Mexican authorities on Friday detained an alleged founder of a vicious gang of drug-cartel hitmen and a former senior police official suspected of aiding drug traffickers.
The announcements came on another day of extreme violence in Mexico. In the northeast, police mistakenly opened fire on a family of six, seriously wounding a teenage girl. In the west, inmates rioted, killing six. And police in Tijuana found three more bodies accompanied by messages that appeared to be from drug traffickers.
Police arrested Jaime Gonzalez Duran, also known as “The Hummer,” in the northern city of Reynosa, across the border from McAllen, Texas.
Gonzalez Duran is allegedly one of the founding members of the Zetas, a group of army deserters who went to work as hit men for the Gulf drug cartel.
Federal Police Commissioner Rodrigo Esparza said Gonzalez Duran deserted from the army in 1999 and was a top lieutenant to current Zeta leader Heriberto Lazcano.
Also on Friday, the army announced that it seized the largest drug-cartel weapons cache ever found in the country.
The raid on Thursday netted 540 rifles, 165 grenades, 500,000 rounds of ammunition and 14 sticks of TNT from a house in Reynosa.
And prosecutors announced that Rodolfo de la Guardia Garcia, the No. 2 official in the Federal Agency of Investigation from 2003-2005, has been placed under house arrest for 40 days as investigators look into the possibility he leaked information to the Sinaloa cartel in return for monthly payments in dollars.
De la Guardia was elected to Interpol’s executive committee in 2002 but was removed from that post by the Mexican government in 2004, the Lyon, France-based Interpol General Secretariat said in a statement on Friday.
The statement said Interpol was never informed as to why the Mexican government removed him and said that during his tenure “Interpol was never given any reason to question his integrity.”
It stressed that “members of the Interpol Executive Committee are national law enforcement officials employed and paid for by their national authorities. They are not staff members” of the international police body.
De la Guardia’s detention by the Attorney-General’s Office was part of the Mexican government’s “Operation Clean House,” which aims to weed out corruption that came to light after the January arrest of Alfredo Beltran Leyva, a reputed Sinaloa cartel lieutenant.
Former federal police commissioner Gerardo Garay and three other officials of the Public Safety Department were arrested earlier, though officials have not revealed the allegations against them.
In the past two weeks, the Sinaloa cartel also has been linked to four Mexican military officers and one soldier, as well as five officials in the organized-crime unit of the Attorney-General’s Office, which oversees the agency that employed de la Guardia Garcia.
Mexican President Felipe Calderon has long acknowledged corruption among the federal police and soldiers leading the nation’s anti-drug campaign.
These announcements suggest corruption still reaches high in the ranks of law enforcement despite decades of crackdowns.
The Sinaloa cartel is one of several criminal gangs waging a savage battle for control of lucrative routes used to bring illegal drugs to consumers in the US. Hundreds of people have been killed, often decapitated, across northern and western Mexico.
The death toll among police is particularly high, leaving officers fearful and jittery.
In the northern city of Monterrey on Friday, police mistakenly opened fire on a family of six after confusing their vehicle with a getaway car used by armed robbers. A 13-year-old girl was shot in the head and chest, said Nuevo Leon state Security Secretary Aldo Fasci Zuazua. Her father was shot in the shoulder and hand, while the mother was grazed by a bullet in the head.
A two-year-old boy suffered minor injuries and two other children, four and six, were treated for shock and released.
In other violence, six prisoners died and two inmates were injured in a riot early on Friday in a prison in the Pacific resort city of Mazatlan, the Televisa television network reported.
In the border city of Tijuana on Friday, three bodies were found alongside messages apparently from drug traffickers, Baja California’s state attorney general’s office said. Another man was found riddled with bullets hours later.
Meanwhile, prosecutors in the Gulf coast state of Tabasco said they arrested the suspected killers of a Mexican radio host, who was gunned down on Sept. 23 while hanging banners to protest a wave of national kidnappings. The hit men worked for the Gulf drug cartel.
More than 4,000 people have been killed this year across Mexico as drug gangs lash back at Calderon’s national crackdown on organized crime.
Kehinde Sanni spends his days smoothing out dents and repainting scratched bumpers in a modest autobody shop in Lagos. He has never left Nigeria, yet he speaks glowingly of Burkina Faso military leader Ibrahim Traore. “Nigeria needs someone like Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso. He is doing well for his country,” Sanni said. His admiration is shaped by a steady stream of viral videos, memes and social media posts — many misleading or outright false — portraying Traore as a fearless reformer who defied Western powers and reclaimed his country’s dignity. The Burkinabe strongman swept into power following a coup in September 2022
‘FRAGMENTING’: British politics have for a long time been dominated by the Labor Party and the Tories, but polls suggest that Reform now poses a significant challenge Hard-right upstarts Reform UK snatched a parliamentary seat from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labor Party yesterday in local elections that dealt a blow to the UK’s two establishment parties. Reform, led by anti-immigrant firebrand Nigel Farage, won the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby in northwest England by just six votes, as it picked up gains in other localities, including one mayoralty. The group’s strong showing continues momentum it built up at last year’s general election and appears to confirm a trend that the UK is entering an era of multi-party politics. “For the movement, for the party it’s a very, very big
ENTERTAINMENT: Rio officials have a history of organizing massive concerts on Copacabana Beach, with Madonna’s show drawing about 1.6 million fans last year Lady Gaga on Saturday night gave a free concert in front of 2 million fans who poured onto Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro for the biggest show of her career. “Tonight, we’re making history... Thank you for making history with me,” Lady Gaga told a screaming crowd. The Mother Monster, as she is known, started the show at about 10:10pm local time with her 2011 song Bloody Mary. Cries of joy rose from the tightly packed fans who sang and danced shoulder-to-shoulder on the vast stretch of sand. Concert organizers said 2.1 million people attended the show. Lady Gaga
SUPPORT: The Australian prime minister promised to back Kyiv against Russia’s invasion, saying: ‘That’s my government’s position. It was yesterday. It still is’ Left-leaning Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese yesterday basked in his landslide election win, promising a “disciplined, orderly” government to confront cost-of-living pain and tariff turmoil. People clapped as the 62-year-old and his fiancee, Jodie Haydon, who visited his old inner Sydney haunt, Cafe Italia, surrounded by a crowd of jostling photographers and journalists. Albanese’s Labor Party is on course to win at least 83 seats in the 150-member parliament, partial results showed. Opposition leader Peter Dutton’s conservative Liberal-National coalition had just 38 seats, and other parties 12. Another 17 seats were still in doubt. “We will be a disciplined, orderly
RSS