BajaNomad

USA to the Rescue! USA infiltrating criminal groups across Mexico

Woooosh - 10-25-2011 at 09:57 AM

Mexico pride is causing angst, but it is the only way to solve this problem imho.

"Over the past two years, officials said, D.E.A. agents in Houston managed to develop “several highly placed confidential sources with direct access” to important leaders of the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas. This paid informant network is a centerpiece of the Houston office’s efforts to infiltrate the “command and control” ranks of the two groups."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/world/americas/united-stat...

WASHINGTON — American law enforcement agencies have significantly built up networks of Mexican informants that have allowed them to secretly infiltrate some of that country’s most powerful and dangerous criminal organizations, according to security officials on both sides of the border.

As the United States has opened new law enforcement and intelligence outposts across Mexico in recent years, Washington’s networks of informants have grown there as well, current and former officials said. They have helped Mexican authorities capture or kill about two dozen high-ranking and midlevel drug traffickers, and sometimes have given American counternarcotics agents access to the top leaders of the cartels they are trying to dismantle.

Typically, the officials said, Mexico is kept in the dark about the United States’ contacts with its most secret informants — including Mexican law enforcement officers, elected officials and cartel operatives — partly because of concerns about corruption among the Mexican police, and partly because of laws prohibiting American security forces from operating on Mexican soil.

“The Mexicans sort of roll their eyes and say we know it’s happening, even though it’s not supposed to be happening,” said Eric L. Olson, an expert on Mexican security matters at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

“That’s what makes this so hard,” he said. “The United States is using tools in a country where officials are still uncomfortable with those tools.”

In recent years, Mexican attitudes about American involvement in matters of national security have softened, as waves of drug-related violence have left about 40,000 people dead. And the United States, hoping to shore up Mexico’s stability and prevent its violence from spilling across the border, has expanded its role in ways unthinkable five years ago, including flying drones in Mexican skies.

The efforts have been credited with breaking up several of Mexico’s largest cartels into smaller — and presumably less dangerous — crime groups. But the violence continues, as does the northward flow of illegal drugs.

While using informants remains a largely clandestine affair, several recent cases have shed light on the kinds of investigations they have helped crack, including a plot this month in which the United States accused an Iranian-American car salesman of trying to hire killers from a Mexican drug cartel, known as Los Zetas, to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington.

American officials said Drug Enforcement Administration informants with links to the cartels helped the authorities to track down several suspects linked to the February murder of a United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, Jaime J. Zapata, who is alleged to have been shot to death by members of Los Zetas in central Mexico.

The D.E.A.’s dealings with informants and drug traffickers — sometimes, officials acknowledged, they are one and the same — are at the center of proceedings in a federal courthouse in Chicago, where one of the highest-ranking leaders of the Sinaloa cartel is scheduled to go on trial next year.

And last month, a federal judge in El Paso sentenced a midlevel leader of the Sinaloa cartel to life in prison after he was found guilty on drug and conspiracy charges. He was accused of working as a kind of double agent, providing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency with information about the movements of a rival cartel in order to divert attention from his own trafficking activities.

As important as informants have been, complicated ethical issues tend to arise when law enforcement officers make deals with criminals. Few informants, law enforcement officials say, decide to start providing information to the government out of altruism; typically, they are caught committing a crime and want to mitigate their legal troubles, or are essentially taking bribes to inform on their colleagues.

Morris Panner, a former assistant United States attorney who is a senior adviser at the Center for International Criminal Justice at Harvard Law School, said some of the recent cases involving informants highlight those issues and demonstrate that the threats posed by Mexican narcotics networks go far beyond the drug trade.

“Mexican organized crime groups have morphed from drug trafficking organizations into something new and far more dangerous,” Mr. Panner said. “The Zetas now are active in extortion, human trafficking, money laundering, and increasingly, anything a violent criminal organization can do to make money, whether in Mexico, Guatemala or, it appears, the U.S.”

Because of the clandestine nature of their communications with informants, and the potential for diplomatic flare-ups between the United States and Mexico, American officials were reluctant to provide any details about the scope of their confidential sources south of the border.

Over the past two years, officials said, D.E.A. agents in Houston managed to develop “several highly placed confidential sources with direct access” to important leaders of the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas. This paid informant network is a centerpiece of the Houston office’s efforts to infiltrate the “command and control” ranks of the two groups.

One of those paid informants was the man who authorities say was approached last spring by a man charged in Iran’s alleged plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador. Law enforcement documents say the informant told his handlers that an Iranian-American, Mansour J. Arbabsiar, had reached out to him to ask whether Los Zetas would be willing to carry out terrorist attacks in the United States and elsewhere.

Authorities would provide only vague details about the informant and his connections to Los Zetas, saying that he had been charged in the United States with narcotics crimes and that those charges had been dropped because he had “previously provided reliable and independently corroborated information to federal law enforcement agents” that “led to numerous seizures of narcotics.”

The Justice Department has been more forthcoming about the D.E.A.’s work with informants in a case against Jesús Vicente Zambada-Niebla, known as Vicentillo. Officials describe Mr. Zambada-Niebla as a logistics coordinator for the Sinaloa cartel, considered one of the world’s most important drug trafficking groups. His lawyers have argued that he was an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration, which offered him immunity in exchange for his cooperation.

The D.E.A. has denied that allegation, and the Justice Department took the rare step of disclosing the agency’s contacts with him in court documents. The intermediary was Humberto Loya-Castro, who was both a confidant to the cartel’s kingpin, Joaquín Guzmán, known as El Chapo, and an informant to the D.E.A.

The documents do not say when the relationship between the agency and Mr. Loya-Castro began, but they indicate that because of his cooperation, the D.E.A. dismissed a 13-year-old conspiracy charge against him in 2008.

In 2009, the documents said, Mr. Loya-Castro arranged a meeting between two D.E.A. agents and Mr. Zambada-Niebla, who was floating an offer to negotiate some kind of cooperation agreement. But on the day of the meeting, the agents’ supervisors canceled it, expressing “concern about American agents meeting with a high-level cartel member like Zambada-Niebla.”

Mr. Zambada-Niebla and Mr. Loya-Castro showed up at the agents’ hotel anyway. The D.E.A. agents sent Mr. Zambada-Niebla away without making any promises, the documents said. A few hours later, Mr. Zambada-Niebla was captured by the Mexican police, and was extradited to the United States in February 2010.

Vanda Felbab-Brown, an expert on organized crime at the Brookings Institution, said that while some had criticized the D.E.A. for entertaining “deals with the devil,” she saw the Zambada case as an important intelligence coup. Even in an age of high-tech surveillance, she said, there is no substitute for human sources’ feeding authorities everything from what targeted traffickers like to eat to where they sleep most nights.

A former senior counternarcotics official echoed that thought.

“A D.E.A. agent’s job, first and foremost, is to get inside the body of those criminal organizations he or she is investigating,” the former official said, asking not to be identified because he occasionally does consulting work in Mexico. “Nothing provides that microscopic view more than a host that opens the door.”

Cypress - 10-25-2011 at 10:17 AM

Paid informants?:biggrin: Are those the same guys the Justice Dept. sold the guns to? The same guns they lost track of and denied selling in the first place? The US govt. has blocked action against illegal immigrants and securing the border. The term "circus" is appropriate.

Woooosh - 10-25-2011 at 10:21 AM

Nothing Mexico is doing is working- so why the skepticism? How much worse could the USA make it? It is smart for the USA to begin to tackle the problem on the Mexico side of the border. The trickle of cartel influence in the USA is now a tsunami.

Ateo - 10-25-2011 at 10:24 AM

Waste of time and money. Prohibition does not work. Only raises the costs for all involved.

Cypress - 10-25-2011 at 10:26 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Woooosh
Nothing Mexico is doing is working- so why the skepticism? How much worse could the USA make it?


A lot, if past performance is an indicator.:O

JoeJustJoe - 10-25-2011 at 11:02 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Woooosh
Nothing Mexico is doing is working- so why the skepticism? How much worse could the USA make it? It is smart for the USA to begin to tackle the problem on the Mexico side of the border. The trickle of cartel influence in the USA is now a tsunami.


Woooosh Santa Claus, US troops, nor snitches will win the US/Calderon "war on drugs."

The USA has it's own problems and should be working on it's own side of the border on the demand side where Americans have an insatiable appetite for drugs, and drugs are everywhere.

You should be skeptical giving the history of the "war on drugs" on either side of the border.

Woooosh - 10-25-2011 at 11:24 AM

You make the mistake of believing this is about drugs. It is about money. Drugs is just the current tool to get money- followed by arms sales, kidnapping, extortion. I think it is worth a shot for the USA to infiltrate the cartels. The lack of outrage one would expect from Mexico is the telling point here. The status quo is unacceptable for either country.

I have a real concern about legalizing drugs- because that will just make them look for lost revenue elsewhere. They won't go away, they won't go back to being poor. I wold rather the cartels make their money from "willing drug consumers" than kidnapping and extortion.

[Edited on 10-25-2011 by Woooosh]

JoeJustJoe - 10-25-2011 at 12:30 PM

Wow that's deep Woooosh. "It's all about the money."

Of course it's all about the money, and essentially "Plan Mexico" is about rewarding US companies with US citizens tax money.

It's like Subcomandante Marcos, of the Zapatista National Liberation Army once said," The United States will be the only winner in the Mexican government's war on drugs. The United States, as the "principal provider" of weapons to both the Mexican security forces and the cartels, is the only winner in the drug war, Marcos said."

Marcos also said this," "What better war for the United States than one that gives it profits, territory and political and military control without the inconvenient 'body bags' and war-wounded that came to it, earlier, from Vietnam, and now from Iraq and Afghanistan?," Marcos asks.

Decriminalization of drugs is a much better answer than continuing this losing "war on drugs." The Mexican drug cartels will lose millions and millions of dollars if Mexico does the right thing and quits jailing people over drugs.

You can't replace drug revenue with kidnapping, extortion, and prostitution, although with the ladder I hear it's a reusable commodity you can use over and over again.:tumble:

For example Woooosh if you get kidnapped. The cartel has to take the time to find you, and make sure you actually have money. Then they have to call your family and ask for a random. Your family might tell them to keep you, and then the kidnappers have to call other family members in the states and see if they would pay. This takes a long time Woooosh.

Now a street drug dealer could bring in $1000 dollars a night, and the cartels could put out an army of street dealers.

After Prohibition ended in the USA. The gangland violence all but disappeared and the gangsters had to reorganized themselves into underground syndicates that controlled gambling and prostitution.

Was John Gotti, aka the Teflon Don all that bad compared to a powerful drug lord like El Chapo who made the " Forbes" most-powerful and rich list?

Woooosh you're just selfish thinking if Mexico legalizes drugs that the Mexican drug cartels are going to kidnap you.

Don't worry Wooosh. I'm sure the "Nomad" members will take up a ransom collection for you, and later the "Nomad" detractors will ask for a full accounting of the money raised. They may even want to see receipts from the kidnapping cartels.

[Edited on 10-25-2011 by JoeJustJoe]

DENNIS - 10-25-2011 at 12:32 PM

I don't believe anything our government says, but if what our government says is true about a network of informants, why would they advertise it?
I just don't believe it.

toneart - 10-25-2011 at 12:36 PM

I have been a consistent proponent of legalization as the best way to curb the violence, but your point does make a lot of sense. Thank you, Woooosh!
Quote:
Originally posted by Woooosh
You make the mistake of believing this is about drugs. It is about money. Drugs is just the current tool to get money- followed by arms sales, kidnapping, extortion. I think it is worth a shot for the USA to infiltrate the cartels. The lack of outrage one would expect from Mexico is the telling point here. The status quo is unacceptable for either country.

I have a real concern about legalizing drugs- because that will just make them look for lost revenue elsewhere. They won't go away, they won't go back to being poor. I wold rather the cartels make their money from "willing drug consumers" than kidnapping and extortion.

[Edited on 10-25-2011 by Woooosh]

Woooosh - 10-25-2011 at 01:54 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by JoeJustJoe They may even want to see receipts from the kidnapping cartels.
[Edited on 10-25-2011 by JoeJustJoe]


Who is they? Aren't YOU a nomad? Maybe the IRS will accept that receipt as a deduction. No worries nomads, my family doesn't do extortion. We have one dead an one still missing for two years to show for it- not counting those who moved away to confuse the extortionists.
:saint:

For the record, I do support legalizing drugs. But even the Netherlands has re-criminalized the higher strength pot. So if pot is legal you will just see more heroin and crack being sold in the USA. The pot and heroin pass through Mexico to the USA for the most-part, but Mexicans make crack in Mexico for the USA under the watchful eyes of ... well pretty much everyone.

[Edited on 10-25-2011 by Woooosh]

US in, AGAIN

tehag - 10-25-2011 at 06:41 PM

Anybody remember the origin of the dreaded Zetas?

Woooosh - 10-25-2011 at 07:04 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by tehag
Anybody remember the origin of the dreaded Zetas?

Mexico?

US in, AGAIN

tehag - 10-25-2011 at 07:20 PM

Fort Benning, Georgia, where they were trained as an elite paramilitary group to combat insurgents (ie cartels).

This is called blowback, which is ridiculously common. There is a book by that name that makes for a real fun read.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zetas_%28Mexico%29

bajatravelergeorge - 10-26-2011 at 03:05 PM

What better way to spread mistrust in an organization than saying you have informants in the organization. It puts a kink in the way they do business and keeps them looking over their backs for the authorities and its a cheap weapon to deploy. (just words)

If you really had alot of informants, the last thing you want is for that information to be made public. This sounds to me like maybe they had a couple of informants that got exposed so they are trying to make in sound like they have alot more of them.

My guess is that the cartels have alot more informants in the authorities organizations than the other way around.

JESSE - 10-26-2011 at 03:39 PM

Ridiculous article. US intelligence agencies have always been deep inside the cartels for DECADES, they know where, who, when, what, and so far it hasn't worked out very well for us (mex-usa).

Woooosh - 10-26-2011 at 03:46 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by JESSE
Ridiculous article. US intelligence agencies have always been deep inside the cartels for DECADES, they know where, who, when, what, and so far it hasn't worked out very well for us (mex-usa).
It's about big money and there is a money trail if anyone chooses to follow it. So far no one wants to follow the money because everyone is getting some- one way or the other. Too big a story I would guess. But only the top 1% of narcos win- like el chapo. The other 99% of street dealers, users and addicts lose in the end. They should form a union or occupy someplace.

[Edited on 10-26-2011 by Woooosh]

bajatravelergeorge - 10-26-2011 at 04:21 PM

Its not just about the money Woooosh, its also about the lead thats shaped into a bullet. Alot of good people are forced to take the money, or get the lead.

Woooosh - 10-26-2011 at 04:44 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by bajatravelergeorge
Its not just about the money Woooosh, its also about the lead thats shaped into a bullet. Alot of good people are forced to take the money, or get the lead.

Yeah, we all saw that on Nat Geo. They make the wrong choice.

BajaGringo - 10-27-2011 at 08:51 AM

If you ask me we're a day late and a dollar short...