Global Ganja Report

The US Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on Sept. 21 imposed Kingpin Act sanctions on four Colombian nationals and 12 companies said to be linked to Joaquín Guzmán Loera AKA "El Chapo"—head of Mexico's Sinaloa Cartel. Guzmán faces charges in the US, but remains at large. (WSJ Corruption Currents blog, Sept. 20) The move comes amid increasing charges that US law enforcement—as well as the Mexican government is favoring the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico's bloody narco wars.

Two half-naked mutilated bodies left hanging from a bridge in the Mexican border town of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, were accompanied by "narco-messages" scrawled on cardboard saying the killings were an example of what will happen to "Internet snitches" (relajes del internet). The message was signed "Z," an apparent reference to Los Zetas.

The US Justice Department announced Aug. 30 that Kenneth Melson, acting head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), had been reassigned to another position in the department and that Dennis Burke, US attorney for Arizona, was resigning from his post. The department gave no reason for the changes, but they were clearly fallout from Operation Fast and Furious, a bungled ATF program that allowed some 2,000 weapons to go from the US to Mexico, where they were probably used in drug cartel violence.

Mexican marines shot and killed Gustavo Acosta Luján in the early morning of Sept. 1 in his home in Jardines de San Andrés, Apodaca municipality, in the northern state of Nuevo León. According to the Secretariat of the Navy, the marines, responding to an anonymous tip, were fired on from inside the house, and Gustavo Acosta, an "alleged criminal" with the alias "M-3," died in the operation. The marines said they found a 9 mm submachine gun, an AR-15 rifle and quantities of cocaine in the house. Mexican president Felipe Calderón Hinojosa has been using soldiers for police work in northern Mexico since militarizing the "war on drugs" shortly after he took office in December 2006.

Tim Padgett of Time magazine's Global Spin blog queried Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske about comments made by Mexican President Felipe Calderón in his speech following the recent Monterrey casino massacre, in which he said the US was complicit for its "insatiable" demand for drugs and should consider "market alternatives" to failed anti-drug policies. Was this a coded reference to legalization, and would this put pressure on the White House to consider the idea? Kerlikowske responded:

An Aug. 31 report on PBS NewsHour provides mixed indications on recent hype about the supposed presence of Mexican drug cartels in the cannabis trade of Northern California's Emerald Triangle—which has now been officially designated a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area by the federal government. In the Mendocino National Forest, which has seen unprecedented raids this year, 10 Mexican nationals are among the approximately 100 arrested. Last year, Mendocino County saw a record-breaking number of armed confrontations during marijuana raids—"many with Mexican nationals with suspected links to drug gangs across the border." Two Mexican nationals were killed in last year's raids—one, named Mariano Fernández, reportedly after he aimed an "AK-47-type rifle" at a police SWAT team.

The US Navy transport ship USS New Orleans recovered an estimated 1,800 pounds of cannabis from a small boat off the coast of San Diego Aug. 20. Coast Guard officials received a call about a 20-foot fishing boat apparently from Mexico, and requested the New Orleans respond as they were operating in the vicinity. As the New Orleans approached, the boat's crew dumped several bundles overboard. Officials said some 1,800 pounds of cannabis was recovered from the dumped bundles. The recovered cannabis and several crew members were turned over to the Mexican navy.

Last month, Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla AKA "El Mayito"—the son of Sinaloa Cartel kingpin Ismael Zambada AKA "El Mayo"—filed pleadings in a Chicago federal court accusing the US Justice Department of giving the cartel "carte blanche to continue to smuggle tons of illicit drugs into Chicago and the rest of the United States." Zambada's pleadings claim that protection included promises to be kept apprised of US and Mexican government investigations close to the "home territories" of cartel leaders so they "could take appropriate actions to evade investigators"—even as the US had indictments, extradition requests, and rewards for the apprehension of the top Sinaloa Cartel leadership.