. consulate employee and her husband in the border area of Juarez, the El Paso Times reported. Authorities said they arrested Jesus Ernesto Chavez Castillo ,…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com Another reminder of the lawlessness in Mexico reared its ugly head Monday when at least 10 federal police officers were killed and more than a dozen wounded in an ambush in an area a major drug organization calls home, the Los Angeles Times reported. The paper reported that the attacks took…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com More than 2,200 people have been arrested in the past 22 months — 429 of them Wednesday — in a crackdown on Mexican drug trafficking organizations in the U.S. dubbed “Project Deliverance”, the Justice Department announced. Among those arrested was Carlos Ramon Castro-Rocha, the suspected leader of the Castro-Rocha drug trafficking…
