Category Archives: Southern theater

MS-13 Smuggling Hundreds of Muslims Across Mexican Border

Posted on by

It’s no secret that MS-13 has ties to Al-Qaeda going back at least to early 2002. Jihad Watch ran a post on Al-Qaeda’s link to MS-13 back in January of 2005 and FrontPage ran a piece a week or so earlier about the connection that included some disturbing details about high ranking known AQ operatives spotted meeting with the gang in Honduras. One of the first pieces I wrote for Red Alerts detailed the link between the Kries faction of the Aryan Nations, Radical Islamist groups and the Bolivarian revolution in Latin America.

The Narco-terror/Islamist connection has been a story that has slowly fallen off most people’s radar unfortunately. I myself forgot about it until alerted to this piece by Dr. Paul William of The Last Crusade that just ran on Family Security Matters that details how little progress we’ve made in the last few years:

In the wake of 9/11, Mara Salvatrucha attracted the attention of top al Qaeda officials, who realized that the gang could be used to smuggle operatives and weapons into the United States.[1] An agreement was forged between the terrorists and the gang-bangers. In exchange for safe passage across the border, al Qaeda – through its cells in South America – agreed to pay the Maras from $30,000 to $50,000 for each sleeper agent they managed to smuggle into the country with bogus matricula consulars.[2]

Matricula consulars are official identification cards that are issued by the Mexican government through its consular offices. The cards verify that the bearers are Mexican citizens who are living outside of Mexico
with the government’s permission.

According to U.S. officials, these cards pose a grave threat to national security. Steven McCraw, assistant director of the FBI’s Office of Intelligence, told a House Judiciary Subcommittee: “The ability of foreign nationals to use the matricula consular provides an opportunity for terrorists to move freely within the United States without triggering name-based watch lists that are disseminated to local police officers.”

Counterfeit matricula consulars are easy to obtain. In Los Angeles, the going rate is $90; in New York City, $150.

[…]

According to border patrol officials, including Sheriff D’Wayne Jenigan of Del Rio, Texas, thousands of Special Interest Aliens (SIAs), with the help of Mara Salvatrucha “coyotes,” have made their way across the Mexican border and into the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Such SIAs come from countries that pose national security concerns: Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Somalia, Yemen, Jordan, Lebanon, and even Iraq.

The routes used by illegal aliens to enter the U.S. have become littered with discarded Muslim prayer blankets, pages from Islamic texts, and Arabic newspapers. Law enforcement officials have named such passageways “terrorists’ alleys” and a street leading north from the city of Douglas, Arizona, as “Arab Road.”

Ready for that fence? The Obama administration is less interested in securing our southern border than Bush, who I respect but had a blind spot on the dangers Mexico poses to us. We need to keep stories like this circulating so that this homeland security issue doesn’t remained buried on the back page until something happens that makes the front page.

h/t reader Damien

Mormons Fighting for Their Lives in Mexico

Posted on by

Though Washington Post reporter William Booth can barely keep the sneering contempt for the Mexican Mormons out of his report his piece is one of the best reports on the conflict between Mexico’s drug cartels and the religious sect that just wants to farm in peace. Mexico’s government has given the sect permission to form a rural police force and arm themselves, which just shows how out of control Mexico is.

Booth, like many here, miss the point about the Cartel’s power grab. Legalization of drugs here will do nothing to put this genie back in the bottle. Otherwise this report, and the included video, give you a sense of how hopeless the situation is down there:

In the past three months, American Mormon communities in Mexico have been sucked into a dust devil of violence sweeping the borderlands. Their relative wealth has made them targets: Their telephones ring with threats of extortion. Their children and elders are taken by kidnappers. They have been drawn into the government’s war with the drug cartels.

This month, a leader of their colony was abducted by heavily armed men dressed as police, then beaten and shot dead 10 minutes from town. Benjamin LeBaron, 31, whom everyone called Benji, had dared to denounce the criminals, while refusing to pay a $1 million ransom demanded by kidnappers who had grabbed his teenage brother from a family ranch in May.

Amid the blood and mesquite at the site of his last breath, Benjamin LeBaron’s killers posted a sign that read: “This is for the leaders of LeBaron who didn’t believe and who still don’t believe.”

[…]

“All we want to do is live in peace. We want nothing to do with the drug cartels. They can’t be stopped. What we want is just to protect ourselves from being kidnapped and killed,” said Marco LeBaron, a college student who came home for the funeral of his brother, the slain anti-crime activist. Marco LeBaron is one of 70 Mormons who have volunteered to join a rural police force to protect the town. The Mexican government has given them permission to arm themselves.

For a taste of how the gangs operate, this section describes a home invasion. Not for the squeamish:

Early on July 7, four trucks loaded with men passed through a highway tollbooth, where they were recorded on videotape outside Galeana, where Benjamin LeBaron lived in a sprawling, new stucco home with his wife and five young children. Two trucks stopped at the cemetery outside town and waited. Two pickup trucks filled with 15 to 20 heavily armed men, wearing helmets, bulletproof vests and blue uniforms, came for LeBaron.

They smashed in his home’s windows and shouted for him to open the door, as his terrified children cried inside, according to an account given by his brothers. LeBaron’s brother-in-law Luis Widmar, 29, who lived across the street, heard the commotion and ran to his aid. Both men were beaten by the gunmen, who threatened to rape LeBaron’s wife in front of her children unless the men revealed where LeBaron kept his arsenal of weapons.

“But he didn’t have any, because I promise you, if he did, he would have used them to protect his family,” Julian LeBaron said.

LeBaron and Widmar were shot in the head outside town. A banner was hung beside their bodies that blamed them for the arrest of 25 gunmen who were seized in June after terrorizing the town of Nicolas Bravo, where they burned down buildings and extorted from business owners. According to Mexican law enforcement officials, the gunmen are members of the Sinaloa drug cartel, which is fighting the Juarez cartel for billion-dollar cocaine-smuggling routes into El Paso.

After the men killed LeBaron and Widmar, a video camera captured their departure at the highway tollbooth — the make, model and year of their vehicles and the license numbers, according to family members. There have been no arrests.

h/t N.T.A.

Bolivarian Infiltrators Poised to Cause Chaos in Honduras

Posted on by

Honduran citizens are receiving anonymous phone calls telling them to “stay home” for their own safety as insurgent cells from Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala are said to already be inside Honduran borders waiting for outed President Zelayna to return. From CFP:

Tegucigalpa, Honduras could become another Tehran by tomorrow night.

Hondurans are trying to get word out by Twitter that they are receiving threatening text messages on their cell phones tonight, telling them to stay inside and not leave their homes tomorrow night.

“Now more than ever I will be the first one out the door,” Honduran Pedro Martinez told Canada Free Press tonight.  Pedro Martinez is the pseudonym we gave to the young Honduran professional that Canada Free Press (CFP) walked through Twitter hookup last week.

“Tomorrow might be a bad day,” Pedro tipped off CFP on twitter.  “People are infiltrating Honduras thru (sic) Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua with the intention to create chaos.”

Looks like deposed Honduran leader Manuel Zelaya, who has called for a popular insurrection in his own country so that he can be returned to power after soldiers removed him at gunpoint on June 28, is on the way back.

With the verbal cunning of good Marxists the world over and the backing of tyrant Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, this is Zelaya’s message today from the safety of Guatemala: “The Honduran people have the right to insurrection.”

“I want to tell you to not leave the streets, that is the only space that they have not taken from us,” he told a news conference alongside Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom,” (Yahoo News.com. July 15, 2009).

Meanwhile, no one in Honduras is running from Zelaya’s threats.  “We are not issuing threats,” acting foreign minister Carlos Lopez said in response to Zelaya’s call for an insurrection, reminding the exiled Honduran leader that Roberto Micheletti’s government was in control and the country was at peace.

“We removed the curfew and the government has complete control of the territory.”

Problem is Pedro and tens of thousands like him, who backed Zelaya’s ouster on June 28, believe the streets and democracy belong to them.

Zelaya’s ultimatum to the interim government ordering it to relinquish power within the week and the demands for his immediate restitution has only raised the peoples’ dander.

People like Pedro expect only the worst from Zelaya.

As does anyone aside from the Marxist supporters of his power grab. It’s no coincidence that Zelaya waited until Obama was in office to make his power grab, now Honduras and Columbia, our one time allies, are about to be swept away by a Chavez led Communist movement and America will at best stand by and cheer.

At worst the Democrats will send in troops to support the culling and guard Chavez’s death camps.

h/t N.T.R.

Mexican Citizens Form Militia to Fight the Drug War

Posted on by

hot-latina-with-big-guns.jpg

The government has been in a losing battle with Cartel forces for years. Tired of the chaos it seems the long suffering Mexican people are fighting the cartel operatives on their own terms:

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (Reuters) – Shadowy vigilante groups are threatening Mexico’s drug gangs near the U.S. border in retaliation for a wave of murders and kidnappings that killed 1,600 people in this city alone last year.

One group in the border city of Ciudad Juarez pledged last week to “clean our city of these criminals” and said their mission was to “end the life of a criminal every 24 hours.”

The emergence of vigilantes would be a new twist to a vicious drug war that killed 5,700 people in Mexico last year and forced the United States to give hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the Mexican government.

Ciudad Juarez, a manufacturing center in the desert across from El Paso, Texas, was the scene of the worst violence in 2008 as drug cartels fought each other as well as staging kidnappings for ransom and extorting businessmen.

In an e-mail to news organizations, the “Juarez Citizen Command” said it was funded by local businessmen sick of abductions and extortion in the city, home to factories that export goods to the United States.

While none of the city’s 1,600 in the last year were undoubtedly the work of vigilantes, a body was found on January 7 with a message next to it that read: “This is for those who continue extorting.”

And six men in their 20s and 30s were shot dead and dumped together in Ciudad Juarez in October with a cardboard sign reading: “Message for all the rats: This will continue.”

Drug gangs often leave threatening messages with the bodies of their victims, but security officials said those two incidents might have been the work of vigilantes.

Another group, “Businessmen United, The Death Squad” put a video on Internet site YouTube last June threatening to go after kidnappers and criminals in Ciudad Juarez, the biggest city in Mexico’s Chihuahua state. The video is no longer on YouTube.

I don’t blame them, and frankly I think I’d support them if able. The Cartels are in control of vast swaths of Mexican territory, raping, kidnapping and killing anyone they want with impunity. The citizens have a right to defend their homes and families from the drug gang threat, by any means necessary.

h/t N.T.A.

U.S. Military Warning of Possible “Sudden Collapse” of Mexican State!

Posted on by

Sure wish there was some sort of physical structure we could use to ensure violence from a failed state didn’t spill over into America. What do you call that? Oh yeah, a fence. Sure could use one of those now:

EL PASO – Mexico is one of two countries that “bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse,” according to a report by the U.S. Joint Forces Command on worldwide security threats.

The command’s “Joint Operating Environment (JOE 2008)” report, which contains projections of global threats and potential next wars, puts Pakistan on the same level as Mexico. “In terms of worse-case scenarios for the Joint Force and indeed the world, two large and important states bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse: Pakistan and Mexico.

“The Mexican possibility may seem less likely, but the government, its politicians, police and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and press by criminal gangs and drug cartels. How that internal conflict turns out over the next several years will have a major impact on the stability of the Mexican state. Any descent by Mexico into chaos would demand an American response based on the serious implications for homeland security alone.”

Mexico has already descended into chaos with military troops battling drug gangs who can equal them in firepower and manpower. Border Patrol has publicly stated that they have plans in place to deal with the expected spillover of drug violence in a statement meant to calm border state residents fears.

John Robb Author of Brave New War has a good post breaking down the basics of why we should be concerned about this, and his blog Global Guerrillas is worth perusing to fully understand why this isn’t simply a “drug war” on our border and solutions aren’t as easy as legalizing pot.