America Security News.- President Barack Obama and Mexico's President Enrique Pena Nieto, right, leave a joint news conference in Mexico City, Mexico, Thursday, May 2, 2013. Credit to AP Photo

Last week, Mr. Obama returned to capitals in Latin America with a vastly different message. Relationships with countries racked by drug violence and organized crime should focus more on economic development and less on the endless battles against drug traffickers and organized crime capos that have left few clear victors. The countries, Mexico in particular, need to set their own course on security, with the United States playing more of a backing role.READ WHOLE ARTICLE HERE

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 - This scene won't be featured in any Ford F-150 pickup truck commercial

Mexican police on Monday discovered the bodies of 16 men dumped in a vehicle in the southwestern state of Guerrero, one of the areas worst hit by feuding between drug gangs.

The victims, found near the city of Coyuca de Catalan, on the border with the western state of Michoacan, had been shot and showed signs of torture, local police said.

“We don’t yet have information on who these people are. This is a very violent area,” a local police official said.

In a statement released Monday afternoon, the attorney general’s office for Guerrero state said all of the bodies were found blindfolded in an abandoned red Ford pick-up truck.

Police were tipped off by an anonymous call Monday morning and shortly afterward officers confirmed the grisly discovery, the statement added.

Michoacan is home to the “La Familia” drug gang and its offshoot “The Knights Templar,” which have been mired in a bloody struggle for control in the area.

Local media reported “La Familia” had claimed responsibility for the attack with messages daubed on the vehicle. It was one of the worst killings in Guerrero in recent months.

Home to the popular beach resort Acapulco, Guerrero has suffered one of the highest death tolls in turf wars between Mexico’s drug cartels, which have overshadowed the administration of outgoing President Felipe Calderon.

Calderon sent reinforcements to Guerrero late last year in an effort to curb the violence blighting Acapulco, and the rate of killing fell during the early months of the operation known as “Guerrero Seguro”, or Safe Guerrero.

However, recent weeks have seen a resurgence in the violence in Guerrero as centrist Enrique Pena Nieto prepares to succeed the conservative Calderon as president in December.

Pena Nieto has pledged to quickly reduce the violence in Mexico. Killings leapt over the last six years during Calderon’s army-led efforts to bring the drug gangs to heel.

More than 55,000 people have died in drug-related violence in Mexico during Calderon’s term.

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.

Two faces, same coin, the Zetas. Heriberto Lazcano, alias Z-3; Miguel Treviño, alias Z-40

Regardless of the veracity of the current rumors that Mexico’s feared Zetas organization has split into pieces, the organization’s breakup is a foregone conclusion given the group’s local revenue streams.

Recently a US law enforcement source told APthat Zetas second-in-command Miguel Angel Treviño, alias  Z-40,  has successfully taken over control of the entire group, displacing Heriberto Lazcano, alias Z-3,  it’s long-time number one. READ MORE HERE

The Americas Post - Prison security chief Alejandro Osuna Rios only survived four months on the job

The head of security for a Mexican prison in Culiacan, the capital of the northwestern state of Sinaloa, has been gunned down, according to police.

Alejandro Osuna Rios was murdered on Friday in front of his house, authorities announced.  The 36-year-old had been in charge of security at the prison for four months.

Osuna Rios was attacked by several gunmen riding in two SUVs as he stood in front of his house with his wife and son in the Villas del Manantial district.

Sinaloa state Attorney General’s Office investigators found 44 bullet casings and an ammunition clip for an AK-47 at the crime scene, as well as the officer’s service weapon.  Osuna Rios, who had just started his vacation, did not have time to draw his 9 mm pistol and return fire, police said.

Sinaloa is currently the scene of a bloody turf war among several heavily armed groups.  The state is home to the drug cartel led by Joaquin “El Chapo” (Shorty) Guzman, who was arrested in Guatemala in 1993 and pulled off a Hollywood-style jailbreak when he escaped from the Puente Grande maximum-security prison in the western state of Jalisco on Jan. 19, 2001.

The Sinaloa organization, sometimes referred to by officials as the Pacific cartel, is the oldest and most powerful drug cartel in Mexico.

The Sinaloa cartel, according to intelligence agencies, is a transnational business empire that operates in the United States, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the Americas and Asia.

About 50,000 people have died in Mexico’s drug war since December 2006, when President Felipe Calderon declared war on the country’s powerful cartels, sending soldiers into the streets to fight criminals.

The Americas Post - In spite of all its recent problems, at least BofA is apparently still popular with the Zetas

Investigators tracking the flow of illicit drug money have now followed it right into the Bank of America.

A federal probe into Los Zetas, a Mexican drug cartel, claims that the group has been laundering money through accounts at BofA, according to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal.

An FBI affidavit filed in Texas last month said that the Mexican drug cartel has been reportedly funneling cash through a Texas-based racehorse business with BofA accounts. The U.S. government has described Los Zetas in the past as “the most technologically advanced, sophisticated and dangerous cartel operating in Mexico.” Tremor Enterprises LLC, the horse business, was for its part allegedly run by Jose Trevino Morales, a U.S. citizen with two brothers in Los Zetas.

In the past, Mexican drug syndicates have allegedly used BofA accounts to buy planes to transport cocaine, according to Bloomberg. Between 2004 and 2007, the bank was also the alleged destination for almost $10 million in illicit funds from an influential political family in Equatorial Guinea.

BofA has admitted such errors in the past. In 2006, officials acknowledged failing to catch South American clients laundering $3 billion through one of its Manhattan branches, according to The New York Times.

BofA has not been accused of any wrongdoing, and according to sources cited by the WSJ, the bank is cooperating with the FBI investigation.

Still, if Los Zetas have been shifting a million dollars a month through accounts held at BofA, as the federal probe claims, it suggests the bank might still have some improvements to make in its defenses against money laundering.

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.