Los Zetas called Mexico's most dangerous drug cartel: Michael Ware ~ CNN

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/08/06/mexico.drug.cartels/index.html

Los Zetas called Mexico's most dangerous drug cartel

From Michael Ware
CNN

VERACRUZ, Mexico (CNN) -- The dead always tell a story. And in Mexico that story is the fight for the right to meet U.S. demand for illegal drugs -- a war becoming more violent and ruthless, mostly because of one group.

Suspected members of Los Zetas drug cartel are presented to reporters in Mexico City in April.

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A flower pays tribute to four children slain last week at this home in Veracruz, Mexico.

Its name is Los Zetas.

Imagine a band of U.S. Green Berets going rogue and offering their services and firepower to drug cartels. That's what happened in Mexico in the 1990s. Commandos from the Mexican army deserted and set up a cartel, known as Los Zetas.

The U.S. government says Los Zetas is "the most technologically advanced, sophisticated and dangerous cartel operating in Mexico."

Los Zetas are blamed for last week's brutal killings of the police chief in the southern Mexican city of Veracruz, his wife and four children. The way in which the killers carried out their crime sent a message.

At 5 a.m. on July 29, two cars pulled up in front of the police chief's house, and eight or nine gunmen got out, armed with assault rifles and 40 mm grenade launchers. They blasted their way into the house, and it took them less than five minutes to execute Jesus Antonio Romero, his wife, also a police officer, and their son. The gunmen then set the house on fire, killing the remaining three children, all girls.

Watch scenes of the escalating drug war in Veracruz »

With their fierce weaponry and military expertise, Los Zetas are considered the most formidable enemy in the drug war.

AC360: The war next door

This week on "Anderson Cooper 360," Michael Ware reports from Mexico on the gruesome tactics used by drug cartels. Thursday: Ware tracks "El Chapo," one of Forbes' wealthiest people in the world and also the most wanted man in North America.
Thursday, 10 p.m. ET

see full schedule »

"The Zetas have obviously assumed the role of being the No. 1 organization responsible for the majority of the homicides, the narcotic-related homicides, the beheadings, the kidnappings, the extortions that take place in Mexico," said Ralph Reyes, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency's chief for Mexico and Central America.

The fight against Los Zetas will take years, Reyes said.

"They continue to train new recruits through several campaigns. One of them is the very open and public narco banners that they post around the country of Mexico, specifically tailored to the military and [saying] that they will offer better pay and better benefits if they join the ranks of the Zetas," Reyes said from his Washington office, where he directs the U.S. battle against Los Zetas.

With its mastery of combat, Reyes said, the organized crime network operates more like a U.S. infantry company patrolling the streets of Falluja, Iraq, than a street gang.

Newspapers in Veracruz have headlines almost every day about drug cartels' bloody violence, more often than not linked to Los Zetas. The DEA said that although the group originally was based on military lines, the cartel has been built into a business structure, with quarterly meetings, business ledgers, even votes on key assassinations.

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And now Los Zetas are taxing businesses beyond their drug reach -- from human trafficking across the U.S. border to, as one recent scandal showed, imposing a kind of tax on the Mexican government. The state oil company has been bleeding billions to corrupt officials linked to Los Zetas.

And, as a DEA agent recently said, the American border makes no difference to Los Zetas. It doesn't matter if violence is perpetrated on the Mexican or U.S. side of the border.

Inside the United States, one of the instruments of assassination Los Zetas unleashed was teenager Rosalio Reta. Given six months of military training in Mexico, he was sent across the border to target rival drug gangs. He was 13 years old when he committed his first killing.

"I loved doing it," Reta says in a police interrogation tape. "Killing that first person, I loved it. I thought I was Superman."

U.S. officials have said there are many more like him.

The war next door 5:10
CNN's Michael Ware travels to Veracruz, Mexico, where a family was murdered as a result of the escalating drug wars.

Click to check out Video HERE>
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/08/06/mexico.drug.cartels/index..html#cnnSTCVideo

 

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Education forLiberation! Venceremos Unidos!

Peter S. Lopez ~aka: Peta

Sacramento, California,Aztlan

Yahoo Email: peter.lopez51@yahoo.com  

 

Links: Join Up!

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c/s

U.S. to Reform Policy on Detention for Immigrants: NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/us/politics/06detain.html?th&emc=th

 

August 6, 2009

U.S. to Reform Policy on Detention for Immigrants

By NINA BERNSTEIN

The Obama administration intends to announce an ambitious plan on Thursday to overhaul the much-criticized way the nation detains immigration violators, trying to transform it from a patchwork of jail and prison cells to what its new chief called a "truly civil detention system."

Details are sketchy, and even the first steps will take months or years to complete. They include reviewing the federal government's contracts with more than 350 local jails and private prisons, with an eye toward consolidating many detainees in places more suitable for noncriminals facing deportation — some possibly in centers built and run by the government.

The plan aims to establish more centralized authority over the system, which holds about 400,000 immigration detainees over the course of a year, and more direct oversight of detention centers that have come under fire for mistreatment of detainees and substandard — sometimes fatal — medical care.

One move starts immediately: the government will stop sending families to the T.. Don Hutto Residential Center, a former state prison near Austin, Tex., that drew an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit and scathing news coverage for putting young children behind razor wire.

"We're trying to move away from 'one size fits all,' " John Morton, who heads the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency as assistant secretary of homeland security, said in an interview on Wednesday. Detention on a large scale must continue, he said, "but it needs to be done thoughtfully and humanely."

Hutto, a 512-bed center run for profit by the Corrections Corporation of America under a $2.8 million-a-month federal contract, was presented as a centerpiece of the Bush administration's tough approach to immigration enforcement when it opened in 2006. The decision to stop sending families there — and to set aside plans for three new family detention centers — is the Obama administration's clearest departure from its predecessor's immigration enforcement policies.

So far, the new administration has embraced many of those policies, expanding a program to verify worker immigration status that has been widely criticized, bolstering partnerships between federal immigration agents and local police departments, and rejecting a petition for legally binding rules on conditions in immigration detention.

But Mr. Morton, a career prosecutor, said he was taking a new philosophical approach to detention — that the system's purpose was to remove immigration violators from the country, not imprison them, and that under the government's civil authority, detention is aimed at those who pose a serious risk of flight or danger to the community.

Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, said last week that she expected the number of detainees to stay the same or grow slightly. But Mr. Morton added that the immigration agency would consider alternative ways to assure that those who face deportation — and are not dangerous — do not flee.

Reviewing and redesigning all facilities, programs and standards will be the task of a new Office of Detention Policy and Planning, he said. Dora Schriro, special adviser to Ms. Napolitano, will become the director, assisted by two experts on detention management and medical care. The agency will also form two advisory boards of community groups and immigrant advocates, one focusing on detention policies and practices, the other on detainee health care.

Mr. Morton said he would appoint 23 detention managers to work in the 23 largest detention centers, including several run by private companies, to ensure that problems are promptly fixed. He is reorganizing the agency's inspection unit into three regional operations, renaming it the Office of Detention Oversight, and making its agents responsible for investigating detainee grievances as well as conducting routine and random checks.

"A lot of this exists already," he said. "A lot of it is making it work better" while Dr. Schriro's office redesigns the detention system, which he called "disjointed" and "very much dependent on excess capacity in the criminal justice system."

Asked if his vision could include building new civil detention centers, he said yes. The current 32,000-bed network costs $2.4 billion a year, but the agency is not ready to calculate the cost of a revamped system.

Vanita Gupta, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who led the lawsuit against the Hutto center, was jubilant over the decision to stop sending families there, but cautious about the other measures.

"The ending of family detention at Hutto is welcome news and long overdue," she said in an e-mail message. "However, without independently enforceable standards, a reduction in beds, or basic due process before people are locked up, it is hard to see how the government's proposed overhaul of the immigration detention system is anything other than a reorganization or renaming of what was in place before."

Ms. Gupta said the changes at Hutto since 2006 illustrated the importance of enforceable rules. Before the A.C.L.U. lawsuit was settled in 2007, some children under 10 stayed as long as a year, mainly confined to family cells with open toilets, with only one hour of schooling a day. Children told of being threatened by guards with separation from their parents, many of them asylum-seekers from around the world.

Only through judicial enforcement of the settlement, she said, have children been granted such liberties as wearing pajamas at night and taking crayons into family cells. The settlement also required the agency to honor agency standards that had been ignored, like timely reviews of the decision to detain a family at all. Some families have been deported, but others were released or are now awaiting asylum decisions in housing run by nonprofit social service agencies.

That kind of stepped-up triage could be part of the more civil detention system envisioned by Mr. Morton and Dr. Schriro, who has been reviewing the detention system for months and is expected to report her recommendations soon.

But the Hutto case also points to the limits of their approach, advocates say. Under the settlement, parents and children accused of immigration violations were detained when possible at the country's only other family detention center, an 84-bed former nursing home in Leesport, Pa., called the Berks Family Shelter Care Facility. The number detained at Hutto has dropped sharply, to 127 individuals from as many as 450.

Advocates noted that Berks, though eclipsed by the criticism of Hutto — the subject of protest vigils, a New Yorker article and a documentary — also has a history of problems, like guards who disciplined children by sending them across the parking lot to a juvenile detention center, and families' being held for two years.

The Hutto legal settlement expires Aug. 29. In the most recent monitoring report last month, Magistrate Judge Andrew W. Austin wrote: "Although the use of this facility to hold families is not a violation of the settlement agreement, it seems fundamentally wrong to house children and their noncriminal parents this way. We can do better."

Mr. Morton, a career prosecutor, seemed to agree. Hutto will be converted into an immigration jail for women, he said, adding: "I'm not ruling out the possibility of detaining families. But Berks is the better facility for that. Hutto is not the long-term answer."

Pool photo by L.M. Otero

A family cell at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center. The government will stop sending families there.

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Education forLiberation! Venceremos Unidos!

Peter S. Lopez ~aka: Peta

Sacramento, California,Aztlan

Yahoo Email: peter.lopez51@yahoo.com  

 

Links: Join Up!

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Humane-Rights-Agenda/ 

 

http://humane-rights-agenda.blogspot.com/ 

 

http://humane-rights-agenda-network.ning.com/ 

 

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NetworkAztlan_News/ 

 

c/s

Venceremos! Judge Sotomayor's Confirmation is a Victory for the Country and the High Court

08-06-2009 @3:33 PM ~ PST
Great news for the day! Let's not put on our party hats now!!!!!
The struggles go on. Now we need to continue our collective work for fair
relevant humane immigration legislation, go out and register our local
communities to vote in upcoming elections and let us  remember the siren
call to FREE LEONARD PELTIER!

President Clinton can go all the way to North Korea to obtain the victorious
release of two American journalists, which we are grateful for today, but
recall he decided not to grant a pardon for Leonard Peltier in his last day in office.
Where was his humanitarian gesture then? Where is President Obama's sense of
justice for a more perfect union in relation to Brother Leonard Peltier now?!?!

Judge Sotomayor's Confirmation is a great victory whose Victory I am sure has
already traveled around the world via the Power of the Internet, yet Brother
Leonard still remain in a prison cage without release!

 

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Education for Liberation! Venceremos Unidos!
Peter S. Lopez ~aka: Peta
Sacramento, California,Aztlan
Yahoo Email: peter.lopez51@yahoo.com

Related Links: Join Up!
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Humane-Rights-Agenda/

http://humane-rights-agenda.blogspot.com/

http://humane-rights-agenda-network.ning.com/

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NetworkAztlan_News/

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From: Sotomayor for Justice <info@maldef.org>
To: PETER LOPEZ <peter.lopez51@yahoo.com>
Sent: Thursday, August 6, 2009 12:58:31 PM
Subject: Judge Sotomayor's Confirmation is a Victory for the Country and the High Court

JUDGE SOTOMAYOR'S CONFIRMATION IS A VICTORY FOR THE COUNTRY AND THE HIGH COURT Judge Sotomayor becomes the first Hispanic to serve on the Supreme Court WASHINGTON D.C. – Today, Judge Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed by a vote of 68 to 31 in the U.S. Senate. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), the nation's leading Latino civil rights organization, joins millions around the country in celebrating Sotomayor's confirmation by the Senate to serve as the first Hispanic Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. MALDEF President and General Counsel Thomas A. Saenz stated, "Justice Sotomayor's eminent qualifications and wise committee testimony shattered a glass ceiling today. This tremendous accomplishment is only marred by the fact that so many senators chose to elevate partisanship and political pandering over principle by voting against her confirmation. History – and the fast-growing community of Latino voters – will judge these senators harshly." The recent confirmation hearings underscored that Judge Sotomayor is known to closely study the facts of each case, apply legal theories through careful and considered deliberation and issue even-handed rulings. Sotomayor's 17-year judicial record and Senate testimony demonstrate an unwavering dedication to these principles. Unsurprisingly, her nomination garnered unyielding and widespread support from law enforcement groups, lawyers, jurists and academia. "It is with great pride and admiration that MALDEF and the Hispanic community welcomes the confirmation of the first Hispanic to serve on the Supreme Court. She is a champion of the ideals to which we all can aspire, namely a strong work ethic and a commitment to public service," stated Claudine Karasik, MALDEF Legislative Staff Attorney. Over the years, it has become increasingly important for our courts to reflect the growing Latino presence in this country. MALDEF thanks President Obama and the members of the U.S. Senate for their leadership in choosing a highly qualified and dedicated public servant to serve our country. Judge Sotomayor's confirmation reflects the commitment of our nation's leaders to promote the legitimacy of the judicial system and secure our community's trust and confidence in the courts. Make sure you receive email updates from Sotomayor for Justice. Add info@maldef.org to your approved senders list. This email was sent to: peter.lopez51@yahoo.com. Click here Powered by ARCOS | Design by Plus Three

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