Global Ganja Report

A scandal involving US law enforcement programs to let guns "walk" into Mexico has now widened to include the 2001-2008 administration of former president George W. Bush, a Republican, as well as the administration of current Democratic president Barack Obama. The latest revelations concern a program codenamed Operation Wide Receiver, in which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) reportedly allowed some 350 or 400 guns to enter Mexico illegally during 2006 and 2007.

State, local and federal law enforcement in Arizona announced Oct. 31 that they have dismantled a smuggling ring allegedly operated by the Sinaloa Cartel, which is believed to have trafficked some $2 billion of drugs from Mexico through the state over the past five years. "We in Arizona continue to stand and fight the Mexican drug cartels, who think they own the place," Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu said in a statement about the investigation, dubbed Operation Pipeline Express. A total of 76 individuals are being held in connection to the ring, from organizational bosses to stash-house guards to those who transported the drugs in backpacks and in vehicles. Weapons and large bundles of compacted cannabis were seized in the raids.

Mexico's former President Vicente Fox again spoke out for drug legalization this month, telling a Washington DC meeting of the right-libertarian Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity that prohibition bears responsibility for the horrific toll in his country's cartel wars: "Fifty thousand kids from 15 to 25 years old have been killed in the last five years. Violence does not defeat violence." He asked rhetorically: "Do we really expect that the government will eradicate the drugs from the face of the earth?"

The clandestine online activist network Anonymous has released an Internet video demanding that Los Zetas, Mexico's bloodiest drug cartel, release one of its members who was kidnapped from a street protest in Veracruz. The Anonymous spokesman—in tie, jacket and Guy Fawkes mask—says if the Zetas don't release their comrade, it will publish the identities and addresses of the syndicate's associates. Speaking in Spanish with fluent use of Mexican slang, the masked spokesman says: "You made a huge mistake by taking one of us. Release him." Otherwise it threatens to reveal the Zetas' "cars, homes, bars, brothels and everything else in their possession. It won't be difficult; we all know who they are and where they are located."

The US Justice Department on Oct. 11 announced charges aganst two men allegedly working for "factions of the Iranian government" with plotting to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, Adel al-Jubeir, and to attack Saudi embassies.

Forty of the firearms that Mexican police seized on April 30 at the home of an alleged drug trafficker in Ciudad Juárez turn out to be among the 2,000 weapons that reached Mexico as a result of the US government's bungled Operation Fast and Furious. The house, which was empty when police arrived, belonged to José Antonio Torres Marrufo, considered by US authorities a top enforcer for the Sinaloa drug cartel of Joaquín Guzmán Loera ("El Chapo"). The weapons were bought legally in Phoenix, Ariz., then taken to El Paso, Tex., and smuggled across the border to Juárez.

Barely a week goes by without a scandal involving a New Mexico law enforcement officer making the headlines in the state. Angelo Vega, the former police chief of the border town of Columbus, pleads guilty to extortion and trafficking arms destined for La Linea criminal organization, one of the protagonists in the so-called Mexican drug wars.

Noel Salgueiro Nevarez AKA "El Flaco" (Skinny), the Sinaloa Cartel's top boss in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, was captured by army troops Oct. 5 in Culiacán, Sinaloa, in what authorities called a precise operation with no shots fired. El Flaco's arrest "affects the leadership structure, as well as the operational capabilities," of the Sinaloa network in Chihuahua, the Defense Secretariat and Prosecutor General's office said in a joint statement. He is said to be the leader of a criminal gang called the Gente Nueva (New People), which serves as a local enforcement arm of the Sinaloa Cartel (also known as the Pacific Cartel) in Chihuahua. However, the cartel's maximum boss, Joaquín Guzmán AKA "El Chapo" (Shorty), still remains at large. (EFE, Borderland Beat, Oct. 5)