Crime in Brazil

Recent surveys reflect public safety has not been the priority of the current Brazilian government. The surveys are talkinf about little investment public safety, high rates of crime and homicide, low percentage of homicides cleared by the justice system, increased sense of insecurity of the population, according to an article published by 180graus.com

The article says that a survey by the website Open Accounts about public spending on public safety, points out that the 3.1 billion in planned budget for public safety in 2012, only 738 million reais (23.8% of total) was used by the federal government.

According to the survey, the pending on the purchase of new vehicles, equipment and infrastructure improvements, such as prisons and police departments, although it was higher than in 2010 and 2011, is far less than that applied in 2007 (R $ 1.2 billion).

Excessive bureaucracy, the systemic failings of the various organs of government and lack of commitment results are the main factors for the low investment of resources in the area. Furthermore, by constitutional provision, the federal government maintains some distance from the public safety issue, since the control of the military and civil police is the responsibility of the states. With this, the difficulties in applying the resources demonstrate the need to review assignments of the central federal government in Brasilia, states and municipalities.

Brazil is considered the second most violent country in the world, based on figures relating to intentional lethal crimes. Annually about 50 thousand Brazilians are victims of homicides in Brazil. Of these, on average, only 8% the police get the criminals and far fewer get to be tried and convicted. The impunity rate reaches the level of 92%, according to the article.

Nevertheless, Brazil supposedly can not be regarded as a country of  impunity, because it has the third prison population in the world, second only to China and the United States, and one of the fastest growth rate of incarceration in the world. In 1995 there were 160 000 prisoners and currently are 540 000.

The Americas Post - Another one bites the dust, but will this really change anything at all?

Mexican authorities have announced the capture of one of the country’s most wanted drug bosses, the head of the Gulf Cartel, marking another victory in President Felipe Calderon’s crackdown on organized crime.

The Mexican Navy paraded Jorge Costilla, alias “El Coss,” before the media on Thursday along with several lower-ranking associates and a large cache of guns, ammunition and jewelry.

A government security official said Costilla, 41, was detained on Wednesday in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas, where the cartel is very active, without putting up a fight.

The U.S. State Department had a reward of up to $5 million for his capture while the Mexican government offered a separate 30 million peso ($2.3 million) reward.

The arrest of the suspected capo comes barely a week after Mexico’s Navy captured senior Gulf Cartel member Mario Cardenas, alias “Fatso,” also in Tamaulipas.

The Gulf Cartel has been weakened by a violent turf war with the Zetas, a gang formed by army deserters who acted as enforcers for the cartel before breaking away in 2010.

It could also have political implications because top officials in the cartel’s stronghold of Tamaulipas have been accused of taking money from local drug gangs.

“All these politicians who were getting money from the Gulf Cartel ought to be very worried now because this information is going to come to light in Mexico or the United States,” said Alberto Islas, a security expert at consultancy Risk Evaluation, after hearing the reports of Costilla’s capture.

Costilla features prominently on a wanted list of 37 kingpins the Mexican government published in 2009. Well over 20 on that list have now been captured or killed.

Few photos of Costilla have been published to date in Mexican media, but the stocky figure presented on Thursday to cameras looked very much like the man in those images.

Islas said he expected Costilla to be extradited to the United States, and that his testimony could prove damaging to officials in Tamaulipas and neighboring Veracruz state, which has also been dogged by allegations of corruption.

Tomas Yarrington, a governor of Tamaulipas between 1999 and 2005, is a fugitive and wanted in Mexico for aiding drug gangs.

Yarrington governed Tamaulipas for the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which will retake the presidency in December after its candidate, Enrique Pena Nieto, won a July 1 election. The PRI suspended Yarrington from the party in May.

Islas said revelations about graft would raise pressure on Pena Nieto to take steps to clean up the image of the centrist PRI, which governed Mexico between 1929 and 2000. That rule was tainted by frequent allegations of corruption.

The FBI said Costilla is believed to have taken over the daily operations of the cartel after his former boss, Osiel Cardenas, was arrested and jailed in Mexico in 2003.

It said a federal arrest warrant was issued for Costilla in Texas in 2002, and that he was charged with drug offenses, threatening to assault and murder federal agents, and money laundering.

The FBI’s wanted notice includes a grainy photograph of Costilla wearing a cowboy hat and a mustache.

With Costilla’s capture, the Gulf cartel is looking increasingly weak, and bloody turf wars for control of the northeastern border with Texas may now intensify. “There will be an increase in violence there,” Islas said.

The stage was now set for increased hostilities in the region between Mexico’s two most powerful gangs, Guzman’s Sinaloa Cartel and the Zetas, he noted.

This could prove a headache for Pena Nieto, who has vowed to quickly reduce the number of beheadings and mass executions. There have been more than 55,000 drug-related deaths in Calderon’s six-year offensive against cartels.

The Americas Post - Bulletproof armor works better than diplomatic license plates in Mexico

Authorities in Mexico are unsure why federal police opened fire on a U.S. Embassy vehicle on a rural mountain road south of the capital, leaving two U.S. government workers wounded.

Officials from both nations said the federal officers were chasing criminals Friday morning when a hail of bullets was fired at the embassy sport utility vehicle, but the accounts left many questions unanswered.

The two American workers were taken to a hospital in the nearby resort city of Cuernavaca. One had a gunshot wound in his leg and the other was wounded in the stomach and a hand, said a Mexican government official who spoke on condition of anonymity. Hospital officials in Cuernavaca said the wounded were later transferred to a Mexico City hospital in stable condition.

Mexico’s federal police agency acknowledged that its own officers fired on the embassy’s SUV, which appeared to be armored and has diplomatic plates. It said the officers were in the area looking for criminals, but it did not explain what happened.

The U.S. Embassy did not release the names of the injured workers, who it said were heading to a military training base south of Mexico City. Its statement said the employees and a Mexican naval captain traveling with them were fired on by a group of men, and were chased when they tried to escape. The naval officer was not seriously injured.

Mexico’s federal police agency acknowledged that its own officers fired on the embassy’s SUV, which appeared to be armored and has diplomatic plates. It said the officers were in the area looking for criminals, but it did not explain what happened.

Its statement said at least four vehicles fired at the embassy vehicle on a road south of the capital, but it did not clarify whether any or all of them were federal police units.  A U.S. official who was briefed on the shooting said later that all the shots were fired by federal police.

Mexican prosecutors said in a statement late Friday that 12 officers based in Mexico City were being held for questioning. Officers based in the capital have jurisdiction only in Mexico City and in four suburbs of neighboring Mexico State, not in Cuernavaca.

The embassy employees were on their way to do training or related work at a military base, the U.S. official said.

“Apparently the police were looking for some bad guys and they ran into each other,” said the official, who agreed to discuss the incident only if his name was not used. “It looks like it was just a bad mistake … they just shot and kept shooting.”

The shooting broke out in an area that has been used by common criminals, drug gangs and leftist rebels in the past.

Mexican officials said the Americans’ vehicle initially was fired on by a carload of gunmen who first displayed their weapons as the embassy SUV drove along a stretch of dirt road off a highway that connects Mexico City to Cuernavaca. The U.S. driver of the Toyota tried to escape, but three other vehicles joined the original one in pursuing them down the dirt road and onto the highway.

Passengers in all four vehicles fired, and the Mexican naval captain called for help, government officials said. Federal police officers and Mexican soldiers then showed up on the road.

The SUV stopped on the highway, but it wasn’t clear if the driver was halted by the chasers or stopped because of the wounds.

The vehicle was riddled with bullets, most concentrated around the passenger-side window. The area was cordoned off and guarded by more than 100 heavily armed marines and soldiers, and the highway was closed for hours. Investigators examined what appeared to be shell casings.

The U.S. Embassy said it was helping Mexico’s government in its investigation of the incident. It said the wounded were not agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration or the FBI, but officials for neither country identified what agency they work for.

“They are receiving appropriate medical care and are in stable condition. We have no further information to share at this time,” said Victoria Nuland, a State Department spokeswoman in Washington.

U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat from Texas who closely follows affairs with Mexico, said both countries appeared to be working together to find out what went wrong.

“If the Mexicans are cooperating with U.S. officials to find out exactly what happened here then I don’t think this will affect the U.S.-Mexico relationship,” he said.

Attacks on diplomatic personnel in Mexico were once considered rare, but this was the third shooting incident in two years.

In 2011, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent was killed and another wounded in a drug gang shooting in northern Mexico.

A drug-gang shooting in 2010 in the border city of Ciudad Juárez killed a U.S. consulate employee, her husband and another man.

While Mexico City has largely been spared the drug violence that hits other parts of the country, Cuernavaca has been the scene of drug gang turf battles involving remnants of the Beltran Leyva cartel.

The Americas Post - Cocaine in Spain is headed down the drain. Photo Credit: Spanish Interior Ministry

Spanish police and the FBI have reportedly blocked a major Mexican drug cartel from launching a European operation. Sinaloa cartel member Jesus Gutierrez Guzman was part of the operation. Guzman is alleged to be the cousin of Joaquin Archivaldo Guzman, known as “El Chapo,” the leader of the Sinaloa cartel.

The ministry said the cartel wanted to make Spain a gateway for operations in Europe, even carrying out test runs using shipping containers without drugs. But investigators managed to monitor many of the group’s activities and intercepted a container carrying 373 kilos (822 pounds) of cocaine in late July before moving in to make the arrests.

The Interior Ministry statement said Jesus Gutierrez Guzman, Rafael Humberto Celaya Valenzuela, Samuel Zazueta Valenzuela and Jesus Gonzalo Palazuelos Soto were arrested near their hotels in the Spanish capital. The statement did not say precisely when the arrests were made, and when called by phone ministry officials could not immediately give exact details of the dates.

Jesus Gutierrez Guzman is alleged to be the cousin of Joaquin Archivaldo Guzman, known as “El Chapo,” the leader of the cartel and Mexico’s most wanted man. Since escaping prison in 2001, Joaquin Archivaldo Guzman has run the Sinaloa cartel, one of Mexico’s two most powerful drug-organizations, from a series of hideouts and safe houses across Mexico.

Law-enforcement officials say he has earned billions of dollars moving tons of cocaine and other drugs north to the United States. In recent months, the Sinaloa cartel and its allies have been waging a brutal war against the paramilitary Zetas cartel across Mexico, often carrying out mass killings that have left hundreds of dismembered bodies dumped in public places.

Along with the alleged link to the cartel leader, the arrests in Spain have attracted a great deal of media interest in Mexico because a Facebook page in Celaya Valenzuela’s name appears to show a photograph of him alongside Mexico’s President-elect Enrique Pena Nieto. The photo was posted on Feb. 11. The presidential elections were held in July.

The operation against the Sinaloa cartel was made possible thanks to agents using “the most modern research techniques,” which had at all times been supervised by judges and prosecutors, the Interior Ministry statement said. It noted that “the bulk” of the investigation was carried out in the United States.

U.S. agents had learned that cartel members were planning to travel to Spain and were later able to confirm the trip, which took place in March 2011, the statement said. Thanks to the information provided by the FBI’s Boston division, Spanish police located the suspects and monitored them closely “to ensure their full identification,” the statement said.

The statement said FBI investigators had determined that the gang intended to begin large cocaine shipments by sea with the drugs concealed in cargo containers. The cartel used stringent security measures to try to ensure the success of the operation and did several test runs, initially shipping containers without any drugs in them.

When they sent a first drugs shipment to Spain on board a ship from Brazil in late July, officers intercepted it, the statement said.

The arrest of his alleged cousin could potentially lead to information about the whereabouts of the fugitive Mexican drug lord. Investigators working to bust Sinaloa’s operations thought in June that they had nabbed a son of Joaquin Archivaldo Guzman, but it turned out they got the wrong man.

The Americas Post - This one looks more like an industrial corridor than a smuggler's tunnel

Three highly sophisticated drug smuggling tunnels equipped with lighting and ventilation – including one with a railcar system – have been discovered along the U.S.-Mexico border in less than a week, the latest signs that cartels are building passages to escape heightened detection above ground.

Two of the tunnels were incomplete, including one that the Mexican army found in a Tijuana warehouse Thursday with more than 40 tons of marijuana at the entry. The passage extended nearly 400 yards, including more than 100 yards into the United States.

Soldiers found the Tijuana warehouse with four moving trucks full of marijuana, a trailer full of dirt, pickaxes, wheelbarrows, drills and other excavation equipment. The tunnel was equipped with a railcar system.

The Mexican army said three people were detained.

It was the second, major incomplete tunnel discovered in the San Diego-Tijuana area in two days and the fourth along the U.S.-Mexico border since Saturday, when a completed passage was found in a vacant strip mall storefront in the southwestern Arizona city of San Luis.

An incomplete tunnel along Arizona’s border with Mexico was found Friday during an inspection of a drainage system on the Mexican side of Nogales in early stages of construction, said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Amber Cargile. No arrests have been made in the investigation of the crude passage.

The 240-yard tunnel in San Luis, Ariz., showed a level of sophistication not typically associated with other crude smuggling passageways that tie into storm drains in the state.

“When you see what is there and the way they designed it, it wasn’t something that your average miner could put together,” said Douglas Coleman, special agent in charge of the Phoenix division of the Drug Enforcement Administration. “You would need someone with some engineering expertise to put something together like this.”

As Thursday’s massive pot seizure in Tijuana demonstrated, tunnels have become an increasingly common way to smuggle enormous loads of heroin, marijuana and other drugs into the country. More than 70 passages have been found on the border since October 2008, surpassing the number of discoveries in the previous six years.

More than 150 secret tunnels have been found along the border since 1990, the vast majority of them incomplete, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Raids last November on two tunnels linking San Diego and Tijuana netted a combined 52 tons of marijuana on both sides of the border.

The first Arizona tunnel was discovered after state police pulled over a man who had 39 pounds of methamphetamine in his vehicle and mentioned the strip mall.

The tunnel was found beneath a water tank in a storage room and stretched across the border to an ice-plant business in the Mexican city of San Luis Rio Colorado. It was reinforced with four-by-six beams and lined with plywood.

Investigators believe the tunnel wasn’t in operation for long because there was little wear on its floor, and 55-gallon drums containing extracted dirt hadn’t been removed from the property.

Coleman said investigators can’t yet say for sure if the tunnel, estimated to cost $1.5 million to build, was operated by the powerful Sinaloa cartel. Still, authorities suspect cartel involvement because the group from Sinaloa controls smuggling routes into Arizona.

“Another cartel wasn’t going to roll into that area and put down that kind of money in Sinaloa territory,” Coleman said. “Nobody is going to construct this tunnel without significant cartel leadership knowing what’s going on.”

On Wednesday, the Mexican army found an incomplete tunnel in Tijuana estimated to be more than 150 yards long, beginning inside a building that advertised as a recycling plant. .

The Mexican army said two tractor-trailers were found inside the building, along with shovels, drills, pickaxes, buckets and other excavation tools. The walls were lined with dirt and wide enough for one person to get through comfortably.

U.S. authorities were investigating the tunnel discovered Wednesday for three months, said ICE spokeswoman Lauren Mack.

It takes six months to a year to build a tunnel, authorities say. Workers use shovels and pickaxes to slowly dig through the soil, sleeping in buildings where the tunnels begin until the job is done. Sometimes they use pneumatic tools.

The tunnels are concentrated along the border in California and Arizona. San Diego is popular because its clay-like soil is easy to dig. In Nogales, smugglers tap into vast underground drainage canals.

San Diego’s Otay Mesa area has the added draw that there are plenty of nondescript warehouses on both sides of the border to conceal trucks getting loaded with drugs. Its streets hum with semitrailers by day and fall silent on nights and weekends.

The Americas Post - These Colombian troops could be the model for new elite Mexican units

The leading security adviser for Mexico’s incoming president announced Friday that he is recommending the creation of elite units of police and troops who will target not just major drug traffickers but also lower-level cartel hitmen as a way of swiftly reducing violence.

The proposal from newly retired Colombian police director Gen. Oscar Naranjo  offers a glimpse of how President-elect Enrique Pena Nieto might fulfill his promise to slash the number of murders and kidnappings by 50 percent during his six years in office.

Similar to the approach that Naranjo employed against Colombian traffickers, the proposal raises the question of whether the widely respected general can reproduce his success in a very different country.

More than 47,500 people have been killed in drug-related violence since President Felipe Calderon launched a military-led offensive against Mexico’s cartels nearly six years ago.

Pena Nieto has pledged to reduce violence by refocusing law-enforcement efforts away from the current administration’s heavy reliance on the military to capture drug-cartel leaders and seize their product. He says he wants to better protect ordinary citizens from criminals.

He provided few specifics during his three-month campaign, leading to speculation he would ease pressure on traffickers as long as they throttled down violence.

U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, who has held a series of meetings with the president-elect and his advisers, said this week that Pena Nieto has discussed a new offensive against the smaller, local gangs that have cropped up in many Mexican states and earn money through kidnapping and extortion in addition to drug dealing.

Naranjo’s proposal of small, elite units dovetails with that idea.

Such units have specific goals and typically work in isolation. The better a unit performs, the more resources it gets. Information is compartmentalized to prevent leaks. The model worked in Colombia and Naranjo said it could also be effective in Mexico.

“It’s good to go after drug dealers in order to capture them. But it’s not good not to have elite groups going after killers in order to impose the law, those squads of hitmen,” he said. “You also have to put a lot of importance on these groups of hitmen to control the violence.”

The idea has been discussed by Mexico’s security experts, and makes sense as a component of a broader strategy to reduce violence, said Eric Olson, associate director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.

“If you want to really stop the violence, don’t focus on the kingpins, focus on the killers, it kind of eliminates this middle range of actors,” he said.

Naranjo also proposed setting violence-reduction targets for Mexico.

“In the first 100 days (of Pena Nieto’s government) the goal should be set for reducing violence. It could go badly. It could go well. But it should be put in play,” he said. “I think it’s possible to tell the Mexicans, `Look, in 100 days we want to cut the violence we have in half.’”

It’s feasible, he said, because Mexico’s violence “is really concentrated. If you look at the map of violence there it’s in six places. It’s impossible that in six cities you can’t have some control.”

The 55-year-old Colombian said he does not believe it wise to use Mexico’s military against drug traffickers, criticizing Calderon’s sending of 10,000 troops into Ciudad Juarez at the end of last year.

It neither reduced deaths nor intimidated criminals, he said.

Naranjo, aided by his U.S. allies, had been advising Calderon’s government since 2007. Colombian police have in the interim trained more than 7,000 Mexicans in investigative techniques.

A top foreign policy adviser to Pena Nieto said the president-elect is focused on fighting crime by swiftly spurring economic growth and job-creation with reforms that include bringing private investment into Mexico’s state-owned Pemex oil company, developing massive shale gas deposits on the Texas border and building alternative supplies including wind energy projects in southern states like Oaxaca and Baja California.

Emilio Lozoya said Pena Nieto’s transition team wants to forge consensus among the lawmakers when Mexico’s next congress convenes in September, three months before Pena Nieto takes office.

“Our aim is to have an energy bill that is clear and gives absolute clarity to local and foreign capital to co-invest along the state in developing these energy sources,” Lozoya said. The importance of economic growth to security, he said, is that “you won’t get one without focusing on the other.”

“The best weapons against organized crime and insecurity are jobs,” he said. He said a focus on developing infrastructure projects and agriculture would also be important for the new administration.

Lozoya also said Pena Nieto’s administration would want more intelligence-sharing from the U.S., particularly to combat money-laundering, and that Mexico would seek a bigger role in building stability in Central America, which he called a major source of the problems afflicting Mexico, drug-trafficking among them.

Despite major security gains under Naranjo, rural Colombia remains turbulent. Thousands of hired guns in the service of rival drug gangs continue to plague it as well as leftist rebels who are deeply engaged in cocaine trafficking.

The Americas Post - Whoever dubbed Anel Violeta Noriega as "La Bonita" must have been sampling the merchandise

She’s gone by a number of different nicknames: “La Bonita” the pretty one; “La Chula,” the beautiful one; and “La Reina del Crimen,” the queen of crime.

And now, she’s gone back to Mexico.

U.S. authorities arrested Anel Violeta Noriega Rios in El Monte, Calif., outside of Los Angeles, on June 27, the Associated Press reports. Mexican authorities say Noriega Rios, 27, is a top operative for Mexico’s La Familia drug cartel in the U.S., and she stands accused of helping oversee the violent cartel’s methamphetamine distribution in California and Washington State.

In a strange twist, the notorious drug runner suspect hid in one of the least likely places: in plain sight.

“It is the last place you’d expect to find someone who was supposed to have run so many drugs,” a source familiar with the investigation told The LA Times when describing Noriega Rios’ humble El Monte apartment. “It is not clear if she was just hiding or just had fallen on hard times.”

According to CNN, “La Bonita” had a five million peso (US$375,000) bounty on her by Mexican authorities, who tipped off U.S. officials about her identity. ICE officers and U.S. marshals arrested Noriega Rios on “administrative immigration violations,” and she was subsequently turned over to Mexican authorities two days later at a border crossing in San Ysidro, Calif.

Noriega Rios was allegedly a contact between her Michoacan cartel and the notorious Sinaloa cartel’s leaders, according to AP, including the “world’s most powerful drug trafficker” Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.

The LA Times notes Noriega Rios had been arrested in the U.S. and deported to Mexico five times between 2004 and 2005, but had no criminal convictions in the U.S.

The Americas Post - It's a long way down from former presidential security chief to DEA prisoner

Retired Colombian police Gen Mauricio Santoyo, who is accused of drugs offenses in the United States, has turned himself in and already been extradited.

Although his counterpart Colombian police general Oscar Naranjo has been selected by the new Mexican president to direct that country’s drug war, Gen Santoyo is accused of working for the other side, by helping drug gangs and right-wing paramilitaries smuggle cocaine to Mexico and the US.  He allegedly committed the crimes while serving as the head of security for the president at the time, Alvaro Uribe.

Gen Santoyo turned himself in to US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents in Colombia’s capital, Bogota.  Local media said Gen Santoyo was taken in a DEA plane to the US state of Virginia, where he has been indicted on conspiracy to distribute cocaine “knowing and intending that it would be unlawfully imported to the United States”.

He is the highest-ranking Colombian officer to face charges of drug trafficking in the US.  According to the indictment by the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Gen Santoyo helped a drug gang called Office of Envigado and right-wing paramilitaries of the United Self Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC) to smuggle cocaine from Colombia through Mexico and Central America to the United States.

He allegedly provided intelligence information collected by the Colombian security forces to drug traffickers.  Prosecutors say this included information about the whereabouts of rival dealers, who would later turn up dead, presumed killed by the drug traffickers to whom Gen Santoyo had handed the information.

The indictment also accuses the general of tipping off drug dealers about impending security operations by the Colombian forces, the DEA and British counter-narcotics agents.   The prosecution says that in exchange for his help, the AUC and the Office of Envigado paid Gen Santoyo sizeable bribes.

Gen Santoyo said he was certain he would be able to rebut all the charges made against him.

The Americas Post - Can Colombian General Oscar Naranjo demilitarize the Mexican drug war?

Inheriting a drug war that has cost more than 47,000 lives since 2006, newly elected Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto is gambling that the Colombian general who helped take down kingpin Pablo Escobar can save Mexico as well.

After winning the vote on July 1, Pena Nieto said Mexicans want immediate results after frustration over the six-year death toll undermined support for President Felipe Calderon. He selected General Oscar Naranjo, the former head of Colombia’s national police, as his security adviser last month and aides say the new president will seek greater intelligence sharing with the U.S. to help break the cartels.

The 45-year-old Pena Nieto must balance public demands for a less-bloody conflict with suspicions that his Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, was more tolerant of drug cartels during a 71-year reign that ended in 2000. Pena Nieto, who pledged during the campaign to scale back the military’s role in fighting organized crime in favor of the police, said yesterday that there would be no truce with the cartels.

“Already the government is taking flak for letting less violent and ostentatious criminal groups off the hook,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, who studies drug war conflicts for the Brookings Institution in Washington. “It will be an even more sensitive issue for Pena Nieto because he has all the PRI baggage of negotiated deals.”

Drug-related violence shaves almost 1.2 percentage points annually off Mexico’s gross domestic product and the country could double its foreign investment, which reached $19.4 billion in 2011, if the cartels were brought under control, said Manuel Suarez-Mier, an economist at American University who helped Mexico negotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement.

“It’s a disaster,” said Suarez-Mier, who represented Mexico’s attorney general when the Merida Initiative, a three- year, $1.6 billion anti-narcotics program funded by the U.S., was signed in 2008. “When you decapitate a cartel, they tend to fracture and now we have more cartels that are more violent.”

A week rarely goes by without reports of dismembered corpses appearing in public as Mexico’s drug gangs battle for territory and routes into the U.S., their biggest market. Three police officers died in a firefight at Mexico City’s international airport on June 25 after they tried to detain suspected traffickers. The mutilated bodies of 14 people were found in bags in an abandoned truck in northern Veracruz state last month, newspaper Milenio reported.

Pena Nieto has vowed to double the number of police to fight the drug war and is counting on Naranjo’s experience to improve security.

“General Naranjo will give a seal of approval, in Mexico and abroad, to our security policies,” Pena Nieto’s campaign said in a statement accompanying his appointment last month.

Naranjo, 55, helped engineer the U.S.-backed crackdown that led to the demise of the Medellin cocaine cartel and its billionaire leader Escobar in 1993, and Pena Nieto credited him for reducing the homicide rate in Colombia.

The Colombian city of Medellin, which was for years the murder capital of Latin America, has seen homicide rates drop to 1,649 in 2011 from 6,349 in 1991, according to government data. The South American country has received more than $7 billion in U.S. anti-narcotics and counter-insurgency aid since 2000, much of it administered by Naranjo when he was national police chief from 2007 to 2012.

Jorge Montano, the PRI’s senior foreign policy coordinator, said in April that the new administration wants to “reset the relationship with the U.S. on the war on drugs,” adding that he would like to see closer cooperation and more information- sharing.

The revival of Pena Nieto’s PRI party has left some in Washington on guard. Representative James Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican who sits on the House Judiciary Committee, said last month at a hearing that he’s concerned Pena Nieto may bring a return to the days when the PRI “minimized violence by turning a blind eye” to drug traffickers.

U.S. federal prosecutors in May filed civil charges against Tomas Yarrington, a former PRI governor in the border state of Tamaulipas who allegedly used millions of dollars in bribes from cartels to invest in Texas real estate. The PRI suspended him and Pena Nieto has said justice must take its course in the case.

“The stakes are high for Mexico,” Victoria Nuland, a U.S. State Department spokeswoman, told reporters in Washington yesterday. “The stakes are high for us. And we think we will be able to have good cooperation.”

Fresh off his election win, Pena Neito rejected concerns the PRI will loosen the reins on the nation’s drug war.

“The Mexican people have given our party a second opportunity. We will honor it with results,” Pena Nieto said after claiming victory. “In facing organized crime, there will be no pact or truce.”

While Pena Nieto has vowed to eventually return troops to their barracks, Mexico may still need them to battle criminals such as Los Zetas, a group of former military officers who have expanded into kidnapping and other illicit businesses, said David Shirk, director of the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego.

“The initial approach will be a kind of detente with organized crime groups,” Shirk said in a phone interview. “But you can’t get rid of guys like Los Zetas without some serious commitment of force.”

The Americas Post - This guy doesn't look very happy about being mistaken for the son of a drug lord

Mexican authorities confirmed that a man arrested earlier this week and initially reported to be the son of fugitive drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” (Shorty) Guzman is in fact another individual.

“After conducting the necessary tests to determine their identities, we found that (the two suspects presented to the media Thursday) are Felix Beltran Leon and Kevin Daniel Beltran Rios, ages 23 and 19, respectively,” the federal Attorney General’s Office said in a statement Friday.

“On June 21, members of the Navy Secretariat presented two people, one of whom was believed to be Jesus Alfredo Guzman Salazar,” Chapo’s son, the AG’s office said.

The men were arrested on charges of “organized crime, possession of firearms for exclusive use of the army, navy and air force, and transactions with illicitly acquired funds,” it added.

Without providing further details on the suspects, the AG’s office said the ongoing investigation will support the allegations against them.

A source with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said earlier Friday that the young man initially identified as Chapo’s son was in fact an individual named Felix Beltran Leon.

That detainee “is one of the bosses who sells drugs for Chapo’s son in (the western state of) Jalisco,” the source said on condition of anonymity.

Several hours earlier, a woman identifying herself as Elodia Leon Vega told reporters in Guadalajara, Jalisco’s capital, that her son, Felix Beltran Leon, had been wrongly identified as the drug kingpin’s relative.

“They’re badly confusing him,” she said in the company of her attorney, rejecting any link between her son and Guzman’s family.

Both said the 23-year-old suspect was born in Los Angeles and is the half-brother of the other detainee, Beltran Rios, for whom they provided no details.

Chapo Guzman, head of the Sinaloa drug cartel, tops the list of Mexico’s 37 most-wanted criminals and is on the Forbes list of the world’s richest people.

He was captured in Guatemala in 1993 and extradited to Mexico, where he was convicted and sentenced to prison. But the drug lord escaped from a maximum-security prison in 2001 and has since built his Sinaloa cartel into Mexico’s most powerful criminal organization.